Red, White & Royal Blue(92)

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From Jean Cocteau to Jean Marais, 1939:

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for having saved me. I was drowning and you threw yourself into the water without hesitation, without a backward look.





* * *



The sound of Alex’s phone buzzing on his nightstand startles him out of a dead sleep. He falls halfway out of bed, fumbling to answer it.

“Hello?”

“What did you do?” Zahra’s voice nearly shouts. By the clicking of heels in the background and muttered swearing, she’s running somewhere.

“Um,” Alex says. He rubs his eyes, trying to get his brain back online. What did he do? “Be more specific?”

“Check the fucking news, you horny little miscreant—how could you possibly be stupid enough to get photographed? I swear to God—”

Alex doesn’t even hear the last part of what she says, because his stomach has just dropped all the way down through the floor and into the fucking basements two floors below.

“Fuck.”

Hands shaking, he switches Zahra to speaker, opens up Google, and types his own name.

BREAKING: Photos Reveal Romantic Relationship Between Prince Henry and Alex Claremont-Diaz

OMFG: FSOTUS and Prince Henry—Totally Doing It

THE ORAL OFFICE: READ FSOTUS’S STEAMY EMAILS TO PRINCE HENRY

Royal Family Declines to Comment on Reports of Prince Henry’s Relationship with First Son

25 GIFs That Perfectly Describe Our Reaction When We Heard About Prince Henry & FSOTUS

DON’T LET FIRST SON GO DOWN ON ME



A bubble of hysterical laughter emerges from his throat.

His bedroom door flies open, and Zahra slams on the light, a steely expression of rage barely concealing the sheer terror on her face. Alex’s brain flashes to the panic button behind his headboard and wonders if the Secret Service will be able to find him before he bleeds out.

“You’re on communications lockdown,” she says, and instead of punching him, she snatches his phone out of his hand and shoves it down the front of her blouse, which has been buttoned wrong in her rush. She doesn’t even blink at his state of half-nakedness, just dumps an armload of newspapers onto his bedspread.

QUEEN HENRY! twenty copies of the Daily Mail proclaim in gigantic letters. INSIDE THE PRINCE’S GAY AFFAIR WITH THE FIRST SON OF THE UNITED STATES!

The cover is splashed with a blown-up photo of what is undeniably himself and Henry kissing in the back seat of the car behind the cafe, apparently shot with a long-range lens through the windshield. Tinted windows, but he forgot about the fucking windshield.

Two smaller photos are inset on the bottom of the page: one of the shots of them on the Beekman’s elevator and a photo of them side by side at Wimbledon, him whispering something in Henry’s ear while Henry smiles a soft, private smile.

Fucking shitting hell. He is so fucked. Henry is so fucked. And, Jesus Christ, his mother’s campaign is fucked, and his political career is fucked, and his ears are ringing, and he’s going to throw up.

“Fuck,” Alex says again. “I need my phone. I have to call Henry—”

“No, you do fucking not,” Zahra says. “We don’t know yet how the emails got out, so it’s radio silence until we find the leak.”

“The—what? Is Henry okay?” God, Henry. All he can think about is Henry’s big blue eyes looking terrified, Henry’s breathing coming shallow and quick, locked in his bedroom in Kensington Palace and desperately alone, and his jaw locks up, something burning in the back of his throat.

“The president is sitting down right now with as many members of the Office of Communications as we could drag out of bed at three in the morning,” Zahra tells him, ignoring his question. Her phone is buzzing nonstop in her hand. “It’s about to be gay DEFCON five in this administration. For God’s sake, put some clothes on.”

Zahra disappears into Alex’s closet, and he flips the newspaper open to the story, his heart pounding. There are even more photos inside. He glances over the copy, but there’s too much to even begin to process.

On the second page, he sees them: printed and annotated excerpts of their emails. One is labeled: PRINCE HENRY: SECRET POET? It begins with a line he’s read about a thousand times by now.

Should I tell you that when we’re apart, your body comes back to me in dreams …

“Fuck!” he says a third time, spiking the newspaper at the floor. That one was his. It feels obscene to see it there. “How the fuck did they get these?”

“Yep,” Zahra agrees. “You dirty did it.” She throws a white button-down and a pair of jeans at him, and he pitches himself out of bed. Zahra gamely holds out an arm for him to steady himself while he pulls his pants up, and despite it all, he’s struck with overwhelming gratitude for her.

“Listen, I need to talk to Henry as soon as possible. I can’t even imagine— God, I need to talk to him.”

“Get some shoes, we’re running,” Zahra tells him. “Priority one is damage control, not feelings.”

He grabs a pair of sneakers, and they take off while he’s still pulling them on, running west. His brain is struggling to keep up, running through about five thousand possible ways this could go, imagining himself ten years down the road being frozen out of Congress, plummeting approval ratings, Henry’s name scratched off the line of succession, his mother losing reelection on a swing state’s disapproval of him. He’s so screwed, and he can’t even decide who to be the angriest with, himself or the Mail or the monarchy or the whole stupid country.