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QUEEN HENRY!twenty copies of theDaily Mailproclaimin gigantic letters.INSIDE THE PRINCE’S GAY AFFAIR WITH THE FIRST SON OF THE UNITED STATES!
The cover is splashed with a blown-up photo of what is undeniably himself and Henry kissing in the back seat of the car behind the cafe, apparently shot with a long-range lens through the windshield. Tinted windows, but he forgot about the fuckingwindshield.
Two smaller photos are inset on the bottom of the page: one of the shots of them on the Beekman’s elevator and a photo of them side by side at Wimbledon, him whispering something in Henry’s ear while Henry smiles a soft, private smile.
Fucking shitting hell. He is so fucked. Henry is so fucked. And, Jesus Christ, his mother’s campaign is fucked, and his political career is fucked, and his ears are ringing, and he’s going to throw up.
“Fuck,” Alex says again. “I need my phone. I have to call Henry—”
“No, you do fucking not,” Zahra says. “We don’t know yet how the emails got out, so it’s radio silence until we find the leak.”
“The—what? Is Henry okay?” God, Henry. All he can think about is Henry’s big blue eyes looking terrified, Henry’s breathing coming shallow and quick, locked in his bedroom in Kensington Palace and desperately alone, and his jaw locks up, something burning in the back of his throat.
“The president is sitting down right now with as many members of the Office of Communications as we could drag out of bed at three in the morning,” Zahra tells him, ignoring his question. Her phone is buzzing nonstop in her hand. “It’s about to be gay DEFCON five in this administration. For God’s sake, put some clothes on.”
Zahra disappears into Alex’s closet, and he flips thenewspaper open to the story, his heart pounding. There are even more photos inside. He glances over the copy, but there’s too much to even begin to process.
On the second page, he sees them: printed and annotated excerpts of their emails. One is labeled:PRINCE HENRY: SECRET POET?It begins with a line he’s read about a thousand times by now.
Should I tell you that when we’re apart, your body comes back to me in dreams…
“Fuck!”he says a third time, spiking the newspaper at the floor. That one washis.It feels obscene to see it there. “How the fuck did theyget these?”
“Yep,” Zahra agrees. “You dirty did it.” She throws a white button-down and a pair of jeans at him, and he pitches himself out of bed. Zahra gamely holds out an arm for him to steady himself while he pulls his pants up, and despite it all, he’s struck with overwhelming gratitude for her.
“Listen, I need to talk to Henry as soon as possible. I can’t even imagine— God, I need to talk to him.”
“Get some shoes, we’re running,” Zahra tells him. “Priority one is damage control, not feelings.”
He grabs a pair of sneakers, and they take off while he’s still pulling them on, running west. His brain is struggling to keep up, running through about five thousand possible ways this could go, imagining himself ten years down the road being frozen out of Congress, plummeting approval ratings, Henry’s name scratched off the line of succession, his mother losing reelection on a swing state’s disapproval of him. He’s so screwed, and he can’t even decide who to be the angriest with, himself or theMailor the monarchy or the whole stupid country.
He nearly crashes into Zahra’s back as she skids to a stop in front of a door.
He pushes the door open, and the whole room goes silent.
His mother stares at him from the head of the table and says flatly, “Out.”
At first he thinks she’s talking to him, but she cuts her eyes down to the people around the table with her.
“Was I not clear? Everyone, out, now,” she says. “I need to talk to my son.”
THIRTEEN
“Sit down,” his mother tells him, and Alex feels dread coil deep in his stomach. He has no clue what to expect—knowing your parent as the person who raised you isn’t the same as being able to guess their moves as a world leader.
He sits, and the silence hovers over them, his mother’s hands folded in a considering pose against her lips. She looks exhausted.
“Are you okay?” she says finally. When he looks up in surprise, there’s no anger in her eyes.
The president stands on the edge of a career-ending scandal, measures her breaths evenly, and waits for her son to answer.
Oh.
It hits him with sudden clarity that he hasn’t at all stopped to consider his own feelings. There simply hasn’t been thetime. When he reaches for an emotion to name, he finds he can’t pin one down, and something shudders inside him and shuts down completely.
He doesn’t often wish away his position in life, but in this moment, he does. He wants to be having this conversation in a different life, just his mother sitting across from him at the dinner table, asking him how he feels about his nice, respectable boyfriend, if he’s doing okay with figuring his identity out. Not like this, in a West Wing briefing room, his dirty emails spread out between them on the table.
“I’m…” he begins. To his horror, he hears something shake in his voice, which he quickly swallows down. “I don’t know. This isn’t how I wanted to tell people. I thought we’d get a chance to do this right.”
