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How did it go??? Are you with Henry now?????
GONNA PUNCH YOU
It turns out forty-six out of forty-seven texts are June and the forty-seventh is Nora asking if either of them know whereshe left her white Chuck Taylors. Alex texts back:your chucks are under my bed and henry says hi.
The message has barely delivered before his phone erupts with a call from June, who demands to be put on speaker and told everything. After, rather than facing Zahra’s wrath himself, he convinces Henry to call Shaan.
“D’you think you could, er, phone Ms. Bankston and let her know Alex is safe and with me?”
“Yes, sir,” Shaan says. “And shall I arrange a car for his departure?”
“Er,” Henry says, and he looks at Alex and mouths,Stay?Alex nods. “Tomorrow?”
There’s a very long pause over the line before Shaan says, “I’ll let her know,” in a voice like he’d rather do literally anything else.
Alex laughs as Henry hangs up, but he returns to his phone again, to the voicemail waiting from his mother. Henry sees his thumb hovering over the play button and nudges his ribs.
“I suppose we do have to face the consequences at some point,” he says.
Alex sighs. “I don’t think I told you, but she, uh. Well, when she fired me, she told me that if I wasn’t a thousand percent serious about you, I needed to break things off.”
Henry nuzzles his nose behind Alex’s ear. “A thousand percent?”
“Yeah, don’t let it go to your head.”
Henry elbows him again, and Alex laughs and grabs his head and aggressively kisses his cheek, smashing his face into the pillow. When Alex finally relents, Henry is pink-faced and mussed and definitely pleased.
“I was thinking about that, though,” Henry says, “the chancebeing with me is going to keep ruining your career. Congress by thirty, wasn’t it?”
“Come on. Look at this face. People love this face. I’ll figure out the rest.” Henry looks deeply skeptical, and Alex sighs again. “Look, I don’t know. I don’t even exactly know, like, how being a legislator would work if I’m with a prince of another country. So, you know. There’s stuff to figure out. But way worse people with way bigger problems than me get elected all the time.”
Henry’s looking at him in the piercing way he has sometimes that makes Alex feel like a bug stuck under a shadowbox with a pushpin. “You’re really not frightened of what might happen?”
“No, I mean, of course I am,” he says. “It definitely stays secret until after the election. And I know it’ll be messy. But if we can get ahead of the narrative, wait for the right time and do it on our own terms, I think it could be okay.”
“How long have you been thinking about this?”
“Consciously? Since, like, the DNC. Subconsciously, in total denial? A long-ass time. At least since you kissed me.”
Henry stares at him from the pillow. “That’s… kind of incredible.”
“What about you?”
“What aboutme?” Henry says. “Christ, Alex. The whole bloody time.”
“The whole time?”
“Since the Olympics.”
“TheOlympics?” Alex yanks Henry’s pillow out from under him. “But that’s, that’s like—”
“Yes, Alex, the day we met, nothing gets past you, does it?” Henry says, reaching to steal the pillow back. “‘What about you,’ he says, as if he doesn’tknow—”
“Shut yourmouth,” Alex says, grinning like an idiot, and he stops fighting Henry for the pillow and instead straddles him and kisses him into the mattress. He pulls the blankets up and they disappear into the pile, a laughing mess of mouths and hands, until Henry rolls onto his phone and his ass presses the button on the voicemail.
“Diaz, you insane, hopeless romantic little shit,” says the voice of the President of the United States, muffled in the bed. “It had better be forever. Be safe.”
Sneaking out of the palace without security at two in the morning was, surprisingly, Henry’s idea. He pulled hoodies and hats out for both of them—the incognito uniform of the internationally recognizable—and Bea staged a noisy exit from the opposite end of the palace while they sprinted through the gardens. Now they’re on the deserted, wet pavement of South Kensington, flanked by tall, red brick buildings and a sign for—
