Casey McQuiston

I can love you and want you and still not want that life. I’m allowed

both superhuman and heartbreakingly flesh and blood

“I’d rather not do this where we might be overheard,” Henry says, taking a left on the landing.

Alex stomps up after him, following him into his bedroom. “Do what?” he says as Henry shuts the door behind them. “What are you gonna do, Henry?”

Henry turns to face him at last, and now that Alex’s eyes aren’t full of rainwater, he can see the skin under his eyes is papery and purple, rimmed pink at his eyelashes. There’s a tense set to his shoulders Alex hasn’t seen in months, not directed at him at least.

“I’m going to let you say what you need to say,” Henry says flatly, “so you can leave.”

Alex stares. “What, and then we’re over?”

Henry doesn’t answer him.

Something rises in Alex’s throat—anger, confusion, hurt, bile. Unforgivably, he feels like he might cry.

“Seriously?” he says, helpless and indignant. He’s still dripping. “What the fuck is going on? A week ago it was emails about how much you missed me and meeting my fucking dad, and that’s it? You thought you could fucking ghost me? I can’t shut this off like you do, Henry.”

Henry paces over to the elaborately carved fireplace across the room and leans on the mantelpiece. “You think I don’t care as much as you?”

“You’re sure as hell acting like it.”

“I honestly haven’t got the time to explain to you all the ways you’re wrong—”

“Jesus, could you stop being an obtuse fucking asshole for, like, twenty seconds?”

“So glad you flew here to insult me—”

“I fucking love you, okay?” Alex half yells, finally, irreversibly. Henry goes very still against the mantelpiece. Alex watches him swallow, watches the muscle that keeps twitching in his jaw, and feels like he might shake out of his skin. “Fuck, I swear. You don’t make it fucking easy. But I’m in love with you.”

A small click cuts the silence: Henry has taken his signet ring off and set it down on the mantel. He holds his naked hand to his chest, kneading the palm, the flickering light from the fire painting his face in dramatic shadows. “Do you have any idea what that means?”

“Of course I do—”

“Alex, please,” Henry says, and when he finally turns to look at him, he looks wretched, miserable. “Don’t. This is the entire goddamned reason. I can’t do this, and you know why I can’t do this, so please don’t make me say it.”

Alex yanks the soggy note out of his pocket, I wish there wasn’t a wall, and throws it at Henry viciously, watches him pick it up. “Then what is that supposed to mean, if you don’t want this?”

Henry stares down at his words from months ago. “Alex, Thisbe and Pyramus both die at the end.”

“Oh my God,” Alex groans. “So, what, was this all never going to be anything real to you?”

And Henry snaps.

“You really are a complete idiot if you believe that,” Henry hisses, the note balled in his fist. “When have I ever, since the first instant I touched you, pretended to be anything less than in love with you? Are you so fucking self-absorbed as to think this is about you and whether or not I love you, rather than the fact I’m an heir to the fucking throne? You at least have the option to not choose a public life eventually, but I will live and die in these palaces and in this family, so don’t you dare come to me and question if I love you when it’s the thing that could bloody well ruin everything.”

Alex doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, his feet rooted to the spot. Henry isn’t looking at him, but staring at a point on the mantel somewhere, tugging at his own hair in exasperation.

“It was never supposed to be an issue,” he goes on, his voice hoarse. “I thought I could have some part of you, and just never say it, and you’d never have to know, and one day you’d get tired of me and leave, because I’m—” He stops short, and one shaking hand moves through the air in front of him in a helpless sort of gesture at everything about himself. “I never thought I’d be standing here faced with a choice I can’t make, because I never . . . I never imagined you would love me back.”

“Well,” Alex says. “I do. And you can choose.”

“You know bloody well I can’t.”

“You can try,” Alex tells him, feeling as if it should be the simplest fucking truth in the world. “What do you want?”

“I want you—”

“Then fucking have me.”

“—but I don’t want this.”

Alex wants to grab Henry and shake him, wants to scream in his face, wants to smash every priceless antique in the room. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t want it!” Henry practically shouts. His eyes are flashing, wet and angry and afraid. “Don’t you bloody see? I’m not like you. I can’t afford to be reckless. I don’t have a family who will support me. I don’t go about shoving who I am in everyone’s faces and dreaming about a career in fucking politics, so I can be more scrutinized and picked apart by the entire godforsaken world. I can love you and want you and still not want that life. I’m allowed, all right, and it doesn’t make me a liar; it makes me a man with some infinitesimal shred of self-preservation, unlike you, and you don’t get to come here and call me a coward for it.”

