Page 45 of Keep

Hank looked around the apartment. His eyes settled on the wall across from the couch—bare, a nail already there like a question someone had put up and never answered. “There,” he said.

Chad looked at the wall. The nail. All that empty space. He thought about the painting there—the two figures in saturated blues and greens, that first leaning-in moment. In a senator’s apartment on South Capitol Street.

“Okay,” he said.

He found his shirt. He found his jacket. He found one sock under the coffee table and the other one inside his left shoe for reasons he chose not to examine. Reassembled enough. Hank was in the kitchen doorway, watching him, and leaving was harder than it should have been.

“I have a class at ten-thirty,” Chad said. “And I work tonight. BJ’s. Eight to two.”

“On a Friday.”

“Bartending is a weekend job.” He pulled his jacket on. “You should come by sometime. Different context.”

“I’d like that,” Hank said carefully. “Although that might require⁠—”

“I know. The forty-eight days. I’m not saying tonight.” He zipped the jacket. “I’m saying eventually.”

“Eventually, then.”

Chad stood at the door with his hand on the knob. Too much to say, too early to say it.

“The thing you were going to say last night,” Chad said. “Before it came out sideways.”

Hank went very still.

“You don’t have to say it now. I’m not asking you to say it now. I’m just—” He chose his words with more care than he usually bothered with. “I know what it was. I want you to know that I know.”

Hank’s face—he could have painted it. A lot of color. Very soft edges.

“Okay,” Hank said quietly.

Chad opened the door. “Low and slow,” he said. “Right?”

The corner of Hank’s mouth pulled up. “That’s right.”

“Okay.” He stepped into the hallway. “Text me.”

“I will,” Hank said. And then, because he was Hank: “Thank you, Chad. For staying. And for—” The hand that had mapped Chad’s entire body last night gestured at the general situation. “This conversation.”

Chad looked at him—the gray t-shirt, the sleep-chaotic hair, the dimples through the beard, the real ones—and felt it land. Whatever this was. Low in his chest, staying there.

Either the best decision he’d ever made or a disaster that would make Mac and Jonathan look like practice rounds.

Reel it in, Chad.

“Don’t thank me yet,” he said. “We’re forty-eight days from dinner in public.”

He headed down the hall toward the stairs. The stairwell smelled like concrete and industrial cleaner and someone’s morning coffee from another unit. He pushed through the lobby door and onto South Capitol Street—Friday morning, commuters, joggers, a woman walking a dog that was mostly ears—and the city didn’t know or care that he’d just walked out of a senator’s apartment with scrambled eggs in his stomach and a forty-eight-day clock ticking behind his ribs.

Class at ten-thirty. Shower. Text Ricky back something that wasn’t the truth, because the truth didn’t fit in a text message. The truth barely fit in his head.

He pulled out his phone. Typed: alive. details later. need shower.

Four seconds: DETAILS. LATER. I’M HOLDING YOU TO THAT.

Chad pocketed the phone and walked toward the Metro, and the morning was bright and ordinary and completely different from every other morning he’d ever walked through. He let himself feel that for half a block before the useful voice—the one that had kept him upright through Mac and Jonathan and a mother who wouldn’t return his calls—said, Forty-eight days, kid. One at a time.

He could do that. Probably.