He sends Henry five texts the first day. Two the second. By day three, none. He’s spent too much of his life talking, talking, talking to not know the signs when someone doesn’t want to hear him anymore.
He starts forcing himself to only check his phone once every two hours instead of once an hour, makes himself hang on by his fingernails until the minutes tick down. A few times, he gets wrapped up in obsessively reading press coverage of the campaign and realizes he hasn’t checked in hours, and every time he’s hit with a hiccupping, desperate hope that there will be something. There never is.
He thought he was reckless before, but he understands now—holding love off was the only thing keeping him from losing himself in this completely, and he’s gone, stupid, lovesick, a fucking disaster. No work to distract him. The tripwire of “Things Only People in Love Say and Do” set off.
So, instead:
A Tuesday night, hiding on the roof of the Residence, pacing so many furious laps that the skin on the backs of his heels splits open and blood soaks into his loafers.
His CLAREMONT FOR AMERICA mug, returned in a carefully marked box from his desk at the campaign office, a concrete reminder of what this already cost him smashed in his bathroom sink.
The smell of earl gray curling up from the kitchens, and his throat going
painfully tight.
Two and a half different dreams about sandy hair wrapped around his fingers.
A three-line email, an excerpt dug up from an archived letter, Hamilton to Laurens, You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent, and not knowing if Henry felt a pang when he read it, if he opened it at all.
On day five, Rafael Luna makes his fifth campaign stop as a surrogate, the Richards campaign’s token twofer minority. Alex hits a momentary emotional impasse: either destroy something or destroy himself. He ends up smashing his phone on the pavement outside the Capitol. The screen is replaced by the end of the day. It doesn’t make any messages from Henry magically appear.
On the morning of day seven, he’s digging in the back of his closet when he stumbles upon a bundle of teal silk—the stupid kimono Pez had made for him. He hasn’t taken it out since LA.
He’s about to shove it back into the corner when he feels something in the pocket. He finds a small folded square of paper. It’s stationery from their hotel that night, the night everything inside Alex rearranged. Henry’s cursive.
Dear Thisbe,
I wish there weren’t a wall. Love, Pyramus
He fumbles his phone out so fast he almost drops it on the floor and smashes it again. The search tells him Pyramus and Thisbe were lovers in a Greek myth, children of rival families, forbidden to be together. Their only way to speak to each other was through a thin crack in the wall built between them.
And that is, officially, too fucking much.
What he does next, he’s sure he’ll have no memory of doing, simply a white-noise gap of time that got him from point A to point B. He texts Cash, what are you doing for the next 24 hours? Alex unearths the emergency credit card from his wallet and buys two plane tickets, first class, nonstop. Boarding in two hours. Dulles International to Heathrow.
Zahra nearly refuses to secure a car after Alex “had the goddamn nerve” to call her from the runway at Dulles. It’s dark and pissing down rain when they land in London around nine in the evening, and he and Cash are both soaked the second they climb out of the car inside the back gates of Kensington.
Clearly, someone has radioed for Shaan, because he’s standing there at the door to Henry’s apartments in an impeccable gray peacoat, dry and unmoved under a black umbrella.
“Mr. Claremont-Diaz,” he says. “What a treat.” Alex has not got the damn time. “Move, Shaan.”
“Ms. Bankston called ahead to warn that you were on the way,” he says. “As you might have guessed by the ease with which you were able to get through our gates. We thought it best to let you kick up a fuss somewhere more private.”
“Move.”
Shaan smiles, looking as if he might be genuinely enjoying watching two hapless Americans become slowly waterlogged. “You’re aware it’s quite late, and it’s well within my power to have security remove you. No member of the royal family has invited you into the palace.”
“Bullshit,” Alex bites out. “I need to see Henry.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that. The prince does not wish to be disturbed.” “Goddammit—Henry!” He sidesteps Shaan and starts shouting up at
Henry’s bedroom windows, where there’s a light on. Fat raindrops are pelting right into his eyeballs. “Henry, you motherfucker!”
“Alex—” says Cash’s nervous voice behind him. “Henry, you piece of shit, get your ass down here!” “You are making a scene,” Shaan says placidly.
“Yeah?” Alex says, still yelling. “How ‘bout I just keep yelling and we see which of the papers show up first!” He turns back to the window and starts flailing his arms too. “Henry! Your Royal fucking Highness!”
