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“As your mother, I can appreciate that maybe this isn’t your fault, but as the president, all I want is to have the CIA fake your death and ride the dead-kid sympathy into a second term.”
He’s been aware for too long that most people don’t navigate thoughts of whether they’ll ever be good enough or if they’re disappointing the entire world.
She’s certain he was the one who vandalized the sign outside one particular senator’s office to read BITCH MCCONNELL, but she’ll never prove it.
His mother sends someone to pick up pizzas, and they take over the game room on the third floor with paper plates and bottles of Shiner shipped in from Texas.
Instead, he’s as weird and manic as he wants to be, and Henry jabs back in sharp flashes of startling wit.
You are the thistle in the tender and sensitive arse crack of my life.
Straight people, he thinks, probably don’t spend this much time convincing themselves they’re straight.
My Bloody Mary is here and I need to talk to it about this phone call.”
There’s something about the two of them, the way they ignite at different temperatures, Alex’s frenetic energy and Henry’s aching sureness.
In an instant of sudden, vivid clarity, he can’t believe he ever thought he was straight.
It’s for the best this way, he tells himself; nobody will get any wrong ideas about what exactly this arrangement is. They’re not going to spoon all night or wake up in each other’s arms or eat breakfast together. Mutually satisfying sexual experiences do not a relationship make.
his primary turn-on has always been competence.
“Hey, don’t threaten me with a good time.”
He watches Henry lather up and shave, put pomade in his hair, put on his Burberry for the day, and he catches himself wishing he could watch it every day. He likes taking Henry apart, but there’s something incredibly intimate about sitting on the bed they wrecked the night before, the only one who watches him create Prince Henry of Wales for the day.
Alex feels like somebody has probably warned him about private email servers before, but he’s a little fuzzy on the details. It doesn’t feel important.
If Alex’s head is a storm, Henry is the place lightning hits ground.
The phrase “see attached bibliography” is the single sexiest thing you have ever written to me.
Should I tell you that when we’re apart, your body comes back to me in dreams? That when I sleep, I see you, the dip of your waist, the freckle above your hip, and when I wake up in the morning, it feels like I’ve just been with you, the phantom touch of your hand on the back of my neck fresh and not imagined? That I can feel your skin against mine, and it makes every bone in my body ache? That, for a few moments, I can hold my breath and be back there with you, in a dream, in a thousand rooms, nowhere at all?
Tho I long for the actual sunlight contact between us I miss you like a home. Shine back honey & think of me.
P.S. This is mortifying and maudlin and, honestly, I hope you forget it as soon as you’ve read it.
Something’s wrong, and he knows it, but he’s too afraid to push back or ask. That, he realizes suddenly, is the danger of allowing love into this—the acknowledgment that if something goes wrong, he doesn’t know how he will stand it.
He’s spent too much of his life talking, talking, talking not to know the signs when someone doesn’t want to hear him anymore.
With me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.
Here lies Prince Henry of Wales. He died as he lived: avoiding plans and sucking cock.
You see, for me, memories are difficult. Very often, they hurt. A curious thing about grief is the way it takes your entire life, all those foundational years that made you who you are, and makes them so painful to look back upon because of the absence there, that suddenly they’re inaccessible. You must invent an entirely new system.
He wants to set himself on fire, but he can’t afford for anyone to see him burn.
“You think?” his dad says. “Nah. Come on. I don’t think this election is gonna hinge on an email server.”
It’s 2020, and Texas is a battleground state for the first time in years.
“Not unless they call Nevada,” Nora says, “which never happens this early.”
