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It’s the last time they see each other for weeks, and after a lot of teasing and maybe some begging, he convinces Henry to download Snapchat. Henry mostly sends tame, fully clothed thirst traps that make Alex sweat in his lectures: a mirror shot, mud-stained white polo pants, a sharp suit. On a Saturday, the C-SPAN stream on his phone gets interrupted by Henry on a sailboat, smiling into the camera with the sun bright on his bare shoulders, and Alex’s heart goes sofucking weird that he has to put his head in his hands for a full minute.
(But, like. It’s fine. It’s not a whole thing.)
Between it all, they talk about Alex’s campaign job, Henry’s nonprofit projects, both of their appearances. They talk about how Pez is now proclaiming himself fully in love with June and spends half his time with Henry rhapsodizing about her or begging him to ask Alex if she likes flowers (yes) or exotic birds (to look at, not to own) or jewelry in the shape of her own face (no).
There are a lot of days when Henry is happy to hear from him and quick to respond, a fast, cutting sense of humor, hungry for Alex’s company and the tangle of thoughts in Alex’s head. But sometimes, he’s taken over by a dark mood, an unusually acerbic wit, strange and vitrified. He’ll withdraw for hours or days, and Alex comes to understand this as grief time, little bouts of depression, or times of “too much.” Henry hates those days completely. Alex wishes he could help, but he doesn’t particularly mind. He’s just as attracted to Henry’s cloudy tempers, the way he comes back from them, and the millions of shades in between.
He’s also learned that Henry’s placid demeanor is shattered with the right poking. He likes to bring up things he knows will get Henry going, including:
“Listen,” Henry is saying, heated, over the phone on a Thursday night. “I don’t give a damn whatJoannehas to say, Remus John Lupin is gay as the day is long, and I won’t hear a word against it.”
“Okay,” Alex says. “For the record, I agree with you, but also, tell me more.”
He launches into a long-winded tirade, and Alex listens,amused and a little awed, as Henry works his way to his point: “I just think, as the prince of this bloody country, that when it comes to Britain’spositivecultural landmarks, it would be nice if we could not throw our own marginalized people under the proverbial bus. People sanitize Freddie Mercury or Elton John or Bowie, who was shagging Jagger up and down Oakley Street in the seventies, I might add. It’s just not thetruth.”
It’s another thing Henry does—whipping out these analyses of what he reads or watches or listens to that confronts Alex with the fact that he has both a degree in English literature and a vested interest in the gay history of his family’s country. Alex has alwaysknownhis gay American history—after all, his parents’ politics have been part of it—but it wasn’t until he figured himself out that he started toengagewith it like Henry.
He’s starting to understand what swelled in his chest the first time he read about Stonewall, why he ached over the SCOTUS decision in 2015. He starts catching up voraciously in his spare time: Walt Whitman, the Laws of Illinois 1961, The White Night Riot,Paris Is Burning.He’s pinned a photo over his desk at work, a man at a rally in the ’80s in a jacket that says across the back:IF I DIE OF AIDS—FORGET BURIAL—JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE F.D.A.
June’s eyes stick on it one day when she drops by the office to have lunch with him, giving him the same strange look she gave him over coffee the morning after Henry snuck into his room. But she doesn’t say anything, carries on through sushi about her latest project, pulling all her journals together into a memoir. Alex wonders if any of this stuff would make it into there. Maybe, if he tells her soon. He should tell her soon.
It’s weird that the thing with Henry could make him understand this huge part of himself, but it does. When he sinksinto thoughts of Henry’s hands, square knuckles and elegant fingers, he wonders how he never realized it before. When he sees Henry next at a gala in Berlin, and he feels that gravitational pull, chases it down in the back of a limo, and binds Henry’s wrists to a hotel bedpost with his own necktie, he knows himself better.
When he shows up for a weekly briefing two days later, Zahra grabs his jaw with one hand and turns his head, peering closer at the side of his neck. “Is that ahickey?”
Alex freezes. “I… um, no?”
“Do I look stupid to you, Alex?” Zahra says. “Who is giving you hickeys, and why have you not gotten them to sign an NDA?”
“Oh my God,” he says, because really, the last person Zahra needs to be concerned about leaking sordid details is Henry. “If I needed an NDA, you would know. Chill.”
Zahra does not appreciate being told to chill.
“Look at me,” she says. “I have known you since you were still leaving skid marks in your drawers. You think I don’t know when you’re lying to me?” She jabs a pointy, polished nail into his chest. “However you got that, it better be somebody off the approved list of girls you are allowed to be seen with during the election cycle, which I will email to you again as soon as you get out of my sight in case you have misplaced it.”
“Jesus, okay.”
“And to remind you,” she goes on, “I will chop my own tit off before I let you pull some idiotic stunt to cause your mother, our first female president, to be the first president to lose reelection since H fucking W. Do you understand me? I will lock you in your room for the next year if I have to, and you can take your finals by fucking smoke signal. I will staple yourdick to the inside of your leg if that keeps it in your fucking pants.”
She returns to her notes with smooth professionalism, as if she has not just threatened his life. Behind her, he can see June at her place at the table, very clearly aware that he’s lying too.
“Do you have a last name?”
Alex has never actually offered a greeting when calling Henry.
“What?” The usual bemused, elongated, one-syllable response.
“A last name,” Alex repeats. It’s late afternoon and stormy outside the Residence, and he’s on his back in the middle of the Solarium, catching up on drafts for work. “That thing I have two of. Do you use your dad’s? Henry Fox? That sounds fucking dope. Or does royalty outrank? Do you use your mom’s name, then?”
He hears some shuffling over the phone and wonders if Henry’s in bed. They haven’t been able to see each other in a couple weeks, so his mind is quick to supply the image.
“The official family name is Mountchristen-Windsor,” Henry says. “Hyphenate, like yours. So my full name is… Henry George Edward James Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor.”
Alex gapes up at the ceiling. “Oh… my God.”
“Truly.”
“I thought Alexander Gabriel Claremont-Diaz was bad.”
