little makeshift Situation Room upstairs, glasses on, high heels still in the suitcase, staring at the screens, hoping and trying and praying. President Mom.
“Okay,” she says evenly. “Okay. Alex. Do you think you could get up and say something for the crowd?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure, Mom,” he says. He clears his throat, and it comes out as strong as hers the second time. “Of course.”
A third pause, then. “God, I love you both so much.”
Leo leaves, and he’s quickly replaced by Zahra, whose sleek red dress and ever-present coffee thermos are the biggest comfort Alex has seen all night. Her ring flashes at him, and he thinks of Shaan and wishes desperately Henry was here already.
“Fix your face,” she says, straightening his collar as she shepherds him and June through to the main exhibit hall and into the back of the stage area. “Big smiles, high energy, confidence.”
He turns helplessly to June. “What do I say?”
“Little bit, ain’t no time for me to write you anything,” she tells him. “You’re a leader. Go lead. You got this.”
Oh God.
Confidence. He looks down at the cuffs of his jacket again, the red, white, and blue. Be Alex, Nora said when she handed it to him. Be Alex.
Alex is—two words that told a few million kids across America they weren’t alone. A letterman jacket in APUSH. Secret loose panels in White House windows. Ruining something because you wanted it too badly and still getting back up and trying again. Not a prince. Something bigger, maybe.
“Zahra,” he asks. “Did they call Texas yet?”
“No,” she says. “Still too close.”
“Still?”
Her smile is knowing. “Still.”
The spotlight is almost blinding when he walks out, but he knows something. Deep down in his heart. They still haven’t called Texas.
“Hey, y’all,” he says to the crowd. His hand squeezes the microphone, but it’s steady. “I’m Alex, your First Son.” The hometown crowd goes wild, and Alex grins and means it, leans into it. When he says what he says next, he intends to believe it.
“You know what’s crazy? Right now, Anderson Cooper is on CNN saying Texas is too close to call. Too close to call. Y’all may not know this about me, but I’m kind of a history nerd. So I can tell you, the last time Texas was too close to call was in 1976. In 1976, we went blue. It was Jimmy Carter, in the wake of Watergate. He just barely squeezed out fifty-one percent of our vote, and we helped him beat Gerald Ford for the presidency.
“Now, I’m standing here, and I’m thinking about it … A reliable, hardworking, honest, Southern Democrat versus corruption, and maliciousness, and hate. And one big state full of honest people, sick as hell of being lied to.”
The crowd absolutely loses it, and Alex almost laughs. He raises his voice into the microphone, speaks up over the sound of cheers and applause and boots stomping on the floor of the hall. “Well, it sounds a little familiar to me, is all. So, what do y’all think, Texas? ¿Se repetirá la historia? Are we gonna make history repeat itself tonight?”
The roar says it all, and Alex yells with them, lets the sound carry him off the stage, lets it wrap around his heart and squeeze back in the blood that’s drained out of it all night. The second he steps backstage, there’s a hand on his back, the achingly familiar gravity of someone else’s body reentering his space before it even touches his, a clean, familiar scent light in the air between.
“That was brilliant,” Henry says, smiling, in the flesh, finally. He’s gorgeous in a navy-blue suit and a tie that, upon closer inspection, is patterned with little yellow roses.
“Your tie—”
“Oh, yes,” he says, “yellow rose of Texas, is it? I read that was a thing. Thought it might be good luck.”
All at once, Alex is in love all over again. He wraps the tie once around the back of his hand and reels Henry in and kisses him like he never has to stop. Which—he remembers, and laughs into Henry’s mouth—he doesn’t.
If he’s talking about who he is, he wishes he’d been someone smart enough to have done this last year. He wouldn’t have made Henry banish himself to a bunch of frozen shrubbery, and he wouldn’t have just stood there while Henry gave him the most important kiss of his life. It would have been like this. He would have taken Henry’s face in both hands and kissed him hard and