Red, White & Royal Blue(76)

“Hey,” he says, his mouth right up in a breath’s space from Henry’s. He watches a drop of water roll down Henry’s perfect nose and disappear into his mouth.

“Hi,” Henry says back, and Alex thinks, Goddamn, I love him. It keeps coming back to him, and it’s getting harder to look into Henry’s soft smiles and not say it.

He kicks out a little to turn them in a slow circle. “You look good out here.”

Henry’s grin goes crooked and a little shy, dipping down to brush against Alex’s jaw. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Alex says. He twists Henry’s wet hair around his fingers. “I’m glad you came this weekend,” Alex hears himself say. “It’s been so intense lately. I … I really needed this.”

Henry’s fingers give a little jab to his ribs, gently scolding. “You carry too much.”

His instinct has always been to shoot back, No, I don’t, or, I want to, but he bites it back and says, “I know,” and he realizes it’s the truth. “You know what I’m thinking right now?”

“What?”

“I’m thinking about, after inauguration, like next year, taking you back out here, just the two of us. And we can sit under the moon and not stress about anything.”

“Oh,” Henry says. “That sounds nice, if unlikely.”

“Come on, think about it, babe. Next year. My mom’ll be in office again, and we won’t have to worry about winning any more elections. I’ll finally be able to breathe. Ugh, it’ll be amazing. I’ll cook migas in the mornings, and we’ll swim all day and never put clothes on and make out on the pier, and it won’t even matter if the neighbors see.”

“Well. It will matter, you know. It will always matter.”

He pulls back to find Henry’s face indecipherable.

“You know what I mean.”

Henry’s looking at him and looking at him, and Alex can’t shake the feeling Henry’s really seeing him for the first time. He realizes it’s probably the only time he’s ever invited love into a conversation with Henry on purpose, and it must be lying wide open on his face.

Something moves behind Henry’s eyes. “Where are you going with all this?”

Alex tries to figure out how the hell to funnel everything he needs to tell Henry into words.

“June says I have a fire under my ass for no good reason,” he says. “I don’t know. You know how they always say to take it one day at a time? I think I take it ten years in the future. Like when I was in high school, it was all: Well, my parents hate each other, and my sister is leaving for college, and sometimes I look at other guys in the shower, but if I keep looking directly ahead, that stuff can’t catch up to me. Or if I take this class, or this internship, or this job. I used to think, if I pictured the person I wanted to be and took all the crazy anxiety in my brain and narrowed it down to that point, I could rewire it. Use it to power something else. It’s like I never learned how to just be where I am.” Alex takes a breath. “And where I am is here. With you. And I’m thinking maybe I should start trying to take it day by day. And just … feel what I feel.”

Henry doesn’t say anything.

“Sweetheart.” The water ripples quietly around him as he slides his hands up to hold Henry’s face in both palms, tracing his cheekbones with the wet pads of his thumbs.

The cicadas and the wind and the lake are probably still making sounds, somewhere, but it’s all faded into silence. Alex can’t hear anything but his heartbeat in his ears.

“Henry, I—”

Abruptly Henry shifts, ducking beneath the surface and out of his arms before he can say anything else.

He pops back up near the pier, hair sticking to his forehead, and Alex turns around and stares at him, breathless at the loss. Henry spits out lake water and sends a splash in his direction, and Alex forces a laugh.

“Christ,” Henry says, slapping at a bug that’s landed on him, “what are these infernal creatures?”

“Mosquitos,” Alex supplies.

“They’re awful,” Henry says loftily. “I’m going to catch an exotic plague.”

“I’m … sorry?”

“I just mean to say, you know, Philip is the heir and I’m the spare, and if that nervy bastard has a heart attack at thirty-five and I’ve got malaria, whither the spare?”

Alex laughs weakly again, but he’s got a distinct feeling of something being pulled out of his hands right before he could grasp it. Henry’s tone has gone light, clipped, superficial. His press voice.

“At any rate, I’m knackered,” Henry is saying now. And Alex watches helplessly as he turns and starts hauling himself out of the water and onto the dock, pulling his shorts back up shivering legs. “If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll go to bed.”

Alex doesn’t know what to say, so he watches Henry walk the long line of the dock, disappearing into the darkness.

A ringing, scooped-out sensation starts behind his molars and rolls down his throat, into his chest, down to the pit of his stomach. Something’s wrong, and he knows it, but he’s too afraid to push back or ask. That, he realizes suddenly, is the danger of allowing love into this—the acknowledgment that if something goes wrong, he doesn’t know how he will stand it.