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May 2024, New York City
It’s the end of spring 2024, and Alex is pretty sure they’re going to break up.
It’s not what either of them wants, not really—of course it’s fucking not. But they’re at an impasse, and Alex knows neither of them can really see a way forward.
They got through the least promising first meeting ever, through years of misguided animosity, through cake, through Henry ghosting Alex not once but twice, through goddamned Richards and the emails leaking and Queen Mary…
They’ve gotten through so many absolutely terrible things, but Alex doesn’t know how they get through the sheer reality of life.
Because there are no monsters right now; no dragons to slay, no nightmares to conquer. The enemy is inexorable and inescapable and it doesn’t have a top or a bottom, a beginning or an end.
The enemy is time, and Alex—who hasn’t yet faced a fight he isn’t ready to take on, who refuses to take a no, who is always ready to plant himself like a tree and say “no, you move”—feels utterly helpless before it.
They had a plan, is the thing.
They had a plan, and lists, and things that were going to happen: Alex would finish law school and Henry would finish his book, and Alex would go into Big Law for a while and then switch to civil rights or immigration law or maybe even politics, while Henry undertook the complex but necessary process of abdication, and then marriage, probably; kids, maybe.
A life.
And then, the Republicans started fighting back for every shred of Texas that the Claremont campaign and the tireless, incredible volunteers and voters had clawed back from them, and Alex felt like his very soul was being torn because that was his Texas.
His place, his lifeblood, the messy place that made him so much of who he is.
So when the DNC contacted him, floating the idea of running as Representative in one of the competitive districts for the State Legislature as soon as he could—he’d need two years of residency—Alex didn’t immediately say no.
It wasn't the federal government, which felt a little too much at this point; it was at the State level.
And those were his people: brown and black and queer and immigrant people, who had done so much to make their voices matter, to make their voices finally count.
Could Alex leave them to fight alone?
Henry didn’t immediately say no either. He understood, he’d been there for so much of it. Alex could see the idea of being in the limelight, of Alex being in politics again so soon didn’t thrill him, but it still felt possible.
“I’ll start the abdication process sooner, and we’ll—we’ll set clear rules, proper schedules. We’ll make it, love.”
But then, Queen Mary died.
It had been a phone call, in the middle of a sunny Saturday morning, not even a stormy dark night, no pathetic fallacy to herald what was coming. Just Bea, calling Henry, and Henry’s face going from a gentle smile to a frown, and then to pained thoughtfulness.
London Bridge had fallen down, and Catherine was asking for Henry.
They’d mended a lot of fences, since Catherine had come down firmly on their side in the struggle against Mary, but there was always some part of Henry that came back a little sad, a little lost, whenever he went to London to see her. Like he was happy to slowly reconnect with her, but still cautious.
Mary’s death didn’t necessarily seem like it would be different, but then it was.
“She—she wants to change so many things, Alex. Wants to make sure that whatever power or prestige is left in the Monarchy, it’s used to have a meaningful impact in people’s lives. And—and she asked for my help.”
And so the abdication has to wait.
But if the abdication waits, then Henry as a romantic partner to Alex becomes a far larger complication for an election than the whole “bisexual and in love with some English guy” already is, something which Nora’s polling and statistical analysis has made abundantly, depressingly clear and which no speech of June’s, however well-written, can overcome.
Which brings them to tonight, where Alex is waiting for Henry in the brownstone kitchen in the dark, and staring down at the paper in front of him, desperately trying to make two plus two equal five.
- Alex is running for the Texas 17th and he needs to move there yesterday to make it happen.
- Henry’s going back to England for an undetermined amount of time to help Catherine, and he’s going to remain Prince Henry for the duration.
- Alex can’t live with himself if he asks Henry to stay with him…
- ... and he can’t live with himself if he doesn’t give this election a shot.
- Alex loves Henry. Henry loves Alex.
- Love is not enough to solve all of the above.
Because love is not enough to change geography, or the succession of the British throne, or the fact that Alex’s candidacy is dead in the water if his partner is a foreign royal.
Alex wishes he knew how to make the equation work.
Wishes desperately that he knew somebody who could tell him how to make it work; that looking at the list and thinking of holding on and damn the consequences wasn’t taking him right back to hearing screaming arguments even with his Walkman turned on high, to a treacherous path that ends with slammed doors and empty closets.
But what he has is him, and Henry, and they’ve gotten through so fucking much but he doesn’t see how they get through this one.
Time passes and the list doesn’t change and eventually the gloomy silence is broken by the sounds of Henry coming home: the click of his key turning the lock, the door creaking open, the low, soothing sound of Henry’s voice as he unclips David from his leash and the clickety-clack of David’s paws on the wood as he runs toward his water bowl.
It’s the well-known soundtrack of the routine of those days they actually get to spend in the same city and under the same roof, and not staying late at the law library (Alex), flying overseas for the christening of the seventh son of the seventh son of a random Marquis (Henry), giving some speech because his mom can’t make it (Alex), or stuck in an airport because of bad weather (both, more often than they should).
The days together have been more rare than they wanted, when they first moved into the brownstone—an uphill battle to be Alex and Henry rather than First Son and Prince which they simply haven’t been able to win, and which maybe they’ve just lost for good.
The sound of Henry’s footsteps precede his actual presence in the kitchen, and he’s suddenly there, warm and Alex’s, at least for now.
“What are you doing in the dark, love?” Henry asks softly, turning on the light by the stove.
He looks dangerously beautiful in the soft amber light: his hair gleams and his eyes are the truest of blues, his mouth the one place Alex wants to spend a lifetime in, and can’t.
Alex shrugs a little, unable to speak, and Henry catches sight of the legal pad, the pen, Alex’s untidy scrawl.
“Ah,” he says, a world of resignation in the syllable. “Did you come up with anything?”
This conversation has basically been ongoing for nearly three weeks, is the thing, in fits and starts, in proposals that are unworkable, in possible options that fizzle out as soon as they’re verbalized. But neither of them has put their cards entirely on the table; neither of them has dared.
They both know what the cards would read.
So Alex shakes his head slowly, and Henry’s face falls—a flash of utter devastation which he tries to quickly cover up with a half-smile.
“I figured if there was any way, your lists would find it,” Henry says, voice a little hoarse. “They’ve changed the world in so many ways already.”
