Red, White, page 18
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.
Tonight, Henry’s silly and warm and ready, his body quick and smooth to give Alex what he’s looking for, laughing and incredulous at his own responsiveness to touch. Alex leans down to kiss him, and Henry murmurs into the corner of his mouth, “Ready when you are, love.”
Alex takes a breath, holds it. He’s ready. He thinks he’s ready.
Henry’s hand comes up to stroke along his jaw, his sweaty hairline, and Alex settles himself between his legs, lets Henry lace the fingers of his right hand with Alex’s left.
He’s watching Henry’s face—he can’t imagine looking at anything other than Henry’s face right now—and his expression goes so soft and his mouth so happy and astonished that Alex’s voice speaks without his permission, a hoarse “baby.” Henry nods, so small that someone who didn’t know all his tics might miss it, but Alex knows exactly what it means, so he leans down and sucks Henry’s earlobe between his lips and calls him baby again, and Henry says, “Yes,” and, “Please,” and tugs his hair at the root.
Alex nips at Henry’s throat and palms at his hips and sinks into the white-out bliss of being that impossibly close to him, of getting to share his body. Somehow it still amazes him that all this seems to be as unbelievably, singularly good for Henry as it is for him. Henry’s face should be illegal, the way it’s turned up toward him, flushed and undone. Alex feels his own lips spreading into a pleased smile, awed and proud.
Afterward, he comes back into his own body in increments—his knees, still dug into the mattress and shaking; his stomach, slick and sticky; his hands, twisted up in Henry’s hair, stroking it gently.
He feels like he’s stepped outside of himself and returned to find everything slightly rearranged. When he pulls his face back to look at Henry, the feeling comes back into his chest: an ache in answer to the curve of Henry’s top lip over white teeth.
“Jesus Christ,” Alex says at last, and when he looks over at Henry again, he’s squinting at him impishly out of one eye, smirking.
“Would you describe it as supersonic?” he says, and Alex groans and slaps him across the chest, and they both dissolve into messy laughter.
They slide apart and make out and argue over who has to sleep in the wet spot until they pass out around four in the morning. Henry rolls Alex onto his side and burrows behind him until he’s covering him completely, his shoulders a brace for Alex’s shoulders, one of his thighs pressed on top of Alex’s thighs, his arms over Alex’s arms and his hands over Alex’s hands, nowhere left untouched. It’s the best Alex has slept in years.
Their alarms to go off three hours later for their flights home.
They shower together. Henry’s mood turns dark and sour over morning coffee at the harsh reality of returning to London so soon, and Alex kisses him dumbly and promises to call and wishes there was more he could do.
He watches Henry lather up and shave, put pomade in his hair, put on his Burberry for the day, and he catches himself wishing he could watch it every day. He likes taking Henry apart, but there’s something incredibly intimate about sitting on the bed they wrecked the night before, the only one who watches him create Prince Henry of Wales for the day.
Through his throbbing hangover, he’s got a suspicion all these feelings are why he held off on fucking Henry for so long.
Also, he might puke. It’s probably unrelated.
They meet the others in the hallway, Henry passing for hungover but handsome, and Alex just doing his best. Bea is looking well-rested, fresh, and very smug about it. June, Nora, and Pez all emerge disheveled from their suite looking like the cats that caught the canaries, but it’s impossible to tell who is a cat and who is a canary. Nora has a smudge of lipstick on the back of her neck. Alex doesn’t ask.
Cash chuckles under his breath when he meets them at the elevators, a tray of six coffees balanced on one hand. Hangover tending isn’t part of his job description, but he’s a mother hen.
“So this is the gang now, huh?”
And through it all, Alex realizes with a start: He has friends now.
CHAPTER EIGHT
You are a dark sorcerer
Henry
to A
Alex,
I can’t think of a single other way to start this email except to say, and I do hope you will forgive both my language and my utter lack of restraint: You are so fucking beautiful.
I’ve been useless for a week, driven around for appearances and meetings, lucky if I’ve made a single meaningful contribution to any of them. How is a man to get anything done knowing Alex Claremont-Diaz is out there on the loose? I am driven to distraction.
It’s all bloody useless because when I’m not thinking about your face, I’m thinking about your arse or your hands or your smart mouth. I suspect the latter is what got me into this predicament in the first place. Nobody’s ever got the nerve to be cheeky to a prince, except you. The moment you first called me a prick, my fate was sealed. 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.
Actually, remember those gay kings I mentioned? I feel that James I, who fell madly in love with a very fit and exceptionally dim knight at a titling match and immediately made him a gentleman of the bedchamber (a real title), would take mercy upon my particular plight.
