3
Porter
I woke up to sunlight cutting through the balcony curtains and the low hum of the ship beneath me, and for about three seconds, I didn’t remember. Then it rushed right back in.
Hanson was on this ship.
I lay there staring at the ceiling, letting that fact settle into my bones. Hanson Swaim. On a gay cruise. Out, apparently. For a few years, he’d said, which meant he’d spent the better part of two decades still in the closet after leaving me, and I didn’t know what to do with that. I didn’t know if it made me feel vindicated or sad or furious, or all of it at once.
I got up and showered, then pulled on shorts and a T-shirt. I took a moment to check myself in the mirror—beard trimmed, hair doing its salt-and-pepper thing, not bad for forty-six. I’d never been vain, but this morning, I was aware of my own reflection in a way I hadn’t been in years, and I resented Hanson a little for that.
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 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.”
“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.