Alex thinks of the reams and reams of papers buried underneath the window seat in the old Austin house, the endless post-its littering his desk at the White House, and the truest list he ever wrote: incomplete, and torn from both of them.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think we can actually achieve time-travel with a list,” Alex says, aiming for some levity, and missing by a mile because his voice sounds like he’s been crying on and off for about four hours.
Which he has been.
Henry walks closer and sits on the stool next to Alex, letting his legs press into Alex’s the way they always do whenever they have breakfast together.
“I just—everything I went through, everything I allowed for the Crown… it has to be for something,” Henry says, placing an unsteady hand near number two on the list. “With my mother’s support, I can actually attempt something that truly matters. That changes something, rather than endless ribbon-cutting ceremonies.”
“I know, H,” Alex tells him. “I really, really get it.”
Because Alex does, of course he does.
They’ve discussed it, since Catherine called: the fact that she wants Henry’s help specifically to spearhead the Crown’s campaign on LGBTIQ+ rights, that she wants to do whatever she could to undo one of the many terrible consequences of the British Empire on many of the countries of the Commonwealth.
And with Catherine as Queen, Henry as the gay Prince isn’t a problem to be buried any longer, but an opportunity to reach out, to do more, to actually put the Crown to practical use.
An opportunity for the years and years of being under Mary’s thumb to mean more than the sum of its horrible, lonely parts.
Alex can’t take that away from Henry, the same way Henry can’t take away Texas and all it means from Alex.
“So where do we go from here?” Henry asks, voice nearly trembling.
“I don’t know, H,” Alex says, lifting a shoulder, feeling a little like he’s dying. “It’s not fair of me to ask you to stay and come with me to Texas, and I… I haven’t found any way where I can go with you and make the election work. So I just—I can’t really see any way forward.”
Neither of them have dared to use the word, in the month they’ve been circling around this reality, this stark set of choices.
Break up.
Alex doesn’t know that either of them will actually say it, wonders if they’re both hoping that if they never say it it won’t be real.
It feels unspeakable, is the thing. Unspeakable and unthinkable and yet at the same time relentlessly inevitable.
Alex hates that he’s starting to get it, why his dad walked out while he was at camp, why all the love in the world couldn’t make him stay, couldn’t keep their family together. As it turns out, when it comes to the stark reality of life, to the bloodless mathematics of choices like these, love feels like it’s being crushed by the sheer weight of everything else.
“What if we met in secret, when we could?” Henry offers.
And Alex has thought about it, of course. He contemplated it seriously, even, if only for a second. But they’d gone through the elevator leak, the emails—a secret never stays secret.
“Go back to how it was, before Kensington and everything after?” Alex says, shakes his head.
How could he survive that? When he’s been with Henry on a stage, proud and triumphant for the world to see? When he’s been with Henry in a home, creating routines and choosing favorite sides of the couch? How can they go back to the shadows now that they’ve been in the sunlight?
“I don’t think I can do that. I love you like I’ll never love anyone, Henry. Having only some of you will kill me. It’s all of you, or…”
“Or none,” Henry says quietly.
“Yeah.”
They look at each other in silence, and Alex sees his own pain starkly reflected in Henry’s eyes.
“I don’t know how to do this,” Henry says, finally, putting a hand on top of Alex’s where he’s fidgeting with his pen; quietly taking care of him, even now, even in the middle of this. “I don’t know how we—how we’re supposed to—”
Alex drops the pen entirely, turns his hand and squeezes Henry’s.
“We—we have dinner, and we have tonight, and—” Alex pauses, swallows. Forces himself to say the hardest thing he’s ever said. “And tomorrow morning we say goodbye.”
Alex has a deadline to get to Texas, and Henry has a deadline to get back to London, and unfortunately, both of those deadlines are here.
Henry nods, blinking quickly, and Alex stands up, decides that if nothing else, he will make sure they follow the plan.
So he puts on one of the playlists they both agree on, hoping the soft music filling the room will help, and he goes about putting together a simple diner: red rice and milanesas, which throw Alex back to eating at his abuela’s house, and which Henry loves.
As Alex cooks, they talk about nothing much: the new sandwich special at the bodega down the street—Henry is cautiously for, Alex vehemently against; the fact that the bougie coffee shop close to the subway station appears to have changed owners yet again and an unnecessary rebrand is imminent; the latest gossip they’ve been able to glean from observations about the co-op polycule living in the brownstone three houses down…
It’s the low-stakes, everyday minutiae of the life and the routines they’ve built together over the last three years, and if Alex makes himself stop and think about it, actually think about the fact that he’s about to lose it, he’ll start crying hysterically into his milanesa.
So he powers through, and Henry does the same across from him, and they finish dinner.
Henry pours them another glass of wine, and leads Alex out of the kitchen by the hand before he can do anything about the dishes.
“Don’t worry about them tonight, Alex,” he says, softly, and steers him to the living room.
David glances up from his bed in the corner, but since they have wine and no treats, he huffs and goes back to sleep.
Henry, for his part, goes to the mantle and lights his favorite candle—an indulgently expensive one he got from Diptyque, filling the room with the scent of sandalwood. He also picks a specific song on their playlist and as the gentle guitar and piano start playing he holds out a hand to Alex.
Alex takes it—he can’t not—and lets his body sink into Henry’s as he’s led into a slow, meandering dance in the spaces between the coffee table and the couch.
It’s dreamy and sad, and every mournful I’ll be seeing you harmonizing their steps feels like a prophecy. Henry’s in his fucking bone marrow: Alex will see him in everything he ever does from now on.
As the song draws to an end, Alex raises his head from where he’d let it rest in the crook of Henry’s neck and kisses Henry slowly, tastes the tears they’ve both silently shed. The kiss deepens, intensifies, and turns from slow to almost frantic in a split-second.
Alex clutches at Henry and swallows his moans, and Henry clutches him right back, his hands restlessly wandering from Alex’s back to his waist and to his ass and then traveling up again, pulling Alex’s shirt from his pants in his wake, making him shiver.
He just wants Henry, so fucking much, all the time.
It’s never stopped; he doesn’t think it ever will.
“Bedroom,” Alex whispers, and Henry nods, breathing heavily and resting his forehead against Alex’s for a moment before pulling away.
