Page 110 of Keep

“I’m just decompressing,” Chad said. “It’s been a lot.”

“It has been a lot.”

“The good kind of a lot.”

“Is there another kind?”

“You’d be surprised.”

Hank studied him for a moment—the calculation of whether to push or wait visible behind his eyes. He chose wait. Which meant Chad was either being respected or managed, and at this hour of this day he didn’t have the energy to determine which.

“I’m going to finish up some emails,” Hank said. “Come to bed whenever.”

“Yeah. Soon.”

Hank kissed him—brief, warm, the slight scratch of the beard—and took his laptop to the den. Chad heard the couch creak, the soft click of keys, the silence of a man re-entering his own life.

He cleaned up—containers in the trash, counter wiped, the cadmium yellow moved to the windowsill where it would be less in the way and more in the light. Small domestic tasks. Autopilot again.

His phone sat on the counter. He picked it up, unlocked it, and scrolled.

Past the texts. Past the notifications. Past the Instagram tags he’d deal with tomorrow or never. Into the camera roll, where the photos lived in reverse chronological order—Georgia first, Shelby’s kitchen, Owen on the porch swing, the boiled peanut sign Chad had snapped from the car window because it was too good not to document.

He scrolled further back. October. The leaves. A shot of the Botanic Garden he’d taken for reference. Ricky making a face at the camera. A blurry photo of the bar that he didn’t remember taking.

And then.

Hank. In bed. The photo from October—the one Chad had taken after, the one Hank had said please don’t post that and Chad had said, it’s only for me. One arm was behind his head, the sheet kicked to the foot of the bed and forgotten. The light from the bedside lamp catching the silver in his beard, the dark hair on his chest, the trail of it down his stomach. His cock soft against his thigh. The body unguarded—not posed, not flexed, not aware of being looked at. Just a man who’d been loved.

Chad looked at it.

Not the way you looked at a photo of someone you loved—though he did love Hank, that was settled. It was the one thing he didn’t question. He looked at it the way he looked at anything he might paint. The composition. The light falling from the left, warm against cool shadow. The way the arm created a diagonal that drew the eye from the hand down through the torso, the hip, the thigh. The vulnerability of the expression—not guarded, not performing, just open in a way that Hank almost never was when he knew anyone was watching.

His fingers itched.

He closed the phone. He set it face down on the counter and stood there for a moment, his hands flat on the cool granite and the itch still in his fingers. The apartment was quiet around him.

From the den, the sound of Hank’s laptop clicking, and the refrigerator humming its one note. On South Capitol Street, two stories down, a siren was going somewhere.

His phone buzzed. He turned it over.

Mom, his phone could have said. I saw the speech. I saw you standing up there. I’m forty-five minutes away, Chad, and I saw it.

It didn’t say that. It said: Frannie Holloway—Tomorrow dinner, 7pm. Attendance is not an option. Wear something nice.

Chad stared at the screen. Then he laughed—short and dry, the kind of laugh that came out when the alternative was something else.

He checked his messages one more time. Scrolled to the bottom. Every thread accounted for. Every person in his life who might have reached out, accounted for.

One absence.

Not a surprise. Not anymore. There’d been no call after the photograph. No call after the punch went viral. No call after he stood on a stage in Georgia and Hank said his name into a microphone. Two months of silence that was really two years of silence that was really a lifetime of learning that love, in the house he grew up in, was conditional, and the conditions had not been met.

Manassas was forty-five minutes away. On a clear day, you could practically see it from the Capitol dome.

Chad turned off the kitchen light. Brushed his teeth with the toothbrush that had been here for two weeks. Changed into the sweatpants he kept in the second drawer because Hank had cleared it without being asked.

In the den, Hank had fallen asleep on the couch. Laptop open on his chest, glasses sliding down his nose, mouth slightly open. The senator, unconscious, looking nothing like a senator and everything like a man who’d been awake for thirty-six hours and had finally lost the argument with his own body.