Red, White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston Page 0,64
Jacinto in a windowless room and bench-clamped his dick to the table until he said he’d concede.”
Alex doesn’t hear whatever Nora says next because a rush of movement at the doors of the Palm Room near the edge of the garden catches his eye. It’s his dad, pulling Luna by the arm. They disappear into a side door, toward the housekeeper’s office.
He leaves his champagne with the girls and weaves a circuitous path toward the Palm Room, pretending to check his phone. Then, after considering whether the scolding he’ll get from the dry-cleaning crew will be worth it, he ducks into the shrubbery.
There’s a loose windowpane in the bottom of the third fixture of the south-facing wall of the housekeeper’s office. It’s popped out of its frame slightly, enough that its bulletproof, soundproof seal isn’t totally intact. It’s one of three windowpanes like this in the Residence. He found them during his first six months at the White House, before June graduated and Nora transferred, when he was alone, with nothing better to do than these little investigative projects around the grounds.
He’s never told anyone about the loose panes; he always suspected they might come in handy one day.
He crouches down and creeps up toward the window, soil rolling into his loafers, hoping he guessed their destination right, until he finds the pane he’s looking for. He leans in, tries to get his ear as close to it as he can. Over the sound of the wind rustling the bushes around him, he can hear two low, tense voices.
“… hell, Oscar,” says one voice, in Spanish. Luna. “Did you tell her? Does she know you’re asking me to do this?”
“She’s too careful,” his father’s voice says. He’s speaking Spanish too—a precaution the two of them occasionally take when they’re concerned about being overheard. “Sometimes it’s best that she doesn’t know.”
There’s the sound of a hissing exhale, weight shifting. “I’m not going behind her back to do something I don’t even want to do.”
“You mean to tell me, after what Richards did to you, there’s not a part of you that wants to burn all his shit to the ground?”
“Of course there is, Oscar, Jesus,” Luna says. “But you and I both know it’s not that fucking simple. It never is.”
“Listen, Raf. I know you kept the files on everything. You don’t even have to make a statement. You could leak it to the press. How many other kids do you think since—”
“Don’t.”
“—and how many more—”
“You don’t think she can win on her own, do you?” Luna cuts across him. “You still don’t have faith in her, after everything.”
“It’s not about that. This time is different.”
“Why don’t you leave me and something that happened twenty fucking years ago out of your unresolved feelings for your ex-wife and focus on winning this goddamn election, Oscar? I don’t—”
Luna cuts himself off because there’s the sound of the doorknob turning, someone entering the offices.
Oscar switches to clipped English, making an excuse about discussing a bill, then says to Luna, in Spanish, “Just think about it.”
There are muffled sounds of Oscar and Luna clearing out of the office, and Alex sinks down onto his ass in the mulch, wondering what the hell he’s missing.
* * *
It starts with a fund-raiser, a silk suit and a big check, a nice white-tablecloth event. It starts, as it always does, with a text: Fund-raiser in LA next weekend. Pez says he’s going to get us all matching embroidered kimonos. Put you down for a plus-two?
He grabs lunch with his dad, who flat-out changes the subject every time Alex brings up Luna, and afterward heads to the gala, where Alex gets to properly meet Bea for the first time. She’s much shorter than Henry, shorter even than June, with Henry’s clever mouth but their mom’s brown hair and heart-shaped face. She’s wearing a motorcycle jacket over her cocktail dress and has a slight posture he recognizes from his own mother as a reformed chainsmoker. She smiles at Alex, wide and mischievous, and he gets her immediately: another rebel kid.
It’s a lot of champagne and too many handshakes and a speech by Pez, charming as always, and as soon as it’s over, their collective security convenes at the exit and they’re off.
Pez has, as promised, six matching silk kimonos waiting in the limo, each one embroidered across the back with a different riff on a name from a movie. Alex’s is a lurid teal and says HOE DAMERON. Henry’s lime-green