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You and me and history, remember?
Words that went down in history. “Meet you in every dream … Keep most of your heart in Washington … Miss you like a home … We two longing loves … My young king.” One day, he tells himself. One day, us too.
He wants to set himself on fire, but he can’t afford for anyone to see him burn.
“Those things are gonna fucking kill you,” Alex says. He said the same thing about five hundred times that summer in Denver, but now he means, I kinda wish they would. “Kid—” “Don’t call me that.”
“I swear to God, if you say I’m too young, I’m gonna lose my shit.” “This isn’t you losing your shit?”
“I don’t give a shit about what you owe us. I trusted you,”
“I’m doing this because it’s what needs to be done, Alex. It was my choice. Nobody else’s.” “Then tell me why.” Luna takes a deep breath and says, “No.”
give yourself away sometimes, sweetheart. there’s so much of you.
And you have fixed my Life—however short. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me. I spun round you a satellite for a month, but shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze.
Zahra slams on the light, a steely expression of rage barely concealing the sheer terror on her face. Alex’s brain flashes to the panic button behind his headboard and wonders if the Secret Service will be able to find him before he bleeds out.
“It’s about to be gay DEFCON five in this administration. For God’s sake, put some clothes on.”
“Fuck!” he says a third time, spiking the newspaper at the floor. That one was his. It feels obscene to see it there.
“Get some shoes, we’re running,” Zahra tells him. “Priority one is damage control, not feelings.”
“Was I not clear? Everyone, out, now,” she says. “I need to talk to my son.”
Of all of the things that have happened in this book so far this is what finally made me cry
It hits him with sudden clarity that he hasn’t at all stopped to consider his own feelings.
“I am your mother. I was your mother before I was ever the president, and I’ll be your mother long after, to the day they put me in the ground and beyond this earth. You are my child. So, if you’re serious about this, I’ll back your play.”
“So,” she says. “Do you feel forever about him?”
“Yeah,” he says, “I do.” Ellen Claremont exhales slowly, and she grins a small, secret grin, the crooked, unflattering one she never uses in public, the one he knows best from when he was a kid around her knees in a small kitchen in Travis County. “Then, fuck it.”
This is the damage you cause, Alex, it all seems to say, right there in hard facts and figures. This is who you hurt.
June has him first, then the rest of them, arms and arms and hands and hands, pulling him close and touching his face and moving him until he’s on the floor, the goddamn terrible hideous antique rug that he hates, sitting on the floor and staring at the rug and the threads of the rug and hearing the Gulf rushing in his ears and thinking distantly that he’s having a panic attack,
“Permission to do a thing, ma’am, slightly outside diplomatic protocol.”
June takes his phone away and shoves it under a couch cushion. He doesn’t bother protesting. Henry’s not going to call.
“I know this is scary,” his mom says, “but you can handle it.” “Give ’em hell,” his dad adds.
We will meet the queen and whoever the fuck else we have to meet to hash this shit out, or so help me God I will personally make your balls into fucking earrings. I will scorched-earth your entire motherfucking life.”
“Sweetheart.” He hears Henry’s exhale over the line. “Hi, love. Are you okay?”
“Philip broke a vase that belonged to Anne Boleyn, Gran ordered a communications lockdown, and Mum hasn’t spoken to anyone,”
don’t know if I would have chosen it yet, but it’s out there now, and … I won’t lie. Not about this. Not about you.”
Henry exhales a wet, broken laugh. “Please, do hurry.”
“Wait. Zahra. Oh my God. I just realized. You’re … my friend.”
“Don’t speak to me for the next six hours. I deserve a fucking nap.”
“Why’d you wait to use Shaan’s personal number?” “Because he’s my fiancé, asshole, but some of us understand the meaning of discretion, so you wouldn’t know about it,”
Now shut up and let me get some sleep before we have to deal with the rest of this. I’m running on nothing but black coffee, a Wetzel’s Pretzel, and a fistful of B12. Do not even breathe in my direction.”
Shes such an icon i love her
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’s my fault. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Henry releases him, hands on his shoulders, jaw set. “Don’t you dare. I’m not sorry for a thing.”
Catherine has been by, once, three hours ago, stone-faced and sad, to tell Henry that she loves him and he could have told her sooner.
“I feel like he’s not telling me something,” Alex whispers. “I believe him when he says he’s in, and he wants to tell everyone the truth. But there’s something else he’s not saying, and it’s freaking me out that I can’t figure out what it is.”
“Oh, love,” she says simply. “He misses Dad.”
That’s the maximum depth of feeling you’ve ever experienced. And then, the worst thing happens to you. The very worst thing that could have happened. The thing you had nightmares about as a child, and you thought, it’s all right because that thing will happen to me when I’m older and wiser, and I’ll have felt so many feelings by then that this one worst feeling, the worst possible feeling, won’t seem so terrible.
“But 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
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I love him, with all that, because of all that. On purpose. I love him on purpose.”
He reaches out a hand and touches the ridge of Henry’s shoulder blade, the skin where the sheet has slid off him, where his lungs stubbornly refuse to stop pulling air. Six feet of boy curled around kicked-in ribs and a recalcitrant heart.
Presently, Alex is thinking about breaking his nose with the coffee percolator.
Do it
“Mum was barely more than that when she met Dad.” “Yes, and you think that was a wise decision?”
“Oh, you love him, do you?” It’s so patronizing that Alex’s hand twitches into a fist under the table. “What exactly do you intend to do, then, Henry? Hmm? Marry him? Make him the Duchess of Cambridge? The First Son of the United bloody States, fourth in line to be Queen of England?” “I’ll fucking abdicate!” Henry says, voice rising. “I don’t care!”
“We have a great uncle who abdicated because he was a fucking Nazi, so it’d hardly be the worst reason anyone’s done it, would it?”
even defending here, Philip? What kind of legacy? What kind of family, that says, we’ll take the murder, we’ll take the raping and pillaging and the colonizing, we’ll scrub it up nice and neat in a museum, but oh no, you’re a bloody poof? That’s beyond our sense of decorum!
I don’t care. You can take your legacy and your decorum and you can shove it up your fucking arse, Philip. I’m done.”
“For what it’s worth,” he says to Philip, “that is the bravest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”
“Yep,” Zahra agrees. “Plus, we banged it out last night.” Without looking up, Shaan meets her hand in a high five.
Henry wondering if it’s safe to accept the love offered to him, and wanting desperately to take it regardless.
