Alex doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, his feet rooted to the spot. Henry isn’t looking at him, but staring at a point on the mantel somewhere, tugging at his own hair in exasperation.
“It was never supposed to be an issue,” he goes on, his voice hoarse. “I thought I could have some part of you, and just never say it, and you’d never have to know, and one day you’d get tired of me and leave, because I’m—” He stops short, and one shaking hand moves through the air in front of him in a helpless sort of gesture at everything about himself. “I never thought I’d be stood here faced with a choice I can’t make, because I never … I never imagined you would love me back.”
“Well,” Alex says. “I do. And you can choose.”
“You know bloody well I can’t.”
“You can try,” Alex tells him, feeling as if it should be the simplest fucking truth in the world. “What do you want?”
“I want you—”
“Then fucking have me.”
“—but I don’t want this.”
Alex wants to grab Henry and shake him, wants to scream in his face, wants to smash every priceless antique in the room. “What does that even mean?”
“I don’t want it!” Henry practically shouts. His eyes are flashing, wet and angry and afraid. “Don’t you bloody see? I’m not like you. I can’t afford to be reckless. I don’t have a family who will support me. I don’t go about shoving who I am in everyone’s faces and dreaming about a career in fucking politics, so I can be more scrutinized and picked apart by the entire godforsaken world. I can love you and want you and still not want that life. I’m allowed, all right, and it doesn’t make me a liar; it makes me a man with some infinitesimal shred of self-preservation, unlike you, and you don’t get to come here and call me a coward for it.”
Alex takes a breath. “I never said you were a coward.”
“I.” Henry blinks. “Well. The point stands.”
“You think I want your life? You think I want Martha’s? Gilded fucking cage? Barely allowed to speak in public, or have a goddamn opinion—”
“Then what are we even doing here? Why are we fighting, then, if the lives we have to lead are so incompatible?”
“Because you don’t want that either!” Alex insists. “You don’t want any of this bullshit. You hate it.”
“Don’t tell me what I want,” Henry says. “You haven’t a clue how it feels.”
“Look, I might not be a fucking royal,” Alex says, crosses the horrible rug, moves into Henry’s space, “but I know what it’s like for your whole life to be determined by the family you were born into, okay? The lives we want—they’re not that different. Not in the ways that matter. You want to take what you were given and leave the world better than you found it. So do I. We can—we can figure out a way to do that together.”
Henry stares at him silently, and Alex can see the scales balancing in his head.
“I don’t think I can.”
Alex turns away from him, falling back on his heels like he’s been slapped. “Fine,” he finally says. “You know what? Fucking fine. I’ll leave.”
“Good.”
“I’ll leave,” he says, and he turns back and leans in, “as soon as you tell me to leave.”
“Alex.”
He’s in Henry’s face now. If he’s getting his heart broken tonight, he’s sure as hell going to make Henry have the guts to do it right. “Tell me you’re done with me. I’ll get back on the plane. That’s it. And you can live here in your tower and be miserable forever, write a whole book of sad fucking poems about it. Whatever. Just say it.”
“Fuck you,” Henry says, his voice breaking, and he gets a handful of Alex’s shirt collar, and Alex knows he’s going to love this stubborn shithead forever.
“Tell me,” he says, a ghost of a smile around his lips, “to leave.”
He feels before he registers being shoved backward into a wall, and Henry’s mouth is on his, desperate and wild. The faint taste of blood blooms on his tongue, and he smiles as he opens up to it, pushes it into Henry’s mouth, tugs at his hair with both hands. Henry groans, and Alex feels it in his spine.
They grapple along the wall until Henry physically picks him up off the floor and staggers backward, toward the bed. Alex bounces when his back hits the mattress, and Henry stands over him for several breaths, staring. Alex would give anything to know what’s going through that fucking head of his.
He realizes, suddenly, Henry’s crying.
He swallows.
That’s the thing: he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if this is supposed to be some kind of consummation, or if it’s one last time. He doesn’t think he could go through with it if he knew it was the latter. But he doesn’t want to go home without having this.
“C’mere.”
He fucks Henry slow and deep, and if it’s the last time, they go down shivering and gasping and epic, all wet mouths and wet eyelashes, and Alex is a cliché on an ivory bedspread, and he hates himself but he’s so in love. He’s in stupid, unbearable love, and Henry loves him too, and at least for one night it matters, even if they both have to pretend to forget in the morning.
Henry comes with his face turned into Alex’s open palm, his bottom lip catching on the knob of his wrist, and Alex tries to memorize every detail down to how his lashes fan across his cheeks and the pink flush that spreads all the way up to his ears. He tells his too-fast brain: Don’t miss it this time. He’s too important.
It’s pitch-black outside when Henry’s body finally subsides, and the room is impossibly quiet, the fire gone out. Alex rolls over onto his side and touches two fingers to his chest, right next to where the key on the chain rests. His heart is beating the same as ever under his skin. He doesn’t know how that can be true.
It’s a long stretch of silence before Henry shifts in the bed beside him and rolls onto his back, pulling a sheet over them. Alex reaches for something to say, but there’s nothing.
* * *
Alex wakes up alone.
It takes a moment for everything to reorient around the fixed point in his chest where last night settled. The elaborate gilded headboard, the heavy embroidered duvet, the soft twill blanket beneath that’s the only thing in the room Henry actually chose. He slides his hand across the sheet, over to Henry’s side of the bed. It’s cool to the touch.
Kensington Palace is gray and dull in the early morning. The clock on the mantelpiece says it’s not even seven, and there’s a violent rain lashing against the big picture window, half-revealed by parted curtains.
