Red, White & Royal Blue (33 page)

Alex looks at him, taking in the whole parcel of him, the centuries of royal blood sitting under an antique Kensington chandelier, and he reaches out to touch his face and looks at his fingers and thinks about holding the Bible at his mother’s inauguration with the same hand.

It hits him, fully: the weight of this. How completely neither of them will ever be able to undo it.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m into making history.”

Henry rolls his eyes and seals it with a smiling kiss, and they fall back into the pillows together, Henry’s wet hair and sweatpants and Alex’s naked limbs all tangled up in the lavish bedclothes.

When Alex was a kid, before anyone knew his name, he dreamed of love like it was a fairy tale, as if it would come sweeping into his life on the back of a dragon one day. When he got older, he learned about love as a strange thing that could fall apart no matter how badly you wanted it, a choice you make anyway. He never imagined it’d turn out he was right both times.

Henry’s hands on him are unhurried and soft, and they make out lazily for hours or days, basking in the rare luxury of it. They take breaks to finish their lukewarm coffee and tea, and Henry has scones and blackcurrant jam sent up. They waste away the morning in bed, watching Mel and Sue squawk
over tea cakes on Henry’s laptop, listening to the rain slow to a drizzle.

At some point, Alex disentangles his jeans from the foot of the bed and fishes out his phone. He’s got three missed calls from Zahra, one ominous voicemail from his mother, and forty-seven unread messages in his group text with June and Nora.

ALEX, Z JUST TOLD ME YOU’RE IN LONDON???????

Alex oh my god

I swear to god if you do something stupid and get yourself caught, I’m gonna kill you myself

But you went after him!!! That’s SO Jane Austen

I’m gonna punch you in the face when you get back. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me

How did it go??? Are you with Henry now?????

GONNA PUNCH YOU

It turns out forty-six out of forty-seven texts are June and the forty-seventh is Nora asking if either of them know where
she left her white Chuck Taylors. Alex texts back:
your chucks are under my bed and henry says hi.

The message has barely delivered before his phone erupts with a call from June, who demands to be put on speaker and told everything. After, rather than facing Zahra’s wrath himself, he convinces Henry to call Shaan.

“D’you think you could, er, phone Ms. Bankston and let her know Alex is safe and with me?”

“Yes, sir,” Shaan says. “And shall I arrange a car for his departure?”

“Er,” Henry says, and he looks at Alex and mouths,
Stay?
Alex nods. “Tomorrow?”

There’s a very long pause over the line before Shaan says, “I’ll let her know,” in a voice like he’d rather do literally anything else.

Alex laughs as Henry hangs up, but he returns to his phone again, to the voicemail waiting from his mother. Henry sees his thumb hovering over the play button and nudges his ribs.

“I suppose we do have to face the consequences at some point,” he says.

Alex sighs. “I don’t think I told you, but she, uh. Well, when she fired me, she told me that if I wasn’t a thousand percent serious about you, I needed to break things off.”

Henry nuzzles his nose behind Alex’s ear. “A thousand percent?”

“Yeah, don’t let it go to your head.”

Henry elbows him again, and Alex laughs and grabs his head and aggressively kisses his cheek, smashing his face into the pillow. When Alex finally relents, Henry is pink-faced and mussed and definitely pleased.

“I was thinking about that, though,” Henry says, “the chance
being with me is going to keep ruining your career. Congress by thirty, wasn’t it?”

“Come on. Look at this face. People love this face. I’ll figure out the rest.” Henry looks deeply skeptical, and Alex sighs again. “Look, I don’t know. I don’t even exactly know, like, how being a legislator would work if I’m with a prince of another country. So, you know. There’s stuff to figure out. But way worse people with way bigger problems than me get elected all the time.”

Henry’s looking at him in the piercing way he has sometimes that makes Alex feel like a bug stuck under a shadowbox with a pushpin. “You’re really not frightened of what might happen?”

“No, I mean, of course I am,” he says. “It definitely stays secret until after the election. And I know it’ll be messy. But if we can get ahead of the narrative, wait for the right time and do it on our own terms, I think it could be okay.”

“How long have you been thinking about this?”

“Consciously? Since, like, the DNC. Subconsciously, in total denial? A long-ass time. At least since you kissed me.”

