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“Yes, good, carry on.”
Alex does, and one of Henry’s hands slides down, leveraging one of Alex’s thighs up so their bodies meet again right at the hard crux between them, and they both groan. Alex thinks, dizzily, that it’s been nearly five years of foreplay, and enough is enough.
He moves his lips down to Henry’s chest, and he feels under his mouth the beat Henry’s heart skips at the realization of what Alex intends. His own heartbeat is probably falling out of rhythm too. He’s in so far over his head, but that’s good—that’s pretty much his comfort zone. He kisses Henry’s solar plexus, his stomach, the stretch of skin above his waistband.
“I’ve, uh,” Alex begins. “I’ve never actually done this before.”
“Alex,” Henry says, reaching down to stroke at Alex’s hair, “you don’t have to, I’m—”
“No, I want to,” Alex says, tugging at Henry’s waistband. “I just need you to tell me if it’s awful.”
Henry is speechless again, looking as if he can’t believe his fucking luck. “Okay. Of course.”
Alex pictures Henry barefoot in a Kensington Palace kitchen and the little sliver of vulnerability he got to see so early on, and he thrills at Henry now, in his bed, spread out and naked and wanting. This can’t be really happening after everything, but miraculously, it is.
If he’s going by the way Henry’s body responds, by the way Henry’s hand sweeps up into his hair and clutches a fistful of curls, he guesses he does okay for a first try. He looks up the length of Henry’s body and is met with burning eye contact, a red lip caught between white teeth. Henry drops his head back on the pillow and groans something that sounds like “fuckingeyelashes.” He’s maybe a little bit in awe of how Henry arches up off the mattress, at hearing his sweet, posh voice reciting a litany of profanities to the ceiling. Alex is living for it, watching Henry come undone, letting him be whatever he needs to be while alone with Alex behind a locked door.
He’s surprised to find himself hauled up to Henry’s mouth and kissed hungrily. He’s been with girls who didn’t like to be kissed afterward and girls who didn’t mind it, but Henry revels in it, based on the deep and comprehensive way he’s kissing him. It occurs to him to make a comment about narcissism, but instead—
“Not awful?” Alex says between kisses, resting his head on the pillow next to Henry’s to catch his breath.
“Definitely adequate,” Henry answers, grinning, and he scoops Alex up against his chest greedily as if he’s trying to touch all of him at once. Henry’s hands are huge on his back, his jaw sharp and rough with a long day’s stubble, his shoulders broad enough to eclipse Alex when he rolls them over and pins Alex to the mattress. None of it feels anything like anything he’s felt before, but it’s just as good, maybe better.
Henry’s kissing him aggressively once more, confident in a way that’s rare from Henry. Messy earnestness and rough focus, not a dutiful prince but any other twenty-something boy enjoying himself doing something he likes, something he’s good at. And he isgoodat it. Alex makes a mental note tofigure out which shadowy gay noble taught Henry all this and send the man a fruit basket.
Henry returns the favor happily, hungrily, and 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.” Henry is one talented bastard, a man of many hidden gifts, Alex muses half-hysterically. A true prodigy. God Save the Queen.
When he’s done, he presses a sticky kiss in the crease of Alex’s leg where he’d slung it over his shoulder, managing to come off polite, and Alex wants to drag Henry up by the hair, but his body is boneless and wrecked. He’s blissed out, dead. Ascended to the next plane, merely a pair of eyes floating through a dopamine haze.
The mattress shifts, and Henry moves up to the pillows, nuzzling his face into the hollow of Alex’s throat. Alex makes a vague noise of approval, and his arms fumble around Henry’s waist, but he’s helpless to do much else. 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.
“Hmm,” Henry hums, the tip of his nose catching on Alex’s. “If I had known this was all it took to shut you up, I’d have done it ages ago.”
With a feat of Herculean strength, he summons up two whole words: “Fuck you.”
Distantly, through a slowly clearing fog, through a messy kiss, Alex can’t help marveling at the knowledge that he’s crossed some kind of Rubicon, here in this room that’s almost as old as the country it’s in, like Washington crossing the Delaware. He laughs into Henry’s mouth, instantly caught up in his own dramatic mental portrait of the two them painted inoils, young icons of their nations, naked and shining wet in the lamplight. He wishes Henry could see it, wonders if he’d find the image as funny.
Henry rolls over onto his back. Alex’s body wants to follow and tuck into his side, but he stays where he is, watching from a few safe inches away. He can see a muscle in Henry’s jaw flexing.
“Hey,” he says. He pokes Henry in the arm. “Don’t freak out.”
“I’m notfreaking out,” he says, enunciating the words.
Alex wriggles an inch closer in the sheets. “It was fun,” Alex says. “I had fun. You had fun, right?”
“Definitely,” he says, in a tone that sends a lazy spark up Alex’s spine.
“Okay, cool. So, we can do this again, anytime you want,” Alex says, dragging the back of his knuckles down Henry’s shoulder. “And you know this doesn’t, like, change anything between us, right? We’re still… whatever we were before, just, you know. With blowjobs.”
Henry covers his eyes with one hand. “Right.”
“So,” Alex says, changing tracks by stretching languidly, “I guess I should tell you, I’m bisexual.”
“Good to know,” Henry says. His eyes flicker down to Alex’s hip, where it’s bared above the sheet, and he says as much to himself as to Alex, “I am very, very gay.”
Alex watches his small smile, the way it wrinkles the corners of his eyes, and very deliberately does not kiss it.
Part of his brain keeps getting stuck on how strange, and strangely wonderful, it is to see Henry like this, open and bare in every way. Henry leans across the pillow to Alex and presses a soft kiss to his mouth, and Alex feels fingertips brush over hisjaw. The touch is so gentle he has to once again remind himself not to care too much.
