Red, White & Royal Blue

by Casey McQuiston

Whatever, fine. Henry is annoyingly attractive. That’s always been a thing, objectively. It’s fine.

You are the thistle in the tender and sensitive arse crack of my life.

Alex forgets what he was going to say next. He just … Well, he gets told he’s great a lot. He just doesn’t often get told he’s good enough.

“You don’t dance?” he says, watching Henry, who is very visibly trying to figure out what to do with his hands. It’s endearing. Wow, Alex is drunk.

Henry’s willingness to dance is directly proportionate to his proximity to Alex’s hands, and the amount of giddy warmth bubbling under Alex’s skin is directly proportionate to the cut of Henry’s mouth when he watches him with Nora. It’s an equation he is not nearly sober enough to parse.

They’ve done this every year, both of them perpetually single and affectionately drunk and happy to make everyone else intrigued and jealous. Nora’s mouth is warm and tastes horrifying, like peach schnapps, and she bites his lip and messes up his hair for good measure.

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.

He slips out onto the portico without really thinking about it, and the instant the door closes behind him, the music snuffs out into silence, and it’s just him and Henry and the garden. He’s got the hazy tunnel vision of a drunk person when they lock eyes on a goal. He follows it down the stairs and onto the snowy lawn.

his face looks softened in half shadows, inviting in a way Alex can’t quite work out.

These things—big events, letting other people feed on his own energy—are rarely too much for Alex.

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

He tests leaning into the kiss and is rewarded by Henry’s mouth sliding and opening against his, Henry’s tongue brushing against his, which is, wow. It’s nothing like kissing Nora earlier—nothing like kissing anyone he’s ever kissed in his life. It feels as steady and huge as the ground under their feet, as encompassing of every part of him, as likely to knock the wind out of his lungs.

“Oh,” Alex says finally, faintly, touching one hand to his lips. Then: “Shit.”

So, the thing about the kiss is, Alex absolutely cannot stop thinking about it.

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.”

Straight people, he thinks, probably don’t spend this much time convincing themselves they’re straight.

He needs a list. So: Things he knows right now. One. He’s attracted to Henry. Two. He wants to kiss Henry again. Three. He has maybe wanted to kiss Henry for a while. As in, probably this whole time.

Sidling up to his desk, he pulls out the binder his mother gave him: DEMOGRAPHIC ENGAGEMENT: WHO THEY ARE AND HOW TO REACH THEM. He drags his finger down to the LGBTQ+ tab and turns to the page he’s looking for, titled with mother’s typical flair: THE B ISN’T SILENT: A CRASH COURSE ON BISEXUAL AMERICANS.

Tonight, she’s sitting on her living room floor in a glowing circle of screens like some kind of Capitol Hill séance.

“Prince Henry is a biscuit,” Nora says, “let him sop you up.” “I’m leaving.”

And he kissed you—with tongue!—and you liked it. So, objectively. What do you think it means?”

“In terms of, like, sexuality, what does that make me?” Nora’s eyes snap back up to him. “Oh, like, I thought we were already there with you being bi and everything,” she says. “Sorry, are we not? Did I skip ahead again? My bad. Hello, would you like to come out to me? I’m listening. Hi.”

“Look, man,” Liam says. “I don’t know what kind of sexual crisis you’re having right now, like, four years after it would have been useful, but, well. I’m not saying what we did in high school makes you gay or bi or whatever, but I can tell you I’m gay, and that even though I acted like what we were doing wasn’t gay back then, it super was.” He sighs. “Does that help, Alex? My Bloody Mary is here and I need to talk to it about this phone call.”

It is, unfortunately, also sexy.

“Shut up, shut all the way up, oh my God,”

Alex has been learning for a while Henry isn’t what he thought, but it’s something else to feel it this close up, the quiet burn in him, the pent-up person under the perfect veneer who tries and pushes and wants.

“I’m going to die,” Henry says helplessly. “I’m going to kill you,” Alex tells him. “Yes, you are,” Henry agrees.

Henry, the prince. Henry, the boy in the garden. Henry, the boy in his bed.

He feels himself standing at a very tall, very dangerous precipice, with no intention of backing away. Henry looks up at him, expectant, hungry.

He kisses Henry until it feels like he can’t breathe, until it feels like he’s going to forget both of their names and titles, until they’re only two people tangled up in a dark room making a brilliant, epic, unstoppable mistake.

He looks transformed in the lamplight, like a god of debauchery, painted gold with his hair all mussed up and his eyes heavy-lidded. Alex lets himself stare; the whipcord muscle under his skin, lean and long and lithe. The spot right at the dip of his waist below his ribs looks impossibly soft, and Alex might die if he can’t fit his hand into that little curve in the next five seconds.

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

“Hi,” he says, when he reaches Henry’s eye level. “Hello,” Henry says back. “I’m gonna take your pants off now,” Alex tells him. “Yes, good, carry on.”

bed, spread out and naked and wanting. This can’t be really happening after everything, but miraculously, it is.

None of it feels anything like anything he’s felt before, but it’s just as good, maybe better.

Alex doesn’t know or care what sounds or words come out of his mouth. He thinks one of them is “sweetheart” and another is “motherfucker.”

He’s sure he used to know quite a lot of words, in more than one language, in fact, but he can’t seem to recall any of them.

With a feat of Herculean strength, he summons up two whole words: “Fuck you.”

Mutually satisfying sexual experiences do not a relationship make.

“Oh, God,” Henry says. “Yeah,” Alex agrees, and he gets Henry’s boxers down. “Oh, God,” Henry repeats, this time with feeling.

He’s watching Alex, eyes blown dark and hazy, and Alex is watching him right back, every nerve in both bodies narrowed down to a single point.

Prince Charming laughs when he comes, and texts Alex at weird hours of the night: You’re a mad, spiteful, unmitigated demon, and I’m going to kiss you until you forget how to talk. And Alex is kind of obsessed with it.

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.”

We meet so many people. I mean, thousands and thousands of people, and a lot of them are morons, and a lot of them are incredible, unique people, but I almost never meet somebody who’s a match for you. Do you know that?” She leans forward and touches his knee, pink fingernails on his navy chinos. “You have so much in you, it’s almost impossible to match it. But he’s your match, dumbass.”

Sometimes you have a fire under your ass for no good goddamn reason. You’re gonna burn out like this.”

And so June knows; she knows about him and she hugs him and doesn’t care. He didn’t realize how terrified he was of her knowing until the fear is gone.

“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.

O, fathers of my bloodline! O, ye kings of olde! 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.

Alex feels like somebody has probably warned him about private email servers before, but he’s a little fuzzy on the details. It doesn’t feel important.