Page 115 of Keep

The apartment was warm when he got back. Late afternoon light—what was left of it—came through the windows at a low angle and caught First Kiss on the wall so the blues went almost violet.

He’d been on the couch for maybe twenty minutes, sketchbook open, the list growing—portfolio inventory, which frames need replacing, call Martin, order titanium white, stretch two more canvases—when the door opened and Hank came in carrying a bag of groceries and looking like a man who’d been congratulated approximately four hundred times today and had run out of ways to say thank you.

“Hey.” Hank set the bag on the counter. “I bought lemons. I don’t know why. They were there, and I thought—we should have lemons.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. People have lemons.” He pulled out a baguette, something wrapped in white paper. “How was your day?”

Chad closed the sketchbook. Opened it. Closed it.

“Diana Thorne called me.”

Hank paused. “The gallery owner? From the faculty show?”

“Yeah.”

“What did she—why did she call?”

“She wants to give me a show. A solo exhibition. At her gallery in Georgetown. In December.”

Hank set the baguette down. Carefully, the way he did everything when his brain was catching up to information—precise, deliberate, buying himself a beat.

“Chad.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s—” His hands went to the counter, then off it, then to his pockets, then out. “Do you need—should I call—I could ask the arts committee to⁠—”

“Nope.” Chad held up one hand. “This is mine.”

Hank stopped. Mouth open, hand half-raised. Chad watched him catch himself—watched the offer form and get intercepted, watched Hank’s face do the quick recalculation of a man remembering that he’d recently stood in a room full of paintings at the Corcoran Gallery, understanding that this was not his world, and that it was fine.

“You’re right,” Hank said. “Of course you’re right.”

“I know.”

“I was going to be helpful.”

“I know. Don’t.”

“I’m going to be very unhelpful, then.” Hank crossed the kitchen and kissed him, and it was the slightly clumsy, off-center kiss of a man whose body had moved before his coordination caught up. His hand landed on Chad’s jaw, and something bumped against Chad’s cheek—cool, smooth, round.

“You’re holding a lemon,” Chad said.

Hank looked at his own hand. He was, in fact, pressing a lemon against Chad’s face.

“So I am.” He stared at it. Set it on the counter with enormous dignity. “I’m proud of you.”

“You held produce against my face.”

“Those are not mutually exclusive.” Hank’s eyes were bright and slightly too wide, and he was doing the thing he did when happiness caught him off guard—the grin that made him look ten years younger, arriving before he could arrange his face into something more senatorial. “Tell me everything. When? How many pieces? What did she say exactly?”

So Chad told him. The call. The terms. Tuesday at ten. Twelve to fifteen pieces. The fact that she hadn’t mentioned the speech, or Hank, or anything that wasn’t the work.

Hank listened with the full-body focus he brought to everything—the attention that had made Chad fall for him in the first place, the way he made you feel like the only source of information in the world. He asked questions: the timeline, the contract situation, whether she provided insurance on the pieces during exhibition.

“I don’t know yet. Tuesday.”