6
Hanson
We barely made it to my cabin.
We’d left the restaurant in a blur—Porter’s hand in mine through the corridor, the elevator, another corridor—stopping twice because one of us pulled the other against a wall and we couldn’t stop kissing each other. His mouth on mine, his hands on my waist, the solid warmth of him pressing me into the bulkhead while a group of guys wolf-whistled past us. I didn’t care who saw. I wanted everyone to see.
Keycard. Door. The click of the lock behind us and then the small, dim quiet of the cabin, just the hum of the ship and the sound of our breathing.
Porter cradled my face in both hands and looked at me. Those brown eyes, dark in the low light, searched mine with an intensity that made my skin feel too thin. “Are you sure this is what you want? There’s no pressure, Hanson. None.”
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
He kissed me. Slower this time, deliberate, thorough, like he had all the time in the world and intended to use it. His beard rasped against my jaw, and I shuddered. I’d never been with a man with a beard, and the friction of it—rough and soft at the same time—was doing something to my nerve endings that I hadn’t anticipated.
I pulled at his button-down, and he stepped back long enough to tug it over his head. And there he was. Broad and solid, dark hair scattered across his chest, thicker at the center and trailing to below his navel. His body was exactly what I’d expected yet nothing I was prepared for—not sculpted, not young, just real. Strong and lived-in and warm.
I put my hands on his chest and felt his heartbeat under my palms—steady, like everything about him. He inhaled sharply at the contact and his stomach muscles tightened. “Your turn.”
I unbuttoned my shirt. Porter’s eyes tracked my fingers, and when I shrugged it off, his gaze moved over me in a way that made me want to cover myself. I was lean where he was broad. Pale where he was tan. I knew what I looked like—stripped down, too thin, every tension line and sharp angle on display.
“Don’t,“
Porter said quietly.
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever you’re doing in your head right now. The inventory. The critique.“
He stepped closer and ran his hands slowly down my ribs to my waist and then the hollow above my hips. My breath caught. “You’re beautiful, Hanson. You’ve always been beautiful.”
I would have to take his word for it, but some of the tension inside me dissipated. “Thank you.”
He kissed my throat, my collarbone, the scar on my shoulder from a mountain biking accident when I was fifteen. He remembered it, found it with his mouth like he still had a map. I tipped my head back and let him, my hands gripping his shoulders, and something inside me started to unlock, something I’d been holding shut for so long that I’d forgotten it was closed.
We moved to the bed. He guided me onto the mattress and stretched out over me, and the weight of him… God, the weight of him, solid and grounding and everywhere. I arched against him instinctively, and when our hips pressed together, his hard cock slid against my own. The sound I made was embarrassing, but completely beyond my control.
Porter grinned. “There you are…”
We took our time with the rest of it. Belts and zippers and the clumsy negotiation of pants in a narrow cruise ship bed. Porter laughed when his knee hit the wall, and I laughed when my elbow caught the nightstand lamp, and somehow the laughter made it better, made it real in a way that pure intensity wouldn’t have. This wasn’t a fantasy. This was two forty-six-year-old men with creaky joints and reading glasses on their nightstands, figuring out how to fit together again.
When we were finally naked, Porter propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at me. His gaze moved over my body slowly, deliberately, the way he’d look at something he was trying to memorize. He traced a line from my sternum to my navel with one rough fingertip, and my cock twitched against my stomach.
“Freckles,“
he said softly. “The sun brought out your freckles.”
“They’ll fade.”
“Not if I have anything to say about it.”
He kissed his way down my chest, taking his time—mouth hot and open against my skin, beard scraping a trail of fire across my stomach. When he reached my hip, I stopped breathing. When he wrapped his hand around my cock, I stopped thinking. “Porter…”
“I’ve got you.”
He stroked me slowly, watching my face, reading every response like a language he was relearning. His grip was firm and sure—callused palm, rough fingers, unhurried—and I was falling apart under it. My hips rocked into his fist, and I heard myself making sounds I didn’t recognize, desperate and unguarded and nothing like the man I was in every other context of my life.
He lowered his mouth and took me in, and the world reduced to the wet heat of his tongue and the gentle suction. His hand braced flat on my stomach, holding me steady. I buried my fingers in his hair—thick, coarser than it used to be, and now silver at the temples—and pulled. He groaned around me, and the vibration nearly ended things right there.
“Stop!“
I gasped. “I want… Porter, stop, I want you.”
He pulled off and looked up at me, lips wet and eyes dark. “How?”
