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Re: Paris?
A 3/4/20 2:41 AM
to Henry
His Royal Horniness,
If I were trying to get fresh with you, you would know it.
For example: I’ve been thinking about your mouth on me all week, and I was hoping I’d see you in Paris so I could put it to use.
I was also thinking you might know how to pick French cheeses. Not my area of expertise.
Alex
First Son of Cheese Shopping and Blowjobs
Re: Paris?
Henry 3/4/20 2:43 AM
to A
Alex, First Son of Making Me Spill My Tea in Said Early Morning Meeting:
Hate you. Will try to get out of Germany.
x
SEVEN
Henry does get out of Germany, and he meets Alex near a herd of crêpe-eating tourists by Place du Tertre, wearing a sharp blue blazer and a wicked smile. They stumble back to his hotel after two bottles of wine, and Henry sinks to his knees on the white marble and looks up at Alex with big, blue, bottomless eyes, and Alex doesn’t know a word in any language to describe it.
He’s so drunk, and Henry’s mouth is so soft, and it’s all so fucking French that he forgets to send Henry back to his own hotel. He forgets they don’t spend the night. So, they do.
He discovers Henry sleeps curled up on his side, his spine poking out in little sharp points that are actually soft if you reach out and touch them, very carefully so as not to wake him because he’s actually sleeping for once. In the morning, room service brings up crusty baguettes and sticky tarts filled withfat apricots and a copy ofLe Mondethat Alex makes Henry translate out loud.
He vaguely remembers telling himself they weren’t going to do things like this. It’s all a little hazy right now.
When Henry’s gone, Alex finds the stationery by the bed:Fromagerie Nicole Barthélémy.Leaving your clandestine hookup directions to a Parisian cheese shop. Alex has to admit: Henry really has a solid handle on his personal brand.
Later, Zahra texts him a screencap of aBuzzFeedarticle about his “best bromance ever” with Henry. It’s a mix of photos: the state dinner, a couple of shots of them grinning outside the stables in Greenwich, one picked up from a French girl’s Twitter of Alex leaning back in his chair at a tiny cafe table while Henry finishes off the bottle of red between them.
Beneath it, Zahra has begrudgingly written:Good work, you little shit.
He guesses this is how they’re going to do this—the world is going to keep thinking they’re best friends, and they’re going to keep playing the part.
He knows, objectively, he should pace himself. It’s only physical. But Perfect Stoic Prince Charming laughs when he comes, and texts Alex at weird hours of the night:You’re a mad, spiteful, unmitigated demon, and I’m going to kiss you until you forget how to talk.And Alex is kind of obsessed with it.
Alex decides not to think too hard. Normally they’d only cross paths a few times a year; it takes creative schedule wrangling and a little sweet-talking of their respective teams to see each other as often as their bodies demand. At least they’ve got a ruse of international public relations.
Their birthdays, it turns out, are less than three weeksapart, which means, for most of March, Henry is twenty-three and Alex is twenty-one. (“I knew he was a goddamn Pisces,” June says). Alex happens to have a voter registration drive at NYU at the end of March, and when he texts Henry about it, he gets a brisk response fifteen minutes later:Have rescheduled visit to New York for nonprofit business to this weekend. Will be in the city ready to carry out birthday floggings &c.
The photographers are readily visible when they meet in front of the Met, so they clasp each other’s hands and Alex says through his big on-camera smile, “I want you alone, now.”
They’re more careful in the States, and they go up to the hotel room one at a time—Henry through the back flanked by two tall PPOs, and later, Alex with Cash, who grins and knows and says nothing.
There’s a lot of champagne and kissing and buttercream from a birthday cupcake Henry’s inexplicably procured smeared around Alex’s mouth, Henry’s chest, Alex’s throat, between Henry’s hips. Henry pins his wrists to the mattress and swallows him down, and Alex is drunk and fucking transported, feeling every moment of twenty-two years and not a single day older, some kind of hedonistic youth of history. Birthday head from another country’s prince will do that.
