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He stopped the thought. Started over.

“I’m a United States senator,” Hank said. His voice was rough and unsteady. “From Georgia. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all night. That’s my job. That’s why I’m closeted. That’s why everything about this terrifies me.” He swallowed. “And I’m sorry I told you like this. I wanted to say something else entirely, and this is what came out, because apparently my brain and my mouth have completely different⁠—”

He stopped. He was spiraling. He could hear himself spiraling.

“Chad?” He reached out and cupped Chad’s face with trembling hands. “Please. Say something.”

But Chad didn’t speak. He lay there in the tangled sheets, flushed and undone, and looked at Hank like he was seeing him clearly for the first time. Or like everything he’d seen before had just rearranged itself.

The Chopin played on in the other room.

Neither of them heard it.

CHAPTER 6

The ceiling was unfamiliar.

Chad lay on his back, cataloging details—the small water stain in the far corner shaped vaguely like Florida, the overhead light fixture that was purely functional and probably came with the apartment, the morning light coming through curtains that were too short for the window. A senator’s apartment. He kept landing on that.

You slept with a senator, Chad.

He turned his head. Hank was asleep beside him, or close to it—breathing slow and deliberate, on his back with one forearm across his chest, the other arm crooked above his head. The sheet had migrated south somewhere in the night and sat at his waist, leaving that chest fully exposed. Dark hair, threaded with silver. Chad had put his hands there. His mouth. He remembered all of it clearly enough.

I’m a senator.

Said like a confession. Said like a man stepping in front of a bus he’d been watching come down the street for three blocks.

The words had landed somewhere between his sternum and his stomach and just sat there, and everything that came after—the quiet, Hank’s face, the weight of it—had been too much to untangle in the dark. He’d done the only thing that made sense: said okay and let Hank pull him close and not thought about it until morning.

Morning had arrived. He was thinking about it.

He sat up carefully, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and sat there with his elbows on his knees. His clothes were scattered. He was aware of his body in the particular way that came after good sex—settled, loose, a faint tenderness that was not unpleasant. He found his underwear on the floor beside the bed, and pulled them on. His jeans were draped over a chair.

He padded out into the main room. His shirt was on the floor near the couch. He picked it up, shook it out, and draped it over his shoulder. The apartment was small and tidy—not sterile, but considered. The books on the shelf were organized by size. That told him something. Invisible Man between two policy volumes. A Langston Hughes collection with a cracked spine. Things people read because they needed them, not because someone assigned them.

The walls, though. The walls were bare. Every single one. No art, no prints, not even a framed poster from a campaign event. Just clean paint and empty space. An artist noticed bare walls the way a musician noticed silence—not as absence, but as a statement. Hank’s walls said temporary. Or careful. Or maybe just alone.

First Kiss is going to look good in here. It’ll be the only thing with a pulse.

A framed photograph on the end table—he moved closer. Two older people, a farmhouse behind them, sunlight flattening everything out the way it did in photos from the nineties. Hank’s parents, probably. They’d died when he was twenty-six. He’d mentioned it at dinner, the way you mentioned things that had calcified into fact—no longer raw, just present.

The only personal item in the whole apartment.

He picked up his phone from the coffee table. 7:48. Two texts from Ricky, sent around one in the morning.

you alive

k assuming yes.

He put the phone in his jeans pocket without responding.

In the kitchen he found the coffee situation—a drip machine, half a bag of Dunkin’ ground beans, filters in the cabinet above. He filled the reservoir, measured the grounds, and set it going. The kitchen was narrow, galley-style, and very clean. The kind of clean that meant someone either never cooked or was meticulous about cleaning up when they did. He stood at the counter while the machine hissed and dripped and tried to organize his thinking.

A senator.

A Republican senator.

From Georgia.