Red, White & Royal Blue (23 page)

“Hello, excuse me, can we get another round of these please?” Alex calls down the bar.

Bea screams, Henry laughs and throws up a V, and it all goes hazy and warm in the way Alex loves. They all tumble
into a round booth, and the lights are low, and he and Henry are keeping a safe distance, but Alex can’t stop staring at how the special-effect beams keep hitting Henry’s cheekbones, hollowing his face out in blues and greens. He’s something else—half-drunk and grinning in a $2,000 suit and a kimono, and Alex can’t tear his eyes away. He waves over a beer.

Once things get going, it’s impossible to tell how Bea is the one persuaded up to the stage first, but she unearths a plastic crown from the prop chest onstage and rips through a cover of “Call Me” by Blondie. They all wolf whistle and cheer, and the bar crowd finally realizes they’ve got two members of the royal family, a millionaire philanthropist, and the White House Trio crammed into one of the sticky booths in a rainbow of vivid silk. Three rounds of shots appear—one from a drunk bachelorette party, one from a herd of surly butch chicks at the bar, and one from a table of drag queens. They raise a toast, and Alex feels more welcomed than he ever has before, even at his family’s victory rallies.

Pez gets up and launches into “So Emotional” by Whitney Houston in a shockingly flawless falsetto that has the whole club on their feet in a matter of moments, shouting their approval as he belts out the glory notes. Alex looks over in giddy awe at Henry, who laughs and shrugs.

“I told you, there’s nothing he can’t do,” he shouts over the noise.

June is watching the whole performance with her hands clapped to her face, her mouth hanging open, and she leans over to Nora and drunkenly yells, “Oh,
no
 … he’s … so … hot…”

“I know, babe,” Nora yells back.

“I want to … put my fingers in his mouth…” she moans, sounding horrified.

Nora cackles and nods appreciatively and says, “Can I help?”

Bea, who has gone through five different lime and sodas so far, politely passes over a shot that’s been handed to her as Pez pulls June up on stage, and Alex throws it back. The burn makes his smile and his legs spread a little wider, and his phone is in his hand before he registers sliding it out of his pocket. He texts Henry under the table:
wanna do something stupid?

He watches Henry pull his own phone out, grin, and arch a brow over at him.

What could be stupider than this?

Henry’s mouth falls open into a very unflattering expression of drunken, bewildered arousal, like a hot halibut, at his reply several beats later. Alex smiles and leans back into the booth, making a show of wrapping wet lips around the bottle of his beer. Henry looks like his entire life might be flashing before his eyes, and he says, an octave too high, “Right, well, I’ll just—nip to the loo!”

And he’s off while the rest of the group is still caught up Pez and June’s performance. Alex gives it to the count of ten before slipping past Nora and following. He swaps a glance with Cash, who’s standing against one wall, gamely wearing a bright pink feather boa. He rolls his eyes but peels off to watch the door.

Alex finds Henry leaning against the sink, arms folded.

“Have I mentioned lately that you’re a
demon
?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Alex says, double-checking the coast is clear before grabbing Henry by the belt and backing into a stall. “Tell me again later.”

“You—you know this is still not convincing me to sing, don’t you?” Henry chokes out as Alex mouths along his throat.

“You really think it’s a good idea to present me with a challenge, sweetheart?”

Which is how, thirty minutes and two more rounds later, Henry is in front of a screaming crowd, absolutely butchering “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen while Nora sings backup and Bea throws glittery gold roses at his feet. His kimono is dangling off one shoulder so the embroidery across the back reads
PRINCE BUTT
. Alex does not know where the roses came from, and he can’t imagine asking would get him anywhere. He also wouldn’t be able to hear the answer because he’s been screaming at the top of his lungs for two minutes straight.

“I wanna make a supersonic woman of youuu!”
Henry shouts, lunging violently sideways, catching Nora by both arms.
“Don’t stop me! Don’t stop me! Don’t stop me!”

“Hey, hey, hey!”
the entire bar yells back. Pez is practically on top of the table now, pounding the back of the booth with one hand and helping June up onto a chair with the other.

“Don’t stop me! Don’t stop me!”

Alex cups his hands around his mouth.
“Ooh, ooh, ooh!”

In a cacophony of shouting and kicking and pelvic-thrusting and flashing lights, the song blasts into the guitar solo, and there’s not a single person in the bar in their seat, not when a Prince of England is knee-sliding across the stage, playing passionate and somewhat erotic air guitar.

