Then:

On a quiet Tuesday in September, Kyle came home with a dazed look on his face. He even came home early. Stan was worried. He thought maybe Kyle had gotten fired, but Kyle was oddly calm as he shed his suit jacket and grabbed a beer. They settled in the living room, all three of them. Jake was playing with blocks on the floor, telling his teddy bear a story in stilted, half-formed sentences. Stan was quietly fretting. He just wanted Kyle to say something so he could stop freaking out about what was probably nothing.

Earlier, Stan had thought about starting a fire in the fireplace and maybe opening a bottle of wine when Kyle got home. Now he was glad he hadn't. He knew something was wrong. The anxiety was basically giving him hives. The room was already too hot and he felt like he needed a clear head.

Whatever was happening, Kyle wasn't sure how to deal with it. He wasn't angry and yelling about whatever great injustice he'd been served. He wasn't happily popping the cork on a bottle of champagne. He wasn't even his normal self, who hitched Jake up into his lap and listened to Stan talk about his day at the office. Instead, Kyle was watching them both carefully, looking between Stan and Jake like he was trying to see something that Stan couldn't understand.

It took ten minutes of silence for Stan to final crack. "What's wrong?" he asked quietly, eyes slipping from Kyle to Jake then back to Kyle.

"Jared Polis is running for Senate," Kyle said.

Stan wondered if maybe Kyle was planning on working for the campaign or something equally outrageous. Stan was well aware of how terrible campaign staff was paid. Taking a hundred thousand dollar a year hit to their income wasn't something he would be jumping for joy about. Kyle volunteered his time for the party already: he was a precinct captain, he'd volunteered for Clinton both times, and was the most hardass organizer the Colorado Second had ever seen. Stan loved that shit: the grassroots, getting people motivated part of politics, but Kyle lived for it. Stan just wasn't sure they could live on it.

"That's... great?"

"Yeah." Kyle sounded sort of lost, like he was still in his office, like there was a contract he was still in the middle of writing, even though he'd come home. It was Stan's least favorite version of Kyle. "It's great for him. He'll be great."

"I don't understand what's going on, Kyle." Stan tried to keep his voice even, but he knew he sounded like he was freaking out.

"Carl Barrington called me yesterday. We had drinks today. Like an hour ago."

"Okay?"

Kyle put his beer down on the table and took in a deep, long breath. "It wasn't about Polis. Well, it kind of was."

"What are you talking about?"

"He was. I mean, we were bullshitting, you know? About work, about the last election, about how great Polis is going to be for the Senate." He smiled distractedly at Jake when Jake plopped a block into his lap. "He started going on and on about opposition in the House race, how the Second needs to stay Democratic." He put the block back into Jake's tiny, wobbling hands. "I started throwing names out there, you know, for the House seat. Because Frank'd be awesome and Linda is amazing on the city council, she'd be even better in the House. A firecracker."

"Yeah, sure." Stan watched Jake toddle back over to his blocks, which he promptly abandoned for his juice. "You gonna be Linda's campaign manager, or something? Carl retiring from masterminding the Colorado Democratic party?"

Kyle shook his head. "There's. They already picked someone out, Carl. And. The D-triple-C. For the seat."

"Kyle." Stan's patience was at its ends. He didn't understand the lost look on Kyle's face, the way he was completely ignoring Jake's systematic destruction of the living room with a combination of apple juice, blocks, and cheerios.

"They want me to run," Kyle said softly. He picked at the label on his bottle and looked up at Stan. He was caught between total panic and tears; Stan could tell from the way his Adam's apple was bobbing and his eyes were crinkling at the corners. "They want me to run for Congress."

Now:

It was a Tuesday in January. Late. Stan'd been on the couch with a book for a while, curled up under a quilt. He wasn't really reading, just like he wasn't really watching TV earlier. He kind of hated January. He hated it on principle, but in DC it was unbearable. It was cold, but not cold enough. It snowed, but not pretty snow, just that ugly, grey, sloppy slush that cities got. Not that Boulder wasn't a city or that the snow wasn't ugly two days in. He missed the mountains every time he looked out the window.

He wasn't surprised when his phone, somewhere down by his knees, dinged. He wasn't surprised when he checked it and it was Kyle, apologizing again for being late. It was January in DC-he was certain that no one got home on time. Although 9:30 was late, and bad, even for Kyle. Even in January. He tossed his book back onto the coffee table and turned the TV back on. It was on low and still on C-Span. Some appropriations subcommittee was bitching about funding allocations. Stan hated Republicans for at least three discrete reasons so he instantly disliked the chairman of every committee. And Jesus fuck, this one was from Alabama, so the accent was grating as all hell. Stan also hated Alabama, even though he'd only been there once. Once was enough.

It was the same boring pontifying that he'd shut off earlier. Congress had been in session for eleven days and already there was the usual assigning of blame and deflection of responsibility that made Stan generally feel terrible about the state of the government. He thought maybe most congresspeople cared. They were easy to vilify though. He knew; he'd probably met half the House.

