Page 12 of Returning the Runner

Porter rolled to the side but didn’t let go. His arm stayed across my waist, heavy and warm. His face was pressed against my shoulder, and I could feel his heartbeat gradually settling against my ribs.

“You said you love me,” he murmured after a while.

“I did.”

“You mean it?”

“I mean it.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he pulled me closer and pressed his lips to the hinge of my jaw.

“I love you too. I never stopped. I tried, but I never stopped.”

I turned my face into his hair and closed my eyes and breathed him in—warm skin, salt, something yeasty and deep underneath that was just Porter—and for the first time in as long as I could remember, every muscle in my body was completely, entirely relaxed.

No tension in my shoulders. No clench in my jaw. No thumb pressing into my palm.

I was still. I was quiet. I was held.

I slept.

EPILOGUE

PORTER

Six months later, on a Tuesday evening in November, Hanson burned the chili.

I smelled it from the taproom, the sharp, acrid scent cutting through the usual warmth of malt and wood smoke. By the time I got next door to the apartment, he was standing at the stove with a wooden spoon in one hand and a look of genuine bewilderment on his face, like the pot had personally betrayed him.

“I looked away for two minutes,” he said.

“You cannot be trusted with legumes.”

“I can direct four hundred aircraft a day, Porter.”

“Could, baby. Past tense. And chili isn’t air traffic.”

He pointed the spoon at me. “I will figure this out.”

“You’ve been saying that for three months.”

“And I will continue saying it until it’s true.”

I leaned against the doorframe and watched him scrape the bottom of the pot. This man had spent twenty-five years making split-second decisions under pressure and was now applying that same energy to ground beef and kidney beans. He’d gained weight since moving to Forestville, still lean, but healthy rather than worn out. His face had filled out. His shoulders sat lower. The freckles from the cruise had faded, but new ones would come next summer. I intended to be there for every single one of them.

He’d given notice at LAX two weeks after the cruise. I hadn’t been sure how we’d manage to merge our lives, but he’d made the decision for us. I couldn’t move my brewery. He could move himself, and so he had. He’d worked out his last month, packed up the apartment in El Segundo, and driven north with a car full of boxes and the small blue glass bowl from Cabo sitting on the passenger seat. That bowl was on the kitchen windowsill now, catching the gray November light.

It hadn’t been seamless. There were hard days when Hanson’s body didn’t know what to do without the adrenaline, when the quiet of Forestville pressed in on him like a held breath and I could see the old restlessness flickering behind his eyes. Days when he’d go still and distant in a way I recognized, and I’d have to remind myself that twenty-five years of armor didn’t come off in a season.

But he stayed. Every time, he stayed. And on the hard days, he’d find me in the taproom or the brew house, and he’d say, “I’m having a rough one,” and I’d say, “Okay,” and that was enough. He was learning to name it instead of only managing it. I was learning to let him have the space without assuming he was leaving.

We were building something. Slowly, deliberately, one day at a time.

Hanson abandoned the chili and opened the window to let the smoke out. Cold air rushed in, and with it, pine and rain and the smell of Forestville in late autumn, wet earth and wood fires. He stood at the window for a moment, breathing it in, and I watched the tension leave his back one vertebra at a time.

“I talked to a guy today,” he said, still facing the window. “About consulting work. FAA safety audits. It would be remote, mostly. Some travel, but not much.”

“Yeah?”