Red, White & Royal Blue

by Casey McQuiston

  He tips his chin up to the warm, sticky hometown air, catches his own eye in the rearview mirror. He looks bronzed and soft-mouthed and young, a Texas boy, the same kid he was when he left for DC. So, no more big thoughts for today.

  Outside the hangar are a handful of PPOs and Henry in a short-sleeved chambray, shorts, and a pair of fashionable sunglasses, Burberry weekender over one shoulder—a goddamn summer dream. Nora’s playlist has segued into “Here You Come Again” by Dolly Parton by the time Alex swings out of the side of the jeep by one arm.

  “Yes, hello, hello, it’s good to see you too!” Henry is saying from somewhere inside a smothering hug from June and Nora. Alex bites his lip and watches Henry squeeze their waists in return, and then Alex has him, inhaling the clean smell of him, laughing into the crook of his neck.

  “Hi, love,” he hears Henry say quietly, privately, right into the hair above his ear, and Alex’s breath forgets how to do anything but laugh helplessly.

  “Drums, please!” erupts from the jeep’s stereo and the beat on “Summertime” kicks in, and Alex whoops his approval. Once Henry’s security team has fallen in with the Secret Service cars, they’re off.

  Henry is grinning wide beside him as they cruise down 45, happily bopping his head along to the music, and Alex can’t help glancing over at him, feeling giddy that Henry—Henry the prince—is here, in Texas, coming home with him. June pulls four bottles of Mexican Coke out of the cooler under her seat and passes them around, and Henry takes the first sip and practically melts. Alex reaches over and takes Henry’s free hand into his own, lacing their fingers together on the console between them.

  It takes an hour and a half to get out to Lake LBJ from Austin, and when they start weaving their way toward the water, Henry asks, “Why is it called Lake LBJ?”

  “Nora?” Alex says.

  “Lake LBJ,” Nora says, “or Lake Lyndon B. Johnson, is one of six reservoirs formed by dams on the Colorado River known as the Texas Highland Lakes. Made possible by LBJ enacting the Rural Electrification Act when he was president. And LBJ had a place out here.”

  “That’s true,” Alex says.

  “Also, fun fact: LBJ was obsessed with his own dick,” Nora adds. “He called it Jumbo and would whip it out all the time. Like, in front of colleagues, reporters, anybody.”

  “Also true.”

  “American politics,” Henry says. “Truly fascinating.”

  “You wanna talk, Henry VIII?” Alex says.

  “Anyway,” Henry says airily, “how long have you lot come out here?”

  “Dad bought it when he and Mom split up, so when I was twelve,” Alex tells him. “He wanted to have a place close to us after he moved. We used to spend so much time here in the summers.”

  “Aw, Alex, remember when you got drunk for the first time out here?” June says.

  “Strawberry daiquiris all day.”

  “You threw up so much,” she says fondly.

  They pull into a driveway flanked by thick trees and drive up to the house at the top of the hill, the same old vibrant orange exterior and smooth arches, tall cactuses and aloe plants. His mom was never into the whole hacienda school of home decor, so his dad went all in when he bought the lake house, tall teal doors and heavy wooden beams and Spanish tile accents in pinks and reds. There’s a big wrap-around porch and stairs leading down the hill to the dock, and all the windows facing the water have been flung open, the curtains drifting out on a warm breeze.

  Their teams fall back to check the perimeter—they’re renting out the place next door for added privacy and the obligatory security presence. Henry effortlessly lifts June’s cooler up onto one shoulder and Alex pointedly does not swoon about it.

  There’s the loud yell of Oscar Diaz coming around the corner, dripping and apparently fresh from a swim. He’s wearing his old brown huaraches and a pair of swim trunks with parrots on them, both arms extended to the sun, and June is summarily scooped up into them.

  “CJ!” he says as he spins her around and deposits her on the stucco railing. Nora is next, and then a bone-crushing hug for Alex.

  Henry steps forward, and Oscar looks him up and down—the Burberry bag, the cooler on his shoulder, the elegant smile, the extended hand. His dad had been confused but ultimately willing to roll with it when Alex asked if he could bring a friend and casually mentioned the friend would be the Prince of Wales. He’s not sure how this will go.