Alex watches, fondness mixing with anticipated heartbreak, as Henry blows out the candle, gives David a goodnight scratch on the neck, and finally turns to lead Alex up the stairs and toward their bedroom, which, he guesses, will soon be only Henry’s again.
They undress in silence, watching each other, and Alex pretends he doesn’t see Henry’s hands shaking a little the same way Henry pretends he doesn’t see the tears Alex is blinking out of his eyes.
When Henry moves closer, runs his hands across Alex’s back again with no barrier between them anymore, it makes Alex feel like he’s being touched for the first time; like his body is being undone and then put back together for Henry alone.
He lets himself get lost in it, lets himself give everything he has to give—his body and his heart and the very breath in his lungs, because he knows, he knows, his body will never really feel his own again.
He gave it in LA and he gave it in Paris, along with his whole heart; maybe earlier—maybe underneath the linden trees, or earlier even, without knowing it, as far back as Rio.
And as Henry carefully lays him on the bed and settles himself between his knees, enters Alex shaking and almost undone already, Alex can’t regret it.
“Alex, you—” Henry starts, breaks off.
They look at each other, history and sex and love and grief saturating the air around them as Alex’s body opens for Henry, as Henry enters him again and again and, as it’s always happened, Alex finds himself just as he loses himself to the sensation..
“You’re—” Henry tries again, gasps, accepts the messy kiss Alex gives him, an encouragement and question both.
“You’re the love of my life,” Henry finally manages to say into his ear, soft and broken, and kisses the tears that Alex allows to fall as he comes.
It’s true for Alex as well, of course, but he can’t make his mouth put the words together; can’t do much more but roll right back into Henry’s body after he pulls out and kiss whatever patch of skin he can find until tiredness wins out.
They fall asleep tangled together, sticky and uncaring, and wake up pretty much the same.
Alex lingers, runs a soft hand through Henry’s hair as Henry rubs a soothing circle on his chest. They quietly watch the sun slowly encroach on the room, signaling an end to much more than the night before, and fuck, Alex never thought he’d genuinely feel so very much like Romeo—thinks back on the disbelief his old high school self felt about anyone wanting to pretend sunshine was moonlight.
He’d give everything to make this moment last forever: he’d spend a lifetime in this liminal space and call it well-spent.
Eventually neither one of them can ignore the buzzing of their phones any longer; Cash and Amy are waiting for Alex, and Shaan is more likely than not running after Henry to nail down a timeline for his return to London.
So they get up, and they go through their side-by-side morning routines one last time—Alex remembers when they’d first done this, three years ago, and he’d thought it would fold into their lives so much he’d stop noticing it.
As it would turn out, they were able to do it less often than he thought, in between their crazy schedules, so it never stopped being something he noticed, and it’s now it’s just one more thing he’s losing.
While Henry goes down to feed David, Alex gathers the basic things he needs, his laptop, a few clothes, toiletries, and not much more because he doesn’t have the heart to take all of it, not now; he’ll hire someone to come after Henry’s left as well.
Before he walks out of their bedroom for the last time, Alex remembers the little black velvet box he’d hidden in the very back of his sock drawer, in the corner where sock pairs got forever lost because it was so oddly inaccessible.
He carefully opens the drawer, doing everything he can to avoid any jarring noises, and rumages until his hands touch the misshapen sock bundle and takes it out.
Alex stares down at the little box in his hands, deceivingly innocuous, and wonders if he’ll ever feel like this again about another person who isn’t Henry.
He really fucking doubts it.
Henry is waiting for him in the hallway that leads to the door when he makes it downstairs, looking utterly beautiful and utterly heartbroken.
“You have everything you need?” he asks softly.
Alex shrugs, because he doesn’t—he won’t be taking Henry, so he pretty much thinks he won’t have everything he needs for the rest of his life, but there’s no real way to say that, and anyway Henry already knows, because he nods.
They stand by the entrance, looking at each other. They’ve said their goodbyes, said as much as they can, except the one thing they most want to: stay.
“Have a safe trip, love,” Henry finally says, as always finding a diplomatic way through.
“You too, H,” Alex says, and he can’t stop himself, he leans in for one last kiss.
It’s short, but no less intense for that—Alex doesn’t think kissing Henry will ever not feel like he’s dying and then coming back to life all at once—and then Alex pulls back and opens the door, because if he doesn’t leave now, he never will.
He glances back once Cash and Amy have herded him inside the car, and sees Henry is still in the doorway, solemn and pale, looking right at him.
Alex doesn’t look away until the SUV turns the corner, and he knows the last glimpse of Henry in their home, in that place that was supposed to be the start of forever but instead was the silent witness to their end, is bound to always haunt him.
He’s right.
We embroidered the memories of the time I was away
Stitching, "We were just kids, babe"
I said, "I don't mind, it takes time"
I thought I was better safe than starry-eyed
I felt a glow like this
Never before and never since
July 2034, Austin, TX -Lake LBJ
It’s the middle of summer 2034, and Alex is done with politics.
He’s fought like his life—like the life of his constituents—depends on it; he’s haggled and pressured and charmed and given loud speeches and filibustered with the best and the worst of them and stared down assholes in dark rooms; slept very little and eaten worse.
And he’s finally gotten through three pieces of legislation that cost him blood, sweat, and tears, and a lot more than he usually lets himself remember: automatic voter registration, a new district map that makes actual sense and not Republican sense, and ranked voting for the great state of Texas.
There’s been more, of course, over the years, but that was the goal; that was what he wanted, when he decided to run.
The fight isn’t over yet, obviously.
It never actually is, that’s the point: every step forward has to be fought for over and over and over again so it doesn’t turn into two steps back.
But Alex wants to fight it in a different place now, while he still has hope and fire in his soul rather than a war-chest and cynicism. Because there’s a part of him that can so easily see the way to keep going—to keep getting re-elected and maybe jump over to the bigger leagues, go for the House of Representatives or even the Senate, follow in the footsteps of his dad and Raf.
It would be really fucking easy, but if he’s learned anything these past ten years it’s that, as it turns out, he doesn’t want to be his dad, or Raf, or his mom. He wants to be Alex.
So needs to get out while there’s still some of Alex left to make it out.
