Red, White & Royal Blue (22 page)

He’s never given much thought to options other than a crow’s path ahead of him. Maybe he should.

“Is now a good time to point out Henry’s very hot, very rich best friend is basically in love with you?” Alex says to June. “He’s like some kind of billionaire, genius, manic-pixie-dream philanthropist. I feel like you would be into that.”

“Please shut up,” she says, and she steals the ice cream back.

Once June knows, their circle of “knowing” is up to a tight seven.

Before Henry, most of his romantic entanglements as FSOTUS were one-off incidents that involved Cash or Amy confiscating phones before the act and pointing at the dotted line on the NDA on the way out—Amy with mechanical professionalism, Cash with the air of a cruise ship director. It was inevitable they be looped in.

And there’s Shaan, the only member of the royal staff who knows Henry is gay, excluding his therapist. Shaan ultimately doesn’t care about Henry’s sexual preferences as long as they’re not getting him into trouble. He’s a consummate professional parceled in immaculately tailored Tom Ford, ruffled by absolutely nothing, whose affection for his charge shows in the way he tends to him like a favorite houseplant. Shaan knows for the same reason Amy and Cash know: absolute necessity.

Then Nora, who still looks smug every time the subject arises. And Bea, who found out when she walked in on one of their after-dark FaceTime sessions, leaving Henry capable of
nothing but flustered British stammering and thousand-yard stares for the next day and a half.

Pez seems to have been in on the secret all along. Alex imagines he demanded an explanation when Henry literally made them flee the country under the cover of night after putting his tongue in Alex’s mouth in the Kennedy Garden.

It’s Pez who answers when Alex FaceTimes Henry at four a.m. DC time, expecting to catch Henry over his morning tea. Henry is holidaying in one of the family’s country homes while Alex suffocates under his last week of college. He doesn’t reflect on why his migraine demands soothing images of Henry looking cozy and picturesque, sipping tea by a lush green hillside. He just hits the buttons on the phone.

“Alexander, babes,” Pez says when he picks up. “How lovely for you to give your auntie Pezza a ring on this magnificent Sunday morning.” He’s smiling from what looks like the passenger seat of a luxury car, wearing a cartoonishly large sunhat and a striped pashmina.

“Hi, Pez,” Alex says, grinning back. “Where are y’all?”

“We are out for a drive, taking in the scenery of Carmarthenshire,” Pez tells him. He tilts the phone over toward the driver’s seat. “Say good morning to your strumpet, Henry.”

“Good morning, strumpet,” Henry says, glancing away from the road to wink at the camera. He’s looking fresh-faced and relaxed, all rolled-up sleeves and soft gray linen, and Alex feels calmer knowing somewhere in Wales, Henry got a decent night’s sleep. “What’s got you up at four in the morning this time?”

“My fucking economics final,” Alex says, rolling over onto his side to squint at the screen. “My brain isn’t working anymore.”

“Can’t you get one of those Secret Service earpieces with Nora on the other end?”

“I can take it for you,” Pez interjects, turning the camera back to himself. “I’m aces with money.”

“Yes, yes, Pez, we know there’s nothing you can’t do,” says Henry’s voice off-camera. “No need to rub it in.”

Alex laughs under his breath. From the angle Pez is holding the phone, he can see Wales rolling by though the car window, dramatic and plunging. “Hey, Henry, say the name of the house you’re staying at again.”

Pez turns the camera to catch Henry in a half smile. “Llwynywermod.”

“One more time.”

“Llwynywermod.”

Alex groans. “Jesus.”

“I was
hoping
you two would start talking dirty,” Pez says. “Please, do go on.”

“I don’t think you could keep up, Pez,” Alex tells him.

“Oh
really
?” The picture returns to Pez. “What if I put my co—”

“Pez,”
comes the sound of Henry’s voice, and a hand with a signet ring on the smallest finger covers Pez’s mouth. “I beg of you. Alex, what part of ‘nothing he cannot do’ did you think was worth testing? Honestly, you are going to get us all killed.”

“That’s the goal,” Alex says happily. “So what are y’all gonna do today?”

