Page 108 of Keep

Chad dropped his bag by the door and stood in the den, listening to the silence of a DC apartment at two in the afternoon on a Wednesday—the traffic on South Capitol Street, the refrigerator humming, the building settling around them with the patient indifference of a structure that did not care who had won what.

Hank was already on the phone.

“Yes. Thank you. I appreciate that, I really do.” He paced the kitchen, one hand in his hair, the other pressing the phone to his ear. “Thursday works. Tell Jim I’ll call him back this afternoon. And can you ask Cathy to pull the—yes. That. Exactly.”

The senator. Back in the building, back in the machinery. It had taken less than an hour.

Chad stood in the den with his bag at his feet and First Kiss on the wall and the cadmium yellow on the counter and thought: So what do you do now?

Not a rhetorical question. Not a philosophical one. A practical one. It was Wednesday afternoon. He had no shift at BJ’s until Friday. His studio at the Corcoran was available, but he hadn’t been there in a week. He had a canvas stretched and primed that he’d been planning to start before Georgia, before the election, before he’d stood on a stage in Forsyth County and been introduced to the state as the man who made a senator brave.

What do you do, Chad?

He unpacked. It didn’t take long—they’d only been gone since Saturday. Four days in Georgia that felt like four months. He hung up shirts, put his kit in the bathroom, and found the charger he’d left plugged in by the bed. Minor acts of maintenance. The body on autopilot while the brain did something else.

Hank appeared in the bedroom doorway, phone finally down, and leaned against the frame. He looked tired in a way Chad hadn’t seen before—not the sharp exhaustion of election night but something deeper, the fatigue of a man who’d been running on adrenaline for weeks and had just felt the supply cut off.

“I need to go in tomorrow,” Hank said. “Cathy’s been fielding calls all morning. Apparently half the Senate wants to congratulate me, and the other half wants to pretend nothing happened.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Frannie says morale among the Democrats is ‘disgustingly high’ and she blames me personally.”

“For winning?”

“For being, quote, ‘the only Republican in America that anyone wants to have a beer with right now.’” Hank’s mouth twitched. “She’s not wrong. I’ve never been popular with the opposition before. It’s unsettling.”

“The price of being likable.”

“I was always likable. I was just also closeted.” Hank said it simply, without bitterness, the way you’d note a change in the weather. Then he crossed the room and pulled Chad into a hug—not the performative kind, not the public kind, just the kind where you held on to someone because you were tired and they were there and the day had been long.

Chad let himself be held. Hank smelled like airplane and coffee and the fading ghost of Shelby’s fabric softener from the guestroom sheets.

“I’m going to make calls for a while,” Hank said into Chad’s hair. “Boring ones. Colleague ones. You don’t have to stay.”

“Where would I go?”

“Anywhere. The studio. The Mall. BJ’s.” Hank pulled back, hands on Chad’s shoulders, studying him. “You look like you need to move.”

The bartender’s eye, apparently, was not a monopoly. “I’m fine.”

“I didn’t say you weren’t.” Hank kissed his forehead. The gesture was courtly—almost parental—and so thoroughly Hank that Chad felt something turn over in his chest. “I said you look like you need to move.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Chad didn’t go anywhere. He sat on the couch with his phone while Hank’s voice carried softly from the den—a steady, low-grade hum of political conversation that Chad had learned to tune out the way you tuned out traffic or birdsong. Background noise. The sound of someone else’s life operating at full capacity.

His phone was a disaster. Notifications he’d been ignoring since Tuesday night—texts, missed calls, Instagram blowing up because someone had tagged him in a screenshot of the speech. He scrolled without reading. The names blurred. People he knew, people he half-knew, people he’d served drinks to twice and who now apparently felt entitled to a congratulatory text.

He found Ricky’s thread.

Tuesday evening 11:47:

CHAD ELLSWORTH, GET ON THAT STAGE

I AM SCREAMING

I am literally screaming in this apartment alone like a crazy person