Page 56 of Keep

They’d developed a rhythm over the past ten days. Chad’s schedule was punishing—classes until three, shifts at BJ’s that ran well past midnight—and Hank’s was no less demanding, with floor votes and the appropriations markup and constituent calls that multiplied as the election approached. They grabbed time where it existed: lunch on a Tuesday gap between Chad’s classes, a late dinner after Hank’s last vote, Sunday morning with coffee and the paper.

It wasn’t enough. But Hank had spent forty years with nothing, so not enough felt like an abundance, and he tried not to examine that too closely.

Wednesday afternoon, he left the Capitol at four-thirty—early by Senate standards, practically truant—and met Chad at the U.S. Botanic Garden.

It had been Chad’s idea.

“You’ve been here five years,” Chad had said the night before, on the phone, with the exasperation he reserved for Hank’s failures of cultural literacy. “And you’ve never been to the Botanic Garden.”

“I walk past it every day.”

“That’s worse. That’s like living next to the Louvre and never going in.”

“I’m not sure the Botanic Garden is the Louvre.”

“It’s free, it’s beautiful, and it smells like a rainforest. It’s better than the Louvre.”

So here they were, standing in the humid warmth of the conservatory while Chad pointed at things and Hank tried to retain information about bromeliads.

He was failing at the bromeliads. He was succeeding at watching Chad.

This was Chad’s territory—not the art world, which Hank had seen at the gallery, but something adjacent. The living world. Chad moved through the conservatory the way he moved behind the bar—reading the room, noting details, alive to the textures of things. He stopped in front of a cluster of orchids and explained something about epiphytes and host trees that Hank immediately forgot because Chad’s hands were moving when he talked and the late afternoon light through the glass ceiling was catching the blond in his hair and Hank’s brain had apparently decided that botany was optional but Chad’s forearms were essential.

You are a United States senator. You have a graduate degree. You are staring at this man’s wrists like they contain classified information.

“You’re not listening,” Chad said.

“I am absolutely listening.”

“What did I just say?”

“Something about... roots.”

“Aerial roots. They absorb moisture from the air.” Chad gave him a look. “You’re hopeless.”

“I’m attentive. I’m just attentive to different things.”

“What things?”

Hank opened his mouth. Closed it. Felt the heat climb his neck. “The, ah. General environment.”

Chad’s mouth twitched. “The general environment.”

“It’s very lush.”

“Uh-huh.”

They moved on. The conservatory was quiet—midweek, mid-afternoon, only a handful of visitors. An older couple by the fern house. A woman with a sketchbook on a bench. The anonymity was a relief. Hank could almost forget the rules here—the forty-eight days of discretion they’d agreed to, the careful distance, the performance of being two men who happened to be in the same building at the same time.

Almost.

In the tropical room, Chad stopped in front of something with wide, flat leaves the color of jade. He reached out and ran a finger along the edge of a leaf, testing the texture, and said something about the plant’s adaptation to low light that Hank would not be able to repeat under oath. And then—without looking, without thinking about it—Hank’s hand found the small of Chad’s back.

Just rested there. Natural as breathing.

Chad didn’t flinch. Didn’t move away. He kept talking about the plant, and Hank kept his hand where it was, and for about four seconds the world was right.

Then his political brain caught up.