Nora has produced a bottle of champagne and starts spraying Henry with it, and Alex loses his
mind
laughing, climbs on top of his seat and wolf whistles. Bea is absolutely beside herself, tears streaming down her face, and Pez actually is on top of the table now, June dancing beside him, with a bright fuschia smear of lipstick in his platinum hair.

Alex feels a tug on his arm—Bea, dragging him down to the
stage. She grabs his hand and spins him in a ballerina twirl, and he puts one of her roses between his teeth, and they watch Henry and grin at each other through the noise. Alex feels somewhere, under the fifty layers of booze, something crystal clear radiating off her, a shared knowledge of how rare and wonderful this version of Henry is.

Henry is yelling into the microphone again, stumbling to his feet, his suit and kimono stuck to him with champagne and sweat in a confusingly sexy mess. His eyes flick upward, hazy and hot, and unmistakably lock with Alex’s at the edge of the stage, smiling broad and messy.
“I wanna make a supersonic man outta youuuuu!”

By the end, there’s a standing ovation awaiting him, and Bea, with a steady hand and a devilish smile, ruffling his champagne-sticky hair. She steers him into the booth and Alex’s side, and he pulls her in after him, and the six of them fall together in a tangle of hoarse laughter and expensive shoes.

He looks at all of them. Pez, his broad smile and glowing joy, the way his white-blond hair flashes against smooth, dark skin. The curve of Bea’s waist and hip and her punk-rock grin as she sucks on the rind of a lime. Nora’s long legs, one of which is propped up on the table and the other crossed over one of Bea’s, her thigh bare where her dress has ridden up. And Henry, flushed and callow and lean, elegant and thrown wide open, his face always turned toward Alex, his mouth unguarded around a laugh, willing.

He turns to June and slurs, “Bisexuality is truly a rich and complex tapestry,” and she screams with laughter and shoves a napkin in his mouth.

Alex doesn’t catch much of the next hour—the back of the limo, Nora and Henry jostling for a spot in his lap, an In-N-
Out drive-thru and June screaming next to his ear, “Animal Style, did you hear me say Animal Style? Stop fucking laughing, Pez.” There’s the hotel, three suites booked for them on the very top floor, riding through the lobby on Cash’s impossibly broad back.

June keeps shushing them as they stumble to their rooms with hands full of grease-soaked burger bags, but she’s louder than any of them, so it’s a zero-sum game. Bea, perpetually the lone sober voice of the group, picks one of the suites at random and deposits June and Nora in the king-size bed and Pez in the empty bathtub.

“I trust you two can handle yourselves?” she says to Alex and Henry in the hallway, a glimmer of mischief in her eyes as she hands them the third key. “I fully intend to put on a robe and investigate this french-fries-dipped-in-milkshake thing Nora told me about.”

“Yes, Beatrice, we shall behave in a manner befitting the crown,” Henry says. His eyes are slightly crossed.

“Don’t be a tosser,” she says, and quickly kisses them both on the cheek before vanishing around the corner.

Henry’s laughing into the curls at the nape of Alex’s neck by the time Alex is fumbling the door open, and they stumble together into the wall, and then toward the bed, clothes dropping in their wake. Henry smells like expensive cologne and champagne and a distinctly Henry smell that never goes away, clean and grassy, and his chest encompasses Alex’s back when he crowds up behind him at the edge of the bed, splaying his hands over his hips.

“Supersonic man out of youuuu,”
Alex mumbles low, craning his head back into Henry’s ear, and Henry laughs and kicks his knees out from under him.

It’s a clumsy, sideways tumble into bed, both of them grabbing greedy handfuls of the other, Henry’s pants still dangling from one ankle, but it doesn’t matter because Henry’s eyes are fluttered shut and Alex is finally kissing him again.

His hands start traveling south on instinct, sweet muscle memory of Henry’s body against his, until Henry reaches down to stop him.

“Hold on, hold on,” Henry says. “I’m just realizing. All that earlier, and you haven’t gotten off yet tonight, have you?” He drops his head back on the pillow, regards him with narrowed eyes. “Well. That just shall not do.”

“Hmm, yeah?” Alex says. He takes advantage of the moment to kiss the column of Henry’s throat, the hollow at his collarbone, the knot of his Adam’s apple. “What are you gonna do about it?”

Henry pushes a hand into his hair and gives it a little pull. “I shall just have to make it the best orgasm of your life. What can I do to make it good for you? Talk about American tax reform during the act? Have you got talking points?”