Pez frees himself by licking Henry’s palm and continues talking. “Frolic naked in the hills, frighten the sheep, return to the house for the usual: tea, biscuits, casting ourselves upon the Thighmaster of love to moan about Claremont-Diaz siblings, which has become tragically one-sided since Henry
took up with you. It used to be all bottles of cognac and shared malaise and ‘When will they notice us’—”

“Don’t tell him that!”

“—and now I just ask Henry, ‘What is your secret?’ And he says, ‘I insult Alex all the time and that seems to work.’”

“I will
turn this car around.
”

“That won’t work on June,” Alex says.

“Let me get a pen—”

It turns out they’re spending their holiday workshopping philanthropy projects. Henry’s been telling Alex for months about their plans to go international, and now they’re talking three refugee programs around Western Europe, HIV clinics in Nairobi and Los Angeles, LGBT youth shelters in four different countries. It’s ambitious, but since Henry still staunchly covers all his own expenses with his inheritance from his father, his royal accounts are untouched. He’s determined to use them for nothing but this.

Alex curls around his phone and his pillow as the sun comes up over DC. He’s always wanted to be a person with a legacy in this world. Henry is undoubtedly, determinedly that. It’s a little intoxicating. But it’s fine. He’s just a little sleep-deprived.

All in all, finals come and go with much less fanfare than Alex imagined. It’s a week of cramming and presentations and the usual amount of all-nighters, and it’s over.

The whole college thing in general went by like that. He didn’t really have the experiences everyone else has, always isolated by fame or harangued by security. He never got a stamp on his forehead on his twenty-first birthday at The Tombs, never jumped in Dalhgren Fountain. Sometimes it’s like he barely went to Georgetown, merely powered through a series of lectures that happened to be in the same geographical area.

Anyway, he graduates, and the whole auditorium gives him a standing ovation, which is weird but kind of cool. A dozen of his classmates want to take a photo with him afterward. They all know him by name. He’s never spoken to any of them before. He smiles for their parents’ iPhones and wonders if he should have tried.

Alex Claremont-Diaz graduates summa cum laude from Georgetown University with a bachelor’s degree in Government,
his Google alerts read when he checks them from the back seat of the limo, before he’s even taken his cap and gown off.

There’s a huge garden party at the White House, and Nora is there in a dress and blazer and a sly smile, pressing a kiss to the side of Alex’s jaw.

“The last of the White House Trio finally graduates,” she says, grinning. “And he didn’t even have to bribe any professors with political or sexual favors to do it.”

“I think some of them might finally manage to purge me from their nightmares soon,” Alex says.

“Y’all do school weird,” June says, crying a little.

There’s a mixed bag of political power players and family friends in attendance—including Rafael Luna, who falls under the heading of both. Alex spots him looking tired but handsome by the ceviche, involved in animated conversation with Nora’s grandfather, the Veep. His dad is in from California, freshly tanned from a recent trek through Yosemite, grinning and proud. Zahra hands him a card that says,
Good job doing what was expected of you,
and nearly shoves him into the punch bowl when he tries to hug her.

An hour in, his phone buzzes in his pocket, and June gives him a mild glare when he diverts his attention mid-sentence to check it. He’s ready to brush it off, but all around
him iPhones and Blackberries are coming out in a flurry of movement.

It’s WASPy Hunter:
Jacinto just called a presser, word is he’s dropping out of the primary a.k.a. officially Claremont vs. Richards 2020.

“Shit,” Alex says, turning his phone around to show June the message.

“So much for the party.”

She’s right—in a matter of seconds, half the tables are empty as campaign staffers and congresspeople leave their seats to huddle together over their phones.

“This is a bit dramatic,” Nora observes, sucking an olive off the end of a toothpick. “We all knew he was gonna give Richards the nomination eventually. They probably got Jacinto in a windowless room and bench-clamped his dick to the table until he said he’d concede.”

Alex doesn’t hear whatever Nora says next because a rush of movement at the doors of the Palm Room near the edge of the garden catches his eye. It’s his dad, pulling Luna by the arm. They disappear into a side door, toward the housekeeper’s office.

He leaves his champagne with the girls and weaves a circuitous path toward the Palm Room, pretending to check his phone. Then, after considering whether the scolding he’ll get from the dry-cleaning crew will be worth it, he ducks into the shrubbery.

