Casey McQuiston

"Right, because it's so hard to get a date when you're a prince."

Henry cuts his eyes back down to Alex. "You'd be surprised."

"How? You're not exactly lacking for options."

Henry keeps looking at him, holding his gaze for two seconds too long. "The options I'd like..." he says, dragging the words out. "They don't quite seem to be options at all."

Alex blinks. "What?"

"I'm saying that I have... people... who interest me," Henry says, turning his body toward Alex now, speaking with a fumbling pointedness, as if it means something. "But I shouldn't pursue them. At least not in my position."

Are they too drunk to communicate in English? He wonders distantly if Henry knows any Spanish.

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about," Alex says.

"You don't?"

"No."

"You really don't?"

"I really, really don't."

Henry's whole face grimaces in frustration, his eyes casting skyward like they're searching for help from an uncaring universe. "Christ, you are as thick as it gets," he says, and he grabs Alex's face in both hands and kisses him.

Je repense à l'histoire, et je me demande si (et comment) elle se souviendra de moi. Et de toi aussi, d'ailleurs. Au passage, ca aurait de la gueule si on écrivait toujours comme ça aujourd'hui, tu ne trouves pas ?
L'histoire, hein ?
Elle est en marche ! Et je te parie qu'on pourrait changer les choses, si on essayait...

Once, there was a young prince who was born in a castle. His mother was a princess scholar, and his father was the most handsome, feared knight in all the land. As a boy, people would bring him everything he could ever dream of wanting. The most beautiful silk clothes, ripe fruit from the orangery. At times, he was so happy, he felt he would never grow tired of being a prince.

He came from a long, long line of princes, but never before had there been a prince quite like him: born with his heart on the outside of his body.

The next thing he knows, he's tripping over his own foot and stumbling backward into the table nearest him. He notices too late that the table is, to his horror, the one bearing the massive eight-tier wedding cake, and he grabs for Henry's arm to catch himself, but all it does is throw both of them off-balance and send them crashing together into the cake stand.

He watches, as if in slow motion, as the cake leans, teeters, shudders, and finally tips. There's absolutely nothing he can do to stop it. It comes crashing down onto the floor in an avalanche of white buttercream, some kind of sugary $75,000 nightmare.

The room goes heart-stoppingly silent as momentum carries him and Henry through the fall and down, down onto the wreckage of the cake on the ornate carpet. Henry's sleeve still clutched in Alex's fist. Henry's glass of champagne has spilled all over both of them and shattered, and out of the corner of his eye, Alex can see a cut across the top of Henry's checkbone beginning to bleed.

For a second, all he can think as he stares up at the ceiling while covered in frosting and champagne is that at least Henry's dance with June won't be the biggest story to come out of the royal wedding.

His next thought is that his mother is going to murder him in cold blood.

You're literally putting your dick in the leader of a foreign state, who is a man, at the biggest political event before the election, in a hotel full of reporters, in a city full of cameras, in a race close enough to fucking hinge on some bullshit like this, like a manifestation of my fucking stress dreams, and you're asking me not to tell the president about it?

It's incredible and baffling, the way Henry's confidence comes in waves like this, how he struggles so much to get through the asking for what he wants and then readily takes it the moment he's given permission, like at the bar, how the right push had him dancing and shouting as if he'd been waiting for someone to tell him he was allowed to do it.

He rolls onto his side and listens, trails the back of his hand across the pillow next to him and imagines Henry lying opposite in his own bed, two parentheses enclosing 3,700 miles. He looks at his chewed-up cuticles and imagines Henry there under his fingers, speaking into only inches of distance. He imagines the way Henry's face would look in the bluish-gray dark. Maybe he would have a faint shadow of stubble on his jaw, waiting for a morning shave, or maybe the circles under his eyes would wash out in the low light.

Somehow, this is the same person who had Alex so convinced he didn't care about anything, who still has the rest of the world convinced he's a mild, unfettered Prince Charming. It's taken months to get here: the full realization of just how wrong he was.

"I miss you," Alex says before he can stop himself.

He instantly regrets it, but Henry says, "I miss you too."

He kisses Henry until it feels like he can't breathe, until it feels like he's going to forget both of their names and titles, until they're only two people tangled up in a dark room making a brilliant, epic, unstoppable mistake.

"This has been going on for seven months? That's why you—Oh my God, I thought you were getting into international relations or something."

"I mean, technically—"

"How is it different from a hotel room? Put the turkeys in my room, Mom."

"I'm not putting the turkeys in your room."

"Put the turkeys in my room."

"No."

"Put them in my room, put them in my room, put them in my room—"

That night, as Alex stares into the cold, pitiless eyes of a prehistoric beast of prey, he has a few regrets.