Red, White & Royal Blue(47)

The photographers are readily visible when they meet in front of the Met, so they clasp each other’s hands and Alex says through his big on-camera smile, “I want you alone, now.”

They’re more careful in the States, and they go up to the hotel room one at a time—Henry through the back flanked by two tall PPOs, and later, Alex with Cash, who grins and knows and says nothing.

There’s a lot of champagne and kissing and buttercream from a birthday cupcake Henry’s inexplicably procured smeared around Alex’s mouth, Henry’s chest, Alex’s throat, between Henry’s hips. Henry pins his wrists to the mattress and swallows him down, and Alex is drunk and fucking transported, feeling every moment of twenty-two years and not a single day older, some kind of hedonistic youth of history. Birthday head from another country’s prince will do that.

It’s the last time they see each other for weeks, and after a lot of teasing and maybe some begging, he convinces Henry to download Snapchat. Henry mostly sends tame, fully clothed thirst traps that make Alex sweat in his lectures: a mirror shot, mud-stained white polo pants, a sharp suit. On a Saturday, the C-SPAN stream on his phone gets interrupted by Henry on a sailboat, smiling into the camera with the sun bright on his bare shoulders, and Alex’s heart goes so fucking weird that he has to put his head in his hands for a full minute.

(But, like. It’s fine. It’s not a whole thing.)

Between it all, they talk about Alex’s campaign job, Henry’s nonprofit projects, both of their appearances. They talk about how Pez is now proclaiming himself fully in love with June and spends half his time with Henry rhapsodizing about her or begging him to ask Alex if she likes flowers (yes) or exotic birds (to look at, not to own) or jewelry in the shape of her own face (no).

There are a lot of days when Henry is happy to hear from him and quick to respond, a fast, cutting sense of humor, hungry for Alex’s company and the tangle of thoughts in Alex’s head. But sometimes, he’s taken over by a dark mood, an unusually acerbic wit, strange and vitrified. He’ll withdraw for hours or days, and Alex comes to understand this as grief time, little bouts of depression, or times of “too much.” Henry hates those days completely. Alex wishes he could help, but he doesn’t particularly mind. He’s just as attracted to Henry’s cloudy tempers, the way he comes back from them, and the millions of shades in between.

He’s also learned that Henry’s placid demeanor is shattered with the right poking. He likes to bring up things he knows will get Henry going, including:

“Listen,” Henry is saying, heated, over the phone on a Thursday night. “I don’t give a damn what Joanne has to say, Remus John Lupin is gay as the day is long, and I won’t hear a word against it.”

“Okay,” Alex says. “For the record, I agree with you, but also, tell me more.”

He launches into a long-winded tirade, and Alex listens, amused and a little awed, as Henry works his way to his point: “I just think, as the prince of this bloody country, that when it comes to Britain’s positive cultural landmarks, it would be nice if we could not throw our own marginalized people under the proverbial bus. People sanitize Freddie Mercury or Elton John or Bowie, who was shagging Jagger up and down Oakley Street in the seventies, I might add. It’s just not the truth.”

It’s another thing Henry does—whipping out these analyses of what he reads or watches or listens to that confronts Alex with the fact that he has both a degree in English literature and a vested interest in the gay history of his family’s country. Alex has always known his gay American history—after all, his parents’ politics have been part of it—but it wasn’t until he figured himself out that he started to engage with it like Henry.

He’s starting to understand what swelled in his chest the first time he read about Stonewall, why he ached over the SCOTUS decision in 2015. He starts catching up voraciously in his spare time: Walt Whitman, the Laws of Illinois 1961, The White Night Riot, Paris Is Burning. He’s pinned a photo over his desk at work, a man at a rally in the ’80s in a jacket that says across the back: IF I DIE OF AIDS—FORGET BURIAL—JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE F.D.A.

June’s eyes stick on it one day when she drops by the office to have lunch with him, giving him the same strange look she gave him over coffee the morning after Henry snuck into his room. But she doesn’t say anything, carries on through sushi about her latest project, pulling all her journals together into a memoir. Alex wonders if any of this stuff would make it into there. Maybe, if he tells her soon. He should tell her soon.

It’s weird that the thing with Henry could make him understand this huge part of himself, but it does. When he sinks into thoughts of Henry’s hands, square knuckles and elegant fingers, he wonders how he never realized it before. When he sees Henry next at a gala in Berlin, and he feels that gravitational pull, chases it down in the back of a limo, and binds Henry’s wrists to a hotel bedpost with his own necktie, he knows himself better.

When he shows up for a weekly briefing two days later, Zahra grabs his jaw with one hand and turns his head, peering closer at the side of his neck. “Is that a hickey?”

Alex freezes. “I … um, no?”

“Do I look stupid to you, Alex?” Zahra says. “Who is giving you hickeys, and why have you not gotten them to sign an NDA?”