  “Hello,” Henry says. “Good to meet you. I’m Henry.”

  Oscar slaps his hand into Henry’s. “Hope you’re ready to fucking party.”

  * * *

  Oscar may be the cook of the family, but Alex’s mom was the one who grilled. It didn’t always track in Pemberton Heights—his Mexican dad in the house diligently soaking a tres leches while his blond mom stood out in the yard flipping burgers—but it worked. Alex determinedly picked up the best from both of them, and now he’s the only one here who can handle racks of ribs while Oscar does the rest.

  The kitchen of the lake house faces the water, always smelling like citrus and salt and herbs, and his dad keeps it stocked with plump tomatoes and clay-soft avocados when they’re visiting. He’s standing in front of the big open windows now, three racks of ribs spread out on pans on the counter in front of him. His dad is at the sink, shucking ears of corn and humming along to an old Chente record.

  Brown sugar. Smoked paprika. Onion powder. Chili powder. Garlic powder. Cayenne pepper. Salt. Pepper. More brown sugar. Alex measures each one out with his hands and dumps them into the bowl.

  Down by the dock, June and Nora are embroiled in what looks like an improvised jousting match, charging at each other on the backs of inflatable animals with pool noodles. Henry is tipsy and shirtless and attempting to referee, standing on the dock with one foot on a piling and waving a bottle of Shiner around like a madman.

  Alex smiles a little to himself, watching them. Henry and his girls.

  “So, you wanna talk about it?” says his father’s voice, in Spanish, from somewhere to his left.

  Alex jumps a little, startled. His dad has relocated to the bar a few feet down from him, mixing up a big batch of cotija and crema and seasonings for elotes.

  “Uh.” Has he been that obvious already?

  “About Raf.”

  Alex exhales, his shoulders dropping, and returns his attention to the dry rub.

  “Ah. That motherfucker,” he says. They’ve only broached the topic in passing obscenities over text since the news broke. There’s a mutual sting of betrayal. “Do you have any idea what he’s thinking?”

  “I don’t have anything kinder to say about him than you do. And I don’t have an explanation either. But…” He pauses thoughtfully, still stirring. Alex can sense him weighing out several thoughts at once, as he often does. “I don’t know. After all this time, I want to believe there’s a reason for him to put himself in the same room as Jeffrey Richards. But I can’t figure out what.”

  Alex thinks about the conversation he overheard in the housekeeper’s office, wondering if his dad is ever going to let him in on the full picture. He doesn’t know how to ask without revealing that he literally climbed into a bush to eavesdrop on them. His dad’s relationship with Luna has always been like that—grown-up talk.

  Alex was at the fund-raiser for Oscar’s Senate run where they first met Luna, Alex only fifteen and already taking notes. Luna showed up with a pride flag unapologetically stuck in his lapel; Alex wrote that down.

  “Why’d you pick him?” Alex asks. “I remember that campaign. We met a lot of people who would’ve made great politicians. Why wouldn’t you pick someone easier to elect?”

  “You mean, why’d I roll the dice on the gay one?”

  Alex concentrates on keeping his face neutral.

  “I wasn’t gonna put it like that,” he says, “but yeah.”

  “Raf ever tell you his parents kicked him out when he was sixteen?”

  Alex winces. “I knew he had a
hard time before college, but he didn’t specify.”

  “Yeah, they didn’t take the news so well. He had a rough couple of years, but it made him tough. The night we met him, it was the first time he’d been back in California since he got kicked out, but he was damn sure gonna come in to support a brother out of Mexico City. It was like when Zahra showed up at your mom’s office in Austin and said she wanted to prove the bastards wrong. You know a fighter when you see one.”

  “Yeah,” Alex says.

  There’s another pause of Chente crooning in the background while his dad stirs, before he speaks again.

  “You know…” he says. “That summer, I sent you to work on his campaign because you’re the best point man I got. I knew you could do it. But I really thought there was a lot you could learn from him too. You got a lot in common.”

  Alex says nothing for a long moment.

  “I gotta be honest,” his dad says, and when Alex looks up again, he’s watching the window. “I thought a prince would be more of a candy-ass.”

