Red, White & Royal Blue (37 page)

And what comes out of Alex’s mouth, comes so fast he has no chance to stop it, only divert it out of English at the last second in case it’s overheard: “Ser
í
a una mentira, porque no ser
í
a
é
l.” It would be a lie, because it wouldn’t be
him.

He knows immediately Raf has caught his meaning, because he takes a sharp step backward, his back hitting the sill again.

“You can’t tell me this shit, Alex!” he says, clawing inside his jacket until he finds and removes another pack of cigarettes. He shakes one out and fumbles with the lighter. “What are
you even
thinking
? I’m on the opponent’s fucking campaign! I can’t hear this! How can you possibly think you can be a politician like this?”

“Who fucking decided that politics had to be about lying and hiding and being something you’re not?”

“It’s
always
been that, Alex!”

“Since when did
you
buy into it?” Alex spits. “You, me, my family, the people we run with—we were gonna be the honest ones! I have absolutely zero interest in being a politician with some perfect veneer and two-point-five kids. Didn’t we decide it was supposed to be about helping people? About the fight? What part of that is so fucking irreconcilable with letting people see who I really am? Who
you
are, Raf?”

“Alex, please. Please. Jesus Christ. You have to leave. I can’t know this. You can’t tell me this. You have to be more careful than this.”

“God,” Alex says, voice bitter, his hands on his hips. “You know, it’s worse than trust. I
believed
in you.”

“I know you did,” Luna says. He’s not even looking at Alex anymore. “I wish you hadn’t. Now, I need you to get out.”

“Raf—”

“Alex. Get. Out.”

He goes, slamming the door behind him.

Back at the Residence, he tries to call Henry. He doesn’t pick up, but he texts:
Sorry. Meeting with Philip. Love you.

He reaches under the bed and gropes in the dark until he finds it: a bottle of Maker’s. The emergency stash.

“Salud,” he mutters under his breath, and he unscrews the top.

bad metaphors about maps

A
                9/25/20 3:21 AM

to Henry

h,

i have had whiskey. bear with me.

there’s this thing you do. this thing. it drives me crazy. i think about it all the time.

there’s a corner of your mouth, and a place that it goes. pinched and worried like you’re afraid you’re forgetting something. i used to hate it. used to think it was your little tic of disapproval.

but i’ve kissed your mouth, that corner, that place it goes, so many times now. i’ve memorized it. topography on the map of you, a world i’m still charting. i know it. i added it to the key. here: inches to miles. i can multiply it out, read your latitude and longitude. recite your coordinates like la rosaria.

this thing, your mouth, its place. it’s what you do when you’re trying not to give yourself away. not in the way that you do all the time, those empty, greedy grabs for you. i mean the truth of you. the weird, perfect shape of your heart. the one on the outside of your chest.

on the map of you, my fingers can always find the green hills, wales. cool waters and a shore of white chalk. the ancient part of you carved out of stone in a prayerful circle, sacrosanct. your spine’s a ridge i’d die climbing.

if i could spread it out on my desk, i’d find the corner of your mouth where it pinches with my fingers, and i’d smooth it away and you’d be marked with the names of saints like all the old maps. i get the nomenclature now—saints’ names belong to miracles.

give yourself away sometimes, sweetheart. there’s so much of you.

fucking yrs,

a

p.s. wilfred owen to siegfried sassoon—1917:

And you have fixed my Life—however short. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me. I spun round you a satellite for a month, but shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze.

Re: Bad metaphors about maps

Henry
                9/25/20 6:07 AM

to A

From Jean Cocteau to Jean Marais, 1939:

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for having saved me. I was drowning and you threw yourself into the water without hesitation, without a backward look.

The sound of Alex’s phone buzzing on his nightstand startles him out of a dead sleep. He falls halfway out of bed, fumbling to answer it.

“Hello?”

“
What did you do?
” Zahra’s voice nearly shouts. By the clicking of heels in the background and muttered swearing, she’s running somewhere.

“Um,” Alex says. He rubs his eyes, trying to get his brain back online. What
did
he do? “Be more specific?”

“Check the fucking news, you horny little miscreant—how could you possibly be
stupid enough to get photographed
? I swear to God—”

Alex doesn’t even hear the last part of what she says, because his stomach has just dropped all the way down through the floor and into the fucking basements two floors below.

“Fuck.”

Hands shaking, he switches Zahra to speaker, opens up Google, and types his own name.

BREAKING: Photos Reveal Romantic Relationship Between Prince Henry and Alex Claremont-Diaz

OMFG: FSOTUS and Prince Henry—Totally Doing It

THE ORAL OFFICE: READ FSOTUS’S STEAMY EMAILS TO PRINCE HENRY

Royal Family Declines to Comment on Reports of Prince Henry’s Relationship with First Son

25 GIFs That Perfectly Describe Our Reaction When We Heard About Prince Henry & FSOTUS

DON’T LET FIRST SON GO DOWN ON ME

A bubble of hysterical laughter emerges from his throat.

His bedroom door flies open, and Zahra slams on the light, a steely expression of rage barely concealing the sheer terror on her face. Alex’s brain flashes to the panic button behind his headboard and wonders if the Secret Service will be able to find him before he bleeds out.

“You’re on communications lockdown,” she says, and instead of punching him, she snatches his phone out of his hand and shoves it down the front of her blouse, which has been buttoned wrong in her rush. She doesn’t even blink at his state of half-nakedness, just dumps an armload of newspapers onto his bedspread.

QUEEN HENRY!
twenty copies of the
Daily Mail
proclaim
in gigantic letters.
INSIDE THE PRINCE’S GAY AFFAIR WITH THE FIRST SON OF THE UNITED STATES!

