Red, White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston Page 0,108

stash.

“Salud,” he mutters under his breath, and he unscrews the top.

bad metaphors about maps

* * *

A                 9/25/20 3:21 AM

to Henry

h,

i have had whiskey. bear with me.

there’s this thing you do. this thing. it drives me crazy. i think about it all the time.

there’s a corner of your mouth, and a place that it goes. pinched and worried like you’re afraid you’re forgetting something. i used to hate it. used to think it was your little tic of disapproval.

but i’ve kissed your mouth, that corner, that place it goes, so many times now. i’ve memorized it. topography on the map of you, a world i’m still charting. i know it. i added it to the key. here: inches to miles. i can multiply it out, read your latitude and longitude. recite your coordinates like la rosaria.

this thing, your mouth, its place. it’s what you do when you’re trying not to give yourself away. not in the way that you do all the time, those empty, greedy grabs for you. i mean the truth of you. the weird, perfect shape of your heart. the one on the outside of your chest.

on the map of you, my fingers can always find the green hills, wales. cool waters and a shore of white chalk. the ancient part of you carved out of stone in a prayerful circle, sacrosanct. your spine’s a ridge i’d die climbing.

if i could spread it out on my desk, i’d find the corner of your mouth where it pinches with my fingers, and i’d smooth it away and you’d be marked with the names of saints like all the old maps. i get the nomenclature now—saints’ names belong to miracles.

give yourself away sometimes, sweetheart. there’s so much of you.

fucking yrs,

a

p.s. wilfred owen to siegfried sassoon—1917:

And you have fixed my Life—however short. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me. I spun round you a satellite for a month, but shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze.

Re: Bad metaphors about maps

* * *

Henry                 9/25/20 6:07 AM

to A

From Jean Cocteau to Jean Marais, 1939:

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for having saved me. I was drowning and you threw yourself into the water without hesitation, without a backward look.

* * *

The sound of Alex’s phone buzzing on his nightstand startles him out of a dead sleep. He falls halfway out of bed, fumbling to answer it.

“Hello?”

“What did you do?” Zahra’s voice nearly shouts. By the clicking of heels in the background and muttered swearing, she’s running somewhere.

“Um,” Alex says. He rubs his eyes, trying to get his brain back online. What did he do? “Be more specific?”

“Check the fucking news, you horny little miscreant—how could you possibly be stupid enough to get photographed? I swear to God—”

Alex doesn’t even hear the last part of what she says, because his stomach has just dropped all the way down through the floor and into the fucking basements two floors below.

“Fuck.”

Hands shaking, he switches Zahra to speaker, opens up Google, and types his own name.

BREAKING: Photos Reveal Romantic Relationship Between Prince Henry and Alex Claremont-Diaz

OMFG: FSOTUS and Prince Henry—Totally Doing It

THE ORAL OFFICE: READ FSOTUS’S STEAMY EMAILS TO PRINCE HENRY

Royal Family Declines to Comment on Reports of Prince Henry’s Relationship with First Son

25 GIFs That Perfectly Describe Our Reaction When We Heard About Prince Henry & FSOTUS

DON’T LET FIRST SON GO DOWN ON ME

A bubble of hysterical laughter emerges from his throat.

His bedroom door flies open, and Zahra slams on the light, a steely expression of rage barely concealing the sheer terror on her face. Alex’s brain flashes to the panic button behind his headboard and wonders if the Secret Service will be able to find him before he bleeds out.

“You’re on communications lockdown,” she says, and instead of punching him, she snatches his phone out of his hand and shoves it down the front of her blouse, which has been buttoned wrong in her rush. She doesn’t even blink at his state of half-nakedness, just dumps an armload of newspapers onto his bedspread.

QUEEN HENRY! twenty copies of the Daily Mail proclaim in gigantic letters. INSIDE THE PRINCE’S GAY AFFAIR WITH THE FIRST SON OF THE UNITED STATES!

The cover is splashed with a blown-up photo of what is undeniably himself and Henry kissing in the back seat of the car behind the cafe, apparently shot with a long-range lens through the windshield. Tinted windows, but he forgot about