Chapter 20 #2
Chad smiled. The first real one since the airplane.
Ricky knew him—knew the version of him that existed before the senator, before the photograph, before any of it.
The Chad who left dishes in the sink and argued about whose turn it was to buy toilet paper and once fell asleep on the couch watching a documentary about octopuses and woke up with a blanket Ricky had put over him.
That Chad was still in there somewhere. Ricky could find him.
I’m proud of you, Ricky sent. Both of you. But especially you.
I didn’t do anything. I just stood there.
Sometimes standing there is the whole thing.
Chad put the phone down. Picked it up again. Put it down.
On the television—Hank had turned it on at some point, muted, CNN running election aftermath coverage—a chyron scrolled across the bottom: SOUTH CAROLINA: CARVER (D) DEFEATS HOWARD (R).
The accompanying footage showed a woman Chad recognized from the segment at Shelby’s house, working a rope line, smiling the smile of someone who’d earned it.
Clancy was gone. The man who’d orchestrated the surveillance, who’d whispered bachelors stick together in Senate hallways, who’d said whatever he’d said that made Hank’s fist connect with his face—gone.
Replaced by a Democrat named Michelle Carver, who probably had no idea that her victory was, for Chad, a small private satisfaction he’d carry without examining too closely.
He watched the chyron scroll past again and felt nothing in particular. Which was itself a kind of resolution.
The afternoon slid into evening. Hank ordered Thai food because neither of them had the energy to cook. They ate at the kitchen counter—pad see ew and spring rolls. The containers were crowding next to Chad’s cadmium yellow tubes, the domestic and the artistic occupying the same three square feet.
Hank talked about the transition. Not the political kind—a re-elected senator didn’t transition, exactly—but the practical recalibrations.
Staffing. Committee assignments. The lame-duck session after Thanksgiving.
The choreography of returning to a workplace where everyone had seen you come out on national television and half of them were still deciding how they felt about it.
Chad listened. Ate. Watched Hank’s hands move as he talked—the gestures more expansive than usual, the energy of a man processing out loud.
This was what it looked like when Hank thought in real time.
He’d have been doing this with Shelby for fifteen years—the dinner debriefs, the strategy sessions disguised as conversation.
Chad was the new audience for an old habit.
You’re the new Shelby. The thought arrived, and he swatted it away. That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t right. He was not a replacement for anyone. Hank had said so. Shelby had said so. Everyone had said so.
So why did it keep circling?
Because you don’t know what you are. That’s why. You know what he is—you’re watching it right now, the senator in his element, doing the work he was born for. And you’re sitting here eating noodles and wondering where you fit.
“You’re quiet,” Hank said.
“I’m eating.”
“You’re always quiet when you’re thinking about something you don’t want to tell me.”
“That’s not—” Chad stopped. “Okay, maybe a little.”
Hank set down his chopsticks. Gave Chad the full attention—the brown eyes, the slightly furrowed brow, the posture of a man who’d just cleared his entire internal schedule. It was flattering and terrifying in equal measure.
“I’m just decompressing,” Chad said. “It’s been a lot.”
“It has been a lot.”
“The good kind of a lot.”
“Is there another kind?”
“You’d be surprised.”
Hank studied him for a moment—the calculation of whether to push or wait visible behind his eyes. He chose wait. Which meant Chad was either being respected or managed, and at this hour of this day he didn’t have the energy to determine which.
“I’m going to finish up some emails,” Hank said. “Come to bed whenever.”
“Yeah. Soon.”
Hank kissed him—brief, warm, the slight scratch of the beard—and took his laptop to the den. Chad heard the couch creak, the soft click of keys, the silence of a man re-entering his own life.
He cleaned up—containers in the trash, counter wiped, the cadmium yellow moved to the windowsill where it would be less in the way and more in the light. Small domestic tasks. Autopilot again.
His phone sat on the counter. He picked it up, unlocked it, and scrolled.
Past the texts. Past the notifications. Past the Instagram tags he’d deal with tomorrow or never.
Into the camera roll, where the photos lived in reverse chronological order—Georgia first, Shelby’s kitchen, Owen on the porch swing, the boiled peanut sign Chad had snapped from the car window because it was too good not to document.