“Inside me. I want you inside me.”
Something shifted in his expression. There was desire, yes, but also tenderness so acute it made my throat ache. He kissed the inside of my thigh. “God, yes.”
There was a brief, graceless interlude involving lube from my toiletry bag, a brief discussion about condoms—we didn’t need them, both negative—and then we were fumbling and half-laughing and completely unwilling to stop touching each other long enough to be efficient about it. Porter’s fingers were thick and careful as he opened me, one and then two, watching my face the entire time. He was patient, steady and attentive, and present.
He pushed inside me slowly. I felt every inch—the stretch, the pressure, the overwhelming fullness of being that close to another person after years of holding everyone at arm’s length. My breath came in short, sharp gasps as I gripped his arms and he held still, buried deep, forehead pressed to mine.
“Okay?“
he whispered.
“Yeah.“
My voice was wrecked. “Move. Please move.”
He moved. Slowly at first, with long, deep strokes that I felt in my spine, in my teeth, in the backs of my eyes. His hand found mine and pinned it to the pillow above my head, fingers interlaced, and I held on like it was the only thing keeping me on the planet. His other hand gripped my hip, angling me up, and when he found the right spot, I cried out. He did it again and again until I was shaking.
“Look at me,“
Porter said, and I opened my eyes—I hadn’t realized I’d closed them—and there he was. Flushed, breathing hard, sweat at his temples, looking at me with those brown eyes like I was the only thing in the world that mattered.
Just like he used to. Exactly like he used to.
“I love you,” I said.
The words fell out of me like they’d been sitting at the front of my mouth for twenty-five years, just waiting for the door to open. I hadn’t planned to say them. I hadn’t even fully formed the thought. But they were true. In fact, they were the truest thing I’d ever said.
Porter’s face crumpled and he buried himself deep, kissing me so hard that I tasted salt. I didn’t know whose tears they were.
After that, it was fast and desperate with no control. Porter’s hips driving into me, my legs wrapped around him, my hand between us, stroking myself in time with his thrusts. I came first—sudden and shattering, spilling over my fist and onto my stomach—and the clench of my body pulled him over with me. He came with my name on his lips, pressed into the curve of my neck, his whole body shuddering against mine.
Silence. The ship humming. The ocean outside. Our breathing, ragged and slowing.
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?”
“It’s part-time. Low-stress. Well, low-stress compared to keeping planes from hitting each other.”
“That’s a low bar.”
He turned around and leaned against the counter. Those gray eyes, soft in the kitchen light, looking at me with an expression I was still getting used to—open, unguarded, home. “It would mean I’m contributing to the household. To us.”
“You do contribute.”
“I burned the chili.”
“You contribute in other ways.”
He almost smiled. “I want to build something here. With you. Not just exist in your life. I want to have my own thing.”
I crossed the kitchen and kissed him. Slow, unhurried, tasting coffee and smoke. His hand came up to my jaw, fingers sliding into my beard the way they always did, and I felt him settle against me with that full-body exhale that still, six months in, made my chest ache with the simple miracle of it.
“Then build it,“
I said against his mouth.
The sounds of the taproom filtered in from next door—glasses clinking, a burst of laughter, the muffled thump of the playlist I’d left running. Tuesday nights were quiet at Holdfast. Locals mostly. The regulars had absorbed Hanson into the fabric of the place with the easy, unsurprised acceptance of a small town that had known us both as kids. Oh, you two finally figured it out? Good. About time.
Hanson pulled back and glanced at the ruined pot on the stove. “Pizza?”
“Pizza.”
He pulled out his phone to order, perched on the counter in my kitchen, in wool socks and a flannel shirt he’d stolen from my closet, frowning at a menu on his phone with the same concentration he’d once given a radar screen. I thought about the boy I’d loved at twenty-one, the one who’d kissed me in the back of a truck on a logging road and trembled and couldn’t express his love aloud.
This was the same man. And he was completely different. And I loved both versions of him—the scared kid and the man who’d finally come home.
“Pepperoni?“
he asked without looking up.
“Always.”
He placed the order, set down his phone, and looked at me. The same way I’d looked at him, I realized, cataloging, memorizing, marveling at the improbable, mundane, extraordinary fact of being here together on a Tuesday night.
“Hey, Porter.”
“Yeah.”
“I love you.”
I closed the distance between us and wrapped my arms around him, pulling him close. “I love you too. Always have, always will.”
Outside, the rain tapped against the window, cold air wrapping around us. I didn’t feel anything. I was in the arms of the man I loved. I was home.