Red, White & Royal Blue(79)

Alex doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, his feet rooted to the spot. Henry isn’t looking at him, but staring at a point on the mantel somewhere, tugging at his own hair in exasperation.

“It was never supposed to be an issue,” he goes on, his voice hoarse. “I thought I could have some part of you, and just never say it, and you’d never have to know, and one day you’d get tired of me and leave, because I’m—” He stops short, and one shaking hand moves through the air in front of him in a helpless sort of gesture at everything about himself. “I never thought I’d be stood here faced with a choice I can’t make, because I never … I never imagined you would love me back.”

“Well,” Alex says. “I do. And you can choose.”

“You know bloody well I can’t.”

“You can try,” Alex tells him, feeling as if it should be the simplest fucking truth in the world. “What do you want?”

“I want you—”

“Then fucking have me.”

“—but I don’t want this.”

Alex wants to grab Henry and shake him, wants to scream in his face, wants to smash every priceless antique in the room. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t want it!” Henry practically shouts. His eyes are flashing, wet and angry and afraid. “Don’t you bloody see? I’m not like you. I can’t afford to be reckless. I don’t have a family who will support me. I don’t go about shoving who I am in everyone’s faces and dreaming about a career in fucking politics, so I can be more scrutinized and picked apart by the entire godforsaken world. I can love you and want you and still not want that life. I’m allowed, all right, and it doesn’t make me a liar; it makes me a man with some infinitesimal shred of self-preservation, unlike you, and you don’t get to come here and call me a coward for it.”

Alex takes a breath. “I never said you were a coward.”

“I.” Henry blinks. “Well. The point stands.”

“You think I want your life? You think I want Martha’s? Gilded fucking cage? Barely allowed to speak in public, or have a goddamn opinion—”

“Then what are we even doing here? Why are we fighting, then, if the lives we have to lead are so incompatible?”

“Because you don’t want that either!” Alex insists. “You don’t want any of this bullshit. You hate it.”

“Don’t tell me what I want,” Henry says. “You haven’t a clue how it feels.”

“Look, I might not be a fucking royal,” Alex says, crosses the horrible rug, moves into Henry’s space, “but I know what it’s like for your whole life to be determined by the family you were born into, okay? The lives we want—they’re not that different. Not in the ways that matter. You want to take what you were given and leave the world better than you found it. So do I. We can—we can figure out a way to do that together.”

Henry stares at him silently, and Alex can see the scales balancing in his head.

“I don’t think I can.”

Alex turns away from him, falling back on his heels like he’s been slapped. “Fine,” he finally says. “You know what? Fucking fine. I’ll leave.”

“Good.”

“I’ll leave,” he says, and he turns back and leans in, “as soon as you tell me to leave.”

“Alex.”

He’s in Henry’s face now. If he’s getting his heart broken tonight, he’s sure as hell going to make Henry have the guts to do it right. “Tell me you’re done with me. I’ll get back on the plane. That’s it. And you can live here in your tower and be miserable forever, write a whole book of sad fucking poems about it. Whatever. Just say it.”

“Fuck you,” Henry says, his voice breaking, and he gets a handful of Alex’s shirt collar, and Alex knows he’s going to love this stubborn shithead forever.

“Tell me,” he says, a ghost of a smile around his lips, “to leave.”

He feels before he registers being shoved backward into a wall, and Henry’s mouth is on his, desperate and wild. The faint taste of blood blooms on his tongue, and he smiles as he opens up to it, pushes it into Henry’s mouth, tugs at his hair with both hands. Henry groans, and Alex feels it in his spine.

They grapple along the wall until Henry physically picks him up off the floor and staggers backward, toward the bed. Alex bounces when his back hits the mattress, and Henry stands over him for several breaths, staring. Alex would give anything to know what’s going through that fucking head of his.

He realizes, suddenly, Henry’s crying.

He swallows.

That’s the thing: he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if this is supposed to be some kind of consummation, or if it’s one last time. He doesn’t think he could go through with it if he knew it was the latter. But he doesn’t want to go home without having this.

“C’mere.”

He fucks Henry slow and deep, and if it’s the last time, they go down shivering and gasping and epic, all wet mouths and wet eyelashes, and Alex is a cliché on an ivory bedspread, and he hates himself but he’s so in love. He’s in stupid, unbearable love, and Henry loves him too, and at least for one night it matters, even if they both have to pretend to forget in the morning.