Red, White & Royal Blue

by Casey McQuiston

He fucks Henry slow and deep, and if it’s the last time, they go down shivering and gasping and epic, all wet mouths and wet eyelashes,

Alex looks at him, taking in the whole parcel of him, the centuries of royal blood sitting under an antique Kensington chandelier, and he reaches out to touch his face and looks at his fingers and thinks about holding the Bible at his mother’s inauguration with the same hand.

I’ve eaten a tremendous amount of Jaffa Cakes about it, to be frank.

I thought, if someone like that ever loved me, it would set me on fire.

when your shoulders cover mine, nothing else in the entire stupid world matters.

He wants to set himself on fire, but he can’t afford for anyone to see him burn.

“It’s about to be gay DEFCON five in this administration.

“It’s about to be gay DEFCON five in this administration.

he sits down and tries very, very hard to make a list in his head. One. One. One.

He opens his mouth: a spill of fireflies, and nothing.

there is a sadness and a hurt in him that is tremendous, and you may very well never truly understand it, but you need to love it as much as you love the rest of him, because that’s him.

Six feet of boy curled around kicked-in ribs and a recalcitrant heart.

the White House was built by slaves, not our forefathers.

I couldn’t let a fucking predator be the most powerful man in the country if it was within my power to stop it.”

Maybe if it were 2016. Maybe if this weren’t an America that already elected a woman to the highest office once.

“Because I’m the prince of—” Henry looks over at her and gestures at the Orangery, at Kensington, sputtering. “Here!”

Anderson Cooper’s face looms on the screen overhead like a disgustingly handsome Hunger Games cannon,

Florida. “Come on, you backyard-shooting-range motherfuckers,”

kisses him like the end of the movie,

Austin is dried flowers from a homecoming corsage in a bowl by the cordless phone,

I came up with the idea for this book on an I-10 off-ramp in early 2016, and I never imagined what it would turn out to be. I mean, at that point I couldn’t imagine what 2016 itself would turn out to be. Yikes. For months after November, I gave up on writing this book. Suddenly what was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek parallel universe needed to be escapist, trauma-soothing, alternate-but-realistic reality. Not a perfect world—one still believably fucked up, just a little better, a little more optimistic. I wasn’t sure I was up to the task. I hoped I was. What I hoped to do, and what I hope I have done with this book by the time you’ve finished it, my dear reader, is to be a spark of joy and hope you needed.