  Alex laughs, glancing back out at Henry, the sway of his back under the afternoon sun. “He’s tougher than he looks.”

  “Not bad for a European,” his dad says. “Better than half the idiots June’s brought home.” Alex’s hands freeze, and his head jerks back to his dad, who’s still stirring with his heavy wooden spoon, face impartial. “Half the girls you’ve brought around too. Not better than Nora, though. She’ll always be my favorite.” Alex stares at him, until his dad finally looks up. “What? You’re not as subtle as you think.”

  “I—I don’t know,” Alex sputters. “I thought you might need to, like, have a Catholic moment about this or something?”

  His dad slaps him on the bicep with the spoon, leaving a splatter of crema and cheese behind. “Have a little more faith in your old man than that, eh? A little appreciation for the patron saint of gender-neutral bathrooms in California? Little shit.”

  “Okay, okay, sorry!” Alex says, laughing. “I just know it’s different when it’s your own kid.”

  His dad laughs too, rubbing a hand over his goatee. “It’s really not. Not to me, anyway. I see you.”

  Alex smiles again. “I know.”

  “Does your ma know?”

  “Yeah, I told her a couple weeks ago.”

  “How’d she take it?”

  “I mean, she doesn’t care that I’m bi. She kind of freaked out it was him. There was a PowerPoint.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “She fired me. And, uh. She told me I need to figure out if the way I feel about him is worth the risk.”

  “Well, is it?”

  Alex groans. “Please, for the love of God, do not ask me. I’m on vacation. I want to get drunk and eat barbecue in peace.”

  His dad laughs ruefully. “You know, in a lot of ways, your mom and me were a stupid idea. I think we both knew it wouldn’t be forever. We’re both too fucking proud. But God, that woman. Your mother is, without question, the love of my life. I’ll never love anyone else like that. It was wildfire. And I got you and June out of it, best things that ever happened to an old asshole like me. That kind of love is rare, even if it was a complete disaster.” He sucks his teeth, considering. “Sometimes you just jump and hope it’s not a cliff.”

  Alex closes his eyes. “Are you done with dad monologues for the day?”

  “You’re such a shit,” he says, throwing a kitchen towel at his head. “Go put the ribs on. I wanna eat today.” He calls after Alex’s back, “You two better take the bunk beds tonight! Santa Maria is watching!”

  They eat later that evening, big piles of elotes, pork tamales with salsa verde, a clay pot of frijoles charros, ribs. Henry gamely piles his plate with some of each and eyeballs it as if waiting for it to reveal its secrets to him, and Alex realizes Henry has never eaten barbecue with his hands before.

  Alex demonstrates and watches with poorly concealed glee as Henry gingerly picks up a rib with his fingertips and considers his approach, cheering as Henry dives in face-first and rips a hunk of meat off with his teeth. He chews proudly, a huge smear of barbecue sauce across his upper lip and the tip of his nose.

  His dad keeps an old guitar in the living room, and June brings it out on the porch so the two of them can pass it back and forth. Nora, one of Alex’s chambrays thrown on over her bikini, floats barefoot in and out, keeping all their glasses filled from a pitcher of sangria brimming with white peaches and blackberries.

  They sit around the fire pit and play old Johnny Cash songs, Selena, Fleetwood Mac. Alex sits and listens to the cicadas and the water and his dad’s rough ranger voice, and when his dad slumps off to bed, June’s songbird one. He feels wrapped up and warm, turning slowly under the moon.

  He and Henry drift to a swing at the edge of the porch, and he curls into Henry’s side, buries his face in the collar of his shirt. Henry puts an arm around him, touches the hinge of Alex’s jaw with fingers that smell like smoke.

  June plucks away at “Annie’s Song,” you fill up my senses like a night in a forest, and the breeze keeps moving to meet the highest branches of the trees, and the water keeps rising to meet the bulkheads, and Henry leans down to meet Alex’s mouth, and Alex is. Well, Alex is so in love he could die.

  * * *

  Alex falls out of bed the following morning with a low-grade hangover and one of Henry’s swimsuits tangled around his elbow. They did, technically, sleep in separate bunks. They just didn’t start there.