I’ll be damned but I miss you.
x
Henry
Re: You are a dark sorcerer
A
to Henry
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
Re: You are a dark sorcerer
Henry
to A
Alex,
You know, when you go to Oxford to get a degree in English literature, as I have, people always want to know who your favorite English author is.
The press team compiled a list of acceptable answers. They wanted a realist, so I suggested George Eliot—no, Eliot was actually Mary Anne Evans under a pen name, not a strong male author. They wanted one of the inventors of the English novel, so I suggested Daniel Defoe—no, he was a dissenter from the Church of England. At one point, I threw out Jonathan Swift just to watch the collective coronary they had at the thought of an Irish political satirist.
In the end they picked Dickens, which is hilarious. They wanted something less fruity than the truth, but truly, what is gayer than a woman who languishes away in a crumbling mansion wearing her wedding gown every day of her life, for the drama?
The fruity truth: My favorite English author is Jane Austen.
So, to borrow a passage from Sense and Sensibility: “You want nothing but patience—or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.” To paraphrase: I hope to see you put your green American money where your filthy mouth is soon.
Yours in sexual frustration,
Henry
* * *
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.
At first, like most things that require time when instant gratification is possible, he doesn’t see the point of Henry’s emails.
But when Richards tells Sean Hannity that his mother hasn’t accomplished anything as president, Alex screams into his elbow and goes back to: The way you speak sometimes is like sugar spilling out of a bag with a hole in the bottom. When WASPy Hunter brings up the Harvard rowing team for the fifth time in one workday: Your arse in those trousers is a crime. When he’s tired of being touched by strangers: Come back to me when you’re done being flung through the firmament, you lost Pleiad.
Now he gets it.
His dad wasn’t wrong about how ugly things would get with Richards leading the ticket. Utah ugly, Christian ugly, ugliness couched in dog whistles and toothy white smiles. Right-wing think pieces about entitlement thrown in his and June’s direction, reeking of: Mexicans stole the First Family jobs too.
He can’t allow the fear of losing in. He drinks coffee and brings his policy work on the campaign trail and drinks more coffee, reads emails from Henry, and drinks even more coffee.
The first DC Pride since his “bisexual awakening” happens while Alex is in Nevada, and he spends the day jealously checking Twitter—confetti raining down on the Mall, grand marshal Rafael Luna with a rainbow bandana around his head. He goes back to his hotel and talks to his minibar about it.
The biggest bright spot in all the chaos is that his lobbying with one of the campaign chairs (and his own mother) has finally paid off: They’re doing a massive rally at Minute Maid Park in Houston. Polls are shifting in directions they’ve never seen before. Politico’s top story of the week: IS 2020 THE YEAR TEXAS BECOMES A TRUE BATTLEGROUND STATE?
“Yes, I will make sure everyone knows the Houston rally was your idea,” his mother says, barely paying attention, as she goes over her speech on the plane to Texas.
“You should say ‘grit,’ not ‘fortitude’ there,” June says, reading the speech over her shoulder. “Texans like grit.”
“Can y’all both go sit somewhere else?” she says, but she adds a note.
Alex knows a lot of the campaign is skeptical, even when they’ve seen the numbers. So when they pull up to Minute Maid and the line wraps around the block twice, he feels beyond gratified. He feels smug. His mom gets up to make her speech to thousands, and Alex thinks, Hell yeah, Texas. Prove the bastards wrong.
He’s still riding the high when he swipes his badge at the door of campaign office the following Monday. He’s been getting tired of sitting at a desk and going through focus groups again and again and again, but he’s ready to pick the fight back up.
The fact that he rounds the corner into his cubicle to find WASPy Hunter holding the Texas Binder brings him right the fuck back down.
“Oh, you left this on your desk,” WASPy Hunter says casually. “I thought maybe it was a new project they were putting us on.”
“Do I go on your side of the cubicle and turn off your Dropkick Murphys Spotify station, no matter how much I want to?” Alex demands. “No, Hunter, I don’t.”
“Well, you do kind of steal my pencils a lot—”
Alex snatches the binder away before he can finish. “It’s private.”
“What is it?” WASPy Hunter asks as Alex shoves it back into his bag. He can’t believe he left it out. “All that data, and the district lines—what are you doing with all that?”
“Nothing.”
“Is it about the Houston rally you pushed for?”
“Houston was a good idea,” he says, instantly defensive.
“Dude . . . you don’t honestly think Texas can go blue, do you? It’s one of the most backward states in the country.”
“You’re from Boston, Hunter. You really want to talk about all the places bigotry comes from?”
“Look, man, I’m just saying.”
“You know what?” Alex says. “You think y’all are off the hook for institutional bigotry because you come from a blue state. Not every white supremacist is a meth-head in Bumfuck, Mississippi—there are plenty of them at Duke or UPenn on Daddy’s money.”
