Page 93 of Keep

“That’s Ricky.” Chad glanced across the room. “He’s harmless. Mostly.”

“The best usually are. Mostly.” Frannie patted Hank’s arm as she turned to go. “I’m going to look at the rest of the show. You two do whatever it is you do.” She took three steps, stopped, and looked back. “Chad. The piece at the end of the far wall—the dark one. That’s yours too?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Go stand in front of something else for a while. I want to look at it without your face telling me how to feel.”

She disappeared into the crowd. Chad exhaled.

“Was that good?” he asked.

“That was very good.”

“She’s terrifying.”

“She made partner at a Denver law firm at thirty-one. She was elected to the Senate at forty-three. She once made Mitch McConnell apologize in writing.” Hank found Chad’s hand and squeezed it. “And she just asked to look at your painting alone. That means she wants to actually see it.”

Chad looked at him. Then at the space where Frannie had been. Then back at Hank.

“Huh,” he said.

They drifted through the show together, and Hank tried to be useful—which mostly meant keeping his mouth shut and letting Chad narrate. Chad knew every piece, every artist, and the story behind each one. A ceramic installation by a second-year who’d nearly quit last spring. A series of charcoal drawings by a woman whose work ethic Chad described with something close to awe. Martin’s own contribution—a large landscape that Hank actually liked, though he suspected liking it was the pedestrian response.

“You can like it,” Chad said, reading him. “It’s good. Martin won’t be offended that a senator likes his painting.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to. You got the look.”

“What look?”

“The one where you’ve formed an opinion and you’re running it through six filters before you say it out loud.”

Hank opened his mouth. Closed it. “That’s... uncomfortably accurate.”

“Three years behind a bar.” Chad steered him toward the next alcove. “You learn to read faces, or you drown.”

They rounded the temporary wall, and Hank stopped.

First Kiss was hanging on the far wall of the alcove, lit from above by a single track light that caught the blues and burgundies differently than the lamp in his apartment. A small white placard to the right: First Kiss. Chad Ellsworth. Acrylic on canvas.

He’d lived with this painting for weeks. He saw it first thing in the morning when he came out for coffee, and last thing at night before he turned off the lights. He knew its shapes, its colors, the way the two figures blurred into each other at the edges.

But here, on a gallery wall, with proper lighting and a placard and strangers stopping to look—it wasn’t his painting anymore. It was a painting. It belonged to the conversation happening around it. Two women were studying it now, speaking quietly. One of them pointed at something in the lower-left corner that Hank had never noticed.

“Strange, isn’t it?” Chad said beside him. “Seeing it out in the world.”

“Yes.” Hank cleared his throat. “It looks different here.”

“Better lighting. Our apartment has the aesthetic of a mid-range interrogation room.”

Hank looked at him.

“Your apartment,” Chad said. “That’s what I—your apartment.”

A small silence. Neither of them touched it.

“It looks good here,” Hank said. “But I want it back.”