Red, White & Royal Blue

by Casey McQuiston

  He’s not, he thinks, upset people know. He’s always been pretty unapologetic when it came to things like who he dates and what he’s into, although those were never anything like this. Still, the cocky shithead part of him is slightly pleased to finally have a claim on Henry. Yep, the prince? Most eligible bachelor in the world? British accent, face like a Greek god, legs for days? Mine.

  But that’s only a tiny, tiny fraction of it. The rest is a knot of fear, anger, violation, humiliation, uncertainty, panic. There are the flaws everyone’s allowed to see—his big mouth, his mercurial temper, his searing impulses—and then there’s this. It’s like how he only wears his glasses when nobody’s around: Nobody’s supposed to see how much he needs.

  He doesn’t care that people think about his body and write about his sex life, real or imagined. He cares that they know, in his own private words, what’s pumping out of his heart.

  And Henry. God, Henry. Those emails—those letters—were the one place Henry could say what he was really thinking. There’s nothing that wasn’t laid out in there: Henry being gay, Bea going to rehab, the queen tacitly keeping Henry in the closet. Alex hasn’t been a good Catholic in a long time, but he knows confession is a sacrament. They were supposed to stay safe.

  Fuck.

  He can’t sit still. He tosses Prisoner of Azkaban aside after four pages. He encounters a think piece on his own relationship on Twitter and has to shut down the whole app. He paces up and down the aisle of the jet, kicking at the bottoms of the seats.

  “Can you please sit down?” Zahra says after twenty minutes of watching him twitch around the cabin. “You’re giving my ulcer an ulcer.”

  “Are you sure they’re gonna let us in when we get there?” Alex asks her. “Like, what if they don’t? What if they, like, call the Royal Guard on us and have us arrested? Can they do that? Amy could probably fight them. Will she get arrested if she tries to fight them?”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Zahra groans, and she pulls out her phone and starts dialing.

  “Who are you calling?”

  She sighs, holding the phone up to her ear as it rings. “Srivastava.”

  “What makes you think he’ll answer?”

  “It’s his personal line.”

  Alex stares at her. “You have his personal line and you haven’t used it until now?”

  “Shaan,” Zahra snaps. “Listen up, you fuck. We are in the air right now. FSOTUS is with me. ETA six hours. You will have a car waiting. We will meet the queen and whoever the fuck else we have to meet to hash this shit out, or so help me God I will personally make your balls into fucking earrings. I will scorched-earth your entire motherfucking life.” She pauses, presumably to listen to him agree because Alex can’t imagine him doing anything else. “Now, put Henry on the phone, and do not try to tell me he’s not there, because I know you haven’t let him out of your sight.”

  And she shoves her phone at Alex’s face.

  He takes it uncertainly and lifts it to his ear. There’s rustling, a confused noise.

  “Hello?”

  It’s Henry’s voice, sweet and posh and shaky and confused, and relief knocks the wind out of him.

  “Sweetheart.”

  He hears Henry’s exhale over the line. “Hi, love. Are you okay?”

  He laughs wetly, amazed. “Fuck, are you kidding me? I’m fine, I’m fine, are you okay?”

  “I’m … managing.”

  Alex winces. “How bad is it?”

  “Philip broke a vase that belonged to Anne Boleyn, Gran ordered a communications lockdown, and Mum hasn’t spoken to anyone,” Henry tells him. “But, er, other than that. All things considered. It’s, er.”

  “I know,” Alex says. “I’ll be there soon.”

  There’s another pause, Henry’s breath shaky over the receiver. “I’m not sorry,” he says. “That people know.”

  Alex feels his heart climb up into his throat.

  “Henry,” he attempts, “I…”

  “Maybe—”

  “I talked to my mom—”

  “I know the timing isn’t ideal—”

  “Would you—”

  “I want—”

  “Hang on,” Alex says. “Are we. Um. Are we both asking the same thing?”

  “That depends. Were you going to ask me if I want to tell the truth?”

  “Yeah,” Alex says, and he thinks his knuckles must be white around the phone. “Yeah, I was.”

