“If you’ll excuse me,” Henry says. He drops his program in his seat and vanishes.
Ten minutes later, Alex finds him in the clubhouse by a gigantic vase of lurid fuschia flowers. His eyes are intent on Alex the moment he sees him, his lip chewed the same furious red as the embroidered Union Jack on his pocket square.
“Hello, Alex,” he says placidly.
Alex takes his tone. “Hi.”
“Has anyone shown you round the clubhouse yet?”
“Nope.”
“Well, then.”
Henry touches two fingers to the back of his elbow, and Alex obeys immediately.
Down a flight of stairs, through a concealed side door and a second hidden corridor, there is a small room full of chairs and tablecloths and one old, abandoned tennis racquet. As soon as the door is closed behind them, Henry slams him up against it.
He gets right up in Alex’s space, but he doesn’t kiss him. He hovers there, a breath away, his hands at Alex’s hips and his mouth split open in a crooked smirk.
“D’you know what I want?” he says, his voice so low and hot that it burns right through Alex’s solar plexus, right into the core of him.
“What?”
“I want,” he says, “to do the absolute last thing I’m supposed to be doing right now.”
Alex juts out his chin, grinningly defiant. “Then tell me to do it, sweetheart.”
And Henry, tonguing the corner of his own mouth, tugs hard to undo Alex’s belt and says, “Fuck me.”
“Well,” Alex grunts, “when at Wimbledon.”
Henry laughs hoarsely and leans down to kiss him, open-mouthed and eager. He’s moving fast, knowing they’re on borrowed time, quick to follow the lead when Alex groans and pulls at his shoulders to change their positions. He gets Henry’s back to his chest, Henry’s palms braced against the door.
“Just so we’re clear,” Alex says, “I’m about to have sex with you in this storage closet to spite your family. Like, that’s what’s happening?”
Henry, who has apparently been carrying his travel-size lube with him this entire time in his jacket, says, “Right,” and tosses it over his shoulder.
“Awesome, fuckin’ love doing things out of spite,” he says without a hint of sarcasm, and he kicks Henry’s feet apart.
And it should be—it should be funny. It should be hot, stupid, ridiculous, obscene, another wild sexual adventure to add to the list. And it is, but … it shouldn’t also feel like last time, like Alex might die if it ever stops. There’s a laugh in his mouth, but it won’t get past his tongue, because he knows this is him helping Henry get through something. Rebellion.
You’re brave. I could use some of that.
After, he kisses Henry’s mouth fiercely, pushes his fingers deep into Henry’s hair, sucks the air out of him. Henry smiles breathlessly against his neck, looking extremely pleased with himself, and says, “I’m rather finished with tennis, aren’t you?”
So, they steal away behind a crowd, blocked by PPOs and umbrellas, and back at Kensington, Henry brings Alex up to his rooms.
His “apartment” is a sprawling warren of twenty-two rooms on the northwest side of the palace closest to the Orangery. He splits it with Bea, but there’s not much of either of them in any of the high ceilings and heavy, jacquard furniture. What is there is more Bea than Henry: a leather jacket flung over the back of a chaise, Mr. Wobbles preening in a corner, a seventeenth-century Dutch oil painting on one landing literally called Woman at her Toilet that only Bea would have selected from the royal collection.
Henry’s bedroom is as cavernous and opulent and insufferably beige as Alex could have imagined, with a gilded baroque bed and windows overlooking the gardens. He watches Henry shrug out of his suit and imagines having to live in it, wondering if Henry simply isn’t allowed to choose what his rooms look like or if he never wanted to ask for something different. All those nights Henry can’t sleep, just knocking around these endless, impersonal rooms, like a bird trapped in a museum.
The only room that really feels like both Henry and Bea is a small parlor on the second floor converted into a music studio. The colors are richest here: hand-woven Turkish rugs in deep reds and violets, a tobacco-colored settee. Little poufs and tables of knickknacks spring up like mushrooms, and the walls are lined with Stratocasters and Flying Vs, violins, an assortment of harps, one stout cello propped up in the corner.
In the center of the room is the grand piano, and Henry sits down at it and plucks away idly, toying with the melody of something that sounds like an old song by The Killers. David the beagle naps quietly near the pedals.
“Play something I don’t know,” Alex says.
Back in high school in Texas, Alex was the most cultured of the jock crowd because he was a book nerd, a politics junkie, the only varsity letterman debating the finer points of Dred Scott in AP US History. He listens to Nina Simone and Otis Redding, likes expensive whiskey. But Henry’s got an entirely different compendium of knowledge.
So he just listens and nods and smiles a little while Henry explains that this is what Brahms sounds like, and this is Wagner, and how they were on the two opposing sides of the Romantic movement. “Do you hear the difference there?” His hands are fast, almost effortless, even as he goes off into a tangent about the War of the Romantics and how Liszt’s daughter left her husband for Wagner, quel scandale.
He switches to an Alexander Scriabin sonata, winking over at Alex at the composer’s first name. The andante—the third movement—is his favorite, he explains, because he read once that it was written to evoke the image of a castle in ruins, which he found darkly funny at the time. He goes quiet, focused, lost in the piece for long minutes. Then, without warning, it changes again, turbulent chords circling back into something familiar—the Elton John songbook. Henry closes his eyes, playing from memory. It’s “Your Song.” Oh.
And Alex’s heart doesn’t spread itself out in his chest, and he doesn’t have to grip the edge of the settee to steady himself. Because that’s what he would do if he were here in this palace to fall in love with Henry, and not just continuing this thing where they fly across the world to touch each other and don’t talk about it. That’s not why he’s here. It’s not.
They make out lazily for what could be hours on the settee—Alex wants to do it on the piano, but it’s a priceless antique or whatever—and then they stagger up to Henry’s room, the palatial bed. Henry lets Alex take him apart with painstaking patience and precision, moans the name of God so many times that the room feels consecrated.
It pushes Henry over some kind of edge, melted and overwhelmed on the lush bedclothes. Alex spends nearly an hour afterward coaxing little tremors out of him, in awe of his elaborate expressions of wonder and blissful agony, ghosting featherlight fingertips over his collarbone, his ankles, the insides of his knees, the small bones of the backs of his hands, the dip of his lower lip. He touches and touches until he brings Henry to another brink with only his fingertips, only his breath on the inside of his thighs, the promise of Alex’s mouth where he’d pressed his fingers before.
Henry says the same two words from the secret room at Wimbledon, this time dressed up in, “Please, I need you to.” He still can’t believe Henry can talk like this, that he gets to be the only one who hears it.