She gives his hand a squeeze, and she and Amy are gone, and he’s alone in a tiny, secluded alleyway with the second car of backup security and a twisted-up feeling in his stomach.

It takes all of an hour before June texts him, All done, followed by, Bringing him to you.

They worked it out before they left: Amy brings June and Henry back to the alley, they have him swap cars like a political prisoner. Alex leans forward to the two agents sitting silently in the front seats. He doesn’t know if they’ve figured out what this really is yet, and he honestly doesn’t care.

“Hey, can I have a minute?”

They exchange a look but get out, and a minute later, there’s another car alongside him and the door is opening, and he’s there. Henry, looking tense and unhappy, but within arm’s reach.

Alex pulls him in by the shoulder on instinct, the door shutting behind him. He holds him there, and this close he can see the faint gray tinge to Henry’s complexion, the way his eyes aren’t connecting. It’s the worst he’s ever seen him, worse than a violent fit or the verge of tears. He looks hollowed-out, vacant.

“Hey,” Alex says. Henry’s gaze is still unfocused, and Alex shifts toward the middle of the seat and into his line of vision. “Hey. Look at me. Hey. I’m right here.”

Henry’s hands are shaking, his breaths coming shallow, and Alex knows the signs, the low hum of an impending panic attack. He reaches down and wraps his hands around one of Henry’s wrists, feeling the racing pulse under his thumbs.

Henry finally meets his eyes. “I hate it,” he says. “I hate this.”

“I know,” Alex says.

“It was … tolerable before, somehow,” Henry says. “When there was never—never the possibility of anything else. But, Christ, this is—it’s vile. It’s a bloody farce. And June and Nora, what, they just get to be used? Gran wanted me to bring my own photographers for this. Did you know that?” He inhales, and it gets caught in his throat and shudders violently on the way back out. “Alex. I don’t want to do this.”

“I know,” Alex tells him again, reaching up to smooth out Henry’s brow with the pad of his thumb. “I know. I hate it too.”

“It’s not fucking fair!” he goes on, his voice nearly breaking. “My shit ancestors walked around doing a thousand times worse than any of this, and nobody cared!”

“Baby,” Alex says, moving his hand to Henry’s chin to bring him back down. “I know. I’m so sorry, babe. But it won’t be like this forever, okay? I promise.”

Henry closes his eyes and exhales through his nose. “I want to believe you. I do. But I’m so afraid I’ll never be allowed.”

Alex wants to go to war for this man, wants to get his hands on everything and everyone that ever hurt him, but for once, he’s trying to be the steady one. So he rubs the side of Henry’s neck gently until his eyes drift back open, and he smiles softly, tipping their foreheads together.

“Hey,” he says. “I’m not gonna let that happen. Listen, I’m telling you right now, I will physically fight your grandmother myself if I have to, okay? And, like, she’s old. I know I can take her.”

“I wouldn’t be so cocky,” Henry says with a small laugh. “She’s full of dark surprises.”

Alex laughs, cuffing him on the shoulder.

“Seriously,” he says. Henry’s looking back at him, beautiful and vital and heartsick and still, always, the person Alex is willing to risk ruining his life for. “I hate this so much. I know. But we’re gonna do it together. And we’re gonna make it work. You and me and history, remember? We’re just gonna fucking fight. Because you’re it, okay? I’m never gonna love anybody in the world like I love you. So, I promise you, one day we’ll be able to just be, and fuck everyone else.”

He pulls Henry in by the nape of his neck and kisses him hard, Henry’s knee knocking against the center console as his hands move up to Alex’s face. Even though the windows are tinted black, it’s the closest they’ve ever come to kissing in public, and Alex knows it’s reckless, but all he can think is a supercut of other people’s letters they’ve quietly sent to each other. Words that went down in history. “Meet you in every dream … Keep most of your heart in Washington … Miss you like a home … We two longing loves … My young king.”

One day, he tells himself. One day, us too.

