Red, White & Royal Blue

by Casey McQuiston

Alex First Son of Your Former Colony

Alex, First Son of Off-Brand England:

Henry really has a solid handle on his personal brand.

and Alex’s heart goes so fucking weird that he has to put his head in his hands for a full minute. (But, like. It’s fine. It’s not a whole thing.)

He’s just as attracted to Henry’s cloudy tempers, the way he comes back from them, and the millions of shades in between.

“Listen,” Henry is saying, heated, over the phone on a Thursday night. “The desire to trot it out as one of our greatest literary achievements does not preclude the fact that Bram Stoker was gay as the day is long, and that Dracula is essentially a work of queer erotica. If anything, that makes the book even more important!”

People sanitize Freddie Mercury or Elton John or Bowie, who was shagging Jagger up and down Oakley Street in the seventies, I might add. It’s just not the truth.”

I will staple your dick to the inside of your leg if that keeps it in your fucking pants.”

“I miss you,” Alex says before he can stop himself. He instantly regrets it, but Henry says, “I miss you too.”

“I sent you like a million texts,” she says. She sounds like she’s vision-boarding his funeral.

But the world is better with her where she is, and right now I’m looking for a new dream that’s better too.”

“Stop trying to Jane Austen my life!” he yells back. “Listen, it’s not my fault he’s a mysterious and retiring young royal and you’re the tempestuous ingénue that caught his eye, okay?”

“Bisexuality is truly a rich and complex tapestry,”

It’s unpredictable and it’s intoxicating and it’s fun, because Alex has never met a challenge he didn’t love, and he—well, Henry is a challenge, head to toe, beginning to end.

Henry rolls Alex onto his side and burrows behind him until he’s covering him completely, his shoulders a brace for Alex’s shoulders, one of his thighs pressed on top of Alex’s thighs, his arms over Alex’s arms and his hands over Alex’s hands, nowhere left untouched. It’s the best Alex has slept in years.

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.

Henry passing for hungover but handsome, and Alex just doing his best.

Take this crown from me, bury me in my ancestral soil. If only you had known the mighty work of thine loins would be undone by a gay heir who likes it when American boys with chin dimples are mean to him.

Utah ugly, Christian ugly, ugliness couched in dog whistles and toothy white smiles.

“You think y’all are off the hook for institutional bigotry because you come from a blue state. Not every white supremacist is a meth-head in Bumfuck, Mississippi—there are plenty of them at Duke or UPenn on Daddy’s money.”

irl chaos demon i’m going for, like, depressed lesbian poet who met a hot yoga instructor at a speakeasy who got her super into meditation and pottery, and now she’s starting a new life as a high-powered businesswoman selling her own line of hand-thrown fruit bowls … HRH Prince Dickhead Bitch, you took me there.

Alex takes a picture and texts it to Henry. 1. tf is this? aren’t there poor people in your country? 2. i’ve already been in the royal box Henry sends back, You are a delinquent and a plague, and then, Please come?

Henry lets Alex take him apart with painstaking patience and precision, moans the name of God so many times that the room feels consecrated.

Henry drools on him. David finds his way onto the bed and curls up at their feet.

Zahra is standing there with her thermos and a look on her face that says she did not get a master’s degree to babysit a fully grown adult who happens to be related to the president.

As if on cue, there’s a series of bumps from the other side of the closet door, and Henry, halfway into Alex’s boxers, comes literally tumbling out of the closet.

Henry has pulled himself off the floor and put on a shirt, and his ears are bright red. “I think, perhaps, if it helps. It was. Er. Rather inevitable. At least for me. So you shouldn’t blame yourself.”

“Would it make any difference at all if I told you not to see him again?” Alex looks over at Henry, looking rumpled and nauseated and terrified at the corner of the bed. “No.”

Alex wonders if it’s too late to swan dive off the roof.

Alex actively wishes for the sweet release of death.

The phrase “see attached bibliography” is the single sexiest thing you have ever written to me.

And third, some saucy tart once tried to impugn my virtue against an oil painting of him, and in the halls of memory, some things demand context.

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?

Henry effortlessly lifts June’s cooler up onto one shoulder and Alex pointedly does not swoon about it.

He and Henry drift to a swing at the edge of the porch, and he curls into Henry’s side, buries his face in the collar of his shirt. Henry puts an arm around him, touches the hinge of Alex’s jaw with fingers that smell like smoke.

June plucks away at “Annie’s Song,” you fill up my senses like a night in a forest, and the breeze keeps moving to meet the highest branches of the trees, and the water keeps rising to meet the bulkheads, and Henry leans down to meet Alex’s mouth, and Alex is. Well, Alex is so in love he could die.

“Fuck off, five-nine is average.”

but because he loves him, and isn’t that wild, to know that that’s what makes the filthy things so good.

Dear Thisbe, I wish there weren’t a wall. Love, Pyramus

Zahra nearly refuses to secure a car after Alex “had the goddamn nerve” to call her from the runway at Dulles.

“I fucking love you, okay?” Alex half yells, finally, irreversibly.

“When have I ever, since the first instant I touched you, pretended to be anything less than in love with you?

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 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.’”

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.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’m into making history.”

“I’ll let her know,” in a voice like he’d rather do literally anything else.

He’s cut off mid-sentence because Alex has stopped in the middle of the corridor and yanked him backward into a kiss. “Hello,” Henry says when they break apart. “What was that for?” “I just, like.” Alex shrugs. “Really love you.”

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.