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And there Henry is, in the flesh, as classically handsome as ever in his tailored three-piece suit, all tousled sandy hair and high cheekbones and a soft, friendly mouth. He holds himself with innately impeccable posture, as if he emerged fully formed and upright out of some beautiful Buckingham Palace posy garden one day. His eyes lock on Alex’s, and something like annoyance or adrenaline spikes in Alex’s chest. He hasn’t had a conversation with Henry in probably a year. His face is still infuriatingly symmetrical.
For a second, all he can think as he stares up at the ceiling while covered in frosting and champagne is that at least Henry’s dance with June won’t be the biggest story to come out of the royal wedding.
all I want is to have the CIA fake your death and ride the dead-kid sympathy into a second term.”
like the kind of paperwork you get from some perverted millionaire who wants to hunt you for sport.
He leaves Alex standing there alone in the kitchen, the box of Cornettos sweating on the counter.
a man called Stu who looks as if he spends weekends yelling at mice in his garden.
Henry hesitates before stiffly bumping his own knuckles against Alex’s with the heavy air of an act of treason.
“Stop telling me what to do! You’re not the prince of me!”
he’s thankful for it, the familiar comfort of antagonism.
“No booty calls,” Alex tells him, and Henry chokes on a laugh.
“Some late nights in Denver would beg to differ.
He stares at the screen, at his own message, for a few seconds too long, suddenly afraid it was a stupid thing to say. He shakes his head, puts the phone down. Locks it. Changes his mind, picks it up again. Unlocks it. Sees the little typing bubble on Henry’s side of the conversation. Puts the phone down. Looks away. Looks back.
“Bake Off makes Chopped look like the fucking Manson tapes.
something feels so restless and hot somewhere beneath his sternum.
his voice is somehow different than Alex remembers. Like very expensive velvet, something moneyed and lush and fluid all at once.
“Here,” Alex says, moving his own hips, “watch me.” With a grave gulp of champagne, Henry says, “I am.”
His knuckle brushes the back of Alex’s hand at their sides, a little zip of warmth in the cold night.
“I’m saying that I have … people … who interest me,” Henry says, turning his body toward Alex now, speaking with a fumbling pointedness, as if it means something. “But I shouldn’t pursue them. At least not in my position.”
Henry’s whole face grimaces in frustration, his eyes casting skyward like they’re searching for help from an uncaring universe. “Christ, you are as thick as it gets,” he says, and he grabs Alex’s face in both hands and kisses him.
He feels like a dog that has to be taken on walks to get his energy out. Especially when June says, “You’re like a dog that has to be taken on walks to get his energy out.”
He can pinpoint moments throughout his life when he thought to himself, See, this means I can’t possibly be into guys.
the place his jaw meets his neck and the place his neck meets his shoulder and the tendon that stretches the length between them,
it’s like trying to have a meaningful conversation with a high-speed computer that loves Chipotle and makes fun of what you’re wearing.
“Prince Henry is a biscuit,” Nora says, “let him sop you up.”
He was my sworn enemy until a couple months ago, and then we were friends, I guess, and now he’s kissed me, and I don’t know what we … are.”
This is all a very not-straight way to react to seeing your male frenemy kissing someone else in a magazine.
My Bloody Mary is here and I need to talk to it about this phone call.”
for a horrified moment Alex thinks he calculated all wrong, but then Henry’s kissing him back, and it’s everything.
caught up in the space between years of sworn hate and something else he’s begun to suspect has always been there. It’s white-hot, and he feels crazy with it, lit up from the inside.
He’s unsure of the dress code for inviting your sworn-enemy-turned-fake-best-friend to your room to have sex with you, especially when that room is in the White House, and especially when that person is a guy, and especially when that guy is a prince of England.
There’s something about the two of them, the way they ignite at different temperatures, Alex’s frenetic energy and Henry’s aching sureness.
“For fuck’s sake, man, you just had my dick in your mouth, you can kiss me good-night.”
“What in the rich-white-people-sex-dungeon hell?”
some kind of hedonistic youth of history.
Oh, Alex thinks. “Oh,” Alex says.
They talk for so long Alex has to plug his phone in to keep the battery from dying.
Henry’s mouth falls open into a very unflattering expression of drunken, bewildered arousal, like a hot halibut,
kissing him deep into the mattress, riding a continuous wave of Henry’s body.
Alex’s voice speaks without his permission,
The way you speak sometimes is like sugar spilling out of a bag with a hole in the bottom.
He looks like a stock photo.
“Fuck me.” “Well,” Alex grunts, “when at Wimbledon.”
Alex spends nearly an hour afterward coaxing little tremors out of him, in awe of his elaborate expressions of wonder and blissful agony, ghosting featherlight fingertips over his collarbone, his ankles, the insides of his knees, the small bones of the backs of his hands, the dip of his lower lip. He touches and touches until he brings Henry to another brink with only his fingertips, only his breath on the inside of his thighs, the promise of Alex’s mouth where he’d pressed his fingers before.
It is, Alex thinks half-hysterically, a very solid visual pun.
SEXUAL EXPERIMENTATION WITH FOREIGN MONARCHS: A GRAY AREA.
clay-soft avocados
“I just know it’s different when it’s your own kid.” His dad laughs too, rubbing a hand over his goatee. “It’s really not. Not to me, anyway. I see you.”
there’s an incandescent little stone of certainty at the bottom of his chest.
There are fireflies winking around his head, landing in his hair. A crown.
It’s the last message Henry sends him.
