Red, White & Royal Blue: Chapters 6–7

It feels as good as—better than—he remembered, and he can’t recall why they haven’t been doing this the whole time, why they’ve been running belligerent circles around each other for so long without doing anything about it.

He feels himself standing at a very tall, very dangerous precipice, with no intention of backing away.

Alex knows it’ll probably leave a mark, which is against rule number one of clandestine hookups for political offspring—and probably royals too.

And when Alex looks again, he finds Henry watching him raptly, eyes bright and smiling.

“So,” Alex says, changing tracks by stretching languidly...

“Listen,” Alex tells her, “I’m trying to keep up a geopolitical public relations ruse here.”

It should not provoke anything visceral...

Henry is still in his full polo regalia, gloves and all, and Alex can’t decide if he is pleased or wants to brain him with a polo stick.

This sport is a travesty.

I could have you made into a royal settee cushion for that kind of lèse-majesté.

You shall have to find someone else to accost in a cloakroom.

Re: fund-raiser guests, I thought you said I was boring?
Regards,
Harangued Royal Highness

Are you trying to get fresh with me?
Regards,
Handsome Royal Heretic

You’re a mad, spiteful, unmitigated demon, and I’m going to kiss you until you forget how to talk.

...some kind of hedonistic youth of history.

They talk about how Pez is now proclaiming himself fully in love with June and spends half his time with Henry rhapsodizing about her or begging him to ask Alex if she likes flowers (yes) or exotic birds (to look at, not to own) or jewelry in the shape of her own face (no).

There are a lot of days when Henry is happy to hear from him and quick to respond, a fast, cutting sense of humor, hungry for Alex’s company and the tangle of thoughts in Alex’s head. But sometimes, he’s taken over by a dark mood, an unusually acerbic wit, strange and vitrified.

There are a lot of days when Henry is happy to hear from him and quick to respond, a fast, cutting sense of humor, hungry for Alex’s company and the tangle of thoughts in Alex’s head. But sometimes, he’s taken over by a dark mood, an unusually acerbic wit, strange and vitrified.

He launches into a long-winded tirade, and Alex listens, amused and a little awed, as Henry works his way to his point: “I just think, as the prince of this bloody country, that when it comes to Britain’s positive cultural landmarks, it would be nice if we could not throw our own marginalized people under the proverbial bus...”

“Oh my God,” he says, because really, the last person Zahra needs to be concerned about leaking sordid details is Henry.

“What?” The usual bemused, elongated, one-syllable response.

Alex doesn’t say anything, letting the silence stretch in a thin thread between them before he cuts it. “You know, this whole arrangement we have...you can tell me stuff. I tell you stuff all the time. Politics stuff and school stuff and nutso family stuff. I know I’m, like, not the paragon of normal human communication, but. You know.”

He makes oblique references to Philip being wound so tight as to double as an atomic clock, or to his grandmother’s disapproval, and he mentions Bea as often as Alex mentions June, but Alex knows there’s more to it than that.

“Oh,” Alex says. He’s not sure how else to respond, reaching into his mental store of political platitudes and finding them all clinical and intolerable.

“Oh,” Alex says. He’s not sure how else to respond, reaching into his mental store of political platitudes and finding them all clinical and intolerable.

“The wonders of the monarchy,” Henry says loftily.

Henry already hears nearly everything about Alex’s current life, but talking about how they grew up has always been some invisible line of demarcation.

He talks about Travis County, making campaign posters with construction paper for fifth-grade student council, family trips to Surfside, running headlong into the waves.

She gives him a dubious look but leaves the last burnt, sludgy vestiges of coffee where they are and rolls off with her cart.

But if he could only figure out a way to make Texas’ vote reflect its soul...he’s nowhere near qualified to single-handedly dismantle Texas’ iron curtains of gerrymandering, but what if he—

“He looks so different,” he says after a long minute, gazing down at the baby Henry on the page and his easy, unfledged sureness.

“Listen, it’s not my fault he’s a mysterious and retiring young royal and you’re the tempestuous ingénue that caught his eye, okay?”

He’s a consummate professional parceled in immaculately tailored Tom Ford, ruffled by absolutely nothing, whose affection for his charge shows in the way he tends to him like a favorite houseplant.

"...It used to be all bottles of cognac and shared malaise and ‘When will they notice us’—”

It’s ambitious, but since Henry still staunchly covers all his own expenses with his inheritance from his father, his royal accounts are untouched.

It’s a little intoxicating.

He leaves his champagne with the girls and weaves a circuitous path toward the Palm Room, pretending to check his phone.

Ten minutes later, Alex finds him in the clubhouse by a gigantic vase of lurid fuschia flowers.

In a cacophony of shouting and kicking and pelvic-thrusting and flashing lights, the song blasts into the guitar solo, and there’s not a single person in the bar in their seat...

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.