The cover is splashed with a blown-up photo of what is undeniably himself and Henry kissing in the back seat of the car behind the cafe, apparently shot with a long-range lens through the windshield. Tinted windows, but he forgot about the fucking
windshield.

Two smaller photos are inset on the bottom of the page: one of the shots of them on the Beekman’s elevator and a photo of them side by side at Wimbledon, him whispering something in Henry’s ear while Henry smiles a soft, private smile.

Fucking shitting hell. He is so fucked. Henry is so fucked. And, Jesus Christ, his mother’s campaign is fucked, and his political career is fucked, and his ears are ringing, and he’s going to throw up.

“
Fuck,
” Alex says again. “I need my phone. I have to call Henry—”

“No, you do fucking not,” Zahra says. “We don’t know yet how the emails got out, so it’s radio silence until we find the leak.”

“The—what? Is Henry okay?” God, Henry. All he can think about is Henry’s big blue eyes looking terrified, Henry’s breathing coming shallow and quick, locked in his bedroom in Kensington Palace and desperately alone, and his jaw locks up, something burning in the back of his throat.

“The president is sitting down right now with as many members of the Office of Communications as we could drag out of bed at three in the morning,” Zahra tells him, ignoring his question. Her phone is buzzing nonstop in her hand. “It’s about to be gay DEFCON five in this administration. For God’s sake, put some clothes on.”

Zahra disappears into Alex’s closet, and he flips the
newspaper open to the story, his heart pounding. There are even more photos inside. He glances over the copy, but there’s too much to even begin to process.

On the second page, he sees them: printed and annotated excerpts of their emails. One is labeled:
PRINCE HENRY: SECRET POET?
It begins with a line he’s read about a thousand times by now.

Should I tell you that when we’re apart, your body comes back to me in dreams …

“Fuck!”
he says a third time, spiking the newspaper at the floor. That one was
his.
It feels obscene to see it there. “How the fuck did they
get these
?”

“Yep,” Zahra agrees. “You dirty did it.” She throws a white button-down and a pair of jeans at him, and he pitches himself out of bed. Zahra gamely holds out an arm for him to steady himself while he pulls his pants up, and despite it all, he’s struck with overwhelming gratitude for her.

“Listen, I need to talk to Henry as soon as possible. I can’t even imagine— God, I need to talk to him.”

“Get some shoes, we’re running,” Zahra tells him. “Priority one is damage control, not feelings.”

He grabs a pair of sneakers, and they take off while he’s still pulling them on, running west. His brain is struggling to keep up, running through about five thousand possible ways this could go, imagining himself ten years down the road being frozen out of Congress, plummeting approval ratings, Henry’s name scratched off the line of succession, his mother losing reelection on a swing state’s disapproval of him. He’s so screwed, and he can’t even decide who to be the angriest with, himself or the
Mail
or the monarchy or the whole stupid country.

He nearly crashes into Zahra’s back as she skids to a stop in front of a door.

He pushes the door open, and the whole room goes silent.

His mother stares at him from the head of the table and says flatly, “Out.”

At first he thinks she’s talking to him, but she cuts her eyes down to the people around the table with her.

“Was I not clear? Everyone, out, now,” she says. “I need to talk to my son.”

THIRTEEN

“Sit down,” his mother tells him, and Alex feels dread coil deep in his stomach. He has no clue what to expect—knowing your parent as the person who raised you isn’t the same as being able to guess their moves as a world leader.

He sits, and the silence hovers over them, his mother’s hands folded in a considering pose against her lips. She looks exhausted.

“Are you okay?” she says finally. When he looks up in surprise, there’s no anger in her eyes.

The president stands on the edge of a career-ending scandal, measures her breaths evenly, and waits for her son to answer.

Oh.

It hits him with sudden clarity that he hasn’t at all stopped to consider his own feelings. There simply hasn’t been the
time. When he reaches for an emotion to name, he finds he can’t pin one down, and something shudders inside him and shuts down completely.

He doesn’t often wish away his position in life, but in this moment, he does. He wants to be having this conversation in a different life, just his mother sitting across from him at the dinner table, asking him how he feels about his nice, respectable boyfriend, if he’s doing okay with figuring his identity out. Not like this, in a West Wing briefing room, his dirty emails spread out between them on the table.

“I’m…” he begins. To his horror, he hears something shake in his voice, which he quickly swallows down. “I don’t know. This isn’t how I wanted to tell people. I thought we’d get a chance to do this right.”

Something softens and resolves in her face, and he suspects he’s answered a question for her beyond the one she asked.

She reaches over and covers one of his hands with her own.

“You listen to me,” she says. Her jaw is set, ironclad. It’s the game face he’s seen her use to stare down Congress, to cow autocrats. Her grip on his hand is steady and strong. He wonders, half-hysterically, if this is how it felt to charge into war under Washington. “I am your mother. I was your mother before I was ever the president, and I’ll be your mother long after, to the day they put me in the ground and beyond this earth. You are my child. So, if you’re serious about this, I’ll back your play.”

Alex is silent.

But the debates,
he thinks.
But the general.

Her gaze is hard. He knows better than to say either of those things. She’ll handle it.

“So,” she says. “Do you feel forever about him?”

And there’s no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he’s known all along.

“Yeah,” he says, “I do.”

Ellen Claremont exhales slowly, and she grins a small, secret grin, the crooked, unflattering one she never uses in public, the one he knows best from when he was a kid around her knees in a small kitchen in Travis County.

“Then, fuck it.”

The Washington Post