Red, White & Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston Page 0,78

in some people being good and doing this job because they want to do good. Doing the right things most of the time and most things for the right reasons. I wanted to be the kind of person who believes in that.”

Henry’s hands move, brushing up to Alex’s shoulders, the dip of his throat, the underside of his jaw, and when Alex finally looks up, Henry’s eyes are soft and steady. “You still are. Because you still bloody care so much.” He leans down and presses a kiss into Alex’s hair. “And you are good. Most things are awful most of the time, but you’re good.”

Alex takes a breath. There’s this way Henry has of listening to the erratic stream of consciousness that pours out of Alex’s mouth and answering with the clearest, crystallized truth that Alex has been trying to arrive at all along. If Alex’s head is a storm, Henry is the place lightning hits ground. He wants it to be true.

He lets Henry push him backward on the bed and kiss him until his mind is blissfully blank, lets Henry undress him carefully. He pushes into Henry and feels the tight cords of his shoulders start to release, like how Henry describes unfurling a sail.

Henry kisses his mouth over and over again and says quietly, “You are good.”

* * *

The pounding on his door comes much too early for Alex to handle loud noises. There’s a sharpness to it he recognizes instantly as Zahra before she even speaks, and he wonders why the hell she didn’t just call before he reaches for his phone and finds it dead. Shit. That would explain the missed alarm.

“Alex Claremont-Diaz, it is almost seven,” Zahra shouts through the door. “You have a strategy meeting in fifteen minutes and I have a key, so I don’t care how naked you are, if you don’t answer this door in the next thirty seconds, I’m coming in.”

He is, he realizes as he rubs his eyes, extremely naked. A cursory examination of the body pressed up against his back: Henry, very comprehensively naked as well.

“Oh fuck me,” Alex swears, sitting up so fast he gets tangled in the sheet and flails sideways out of bed.

“Blurgh,” Henry groans.

“Fucking shit,” says Alex, whose vocabulary is apparently now only expletives. He yanks himself free and scrambles for his chinos. “Goddammit ass fucker.”

“What,” Henry says flatly to the ceiling.

“I can hear you in there, Alex, I swear to God—”

There’s another sound from the door, like Zahra has kicked it, and Henry flies out of bed too. He is truly a picture, wearing an expression of bewildered panic and absolutely nothing else. He eyes the curtains furtively, as if considering hiding in them.

“Jesus tits,” Alex continues as he fumbles to pull his pants up. He snatches a shirt and boxers at random from the floor, shoves them at Henry’s chest, and points him toward the closet. “Get in there.”

“Quite,” he observes.

“Yes, we can unpack the ironic symbolism later. Go,” Alex says, and Henry does, and when the door swings open, Zahra is standing there with her thermos and a look on her face that says she did not get a master’s degree to babysit a fully grown adult who happens to be related to the president.

“Uh, morning,” he says.

Zahra’s eyes do a quick sweep of the room—the sheets on the floor, the two pillows that have been slept on, the two phones on the nightstand.

“Who is she?” she demands, marching over to the bathroom and yanking open the door like she’s going to find some Hollywood starlet in the bathtub. “You let her bring a phone in here?”

“Nobody, Jesus,” Alex says, but his voice cracks in the middle. Zahra arches an eyebrow. “What? I got kinda drunk last night, that’s all. It’s chill.”

“Yes, it is so very, very chill that you’re going to be hungover for today,” Zahra says, rounding on him.

“I’m fine,” he says. “It’s fine.”

As if on cue, there’s a series of bumps from the other side of the closet door, and Henry, halfway into Alex’s boxers, comes literally tumbling out of the closet.

It is, Alex thinks half-hysterically, a very solid visual pun.

“Er,” Henry says from the floor. He finishes pulling Alex’s boxers up his hips. Blinks. “Hello.”

The silence stretches.

“I—” Zahra begins. “Do I even want you to explain to me what the fuck is happening here? Literally how is he even here, like, physically or geographically, and why—no, nope. Don’t answer that. Don’t tell me anything.” She