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.”
There it was, the question I’d been waiting for since the Lido deck. The question I’d been dreading for twenty-five years. Still, I had my answer ready. “I told you why I left. I got a job offer—”
“Hanson.”
“It was a good opportunity. The FAA was recruiting—”
“Hanson.”
He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. My name in his mouth was enough—the sound of it, the way he said it like he knew me, like he’d always known me, like I couldn’t hide behind a résumé and expect him to buy it. I closed my mouth and pressed my thumb into my palm. An old gesture, one I didn’t even realize I was doing half the time.
“You do that when you’re avoiding something,“
Porter said quietly. “The thumb thing. You’ve always done that.”
Something cracked in my chest. A hairline fracture, barely visible, but I felt it spread.
“I know you, Hanson. I know when you’re running a script. And I’ve waited twenty-five years for the version that isn’t scripted.“
He leaned forward, forearms on the table. “So just fucking tell me. Whatever it is, I can take it.”
The ocean moved beneath us. The jazz bar sent a muted thread of saxophone through the wall. I looked at my drink, at the table, at my own hands, anywhere but at him.
Until I finally found the courage to face him. “My parents.“
The words felt like gravel in my throat. “You know what they were like.”
“I know they were religious.”
“Religious is… That’s one word for it.“
I almost laughed. “The church and God and their beliefs were everything to them. And after Danny died—”
I stopped. Danny. My brother. I hadn’t said his name aloud in years. He’d been seven when it happened. I’d been four. A fall from a hayloft at my uncle’s farm, a stupid, random, senseless accident that turned my parents into people held together by grief and God and the remaining son who’d had to be enough for two.
“After Danny died, I was it. The only one. Everything they had left went into me. Every expectation, every hope, every rule. And the rules were…“
I exhaled. “You know. Be good. Be faithful. Be the son they needed. Don’t make waves. Don’t embarrass the family. Don’t—”
“Be gay.”
“Don’t be gay.”
Porter was quiet. Listening. His hands were still on the table, his beer untouched.
“So when you and I…“
I swallowed. “When we were together, I was twenty-one years old and so in love with you, and I was absolutely terrified. Every single day. Not of you. Never of you. Of everything else. Of someone seeing. Of my parents finding out. Of being the thing that finally broke them after Danny.”
“I know that part,“
Porter said softly. “I knew that then.”
“You knew part of it. You didn’t know…“
The fracture in my chest was widening. I could feel the pressure behind it, all the things I’d packed away and sealed shut, carried for two and a half decades. Now, Porter was sitting there with those steady brown eyes, and the seal was failing.
“I could see what it was doing to you,“
I said. “The hiding. The secrecy. You wanted to be out. You wanted to be real, and I couldn’t… I was making you smaller, Porter. Every time I said ‘not here’ or ‘don’t tell anyone’ or ‘we have to be careful,’ I watched a piece of you go dark. And I couldn’t…”
My voice cracked. I pressed my thumb into my palm so hard it ached. “I couldn’t be the reason you dimmed.”
Porter’s breath caught, a small, sharp intake across the table.
“So I left. I took the job and told myself it was the right thing. That you’d move on and find someone who could give you what I couldn’t. Someone who wasn’t…“
I gestured vaguely at myself. At the wreckage of it. “Someone who wasn’t stuck in the closet.”
“You left because you thought you were protecting me.”
“I left because I was protecting you.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make.”
His voice was quiet, but it landed like a hammer. I flinched, a visible, physical response I couldn’t control. Porter noticed and didn’t look away.
“You decided for me,“
he said. “You decided I was better off without you, and you left, and you never… You never even asked me, Hanson. You never said, ‘I’m drowning and don’t know what to do.’ You just disappeared, and I spent twenty-five years thinking…”
Porter stopped. His jaw worked. I watched the emotion move through him like weather across a landscape—anger, grief, something raw and unfinished that I’d put there a lifetime ago.
“Thinking what?“
I whispered.
“That I wasn’t worth staying for.“
His eyes were bright. Not crying, not yet, but close. “That you were ashamed of me. Of us. That what we had wasn’t enough to make you brave.”
The words hit me like a collision. Head-on, full speed, no survivable outcome. “No! Porter, no. That was never—”
“I know that now. You just told me.“
He pressed his palms flat on the table and took a breath. “But I need you to understand that I have carried that story for twenty-five years. Every relationship I’ve had since you, every guy who got close and then didn’t stay, I measured it against the first time, which was you, and the lesson I learned from it, which was that I was not enough.”
“You were always enough.“
My voice didn’t sound like mine. “You were the best thing I ever. Fuck, Porter, you were everything, and I was too broken to hold on to it.”
We sat there across from each other with twenty-five years of wreckage on the table between us, and neither of us moved.
“Where are your parents now?“
Porter finally asked.
“They moved to Texas, last thing I heard. We haven’t spoken since I came out.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, Porter, I’m the one who’s sorry,“
I said. It was the most inadequate word in the English language, but it was all I had. “I am so, so sorry.”
He looked at me for a long time. I watched him cycle through it, the anger, the old hurt, the new understanding, the impossible math of forgiveness. I didn’t rush him. I didn’t deserve to rush him.
“I need you to hear something,“
he said finally. “What you went through with your parents, with Danny, I understand that. I do. I can hold that with compassion. But you made a choice for both of us, and you didn’t give me a voice. And if this—” He gestured between us. At the table, the ship, the ocean, whatever this was. “If this is anything, I need to know you won’t do that again. That you won’t decide what I can handle.”
“I won’t.”
“That’s easy to say on a boat with a gin and tonic.”
“I know.”
He searched my face. I let him look. I didn’t rearrange my expression, didn’t smooth my features into composure, didn’t reach for the mask. I just let him see me: tired, guilty, cracked open, terrified, still so in love with him it felt like a medical condition. “I never stopped thinking about you. In twenty-five years, I never stopped.”
Porter’s hand moved across the table slowly, deliberately, the way he did everything. His fingers found mine, warm, rough, and steady. “Me neither.”