Page 5 of Returning the Runner

Breakfast was a buffet on Deck 10, a sprawling, chaotic affair with a made-to-order omelet station and a coffee line that stretched halfway to the elevators. I loaded up a plate, found a table near the window, and ate while watching the ocean scroll past. We were somewhere off the coast of Baja California, the water a deep, tempting blue.

I was halfway through my eggs when I spotted him. He was in the coffee line. Navy-blue T-shirt, gray shorts, hair still slightly damp from a shower. He looked better than he had last night—rested, or at least less visibly wired—but he still held himself like a man braced for turbulence. Shoulders up, jaw set, thumb pressing into his opposite palm. I’d noticed that gesture last night. I was pretty sure he didn’t know he did it.

He got his coffee, turned, and saw me. A half-second pause for that little recalibration I was starting to recognize, and then he walked over. “Morning.”

“Sit.”

He sat, setting his coffee on the table with both hands, precisely centered. No food.

“That’s not breakfast,” I said, nodding at the cup.

“I don’t eat breakfast.”

“Since when?”

“Since—” He paused. “I don’t know. A while.”

“There’s an omelet station.”

“Porter.”

“I’m just saying. It’s free. The omelets are free, Hanson.”

That almost-smile again, the twitch at the corner of his mouth that he kept catching before it fully formed. “I’ll survive on caffeine.”

“You look like you’ve been surviving on caffeine for twenty years.”

It came out sharper than I meant. Or maybe not. Maybe I’d meant it exactly that sharply because the truth was that he looked thin and tired, and it bothered me in a way I didn’t want it to. I didn’t want to care whether Hanson Swaim was eating breakfast. I’d spent twenty-five years not caring, and I wasn’t about to start now.

Except I’d never actually stopped. That was the problem.

“I’ll get a muffin,” he said mildly. “Will that satisfy your concern?”

“Blueberry. They’re good.”

He went and got a muffin. Blueberry. He ate it in small, precise bites while I pretended that it didn’t make me feel something. We talked about nothing—the ship, the itinerary, a port stop in Cabo the next day. Safe, neutral territory. Two acquaintances catching up over breakfast. Except his knee was six inches from mine under the table, and I was acutely aware of every one of those inches.

The ship was a strange universe. Contained, suspended, outside of real time. No work, no obligations, nowhere to be except wherever you decided to be. For me, a guy who ran a brewery seven days a week, the freedom was disorienting. For Hanson—a man who spent his days managing a thousand moving pieces in three dimensions—I imagined it was something closer to terrifying.

But I watched him trying. That was what got me, seeing him trying to relax, and it was like watching someone read from a manual in a language they half-remembered.

We kept running into each other. The ship made it inevitable—two thousand passengers, but the same pools, the same restaurants, the same sun decks. I saw him at the pool that afternoon, stretched out on a lounger with a book he wasn’t reading, sunglasses hiding his eyes. His skin was pale against the chair, and I thought about all those years in dark rooms watching radar screens, and something twisted in my chest.

I dropped onto the lounger next to him. “What are you reading?”

He tilted the cover toward me. Some thriller.

“Any good?”

“I’ve read the same page four times.”

“Riveting.”

He lowered his sunglasses and looked at me over the rims, and there they were, those gray eyes, sharp and searching and just a little amused. “Are you stalking me, Waugh?”

“It’s a ship. There are only so many pools.”

“There are four, actually.”