Red, White & Royal Blue(15)

He really doesn’t appreciate some inbred royal baby upending his system. But he did rather enjoy that fight.

He lies there, waits. Listens to the shuffling of feet outside the door. Lets minutes go by.

“So, uh,” he tries. “Star Wars?”

He means it in a nonthreatening, offhanded way, but habit wins and it comes out accusatory.

“Yes, Alex,” Henry says archly, “believe it or not, the children of the crown don’t only spend their childhood going to tea parties.”

“I assumed it was mostly posture coaching and junior polo league.”

Henry takes a deeply unhappy pause. “That … may have been part of it.”

“So you’re into pop culture, but you act like you’re not,” Alex says. “Either you’re not allowed to talk about it because it’s unseemly for the crown, or you choose not to talk about it because you want people to think you’re cultured. Which one?”

“Are you psychoanalyzing me?” Henry asks. “I don’t think royal guests are allowed to do that.”

“I’m trying to understand why you’re so committed to acting like someone you’re not, considering you just told that little girl in there that greatness means being true to yourself.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and if I did, I’m not sure that’s any of your concern,” Henry says, his voice strained at the edges.

“Really? Because I’m pretty sure I’m legally bound to pretend to be your best friend, and I don’t know if you’ve thought this through yet, but that’s not going to stop with this weekend,” Alex tells him. Henry’s fingers go tense against his forearm. “If we do this and we’re never seen together again, people are gonna know we’re full of shit. We’re stuck with each other, like it or not, so I have a right to be clued in about what your deal is before it sneaks up on me and bites me in the ass.”

“Why don’t we start…” Henry says, turning his head to squint at him. This close Alex can just make out the silhouette of Henry’s strong royal nose. “… with you telling me why exactly you hate me so much?”

“Do you really want to have that conversation?”

“Maybe I do.”

Alex crosses his arms, recognizes it as a mirror to Henry’s tic, and uncrosses them.

“Do you really not remember being a prick to me at the Olympics?”

Alex remembers it in vivid detail: himself at eighteen, dispatched to Rio with June and Nora, the campaign’s delegation to the summer games, one weekend of photo ops and selling the “next generation of global cooperation” image. Alex spent most of it drinking caipirinhas and subsequently throwing caipirinhas up behind Olympic venues. And he remembers, down to the Union Jack on Henry’s anorak, the first time they met.

Henry sighs. “Is that the time you threatened to push me into the Thames?”

“No,” Alex says. “It was the time you were a condescending prick at the diving finals. You really don’t remember?”

“Remind me?”

Alex glares. “I walked up to you to introduce myself, and you stared at me like I was the most offensive thing you had ever seen. Right after you shook my hand, you turned to Shaan and said, ‘Can you get rid of him?’”

A pause.

“Ah,” Henry says. He clears his throat. “I didn’t realize you’d heard that.”

“I feel like you’re missing the point,” Alex says, “which is that it’s a douchey thing to say either way.”

“That’s … fair.”

“Yeah, so.”

“That’s all?” Henry asks. “Only the Olympics?”

“I mean, that was the start.”

Henry pauses again. “I’m sensing an ellipsis.”

“It’s just…” Alex says, and as he’s on the floor of a supply closet, waiting out a security threat with a Prince of England at the end of a weekend that has felt like some very specific ongoing nightmare, censoring himself takes too much effort. “I don’t know. Doing what we do is fucking hard. But it’s harder for me. I’m the son of the first female president. And I’m not white like she is, can’t even pass for it. People will always come down harder on me. And you’re, you know, you, and you were born into all of this, and everyone thinks you’re Prince fucking Charming. You’re basically a living reminder I’ll always be compared to someone else, no matter what I do, even if I work twice as hard.”

Henry is quiet for a long while.

“Well,” Henry says when he speaks at last. “I can’t very well do much about the rest. But I can tell you I was, in fact, a prick that day. Not that it’s any excuse, but my father had died fourteen months before, and I was still kind of a prick every day of my life at the time. And I am sorry.”

Henry twitches one hand at his side, and Alex falls momentarily silent.

The cancer ward. Of course, Henry chose a cancer ward—it was right there on the fact sheet. Father: Famed film star Arthur Fox, deceased 2015, pancreatic cancer. The funeral was televised. He goes back over the last twenty-four hours in his head: the sleeplessness, the pills, the tense little grimace Henry does in public that Alex has always read as aloofness.