Page 66 of Keep

Mac never looked like that after. Jonathan either.

The thought came and went. Not the old panic. Just the quiet fact that whatever his picker had done wrong before, it hadn’t done it here.

“Thank you,” Hank said.

“Don’t thank me for sex.”

“I’m not thanking you for—” He turned his head. Those brown eyes, still glassy. “The care. You were—careful with me.”

“You asked for doggy-style and I delivered. That’s just good service.”

Hank laughed deeply, jovial, shaking the bed. Chad watched it happen and thought, Keep this. Whatever this is.

They lay there. The quiet settled.

Chad reached for his phone on the nightstand. Didn’t think about it.

Hank was on his back, one arm behind his head, the other resting on his stomach. The sheet had been kicked to the foot of the bed at some point. The lamplight caught everything—the chest hair, the softening lines of his body, the silver in his beard. Not posed. Not aware of being looked at. Just a man in his own bed with his guard all the way down.

Chad lifted the phone. Framed it. Tapped the shutter.

Hank’s eyes opened. “Did you just⁠—”

“Yes.”

“Chad—”

“It’s a good picture.” He tilted the screen away before Hank could see what he’d been looking at. The arm behind the head. The golden lamplight. The unguarded face of a man who didn’t know he was being seen.

“Please don’t share that.” Quick. Reflex cutting through the post-sex haze.

“It’s for me only.”

Hank studied him. Whatever he saw was enough. “Okay.”

Chad looked at the image one more time. A warmth settled low in his ribs, his to hold.

He set the phone face down on the nightstand. Fitted himself against Hank’s side. Head on his chest. Hank’s arm came around him.

Tomorrow, the Kennedy Center. Tchaikovsky. A balcony in the dark. Another stretch of the only rule they had.

Hank’s breathing deepened.

Chad closed his eyes and didn’t think about the photograph or what it meant that he wanted to keep it.

He just kept it.

CHAPTER 11

Chad stopped dead in the middle of the Kennedy Center’s Grand Foyer.

“Holy shit,” he breathed.

Hank had forgotten what it was like to see the space for the first time. Six hundred feet of red carpet stretching toward the windows. The Hadrian-inspired chandeliers—eighteen of them—blazing overhead. The bronze bust of Kennedy. The flags, the mirrors, the sheer, overwhelming scale of it.

He watched Chad turn slowly, taking it in with those artist’s eyes that missed nothing, and felt something loosen in his chest. This was what he’d wanted. Not just to bring Chad here, but to see it through him. To remember why it mattered.

“It’s a palace,” Chad said. “I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never been inside.”