“I don’t give a shit about what you owe us. I trusted you,” he says. “Don’t condescend to me. You know as much as anyone what I’m capable of, what I’ve seen. If you told me, I would get it.”

He’s so close he’s practically breathing Luna’s reeking cigarette smoke, and when he looks into his face, there’s a flicker of recognition at the bloodshot, blackened eyes and the gaunt cheekbones. It reminds him of how Henry looked in the back of the Secret Service car.

“Does Richards have something on you?” he asks. “Is he making you do this?”

Luna hesitates. “I’m doing this because it’s what needs to be done, Alex. It was my choice. Nobody else’s.”

“Then tell me why.”

Luna takes a deep breath and says, “No.”

Alex imagines his fist in Luna’s face and removes himself by two steps, out of range.

“You remember that night in Denver,” he says, measured, his voice quavering, “when we ordered pizza and you showed me pictures of all the kids you fought for in court? And we drank that nice bottle of scotch from the mayor of Boulder? I remember lying on the floor of your office, on the ugly-ass carpet, drunk off my ass, thinking, ‘God, I hope I can be like him.’ Because you were brave. Because you stood up for things. And I couldn’t stop wondering how you had the nerve to get up and do what you do every day with everyone knowing what they know about you.”

Briefly, Alex thinks he’s gotten through to Luna, from the way he closes his eyes and braces himself against the sill. But when he faces Alex again, his stare is hard.

“People don’t know a damn thing about me. They don’t know the half of it. And neither do you,” he says. “Jesus, Alex, please, don’t be like me. Find another fucking role model.”

Alex, finally at his limit, lifts his chin and spits out, “I already am like you.”

It hangs in the air between them, as physical as the kicked-over chair. Luna blinks. “What are you saying?”

“You know what I’m saying. I think you always knew, before I even did.”

“You don’t—” he says, stammering, trying to put it off. “You’re not like me.”

Alex levels his stare. “Close enough. And you know what I mean.”

“Okay, fine, kid,” Luna finally snaps, “you want me to be your fucking sherpa? Here’s my advice: Don’t tell anyone. Go find a nice girl and marry her. You’re luckier than me—you can do that, and it wouldn’t even be a lie.”

And what comes out of Alex’s mouth, comes so fast he has no chance to stop it, only divert it out of English at the last second in case it’s overheard: “Sería una mentira, porque no sería él.” It would be a lie, because it wouldn’t be him.

He knows immediately Raf has caught his meaning, because he takes a sharp step backward, his back hitting the sill again.

“You can’t tell me this shit, Alex!” he says, clawing inside his jacket until he finds and removes another pack of cigarettes. He shakes one out and fumbles with the lighter. “What are you even thinking? I’m on the opponent’s fucking campaign! I can’t hear this! How can you possibly think you can be a politician like this?”

“Who fucking decided that politics had to be about lying and hiding and being something you’re not?”

“It’s always been that, Alex!”

“Since when did you buy into it?” Alex spits. “You, me, my family, the people we run with—we were gonna be the honest ones! I have absolutely zero interest in being a politician with some perfect veneer and two-point-five kids. Didn’t we decide it was supposed to be about helping people? About the fight? What part of that is so fucking irreconcilable with letting people see who I really am? Who you are, Raf?”

“Alex, please. Please. Jesus Christ. You have to leave. I can’t know this. You can’t tell me this. You have to be more careful than this.”

“God,” Alex says, voice bitter, his hands on his hips. “You know, it’s worse than trust. I believed in you.”

“I know you did,” Luna says. He’s not even looking at Alex anymore. “I wish you hadn’t. Now, I need you to get out.”

“Raf—”

“Alex. Get. Out.”

He goes, slamming the door behind him.

Back at the Residence, he tries to call Henry. He doesn’t pick up, but he texts: Sorry. Meeting with Philip. Love you.

He reaches under the bed and gropes in the dark until he finds it: a bottle of Maker’s. The emergency stash.

