Page 7 of Returning the Runner

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.