  Over the kitchen sink, he chugs a glass of water and stares out the window, the sun blinding and bright on the lake, and there’s an incandescent little stone of certainty at the bottom of his chest.

  It’s this place—the absolute separation from DC, the familiar old smells of cedar trees and dried chile de árbol, the sanity of it. The roots. He could go outside and dig his fingers into the springy ground and understand anything about himself.

  And he does understand, really. He loves Henry, and it’s nothing new. He’s been falling in love with Henry for years, probably since he first saw him in glossy print on the pages of J14, almost definitely since Henry pinned Alex to the floor of a medical supply closet and told him to shut the hell up. That long. That much.

  He smiles as he reaches for a frying pan, because he knows it’s exactly the kind of insane risk he can’t resist.

  By the time Henry comes wandering into the kitchen in his pajamas, there’s an entire breakfast spread on the long green table, and Alex is at the stove, flipping his dozenth pancake.

  “Is that an apron?”

  Alex flourishes toward the polka-dotted thing he’s got on over his boxers with his free hand, as if showing off one of his tailored suits. “Morning, sweetheart.”

  “Sorry,” Henry says. “I was looking for someone else. Handsome, petulant, short, not pleasant until after ten a.m.? Have you seen him?”

  “Fuck off, five-nine is average.”

  Henry crosses the room with a laugh and nudges up behind him at the stove to peck him on the cheek. “Love, you and I both know you’re rounding up.”

  It’s only a step on the way to the coffeemaker, but Alex reaches back and gets a hand in Henry’s hair before he can move, pulling him into a kiss on the mouth this time. Henry huffs a little in surprise but returns it fully.

  Alex forgets, momentarily, about the pancakes and everything else, not because he wants to do absolutely filthy things to Henry—maybe even with the apron still on—but because he loves him, and isn’t that wild, to know that that’s what makes the filthy things so good.

  “I didn’t realize this was a jazz brunch,” says Nora’s voice suddenly, and Henry springs backward so fast he almost puts his ass in the bowl of batter. She sidles up to the forgotten coffeemaker, grinning slyly at them.

  “That doesn’t seem sanitary,” June is saying with a yawn as she folds herself into a chair at the table.

  “Sorry,” Henry says sheepishly.

  “Don’t be,” Nora
tells him.

  “I’m not,” Alex says.

  “I’m hungover,” June says as she reaches for the pitcher of mimosas. “Alex, you did all this?”

  Alex shrugs, and June squints at him, bleary but knowing.

  That afternoon, over the sounds of the boat’s engine, Henry talks to Alex’s dad about the sailboats that jut up from the horizon, getting into a complex discussion on outboard motors that Alex can’t hope to follow. He leans back against the bow and watches, and it’s so easy to imagine it: a future Henry who comes to the lake house with him every summer, who learns how to make elotes and ties neat cleat hitches and fits right into place in his weird family.

  They go swimming, yell over one another about politics, pass the guitar around again. Henry takes a photo of himself with June and Nora, one under each arm and both in their bikinis. Nora is holding his chin in one hand and licking the side of his face, and June has her fingers tangled up in his hair and her head in the crook of his neck, smiling angelically at the camera. He sends it to Pez and receives anguished keysmashes and crying emojis in response, and they all almost piss themselves laughing.

  It’s good. It’s really, really good.

  Alex lies awake that night, drunk on Shiner and way too many campfire marshmallows, and he stares at whorls in the wood panels of the top bunk and thinks about coming of age out here. He remembers when he was a kid, freckly and unafraid, when the world seemed like it was blissfully endless but everything still made perfect sense. He used to leave his clothes in a pile on the pier and dive headfirst into the lake. Everything was in its right place.

  He wears a key to his childhood home around his neck, but he doesn’t know the last time he actually thought about the boy who used to push it into the lock.

  Maybe losing the job isn’t the worst thing that could have happened.

  He thinks about roots, about first and second languages. What he wanted when he was a kid and what he wants now and where those things overlap. Maybe that place, the meeting of the two, is here somewhere, in the gentle insistence of the water around his legs, crude letters carved with an old pocket knife. The steady thrum of another person’s pulse against his.