Page 11 of Returning the Runner

“Whatever you’re doing in your head right now. The inventory. The critique.” He stepped closer and ran his hands slowly down my ribs to my waist and then the hollow above my hips. My breath caught. “You’re beautiful, Hanson. You’ve always been beautiful.”

I would have to take his word for it, but some of the tension inside me dissipated. “Thank you.”

He kissed my throat, my collarbone, the scar on my shoulder from a mountain biking accident when I was fifteen. He remembered it, found it with his mouth like he still had a map. I tipped my head back and let him, my hands gripping his shoulders, and something inside me started to unlock, something I’d been holding shut for so long that I’d forgotten it was closed.

We moved to the bed. He guided me onto the mattress and stretched out over me, and the weight of him… God, the weight of him, solid and grounding and everywhere. I arched against him instinctively, and when our hips pressed together, his hard cock slid against my own. The sound I made was embarrassing, but completely beyond my control.

Porter grinned. “There you are…”

We took our time with the rest of it. Belts and zippers and the clumsy negotiation of pants in a narrow cruise ship bed. Porter laughed when his knee hit the wall, and I laughed when my elbow caught the nightstand lamp, and somehow the laughter made it better, made it real in a way that pure intensity wouldn’t have. This wasn’t a fantasy. This was two forty-six-year-old men with creaky joints and reading glasses on their nightstands, figuring out how to fit together again.

When we were finally naked, Porter propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at me. His gaze moved over my body slowly, deliberately, the way he’d look at something he was trying to memorize. He traced a line from my sternum to my navel with one rough fingertip, and my cock twitched against my stomach.

“Freckles,” he said softly. “The sun brought out your freckles.”

“They’ll fade.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.”

He kissed his way down my chest, taking his time—mouth hot and open against my skin, beard scraping a trail of fire across my stomach. When he reached my hip, I stopped breathing. When he wrapped his hand around my cock, I stopped thinking. “Porter…”

“I’ve got you.”

He stroked me slowly, watching my face, reading every response like a language he was relearning. His grip was firm and sure—callused palm, rough fingers, unhurried—and I was falling apart under it. My hips rocked into his fist, and I heard myself making sounds I didn’t recognize, desperate and unguarded and nothing like the man I was in every other context of my life.

He lowered his mouth and took me in, and the world reduced to the wet heat of his tongue and the gentle suction. His hand braced flat on my stomach, holding me steady. I buried my fingers in his hair—thick, coarser than it used to be, and now silver at the temples—and pulled. He groaned around me, and the vibration nearly ended things right there.

“Stop!” I gasped. “I want… Porter, stop, I want you.”

He pulled off and looked up at me, lips wet and eyes dark. “How?”

“Inside me. I want you inside me.”

Something shifted in his expression. There was desire, yes, but also tenderness so acute it made my throat ache. He kissed the inside of my thigh. “God, yes.”

There was a brief, graceless interlude involving lube from my toiletry bag, a brief discussion about condoms—we didn’t need them, both negative—and then we were fumbling and half-laughing and completely unwilling to stop touching each other long enough to be efficient about it. Porter’s fingers were thick and careful as he opened me, one and then two, watching my face the entire time. He was patient, steady and attentive, and present.

He pushed inside me slowly. I felt every inch—the stretch, the pressure, the overwhelming fullness of being that close to another person after years of holding everyone at arm’s length. My breath came in short, sharp gasps as I gripped his arms and he held still, buried deep, forehead pressed to mine.

“Okay?” he whispered.

“Yeah.” My voice was wrecked. “Move. Please move.”

He moved. Slowly at first, with long, deep strokes that I felt in my spine, in my teeth, in the backs of my eyes. His hand found mine and pinned it to the pillow above my head, fingers interlaced, and I held on like it was the only thing keeping me on the planet. His other hand gripped my hip, angling me up, and when he found the right spot, I cried out. He did it again and again until I was shaking.

“Look at me,” Porter said, and I opened my eyes—I hadn’t realized I’d closed them—and there he was. Flushed, breathing hard, sweat at his temples, looking at me with those brown eyes like I was the only thing in the world that mattered.

Just like he used to. Exactly like he used to.

“I love you,” I said.

The words fell out of me like they’d been sitting at the front of my mouth for twenty-five years, just waiting for the door to open. I hadn’t planned to say them. I hadn’t even fully formed the thought. But they were true. In fact, they were the truest thing I’d ever said.

Porter’s face crumpled and he buried himself deep, kissing me so hard that I tasted salt. I didn’t know whose tears they were.

After that, it was fast and desperate with no control. Porter’s hips driving into me, my legs wrapped around him, my hand between us, stroking myself in time with his thrusts. I came first—sudden and shattering, spilling over my fist and onto my stomach—and the clench of my body pulled him over with me. He came with my name on his lips, pressed into the curve of my neck, his whole body shuddering against mine.

Silence. The ship humming. The ocean outside. Our breathing, ragged and slowing.