  “Then, yes.”

  A breath, barely. “You want that?”

  Henry takes a moment to respond, but his voice is level. “I don’t know if I would have chosen it yet, but it’s out there now, and … I won’t lie. Not about this. Not about you.”

  Alex’s eyelashes are wet.

  “I fucking love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  “Just hold on until I get there; we’re gonna figure this out.”

  “I will.”

  “I’m coming. I’ll be there soon.”

  Henry exhales a wet, broken laugh. “Please, do hurry.”

  They hang up, and he passes the phone back to Zahra, who takes it wordlessly and tucks it back into her bag.

  “Thank you, Zahra, I—”

  She holds up one hand, eyes closed. “Don’t.”

  “Seriously, you didn’t have to do that.”

  “Look, I’m only going to say this once, and if you ever repeat it, I’ll have you kneecapped.” She drops her hand, fixing him with a glare that manages to be both chilly and fond. “I’m rooting for you, okay?”

  “Wait. Zahra. Oh my God. I just realized. You’re … my friend.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Zahra, you’re my mean friend.”

  “Am not.” She yanks a blanket from her pile of belongings, turning her back to Alex and wrapping it around her. “Don’t speak to me for the next six hours. I deserve a fucking nap.”

  “Wait, wait, okay, wait,” Alex says. “I have one question.”

  She sighs heavily. “What?”

  “Why’d you wait to use Shaan’s personal number?”

  “Because he’s my fiancé, asshole, but some of us understand the meaning of discretion, so you wouldn’t know about it,” she tells him without even so much as looking at him, curled up against the window of the plane. “We agreed we’d never use our personal numbers for work contact. Now shut up and let me get some sleep before we have to deal with the rest of this. I’m running on nothing but black coffee, a Wetzel’s Pretzel, and a fistful of B12. Do not even breathe in my direction.”

  * * *

  It’s not Henry but Bea who answers when Alex knocks on the closed door of the music room on the second floor of Kensington.

  “I told you to stay away—” Bea is saying as soon as the door is open, brandishing a guitar over her shoulder. She drops it as soon as she sees him. “Oh, Alex, I’m so sorry, I thought you were Philip.” She scoops him up with her free hand into a surprisingly bone-crushing hug. “Thank God you’re here, I was about to come get you myself.”

  When she releases him, he’s finally able to see Henry behind her, slumped on the settee with a bottle of brandy. He smiles at Alex, weakly, and says, “Bit short for a stormtrooper.”

  Alex’s laugh comes out half sob, and it’s impossible to know if he moves first or if Henry does, but they meet in the middle of the room, Henry’s arms around Alex’s neck, swallowing him up. If Henry’s voice on the phone was a tether, his body is the gravity that makes it possible, his hand gripping the back of Alex’s neck a magnetic force, a permanent compass north.

  “I’m sorry,” is what comes out of Alex’s mouth, miserably, earnestly, muffled against Henry’s throat. “It’s my fault. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Henry releases him, hands on his shoulders, jaw set. “Don’t you dare. I’m not sorry for a thing.”

  Alex laughs again, incredulous, looking into the heavy circles under Henry’s eyes and the chewed-up bottom lip and, for the f
irst time, seeing a man born to lead a nation.

  “You’re unbelievable,” Alex says. He leans up and kisses the underside of his jaw, finding it rough from a full, fitful day without a shave. He pushes his nose, his cheek into it, feels some of the tension sap out of Henry at the touch. “You know that?”

  They find their way onto the lush purples and reds of the Persian rugs on the floor, Henry’s head in Alex’s lap and Bea on a pouf, plucking away at a weird little instrument she tells Alex is called an autoharp. Bea pulls over a tiny table and sets out crackers and a little chunk of soft cheese and takes away the brandy bottle.

  From the sound of it, the queen is absolutely livid—not just to finally have confirmation about Henry, but because it’s via something as undignified as a tabloid scandal. Philip drove in from Anmer Hall the minute the news broke and has been rebuffed by Bea every time he tries to get near Henry for what he says “will simply be a stern discussion about the consequences of his actions.” Catherine has been by, once, three hours ago, stone-faced and sad, to tell Henry that she loves him and he could have told her sooner.