Shaan touches a finger to his earpiece. “Team Bravo, we’ve got a situa
—”
“For Christ’s sake, Alex, what are you doing?”
Alex freezes, his mouth open around another shout, and there’s Henry
standing behind Shaan in the doorway, barefoot in worn-in sweats. Alex’s heart is going to fall out of his ass. Henry looks unimpressed.
He drops his arms. “Tell him to let me in.”
Henry sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “It’s fine. He can come
in.”
“Thank you,” he says, pointedly looking at Shaan, who does not seem to
care at all if he dies of hypothermia. He sloshes into the palace, ditching his
soaked shoes as Cash and Shaan disappear behind the door.
Henry, who led the way in, hasn’t even stopped to speak to him, and all Alex can do is follow him up the grand staircase toward his rooms.
“Really nice,” Alex yells after him, dripping as aggressively as he can manage along the way. He hopes he ruins a rug. “Fuckin’ ghost me for a week, make me stand in the rain like a brown John Cusack, and now you won’t even talk to me. I’m really just having a great time here. I can see why y’all all had to marry your fucking cousins.”
“I’d rather not do this where we might be overheard,” Henry says, taking a left on the landing.
Alex stomps up after him, following him into his bedroom. “Do what?” he says as Henry shuts the door behind them. “What are you gonna do, Henry?”
Henry turns to face him at last, and now that Alex’s eyes aren’t full of rainwater, he can see the skin under his eyes is papery and purple, rimmed pink at his eyelashes. There’s a tense set to his shoulders Alex hasn’t seen in months, not directed at him at least.
“I’m going to let you say what you need to say,” Henry says flatly, “so you can leave.”
Alex stares. “What, and then we’re over?” Henry doesn’t answer him.
Something rises in Alex’s throat—anger, confusion, hurt, bile.
Unforgivably, he feels like he might cry.
“Seriously?” he says, helpless and indignant. He’s still dripping. “What the fuck is going on? A week ago it was emails about how much you missed me and meeting my fucking dad, and that’s it? You thought you could fucking ghost me? I can’t shut this off like you do, Henry.”
Henry paces over to the elaborately carved fireplace across the room and leans on the mantelpiece. “You think I don’t care as much as you?”
“You’re sure as hell acting like it.”
“I honestly haven’t got the time to explain to you all the ways you’re wrong—”
“Jesus, could you stop being an obtuse fucking asshole for, like, twenty seconds?”
“So glad you flew here to insult me—”
“I fucking love you, okay?” Alex half yells, finally, irreversibly. Henry goes very still against the mantelpiece. Alex watches him swallow, watches the muscle that keeps twitching in his jaw, and feels like he might shake out of his skin. “Fuck, I swear. You don’t make it fucking easy. But I’m in love with you.”
A small click cuts the silence: Henry has taken his signet ring off and set it down on the mantel. He holds his naked hand to his chest, kneading the palm, the flickering light from the fire painting his face in dramatic shadows. “Do you have any idea what that means?”
“Of course I do—”
“Alex, please,” Henry says, and when he finally turns to look at him, he looks wretched, miserable. “Don’t. This is the entire goddamned reason. I can’t do this, and you know why I can’t do this, so please don’t make me say it.”
Alex swallows hard. “You’re not even gonna try to be happy?”
“For Christ’s sake,” Henry says, “I’ve been trying to be happy my entire idiot life. My birthright is a country, not happiness.”
Alex yanks the soggy note out of his pocket, I wish there wasn’t a wall, and throws it at Henry viciously, watches him pick it up. “Then what is that supposed to mean, if you don’t want this?”
Henry stares down at his words from months ago. “Alex, Thisbe and Pyramus both die at the end.”
“Oh my God,” Alex groans. “So, what, was this all never going to be anything real to you?”
And Henry snaps.
“You really are a complete idiot if you believe that,” Henry hisses, the note balled in his fist. “When have I ever, since the first instant I touched you, pretended to be anything less than in love with you? Are you so fucking self-absorbed as to think this is about you and whether or not I love you, rather than the fact I’m an heir to the fucking throne? You at least have the option to not choose a public life eventually, but I will live and die in these palaces and in this family, so don’t you dare come to me and question if I love you when it’s the thing that could bloody well ruin everything.”
