Red, White & Royal Blue

by Casey McQuiston

“As your mother, I can appreciate that maybe this isn’t your fault, but as the president, all I want is to have the CIA fake your death and ride the dead-kid sympathy into a second term.”

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

omfg, one commenter writes, make out already.

She’s certain he was the one who vandalized the sign outside one particular senator’s office to read BITCH MCCONNELL, but she’ll never prove it.

KENNEDYS + BUSHES + BIZARRO MAFIA OLD MONEY SITH POWERS = RICHARDSES?

died.

One does not foster a lifelong love of Star Wars without knowing an “empire” isn’t a good thing.

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

Cornbread knows my sins, Henry. Cornbread knows what I have done, and he is here to make me atone.”

yo there’s a bond marathon on and did you know your dad was a total babe HRH Prince Dickhead I BEG YOU TO NOT

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

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.

“Let me lay out some observations for you,” she says. “You extrapolate. First, you’ve been, like, Joker–level obsessed with Henry for years—do not interrupt me—and since the royal wedding, you’ve gotten his phone number and used it not to set up any appearances but instead to long-distance flirt with him all day every day. You’re constantly making big cow eyes at your phone, and if somebody asks you who you’re texting, you act like you got caught watching porn. You know his sleep schedule, he knows your sleep schedule, and you’re in a noticeably worse mood if you go a day without talking to him. You spent the entire New Year’s party straight-up ignoring the who’s who of hot people who want to fuck America’s most eligible bachelor to literally watch Henry stand next to the croquembouche. And he kissed you—with tongue!—and you liked it. So, objectively. What do you think it means?”

This is all a very not-straight way to react to seeing your male frenemy kissing someone else in a magazine.

He considers texting Nora, asking her if he can come over to finally have some big epiphany. He considers calling Rafael Luna and meeting him for beers and asking to hear all about his first gay sexual exploits as an REI-wearing teenage antifascist. And he considers going downstairs and asking Amy about her transition and her wife and how she knew she was different.

Henry fumbles with his shirt tail, eyes wide, and starts humming “God Save the Queen” under his breath. “What are you doing?” “Christ, I’m trying to make it”—he gestures inelegantly at the front of his pants—“go away.” Alex very pointedly does not look down.

“Okay, so,” Alex says. “Yeah. So here’s what we’re gonna do. You are gonna go be, like, five hundred feet away from me for the rest of the night, or else I am going to do something that I will deeply regret in front of a lot of very important people.” “All right…” “And then,” Alex says, and he grabs Henry’s tie again, close to the knot, and draws his mouth up to a breath away from Henry’s. He hears Henry swallow. He wants to follow the sound down his throat. “And then you are going to come to the East Bedroom on the second floor at eleven o’clock tonight, and I am going to do very bad things to you, and if you fucking ghost me again, I’m going to get you put on a fucking no-fly list. Got it?” Henry bites down on a sound that tries to escape his mouth, and rasps, “Perfectly.”

“And then you are going to come to the East Bedroom on the second floor at eleven o’clock tonight, and I am going to do very bad things to you, and if you fucking ghost me again, I’m goin...

God, if any ghosts of Founding Fathers are hanging around the White House tonight, they must really be suffering. He’s trying not to think too hard about what comes next. He may not have experience in practical application, but he’s done research. He has diagrams. He can do this.

He looks transformed in the lamplight, like a god of debauchery, painted gold with his hair all mussed up and his eyes heavy-lidded.

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

Henry is one talented bastard, a man of many hidden gifts, Alex muses half-hysterically. A true prodigy. God Save the Queen.

Henry on horseback is nothing new. Henry in full polo gear—the helmet, the polo sleeves capped right at the bulge of his biceps, the snug white pants tucked into tall leather boots, the intricately buckled leather knee padding, the leather gloves—is familiar. He has seen it before. Categorically, it should be boring. It should not provoke anything visceral, carnal, or bodice-ripping in nature in him at all. But Henry urging his horse across the field with the power of his thighs, his ass bouncing hard in the saddle, the way the muscles in his arms stretch and flex when he swings, looking the way he does and wearing the things he’s wearing—it’s a lot. He’s sweating. It’s February in Connecticut, and Alex is sweating under his coat.

“Enjoy your summit with the English delegation,” she tells him flatly, and Alex sends up a vague prayer of thanks for staff NDAs.

night.

People sanitize Freddie Mercury or Elton John or Bowie, who was shagging Jagger up and down Oakley Street in the seventies, I might add. It’s just not the truth.”