  “And I said, ‘That’s great, Mum, but as long as you’re letting Gran keep me trapped, it doesn’t mean a fucking thing,’” Henry says. Alex stares down at him, shocked and a little impressed. Henry rests an arm over his face. “I feel awful. I was—I dunno. All the times she should have been there the past few years, it caught up to me.”

  Bea sighs. “Maybe it was the kick in the arse she needs. We’ve been trying to get her to do anything for years since Dad.”

  “Still,” Henry says. “The way Gran is—Mum isn’t to blame for that. And she did manage to protect us, before. It’s not fair.”

  “H,” Bea says firmly. “It’s hard, but she needed to hear it.” She looks down at the little buttons of the autoharp. “We deserve to have one parent, at least.”

  The corner of her mouth pinches, so much like Henry’s.

  “Are you okay?” Alex asks her. “I know I—I saw a couple articles…” He doesn’t finish the sentence. “The Powder Princess” was the fourth-highest Twitter trend ten hours ago.

  Her frown twitches into a half-smile. “Me? Honestly, it’s almost a relief. I’ve always said that the most comfortable I could be is everyone knowing my story upfront, so I don’t have hear the speculations or lie to cover the truth—or explain it. I’d rather it, you know, hadn’t been this way. But here we are. At least now I can stop acting as if it’s something to be ashamed of.”

  “I know the feeling,” Henry says softly.

  The quiet ebbs and flows after a while, the London night black and pressing in against the windowpanes. David the beagle curls up protectively at Henry’s side, and Bea picks a Bowie song to play. She sings under her breath, “I, I will be king, and you, you will be queen,” and Alex almost laughs. It feels like how Zahra has described hurricane days to him: stuck together, hoping the sandbags will hold.

  Henry drifts asleep at some point, and Alex is thankful for it, but he can still feel tension in every part of Henry’s body against him.

  “He hasn’t slept since the news,” Bea tells him quietly.

  Alex nods slightly, searching her face. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Always.”

  “I feel like he’s not telling me something,” Alex whispers. “I believe him when he says he’s in, and he wants to tell everyone the truth. But there’s something else he’s not saying, and it’s freaking me out that I can’t figure out what it is.”

  Bea looks up, her fingers stilling. “Oh, love,” she says simply. “He misses Dad.”

  Oh.

  He sighs, putting his head in his hands. Of course.

  “Can you explain?” he attempts lamely. “What that’s like? What I can do?”

  She shifts on her pouf, repositioning the harp onto the floor, and reaches into her sweater. She withdraws a silver coin on a chain: her sobriety chip.

  “D’you mind if I go a bit sponsor?” she asks with a smirk. He offers her a weak half smile, and she continues.

  “So, imagine we’re all born with a set of feelings. Some are broader or deeper than others, but for everyone, there’s that ground floor, a bottom crust of the pie. That’s the maximum depth of feeling you’ve ever experienced. And then, the worst thing happens to you. The very worst thing that could have happened. The thing you had nightmares about as a child, and you thought, it’s all right because that thing will happen to me when I’m older and wiser, and I’ll have felt so many feelings by then that this one worst feeling, the worst possible feeling, won’t seem so terrible.

  “But it happens to you when you’re young. It happens when your brain isn’t even fully done cooking—when you’ve barely experienced anything, really. The worst thing is one of the first big things that ever happens to you in your life. It happens to you, and it goes all the way down to the bottom of what you know how to feel, and it rips it open and carves out this chasm down below to make room. And because you were so young, and because it was one of the first big things to happen in your life, you’ll always carry it inside you. Every time something terrible happens to you from then on, it doesn’t just stop at the bottom—it goes all the way down.”

  She reaches across the tiny tea table and the sad little pile of water crackers and touches the back of Alex’s hand.

