Page 6 of Returning the Runner

“And yet, here I am at yours.”

He pushed his sunglasses back up, but I caught the smile before he could hide it. A real one this time—not the twitch, not the almost. A full, unguarded smile that creased the corners of his eyes and brought out the freckles the sun was already pulling from his skin, and it hit me like a punch to the sternum.

Don’t, I told myself. Don’t do this.

But my body had already decided. My body had decided the moment I saw Hanson on the Lido deck. It was my brain that was lagging, still sorting through twenty-five years of scar tissue and trying to build a case for self-preservation.

The afternoon passed slowly. We stayed by the pool—sometimes talking, sometimes not. He told me about a near-miss incident at LAX that had made the news, and the way he described it—clinical, precise, every detail accounted for—told me everything about how his brain worked.

I told him about the time a batch of IPA exploded in my garage during my homebrewing days, and he laughed. Head tipped back, throat exposed, a sound I hadn’t heard in a quarter of a century that hit me somewhere below the ribs and stayed.

At one point, a guy walked past—young, beautiful, the kind of effortlessly sculpted body that made the pool deck feel like a magazine shoot—and I caught Hanson not looking at him. He was watching me. Though when I noticed, he averted his gaze. Quickly, like he’d been caught. Like I wasn’t supposed to see.

The sun was lower, turning the water blindingly sparkly. I’d had two beers, Hanson had switched from coffee to a gin and tonic, and the space between our loungers had somehow shrunk to nothing. His hand was resting on the arm of his chair, close enough to touch. Long fingers, neat nails, a tension in the tendons that never quite released.

I remembered those hands. I remembered them on my face, in my hair, pressed flat against my back in the bed of my truck on a logging road outside Forestville when we were nineteen and terrified and electric with want. I remembered the way they’d trembled.

The ship swayed gently, and Hanson’s hand slid an inch closer to mine on the shared edge between our chairs. I didn’t know if it was the ocean or a choice. I didn’t move away. “Hanson.”

“Yeah.”

“Have a drink with me tonight.”

He was quiet. One beat. Two. “We’ve been having drinks all day.”

“I mean just us. Somewhere quiet. I think we…” I searched for words, trying to find the version of this that was honest without being terrifying. “I think we have more to talk about.”

He didn’t answer right away. I watched his thumb press slowly into his palm. I watched him weigh the risk, the exposure, whatever calculation was running behind those gray eyes. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Okay.”

The same words as last night. But they sounded different now. Less guarded, more like a door opening another inch.

Be careful, I told myself.

But I already knew I wouldn’t be.

4

HANSON

Porter had found us a spot on the upper deck, a corner table at a small bar I hadn’t even known existed, tucked behind the jazz lounge all the way at the aft of the ship. It was quiet up here. A handful of couples murmuring at other tables, a bartender polishing glasses, the ocean sprawling black and silver under a half-moon. The wind was warm and steady, and the ship moved beneath us in long, slow rolls that were somehow comforting.

Porter had a local craft beer. He’d spent five minutes interrogating the bartender about the draft list before settling on something from a San Diego brewery with a visible reluctance that made me grin. I had my gin and tonic. We’d run out of small talk somewhere around Deck 9 on the elevator ride up, and now we were sitting across from each other in silence. It wasn’t comfortable.

He let it sit. Porter could hold a silence without rushing to fill it, which made him more dangerous than someone who pushed. Pushing, I could handle. Patience undid me.

“So,” he said eventually.

“So.”

“We’ve been doing this all day. The catching-up thing. The ‘how about this weather’ thing.” He turned his glass on the table. “And it’s been good. I’m not saying it hasn’t been good.”

“But.”

“But I didn’t ask you up here to talk about beer and turbulence reports.”

I took a sip of my drink. Set it down. Aligned it with the edge of the napkin. “What did you ask me up here to talk about?”

Porter looked at me steadily. Those brown eyes… God, those brown eyes. They hadn’t changed at all. They still looked at me like they could see straight through to the back of my skull. “I want to know why you left. The real reason.”