Alex doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, his feet rooted to the spot. Henry isn’t looking at him, but staring at a point on the mantel somewhere, tugging at his own hair in exasperation.
“It was never supposed to be an issue,” he goes on, his voice hoarse. “I thought I could have some part of you, and just never say it, and you’d never have to know, and one day you’d get tired of me and leave, because I’m—” He stops short, and one shaking hand moves through the air in front of him in a helpless sort of gesture at everything about himself. “I never thought I’d be standing here faced with a choice I can’t make, because I never . . . I never imagined you would love me back.”
“Well,” Alex says. “I do. And you can choose.” “You know bloody well I can’t.”
“You can try,” Alex tells him, feeling as if it should be the simplest fucking truth in the world. “What do you want?”
“I want you—”
“Then fucking have me.” “—but I don’t want this.”
Alex wants to grab Henry and shake him, wants to scream in his face, wants to smash every priceless antique in the room. “What does that even mean?”
“I don’t want it!” Henry practically shouts. His eyes are flashing, wet and angry and afraid. “Don’t you bloody see? I’m not like you. I can’t afford to be reckless. I don’t have a family who will support me. I don’t go about shoving who I am in everyone’s faces and dreaming about a career in fucking politics, so I can be more scrutinized and picked apart by the entire godforsaken world. I can love you and want you and still not want that life. I’m allowed, all right, and it doesn’t make me a liar; it makes me a man with some infinitesimal shred of self-preservation, unlike you, and you don’t get to come here and call me a coward for it.”
Alex takes a breath. “I never said you were a coward.” “I.” Henry blinks. “Well. The point stands.”
“You think I want your life? You think I want Martha’s? Gilded fucking cage? Barely allowed to speak in public, or have a goddamn opinion—”
“Then what are we even doing here? Why are we fighting, then, if the lives we have to lead are so incompatible?”
“Because you don’t want that either!” Alex insists. “You don’t want any of this bullshit. You hate it.”
“Don’t tell me what I want,” Henry says. “You haven’t a clue how it feels.”
“Look, I might not be a fucking royal,” Alex says, crosses the horrible rug, moves into Henry’s space, “but I know what it’s like for your whole life to be determined by the family you were born into, okay? The lives we want—they’re not that different. Not in the ways that matter. You want to take what you were given and leave the world better than you found it. So do I. We can—we can figure out a way to do that together.”
Henry stares at him silently, and Alex can see the scales balancing in his head.
“I don’t think I can.”
Alex turns away from him, falling back on his heels like he’s been slapped. “Fine,” he finally says. “You know what? Fucking fine. I’ll leave.”
“Good.”
“I’ll leave,” he says, and he turns back and leans in, “as soon as you tell me to leave.”
“Alex.”
He’s in Henry’s face now. If he’s getting his heart broken tonight, he’s sure as hell going to make Henry have the guts to do it right. “Tell me you’re done with me. I’ll get back on the plane. That’s it. And you can live here in your tower and be miserable forever, write a whole book of sad fucking poems about it. Whatever. Just say it.”
“Fuck you,” Henry says, his voice breaking, and he gets a handful of Alex’s shirt collar, and Alex knows he’s going to love this stubborn shithead forever.
“Tell me,” he says, a ghost of a smile around his lips, “to leave.” He feels before he registers being shoved backward into a wall, and
Henry’s mouth is on his, desperate and wild. The faint taste of blood blooms on his tongue, and he smiles as he opens up to it, pushes it into Henry’s mouth, tugs at his hair with both hands. Henry groans, and Alex feels it in his spine.
They grapple along the wall until Henry physically picks him up off the floor and staggers backward, toward the bed. Alex bounces when his back hits the mattress, and Henry stands over him for several breaths, staring.
Alex would give anything to know what’s going through that fucking head of his.
He realizes, suddenly, Henry’s crying. He swallows.
That’s the thing: he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if this is supposed to be some kind of consummation, or if it’s one last time. He doesn’t think he could go through with it if he knew it was the latter. But he doesn’t want to go home without having this.
“C’mere.”
