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Without ever touching his skin / How can I be guilty as sin?
Henry knows who he is, of course, but this is the first time he’s seen him in the flesh. It’s the first time they’ve occupied the same space and as he watches Alex’s head tilt back in joy and laughter, his dark curls long and lively, his soul becomes realigned. And maybe more importantly, it’s the first time his heart has beaten properly, fully, since the passing of his father.
Without even a second glance at the yellow ipê-amarelo in his pocket, he knows that if someone like that ever loved him, it would set him on fire.
Henry feels consumed by the larger-than-life boy when he returns to Kensington. They hadn’t even exchanged proper words, but the mere existence of a boy like Alex Claremont-Diaz has him fantasizing about impossible futures. Ones where he could love and love loudly.
So Henry clings to the memory as he goes about his daily life. He attends royal meetings and ribbon cuttings and he treats the American boy with dark skin and a chin dimple like a sacred oath that is his alone to keep.
He follows him as his mother becomes President of the United States and is sworn in on a cold winter day in front of a massive crowd of supporters. Henry hides in the closet with his laptop to stream the foreign country’s inauguration and captures every moment it shows Alex’s face, carrying them close to his heart.
Time passes and Henry holds on to the boy he’s never truly met, or even touched, like the most precious thing he’s ever had. He lets his feelings balloon in size, but it feels wrong so he only ever recites them to a Waterloo Vase, too afraid of what may become of him if he were to do anything more.
Nevertheless, like a rising tide, Henry gets swept away.
My bedsheets are ablaze / I’ve screamed his name / Building up like waves / Crashing over my grave
“Alex, please, I need more—I can’t,” Henry begs. His hands are pinned to the mattress above his head, useless in his quest to come, and his hips are raised atop a pillow. Alex is standing up against the edge of the bed with Henry’s ankles locked behind his lower back. Their position allows the shorter man to pound into him at a punishing angle, grazing his prostate and pushing him to the brink.
“Oh, sweetheart, I think you can come hands-free,” Alex responds, his words bracketed by deep thrusts. Sweat drips from his curls and falls onto the mess that is Henry’s stomach. It’s covered in sticky pre-cum, a bit of lube, and his own perspiration.
Alex had taken his time opening him up, teasing his rim and lapping at his cock as he kept Henry in place with one strong arm across his chest. He was helpless, completely at the whims of the other man, but Henry wouldn’t have it any other way. He was hurdling headfirst towards an orgasm and he just needed…a little…more.
Henry squirms and writhes, trying desperately for more friction. Something. Anything.
He must clock his desperation because Alex suddenly hitches one knee up and places it on the sheets beside his ass. He makes no move to let go of his hands though, stubborn in his desire to get Henry off from solely the hypnotic roll of his hips alone.
“I’m so close, ‘lex,” Henry pleads. He looks down at his cock bouncing pathetically against his abdomen. The head is nearly purple, peeking out from his foreskin and leaking a steady stream of pre-cum. It’s a truly obscene picture.
Alex speeds up his thrusts and there, right there. “Come for me, Henry.”
“Alex!” he screams. A burst of light races down his spine, his back arching as he—
Henry’s eyes fly open. He’s panting hard from the dream and his groin feels sticky and warm. Pulling back the sheets, he groans.
This is not the first time the first son has featured in a dream of his, nor is it the first time it’s been of the naughty variety, but he feels particularly guilty on this occasion knowing he’ll be seeing the other man this weekend at his brother’s nuptials.
His only hope is to keep himself as far away from Alex as possible and to pray that his pale skin, for once, doesn’t betray his true feelings.
Crashing into him tonight / He’s a paradox
This is quite frankly, the last thing Henry needs. He’s stripping out of his now-ruined suit and watching as dollops of buttercream fly across the tiled bathroom floor. It’s a bloody mess.
Alex had crashed into him destroying Philip’s eight-tier, disgustingly expensive cake in front of a full room of appalled guests. They’d both been marched off to separate washrooms in the hope that Henry might still be able to return for some part of the celebration. He’s far less optimistic about the possibility, but he’d received a stern look and a request to work expeditiously from Shaan as he locked the door.
Henry wants to perish from the face of the earth.
He genuinely can not fathom why the brown-eyed, politician’s son holds so much anger for him. One second he’s talking animatedly with a nobleman from the countryside and the next he’s glaring daggers at Henry from across the room. Alex is known as this generous American heartthrob, but never with him.
