Red, White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston Page 0,16
follows an impulse and drives his elbow into Henry’s side, hard.
Henry lets out a muffled yelp, and the next thing Alex knows, he’s been yanked sideways by his shirt and Henry is halfway on top of him, pinning him down with one thigh. His head throbs where he’s clocked it against the linoleum floor, but he can feel his lips split into a smile.
“So you do have some fight in you,” Alex says. He bucks his hips, trying to shake Henry off, but he’s taller and stronger and has a fistful of Alex’s collar.
“Are you quite finished?” Henry says, sounding strangled. “Can you perhaps stop putting your sodding life in danger now?”
“Aw, you do care,” Alex says. “I’m learning all your hidden depths today, sweetheart.”
Henry exhales and slumps off him. “I cannot believe even mortal peril will not prevent you from being the way you are.”
The weirdest part, Alex thinks, is that what he said was true.
He keeps getting these little glimpses into things he never thought Henry was. A bit of a fighter, for one. Intelligent, interested in other people. It’s honestly disconcerting. He knows exactly what to say to each Democratic senator to make them dish about bills, exactly when Zahra’s running low on nicotine gum, exactly which look to give Nora for the rumor mill. Reading people is what he does.
He really doesn’t appreciate some inbred royal baby upending his system. But he did rather enjoy that fight.
He lies there, waits. Listens to the shuffling of feet outside the door. Lets minutes go by.
“So, uh,” he tries. “Star Wars?”
He means it in a nonthreatening, offhanded way, but habit wins and it comes out accusatory.
“Yes, Alex,” Henry says archly, “believe it or not, the children of the crown don’t only spend their childhood going to tea parties.”
“I assumed it was mostly posture coaching and junior polo league.”
Henry takes a deeply unhappy pause. “That … may have been part of it.”
“So you’re into pop culture, but you act like you’re not,” Alex says. “Either you’re not allowed to talk about it because it’s unseemly for the crown, or you choose not to talk about it because you want people to think you’re cultured. Which one?”
“Are you psychoanalyzing me?” Henry asks. “I don’t think royal guests are allowed to do that.”
“I’m trying to understand why you’re so committed to acting like someone you’re not, considering you just told that little girl in there that greatness means being true to yourself.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and if I did, I’m not sure that’s any of your concern,” Henry says, his voice strained at the edges.
“Really? Because I’m pretty sure I’m legally bound to pretend to be your best friend, and I don’t know if you’ve thought this through yet, but that’s not going to stop with this weekend,” Alex tells him. Henry’s fingers go tense against his forearm. “If we do this and we’re never seen together again, people are gonna know we’re full of shit. We’re stuck with each other, like it or not, so I have a right to be clued in about what your deal is before it sneaks up on me and bites me in the ass.”
“Why don’t we start…” Henry says, turning his head to squint at him. This close Alex can just make out the silhouette of Henry’s strong royal nose. “… with you telling me why exactly you hate me so much?”
“Do you really want to have that conversation?”
“Maybe I do.”
Alex crosses his arms, recognizes it as a mirror to Henry’s tic, and uncrosses them.
“Do you really not remember being a prick to me at the Olympics?”
Alex remembers it in vivid detail: himself at eighteen, dispatched to Rio with June and Nora, the campaign’s delegation to the summer games, one weekend of photo ops and selling the “next generation of global cooperation” image. Alex spent most of it drinking caipirinhas and subsequently throwing caipirinhas up behind Olympic venues. And he remembers, down to the Union Jack on Henry’s anorak, the first time they met.
Henry sighs. “Is that the time you threatened to push me into the Thames?”
“No,” Alex says. “It was the time you were a condescending prick at the diving finals. You really don’t remember?”
“Remind me?”
Alex glares. “I walked up to you to introduce myself, and you stared at me like I was the most offensive thing you had ever seen. Right after you shook my hand, you turned to Shaan and said, ‘Can you get rid of him?’”