Red, White & Royal Blue(39)

“How long can I have?” he says.

“Five min—”

“I can make that work.”

He turns on his heel and stalks over to the ornamental display of chocolates, where Nora has apparently lured Henry with the promise of profiteroles. He plants himself between them.

“Hi,” he says. Nora smiles. Henry’s mouth drops open. “Sorry to interrupt. Important, um. International. Relations. Stuff.” And he seizes Henry by the elbow and yanks him bodily away.

“Do you mind?” Henry has the nerve to say.

“Shut your face,” Alex says, briskly leading him away from the tables, where people are too busy mingling and listening to the music to notice Alex frog-marching an heir to the throne out of the dining room.

They reach the doors, and Amy is there. She hesitates, hand on the knob.

“You’re not going to kill him, are you?” she says.

“Probably not,” Alex tells her.

She opens the door just enough to let them through, and Alex hauls Henry into the Red Room with him.

“What on God’s earth are you doing?” Henry demands.

“Shut up, shut all the way up, oh my God,” Alex hisses, and if he weren’t already hell-bent on destroying Henry’s infuriating idiot face with his mouth right now, he would consider doing it with his fist. He’s focused on the burst of adrenaline carrying his feet over the antique rug, Henry’s tie wrapped around his fist, the flash in Henry’s eyes. He reaches the nearest wall, shoves Henry against it, and crushes their mouths together.

Henry’s too shocked to respond, mouth falling open slackly in a way that’s more surprise than invitation, and for a horrified moment Alex thinks he calculated all wrong, but then Henry’s kissing him back, and it’s everything. It feels as good as—better than—he remembered, and he can’t recall why they haven’t been doing this the whole time, why they’ve been running belligerent circles around each other for so long without doing anything about it.

“Wait,” Henry says, breaking off. He pulls back to look at Alex, wild-eyed, mouth a vivid red, and Alex could fucking scream if he weren’t worried dignitaries in the next room might hear him. “Should we—”

“What?”

“I mean, er, should we, I dunno, slow down?” Henry says, cringing so hard at himself that one eye closes. “Go for dinner first, or—”

Alex is actually going to kill him.

“We just had dinner.”

“Right. I meant—I just thought—”

“Stop thinking.”

“Yes. Gladly.”

In one frantic motion, Alex knocks the candelabra off the table next to them and pushes Henry onto it so he’s sitting with his back against—Alex looks up and almost breaks into deranged laughter—a portrait of Alexander Hamilton. Henry’s legs fall open readily and Alex crowds up between them, wrenching Henry’s head back into another searing kiss.

They’re really moving now, wrecking each other’s suits, Henry’s lip caught between Alex’s teeth, the portrait’s frame rattling against the wall when Henry’s head drops back and bangs into it. Alex is at his throat, and he’s somewhere between angry and giddy, caught up in the space between years of sworn hate and something else he’s begun to suspect has always been there. It’s white-hot, and he feels crazy with it, lit up from the inside.

Henry gives as good as he gets, hooking one knee around the back of Alex’s thigh for leverage, delicate royal sensibilities nowhere in the cut of his teeth. Alex has been learning for a while Henry isn’t what he thought, but it’s something else to feel it this close up, the quiet burn in him, the pent-up person under the perfect veneer who tries and pushes and wants.

He drops a hand onto Henry’s thigh, feeling the electrical pulse there, the smooth fabric over hard muscle. He pushes up, up, and Henry’s hand slams down over his, digging his nails in.

“Time’s up!” comes Amy’s voice through a crack in the doors.

They freeze, Alex falling back onto his heels. They can both hear it now, the sounds of bodies moving too close for comfort, wrapping up the night. Henry’s hips give one tiny push up into him, involuntary, surprised, and Alex swears.

“I’m going to die,” Henry says helplessly.

“I’m going to kill you,” Alex tells him.

“Yes, you are,” Henry agrees.

Alex takes an unsteady step backward.

“People are gonna be coming in here soon,” Alex says, reaching down and trying not to fall on his face as he scoops up the candelabra and shoves it back onto the table. Henry is standing now, looking wobbly, his shirt untucked and his hair a mess. Alex reaches up in a panic and starts patting it back into place. “Fuck, you look—fuck.”

Henry fumbles with his shirt tail, eyes wide, and starts humming “God Save the Queen” under his breath.

“What are you doing?”

“Christ, I’m trying to make it”—he gestures inelegantly at the front of his pants—“go away.”

Alex very pointedly does not look down.

“Okay, so,” Alex says. “Yeah. So here’s what we’re gonna do. You are gonna go be, like, five hundred feet away from me for the rest of the night, or else I am going to do something that I will deeply regret in front of a lot of very important people.”