Casey McQuiston

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.

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."

"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.

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...

At cruising altitude, he takes the chain off his neck and slides the ring on next to the old house key. They clink together gently as he tucks them both under his shirt, two homes side by side.

As your mother, I can appreciate that maybe this isn't your fault, but as the president, all I want is to have the CIA fake your death and ride the dead-kid sympathy into a second term.

Of course I'm nervous, Nora, it's a presidential election and the president gave birth to me.

Things he knows right now.

One. He's attracted to Henry.

Two. He wants to kiss Henry again.

Three. He has maybe wanted to kiss Henry for a while. As in, probably this whole time.

I can love you and want you and still not want that life.

Someone else's choice doesn't change who you are.