“So what’s the plan now, Little Bit?” June asks, voice a little tinny over the phone.
Alex shrugs, looks around the office where he’s spent a lot more time than his apartment in Austin and definitely than in his house in Bastrop, the couch where he’s slept more nights than he can remember, the French press that is never really empty except when one of his aides takes it away for a wash before a new type of fungi is created in it.
He mostly feels relief, at the thought of leaving all of it behind, and it’s that above all which tells him he’s making the right call.
“UT Austin’s offered me a lecturing series as soon as next semester, if I’m up for it,” he replies. “And I’m talking to RAICES, seeing if I can join the Legal Services team in their Austin office.”
“That sounds really good, Alex,” June says, pauses for a moment, her breath coming through as a burst of static. “But what’s the plan outside of work?”
It’s a question June asked often when Alex first ran, and asked less and less often when Alex couldn’t come up with much of an answer outside of going for very early morning runs and the occasional NDA’d as hell hook-up.
He hasn’t really dated. He tells everyone that he hasn’t had the time, which is actually true, but…
“I don’t know yet,” Alex finally replies.
June must read a lot more into that than Alex is ready for, because she hums in understanding.
“You better have a better answer than that when I see you at the lake house this weekend,” she says, and before he can say anything else, hits him with a bomb. “Pez is bringing Henry.”
It’s a surprise and it’s not.
Pez has been flitting in and out of June and Nora’s relationship for years, now, in various ways and configurations Alex very much does not want to think about, and him showing up at the traditional Claremont-Diaz Fourth of July gathering at Lake LBJ isn’t exactly unusual.
Henry showing up is, though.
It’s not that they haven’t seen each other in the past ten years, or that Alex hasn’t heard from Henry at all.
They’ve remained cordial and genuinely friendly if they happened to run into each other at one of Pez’s galas, and of course Henry came to Austin to inaugurate the Okonjo Foundation LGBTIQ+ shelter where Alex was one of the keynote speakers, given the fact that he and a few of his fellow legislators had pushed hard to make the shelter happen.
But there’s always been a line, since the break-up; things they don’t say, topics they don’t touch, memories they stay well away from.
A distance, both emotional and physical, that they don’t cross.
It was incredibly hard, immediately after: Alex’s mom had been right, of course, in that their names would be forever linked even if their lives weren’t any longer.
And then time passed, and no horrible dirt was spilled, no blind items anywhere, only good things and good wishes shared if they ever were asked about each other, and the scrutiny died down a little.
Alex was a State Representative in Texas and whatever headlines he made were all about that, and Henry, well. Henry took on his mom’s challenge and ran with it: speeches, foundations, donations, nearly outright lobbying, tours of the Commonwealth, all of it.
Eventually dating again, too, which made Alex feel a little insane: happy that Henry was okay, of course, but also kinda like he wanted to throw up.
The last time Alex saw Henry in person had been at least a couple of years ago, a charity event for the Austin shelter—single again, apparently, from Pez’s whispered aside, but they’d basically only exchanged hellos before Alex had to run right back to the Capitol to stave off a late night amendment ambush attempt on a bill he was co-sponsoring.
But this will be different.
This will be Henry in private; Henry with the blue, blue water behind him—nearly as blue as his own eyes—and the sun in his hair, and the freckles on his shoulders.
A Henry that Alex could reach out and touch, in ways that have felt utterly impossible for a long time. A Henry that could reach out and touch Alex.
It's been nearly ten years, and that means that every blood cell and skin cell in Alex’s body that was around when Henry was is long gone and replaced, and yet his body feels just as much Henry’s as it did then.
Entire patches of skin, organs, the very blood in his veins—forever haunted.
It’s also been a long time since he’s felt the bargain was worth it. There have been more nights than he’s willing to admit when he’s wished, desperately, for a way to go back to his twenty-five year old self and tell him that sacrificing love and calling it a life will end up making life feel empty.
The fight had to be fought, yes.
But maybe not by them.
Maybe not right then.
“Is that okay, Alex?” June asks, and Alex realizes he’s been quiet on the line too long.
“Yeah, Bug, of course,” he reassures her. “It’s—it’s more than okay.”
Still, after he hangs up with June, once they’re done discussing the logistics of who will take what up to the house and nail down some specifics on the menu, Alex shoots off a text to Nora.
tell me if doing something over again is doomed
numbers-wise
irl chaos demon
if this is about trying a buzzcut again YES IT ISirl chaos demon
if it’s about henry, fucking go for it, 100000%listen my jawline looked amazing okay idc what you say
but fine
and yeah maybe it’s about henry
irl chaos demon
great, i’ll make sure your room is stocked with condoms. obviously whatever you had in there expired five years ago, you absolute non-slutthat was way harsh, tai
With that particular bit of approval, Alex starts letting himself hope.
It’s a peculiar feeling—like using some long-forgotten muscle. He hasn’t been in the business of hoping much, the last few years. Planning, yes; maneuvering and glad-handing and quietly moving pieces into place until what he was aiming for came together.
But hoping had felt a little too reckless; a little too much like something he’d left behind along with more than half of his heart that morning at the brownstone in Brooklyn.
It feels possible now, as he packs up the last of his things, looks around the office one last time, and walks out of the Capitol as regular Alex again, and no longer State Rep. Claremont-Diaz.
He can hope again, and maybe, just maybe, if Henry is up for it, make a new bargain.
The days leading up to the weekend are busy with all that dismantling the political side of his career entails, from having a couple of necessary goodbye lunches and coffees with some of his key allies, having goodbye drinks with his staff, drafting a lot of recommendation letters and a goodbye letter to his constituents, to listing his house in Bastrop.
He’s also putting together a more serious proposal for his lecturing series, and going back over his Immigration Law notes whenever he’s not doing that.
And, yeah, maybe he’s keeping himself extra distracted so he doesn’t have that much time to let himself freak out about the Henry of it all, but he’s not admitting it out loud, no matter how many texts about condoms Nora keeps sending.
It works, kind of, all the way up until the drive down to the lake house.
But then he’s parking in his usual spot and getting his bag and a whole bunch of groceries out, struggling a little because he maybe brought too many tortillas and too much home-made salsa and mezcal even though it’s never enough, and that’s when he hears him.
“Let me help you with that, love.”
