Red, White & Royal Blue

by Casey McQuiston

Alex tries to imagine what they must look like: the prince and the First Son, the two leading heartthrobs of their respective countries, shoulder to shoulder on their way to the bar. It’s intimidating and thrilling, living up to that kind of rich, untouchable fantasy.

It’s loud and messy and wonderful. Alex has always loved these parties, the sparkling joy of it all, the way champagne bubbles on his tongue and confetti sticks to his shoes. It’s a reminder that even though he stresses and stews in private rooms, there will always be a sea of people he can disappear into, that the world can be warm and welcoming and fill up the walls of this big old house he lives in with something bright and infectiously alive.

When he turns, the moonlight catches on him, and his face looks softened in half shadows, inviting in a way Alex can’t quite work out.

Maybe he can absorb some of the “much” from the place where their shoulders are pressed together.

In an instant of sudden, vivid clarity, he can’t believe he ever thought he was straight.

Ascended to the next plane, merely a pair of eyes floating through a dopamine haze.

Part of his brain keeps getting stuck on how strange, and strangely wonderful, it is to see Henry like this, open and bare in every way. Henry leans across the pillow to Alex and presses a soft kiss to his mouth, and Alex feels fingertips brush over his jaw. The touch is so gentle he has to once again remind himself not to care too much.

But sometimes, he’s taken over by a dark mood, an unusually acerbic wit, strange and vitrified. He’ll withdraw for hours or days, and Alex comes to understand this as grief time, little bouts of depression, or times of “too much.”

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

He hears about sneaking out of the palace and joyriding around the countryside, learning to sail, being propped up in director’s chairs. The man Henry remembers is both superhuman and heartbreakingly flesh and blood, a man who encompassed Henry’s entire childhood and charmed the world but was also simply a man.

He rolls onto his side and listens, trails the back of his hand across the pillow next to him and imagines Henry lying opposite in his own bed, two parentheses enclosing 3,700 miles.

June is often a mystery, a big ball of complex emotions and motivations, but her heart is honest and true. She’s very much what Alex holds in his memory as the sanctified idea of Southerness at its best: always generous and warm and sincere, work-strong and reliable, a light left on.

He looks at all of them. Pez, his broad smile and glowing joy, the way his white-blond hair flashes against smooth, dark skin. The curve of Bea’s waist and hip and her punk-rock grin as she sucks on the rind of a lime. Nora’s long legs, one of which is propped up on the table and the other crossed over one of Bea’s, her thigh bare where her dress has ridden up. And Henry, flushed and callow and lean, elegant and thrown wide open, his face always turned toward Alex, his mouth unguarded around a laugh, willing.

And through it all, Alex realizes with a start: He has friends now.

So, to borrow a passage from Sense and Sensibility: “You want nothing but patience—or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.”

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

There’s this way Henry has of listening to the erratic stream of consciousness that pours out of Alex’s mouth and answering with the clearest, crystallized truth that Alex has been trying to arrive at all along. If Alex’s head is a storm, Henry is the place lightning hits ground. He wants it to be true.

The truth is I am an unlucky honest man, that speak my sentiments to all and with emphasis. I say this to you because you know it and will not charge me with vanity. I hate Congress—I hate the army—I hate the world—I hate myself. The whole is a mass of fools and knaves; I could almost except you …

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?

You engross my thoughts too intirely to allow me to think of any thing else—you not only employ my mind all day; but you intrude upon my sleep. I meet you in every dream—and when I wake I cannot close my eyes again for ruminating on your sweetness.

Tho I long for the actual sunlight contact between us I miss you like a home. Shine back honey & think of me.

He came from a long, long line of princes, but never before had there been a prince quite like him: born with his heart on the outside of his body. When he was small, his family would smile and laugh and say he would grow out of it one day. But as he grew, it stayed where it was, red and visible and alive. He didn’t mind it very much, but every day, the family’s fear grew that the people of the kingdom would soon notice and turn their backs on the prince.

