Page 1 of Returning the Runner

1

PORTER

I’d told myself this wasn’t desperate.

Forty-six years old, single, standing on the embarkation deck of a gay cruise with a rolling suitcase and a name tag lanyard that read Hi, I’m Porter! in rainbow letters wasn’t desperate. It was brave, optimistic. I was a man who still believed in love, dammit, not a man who’d run out of options in a town of four thousand people.

I believed about sixty percent of that.

Though, apparently, this was a smaller cruise ship, it still felt enormous to me—ten decks of gleaming white steel, currently being swarmed by a few thousand men in tank tops and sunglasses. The energy was undeniable. Music was already thumping from somewhere near the pool deck. Two guys next to me in matching Speedos were taking a selfie with the ship’s name in the background. A drag queen in full regalia was directing people toward the welcome mixer like a sequined air traffic marshal.

I shouldered my backpack and headed up, dragging my suitcase behind me. I’d booked a balcony cabin—a splurge I’d justified by telling myself I deserved it. Holdfast Brewery, located just outside of Forestville, was doing great. The brewery itself was thriving, and the taproom I’d added a few months ago was also drawing crowds.

I had friends, regulars, a life I’d built with my own hands in the town I’d grown up in. But my apartment adjacent to the taproom was quiet at night, and I was tired of pretending that didn’t bother me.

So here I was. One week in the Mexican Riviera on a ship full of gay men. If I couldn’t find at least one spark in that scenario, I’d officially give up and get a dog.

I found my cabin, hauled my luggage inside, tossed my bag on the bed, and stepped onto the balcony. The harbor stretched out below—Long Beach, hazy with afternoon sun, cranes and container ships in the distance. I leaned on the railing and took a breath. Salt air. Diesel. Sunscreen. I could feel the hum of the engines through the steel under my hands.

Okay, let’s do this.

I quickly changed into shorts and a T-shirt and headed back out. The welcome mixer was on the Lido deck, with an open bar, music, and a couple hundred men milling around with drinks. It looked to be a good mix of established couples, groups of friends, and singles like me. At least I wasn’t the only one.

I grabbed a beer—a pale ale, mass-produced and watery, nothing like what I brewed at Holdfast but cold and fine—and found a spot near the railing where I could watch the crowd. This part, I was good at. I’d been a bartender for many, many years while saving to start my own brewery, and bartenders know how to read a room.

I clocked the clusters forming—the friend groups who’d booked together, the couples, the solo guys like me, nursing drinks and trying to look approachable without looking needy. I made eye contact with a few people. Smiled. Got smiled at.

A tall guy with kind eyes and a Hawaiian shirt started to walk toward me, and I straightened a little. He was cute. A tad young for me, perhaps, since I guessed him to be early thirties, but maybe he looked young for his age?

And then the crowd shifted, and I saw him.

He was standing near the far end of the bar. Alone, holding a glass of something clear—gin or vodka—and scanning the crowd with that stillness I would have recognized in a pitch-black room.

Hanson Swaim.

The air left my lungs like someone had squeezed it all out.

Twenty-five years. I hadn’t seen Hanson in twenty-five years. But my body knew him before my brain caught up, some deep, animal recognition that bypassed thought entirely and went straight to my heart. My fingers tightened around my beer. The music, the laughter, and the clink of glasses all receded to a dull hum, like someone had turned the volume down on everything that wasn’t him.

He looked older. Of course he did. We were forty-six now, not twenty-one. But the bones of him were the same. That lean, angular frame. The way he held himself—contained, watchful, like he was calculating every possible outcome of the next thirty seconds.

His hair was shorter than I remembered, cropped close and neat where it used to fall across his forehead in a way that made me want to push it back. Sandy blond gone a shade darker. Clean-shaven as always. And those eyes… I was too far away to see their color, but I didn’t need to. I knew they were gray. Gray-blue-green, shifting like weather, and just as hard to read.

He was thinner than he should’ve been. Not sick-thin, but worn. His shoulders were tight under a navy-blue linen shirt that probably cost more than everything in my suitcase combined. He looked put-together and completely exhausted. He looked like Hanson.

My heart was doing something I hadn’t given it permission to do.

No. I took a breath. Then another. Forced my grip to loosen on the bottle. No. I didn’t come here for this. I came here to move forward, not to get dragged back into⁠—

He turned his head. Our eyes met across forty feet of crowded deck, and the twenty-five years between us collapsed like a house of cards.

Recognition hit him and his lips parted slightly, his whole body going still. There was shock—raw, unguarded, real. For two seconds, I saw the Hanson I used to know, the one underneath the composure, the one who’d looked at me like I was the only thing in the room that mattered.

Then the mask came back. I watched him assemble it in real time—the straightening of his spine, the controlled breath, the careful neutrality settling over his features like a visor clicking into place. He lifted his glass to me. A small, measured gesture. Hello. I see you. I’m not going to make this a scene.

Classic Hanson. Twenty-five years, and he was still managing the situation.

The tall guy in the Hawaiian shirt had reached me by now and was saying something I couldn’t process. I heard myself respond—“Sorry, give me a minute”—and then I was moving, crossing the deck, weaving through the crowd with my beer in my hand, my heart in my throat, and absolutely no idea what I was going to say.