Alex looks up, and Henry is grinning at him. “I hate you.”

“Maybe some light lacrosse role-play?” He’s laughing now, arms coming up around Alex’s shoulders to squeeze him to his chest.
“O captain, my captain.”

“You’re literally the worst,” Alex says, and undercuts it by leaning up to kiss him once more, gently, then deeply, long and slow and heated. He feels Henry’s body shifting beneath his, opening up.

“Hang on,” Henry says, breaking off breathlessly. “Wait.” Alex opens his eyes, and when he looks down, the expression on Henry’s face is a more familiar one: nervous, unsure. “I do actually. Er. Have an idea.”

He slides a hand up Henry’s chest to the side of his jaw, ghosting over his cheek with one finger. “Hey,” he says, serious now. “I’m listening. For real.”

Henry bites his lip, visibly searching for the right words, and apparently comes to a decision.

“C’mere,” he says, surging up to kiss Alex, and he’s putting his whole body into it now, sliding his hands down to palm at Alex’s ass as he kisses him. Alex feels a sound tear itself from his throat, and he’s following Henry’s lead blindly now, kissing him deep into the mattress, riding a continuous wave of Henry’s body.

He feels Henry’s thighs—those goddamn horseback-riding, polo-playing thighs—moving around him, soft, warm skin wrapping around his waist, heels pressing into his back. When Alex breaks off to look at him, the intention on Henry’s face is as plain as anything he’s ever read there.

“You sure?”

“I know we haven’t,” Henry says quietly. “But, er. I have, before, so, I can show you.”

“I mean, I’m familiar with the mechanics,” Alex says, smirking a little, and he sees a corner of Henry’s mouth quirk up to mirror him. “But you want me to?”

“Yeah,” he says. He pushes his hips up, and they both make some unflattering, involuntary noises. “Yes. Absolutely.”

Henry’s shaving kit is on the nightstand, and he reaches over and fumbles blindly through it before finding what he’s looking for—a condom and a tiny bottle of lube.

Alex almost laughs at the sight. Travel-size lube. He’s had some experimental sex in his lifetime, but it never occurred to him to consider if such a thing existed, much less if Henry was jetting around with it alongside his dental floss.

“This is new.”

“Yes, well,” Henry says, and he takes one of Alex’s hands in his and brings it to his own mouth, kissing his fingertips. “We all must learn and grow, mustn’t we?”

Alex rolls his eyes, ready to snark, except Henry sucks two fingers into his mouth, very effectively shutting him the hell up. It’s incredible and baffling, the way Henry’s confidence comes in waves like this, how he struggles so much to get through the asking for what he wants and then readily takes it the moment he’s given permission, like at the bar, how the right push had him dancing and shouting as if he’d been waiting for someone to tell him he was allowed to do it.

They’re not as drunk as they were, but there’s enough alcohol in their systems, and it doesn’t feel as daunting as it would otherwise, the first time, even as his fingers start to find their way. Henry’s head falls back onto the pillows, and he closes his eyes and lets Alex take over.

The thing about sex with Henry is, it’s never the same twice. Sometimes he moves easily, caught up in the rush, and other times he’s tense and taut and wants Alex to work him loose and take him apart. Sometimes nothing gets him off faster than being talked back to, but other times they both want him to use every inch of authority in his blood, not to let Alex get there until he’s told, until he begs.

It’s unpredictable and it’s intoxicating and it’s
fun,
because Alex has never met a challenge he didn’t love, and he—well, Henry is a challenge, head to toe, beginning to end.

Tonight, Henry’s silly and warm and ready, his body quick and smooth to give Alex what he’s looking for, laughing and incredulous at his own responsiveness to touch. Alex leans down to kiss him, and Henry murmurs into the corner of his mouth, “Ready when you are, love.”

Alex takes a breath, holds it. He’s ready. He thinks he’s ready.

Henry’s hand comes up to stroke along his jaw, his sweaty hairline, and Alex settles himself between his legs, lets Henry lace the fingers of his right hand with Alex’s left.

He’s watching Henry’s face—he can’t imagine looking at anything other than Henry’s face right now—and his expression goes so soft and his mouth so happy and astonished that Alex’s voice speaks without his permission, a hoarse “baby.” Henry nods, so small that someone who didn’t know all his tics might miss it, but Alex knows exactly what it means, so he leans down and sucks Henry’s earlobe between his lips and calls him
baby
again, and Henry says, “Yes,” and, “Please,” and tugs his hair at the root.