Red, White & Royal Blue

by Casey McQuiston

  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!”

  “Hello, excuse me, can we get another round of these please?” Alex calls down the bar.

  Bea screams, Henry laughs and throws up a V, and it all goes hazy and warm in the way Alex loves. They all tumble into a round booth, and the lights are low, and he and Henry are keeping a safe distance, but Alex can’t stop staring at how the special-effect beams keep hitting Henry’s cheekbones, hollowing his face out in blues and greens. He’s something else—half-drunk and grinning in a $2,000 suit and a kimono, and Alex can’t tear his eyes away. He waves over a beer.

  Once things get going, it’s impossible to tell how Bea is the one persuaded up to the stage first, but she unearths a plastic crown from the prop chest onstage and rips through a cover of “Call Me” by Blondie. They all wolf whistle and cheer, and the bar crowd fina
lly realizes they’ve got two members of the royal family, a millionaire philanthropist, and the White House Trio crammed into one of the sticky booths in a rainbow of vivid silk. Three rounds of shots appear—one from a drunk bachelorette party, one from a herd of surly butch chicks at the bar, and one from a table of drag queens. They raise a toast, and Alex feels more welcomed than he ever has before, even at his family’s victory rallies.

  Pez gets up and launches into “So Emotional” by Whitney Houston in a shockingly flawless falsetto that has the whole club on their feet in a matter of moments, shouting their approval as he belts out the glory notes. Alex looks over in giddy awe at Henry, who laughs and shrugs.

  “I told you, there’s nothing he can’t do,” he shouts over the noise.

  June is watching the whole performance with her hands clapped to her face, her mouth hanging open, and she leans over to Nora and drunkenly yells, “Oh, no … he’s … so … hot…”

  “I know, babe,” Nora yells back.

  “I want to … put my fingers in his mouth…” she moans, sounding horrified.

  Nora cackles and nods appreciatively and says, “Can I help?”

  Bea, who has gone through five different lime and sodas so far, politely passes over a shot that’s been handed to her as Pez pulls June up on stage, and Alex throws it back. The burn makes his smile and his legs spread a little wider, and his phone is in his hand before he registers sliding it out of his pocket. He texts Henry under the table: wanna do something stupid?

  He watches Henry pull his own phone out, grin, and arch a brow over at him.

  What could be stupider than this?

  Henry’s mouth falls open into a very unflattering expression of drunken, bewildered arousal, like a hot halibut, at his reply several beats later. Alex smiles and leans back into the booth, making a show of wrapping wet lips around the bottle of his beer. Henry looks like his entire life might be flashing before his eyes, and he says, an octave too high, “Right, well, I’ll just—nip to the loo!”

  And he’s off while the rest of the group is still caught up Pez and June’s performance. Alex gives it to the count of ten before slipping past Nora and following. He swaps a glance with Cash, who’s standing against one wall, gamely wearing a bright pink feather boa. He rolls his eyes but peels off to watch the door.

  Alex finds Henry leaning against the sink, arms folded.

  “Have I mentioned lately that you’re a demon?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Alex says, double-checking the coast is clear before grabbing Henry by the belt and backing into a stall. “Tell me again later.”

  “You—you know this is still not convincing me to sing, don’t you?” Henry chokes out as Alex mouths along his throat.

  “You really think it’s a good idea to present me with a challenge, sweetheart?”

  Which is how, thirty minutes and two more rounds later, Henry is in front of a screaming crowd, absolutely butchering “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen while Nora sings backup and Bea throws glittery gold roses at his feet. His kimono is dangling off one shoulder so the embroidery across the back reads PRINCE BUTT. Alex does not know where the roses came from, and he can’t imagine asking would get him anywhere. He also wouldn’t be able to hear the answer because he’s been screaming at the top of his lungs for two minutes straight.

  “I wanna make a supersonic woman of youuu!” Henry shouts, lunging violently sideways, catching Nora by both arms. “Don’t stop me! Don’t stop me! Don’t stop me!”

  “Hey, hey, hey!” the entire bar yells back. Pez is practically on top of the table now, pounding the back of the booth with one hand and helping June up onto a chair with the other.

  “Don’t stop me! Don’t stop me!”

  Alex cups his hands around his mouth. “Ooh, ooh, ooh!”

  In a cacophony of shouting and kicking and pelvic-thrusting and flashing lights, the song blasts into the guitar solo, and there’s not a single person in the bar in their seat, not when a Prince of England is knee-sliding across the stage, playing passionate and somewhat erotic air guitar.

  Nora has produced a bottle of champagne and starts spraying Henry with it, and Alex loses his mind laughing, climbs on top of his seat and wolf whistles. Bea is absolutely beside herself, tears streaming down her face, and Pez actually is on top of the table now, June dancing beside him, with a bright fuschia smear of lipstick in his platinum hair.

  Alex feels a tug on his arm—Bea, dragging him down to the stage. She grabs his hand and spins him in a ballerina twirl, and he puts one of her roses between his teeth, and they watch Henry and grin at each other through the noise. Alex feels somewhere, under the fifty layers of booze, something crystal clear radiating off her, a shared knowledge of how rare and wonderful this version of Henry is.

