Red, White & Royal Blue(94)

Richards added that he believes the American voters have a right to know everything else for which President Claremont’s server may have been used.

Sources close to the Claremont administration insist the private server is similar to the one set up during President George W. Bush’s administration and used only for communication within the White House about day-to-day operations and personal correspondence for the First Family and core White House personnel.

First rounds of examination of “The Waterloo Letters” by experts have yet to reveal any evidence of classified information or otherwise compromising content outside of the nature of the First Son’s relationship with Prince Henry.





* * *



For five endless, unbearable hours, Alex is shuffled from room to room in the West Wing, meeting with what seems to be every strategist, press staffer, and crisis manager his mother’s administration has to offer.

The only moment he recalls with any clarity is pulling his mother into an alcove to say, “I told Raf.”

She stares at him. “You told Rafael Luna that you’re bisexual?”

“I told Rafael Luna about Henry,” he says flatly. “Two days ago.”

She doesn’t ask why, just sighs grimly, and they both hover over the implication before she says, “No. No, those pictures were taken before that. It couldn’t have been him.”

He runs through pro and con lists, models of different outcomes, fucking charts and graphs and more data than he has ever wanted to see about his own relationship and its ramifications for the world around him. This is the damage you cause, Alex, it all seems to say, right there in hard facts and figures. This is who you hurt.

He hates himself, but he doesn’t regret anything, and maybe that makes him a bad person and a worse politician, but he doesn’t regret Henry.

For five endless, unbearable hours, he’s not allowed to even try to contact Henry. The press sec drafts a statement. It looks like any other memo.

For five hours, he doesn’t shower or change his clothes or laugh or smile or cry. It’s eight in the morning when he’s finally released and told to stay in the Residence and stand by for further instructions.

He’s handed his phone, at last, but there’s no answer when he calls Henry, and no response when he texts. Nothing at all.

Amy walks him through the colonnade and up the stairs, saying nothing, and when they reach the hallway between the East and West Bedrooms, he sees them.

June, her hair in a haphazard knot on the top of her head and in a pink bathrobe, her eyes red-rimmed. His mom, in a sharp, no-nonsense black dress and pointed heels, jaw set. Leo, barefoot in his pajamas. And his dad, a leather duffel still hanging off one shoulder, looking harried and exhausted.

They all turn to look at him, and Alex feels a wave of something so much bigger than himself sweep over him, like when he was a child standing bowlegged in the Gulf of Mexico, riptide sucking at his feet. A sound escapes his throat uninvited, something that he barely even recognizes, and June has him first, then the rest of them, arms and arms and hands and hands, pulling him close and touching his face and moving him until he’s on the floor, the goddamn terrible hideous antique rug that he hates, sitting on the floor and staring at the rug and the threads of the rug and hearing the Gulf rushing in his ears and thinking distantly that he’s having a panic attack, and that’s why he can’t breathe, but he’s just staring at the rug and he’s having a panic attack and knowing why his lungs won’t work doesn’t make them work again.

He’s faintly aware of being shifted into his room, to his bed, which is still covered in the godforsaken fucking newspapers, and someone guides him onto it, and he sits down and tries very, very hard to make a list in his head.

One.

One.

One.



* * *



He sleeps in fits and starts, wakes up sweating, wakes up shivering. He dreams in short, fractured scenes that swell and fade erratically. He dreams of himself at war, in a muddy trench, love letter soaking red in his chest pocket. He dreams of a house in Travis County, doors locked, unwilling to let him in again. He dreams of a crown.

He dreams once, briefly, of the lake house, an orange beacon under the moon. He sees himself there, standing in water up to his neck. He sees Henry, sitting naked on the pier. He sees June and Nora, hands clasped together, and Pez on the grass between them, and Bea, digging pink fingertips into the wet soil.

In the trees next to them, he hears the snap, snap, snap of branches.

“Look,” Henry says, pointing up at the stars.

And Alex tries to say, Don’t you hear it? Tries to say, Something’s coming. He opens his mouth: a spill of fireflies, and nothing.

When he opens his eyes, June is sitting up against the pillows next to him, bitten nails pressed against her bottom lip, still in her bathrobe and keeping watch. She reaches down and squeezes his hand. He squeezes back.



* * *



Between dreams he catches the sound of muffled voices in the hallway.

“Nothing,” Zahra’s voice is saying. “Not a thing. Nobody is taking our calls.”

“How can they not be taking our calls? I’m the goddamn president.”

“Permission to do a thing, ma’am, slightly outside diplomatic protocol.”