Chapter 20
The flight attendant called Hank “Senator” before they’d cleared the gate, and that was how Wednesday started.
Not a big moment. Just a woman with a beverage cart and a professional smile recognizing the face that had been on every screen in the country twelve hours ago.
“Can I get you anything, Senator? Congratulations, by the way.” Hank thanked her, ordered coffee, and went back to his phone, thumbs working through what looked like an endless scroll of messages.
Chad ordered a ginger ale and watched Georgia disappear through the window.
Tuesday night was already becoming something else—not a memory exactly, more like a photograph someone else had taken.
The community center. The fluorescent lights.
The podium. This is Chad. He makes me brave.
He could replay it in sequence, could see Hank’s hands shaking with the index cards, could feel the exact moment Hank’s fingers had closed around his and pulled him forward.
But it was flattening. Becoming a story.
The kind of thing that would get retold until the retelling replaced the thing itself.
At the gate in Atlanta, a man in a Braves cap had stared at them for a full thirty seconds before looking away. Chad couldn’t tell if he’d been recognized or if the guy was just working through his feelings about two men holding boarding passes in close proximity.
Welcome to the rest of your life, buddy. Better get used to the staring.
Hank was deep in his phone now. The posture had changed somewhere over the Carolinas—shoulders squaring, jaw setting, the accent pulling back from its Georgia sprawl into something more clipped and careful—the senator reassembling himself in real time, component by component.
“Frannie wants dinner tomorrow,” Hank said without looking up. “She says, and I quote, ‘Tell the boyfriend I’m vetting him properly this time and he should prepare accordingly.’”
“Should I be scared?”
“Frannie’s harmless.”
“You hesitated.”
“I did not hesitate.” Hank hesitated. “She’s mostly harmless.”
Chad smiled and turned back to the window. Virginia now, the suburban sprawl south of DC beginning to assert itself—highways and housing developments and the beige of mid-Atlantic architecture. Somewhere down there was Manassas.
He didn’t look for it.
The pilot announced their descent into Reagan National, and Hank put his phone away long enough to take Chad’s hand.
A slight gesture—automatic, easy, the way you’d reach for something you expected to be there.
Three weeks ago, that hand would have stayed in his lap on an airplane.
Three weeks ago, a lot of things would have stayed where they were.
“You okay?” Hank asked.
“Just tired.”
“We’ll be home soon.”
Home. Hank said it like it was settled. Like the word had an address they both knew.
Chad squeezed his hand and didn’t say anything.
The apartment was the same, and it wasn’t.
Same hardwood floors. Same den with the couch and the bookshelves and the desk where Hank left his laptop open like a man who trusted the world not to touch his things.
Same kitchen where Hank had made him eggs the morning after, low and slow, the careful choreography of a man performing domesticity for an audience of one.
But First Kiss hung on the wall across from the couch—acrylic on canvas, a painting Chad had made in his studio seven weeks ago and offered on a first date. It looked good there. Like the wall had been waiting for it.
And Chad’s stuff was here. Not all of it—the bulk of his life was still technically at the Foggy Bottom apartment with Ricky, clothes in the closet, canvases against the wall, the accumulated debris of twenty-three years of not owning very much.
But enough had migrated. His toothbrush in the bathroom.
A hoodie over the desk chair. Two tubes of cadmium yellow on the kitchen counter because he’d been working on something the week before the election and had set them down and never picked them up.
Neither of them had discussed this. The conversation from three weeks ago—Hank’s blurted move-in request, Chad’s I need to think, the alarm bells that had clanged and then quieted—had never actually concluded.
There’d been no official resolution, no lease discussion, no moment where Chad had said yes, I’m moving in.
He’d just started being here more than he was anywhere else, and Hank had started saying home like it included both of them, and the thing had happened the way most real things happened. Not with a declaration. With gravity.
Chad dropped his bag by the door and stood in the den, listening to the silence of a DC apartment at two in the afternoon on a Wednesday—the traffic on South Capitol Street, the refrigerator humming, the building settling around them with the patient indifference of a structure that did not care who had won what.
Hank was already on the phone.
