Red, White & Royal Blue(49)

“Wasn’t?”

“Hey,” Alex huffs. “Are you trying to say I’m still not good at them?”

“No, no, I wouldn’t dream of it,” Henry says, and Alex can hear the small smile in his voice. “It was just the first one that was … Well. It was enthusiastic, at least.”

“I don’t remember you complaining.”

“Yes, well, I’d only been fantasizing about it for ages.”

“See, there’s a thing,” Alex points out. “You just told me that. You can tell me other stuff.”

“It’s hardly the same.”

He rolls over onto his stomach, considers, and very deliberately says, “Baby.”

It’s become a thing: baby. He knows it’s become a thing. He’s slipped up and accidentally said it a few times, and each time, Henry positively melts and Alex pretends not to notice, but he’s not above playing dirty here.

There’s a slow hiss of an exhale across the line, like air escaping through a crack in a window.

“It’s, ah. It’s not the best time,” he says. “How did you put it? Nutso family stuff.”

Alex purses his lips, bites down on his cheek. There it is.

He’s wondered when Henry would finally start talking about the royal family. He makes oblique references to Philip being wound so tight as to double as an atomic clock, or to his grandmother’s disapproval, and he mentions Bea as often as Alex mentions June, but Alex knows there’s more to it than that. He couldn’t tell you when he started noticing, though, just like he doesn’t know when he started ticking off the days of Henry’s moods.

“Ah,” he says. “I see.”

“I don’t suppose you keep up with any British tabloids, do you?”

“Not if I can help it.”

Henry offers the bitterest of laughs. “Well, the Daily Mail has always had a bit of an affinity for airing our dirty laundry. They, er, they gave my sister this nickname years ago. ‘The Powder Princess.’”

A ding of recognition. “Because of the…”

“Yes, the cocaine, Alex.”

“Okay, that does sound familiar.”

Henry sighs. “Well, someone’s managed to bypass security to spray paint ‘Powder Princess’ on the side of her car.”

“Shit,” Alex says. “And she’s not taking it well?”

“Bea?” Henry laughs, a little more genuinely this time. “No, she doesn’t usually care about those things. She’s fine. More shaken up that someone got past security than anything. Gran had an entire PPO team sacked. But … I dunno.”

He trails off, and Alex can guess.

“But you care. Because you want to protect her even though you’re the little brother.”

“I … yes.”

“I know the feeling. Last summer I almost punched a guy at Lollapalooza because he tried to grab June’s ass.”

“But you didn’t?”

“June had already dumped her milkshake on him,” Alex explains. He shrugs a little, knowing Henry can’t see it. “And then Amy Tased him. The smell of burnt strawberry milkshake on a sweaty frat guy is really something.”

Henry laughs fully at that. “They never do need us, do they?”

“Nope,” Alex agrees. “So you’re upset because the rumors aren’t true.”

“Well … they are true, actually,” Henry says.

Oh, Alex thinks.

“Oh,” Alex says. He’s not sure how else to respond, reaching into his mental store of political platitudes and finding them all clinical and intolerable.

Henry, with a little trepidation, presses on. “You know, Bea has only ever wanted to play music,” he starts. “Mum and Dad played too much Joni Mitchell for her growing up, I think. She wanted guitar lessons; Gran wanted violin since it was more proper. Bea was allowed to learn both, but she went to uni for classical violin. Anyway, her last year of uni, Dad died. It happened so … quickly. He just went.”

Alex shuts his eyes. “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Henry says, voice rough. “We all went round the bend a bit. Philip just had to be the man of the family, and I was an arsehole, and Mum didn’t leave her rooms. Bea just stopped seeing the point in anything. I was starting uni when she finished, and Philip was deployed halfway round the globe, and she was out every single night with all the posh London hipsters, sneaking out to play guitar at secret shows and doing mountains of cocaine. The papers loved it.”

“Jesus,” Alex hisses. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Henry says, steadiness rising in his voice as if he’s stuck out his chin in that stubborn way he does sometimes. Alex wishes he could see it. “In any event, the speculation and paparazzi photos and the goddamn nickname got to be too much, and Philip came home for a week, and he and Gran literally put her in a car and had her driven to rehab and called it a wellness retreat to the press.”

“Wait—sorry,” Alex says before he can stop himself. “Just. Where was your mom?”

“Mum hasn’t been involved in much since Dad died,” Henry says on an exhale, then stops short. “Sorry. That’s not fair. It’s … the grief has been total for her. It was paralyzing. It is paralyzing. She was such a spitfire. I dunno. She still listens, and she tries, and she wants us to be happy. But I don’t know if she has it in her anymore to be a part of anyone’s happiness.”