Page 9 of Returning the Runner

“You make incredibly loud faces, Porter. You always have.”

I sat across from him, and we looked at each other, and the air between us was different. Lighter. Still charged, but the charge had shifted frequency—less bracing for impact, more leaning into the current. “How’d you sleep?” I asked.

“Better than I have in months.”

“The sea air.”

“Sure,” he said. “We’ll go with that. The sea air.”

His eyes held mine over his coffee cup, and I felt it, the thing we’d been circling since the Lido deck. Not just memory, not just history. Something present tense. Something alive.

We spent the day together. Not by accident this time. By choice.

The ship docked near Cabo San Lucas that morning, and we were tendered to a pier near the town center. We walked off the pier together into blinding sunlight, dusty streets, and the chaos of a port town aimed at entertaining tourists—and making money off them. Neither of us had booked an excursion, and so we just walked, waving away the countless street vendors who approached us.

We found a taco stand where a woman with weathered hands served us fish tacos on paper plates, and we sat on a low wall overlooking the water, eating with our shoulders touching. Whether it was because they were fresh, because we were in Mexico, or because of the company, they were the best damn tacos I’d ever had in my life.

Hanson was different today. The shift was subtle, and you’d miss it if you didn’t know what you were looking at. But I knew. The set of his shoulders was a fraction lower. His sentences were a little longer, a little less carefully constructed. He laughed more easily. When he talked, he looked at me instead of at a fixed point over my shoulder. And the thumb thing, the compulsive press into his palm, happened only once all morning.

He told me about LA. Not the surface version from the first night, but the real one. His apartment in El Segundo, convenient to the airport and devoid of personality. The shift schedules that wrecked his sleep and the planes he always heard, even in his apartment. The way the job had narrowed his world to a dark room, a radar screen, and the constant, grinding weight of knowing that a single mistake could kill hundreds of people.

“You love it though,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment, squinting out at the marina. A pelican dove into the water and came up with nothing. “I used to. Now I think I’m just good at it. And I confused those two things for a long time.”

I understood that. I’d seen it happen to guys who took over their family’s farm or their dad’s shop, not because they wanted it, but because competence felt enough like purpose to keep them going. The difference was that those guys were stuck. Hanson had options. He just hadn’t let himself see them yet. “When’s the last time you took time off?”

“Define time off.”

“More than a weekend.”

He thought about it, and the fact that he had to calculate was its own answer. “This is the first real break I’ve taken in… I don’t know. Years.”

“Hanson.”

“I know.”

I looked at him, at the freckles multiplying across his nose, the way the sun turned his cropped hair almost gold, the way he held his taco with the same precise care he probably held everything. Something inside me shifted. Something that was choosing him right now, in present tense, not because of who he’d been but because of who he was.

We wandered through town after lunch, popping into several shops that had handmade products, avoiding the China-made tourist crap. We found one where an older man sold hand-blown glass, and Hanson picked up a small blue bowl and turned it in his hands, examining it with those careful fingers. He bought it. When I asked him why, he said, “I don’t know. It’s the color of the water today.”

Hanson Swaim, buying something impractical and beautiful because of how it made him feel. The man was thawing in real time, and I was trying very hard not to stare at him as if it were a miracle.

Back on the ship that afternoon, we found loungers on a quieter deck with less thumping music and more shade. We both read for a while, Hanson actually making progress in his thriller. Our legs were close enough that his ankle rested against mine, and neither of us moved it.

“Porter,” he said at one point, not looking up from his book.

“Yeah.”

“Thank you for last night. For pushing me to… For not letting me off the hook.”

“You don’t have to thank me for that.”

“I do though.” He lowered the book and looked at me. Those gray eyes, unguarded in a way I was still getting used to. “No one else has ever called me on my bullshit the way you do. I forgot what that felt like.”

“Hanson Swaim admitting he’s full of bullshit. Should I mark the occasion?”

“Don’t push your luck.”