What could have possibly made Alex hate him so much? They’ve so rarely interacted and it’s not like he knows about Henry’s repressed longing or his deep-seated infatuation with the way his curls flop so effortlessly across his forehead. He’s spent hours waxing poetic about the intricacies of the man to his best mate Pez, yet every interaction he has with him becomes hostile.
The short conversation they’d had before toppling over his brother and Martha’s wedding cake was undoubtedly their longest yet, so it made next to zero sense. Although, perhaps that was for the best. The further away he kept Alex, the less likely it would be that his feelings consumed him.
Henry shakes his head. It was a helpless cause, paradoxical really. It seemed that the more he tried to ignore the man, the more his obsession flourished.
The young boy he’d met in Rio had lit the match, but the man he’d become had set his body aflame. Henry wants to die in that inferno, burned to ash by all that is Alexander Claremont-Diaz.
These fatal fantasies / Giving way to labored breath / Taking all of me / We’ve already done it in my head
Alex had given him his number. Henry now has free reign to text the man responsible for nearly every fantasy that crosses his mind and the mere thought of doing so sends him adrift.
“No booty calls,” he’d told him and Henry had nearly choked. Luckily, Alex had promptly turned around and headed for the car waiting to take him to the private airstrip, so he missed the way Henry had flushed a deep maroon at the insinuated possibility.
But he’s following his request. He’s yet to actually message the first son, but their short press tour had sent him into a tizzy. Locked up in the broom closet of the hospital he’d learned what the man had smelled like. Watching Alex read a book to a cancer-stricken child had his heart spiraling. Snide remarks over a late night FaceTime aside, having the object of his infatuation so near was an outright taunt to his years-long crush. Henry is well and truly fucked. And also, very deeply gay.
Which is how he’s found himself alone in his shower, one hand propped up against the marble wall and the other gripped tightly around his cock as water beats down against his back. He’d woken up hard and these days, only one thing gives him the satisfaction he wants. The satisfaction he needs.
So he’s in the shower, steam billowing up around his feet as he gets himself off to thoughts of Alex. Henry imagines himself pressed up against the tiled wall as the other man pounds into him from behind. He pictures a separate fantasy where Alex is on his knees before him, mouth open wide and lips spit slicked, as he waits desperately for Henry to finish on his tongue.
His heart rate speeds up and his breath becomes labored. Henry’s moving his hand more rapidly along his cock, twisting his wrist slightly on the upstroke, his thumb coming out to play with the foreskin there. It’s delicious torture visualizing all the ways Alex could take him apart so completely.
With a final groan, Henry comes against the shower wall. He slows down his movements but takes care to pull all the pleasure from his utopic haze.
He steps back and holds his hand beneath the stream of water, rinsing away the white mess as well as any dream that one day his imagination could be more than just that.
Henry knows it can’t be though, so he sighs and returns to reality. The one in which Alex is barely even a friend and to the best of his knowledge painfully straight.
I keep these longings locked / In lowercase inside a vault
“He invited you, and by extension us, to his New Year’s Eve bash, so surely he can be considered a friend of yours,” his best mate argues. “And really, it’s just a tiny little hop from friends to something more.”
“I can’t, Pez. He can never know about my feelings.”
“You mean your desperate longing and disgusting pining?” Pez jokes. Henry just glares at him from across the room. He’d been fiddling around at the piano when his friend had stopped by and gracefully made himself home upon the settee in their music room.
“It’s not happening,” Henry tells him. It would be ludicrous for him to confess to such deep emotions for a man he’s only just recently befriended. Regardless of how frequently they text or the Christmas phone call he’d received, a friendship is all that existed between them and likely all they would ever have.
“I would like the record to show that I am firmly against this decision.”
“Noted.”
“And that the New Year is all about fresh starts and new beginnings and what I’m really saying is that if you’re going to get a New Year’s kiss it may as well be from the man you're obsessed with,” Pez says with a smirk.
He’s been trying to will a confession from Henry’s lips ever since his post-wedding fiasco press tour with Alex but has yet to succeed. Henry has instead resolutely ignored any and all suggestions in favor of locking his feelings away and tossing out the key. His heart will be much safer that way.
I keep recalling things we never did / Messy top lip kiss / How I long for our trysts
Alex had no need to worry that someone could possibly steal his shine tonight. He’s the best thing at this party and the only person Henry has looked at since stepping foot into the ballroom.
So Henry’s downing champagne and dancing with the gorgeous man and fantasizing about all the things that could be if his life were different. If he were different. He finds himself longing for another existence where he could chase after such a tryst instead of hiding out in a garden at the very sight of Alex kissing another person.