“Salud,” he mutters under his breath, and he unscrews the top.

bad metaphors about maps

* * *

A <[email protected]>????????????????9/25/20 3:21 AM

to Henry

h,

i have had whiskey. bear with me.

there’s this thing you do. this thing. it drives me crazy. i think about it all the time.

there’s a corner of your mouth, and a place that it goes. pinched and worried like you’re afraid you’re forgetting something. i used to hate it. used to think it was your little tic of disapproval.

but i’ve kissed your mouth, that corner, that place it goes, so many times now. i’ve memorized it. topography on the map of you, a world i’m still charting. i know it. i added it to the key. here: inches to miles. i can multiply it out, read your latitude and longitude. recite your coordinates like la rosaria.

this thing, your mouth, its place. it’s what you do when you’re trying not to give yourself away. not in the way that you do all the time, those empty, greedy grabs for you. i mean the truth of you. the weird, perfect shape of your heart. the one on the outside of your chest.

on the map of you, my fingers can always find the green hills, wales. cool waters and a shore of white chalk. the ancient part of you carved out of stone in a prayerful circle, sacrosanct. your spine’s a ridge i’d die climbing.

if i could spread it out on my desk, i’d find the corner of your mouth where it pinches with my fingers, and i’d smooth it away and you’d be marked with the names of saints like all the old maps. i get the nomenclature now—saints’ names belong to miracles.

give yourself away sometimes, sweetheart. there’s so much of you.

fucking yrs,

a

p.s. wilfred owen to siegfried sassoon—1917:

And you have fixed my Life—however short. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me. I spun round you a satellite for a month, but shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze.

Re: Bad metaphors about maps

* * *

Henry <[email protected]>????????????????9/25/20 6:07 AM

to A

From Jean Cocteau to Jean Marais, 1939:

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for having saved me. I was drowning and you threw yourself into the water without hesitation, without a backward look.

* * *

The sound of Alex’s phone buzzing on his nightstand startles him out of a dead sleep. He falls halfway out of bed, fumbling to answer it.

“Hello?”

“What did you do?” Zahra’s voice nearly shouts. By the clicking of heels in the background and muttered swearing, she’s running somewhere.

“Um,” Alex says. He rubs his eyes, trying to get his brain back online. What did he do? “Be more specific?”

“Check the fucking news, you horny little miscreant—how could you possibly be stupid enough to get photographed? I swear to God—”

Alex doesn’t even hear the last part of what she says, because his stomach has just dropped all the way down through the floor and into the fucking basements two floors below.

“Fuck.”

Hands shaking, he switches Zahra to speaker, opens up Google, and types his own name.

BREAKING: Photos Reveal Romantic Relationship Between Prince Henry and Alex Claremont-Diaz

OMFG: FSOTUS and Prince Henry—Totally Doing It

THE ORAL OFFICE: READ FSOTUS’S STEAMY EMAILS TO PRINCE HENRY

Royal Family Declines to Comment on Reports of Prince Henry’s Relationship with First Son

25 GIFs That Perfectly Describe Our Reaction When We Heard About Prince Henry & FSOTUS

DON’T LET FIRST SON GO DOWN ON ME

A bubble of hysterical laughter emerges from his throat.

His bedroom door flies open, and Zahra slams on the light, a steely expression of rage barely concealing the sheer terror on her face. Alex’s brain flashes to the panic button behind his headboard and wonders if the Secret Service will be able to find him before he bleeds out.

“You’re on communications lockdown,” she says, and instead of punching him, she snatches his phone out of his hand and shoves it down the front of her blouse, which has been buttoned wrong in her rush. She doesn’t even blink at his state of half-nakedness, just dumps an armload of newspapers onto his bedspread.

QUEEN HENRY! twenty copies of the Daily Mail proclaim in gigantic letters. INSIDE THE PRINCE’S GAY AFFAIR WITH THE FIRST SON OF THE UNITED STATES!

The cover is splashed with a blown-up photo of what is undeniably himself and Henry kissing in the back seat of the car behind the cafe, apparently shot with a long-range lens through the windshield. Tinted windows, but he forgot about the fucking windshield.