  “Do you understand?” she asks him, looking right into his eyes. “You need to understand this to be with Henry. He is the most loving, nurturing, selfless person you could hope to meet, but there is a sadness and a hurt in him that is tremendous, and you may very well never truly understand it, but you need to love it as much as you love the rest of him, because that’s him. That is him, part and parcel. And he is prepared to give it all to you, which is far more than I ever, in a thousand years, thought I would see him do.”

  Alex sits, trying for a long moment to absorb it, and says, “I’ve never … I haven’t been through anything like that,” he says, voice rough. “But I’ve always felt it, in him. There’s this side of him that’s … unknowable.” He takes a breath. “But the thing is, jumping off cliffs is kinda my thing. That’s the choice. I love him, with all that, because of all that. On purpose. I love him on purpose.”

  Bea smiles gently. “Then you’ll do fine.”

  Sometime around four in the morning, he climbs into bed behind Henry, Henry whose spine pokes out in soft points, Henry who has been through the worst thing and now the next worst thing and is still alive. He reaches out a hand and touches the ridge of Henry’s shoulder blade, the skin where the sheet has slid off him, where his lungs stubbornly refuse to stop pulling air. Six feet of boy curled around kicked-in ribs and a recalcitrant heart.

  Carefully, his chest to Henry’s back, he slots himself into place.

  * * *

  “It’s foolishness, Henry,” Philip is saying. “You’re too young to understand.”

  Alex’s ears are ringing.

  They sat down in Henry’s kitchen this morning with scones and a note from Bea that she’d gone to meet with Catherine. And then suddenly, Philip was bursting through the door, suit askew, hair uncombed, shouting at Henry about the nerve to break the communications embargo, to bring Alex here while the palace is being watched, to keep embarrassing the family.

  Presently, Alex is thinking about breaking his nose with the coffee percolator.

  “I’m twenty-three, Philip,” Henry says, audibly struggling to keep his voice even. “Mum was barely more than that when she met Dad.”

  “Yes, and you think that was a wise decision?” Philip says nastily. “Marrying a man who spent half our childhoods making films, who never served his country, who got sick and left us and Mum—”

  “Don’t, Philip,” Henry says. “I swear to God. Just because your obsession with family legacy didn’t impress him—”

  “You clearly don’t know the first fucking thing about what a legacy means if you can let something like this happen,” Philip snaps. “The only
thing to do now is bury it and hope that somehow people will believe that none of it was real. That’s your duty, Henry. It’s the least you can do.”

  “I’m sorry,” Henry says, sounding wretched, but there’s a bitter defiance rising in him too. “I’m sorry that I’m such a disgrace for being the way I am.”

  “I don’t care if you’re gay,” Philip says, dropping that big fat if like Henry hasn’t already specifically told him. “I care that you’ve made this choice, with him”—he cuts his eyes sharply to Alex as if he finally exists in the same room as this conversation—“someone with a fucking target on his back, to be so stupid and naive and selfish as to think it wouldn’t completely fuck us all.”

  “I knew, Philip. Christ,” Henry says. “I knew it could ruin everything. I was terrified of exactly this. But how could I have predicted? How?”

  “As I said, naive,” Philip tells him. “This is the life we live, Henry. You’ve always known it. I’ve tried to tell you. I wanted to be a good brother to you, but you don’t bloody listen. It’s time to remember your place in this family. Be a man. Stand up and take responsibility. Fix this. For once in your life, don’t be a coward.”

  Henry flinches like he’s been physically slapped. Alex can see it now—this is how he was broken down over the years. Maybe not always as explicitly, but always there, always implied. Remember your place.

  And he does the thing Alex loves so much: He sticks his chin out, steeling himself up. “I’m not a coward,” he says. “And I don’t want to fix it.”

  Philip slants a harsh, humorless laugh at him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You can’t possibly know.”

  “Fuck off, Philip, I love him,” Henry says.

  “Oh, you love him, do you?” It’s so patronizing that Alex’s hand twitches into a fist under the table. “What exactly do you intend to do, then, Henry? Hmm? Marry him? Make him the Duchess of Cambridge? The First Son of the United bloody States, fourth in line to be Queen of England?”

  “I’ll fucking abdicate!” Henry says, voice rising. “I don’t care!”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Philip spits back.