AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Henry huffs a laugh. “You’re one to talk. I wasn’t the one who stormed the palace in a fit of pique to call me an ‘obtuse fucking asshole.’”
“In my defense,” Alex says, “youwerean obtuse fucking asshole.”
Henry pauses, takes a sip of his tea, and places it on the nightstand. “I was,” he agrees, and he leans forward and presseshis mouth to Alex’s, one hand steadying his mug so it doesn’t spill. He tastes like toothpaste and Earl Grey, and maybe Alex isn’t getting dumped after all.
“Hey,” he says when Henry pulls back. “Where were you?”
Henry doesn’t answer, and Alex watches him kick his wet sneakers onto the floor before climbing up to sit between Alex’s open legs. He places his hands on Alex’s thighs, bracketing him with his full attention, and when he looks up into Alex’s eyes, his are clear blue and focused.
“I needed a run,” he says. “To clear my head a bit, figure out… what’s next. Very Mr. Darcy brooding at Pemberley. And I ran into Philip. I hadn’t mentioned it, but he and Martha are here for the week while they’re doing renovations on Anmer Hall. He was up early for some appearance or other, eating toast. Plain toast. Have you ever seen someone eat toast without anything on it? Harrowing, truly.”
Alex chews his lip. “Where’s this going, babe?”
“We chatted for a bit. He didn’t seem to know about your… visitation… last night, thankfully. But he was on about Martha, and land holdings, and the hypothetical heirs they have to start working on, even though Philip hates children, and suddenly it was as if… as if everything you said last night came back to me. I thought, God, that’s it, isn’t it? Just following the plan. And it’s not that he’s unhappy. He’s fine. It’s all very deeply fine. A whole lifetime of fine.” He’s been pulling at a thread on the duvet, but he looks back up, squarely into Alex’s eyes, and says, “That’s not good enough for me.”
There’s a desperate stutter in Alex’s heartbeat. “It’s not?”
He reaches up and touches a thumb to Alex’s cheekbone. “I’m not… good at saying these things like you are, but. I’ve always thought… ever since I knew about me, and evenbefore, when I could sense I wasdifferent—and, after everything the past few years, all the mad things my head does—I’ve always thought of myself as a problem that deserved to stay hidden. Never quite trusted myself, or what I wanted. Before you, I was all right letting everything happen to me. I honestly have never thought I deserved to choose.” His hand moves, fingertips brushing a curl behind Alex’s ear. “But you treat me like I do.”
There’s something painfully hard in Alex’s throat, but he pushes past it. He reaches over and sets his mug down next to Henry’s on the nightstand.
“You do,” he says.
“I think I’m actually beginning to believe that,” Henry says. “And I don’t know how long it would have taken if I didn’t have you to believe for me.”
“And there’s nothing wrong with you,” Alex tells him. “I mean, aside from the fact that you’re occasionally an obtuse fucking asshole.”
Henry laughs again, wetly, his eyes crinkling up in the corners, and Alex feels his heart lift into his throat, up to the embellished ceilings, pushing out to fill the whole room all the way to the glinting gold ring still sitting above the fireplace.
“I am sorry about that,” Henry says. “I—I wasn’t ready to hear it. That night, at the lake… it was the first time I let myself think you might actually say it. I panicked, and it was daft and unfair, and I won’t do it again.”
“You better not,” Alex tells him. “So, you’re saying… you’re in?”
“I’m saying,” Henry begins, and the knit of his brow is nervous but his mouth keeps speaking, “I’m terrified, and my whole life is completely mad, but trying to give you up thisweek nearly killed me. And when I woke up this morning and looked at you… there’s no trying to get by for me anymore. I don’t know if I’ll ever be allowed to tell the world, but I… I want to. One day. If there’s any legacy for me on this bloody earth, I want it to be true. So I can offer you all of me, in whatever way you’ll have me, and I can offer you the chance of a life. If you can wait, I want you to help me try.”
Alex looks at him, taking in the whole parcel of him, the centuries of royal blood sitting under an antique Kensington chandelier, and he reaches out to touch his face and looks at his fingers and thinks about holding the Bible at his mother’s inauguration with the same hand.
It hits him, fully: the weight of this. How completely neither of them will ever be able to undo it.
“Okay,” he says. “I’m into making history.”
Henry rolls his eyes and seals it with a smiling kiss, and they fall back into the pillows together, Henry’s wet hair and sweatpants and Alex’s naked limbs all tangled up in the lavish bedclothes.
When Alex was a kid, before anyone knew his name, he dreamed of love like it was a fairy tale, as if it would come sweeping into his life on the back of a dragon one day. When he got older, he learned about love as a strange thing that could fall apart no matter how badly you wanted it, a choice you make anyway. He never imagined it’d turn out he was right both times.
Henry’s hands on him are unhurried and soft, and they make out lazily for hours or days, basking in the rare luxury of it. They take breaks to finish their lukewarm coffee and tea, and Henry has scones and blackcurrant jam sent up. They waste away the morning in bed, watching Mel and Sue squawkover tea cakes on Henry’s laptop, listening to the rain slow to a drizzle.
At some point, Alex disentangles his jeans from the foot of the bed and fishes out his phone. He’s got three missed calls from Zahra, one ominous voicemail from his mother, and forty-seven unread messages in his group text with June and Nora.
ALEX, Z JUST TOLD ME YOU’RE IN LONDON???????
Alex oh my god
I swear to god if you do something stupid and get yourself caught, I’m gonna kill you myself
But you went after him!!! That’s SO Jane Austen
I’m gonna punch you in the face when you get back. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me