It makes his heart stop for what feels like a full fucking minute—but of course it’s not, of course it’s not because he’s not dropping dead—and then start racing.
It’s the voice, of course, but also the casual pet name. It’s—it’s something Henry uses all the time, with the people he’s close to, so it doesn’t mean—it doesn’t mean—
But it at least means that even after ten years and that line they couldn’t cross, Henry still considers him one of his own, the same way Alex does, the same way he always will.
“Ye-yeah, thanks,” he says, after clearing his throat, not daring to turn, not just yet.
And then he feels Henry, the heat of him, come close, stand right behind him, and it’s all he can do not to lean back, let himself rest against that body he knew as well as his own.
Henry reaches to grab the canvas bags that are about to fall, enveloping Alex for a moment, and Alex glances sideways and up, meets his eyes. They’re already on Alex’s, steady and blue, a sky Alex desperately missed falling into.
They share the load for just a moment, and then Henry takes the lion’s share of the groceries and walks towards the house, leaving Alex with his bag and a single bottle of mezcal, staring at the way the muscles of Henry’s back shift beneath his soft chambray shirt, the way the slightly too-long hair at the back of his head brushes his collar.
Well.
This is certainly going to be some kind of weekend.
He follows Henry inside to find a controlled sort of chaos: Nora mixing up margaritas, Pez attempting to teach June some sort of dance along to whatever music they have on, and Henry dodging all three of them and trying to get the groceries in the right place.
David is half-dozing on a corner, blinking at all of them blearily, and Alex guesses if he was younger he’d be barking in the midst, trying to get a treat.
“Alejandro!” Nora yells, when she catches sight of him, somehow splattering a dash of margarita on the counter. “Finally someone who can cook!”
Pez comes to a dead stop at that, accidentally making June stumble into him, and making Henry stumble into her, the most ridiculous sort of dominos. Thankfully, Henry is able to salvage the salsa because Alex would’ve killed them all—finding decent chile morita to make it took a good chunk of his afternoon yesterday.
“I do protest,” Pez exclaims, putting a hand on his puffed out chest. “Have I not fed you many a wonderful delicacy in your time, Miss Holleran?”
“I mean, yeah, but are you actually sober enough to cook anything right now?” Nora shoots back.
“Ah. No, not,” Pez says, decisively.
Nora nods. “So, back to my previous point: Alejandro! Finally someone who can cook!”
Alex shakes his head, unable to keep himself from grinning. “I can’t believe y’all. I drive all the way here and all you want me for is my cooking skills? Not even a hello, how are you?”
“Well, no, we also want you for your devastating cheekbones, darling,” Pez says, disentangling from June and smacking a kiss on one of Alex’s aforementioned cheekbones, while Nora shouts about Austin only being like an hour away.
June pulls Alex into a proper hug, doing the usual big sister thing where she tries to figure out if he’s lost too much weight at the same time as she hugs him.
“I’m fine, Bug,” Alex reassures her. “I haven’t been running that much, and I even ate a whole vegetable yesterday.”
It was an avocado he sliced into a couple of quesadillas he made himself for dinner once he realized he’d spent too long reading up on the latest immigration court precedents to do anything more complex, but it still counts.
June grumbles a little but lets him go, and Alex finally makes it into the kitchen where Henry is putting the last of the groceries away, a fond little smile on his face.
“Still running too much whenever you’re stressed?” he asks Alex, soft and knowing.
Alex raises a helpless shoulder. “I had to deal with legislators every single day, H. I was always stressed.”
“Fair enough,” Henry says. “So, how can I help?”
Alex tilts his head a little. “We’re not gonna be making quiche, you know?”
“I can make things other than quiche, as you well know, and I’ve actually-” Henry starts arguing, and then stops, rolling his eyes when he catches sight of Alex’s shit-eating grin. “You’re a pest.”
“Always,” Alex says, because even fifty years on that will never not be true. “Are you up to helping me make salpicón? We can have tostadas, it’s way too hot for anything else.”
“I’ll cut the carrots and the potatoes,” Henry agrees, and they fall into the rhythm of making dinner together almost like no time has passed.
Almost.
Alex can’t help but notice some of the changes: Henry’s hair has darkened into a more burnished gold, making him look more like his dad, and he’s a little more broad in the shoulders than he used to be. Alex himself is a little leaner—his body settled fully into a runner’s build because he doesn’t have the time to do a full gym routine—and he’s wearing his glasses all the time now, the cost of reading so many endless bills with stupid tiny font sizes.
Still, it’s the exact sort of comfort Alex needed right now, and as the day wears on and they eat tostadas and drink more margaritas, Alex feels the years roll off his shoulders, lets himself laugh and drink and raucously sing out of tune to the old school Shakira playlist June has imposed upon all of them.
Nobody’s watching him; nobody is waiting for him to make a mistake, to say the wrong thing, to run his mouth just enough that he dooms this week’s amendment or screws up this month’s bill.
He can just be, and it’s been such a long fucking time.
He wishes Bea were here, too—wishes she could be part of how the years have fallen off all of them, how they’re remembering how to be careless and happy together, not ambassadors of their countries or their duties or their causes, but just old friends laughing together again after too long.
He remembers LA, suddenly, his birthday, being newly twenty-two and drunk and so in love he could have died, drinking and singing and feeling like he belonged, finally.
He wants to go back to his twenty-two year old self, grab him by the face and tell him to pay attention, to not forget a single second of it, but…
But he doesn’t have to, because he’s never forgotten.
How could he forget Henry’s face lit up in the multicolored lights of the karaoke bar, his crooked grin, as truly recklessly happy as Alex had ever seen it? How could he forget the very first time he ever sank into Henry’s body that night, lost himself there, never really ever found himself again—not that he wanted to?
June catches his eyes for a moment, quirking an eyebrow, checking in.
He smiles at her, lets the past stay where it belongs, lets himself be fully present in the enveloping joy of the here and now, lets himself drink another margarita and lean into the warmth of Henry’s body when Henry sits next to him on the couch.
Henry doesn’t move away.
It’s a good night.
The next morning he’s up earlier than anybody else, probably because while he did put away a fair number of margaritas, the other four had gotten started before him, so he sets about getting things together for breakfast.