There’s a loose windowpane in the bottom of the third fixture of the south-facing wall of the housekeeper’s office. It’s popped out of its frame slightly, enough that its bulletproof, soundproof seal isn’t totally intact. It’s one of three windowpanes like this in the Residence. He found them during his
first six months at the White House, before June graduated and Nora transferred, when he was alone, with nothing better to do than these little investigative projects around the grounds.

He’s never told anyone about the loose panes; he always suspected they might come in handy one day.

He crouches down and creeps up toward the window, soil rolling into his loafers, hoping he guessed their destination right, until he finds the pane he’s looking for. He leans in, tries to get his ear as close to it as he can. Over the sound of the wind rustling the bushes around him, he can hear two low, tense voices.

“… hell, Oscar,” says one voice, in Spanish. Luna. “Did you tell her? Does she know you’re asking me to do this?”

“She’s too careful,” his father’s voice says. He’s speaking Spanish too—a precaution the two of them occasionally take when they’re concerned about being overheard. “Sometimes it’s best that she doesn’t know.”

There’s the sound of a hissing exhale, weight shifting. “I’m not going behind her back to do something I don’t even want to do.”

“You mean to tell me, after what Richards did to you, there’s not a part of you that wants to burn all his shit to the ground?”

“Of course there is, Oscar, Jesus,” Luna says. “But you and I both know it’s not that fucking simple. It never is.”

“Listen, Raf. I know you kept the files on everything. You don’t even have to make a statement. You could leak it to the press. How many other kids do you think since—”

“Don’t.”

“—and how many more—”

“You don’t think she can win on her own, do you?” Luna cuts across him. “You still don’t have faith in her, after everything.”

“It’s not about that. This time is different.”

“Why don’t you leave me and something that happened
twenty fucking years ago
out of your unresolved feelings for your ex-wife and focus on winning this goddamn election, Oscar? I don’t—”

Luna cuts himself off because there’s the sound of the doorknob turning, someone entering the offices.

Oscar switches to clipped English, making an excuse about discussing a bill, then says to Luna, in Spanish, “Just think about it.”

There are muffled sounds of Oscar and Luna clearing out of the office, and Alex sinks down onto his ass in the mulch, wondering what the hell he’s missing.

It starts with a fund-raiser, a silk suit and a big check, a nice white-tablecloth event. It starts, as it always does, with a text:
Fund-raiser in LA next weekend. Pez says he’s going to get us all matching embroidered kimonos. Put you down for a plus-two?

He grabs lunch with his dad, who flat-out changes the subject every time Alex brings up Luna, and afterward heads to the gala, where Alex gets to properly meet Bea for the first time. She’s much shorter than Henry, shorter even than June, with Henry’s clever mouth but their mom’s brown hair and heart-shaped face. She’s wearing a motorcycle jacket over her cocktail dress and has a slight posture he recognizes from his own mother as a reformed chainsmoker. She smiles at Alex,
wide and mischievous, and he gets her immediately: another rebel kid.

It’s a lot of champagne and too many handshakes and a speech by Pez, charming as always, and as soon as it’s over, their collective security convenes at the exit and they’re off.

Pez has, as promised, six matching silk kimonos waiting in the limo, each one embroidered across the back with a different riff on a name from a movie. Alex’s is a lurid teal and says
HOE DAMERON
. Henry’s lime-green one reads
PRINCE BUTTERCUP
.

They end up somewhere in West Hollywood at a shitty, sparkling karaoke bar Pez somehow knows about, neon bright enough that it feels spontaneous even though Cash and the rest of their security have been checking it and warning people against taking photos for half an hour before they arrive. The bartender has immaculate pink lipstick and stubble poking through thick foundation, and they rapidly line up five shots and a soda with lime.

“Oh, dear,” Henry says, peering down into his empty shot glass. “What’s in these? Vodka?”

“Yep,” Nora confirms, to which both Pez and Bea break out into fits of giggles.

“What?” Alex says.

“Oh, I haven’t had vodka since uni,” Henry says. “It tends to make me, erm. Well—”

“Flamboyant?” Pez offers. “Uninhibited?
Randy?
”

“Fun?” Bea suggests.

“
Excuse
you, I am
loads
of fun all the time! I am a
delight
!”