“Yes. Thank you. I appreciate that, I really do.” He paced the kitchen, one hand in his hair, the other pressing the phone to his ear. “Thursday works. Tell Jim I’ll call him back this afternoon. And can you ask Cathy to pull the—yes. That. Exactly.”
The senator. Back in the building, back in the machinery. It had taken less than an hour.
Chad stood in the den with his bag at his feet and First Kiss on the wall and the cadmium yellow on the counter and thought: So what do you do now?
Not a rhetorical question. Not a philosophical one.
A practical one. It was Wednesday afternoon.
He had no shift at BJ’s until Friday. His studio at the Corcoran was available, but he hadn’t been there in a week.
He had a canvas stretched and primed that he’d been planning to start before Georgia, before the election, before he’d stood on a stage in Forsyth County and been introduced to the state as the man who made a senator brave.
What do you do, Chad?
He unpacked. It didn’t take long—they’d only been gone since Saturday.
Four days in Georgia that felt like four months.
He hung up shirts, put his kit in the bathroom, and found the charger he’d left plugged in by the bed.
Minor acts of maintenance. The body on autopilot while the brain did something else.
Hank appeared in the bedroom doorway, phone finally down, and leaned against the frame.
He looked tired in a way Chad hadn’t seen before—not the sharp exhaustion of election night but something deeper, the fatigue of a man who’d been running on adrenaline for weeks and had just felt the supply cut off.
“I need to go in tomorrow,” Hank said. “Cathy’s been fielding calls all morning. Apparently half the Senate wants to congratulate me, and the other half wants to pretend nothing happened.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Frannie says morale among the Democrats is ‘disgustingly high’ and she blames me personally.”
“For winning?”
“For being, quote, ‘the only Republican in America that anyone wants to have a beer with right now.’” Hank’s mouth twitched. “She’s not wrong. I’ve never been popular with the opposition before. It’s unsettling.”
“The price of being likable.”
“I was always likable. I was just also closeted.” Hank said it simply, without bitterness, the way you’d note a change in the weather.
Then he crossed the room and pulled Chad into a hug—not the performative kind, not the public kind, just the kind where you held on to someone because you were tired and they were there and the day had been long.
Chad let himself be held. Hank smelled like airplane and coffee and the fading ghost of Shelby’s fabric softener from the guestroom sheets.
“I’m going to make calls for a while,” Hank said into Chad’s hair. “Boring ones. Colleague ones. You don’t have to stay.”
“Where would I go?”
“Anywhere. The studio. The Mall. BJ’s.” Hank pulled back, hands on Chad’s shoulders, studying him. “You look like you need to move.”
The bartender’s eye, apparently, was not a monopoly. “I’m fine.”
“I didn’t say you weren’t.” Hank kissed his forehead. The gesture was courtly—almost parental—and so thoroughly Hank that Chad felt something turn over in his chest. “I said you look like you need to move.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Chad didn’t go anywhere. He sat on the couch with his phone while Hank’s voice carried softly from the den—a steady, low-grade hum of political conversation that Chad had learned to tune out the way you tuned out traffic or birdsong.
Background noise. The sound of someone else’s life operating at full capacity.
His phone was a disaster. Notifications he’d been ignoring since Tuesday night—texts, missed calls, Instagram blowing up because someone had tagged him in a screenshot of the speech.
He scrolled without reading. The names blurred.
People he knew, people he half-knew, people he’d served drinks to twice and who now apparently felt entitled to a congratulatory text.
He found Ricky’s thread.
Tuesday evening 11:47:
CHAD ELLSWORTH, GET ON THAT STAGE
I AM SCREAMING
I am literally screaming in this apartment alone like a crazy person
Wednesday morning 7:12:
ok I’ve calmed down
I haven’t calmed down
When are you home?
Chad typed: Just landed. At Hank’s.
Three dots immediately.
At HANK’S. Not “the apartment.” Not “home.” At Hank’s. We’re going to talk about your pronouns later, papi.
How’s my apartment?
YOUR apartment has a new throw pillow situation, and you will respect it when you come to collect your remaining earthly possessions.
Who says I’m collecting anything?
Your toothbrush has been gone for two weeks, Chad. The crime scene tells a story.