Until he met the most devastatingly gorgeous peasant boy from a nearby village who said absolutely ghastly things to him that made him feel alive for the first time in years and who turned out to be the most mad sort of sorcerer, one who could conjure up things like gold and vodka shots and apricot tarts out of absolutely nothing, and the prince’s whole life went up in a puff of dazzling purple smoke, and the kingdom said, “I can’t believe we’re all so surprised.”

May the terrific U.S.A. be meanwhile not a brute to you. I feel in you a confidence, dear Boy–which to show is a joy to me. My hopes and desires and sympathies right heartily and most firmly, go with you. So keep up your heart, and tell me, as it shapes itself, your (inevitably, I imagine, more or less weird) American story. May, at any rate, tutta quella gente be good to you.

The sky is wide open and bluebonnet blue for miles, the sun low and heavy with an early morning start, and Alex has his sunglasses on and his arms bare and the doors and roof off. He cranks up the stereo and feels like he could throw anything away on the wind whipping through his hair and it would just float away like it never was, as if nothing matters but the rush and skip in his chest.

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.

“You know, in a lot of ways, your mom and me were a stupid idea. I think we both knew it wouldn’t be forever. We’re both too fucking proud. But God, that woman. Your mother is, without question, the love of my life. I’ll never love anyone else like that. It was wildfire.

“Sometimes you just jump and hope it’s not a cliff.”

They sit around the fire pit and play old Johnny Cash songs, Selena, Fleetwood Mac. Alex sits and listens to the cicadas and the water and his dad’s rough ranger voice, and when his dad slumps off to bed, June’s songbird one. He feels wrapped up and warm, turning slowly under the moon.

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.

Over the kitchen sink, he chugs a glass of water and stares out the window, the sun blinding and bright on the lake, and there’s an incandescent little stone of certainty at the bottom of his chest.

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 lies awake that night, drunk on Shiner and way too many campfire marshmallows, and he stares at whorls in the wood panels of the top bunk and thinks about coming of age out here. 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. He used to leave his clothes in a pile on the pier and dive headfirst into the lake. Everything was in its right place.

The lines of him are long and languid in the moonlight, 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. There are fireflies winking around his head, landing in his hair. A crown.

He wants to stay tangled up in Henry’s legs forever. He wants to match the new freckles across Henry’s nose to the stars above them and make him name the constellations.

“You carry too much.” His instinct has always been to shoot back, No, I don’t, or, I want to, but he bites it back and says, “I know,” and he realizes it’s the truth. “You know what I’m thinking right now?”

“I’m thinking about, after inauguration, like next year, taking you back out here, just the two of us. And we can sit under the moon and not stress about anything.”

I used to think, if I pictured the person I wanted to be and took all the crazy anxiety in my brain and narrowed it down to that point, I could rewire it. Use it to power something else. It’s like I never learned how to just be where I am.” Alex takes a breath. “And where I am is here. With you. And I’m thinking maybe I should start trying to take it day by day. And just … feel what I feel.”

You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent,

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

He’s fine. It’s all very deeply fine. A whole lifetime of fine.” He’s been pulling at a thread on the duvet, but he looks back up, squarely into Alex’s eyes, and says, “That’s not good enough for me.”

does—I’ve always thought of myself as a problem that deserved to stay hidden. Never quite trusted myself, or what I wanted. Before you, I was all right letting everything happen to me. I honestly have never thought I deserved to choose.” His hand moves, fingertips brushing a curl behind Alex’s ear. “But you treat me like I do.”

Henry laughs again, wetly, his eyes crinkling up in the corners, and Alex feels his heart lift into his throat, up to the embellished ceilings, pushing out to fill the whole room all the way to the glinting gold ring still sitting above the fireplace.

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.”

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.

“Diaz, you insane, hopeless romantic little shit,” says the voice of the President of the United States, muffled in the bed. “It had better be forever. Be safe.”

“Come, hijo mío, de la miel, porque es buena, and the honeycomb, sweet to thy taste.”

At cruising altitude, he takes the chain off his neck and slides the ring on next to the old house key. They clink together gently as he tucks them both under his shirt, two homes side by side.

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.