Red, White & Royal Blue(77)
For the first time since Henry grabbed him and kissed him with so much certainty in the garden, the thought enters Alex’s mind: What if it was never his decision to make? What if he got so wrapped up in everything Henry is—the words he writes, the earnest heartsickness of him—he forgot to take into account that it’s just how he is, all the time, with everyone?
What if he’s done the thing he swore he would never do, the thing he hates, and fallen in love with a prince because it was a fantasy?
When he gets back to their room, Henry’s already in his bunk and silent, his back turned.
* * *
In the morning, Henry is gone.
Alex wakes up to find his bunk empty and made up, the pillow tucked neatly beneath the blanket. He practically throws the door off its hinges running out onto the patio, only to find it empty as well. The yard is empty, the pier is empty. It’s like he was never even there.
He finds the note in the kitchen:
Alex,
Had to go early for a family matter. Left with the PPOs. Didn’t want to wake you.
Thank you for everything.
X
It’s the last message Henry sends him.
TEN
He sends Henry five texts the first day. Two the second. By day three, none. He’s spent too much of his life talking, talking, talking not to know the signs when someone doesn’t want to hear him anymore.
He starts forcing himself to only check his phone once every two hours instead of once an hour, makes himself hang on by his fingernails until the minutes tick down. A few times, he gets wrapped up in obsessively reading press coverage of the campaign and realizes he hasn’t checked in hours, and every time he’s hit with a hiccupping, desperate hope that there will be something. There never is.
He thought he was reckless before, but he understands now—holding love off was the only thing keeping him from losing himself in this completely, and he’s gone, stupid, lovesick, a fucking disaster. No work to distract him. The tripwire of “Things Only People in Love Say and Do” set off.
So, instead:
A Tuesday night, hiding on the roof of the Residence, pacing so many furious laps that the skin on the backs of his heels splits open and blood soaks into his loafers.
His CLAREMONT FOR AMERICA mug, returned in a carefully marked box from his desk at the campaign office, a concrete reminder of what this already cost him smashed in his bathroom sink.
The smell of Earl Grey curling up from the kitchens, and his throat going painfully tight.
Two and a half different dreams about sandy hair wrapped around his fingers.
A three-line email, an excerpt dug up from an archived letter, Hamilton to Laurens, You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent, drafted and deleted.
On day five, Rafael Luna makes his fifth campaign stop as a surrogate, the Richards campaign’s token twofer minority. Alex hits a momentary emotional impasse: either destroy something or destroy himself. He ends up smashing his phone on the pavement outside the Capitol. The screen is replaced by the end of the day. It doesn’t make any messages from Henry magically appear.
On the morning of day seven, he’s digging in the back of his closet when he stumbles upon a bundle of teal silk—the stupid kimono Pez had made for him. He hasn’t taken it out since LA.
He’s about to shove it back into the corner when he feels something in the pocket. He finds a small folded square of paper. It’s stationery from their hotel that night, the night everything inside Alex rearranged. Henry’s cursive.
Dear Thisbe,
I wish there weren’t a wall.
Love, Pyramus
He fumbles his phone out so fast he almost drops it on the floor and smashes it again. The search tells him Pyramus and Thisbe were lovers in a Greek myth, children of rival families, forbidden to be together. Their only way to speak to each other was through a thin crack in the wall built between them.
And that is, officially, too fucking much.
What he does next, he’s sure he’ll have no memory of doing, simply a white-noise gap of time that got him from point A to point B. He texts Cash, what are you doing for the next 24 hours? Then he unearths the emergency credit card from his wallet and buys two plane tickets, first class, nonstop. Boarding in two hours. Dulles International to Heathrow.
* * *
Zahra nearly refuses to secure a car after Alex “had the goddamn nerve” to call her from the runway at Dulles. It’s dark and pissing down rain when they land in London around nine in the evening, and he and Cash are both soaked the second they climb out of the car inside the back gates of Kensington.
Clearly, someone has radioed for Shaan, because he’s standing there at the door to Henry’s apartments in an impeccable gray peacoat, dry and unmoved under a black umbrella.
“Mr. Claremont-Diaz,” he says. “What a treat.”
Alex has not got the damn time. “Move, Shaan.”
“Ms. Bankston called ahead to warn me that you were on the way,” he says. “As you might have guessed by the ease with which you were able to get through our gates. We thought it best to let you kick up a fuss somewhere more private.”
“Move.”
Shaan smiles, looking as if he might be genuinely enjoying watching two hapless Americans become slowly waterlogged. “You’re aware it’s quite late, and it’s well within my power to have security remove you. No member of the royal family has invited you into the palace.”