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“Zahra,” he asks. “Did they call Texas yet?”
“No,” she says. “Still too close.”
“Still?”
Her smile is knowing. “Still.”
The spotlight is almost blinding when he walks out, but he knows something. Deep down in his heart. They still haven’t called Texas.
“Hey, y’all,” he says to the crowd. His hand squeezes the microphone, but it’s steady. “I’m Alex, your First Son.” The hometown crowd goes wild, and Alex grins and means it, leans into it. When he says what he says next, he intends to believe it.
“You know what’s crazy? Right now, Anderson Cooper is on CNN saying Texas is too close to call.Too close to call.Y’all may not know this about me, but I’m kind of a history nerd. So I can tell you, the last time Texas wastoo close to callwas in 1976. In 1976, we went blue. It was Jimmy Carter, in the wake of Watergate. He just barely squeezed out fifty-one percent of our vote, and we helped him beat Gerald Ford for the presidency.
“Now, I’m standing here, and I’m thinking about it… A reliable, hardworking, honest, Southern Democrat versus corruption, and maliciousness, and hate. And one big state full of honest people, sick as hell of being lied to.”
The crowd absolutely loses it, and Alex almost laughs. He raises his voice into the microphone, speaks up over the sound of cheers and applause and boots stomping on the floor of the hall. “Well, it sounds a little familiar to me, is all. So, what doy’all think, Texas? ¿Se repetirála historia? Are we gonna make history repeat itself tonight?”
The roar says it all, and Alex yells with them, lets the sound carry him off the stage, lets it wrap around his heart and squeeze back in the blood that’s drained out of it all night. The second he steps backstage, there’s a hand on his back, the achingly familiar gravity of someone else’s body reentering his space before it even touches his, a clean, familiar scent light in the air between.
“That wasbrilliant,” Henry says, smiling, in the flesh,finally.He’s gorgeous in a navy-blue suit and a tie that, upon closer inspection, is patterned with little yellow roses.
“Your tie—”
“Oh, yes,” he says, “yellow rose of Texas, is it? I read that was a thing. Thought it might be good luck.”
All at once, Alex is in love all over again. He wraps the tie once around the back of his hand and reels Henry in and kisses him like he never has to stop. Which—he remembers, and laughs into Henry’s mouth—he doesn’t.
If he’s talking about who he is, he wishes he’d been someone smart enough to have done this last year. He wouldn’t have made Henry banish himself to a bunch of frozen shrubbery, and he wouldn’t have just stood there while Henry gave him the most important kiss of his life. It would have been like this. He would have taken Henry’s face in both hands and kissed him hard and deep and on purpose and said, “Take anything you want and know you deserve to have it.”
He pulls back and says, “You’re late, Your Highness.”
Henry laughs. “Actually, I’m just in time for the upswing, it would seem.”
He’s talking about the latest round of calls, which apparentlycame in while Alex was onstage. Out in their VIP area, everyone’s out of their seat, watching Anderson Cooper and Wolf Blitzer parse the returns on the big screens. Virginia: Claremont. Colorado: Claremont. Michigan: Claremont. Pennsylvania: Claremont. It almost fully makes up the difference in votes, with the West Coast still to go.
Shaan is here too, in one corner with Zahra, huddled with Luna and Amy and Cash, and Alex’s head almost spins at the thought of how many nations could be brought to their knees by this particular gang. He grabs Henry’s hand and pulls him into it all.
The magic comes in a nervous trickle—Henry’s tie, hopeful lilts in voices, a few stray bits of confetti that escape the nets laced through the rafters and get stuck in Nora’s hair—and then, all at once.
10:30 brings the big rush: Richards steals Iowa, yes, and sews up Utah and Montana, but the West Coast comes storming in with California’s fifty-five fucking electoral votes. “Big damn heroes,” Oscar crows when it’s called to raucous cheers and nobody’s surprise, and he and Luna slap their palms together.West Side Bastardos.
By midnight, they’ve taken the lead, and it does, finally, feel like a party, even if they’re not out of the woods yet. Drinks are flowing, voices are loud, the crowd on the other side of the partition is electric. Gloria Estefan wailing through the sound system feels fitting again, not a stabbing, sick irony at a funeral. Across the room, Henry’s with June, making a gesture at her hair, and she turns and lets him fix a piece of her braid that came loose earlier in a fit of anxiety.
Alex is so busy watching them, his two favorite people, he doesn’t notice another person in his path until he collides withthem headfirst, spilling their drink and almost sending them both stumbling into the massive victory cake on the buffet table.
“Jesus, sorry,” he says, immediately reaching for a pile of napkins.
“If you knock over another expensive cake,” says an extremely familiar whiskey-warm drawl, “I’m pretty sure your mom is gonna disinherit you.”
He turns to see Liam, almost the same as he remembers—tall, broad-shouldered, sweet-faced, scruffy.
He’s so mad he has such a specific type of dude and never even noticed it for so long.
“Oh my God, you came!”
“Of course I did,” Liam says, grinning. Beside him, there’s a cute guy grinning too. “I mean, it kind of seemed like the Secret Service were gonna come requisition me from my apartment if I didn’t come.”
Alex laughs. “Look, the presidency hasn’t changed methatmuch. I’m still as aggressive a party instigator as I ever was.”