He fucks Henry slow and deep, and if it’s the last time, they go down shivering and gasping and epic, all wet mouths and wet eyelashes, and Alex is a cliché on an ivory bedspread, and he hates himself but he’s so in love.
He’s in stupid, unbearable love, and Henry loves him too, and at least for one night it matters, even if they both have to pretend to forget in the morning.
Henry comes with his face turned into Alex’s open palm, his bottom lip catching on the knob of his wrist, and Alex tries to memorize every detail down to how his lashes fan across his cheeks and the pink flush that spreads all the way up to his ears. He tells his too-fast brain: Don’t miss it this time. He’s too important.
It’s pitch black outside when Henry’s body finally subsides, and the room is impossibly quiet, the fire gone out. Alex rolls over onto his side and touches two fingers to his chest, right next to where the key on the chain rests. His heart is beating the same as ever under his skin. He doesn’t know how that can be true.
It’s a long stretch of silence before Henry shifts in the bed beside him and rolls onto his back, pulling a sheet over them. Alex reaches for something to say, but there’s nothing.
Alex wakes up alone.
It takes a moment for everything to reorient around the fixed point in his chest where last night settled. The elaborate gilded headboard, the heavy embroidered duvet, the soft twill blanket beneath that’s the only thing in the room Henry actually chose. He slides his hand across the sheet, over to Henry’s side of the bed. It’s cool to the touch.
Kensington Palace is gray and dull in the early morning. The clock on the mantelpiece says it’s not even seven, and there’s a violent rain lashing against the big picture window, half-revealed by parted curtains.
Henry’s room has never felt much like Henry, but in the quiet of morning, he shows up in pieces. A pile of journals on the desk, the topmost splotched with ink from a pen exploding in his bag on a plane. An oversized
cardigan, worn through and patched at the elbows, slung over an antique wingback chair near the window. David’s leash hanging from the doorknob.
And beside him, there’s a copy of Le Monde on the nightstand, tucked under a gigantic leather bound volume of Wilde’s complete works. He recognizes the date: Paris. The first time they woke up next to each other.
He squeezes his eyes shut, feeling for once in his life that he should stop being so damn nosy. It’s time, he realizes, to start accepting only what Henry can give him.
The sheets smell like Henry. He knows:
One. Henry isn’t here.
Two. Henry never said yes to any kind of future last night.
Three. This could very well be the last time he gets to inhale Henry’s scent on anything.
But, four. Next to the clock on the mantel, Henry’s ring still sits.
The doorknob turns, and Alex opens his eyes to find Henry, holding two mugs and smiling a wan, unreadable smile. He’s in soft sweats again, brushed with morning mist.
“Your hair in the mornings is truly a wonder to behold,” is how he breaks the silence. He crosses and kneels on the edge of the mattress, offering Alex a mug. It’s coffee, one sugar, cinnamon. He doesn’t want to feel anything about Henry knowing how he likes his coffee, not when he’s about to be dumped, but he does.
Except, when Henry looks at him again, watches him take the first blessed sip of coffee, the smile comes back in earnest. He reaches down and palms one of Alex’s feet through the duvet.
“Hi,” Alex says carefully, squinting over his coffee. “You seem . . . less pissy.”
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, “you were an 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 presses his mouth to Alex’s, one hand steadying his mug so it doesn’t spill. He tastes like toothpaste and earl gray, 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 even before, when I could sense I was different
—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 this week 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 squawk over 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
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 where she 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 chance being 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 about me?” Henry says. “Christ, Alex. The whole bloody time.” “The whole time?”
“Since the Olympics.”
“The Olympics?” 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’t know—”
“Shut your mouth,” 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 the 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—
“Stop, are you kidding me?” Alex says. “Prince Consort Road? Oh my God, take a picture of me with the sign.”
“Not there yet!” Henry says over his shoulder. He gives Alex’s arm another pull to keep him running. “Keep moving, you wastrel.”
They cross to another street and duck into an alcove between two pillars while Henry fishes a keyring with dozens of keys out of his hoodie. “Funny thing about being a prince—people will give you keys to just about anything if you ask nicely.”
Alex gawks, watching Henry feel around the edge of a seemingly plain wall. “All this time, I thought I was the Ferris Bueller of this relationship.”
“What, did you think I was Sloane?” Henry says, pushing the panel open a crack and yanking Alex into a wide, dark plaza.