He scrolled further back. October. The leaves. A shot of the Botanic Garden he’d taken for reference. Ricky making a face at the camera. A blurry photo of the bar that he didn’t remember taking.
And then.
Hank. In bed. The photo from October—the one Chad had taken after, the one Hank had said please don’t post that and Chad had said, it’s only for me.
One arm was behind his head, the sheet kicked to the foot of the bed and forgotten.
The light from the bedside lamp catching the silver in his beard, the dark hair on his chest, the trail of it down his stomach.
His cock soft against his thigh. The body unguarded—not posed, not flexed, not aware of being looked at. Just a man who’d been loved.
Chad looked at it.
Not the way you looked at a photo of someone you loved—though he did love Hank, that was settled.
It was the one thing he didn’t question.
He looked at it the way he looked at anything he might paint.
The composition. The light falling from the left, warm against cool shadow.
The way the arm created a diagonal that drew the eye from the hand down through the torso, the hip, the thigh.
The vulnerability of the expression—not guarded, not performing, just open in a way that Hank almost never was when he knew anyone was watching.
His fingers itched.
He closed the phone. He set it face down on the counter and stood there for a moment, his hands flat on the cool granite and the itch still in his fingers. The apartment was quiet around him.
From the den, the sound of Hank’s laptop clicking, and the refrigerator humming its one note. On South Capitol Street, two stories down, a siren was going somewhere.
His phone buzzed. He turned it over.
Mom, his phone could have said. I saw the speech. I saw you standing up there. I’m forty-five minutes away, Chad, and I saw it.
It didn’t say that. It said: Frannie Holloway—Tomorrow dinner, 7pm. Attendance is not an option. Wear something nice.
Chad stared at the screen. Then he laughed—short and dry, the kind of laugh that came out when the alternative was something else.
He checked his messages one more time. Scrolled to the bottom. Every thread accounted for. Every person in his life who might have reached out, accounted for.
One absence.
Not a surprise. Not anymore. There’d been no call after the photograph.
No call after the punch went viral. No call after he stood on a stage in Georgia and Hank said his name into a microphone.
Two months of silence that was really two years of silence that was really a lifetime of learning that love, in the house he grew up in, was conditional, and the conditions had not been met.
Manassas was forty-five minutes away. On a clear day, you could practically see it from the Capitol dome.
Chad turned off the kitchen light. Brushed his teeth with the toothbrush that had been here for two weeks. Changed into the sweatpants he kept in the second drawer because Hank had cleared it without being asked.
In the den, Hank had fallen asleep on the couch.
Laptop open on his chest, glasses sliding down his nose, mouth slightly open.
The senator, unconscious, looking nothing like a senator and everything like a man who’d been awake for thirty-six hours and had finally lost the argument with his own body.
Chad stood in the doorway and watched him breathe.
You are twenty-three years old. You pour drinks for a living. You are four months from a degree you’re not sure means anything. And the man asleep on that couch just told the entire state of Georgia that you make him brave.
So what do you make yourself?
He closed Hank’s laptop. Took the glasses off and set them on the coffee table. Pulled the throw blanket from the back of the couch and laid it over him, the way Ricky had done for Chad once, a long time ago, during a documentary about octopuses.
Hank didn’t wake up. First Kiss watched from the wall—the two figures, barely figures, leaning into each other in the abstract space Chad had made for them.
He’d painted it in September when he didn’t know who Hank was.
He’d given it away on a first date. Now it hung in the apartment where he apparently lived, in the life he was apparently building, and he still wasn’t sure what that meant.
He turned off the lamp. Went to bed alone.
The sheets smelled like Hank. The pillow smelled like Hank. The whole apartment, if he was being honest, was slowly becoming a place that smelled like both of them, and he didn’t have a name for that scent yet.
Tomorrow he’d go to the studio. Tomorrow he’d figure out what the canvases wanted. Tomorrow he’d start answering the question that had been forming since the podium, the one that sat in his chest like a stone he couldn’t quite swallow.
Tonight he’d just lie in the dark, listen to the building settle, the distant sound of someone else’s siren, and the absolute silence from a phone that would not ring from Manassas.
Tomorrow.