He takes out the two gigantic French presses that he forced his dad to buy for the lake house years ago, loading them up with fresh coffee, and rummages in one of the smaller shopping bags Henry didn’t manage to put away until he finds the box of Earl Grey he brought—Henry’s preferred brand, from the ones he can get in the U.S.
He plates up some fruit and just as he’s wondering whether he should do pancakes or maybe just set out some bagels and muffins, David pads into the kitchen, clearly looking for a treat.
Alex kneels down to greet him, scratching behind his ears.
“Hey, boy, you remember me?”
David snuffles agreeably, leaning into Alex, and yeah, he’s older but he seems to remember Alex well enough. He wonders why Henry brought him over—he never really did that for short trips before—but he’s too happy to see him to complain.
“He missed you.”
Alex looks up at the voice to see Henry leaning against the kitchen counter, looking appealingly sleep-rumpled.
“I missed him,” Alex admits easily, because there’s no use denying it.
He got used to having a dog, over the three years they lived together, and it felt like loneliness on top of loneliness not having anything but a particularly resistant cactus, but with his schedule over the last few years, even the cactus struggled.
Henry smiles fondly, something of the past but entirely of the present in the corner of his mouth.
“Pancakes okay for breakfast? Or do you want something else?” Alex asks him, still petting David.
“Pancakes are wonderful,” Henry says. “As long as there’s cinnamon in the batter.”
“Of course,” Alex promises, and with a last ruffle of David’s ears, groans back to his feet.
All that running hasn’t been particularly kind to his knees.
He starts putting together the batter while Henry sets the kettle to boil, and accepts a cup of coffee when it’s ready, smiles as the smell of bergamot mixes with everything else in the kitchen.
Some nights—the particularly hard ones, of which there were many—Alex would brew a cup of Earl Grey and let it go cold in his own kitchen counter, finding the smallest bit of comfort in the ghost the scent conjured.
It’s good to be around the real thing right now.
After a moment of comfortable silence, Henry clears his throat.
“Alex, I—I hope it’s truly alright that I’m here,” he says. “Pez said that June really just sort of told you I was coming, not asked you, and I—”
“Hey, H, of course it’s okay,” Alex interrupts, before Henry gets into a spiral. “I mean, yeah, June just told me, but I almost always agree when she tells me things. And I really agreed with this one. It’s good to have you here.”
Henry grins, glancing down at his tea and then back up again, a delicate blush suffusing his cheeks.
“It’s good to be here,” he says quietly. “I’ve seen all of you, of course, but. It’s different, here. Better.”
“I know what you mean,” Alex says, because he truly, truly does. “And, hey, you’re treated to the full June and Nora and Pez show, no holds barred, which is always something to see, which is another reason I’m thrilled you’re here—I don’t have to be the weird fourth wheel.”
Henry laughs a little. “They are quite something, aren’t they? It’s rather wonderful that they’ve carved out a space for themselves where what they have truly works for them.”
Alex nods, and as he starts carefully pouring batter into the pan and trying to keep the pancakes in shape, he senses Henry’s circling around something else.
There’s always been a particular quality to his silences, when he’s trying to figure out how to ask something.
“Have you always—I mean—has nobody else helped you, with the fourth wheel situation?” he asks, with careful hesitance. “No serious relationship?”
Alex feels a thrilling sort of zing at the question, and at what it might point towards, but takes a deep breath, reminds himself to hold his fucking horses.
“Not really,” Alex shrugs.
He thinks about explaining how it had felt like there’d been a crater inside him, where Henry used to be, how it seemed impossible for anything else to take hold inside the whistling, barren emptiness of that space—how it seemed unfair to even let another person try.
But it feels a little too heavy for the golden-lit morning, so he offers the second, much easier explanation.
“With the hours I kept, my longest-term relationship was with the couch in my office, honestly. Anyway, anything more serious you probably would’ve read about.”
It’s not vanity, not really—even with the lesser degree of coverage that local politics usually comes with, Alex kept making headlines whenever he did something, good or bad, just by virtue of the double-whammy of being an ex-FSOTUS and the ex-boyfriend of a Prince.
“I guess you read about, uh. About me and Sesan,” Henry says after a moment, clearing his throat.
Alex raises his eyebrows. It’s not like he could have missed it—not like anyone could have missed it.
The press had gone nuts, tabloids putting out issue after issue, and the story had trended for days on social media: history repeating itself, a Prince of England falling for Olusesan Jones, a British-Nigerian stage actor famous for doing Shakespeare; the perfect love story for Catherine and Arthur’s son.
Alex had been in the middle of a marathon filibustering session over a voting rights bill when the news had broken, and it had almost broken him, but he couldn’t let it show.
So he’d kept going, keeping the floor on and on and on to give time for the frantic negotiations in the hallways and back chambers and when they’d managed to agree on acceptable amendments, he’d finally walked off the podium, voice completely shot, exhausted, nodding at the back claps and congratulations from his fellow Democrats, and let himself quietly cry in the bathroom.
It had been the risk, of course, when they’d let each other go. That one of them would find someone else; figure out the timing and the insanity of their lives with someone else.
It hadn’t stopped his heart from breaking all over again; he’d wondered, sometimes, if it wasn’t so broken that parts of it were nothing but dust.
“Hard not to,” he finally replies, and Henry glances down, looking a little uncomfortable. “I did wonder for a while there if I’d only end up being a footnote in the story of the romance of the century.”
Henry’s head shoots back up, his eyes wide and dark blue with overwhelming emotion.
“Christ, Alex, never,” he says, vehemently. “Sesan was lovely, but you—you’re—you’ll always be—”
He trails off, and they both hear it, in the silence, an echo of what Henry had said, that last night they were together.
The love of my life.
“Yeah,” Alex says after a moment, voice rough. “You were, too. It was never that the love wasn’t there, it was just—”
“Everything else,” Henry offers, a sad smile on his lips.
Before Alex can say anything else, though, Nora, June, and Pez clatter into the kitchen, demanding coffee and breakfast, and the moment is swept away in their collective noise.
The rest of the day is filled with as many of their usual lake house activities as they can pack in: taking the boat out in the water, sunbathing, an ill-advised game of drunken Marco Polo, and an even more ill-advised game of drunken charades.