* * *

The anxiety feels like buzzing little wings in his ear in the silence, like a petulant wasp. It catches him when he tries to sleep and startles him awake, follows him on laps paced up and down the floors of the Residence. It’s getting harder to brush off the feeling he’s being watched.

The worst part is that there’s no end in sight. They’ll definitely have to keep it up at least until the election is over, and even then, there’s the always looming possibility of the queen outright forbidding it. His idealistic streak won’t let him fully accept it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

He keeps waking up in DC, and Henry keeps waking up in London, and the whole world keeps waking up to talk about the two of them in love with other people. Pictures of Nora’s hand in his. Speculation about whether June will get an official announcement of royal courtship. And the two of them, Henry and Alex, like the world’s worst illustration of the Symposium: split down the middle and sent bleeding into separate lives.

Even that thought depresses him because Henry’s the only reason he’s become a person who cites Plato. Henry and his classics. Henry in his palace, in love, in misery, not talking much anymore.

Even with both of them trying as hard as they are, it’s impossible to feel like it’s not pulling them apart. The whole charade takes and takes from them, takes days that were sacred—the night in LA, the weekend at the lake, the missed chance in Rio—and records over the tape with something more palatable. The narrative: two fresh-faced young men who love two beautiful young women and definitely not ever each other.

He doesn’t want Henry to know. Henry has a hard enough time as it is, looked at sideways by his whole family, Philip who knows and has not been kind. He tries to sound calm and whole over the phone when they talk, but he doesn’t think it’s convincing.

When he was younger and the anxiety got this bad, when the stakes in his life were much, much lower, this would be the point of self-destruction. If he were in California, he’d sneak the jeep out and drive way too fast down the 101, doors off, blasting N.W.A., inches from being painted on the pavement. In Texas, he’d steal a bottle of Maker’s from the liquor cabinet and get wasted with half the lacrosse team and maybe, afterward, climb through Liam’s window and hope to forget by morning.

The first debate is in a matter of weeks. He doesn’t even have work to keep him busy, so he stews and stresses and goes for long, punishing runs until he has the satisfaction of blisters. He wants to set himself on fire, but he can’t afford for anyone to see him burn.

He’s returning a box of borrowed files to his dad’s office in the Dirksen Building after hours when he hears the faint sound of Muddy Waters from the floor above, and it hits him. There’s one person he can burn down instead.

He finds Rafael Luna hunched at his office’s open window, sucking down a cigarette. There are two empty, crumpled packs of Marlboros next to a lighter and an overflowing ashtray on the sill. When he turns around at the slam of the door, he coughs out a startled cloud of smoke.

“Those things are gonna fucking kill you,” Alex says. He said the same thing about five hundred times that summer in Denver, but now he means, I kinda wish they would.

“Kid—”

“Don’t call me that.”

Luna turns, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray, and Alex can see a muscle clenching in his jaw. As handsome as he always is, he looks like shit. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“No shit,” Alex says. “I just wanted to see if you would have the balls to actually talk to me.”

“You do realize you’re talking to a United States senator,” he says placidly.

“Yeah, big fucking man,” Alex says. He’s advancing on Luna now, kicking a chair out of the way. “Important fucking job. Hey, how ’bout you tell me how you’re serving the people who voted for you by being Jeffrey Richards’s chickenshit little sellout?”

“What the hell did you come here for, Alex, eh?” Luna asks him, unmoved. “You gonna fight me?”

“I want you to tell me why.”

His jaw clenches again. “You wouldn’t understand. You’re—”

“I swear to God, if you say I’m too young, I’m gonna lose my shit.”

“This isn’t you losing your shit?” Luna asks mildly, and the look that crosses Alex’s face must be murderous because he immediately puts a hand up. “Okay, bad timing. Look, I know. I know it seems shitty, but there’s—there are moving parts at work here that you can’t even imagine. You know I’ll always be indebted to your family for what you all have done for me, but—”