Alex chews his lip. “Where’s this going, babe?”

“We chatted for a bit. He didn’t seem to know about your … visitation … last night, thankfully. But he was on about Martha, and land holdings, and the hypothetical heirs they have to start working on, even though Philip hates children, and suddenly it was as if … as if everything you said last night came back to me. I thought, God, that’s it, isn’t it? Just following the plan. And it’s not that he’s unhappy. He’s fine. It’s all very deeply fine. A whole lifetime of fine.” He’s been pulling at a thread on the duvet, but he looks back up, squarely into Alex’s eyes, and says, “That’s not good enough for me.”

There’s a desperate stutter in Alex’s heartbeat. “It’s not?”

He reaches up and touches a thumb to Alex’s cheekbone. “I’m not … good at saying these things like you are, but. I’ve always thought … ever since I knew about me, and even before, when I could sense I was different—and, after everything the past few years, all the mad things my head does—I’ve always thought of myself as a problem that deserved to stay hidden. Never quite trusted myself, or what I wanted. Before you, I was all right letting everything happen to me. I honestly have never thought I deserved to choose.” His hand moves, fingertips brushing a curl behind Alex’s ear. “But you treat me like I do.”

There’s something painfully hard in Alex’s throat, but he pushes past it. He reaches over and sets his mug down next to Henry’s on the nightstand.

“You do,” he says.

“I think I’m actually beginning to believe that,” Henry says. “And I don’t know how long it would have taken if I didn’t have you to believe for me.”

“And there’s nothing wrong with you,” Alex tells him. “I mean, aside from the fact that you’re occasionally an obtuse fucking asshole.”

Henry laughs again, wetly, his eyes crinkling up in the corners, and Alex feels his heart lift into his throat, up to the embellished ceilings, pushing out to fill the whole room all the way to the glinting gold ring still sitting above the fireplace.

“I am sorry about that,” Henry says. “I—I wasn’t ready to hear it. That night, at the lake … it was the first time I let myself think you might actually say it. I panicked, and it was daft and unfair, and I won’t do it again.”

“You better not,” Alex tells him. “So, you’re saying … you’re in?”

“I’m saying,” Henry begins, and the knit of his brow is nervous but his mouth keeps speaking, “I’m terrified, and my whole life is completely mad, but trying to give you up this week nearly killed me. And when I woke up this morning and looked at you … there’s no trying to get by for me anymore. I don’t know if I’ll ever be allowed to tell the world, but I … I want to. One day. If there’s any legacy for me on this bloody earth, I want it to be true. So I can offer you all of me, in whatever way you’ll have me, and I can offer you the chance of a life. If you can wait, I want you to help me try.”

Alex looks at him, taking in the whole parcel of him, the centuries of royal blood sitting under an antique Kensington chandelier, and he reaches out to touch his face and looks at his fingers and thinks about holding the Bible at his mother’s inauguration with the same hand.

It hits him, fully: the weight of this. How completely neither of them will ever be able to undo it.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m into making history.”

Henry rolls his eyes and seals it with a smiling kiss, and they fall back into the pillows together, Henry’s wet hair and sweatpants and Alex’s naked limbs all tangled up in the lavish bedclothes.

When Alex was a kid, before anyone knew his name, he dreamed of love like it was a fairy tale, as if it would come sweeping into his life on the back of a dragon one day. When he got older, he learned about love as a strange thing that could fall apart no matter how badly you wanted it, a choice you make anyway. He never imagined it’d turn out he was right both times.

Henry’s hands on him are unhurried and soft, and they make out lazily for hours or days, basking in the rare luxury of it. They take breaks to finish their lukewarm coffee and tea, and Henry has scones and blackcurrant jam sent up. They waste away the morning in bed, watching Mel and Sue squawk over tea cakes on Henry’s laptop, listening to the rain slow to a drizzle.

At some point, Alex disentangles his jeans from the foot of the bed and fishes out his phone. He’s got three missed calls from Zahra, one ominous voicemail from his mother, and forty-seven unread messages in his group text with June and Nora.

ALEX, Z JUST TOLD ME YOU’RE IN LONDON???????

Alex oh my god

I swear to god if you do something stupid and get yourself caught, I’m gonna kill you myself

But you went after him!!! That’s SO Jane Austen

I’m gonna punch you in the face when you get back. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me

How did it go??? Are you with Henry now?????

GONNA PUNCH YOU

It turns out forty-six out of forty-seven texts are June and the forty-seventh is Nora asking if either of them know where she left her white Chuck Taylors. Alex texts back: your chucks are under my bed and henry says hi.

The message has barely delivered before his phone erupts with a call from June, who demands to be put on speaker and told everything. After, rather than facing Zahra’s wrath himself, he convinces Henry to call Shaan.

“D’you think you could, er, phone Ms. Bankston and let her know Alex is safe and with me?”

“Yes, sir,” Shaan says. “And shall I arrange a car for his departure?”

“Er,” Henry says, and he looks at Alex and mouths, Stay? Alex nods. “Tomorrow?”

There’s a very long pause over the line before Shaan says, “I’ll let her know,” in a voice like he’d rather do literally anything else.

Alex laughs as Henry hangs up, but he returns to his phone again, to the voicemail waiting from his mother. Henry sees his thumb hovering over the play button and nudges his ribs.

“I suppose we do have to face the consequences at some point,” he says.

Alex sighs. “I don’t think I told you, but she, uh. Well, when she fired me, she told me that if I wasn’t a thousand percent serious about you, I needed to break things off.”

Henry nuzzles his nose behind Alex’s ear. “A thousand percent?”

“Yeah, don’t let it go to your head.”

Henry elbows him again, and Alex laughs and grabs his head and aggressively kisses his cheek, smashing his face into the pillow. When Alex finally relents, Henry is pink-faced and mussed and definitely pleased.

“I was thinking about that, though,” Henry says, “the chance being with me is going to keep ruining your career. Congress by thirty, wasn’t it?”

“Come on. Look at this face. People love this face. I’ll figure out the rest.” Henry looks deeply skeptical, and Alex sighs again. “Look, I don’t know. I don’t even exactly know, like, how being a legislator would work if I’m with a prince of another country. So, you know. There’s stuff to figure out. But way worse people with way bigger problems than me get elected all the time.”

Henry’s looking at him in the piercing way he has sometimes that makes Alex feel like a bug stuck under a shadowbox with a pushpin. “You’re really not frightened of what might happen?”

“No, I mean, of course I am,” he says. “It definitely stays secret until after the election. And I know it’ll be messy. But if we can get ahead of the narrative, wait for the right time and do it on our own terms, I think it could be okay.”

“How long have you been thinking about this?”

“Consciously? Since, like, the DNC. Subconsciously, in total denial? A long-ass time. At least since you kissed me.”

Henry stares at him from the pillow. “That’s … kind of incredible.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?” Henry says. “Christ, Alex. The whole bloody time.”

“The whole time?”

“Since the Olympics.”

“The Olympics?” Alex yanks Henry’s pillow out from under him. “But that’s, that’s like—”

“Yes, Alex, the day we met, nothing gets past you, does it?” Henry says, reaching to steal the pillow back. “‘What about you,’ he says, as if he doesn’t know—”

“Shut your mouth,” Alex says, grinning like an idiot, and he stops fighting Henry for the pillow and instead straddles him and kisses him into the mattress. He pulls the blankets up and they disappear into the pile, a laughing mess of mouths and hands, until Henry rolls onto his phone and his ass presses the button on the voicemail.

“Diaz, you insane, hopeless romantic little shit,” says the voice of the President of the United States, muffled in the bed. “It had better be forever. Be safe.”

* * *