Red, White & Royal Blue(118)

There’s a heavy pause, and June says, “I’m gonna go stress eat the cold pizza the polling people have. Sound good? Cool.” And she’s gone.

By 12:30, nobody can believe it’s down to this.

Texas has never in history gone this long without being called. If it were any other state, Richards probably would have called to concede by now.

Luna is pacing. Alex’s dad is sweating through his suit. June is going to smell like pizza for a week. Zahra is on the phone, yelling into someone’s voicemail, and when she hangs up, she explains that her sister is having trouble getting into a good daycare and agreed to put Zahra on the job as an outlet for her stress. Ellen, too tense to stay upstairs, is stalking through it all like a hungry lioness.

And that’s when June comes charging up to them, her hand on the arm of a girl Alex recognizes—her college roommate, his brain supplies. She’s got on a poll volunteer shirt and a broad smile.

“Y’all—” June says, breathless. “Molly just—she just came from—fuck, just, tell them!”

And Molly opens her blessed mouth and says, “We think you have the votes.”

Nora drops her phone. Ellen steps over it to grab Molly’s other arm. “You think or you know?”

“I mean, we’re pretty sure—”

“How sure?”

“Well, they just counted another 10,000 ballots from Harris County—”

“Oh my God—”

“Wait, look—”

It’s on the projection screen now. They’re calling it. Anderson Cooper, you handsome bastard.

Texas is gray for five more seconds, before flooding beautiful, beautiful, unmistakable Lake LBJ blue.

Thirty-eight votes for Claremont, for a grand total of 301. And the presidency.

“Four more years!” Alex’s mom outright screams, louder than he’s heard her scream in years.

The cheers come in a hum, in a rumble, and finally, in a storm, pressing from the other side of the partition, from the hills surrounding the arena and the city surrounding the streets, from the country itself. From, maybe, a few sleepy allies in London.

From his side, Henry, whose eyes are wet, seizes Alex’s face roughly in both hands and kisses him like the end of the movie, whoops, and shoves him at his family.

The nets are cut loose from the ceiling, and down come the balloons, and Alex staggers into a press of bodies and his father’s chest, a delirious hug, into June, who is a crying disaster, and Leo, who is somehow crying more. Nora is sandwiched between both beaming, proud parents, screaming at the top of her lungs, and Luna is throwing Claremont campaign pamphlets in the air like a mafioso with hundred dollar bills. He sees Cash, severely testing the weight limits of the venue’s chairs by dancing on one, and Amy, waving around her phone so her wife can see it all over FaceTime, and Zahra and Shaan, aggressively making out against a giant stack of CLAREMONT/HOLLERAN 2020 yard signs. WASPy Hunter hoisting another staffer up on his shoulders, Liam and Spencer raising their beers in a toast, a hundred campaign staffers and volunteers crying and shouting in disbelief and joy. They did it. They did it. The Lometa Longshot and a long-awaited blue Texas.

The crowd pushes him back into Henry’s chest, and after absolutely everything, all the emails and texts and months on the road and secret rendezvous and nights of wanting, the whole accidentally-falling-in-love-with-your-sworn-enemy-at-the-absolute-worst-possible-time thing, they made it. Alex said they would—he promised. Henry’s smiling so wide and bright that Alex thinks his heart’s going to break trying to hold the size of this entire moment, the completeness of it, a thousand years of history swelling inside his rib cage.

“I need to tell you something,” Henry says, breathless, when Alex pulls back. “I bought a brownstone. In Brooklyn.”

Alex’s mouth falls open. “You didn’t!”

“I did.”

And for a fraction of a second, a whole crystallized life flashes into view, a next term and no elections left to win, a schedule packed with classes and Henry smiling from the pillow next to him in the gray light of a Brooklyn morning. It drops right into the well of his chest and spreads, like how hope spreads. It’s a good thing everyone else is already crying.

“Okay, people,” says Zahra’s voice through the rush of blood and love and adrenaline and noise in his ears. Her mascara is streaming, her lipstick smeared across her chin. Beside her, he can hear his mother on the phone with one finger jammed into her ear, taking Richards’s concession call. “Victory speech in fifteen. Places, let’s go!”

Alex finds himself shuffled sideways, through the crowd and over to a little corral near the stage, behind the curtains, and then his mother’s on stage, and Leo, and Mike and his wife, and Nora and her parents and June and their dad. Alex strides out after them, waving into the white glow of the spotlight, shouting a jumble of languages into the noise. He’s so caught up that he doesn’t realize at first Henry isn’t at his side, and he turns back to see him hovering in the wings, just behind a curtain. Always hesitant to step on anyone’s moment.

That’s not going to fly anymore. He’s family. He’s part of it all now, headlines and oil paintings and pages in the Library of Congress, etched right alongside. And he’s part of them. Goddamn forever.

“Come on!” Alex yells, waving him over, and Henry spares a second to look panicked before he’s tipping his chin up and buttoning his suit jacket and stepping out onto the stage. He gravitates to Alex’s side, beaming. Alex throws one arm around him and the other around June. Nora presses in at June’s other side.