Henry stares at him from the pillow. “That’s … kind of incredible.”

“What about you?”

“What about
me
?” Henry says. “Christ, Alex. The whole bloody time.”

“The whole time?”

“Since the Olympics.”

“The
Olympics
?” Alex yanks Henry’s pillow out from under him. “But that’s, that’s like—”

“Yes, Alex, the day we met, nothing gets past you, does it?” Henry says, reaching to steal the pillow back. “‘What about you,’ he says, as if he doesn’t
know
—”

“Shut your
mouth,
” Alex says, grinning like an idiot, and he stops fighting Henry for the pillow and instead straddles him and kisses him into the mattress. He pulls the blankets up and they disappear into the pile, a laughing mess of mouths and hands, until Henry rolls onto his phone and his ass presses the button on the voicemail.

“Diaz, you insane, hopeless romantic little shit,” says the voice of the President of the United States, muffled in the bed. “It had better be forever. Be safe.”

Sneaking out of the palace without security at two in the morning was, surprisingly, Henry’s idea. He pulled hoodies and hats out for both of them—the incognito uniform of the internationally recognizable—and Bea staged a noisy exit from the opposite end of the palace while they sprinted through the gardens. Now they’re on the deserted, wet pavement of South Kensington, flanked by tall, red brick buildings and a sign for—

“Stop, are you kidding me?” Alex says. “
Prince Consort Road?
Oh my God, take a picture of me with the sign.”

“Not there yet!” Henry says over his shoulder. He gives Alex’s arm another pull to keep him running. “Keep moving, you wastrel.”

They cross to another street and duck into an alcove between two pillars while Henry fishes a keyring with dozens of keys out of his hoodie. “Funny thing about being a prince—people will give you keys to just about anything if you ask nicely.”

Alex gawks, watching Henry feel around the edge of a seemingly plain wall. “All this time, I thought
I
was the Ferris Bueller of this relationship.”

“What, did you think I was Sloane?” Henry says, pushing the panel open a crack and yanking Alex into a wide, dark plaza.

The grounds are sloping, white tiles carrying the sounds of their feet as they run. Sturdy Victorian bricks tower into the night, framing the courtyard, and Alex thinks,
Oh
. The Victoria and Albert Museum. Henry has a key to the V&A.

There’s a stout old security guard waiting at the doors.

“Can’t thank you enough, Gavin,” Henry says, and Alex notices the thick wad of cash Henry slips into their handshake.

“Renaissance City tonight, yeah?” Gavin says.

“If you would be so kind,” Henry tells him.

And they’re off again, hustling through rooms of Chinese art and French sculptures. Henry moves fluidly from room to room, past a black stone sculpture of a seated Buddha and John the Baptist nude and in bronze, without a single false step.

“You do this a lot?”

Henry laughs. “It’s, ah, sort of my little secret. When I was young, my mum and dad would take us early in the morning, before opening. They wanted us to have a sense of the arts, I suppose, but mostly history.” He slows and points to a massive piece, a wooden tiger mauling a man dressed as a European soldier, the sign declaring:
TIPU’S TIGER.
“Mum would take us to look at this one and whisper to me, ‘See how the tiger is eating him up? That’s because my great-great-great-great grandad
stole
this from India. I think we should give it back, but your gran says no.’”

Alex watches Henry’s face in quarter profile, the slight pain that moves under his skin, but he shakes it off quickly and takes Alex’s hand back up. They’re running again.

“Now, I like to come at night,” he says. “A few of the
higher-up security guards know me. Sometimes I think I keep coming because, no matter how many places I’ve been or people I’ve met or books I read, this place is proof I’ll never learn it all. It’s like Westminster: You can look at every individual carving or pane of stained glass and know there’s this wealth of stories there, that everything was put in a specific place for a reason. Everything has a meaning, an intention. There are pieces in here—
The Great Bed of Ware,
it’s mentioned in
Twelfth Night, Epicoene, Don Juan,
and it’s here. Everything is a story, never finished. Isn’t it incredible? And the archives, God, I could spend hours in the archives, they—
mmph.
”

He’s cut off mid-sentence because Alex has stopped in the middle of the corridor and yanked him backward into a kiss.