The grounds are sloping, white tiles carrying the sounds of their feet as they run. Sturdy Victorian bricks tower into the night, framing the courtyard, and Alex thinks, Oh. The Victoria and Albert Museum. Henry has a key to the V&A.
There’s a stout old security guard waiting at the doors.
“Can’t thank you enough, Gavin,” Henry says, and Alex notices the thick wad of cash Henry slips into their handshake.
“Renaissance City tonight, yeah?” Gavin says. “If you would be so kind,” Henry tells him.
And they’re off again, hustling through rooms of Chinese art and French sculptures. Henry moves fluidly from room to room, past a black stone sculpture of a seated Buddha and John the Baptist nude and in bronze, without a single false step.
“You do this a lot?”
Henry laughs. “It’s, ah, sort of my little secret. When I was young, my mum and dad would take us early in the morning, before opening. They wanted us to have a sense of the arts, I suppose, but mostly history.” He slows and points to a massive piece, a wooden tiger mauling a man dressed as a European soldier, the sign declaring: TIPU’S TIGER. “Mum would take us to look at this one and whisper to me, ‘See how the tiger is eating him up? That’s because my great-great-great-great grandad stole this from India. I think we should give it back, but your gran says no.’”
Alex watches Henry’s face in quarter profile, the slight pain that moves under his skin, but he shakes it off quickly and takes Alex’s hand back up. They’re running again.
“Now, I like to come at night,” he says. “A few of the higher-up security guards know me. Sometimes I think I keep coming because, no matter how many places I’ve been or people I’ve met or books I read, this place is proof I’ll never learn it all. It’s like Westminster: You can look at every individual carving or pane of stained glass and know there’s this wealth of stories there, that everything was put in a specific place for a reason. Everything has a meaning, an intention. There are pieces in here—The Great Bed of
Ware, it’s mentioned in Twelfth Night, Epicoene, Don Juan, and it’s here. Everything is a story, never finished. Isn’t it incredible? And the archives, God, I could spend hours in the archives, they—mmph.”
He’s cut off mid-sentence because Alex has stopped in the middle of the corridor and yanked him backward into a kiss.
“Hello,” Henry says when they break apart. “What was that for?” “I just, like.” Alex shrugs. “Really love you.”
The corridor dumps them out into a cavernous atrium, rooms sprawling out in each direction. Only some of the overhead lighting has been left on,
and Alex can see an enormous chandelier looming high in the rotunda, tendrils and bubbles of glass in blues and greens and yellows. Behind it, there’s an elaborate iron choir screen standing broad and gorgeous on the landing above.
“This is it,” Henry says, pulling Alex by the hand to the left, where light spills out of an immense archway. “I called ahead to Gavin to make sure they left a light on. It’s my favorite room.”
Alex has personally helped with exhibitions at the Smithsonian and sleeps in a room once occupied by Ulysses S. Grant’s father-in-law, but he still loses his breath when Henry pulls him through the marble pillars.
In the half light, the room is alive. The vaulted roof seems to stretch up forever into the inky London sky, and beneath it the room is arranged like a city square somewhere in Florence, climbing columns and towering altars and archways. Deep basins of fountains are planted in the floor between statues on heavy pedestals, and effigies lie behind black doorways with the Resurrection carved into their slate. Dominating the entire back wall is a colossal, Gothic choir screen carved from marble and adorned with ornate statues of saints, black and gold and imposing, holy.
When Henry speaks again, it’s soft, as if he’s trying not to break the spell.
“In here, at night, it’s almost like walking through a real piazza,” Henry says. “But there’s nobody else around to touch you or gawk at you or try to steal a photo of you. You can just be.”
Alex looks over to find Henry’s expression careful, waiting, and he realizes this is the same as when Alex took Henry to the lake house—the most sacred place he has.
He squeezes Henry’s hand and says, “Tell me everything.”
Henry does, leading him around to each piece in turn. There’s a life-size sculpture of Zephyr, the Greek god of the west wind brought to life by Francavilla, a crown on his head and one foot on a cloud. Narcissus on his knees, mesmerized by his own reflection in the pool, once thought to be Michelangelo’s lost Cupid but actually carved by Cioli—“Do you see here, where they had to repair his knuckles with stucco?”—Pluto stealing Proserpina away to the underworld, and Jason with his golden fleece.