Just as the afternoon is giving way into the evening, Alex makes his way back to the kitchen to get everything ready for the barbecue, ready to channel his inner Claremont rather than his inner Diaz.
Henry comes in about ten minutes later, looking sun-kissed and tottering just a little bit on his feet, earnestly asking how he can help, and Alex is really trying not to read too much into it but it’s hard not to.
He would dare anybody to have Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor follow after them time and time again and not let themselves want it for forever.
But a hungry set of thirty-somethings are not a force to be messed with, so Alex directs Henry toward preparing the elotes—he figures seasoning them and wrapping them up in tinfoil doesn’t leave too much room for screw ups—and goes about checking on the various bits of meat, poultry, and portobello mushrooms he left in the fridge to marinade in the morning and putting together some of the sides.
He feels buzzed, and happy, and as he and Henry move around in the kitchen and talk about nothing much at all—Phillip’s ill-advised haircut, Ellen accidentally triggering a listicle around tablescapes after posting too many of Leo’s on Instagram, the fact that the son and apparent heir of the man who owns Henry’s favorite falafel cart apparently married and defected to a taco truck across the park, sparking scandal—and it’s easy.
It’s so fucking easy, in a way things haven’t been for so long.
June notices, of course.
She walks into the kitchen to make another batch of sangria and steal a bite of the guacamole in process, and while Henry is distracted with a particularly stubborn bit of foil, leans into Alex’s shoulder.
“You look happy, Little Bit,” she whispers.
She hasn’t told him anything close to that in years. It’s been tired, or stressed, or too thin, or sometimes, on those days when he could finally make some things happen, satisfied.
But not happy.
“I am,” Alex says.
“You should keep it,” June says, decisive and sweet, the way she always is when she’s drunk a little too much red wine.
“Keep what?” Alex asks her, smiling a little.
“Whatever it is that’s making you happy,” June explains, like it’s obvious.
Alex’s eyes immediately stray to where Henry is triumphantly sharing with David that he’s finished with all the elotes, doing a little hip shake of celebration that is ridiculous and endearing and the sort of unselfconscious Henry hardly ever lets himself be.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Alex says, glancing back to June to meet knowing eyes.
Once the food is ready, they take it out to the patio and Alex mans the grill, using every bit of knowledge ever accrued by being Ellen Claremont’s kid and usual grill gopher.
Henry takes it upon himself to make sure Alex always has a drink or a plate or a spatula, the hottest fucking kitchen assistant of all time, and by the time the food is ready and everyone is eating, the sun is starting to dip into the horizon.
Pez declares the food excellent and promises he’ll try to get Alex a Michelin star (“You can’t give Michelin stars to, like, a person who cooks in their house, Pez” “Strumpet, you can do anything you set your heart to! Also I know people, and I’m very rich.” Which is, of course, hard to argue against) and everyone eats so much they sober up a little.
Nora and June light a respectable bonfire in the fire pit, and they have decadent and creative s’mores for dessert while they wait for the fireworks—Henry gets increasingly messy, melted chocolate and marshmallow smeared on his lips, and Alex thinks it would be so easy, so easy, to just kiss it all away, but tries to restrain himself and hands him napkins instead.
When the fireworks finally start they move to the pier, ooh-ing and aah-ing, picking favorites and guessing color combinations.
Alex leans close to Henry, asks, “Isn’t there some royal decree against enjoying the U.S. independence this much? Won’t you get dragged to a dungeon or something when you go back?”
Henry turns to look at him, and he lifts an insouciant shoulder. “Well—I submitted all the paperwork to abdicate before coming here, and my mum promised me I wouldn’t have to go back to sign anything else until the furor died down, so I’m not too concerned about dungeons. It’s why I brought Davey with me, actually.”
Alex’s mouth drops open and he knows he’s staring, but fucking hell.
“Happy Independence Day to you, too, H,” he finally says, smiling.
Henry smiles back, wide and crooked, all Henry Fox and not one bit of His Royal Highness Prince Henry, the multi-colored lights reflecting in his eyes in truly mesmerizing ways, and Alex loves him.
Loves him like he did in LA, and in Paris, and like the first time they were on this pier, and when they danced among ancient statues, and when they stepped out on a balcony for all the world to see, and when they moved in together, and like he did when he moved out.
Henry seems to know or guess what Alex is thinking because he presses closer, lets his fingers tangle with Alex’s, and that’s how they watch the rest of the fireworks—hand in hand.
Once the fireworks are over, Nora turns to look at them, and raises an eyebrow when she looks at their joined hands.
Alex braces himself for yet another joke about condoms, but instead Nora gives the least convincing stretch and yawn he’s ever seen and practically drags June and Pez back to the house.
“Do you want to go inside, too?” Henry asks.
“Not really,” Alex says, even though he means absolutely the hell not, but, hey, trying to keep it cool. “D’you—is it okay if we stay out here a while longer?”
“Very okay,” Henry replies with a small smile.
Alex relaxes where he’s sitting next to Henry on the pier, breathing in deeply and taking in the soft sounds of the lake at night, oddly loud after the cacophony of fireworks.
He doesn’t let go of Henry’s hand.
“Do you think I abdicated too late?” Henry asks after a moment.
Alex looks over at him, sees the furrow in his brow that betrays true worry.
“What do you mean by too late?”
“We just—we had so many plans and things we wanted to do together and everything became so complicated, once I chose to stay on as an active Royal,” Henry says, biting his lip. “It seemed so important at the time. But I don’t know if it was worth—”
He breaks off, looks down at where their hands are joined together between them.
“We were so young, H,” Alex tells him. “I didn’t see it that way at the time, of course, but now, looking back…” He pauses for a moment. “We were so young, and so unused to our time being our own. We only really had those couple of months, that holiday after the election, and then it was back to packed schedules and law school and whatever the Palace needed, and… I just don’t think we had the time to just settle into anything, to try to figure out how to keep each other and keep up with everything else.”
Henry nods. “I think you’re right. I didn’t feel young at the time, of course—I think the last time I felt young was before my dad was diagnosed, but. I do see what you mean.”
Alex scoots a little closer, wishing desperately—as he always has—that there was a way to undo the terrible pain Arthur’s death brought Henry even as he knows it’s a hurt that nothing can undo.
He wants to be as open with Henry as Henry is being with him, though, to repay the trust. So he shares his own doubts.
