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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.
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.
A little appreciation for the patron saint of gender-neutral bathrooms in California? Little shit.”
I’ll never love anyone else like that. It was wildfire.
“Sometimes you just jump and hope it’s not a cliff.”
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.
He chews proudly, a huge smear of barbecue sauce across his upper lip and the tip of his nose.
Alex is so in love he could die.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alex looks at him and something so buoyant fills up his chest that he feels like he could swim the length of the lake without stopping for air.
just skin and skin and skin lit soft and blue, and he’s so beautiful that Alex thinks this moment, the soft shadows and pale thighs and crooked smile, should be the portrait of Henry that goes down in history.
He wants to match the new freckles across Henry’s nose to the stars above them and make him name the constellations.
It’s like I never learned how to just be where I am.”
Dear Thisbe, I wish there weren’t a wall. Love, Pyramus
“Fuckin’ ghost me for a week, make me stand in the rain like a brown John Cusack, and now you won’t even talk to me. I’m really just having a great time here. I can see why all y’all had to marry your fucking cousins.”
“Fuck, I swear. You don’t make it fucking easy. But I’m in love with you.”
You at least have the option to not choose a public life eventually, but I will live and die in these palaces and in this family, so don’t you dare come to me and question if I love you when it’s the thing that could bloody well ruin everything.”
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 knows he’s going to love this stubborn shithead forever.
Alex is a cliché on an ivory bedspread, and he hates himself but he’s so in love.
Henry’s room has never felt much like Henry, but in the quiet of morning, he shows up in pieces.
He tastes like toothpaste and Earl Grey,
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.
“Stop, are you kidding me?” Alex says. “Prince Consort Road? Oh my God, take a picture of me with the sign.”
“All this time, I thought I was the Ferris Bueller of this relationship.”
You can look at every individual carving or pane of stained glass and know there’s this wealth of stories there, that everything was put in a specific place for a reason.
Everything is a story, never finished.
Alex has personally helped with exhibitions at the Smithsonian and sleeps in a room once occupied by Ulysses S. Grant’s father-in-law, but he still loses his breath when Henry pulls him through the marble pillars.
“I’m taking a picture of a national gay landmark,” Alex tells him. “And also a statue.”
“The top list of reasons to love you goes brain, then dick, then imminent status as a revolutionary gay icon.”
He wonders what Santa Chiara would think of them, a lost David and Jonathan, turning slowly on the spot.
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.
Please do keep me in your—what is it American politicians say?—thoughts and prayers.
my body shall be all, all yours, as yours will be all, all mine, beloved.… And nothing will matter but just we two, we two longing loves at last come together.
Here lies Prince Henry of Wales. He died as he lived: avoiding plans and sucking cock.
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.
I know well that, at this hour, I could as easily forget your name as the food by which I live; nay, it were easier to forget the food, which only nourishes my body miserably, than your name, which nourishes both body and soul, filling the one and the other with such sweetness that neither weariness nor fear of death is felt by me while memory preserves you to my mind. Think, if the eyes could also enjoy their portion, in what condition I should find myself.
The anxiety feels like buzzing little wings in his ear in the silence, like a petulant wasp.
He wants to set himself on fire, but he can’t afford for anyone to see him burn.
“Sería una mentira, porque no sería él.”
It would be a lie, because it would not be him.
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.
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.
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.
“It’s about to be gay DEFCON five in this administration.
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.
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
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Not me crying because true
I love him on purpose.”
