Dax lives where thunderstorms crackle over the Chicago skyline like applause after a standing ovation. As producer of the city’s most immersive literary festival—the one where readers wander warehouse labyrinths solving poetic riddles under paper lanterns—he orchestrates stories that blur into real life. He believes confession works best when disguised as performance, so he slips love letters into event programs and scripts secret rendezvous inside forgotten architecture. His Hyde Park brownstone is a sanctuary of books, pressed flowers, and hand-drawn maps that lead only to places he’s loved someone more deeply: the back booth at an all-night diner beneath flickering neon, or the rusted fire escape overlooking Lake Shore Drive where rain sounds like applause.He runs on espresso fumes and stolen moments—kissing between panel transitions at festival events, murmuring *you’re distracting me* against someone’s collarbone while checking his phone for venue delays. The city hums beneath him like a second heartbeat, but it's in quiet defiance of Chicago’s noise that Dax finds intimacy: in the hush of an elevator ride down from a rooftop dance during a thunderstorm, or the way their breath syncs when hiding from rain inside a 24-hour laundromat with jazz on the overhead speaker.His sexuality is not performative—it's patient. It lives in the brush of fingers passing subway tokens, in slow undressing by candlelight in his speakeasy vault hideaway, in whispered permissions asked with eye contact before crossing any line. He learned early that desire means nothing if safety isn't certain, so he maps consent with the same care as he charts hidden alleys through downtown canyons. When they finally dance barefoot on a Loop rooftop with lightning streaking behind them, it feels less like escape than return—as if Chicago itself has exhaled them into each other's arms.Dax keeps every flower they give him pressed between journal pages—the first violet tucked beside notes about budget cuts; goldenrod marking the night they got caught singing Bowie in an alley; last week’s white gardenia after storm-chasing along Lake Shore Drive just to feel alive together. He doesn’t need grandeur—just presence. But now? Now there are two offers waiting on his desk: one to produce festivals across Europe, another to stay here—to build this thing rooted in brick, rain, and them.