“Hello,” Henry says when they break apart. “What was that for?”

“I just, like.” Alex shrugs. “Really love you.”

The corridor dumps them out into a cavernous atrium, rooms sprawling out in each direction. Only some of the overhead lighting has been left on, and Alex can see an enormous chandelier looming high in the rotunda, tendrils and bubbles of glass in blues and greens and yellows. Behind it, there’s an elaborate iron choir screen standing broad and gorgeous on the landing above.

“This is it,” Henry says, pulling Alex by the hand to the left, where light spills out of an immense archway. “I called ahead to Gavin to make sure they left a light on. It’s my favorite room.”

Alex has personally helped with exhibitions at the Smithsonian and sleeps in a room once occupied by Ulysses S. Grant’s father-in-law, but he still loses his breath when Henry pulls him through the marble pillars.

In the half light, the room is alive. The vaulted roof seems
to stretch up forever into the inky London sky, and beneath it the room is arranged like a city square somewhere in Florence, climbing columns and towering altars and archways. Deep basins of fountains are planted in the floor between statues on heavy pedestals, and effigies lie behind black doorways with the Resurrection carved into their slate. Dominating the entire back wall is a colossal, Gothic choir screen carved from marble and adorned with ornate statues of saints, black and gold and imposing, holy.

When Henry speaks again, it’s soft, as if he’s trying not to break the spell.

“In here, at night, it’s almost like walking through a real piazza,” Henry says. “But there’s nobody else around to touch you or gawk at you or try to steal a photo of you. You can just
be.
”

Alex looks over to find Henry’s expression careful, waiting, and he realizes this is the same as when Alex took Henry to the lake house—the most sacred place he has.

He squeezes Henry’s hand and says, “Tell me everything.”

Henry does, leading him around to each piece in turn. There’s a life-size sculpture of Zephyr, the Greek god of the west wind brought to life by Francavilla, a crown on his head and one foot on a cloud. Narcissus on his knees, mesmerized by his own reflection in the pool, once thought to be Michelangelo’s lost Cupid but actually carved by Cioli—“Do you see here, where they had to repair his knuckles with stucco?”—Pluto stealing Proserpina away to the underworld, and Jason with his golden fleece.

They wind up back at the first statue,
Samson Slaying a Philistine
, the one that knocked the wind out of Alex when they walked in. He’s never seen anything like it—the smooth
muscles, the indentations of flesh, the breathing, bleeding life of it, all carved by Giambologna out of marble. If he could touch it, he swears the skin would be warm.

“It’s a bit ironic, you know,” Henry says, gazing up at it. “Me, the cursed gay heir, standing here in Victoria’s museum, considering how much she
loved
those sodomy laws.” He smirks. “Actually … you remember how I told you about the gay king, James I?”

“The one with the dumb jock boyfriend?”

“Yes, that one. Well, his most beloved favorite was a man named George Villiers. ‘The handsomest-bodied man in all of England,’ they called him. James was completely besotted. Everyone knew. This French poet, de Viau, wrote a poem about it.” He clears his throat and starts to recite: “‘One man fucks Monsieur le Grand, another fucks the Comte de Tonnerre, and it is well known that the King of England, fucks the Duke of Buckingham.’” Alex must be staring, because he adds, “Well, it rhymes in French. Anyway. Did you know the reason the King James translation of the Bible exists is because the Church of England was so displeased with James for flaunting his relationship with Villiers that he had the translation commissioned to appease them?”

“You’re kidding.”

“He stood in front of the Privy Council and said, ‘Christ had John, and I have George.’”

“Jesus.”

“Precisely.” Henry’s still looking up at the statue, but Alex can’t stop looking at him and the sly smile on his face, lost in his own thoughts. “And James’s son, Charles I, is the reason we have dear Samson. It’s the only Giambologna that ever left Florence. He was a gift to Charles from the King of Spain, and
Charles gave it, this massive, absolutely priceless masterpiece of a sculpture, to Villiers. And a few centuries later, here he is. One of the most beautiful pieces we own, and we didn’t even steal it. We only needed Villiers and his trolloping ways with the queer monarchs. To me, if there were a registry of national gay landmarks in Britain, Samson would be on it.”