He got up and puttered into the kitchen. He grabbed a beer out of the fridge and eyed the plate he'd made for Kyle, hours ago, under plastic wrap on the top shelf. At five he'd thought maybe Kyle would get home by seven-thirty. He tried to be home before eight every night. In a few weeks, he'd be reliably in the door by seven-thirty three nights out of five. In the mean time, Stan was making his best attempt to read through the DC public library and to stay off the comments section on CNN articles. Sometimes he called his Mom.

Stan checked the clock on the microwave as he settled down at the tiny kitchen table. It was 10:15 and he was still alone. He thought about going back to his book but he heard the door unlocking and finally, thankfully, Kyle was home. Stan hopped up and jogged into the hallway, beer dangling precariously in his fingertips, and let a grin take over his face at Kyle's harried, exhausted, completely relieved look.

"Hey."

Kyle tossed his briefcase down and toed off his shoes. "Hey," he echoed. "Jake asleep?"

"Since eight," Stan answered.

Kyle came over and kissed him. "I'm sorry."

"I know."

"The meeting ran late."

Stan shrugged like it wasn't a big deal. It wasn't, not really. Now that Kyle was home his head didn't feel like it was full of wool or like the world stopped turning. When Jake was awake or Kyle was home, Stan felt engaged. Stuck with a sleeping six year old and nothing but crappy television and books, the world was insanely small and unpleasant.

Kyle tossed his suit jacket on a chair by the door as he crossed the narrow hall into the kitchen. Stan leaned against the doorframe, watching Kyle root through the fridge and come out with his own beer.

"Anyway," Kyle said as he popped the cap off and practically collapsed into a kitchen chair, "what'd you two do today?"

"I don't know." Stan sighed and sat across from Kyle. Kyle's tie was half unknotted, crooked on his chest, and he desperately needed to shave. Stan squashed the urge to brush his knuckles across Kyle's stubble because Kyle hated it. He said it felt weird. Stan didn't manage to stop himself from undoing Kyle's tie, which earned him another tired smile. "We played Uno. Watched The Lion King again. He had homework today."

Kyle was quietly staring at the label on his beer, unblinking. Stan knew that Kyle hated this. He could tell from the look on his face whenever they talked about Jake, like he was soaking in every tiny detail of their day. He hated coming home after Jake went to bed and, most days, leaving before Jake woke up.

"Dude," Stan said softly. He put his hand out, palm up, and Kyle tangled their fingers together. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine." He looked up at Stan again finally. "I'm just exhausted, and I miss you, and I miss Jake."

"January sucks."

Kyle laughed quietly. There wasn't much mirth in it, but Stan would take any laugh over Kyle staring morosely at his beer. "You think everything sucks, Stan."

"Not you. Not Jake." He took a swig of beer. "I think DC sucks, though."

Kyle cringed. "I'm sorry."

"Don't apologize."

"Well, I don't know what else you want me to say. You wanna go stay in Boulder? You guys can go home, if you want." Kyle's nose wrinkled, like the just saying the words left an awful taste in his mouth.

They'd talked about it before. Kyle offered it in the beginning, three years ago, in that other lifetime. Stan could stay. He could drop Jake off at daycare and putter around his office at SolTech. They could live off Skype calls, facetime, and rack up enough frequent flier miles to kill off a species of fish. They were already working their way up in the ranks of American Airlines' most valued customers as it was, with district work weeks and going home for long weekends. If Kyle was running back and forth every weekend he'd spend half his life on a plane. Stan didn't understand how the rest of Congress pulled it off without going insane.

Stan knew Boulder was always an option. His presence in Washington wasn't required, only Kyle's. Kyle was an oddball Congressman for having his family here in the first place. Stan got strange looks for those first two years whenever Kyle had someone over for dinner and drinks. They both hated the idea of spending half the year apart, though, so that's what they'd decided: they did this together or not at all. The thought of Kyle here alone being slowly eaten from the inside by the fucking House of Representatives horrified Stan. So he shook his head.

"No way. We're a team."

That earned him a real smile across Kyle's tired face. "You wanna stay up with me for a while? I have a couple memos to read."

Stan nodded. 'A couple' could be two or seven; Stan didn't care. This was his favorite part of days in DC: they curled up on the couch with a blanket and Kyle read while Stan vaguely paid attention to whatever was next in his Netflix queue.

Sometimes Kyle read aloud the bits and pieces that Allie, his policy advisor, had worded particularly awfully. In between dry sentences on farming subsidies there'd sometimes be a limerick pencilled into the margins about that soul sucking blowhard from Montana and how deeply he loved his cows. Stan found it hilarious but he worried, sometimes, about whether or not anyone would someday find one of those marked-up copies and cause a scandal with them.

Kyle made it to nearly midnight before he drifted off against Stan's shoulder. He'd been up since five and while Stan firmly believed that eighty percent of Congress did nothing at all, he knew that Kyle wasn't one of those Congresspeople. He'd probably spent every minute he wasn't in meetings calling constituents back because Kyle was exactly that kind of person.

And that was why Stan couldn't ever leave him here alone, because Stan thought Washington had a way of chewing people up and spitting them back out without a heart. He couldn't bear the thought.