Red, White & Royal Blue(30)

“That man has been begging me to introduce him to your sister since the wedding,” Henry says.

“Seriously?”

“We’ve probably just saved him a tremendous amount of money. He was going to start pricing skywriters soon.”

Alex tosses his head back and laughs, and Henry watches, still grinning. June and Nora had a point. He does, against all odds, really like this person.

“Well, come on,” Alex says. “I’m already two whiskeys in. You’ve got some catching up to do.”

More than one conversation drops out as Alex and Henry pass, mouths hanging open over entremets. Alex tries to imagine what they must look like: the prince and the First Son, the two leading heartthrobs of their respective countries, shoulder to shoulder on their way to the bar. It’s intimidating and thrilling, living up to that kind of rich, untouchable fantasy. That’s what people see, but none of them know about the Great Turkey Calamity. Only Alex and Henry do.

He scores the first round and the crowd swallows them up. Alex is surprised how pleased he is by the physical presence of Henry next to him. He doesn’t even mind having to look up at him anymore. He introduces Henry to some White House interns and laughs as they blush and stutter, and Henry’s face goes pleasantly neutral, an expression Alex used to mistake as unimpressed but can now read for what it is: carefully concealed bemusement.

There’s dancing, and mingling, and a speech by June about the immigration fund they’re supporting with their donations tonight, and Alex ducks out of an aggressive come-on by a girl from the new Spider-Man movies and into a haphazard conga line, and Henry actually seems to have fun. June finds them at some point and steals Henry away to gab at the bar. Alex watches them from afar, wondering what they could possibly be talking about that has June nearly falling off her barstool laughing, until the crowd overtakes him again.

After a while, the band breaks and a DJ takes over with a mix of early 2000s hip-hop, all the greatest hits that came out when Alex was a child and were somehow still in rotation at dances in his teens. That’s when Henry finds him, like a man lost at sea.

“You don’t dance?” he says, watching Henry, who is very visibly trying to figure out what to do with to do with his hands. It’s endearing. Wow, Alex is drunk.

“No, I do,” Henry says. “It’s just, the family-mandated ballroom dancing lessons didn’t exactly cover this?”

“C’mon, it’s, like, in the hips. You have to loosen up.” He reaches down and puts both hands on Henry’s hips, and Henry instantly tenses under the touch. “That’s the opposite of what I said.”

“Alex, I don’t—”

“Here,” Alex says, moving his own hips, “watch me.”

With a grave gulp of champagne, Henry says, “I am.”

The song crossfades into another buh-duh dum-dum-dum, dum-duh-dum duh-duh-dum—

“Shut up,” Alex yells, cutting off whatever else Henry was saying, “shut your dumb face, this is my shit!” He throws his hands up in the air as Henry stares at him blankly, and around them, people start cheering too, hundreds of shoulders shimmying to the shouty, Lil Jon–flavored nostalgia of “Get Low.”

“Did you seriously never go to an awkward middle school dance and watch a bunch of teenagers dry hump to this song?”

Henry is holding on to his champagne for dear life. “You absolutely must know I did not.”

Alex flails one arm out and snatches Nora from a nearby huddle, where she’s been flirting with Spider-Man girl. “Nora! Nora! Henry has never watched a bunch of teenagers dry hump to this song!”

“What?”

“Please tell me nobody is going to dry hump me,” Henry says.

“Oh my God, Henry,” Alex yells, seizing Henry by one lapel as the music pounds on, “you have to dance. You have to dance. You need to understand this formative American coming-of-age experience.”

Nora grabs Alex, pulling him away from Henry and spinning him around, her hands on his waist, and starts grinding with abandon. Alex whoops and Nora cackles and the crowd jumps around and Henry just gawks at them.

“Did that man just say ‘sweat drop down my balls’?”

It’s fun—Nora against his back, sweat on his brow, bodies pushing in around him. To one side, a podcast producer and that guy from Stranger Things are hitting the Kid ’n Play, and to the other, Pez is literally bending over to the front and touching his toes as instructed. Henry’s face is shocked and confused, and it’s hilarious. Alex accepts a shot off a passing tray and drinks to the strange spark in his gut at the way Henry watches them. Alex pouts his lips and shakes his ass, and with extreme trepidation, Henry starts bopping his head a little.

“Fuck it up, vato!” Alex yells, and Henry laughs despite himself. He even gives his hips a little shake.

“I thought you weren’t going to babysit him all night,” June stage-whispers in his ear as she twirls by.

“I thought you were too busy for guys,” Alex replies, nodding significantly at Pez in the periphery. She winks at him and disappears.

From there, it’s a series of crowd-pleasers until midnight, the lights and music blasting at full capacity. Confetti, somehow blasting into the air. Did they arrange for confetti cannons? More drinks—Henry starts drinking directly from a bottle of Mo?t & Chandon. Alex likes the look on Henry’s face, the sure curl of his hand around the neck of the bottle, the way his lips wrap around the mouth of it. Henry’s willingness to dance is directly proportionate to his proximity to Alex’s hands, and the amount of giddy warmth bubbling under Alex’s skin is directly proportionate to the cut of Henry’s mouth when he watches him with Nora. It’s an equation he is not nearly sober enough to parse.