Alex takes a breath. “I never said you were a coward.”

His own room was forever the same, just steadily more stuffed with lacrosse trophies and piles of AP coursework. It’s all gathering dust in the house they still keep back home. On a chain around his neck, always hidden from view, he’s worn the key to that house since the day he left for DC.

Beside him, he hears Henry mutter slowly, “Oh my fucking Christ.”

He registers dimly that it’s the first time he’s ever heard the prince swear, before the flash from someone’s camera goes off.

Alex presses his lips together. He needs a list.

When he was a kid, he used to hide pages and pages of loose leaf paper covered in messy, loopy handwriting under the worn denim cushion of the window seat in the house in Austin. Rambling treatises on the role of government in America with all the Gs written backward, paragraphs translated from English to Spanish, tables of his elementary school classmates’ strengths and weaknesses. And lists. Lots of lists. The lists help.

“Then what are we even doing here? Why are we fighting, then, if the lives we have to lead are so incompatible?”

“Because you don’t want that either!” Alex insists. “You don’t want any of this bullshit. You hate it.”

“Don’t tell me what I want,” Henry says. “You haven’t a clue how it feels.”

“Look, I might not be a fucking royal,” Alex says, crosses the horrible rug, moves into Henry’s space, “but I know what it’s like for your whole life to be determined by the family you were born into, okay? The lives we want—they’re not that different. Not in the ways that matter. You want to take what you were given and leave the world better than you found it. So do I. We can—we can figure out a way to do that together.”

Henry stares at him silently, and Alex can see the scales balancing in his head.

“I don’t think I can.”

Alex turns away from him, falling back on his heels like he’s been slapped. “Fine,” he finally says. “You know what? Fucking fine. I’ll leave.”

“I’ll leave,” he says, and he turns back and leans in, “as soon as you tell me to leave.”

“Alex.”

He’s in Henry’s face now. If he’s getting his heart broken tonight, he’s sure as hell going to make Henry have the guts to do it right. “Tell me you’re done with me. I’ll get back on the plane. That’s it. And you can live here in your tower and be miserable forever, write a whole book of sad fucking poems about it. Whatever. Just say it.”

“Fuck you,” Henry says, his voice breaking, and he gets a handful of Alex’s shirt collar, and Alex knows he’s going to love this stubborn shithead forever.

“Tell me,” he says, a ghost of a smile around his lips, “to leave.”

He feels before he registers being shoved backward into a wall, and Henry’s mouth is on his, desperate and wild. The faint taste of blood blooms on his tongue, and he smiles as he opens up to it, pushes it into Henry’s mouth, tugs at his hair with both hands. Henry groans, and Alex feels it in his spine.

They grapple along the wall until Henry physically picks him up off the floor and staggers backward, toward the bed. Alex bounces when his back hits the mattress, and Henry stands over him for several breaths, staring. Alex would give anything to know what’s going through that fucking head of his.

He realizes, suddenly, Henry’s crying.

He swallows.

That’s the thing: he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if this is supposed to be some kind of consummation, or if it’s one last time. He doesn’t think he could go through with it if he knew it was the latter. But he doesn’t want to go home without having this.

“C’mere.”

He fucks Henry slow and deep, and if it’s the last time, they go down shivering and gasping and epic, all wet mouths and wet eyelashes, and Alex is a cliché on an ivory bedspread, and he hates himself but he’s so in love. He’s in stupid, unbearable love, and Henry loves him too, and at least for one night it matters, even if they both have to pretend to forget in the morning.

Henry comes with his face turned into Alex’s open palm, his bottom lip catching on the knob of his wrist, and Alex tries to memorize every detail down to how his lashes fan across his cheeks and the pink flush that spreads all the way up to his ears. He tells his too-fast brain: Don’t miss it this time. He’s too important.

It’s pitch black outside when Henry’s body finally subsides, and the room is impossibly quiet, the fire gone out. Alex rolls over onto his side and touches two fingers to his chest, right next to where the key on the chain rests. His heart is beating the same as ever under his skin. He doesn’t know how that can be true.

It’s a long stretch of silence before Henry shifts in the bed beside him and rolls onto his back, pulling a sheet over them. Alex reaches for something to say, but there’s nothing.

Alex wakes up alone.

It takes a moment for everything to reorient around the fixed point in his chest where last night settled. The elaborate gilded headboard, the heavy embroidered duvet, the soft twill blanket beneath that’s the only thing in the room Henry actually chose. He slides his hand across the sheet, over to Henry’s side of the bed. It’s cool to the touch.