WASPy Hunter looks startled but not convinced. “None of that changes that red states have been red forever,” he says, laughing, like it’s something to joke about, “and none of those populations seem to care enough about what’s good for them to vote.”
“Maybe those populations might be more motivated to vote if we made an actual effort to campaign to them and showed them that we care, and how our platform is designed to help them, not leave them behind,” Alex says hotly. “Imagine if nobody who claims to have your interests at heart ever came to your state and tried to talk to you, man. Or if you were a felon, or—fucking voter ID laws, people who can’t access polls, who can’t leave work to get to one?”
“Yeah, I mean, it’d be great if we could magically mobilize every eligible marginalized voter in red states, but political campaigns have a finite amount of time and resources, and we have to prioritize based on projections,” WASPy Hunter says, as if Alex, the First Son of the United States, is unfamiliar with how campaigns work. “There just aren’t the same number of bigots in blue states. If they don’t want to be left behind, maybe people in red states should do something about it.”
And Alex has, quite frankly, had it.
“Did you forget that you’re working on the campaign of someone Texas fucking created?” he says, and his voice has officially risen to the point where staffers in the neighboring cubicles are staring, but he doesn’t care. “Why don’t we talk about how there’s a chapter of the Klan in every state? You think there aren’t racists and homophobes growing up in Vermont? Man, I appreciate that you’re doing the work here, but you’re not special. You don’t get to sit up here and pretend like it’s someone else’s problem. None of us do.”
He takes his bag and his binder and storms out.
The minute he’s outside the building, he pulls out his phone on impulse, opens up Google. There are test dates this month. He knows there are.
LSAT washington dc area test center, he types.
3 Geniuses and Alex
June 23, 2020, 12:34 PM
juniper
BUG
Not my name, not anyone’s name, stop
leading member of korean pop band bts kim nam-june
BUG
I’m blocking your number
HRH Prince Dickhead
Alex, please don’t tell me Pez has indoctrinated you with K-pop.
well you let nora get you into drag race so
irl chaos demon
[latrice royale eat it.gif]
BUG
What did you want Alex????
where’s my speech for milwaukee? i know you took it
HRH Prince Dickhead
Must you have this conversation in the group chat?
BUG
Part of it needed to be rewritten!!! I put it back with edits in the outside pocket of your messenger bag
davis is gonna kill you if you keep doing this
BUG
Davis saw how well my tweaks to the talking points went over on Seth Meyers last week so he knows better
why is there a rock in here too
BUG
That is a clear quartz crystal for clarity and good vibes do not @ me. We need all the help we can get right now
stop putting SPELLS on my STUFF
irl chaos demon
BURN THE WITCH
irl chaos demon
hey what do we think of this #look for the college voter thing tomorrow
irl chaos demon
[Attached Image]
irl chaos demon
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
. . .
HRH Prince Dickhead
Bitch, you took me there.
alskdjfadslfjad
NORA YOU BROKE HIM
irl chaos demon
lmaoooooo
NO MORE DRAG RACE. THIS FRIENDSHIP IS CANCELED
* * *
The invitation comes certified airmail straight from Buckingham Palace. Gilded edges, spindly calligraphy: THE CHAIRMAN AND COMMITTEE OF MANAGEMENT OF THE CHAMPIONSHIPS REQUEST THE PLEASURE OF THE COMPANY OF ALEXANDER CLAREMONT-DIAZ IN THE ROYAL BOX ON THE 6TH OF JULY, 2020.
Alex takes a picture and texts it to Henry.
1. tf is this? aren’t there poor people in your country?
2. i’ve already been in the royal box
Henry sends back, You are a delinquent and a plague, and then, Please come?
And here Alex is, spending his one day off from the campaign at Wimbledon, only to get his body next to Henry’s again.
“So, as I’ve warned you,” Henry says as they approach the doors to the Royal Box, “Philip will be here. And assorted other nobility with whom you may have to make conversation. People named Basil.’”
“I think I’ve proven that I can handle royals.”
Henry looks doubtful. “You’re brave. I could use some of that.”
The sun is, for once, bright over London when they step outside, flooding the stands around them, which have already mostly filled with spectators. He notices David Beckham in a well-tailored suit—once again, how had he convinced himself he was straight?—before David Beckham turns away and Alex sees it was Bea he was talking to, her face bright when she spots them.
“Oi, Alex! Henry!” she chirps over the murmur of the Box. She’s a vision in a lime-green, drop-waist silk dress, a pair of huge, round Gucci sunglasses embellished with gold honeybees perched on her nose.
“You look gorgeous,” Alex says, accepting a kiss on his cheek.
“Why thank you, darling,” Bea says. She takes one of their arms in each of hers and whisks them off down the steps. “Your sister helped me pick the dress, actually. It’s McQueen. She’s a genius, did you know?”