Henry’s room has never felt much like Henry, but in the quiet of morning, he shows up in pieces. A pile of journals on the desk, the topmost splotched with ink from a pen exploding in his bag on a plane. An oversized cardigan, worn through and patched at the elbows, slung over an antique wingback chair near the window. David’s leash hanging from the doorknob.
And beside him, there’s a copy of Le Monde on the nightstand, tucked under a gigantic leather-bound volume of Wilde’s complete works. He recognizes the date: Paris. The first time they woke up next to each other.
He squeezes his eyes shut, feeling for once in his life that he should stop being so damn nosy. It’s time, he realizes, to start accepting only what Henry can give him.
The sheets smell like Henry. He knows:
One. Henry isn’t here.
Two. Henry never said yes to any kind of future last night.
Three. This could very well be the last time he gets to inhale Henry’s scent on anything.
But, four. Next to the clock on the mantel, Henry’s ring still sits.
The doorknob turns, and Alex opens his eyes to find Henry, holding two mugs and smiling a wan, unreadable smile. He’s in soft sweats again, brushed with morning mist.
“Your hair in the mornings is truly a wonder to behold,” is how he breaks the silence. He crosses and kneels on the edge of the mattress, offering Alex a mug. It’s coffee, one sugar, cinnamon
. He doesn’t want to feel anything about Henry knowing how he likes his coffee, not when he’s about to be dumped, but he does.
Except, when Henry looks at him again, watches him take the first blessed sip of coffee, the smile comes back in earnest. He reaches down and palms one of Alex’s feet through the duvet.
“Hi,” Alex says carefully, squinting over his coffee. “You seem … less pissy.”
Henry huffs a laugh. “You’re one to talk. I wasn’t the one who stormed the palace in a fit of pique to call me an ‘obtuse fucking asshole.’”
“In my defense,” Alex says, “you were an obtuse fucking asshole.”
Henry pauses, takes a sip of his tea, and places it on the nightstand. “I was,” he agrees, and he leans forward and presses his mouth to Alex’s, one hand steadying his mug so it doesn’t spill. He tastes like toothpaste and Earl Grey, and maybe Alex isn’t getting dumped after all.
“Hey,” he says when Henry pulls back. “Where were you?”
Henry doesn’t answer, and Alex watches him kick his wet sneakers onto the floor before climbing up to sit between Alex’s open legs. He places his hands on Alex’s thighs, bracketing him with his full attention, and when he looks up into Alex’s eyes, his are clear blue and focused.
“I needed a run,” he says. “To clear my head a bit, figure out … what’s next. Very Mr. Darcy brooding at Pemberley. And I ran into Philip. I hadn’t mentioned it, but he and Martha are here for the week while they’re doing renovations on Anmer Hall. He was up early for some appearance or other, eating toast. Plain toast. Have you ever seen someone eat toast without anything on it? Harrowing, truly.”
Alex chews his lip. “Where’s this going, babe?”
“We chatted for a bit. He didn’t seem to know about your … visitation … last night, thankfully. But he was on about Martha, and land holdings, and the hypothetical heirs they have to start working on, even though Philip hates children, and suddenly it was as if … as if everything you said last night came back to me. I thought, God, that’s it, isn’t it? Just following the plan. And it’s not that he’s unhappy. He’s fine. It’s all very deeply fine. A whole lifetime of fine.” He’s been pulling at a thread on the duvet, but he looks back up, squarely into Alex’s eyes, and says, “That’s not good enough for me.”
There’s a desperate stutter in Alex’s heartbeat. “It’s not?”
He reaches up and touches a thumb to Alex’s cheekbone. “I’m not … good at saying these things like you are, but. I’ve always thought … ever since I knew about me, and even before, when I could sense I was different—and, after everything the past few years, all the mad things my head does—I’ve always thought of myself as a problem that deserved to stay hidden. Never quite trusted myself, or what I wanted. Before you, I was all right letting everything happen to me. I honestly have never thought I deserved to choose.” His hand moves, fingertips brushing a curl behind Alex’s ear. “But you treat me like I do.”
There’s something painfully hard in Alex’s throat, but he pushes past it. He reaches over and sets his mug down next to Henry’s on the nightstand.
“You do,” he says.
“I think I’m actually beginning to believe that,” Henry says. “And I don’t know how long it would have taken if I didn’t have you to believe for me.”
“And there’s nothing wrong with you,” Alex tells him. “I mean, aside from the fact that you’re occasionally an obtuse fucking asshole.”
Henry laughs again, wetly, his eyes crinkling up in the corners, and Alex feels his heart lift into his throat, up to the embellished ceilings, pushing out to fill the whole room all the way to the glinting gold ring still sitting above the fireplace.
“I am sorry about that,” Henry says. “I—I wasn’t ready to hear it. That night, at the lake … it was the first time I let myself think you might actually say it. I panicked, and it was daft and unfair, and I won’t do it again.”
“You better not,” Alex tells him. “So, you’re saying … you’re in?”
“I’m saying,” Henry begins, and the knit of his brow is nervous but his mouth keeps speaking, “I’m terrified, and my whole life is completely mad, but trying to give you up this week nearly killed me. And when I woke up this morning and looked at you … there’s no trying to get by for me anymore. I don’t know if I’ll ever be allowed to tell the world, but I … I want to. One day. If there’s any legacy for me on this bloody earth, I want it to be true. So I can offer you all of me, in whatever way you’ll have me, and I can offer you the chance of a life. If you can wait, I want you to help me try.”
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?”
&n
bsp; “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—”
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