Page 9 of Keep

CHAPTER 2

Henry “Hank” Fortner woke at six a.m. to the soft opening notes of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1.

He lay still for a moment, watching the early September light move across the ceiling, the fan turning above him. He’d chosen this building on South Capitol Street specifically for its soundproofing—thick walls, good windows, the kind of silence that let a man think clearly.

This morning, he was not thinking clearly.

He was hard.

Morning wood was a biological fact, had been since puberty, and Hank Fortner was not the sort of man to be embarrassed by biological facts. What was unusual was the dream that had caused it.

Not Todd this time. Someone with blond hair and blue eyes and a dimpled smile that had done something structurally unsound to his chest.

Chad.

The bartender from BJ’s. The kiss—three seconds, maybe four—that had somehow reorganized his entire nervous system.

“Google, stop the music.”

The Bach cut off mid-phrase.

Hank threw back the sheet and looked down at himself. Forty years old. United States Senator. Erect as a flagpole at a government building, which was, he supposed, thematically consistent.

He reached for the bottle of lotion on his nightstand—right there, next to the washcloth, no shame, because he was forty years old and single and living alone—and pumped some into his palm.

Usually, his fantasies were carefully curated. Todd, his college roommate—straight, married with kids now—sun-bleached hair and tan skin from those summers as camp counselors. The one who’d never known. Sometimes an actor—Chris Hemsworth or Tom Hardy. Safe, distant men he’d never meet, never disappoint, never have to explain himself to.

But this morning it was Chad’s face. Chad’s mouth. The scratch of light stubble. The way he’d grabbed the front of Hank’s shirt and pulled him across the bar like it was the simplest thing in the world.

Three seconds. Maybe four.

Hank stroked himself, and for once his brain did not supply a running commentary of risk assessments.

He came with a quiet grunt, spilling across his stomach, and lay there breathing while the ceiling fan turned and the light shifted, and he thought: Tomorrow. He’s expecting you tomorrow.

He cleaned himself up with the washcloth, folded it neatly—because he was Hank Fortner and he folded things—and headed for the shower.

Under the hot spray, the rational mind reasserted itself.

He was a United States Senator. Republican. Georgia. He had spent his entire adult life constructing a careful, respectable, thoroughly closeted existence, and in one evening he had kissed a twenty-three-year-old bartender in a gay bar in Dupont Circle.

You’ve lost your mind.

Possibly. But it had felt⁠—

He didn’t have the word for it. Good was insufficient. Right was terrifying. Necessary came closest, and that was the most frightening option of all.

He shampooed his hair, soaped his body, and tried to think practically. Tomorrow night. He’d pick Chad up at his apartment in Foggy Bottom—six-thirty, as agreed—take him somewhere nice, somewhere they could talk.

And then what?

He had no idea. He had never dated a man. Never kissed one until last night. His entire romantic history consisted of a ten-year marriage to a woman who’d loved him enough to let him go and a series of solitary evenings with carefully curated fantasies and a bottle of lotion.

You’re forty years old and your first kiss with a man happened over a bar where three hundred men sang “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” You are not equipped for this.

Hank turned off the water and stepped out. In the mirror, a middle-aged man stared back—dark hair going gray at the temples, beard showing more silver than he remembered, brown eyes that crinkled at the corners. Broad through the chest and shoulders. Bearish, Chad had probably thought. The build looked better in a flannel shirt than a suit, though suits were what the job required.

Not young. Not inexperienced in life. But in this particular arena, a complete and utter novice.