Page 3 of Harris

The last thing he needed was to air his suspicions that Harris was keeping something from him. Especially when neither he nor Harris made it known they were lovers. They weren’t hiding it, but it wasn’t a topic of conversation either.

“Okay, well, breakfast is ready if you’ve had enough of staring longingly…I mean thinking,” Kyle said with a wide grin.

The guy was as good a person as they come. He was Fletcher’s brother, rich as sin, with a philanthropic streak as wide as the Mississippi. He’d suffered traumatic abuse at the hands of their parents, hence the limp and the cane.

“Think you’re funny, eh?” Woodley growled in amusement.

“I know I am. You two aren’t fooling anyone. You’re way more than friends. Everyone knows it. I don’t understand why the two of you aren’t open about it. Especially around here, considering the ratio of gays to straights is ever growing.”

“Everyone knows what exactly?” Woodley wanted specifics. He always worked better with details.

“That you and Harris are knocking boots, doing the horizontal tango, bumping uglies, getting jiggy, boinking, doing the humpty hump, being freaks between the sheets.”

“Okay, okay. Are you finished?” Hell, he felt like he might be back in high school.

Kyle grinned and glanced upwards as if considering his answer. “Yeah, I think you get the point.”

Woodley knew denying it was useless, so he went with another version of the truth.

“What good would it do?” he asked in all seriousness.

Kyle looked at him strangely. “What do you mean?”

“What good would it do acting like we’re some damn couple or some shit like that? We ain’t. We both know the ground rules. One way or another, it’ll end. Either by one of us leaving or being killed. This ain’t no fairy tale, kid.”

“Shit. That’s morbid,” Kyle whispered.

“Morbid or not, it’s the truth, and the truth sucks sometimes. Why throw useless emotions into a lost cause? It’d just screw everything up. So we like fucking, big deal. If it wasn’t me, I’m sure Harris would find some cowboy to bend over for a time, but that would be destined to end just the same.”

Kyle’s all-too-inquisitive eyes felt like they were trying to bore a hole into Woodley’s mind, but he’d find nothing but the truth in what he’d said. He and Harris knew the score. They’d have their fun for a time, and there’d be no hard feelings when that time was over. Point blank. Nothing more to see here. Move along, folks.

“I’m sorry,” Kyle said.

“Sorry? For what?” Woodley’s head snapped back in shock. What was this guy sorry for? He had nothing to do with it.

“That the two of you have been so badly hurt that neither of you thinks you’re fixable.”

Woodley felt the blow as if he’d been hit with a sucker punch, but Kyle hadn’t moved. What the fuck? Where did the guy get that from? Fixed? He wasn’t looking to be fixed. He was looking for his father’s killer. That was his life now. That was his mission. There was no other part left of who he was before.

As Woodley was about to respond, young Freddie ran out of the house. “Isaiah said to tell you two that the bacon was getting cold, and if you weren’t going to eat it, we were.”

Isaiah was Bryan’s grandfather. Bryan was the ranch owner in a throuple relationship with Kyle and one of the Navy SEALs, Shaw. Though Isaiah was in his late seventies and confined to a wheelchair, he was as tough a rancher as any man in Texas.

Woodley took this opportunity to duck out of answering Kyle. “Okay, okay. We’re coming,” Woodley said as he followed the young boy back into the kitchen without looking back at his friend.

There would never be a happily-ever-after for him and Harris. He lived in a world of facts, not fiction, and that was where he’d stay.

***

Harris

“No way in hell is this happening,” Jennifer growled as she stood from the kitchen table in the lake house. “Have all of you lost your damn minds?”

“Sis, calm down,” Harris said as he closely watched the laptop floating a couple of feet above the table. “You can’t allow your emotions to get the better of you. Take a deep breath.”

“To hell with that, and easy for you to say,” she growled as good as any SEAL. “What if I told you I was willingly taking off to become a prisoner of the Noah Group again? That I was headed back to California, to the cult? Would you be calm? Would you sit by and let it happen?”

Rick, Spencer’s boyfriend, walked around the kitchen table, refilling coffee cups as if the sight of a hovering laptop and yellingpeople were nothing new.

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