  Henry is yelling into the microphone again, stumbling to his feet, his suit and kimono stuck to him with champagne and sweat in a confusingly sexy mess. His eyes flick upward, hazy and hot, and unmistakably lock with Alex’s at the edge of the stage, smiling broad and messy. “I wanna make a supersonic man outta youuuuu!”

  By the end, there’s a standing ovation awaiting him, and Bea, with a steady hand and a devilish smile, ruffling his champagne-sticky hair. She steers him into the booth and Alex’s side, and he pulls her in after him, and the six of them fall together in a tangle of hoarse laughter and expensive shoes.

  He looks at all of them. Pez, his broad smile and glowing joy, the way his white-blond hair flashes against smooth, dark skin. The curve of Bea’s waist and hip and her punk-rock grin as she sucks on the rind of a lime. Nora’s long legs, one of which is propped up on the table and the other crossed over one of Bea’s, her thigh bare where her dress has ridden up. And Henry, flushed and callow and lean, elegant and thrown wide open, his face always turned toward Alex, his mouth unguarded around a laugh, willing.

  He turns to June and slurs, “Bisexuality is truly a rich and complex tapestry,” and she screams with laughter and shoves a napkin in his mouth.

  Alex doesn’t catch much of the next hour—the back of the limo, Nora and Henry jostling for a spot in his lap, an In-N-Out drive-thru and June screaming next to his ear, “Animal Style, did you hear me say Animal Style? Stop fucking laughing, Pez.” There’s the hotel, three suites booked for them on the very top floor, riding through the lobby on Cash’s impossibly broad back.

  June keeps shushing them as they stumble to their rooms with hands full of grease-soaked burger bags, but she’s louder than any of them, so it’s a zero-sum game. Bea, perpetually the lone sober voice of the group, picks one of the suites at random and deposits June and Nora in the king-size bed and Pez in the empty bathtub.

  “I trust you two can handle yourselves?” she says to Alex and Henry in the hallway, a glimmer of mischief in her eyes as she hands them the third key. “I fully intend to put on a robe and investigate this french-fries-dipped-in-milkshake thing Nora told me about.”

  “Yes, Beatrice, we shall behave in a manner befitting the crown,” Henry says. His eyes are slightly crossed.

  “Don’t be a tosser,” she says, and quickly kisses them both on the cheek before vanishing around the corner.

  Henry’s laughing into the curls at the nape of Alex’s neck by the time Alex is fumbling the door open, and they stumble together into the wall, and then toward the bed, clothes dropping in their wake. Henry smells like expensive cologne and champagne and a distinctly Henry smell that never goes away, clean and grassy, and his chest encompasses Alex’s back when he crowds up behind him at the edge of the bed, splaying his hands over his hips.

  “Supersonic man out of youuuu,” Alex mumbles low, craning his head back into Henry’s ear, and Henry laughs and kicks his knees out from under him.

  It’s a clumsy, sideways tumble into bed, both of them grabbing greedy handfuls of the other, Henry’s pants still dangling from one ankle, but it doesn’t matter because Henry’s eyes are fluttered shut and Alex is finally kissing him again.

  Hi
s hands start traveling south on instinct, sweet muscle memory of Henry’s body against his, until Henry reaches down to stop him.

  “Hold on, hold on,” Henry says. “I’m just realizing. All that earlier, and you haven’t gotten off yet tonight, have you?” He drops his head back on the pillow, regards him with narrowed eyes. “Well. That just shall not do.”

  “Hmm, yeah?” Alex says. He takes advantage of the moment to kiss the column of Henry’s throat, the hollow at his collarbone, the knot of his Adam’s apple. “What are you gonna do about it?”

  Henry pushes a hand into his hair and gives it a little pull. “I shall just have to make it the best orgasm of your life. What can I do to make it good for you? Talk about American tax reform during the act? Have you got talking points?”

  Alex looks up, and Henry is grinning at him. “I hate you.”

  “Maybe some light lacrosse role-play?” He’s laughing now, arms coming up around Alex’s shoulders to squeeze him to his chest. “O captain, my captain.”

  “You’re literally the worst,” Alex says, and undercuts it by leaning up to kiss him once more, gently, then deeply, long and slow and heated. He feels Henry’s body shifting beneath his, opening up.

  “Hang on,” Henry says, breaking off breathlessly. “Wait.” Alex opens his eyes, and when he looks down, the expression on Henry’s face is a more familiar one: nervous, unsure. “I do actually. Er. Have an idea.”

  He slides a hand up Henry’s chest to the side of his jaw, ghosting over his cheek with one finger. “Hey,” he says, serious now. “I’m listening. For real.”

  Henry bites his lip, visibly searching for the right words, and apparently comes to a decision.

  “C’mere,” he says, surging up to kiss Alex, and he’s putting his whole body into it now, sliding his hands down to palm at Alex’s ass as he kisses him. Alex feels a sound tear itself from his throat, and he’s following Henry’s lead blindly now, kissing him deep into the mattress, riding a continuous wave of Henry’s body.