He’s starting to understand what swelled in his chest the first time he read about Stonewall, why he ached over the SCOTUS decision in 2015. He starts catching up voraciously in his spare time: Walt Whitman, the Laws of Illinois 1961, The White Night Riot, Paris Is Burning. He’s pinned a photo over his desk at work, a man at a rally in the ’80s in a jacket that says across the back: IF I DIE OF AIDS—FORGET BURIAL—JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE F.D.A.

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.

H, Are you implying that you’re James I and I’m some hot, dumb jock? I’m more than fantastic bone structure and an ass you can bounce a quarter on, Henry!!!! Don’t apologize for calling me pretty. Because then you’re putting me in a position where I have to apologize for saying you blew my fucking mind in LA and I’m gonna die if it doesn’t happen again soon. How’s that for lack of restraint, huh? You really wanna play that game with me? Listen: I’ll fly to London right now and pull you out of whatever pointless meeting you’re in and make you admit how much you love it when I call you “baby.” I’ll take you apart with my teeth, sweetheart. xoxo A

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.

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

He switches to an Alexander Scriabin sonata, winking over at Alex at the composer’s first name.

“Seriously?” she hisses. “You’re literally putting your dick in the leader of a foreign state, who is a man, at the biggest political event before the election, in a hotel full of reporters, in a city full of cameras, in a race close enough to fucking hinge on some bullshit like this, like a manifestation of my fucking stress dreams, and you’re asking me not to tell the president about it?”

“Listen,” she says. “We don’t have time to deal with this, and your mother has enough to manage without having to process her son’s fucking quarter-life NATO sexual crisis, so—I won’t tell her. But once the convention is over, you have to.”

EXPLORING YOUR SEXUALITY: HEALTHY, BUT DOES IT HAVE TO BE WITH THE PRINCE OF ENGLAND?

“this is a really, really big fucking deal. This is not just some person from class or some intern. You need to think really long and hard because you are putting yourself and your career and, above all, this campaign and this entire administration, in danger here. I know you’re young, but this is a forever decision. Even if you don’t stay with him forever, if people find out, that sticks with you forever. So you need to figure out if you feel forever about him. And if you don’t, you need to cut it the fuck out.”

History, huh? Bet we could make some.

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?

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

“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.”

Did you know the reason the King James translation of the Bible exists is because the Church of England was so displeased with James for flaunting his relationship with Villiers that he had the translation commissioned to appease them?”

“You’re kidding.” “He stood in front of the Privy Council and said, ‘Christ had John, and I have George.’”

To me, if there were a registry of national gay landmarks in Britain, Samson would be on it.”

“I’m taking a picture of a national gay landmark,” Alex tells him. “And also a statue.” Henry laughs indulgently, and Alex closes the space between them, takes Henry’s baseball cap off and stands on his toes to kiss the ridge of his brow. “It’s funny,” Henry says. “I always thought of the whole thing as the most unforgivable thing about me, but you act like it’s one of the best.” “Oh, yeah,” Alex says. “The top list of reasons to love you goes brain, then dick, then imminent status as a revolutionary gay icon.” “You are quite literally Queen Victoria’s worst nightmare.” “And that’s why you love me.” “My God, you’re right. All this time, I was just after the bloke who’d most infuriate my homophobic forebears.” “Ah, and we can’t forget they were also racist.” “Certainly not.” Henry nods seriously. “Next time we shall visit some of the George III pieces and see if they burst into flame.”

Alex takes his hand, and Henry turns to face the chapel like a nervous postulant, his cheeks hollowed out in the low light, before pulling Alex into it. When they kiss, Alex can hear a half-remembered old proverb from catechism, mixed up between translations of the book: “Come, hijo mío, de la miel, porque es buena, and the honeycomb, sweet to thy taste.” He wonders what Santa Chiara would think of them, a lost David and Jonathan, turning slowly on the spot. He brings Henry’s hand to his mouth and kisses the little knob of his knuckle, the skin over the blue vein there, bloodlines, pulses, the old blood kept in perpetuity within these walls, and he thinks, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen.

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.

(I’ll agree with your assessment that you’re the Han to my Leia in that you are, without doubt, a scruffy-looking nerf herder who would pilot us into an asteroid field. I happen to like nice men.)

Here lies Prince Henry of Wales. He died as he lived: avoiding plans and sucking cock.

“Because I’m not like the rest of the men of this family, beginning with the fact that I am very deeply gay, Philip.”