“I gotta be honest, H, I don’t know that we knew how to have smaller lives, then. How to—how to lead good lives and do good things separate from duty. How to lead lives of service that wouldn’t eat us alive.” Alex stops, and then shares something he would never, ever tell another living soul. “You know, right after I won the election, that very first one… my team was celebrating and June and Nora and my parents were hugging me, and you sent me that text to congratulate me, and I realized—”
Henry’s barely breathing next to him, entirely focused on Alex, and he raises his eyebrows, inviting Alex to continue.
“—I realized I would’ve actually been okay, if I’d lost. As it turns out, what I wasn’t okay with was losing you, but I was a whole two years late and more than a few dollars short for that realization to do much good.”
Henry’s face crumples. “Oh, darling.”
“Don’t get me wrong, H—I’m really fucking proud of what I achieved, just like I’m really fucking proud of what you achieved,” Alex says quickly, squeezing Henry’s hand in his for emphasis. “But I really don’t know that I’d want to do it again. At least… not without you.”
Henry looks at Alex for a moment, his face brimming with emotion, and without another word, he leans closer and kisses him.
It’s the kind of kiss that Alex hasn’t had for ten years: a kiss that knows him, that owns him, that takes over every part of his brain that is going in a million directions a million times an hour and makes him stop, makes him be entirely present in his own body.
He kisses back, of course, one arm going around Henry and clutching him closer, another lifting until he’s resting a hand on the side of Henry’s face, running a thumb over his jaw—a perfect cliff he’ll never stop breaking himself against, if only because he’s always found his truest self in its magnificent edges.
The kiss keeps going, slow and frantic by turns, a rewinding of time and a brand new beginning all at once.
“D’you—should we take this inside?” Henry finally gasps against his lips, the way his hand is buried in Alex’s hair not exactly betraying too much urgency.
“As long as we don’t have to stop kissing for more than a couple of minutes, sure,” Alex says, means it.
Henry pulls back then, a glint of challenge and sheer joy in his eyes. It’s mesmerizing.
“Alright, then—race you,” he says, and then springs upright with the sort of grace that only years of polo and etiquette training can give a person before running towards the house.
It takes Alex a second longer than he’d like to admit to get up and follow after him—his knees, again—but he’s running as fast as he can soon enough.
Things slow down a little when they’re in Alex’s room; an odd shyness when they both seem to realize at the same time that they haven’t seen each other naked for a decade, after knowing each other down to the backs of their knees.
But if Henry was brave enough to kiss him on the pier, Alex can be brave now—he takes off his shirt and his swim trunks and reaches for Henry to help him undress until they’re both bare.
Henry runs a reverent hand down Alex’s chest, leaving a trail of goosebumps as his fingers move over Alex’s skin. The memory of Henry doing this the very first time they had sex collapses with the here and now, where the skin and cells and the very blood that was haunted by Henry are all coming back to life.
“Christ, Alex—you’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever known,” Henry says, blinking away tears.
“That can’t be true, because you exist,” Alex tells him seriously, and catches Henry’s trailing hand in his own, brings it up to his mouth to kiss his knuckles.
Henry shivers, closes his eyes, and when he opens them again they’re all heat and purpose: he tugs Alex close by the hand still connecting them and leads him to the bed and between his gorgeous, endless legs.
“Fuck me, Alex,” he whispers, and Alex is undone.
Entering Henry again feels like an absolution, like the answer to the questions that plagued him during those uneasy midnights when he couldn’t bring himself to leave his office only to go back to a yawningly empty house. Their bodies find a rhythm soon enough, inexorable and inescapable, a gravity between them years and continents apart could never unmake.
This is where he belongs, where they belong together.
Alex has never been more Alex than when he’s with Henry: he knows this to be absolutely true. The ten years apart have proven that much.
When it’s over they lie like parenthesis, breathing deeply, just looking at each other. Alex had more than a few bittersweet dreams like this, over the years, but no dream could ever really hold up to the heartbreaking beauty of the real Henry.
“Henry?” Alex asks, breaking the nearly solemn silence. “Did you mean it, when you said you’d be staying here in the US for a while?”
“I did, yes,” Henry replies, looking a little puzzled.
“Are you—are you thinking of staying somewhere in particular?”
“Well, Pez has a place in New York where I’ve stayed more than a few times, so I thought perhaps there, but—” and here Henry pauses, tilts his head a little. “But I’m open to a different option if one were to be available, of course.”
“So if I said you should stay with me, specifically, like—in Austin… would that be an option for you?”
The question is tentative, because Alex feels like it’s a little crazy to consider it, but the possibility of letting Henry go all over again is unimaginable.
“Yes, Alex,” Henry says, like a vow, a small, beautiful smile on his face.
Alex grins in relief, and then thinks about the small black box he still has, that he’s kept all this time, in every sock drawer he’s had.
He thinks about jumping, and about cliffs, and about doing things again and finding grace instead of doom, and he asks what he wanted to ask ten years ago.
“And—and if I said that we should get married, maybe?”
Henry’s smile widens at that, even as he takes a shaky breath, and instead of answering he pulls on the thin gold chain around his neck, lifts the ring that hangs on it that Alex hadn’t looked at too closely when they undressed.
“This is my father’s wedding ring,” he says. “He—he left it to me so I could propose to the person I loved one day. I think that, even though I wasn’t able to tell him out loud, he knew that person would be a man.”
Alex opens his mouth, can’t even begin to find the words for the vast love he feels for Henry and for Arthur Fox, even though he wasn’t lucky enough to meet him.
“How long have you worn it?” he eventually asks. He would’ve remembered it if he’d seen it before.
Henry glances down at the ring and then back up at Alex, and Alex sees his past in the endless blue of Henry’s eyes, but he sees his future, too—their future.
“For ten years,” Henry replies. “I put it on when I arrived in England, after we—well. It was a promise I made to myself that when the timing was right, I’d go wherever you were and never let you go again.”
“Baby,” Alex whispers, overwhelmed.
Henry lifts his chin a little—still the bravest son of a bitch Alex has ever known—and says, “So it’s not a question of whether I’ll marry you, Alex, but if you’ll marry me.”
And Alex laughs even as he pulls Henry for a kiss that is all yes.