They wind up back at the first statue, Samson Slaying a Philistine, the one that knocked the wind out of Alex when they walked in. He’s never
seen anything like it—the smooth muscles, the indentations of flesh, the breathing, bleeding life of it, all carved by Giambologna out of marble. If he could touch it, he swears the skin would be warm.
“It’s a bit ironic, you know,” Henry says, gazing up at it. “Me, the cursed gay heir, standing here in Victoria’s museum, considering how much she loved those sodomy laws.” He smirks. “Actually . . . you remember how I told you about the gay king, James I?”
“The one with the dumb jock boyfriend?”
“Yes, that one. Well, his most beloved favorite was a man named George Villiers. ‘The handsomest-bodied man in all of England,’ they called him. James was completely besotted. Everyone knew. This French poet, de Viau, wrote a poem about it.” He clears his throat and starts to recite: “‘One man fucks Monsieur le Grand, another fucks the Comte de Tonnerre, and it is well known that the King of England, fucks the Duke of Buckingham.’” Alex must be staring, because he adds, “Well, it rhymes in French. Anyway. Did you know the reason the King James translation of the Bible exists is because the Church of England was so displeased with James for flaunting his relationship with Villiers that he had the translation commissioned to appease them?”
“You’re kidding.”
“He stood in front of the Privy Council and said, ‘Christ had John, and I have George.’”
“Jesus.”
“Precisely.” Henry’s still looking up at the statue, but Alex can’t stop looking at him and the sly smile on his face, lost in his own thoughts. “And James’s son, Charles I, is the reason we have dear Samson. It’s the only Giambologna that ever left Florence. He was a gift to Charles from the King of Spain, and Charles gave it, this massive, absolutely priceless masterpiece of a sculpture, to Villiers. And a few centuries later, here he is. One of the most beautiful pieces we own, and we didn’t even steal it. We only needed Villiers and his trolloping ways with the queer monarchs. To me, if there were a registry of national gay landmarks in Britain, Samson would be on it.”
Henry’s beaming like a proud parent, like Samson is his, and Alex is hit with a wave of pride in kind.
He takes his phone out and lines up a shot, Henry standing there all soft and rumpled and smiling next to one of the most exquisite works of art in the world.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m taking a picture of a national gay landmark,” Alex tells him. “And also a statue.”
Henry laughs indulgently, and Alex closes the space between them, takes Henry’s baseball cap off and stands on his toes to kiss the ridge of his brow.
“It’s funny,” Henry says. “I always thought of the whole thing as the most unforgivable thing about me, but you act like it’s one of the best.”
“Oh, yeah,” Alex says. “The top list of reasons to love you goes brain, then dick, then imminent status as a revolutionary gay icon.”
“You are quite literally Queen Victoria’s worst nightmare.” “And that’s why you love me.”
“My God, you’re right. All this time, I was just after the bloke who’d most infuriate my homophobic forebears.”
“Ah, and we can’t forget they were also racist.”
“Certainly not.” Henry nods seriously. “Next time we shall visit some of the George III pieces and see if they burst into flame.”
Through the marble choir screen at the back of the room is a second, deeper chamber, this one filled with church relics. Past stained glass and statues of saints, at the very end of the room, is an entire high altar chapel removed from its church. The sign explains its original setting was the apse of the convent church of Santa Chiara in Florence in the fifteenth century, and it’s stunning, set deep into an alcove to create a real chapel, with statues of Santa Chiara and Saint Francis of Assisi.
“When I was younger,” Henry says, “I had this very elaborate idea of taking somebody I loved here and standing inside the chapel, that he’d love it as much as I did, and we’d slow dance right in front of the Blessed Mother. Just a . . . daft pubescent fantasy.”
Henry hesitates, before finally sliding his phone out of his pocket. He presses a few buttons and extends a hand to Alex, and, quietly, “Your Song” starts to play from the tiny speaker.
Alex exhales a laugh. “Aren’t you gonna ask if I know how to waltz?” “No waltzing,” Henry says. “Never cared for it.”
Alex takes his hand, and Henry turns to face the chapel like a nervous postulant, his cheeks hollowed out in the low light, before pulling Alex into it.