The man has every right to do so, but Henry so desperately wishes that he wouldn’t. Or even better, that the person whose upper lip he was sucking on was his. That he could get lost in the glide of his tongue and the soft texture of his curls tangled up in his fingers. That the man who occupies his dreams could be real and tangible and—
Alex is here. The honest-to-god real Alex. The one in the burgundy velvet suit who’s soaking his shoes as he crunches through the snow towards Henry. Oh, how he wishes things were different.
But he’s a little drunk and so is Alex, so he lets go of royal pretenses and formal etiquette to pretend, for just one second, that he is someone else. To pretend he’s a normal boy with a crush on his friend on New Year’s Eve and that they aren’t standing outside the most famous house in America.
Henry rants about his life and Christ, Alex just doesn’t get it so he does the last possible thing he should do and he kisses him. He kisses the first son under a snow-covered linden tree on New Year’s Eve and for the briefest of moments, his mind settles.
My boredom’s bone deep / This cage was once just fine / Am I allowed to cry?
Henry had fucked up. He had well and truly sat it in this time. In his buzzed stupor, he’d convinced himself it was a good idea to kiss Alex. That it would all be fine and dandy to expose to a foreign dignitary that he was not in fact the heterosexual heir that the palace made him out to be.
Alex has blown up his phone since that night, but Henry wants no part of that. He is staying far away from anything the man could possibly have to say.
He’d languished over his actions on the flight back to London and while Pez was more than pleased with the evening’s outcome despite its abrupt ending, the very thought of what had transpired had Henry’s stomach turning and it was not from the turbulence.
But as bad as his actions were, the resulting taste of freedom was far worse. A single kiss had opened up a door to possibility and now the palace’s cage feels suffocating. Long before the party or ever meeting Alex, Henry had accepted his fate and knew that one day he would be married off to some high-society woman to produce heirs. And even though nothing has tangibly changed in that regard, it now seems far more painful.
For one short moment, he could see something more. A future where he could be something more. Henry wants to cry. Cry for the loss of that fantasy and the knowledge that it will never come true. That he will always just be the Prince of England: a smiling figurehead to the public who knows absolutely nothing about who he is on the inside.
They’ll fawn over him and he’ll grow up to have little babies and his marriage will be a complete and total farce. The crown’s all-encompassing and everlasting power will follow him to his grave.
One slip and falling back into the hedge maze / Oh what a way to die
Henry would die a happy man if he succumbed right at this very instant. His hands are tied to the hotel bedpost with Alex’s necktie and the man is proving just how talented he is with his tongue and mouth below his waist. It’s downright sinful and his head is spiraling.
They’re in Berlin and Henry is in love. From the way the other man’s eyes crinkle when he smiles to how much pride he takes in his ever-improving blowjob skills, he’s in love with it all. Each time they’re together the inferno reignites, setting them both ablaze in a hazy glow. It’s everything he’s fantasized about and more.
It’s wet dreams and showers spent alone with nothing but his hand for pleasure, but it’s also something so uniquely Alex that his fantasies alone couldn’t possibly dream up. It’s Santal 33 overcoming his senses and whispered sighs from parted lips at night that give way to raspy morning moans. It’s 2 a.m. phone calls and verbose emails and half-dressed handjobs completed with a wave of adrenaline crashing over his system.
It’s always something new, but also somehow always something perfect. Tonight it’s his restrained hands trying desperately to break loose if only to dig his fingers into wild curls.
Meanwhile, Alex makes the most of his free hands and brings one up to play with the base of his cock and the blond hair there. His fingers are lazy in comparison to his eager mouth, but each little press of his fingertips sends a jolt right to Henry’s heart.
“God, Alex,” he gasps and his hips thrust up involuntarily. It activates Alex’s gag reflex, but the man just moans and tries to push past it. Christ.
His tongue is tracing patterns along the underside of his cock and there’s a bit of drool dripping from his lower lip onto the sheets below. Their actions feel dirty and forbidden, but it’s his almost tender gaze that sets him off. Alex looks up with hooded eyes, dilated pupils, and quite frankly obscene eyelashes and Henry is gone.
He comes with a choked-out laugh down the younger man’s throat, his eyes closing as his body hums with satisfaction.
Eventually, Henry comes to in a daze, Alex having climbed up to release his wrists. The other man is still hard, but the first thing Henry does is take his lips. He can taste remnants of his release there and it unlocks something deep within his soul knowing that they can share these lust-filled moments together hidden away in a foreign country’s hotel room.
Even if it’s simply a convenient tryst, to Henry, it’s the best kind of sinning.
What if he’s written ‘mine’ on my upper thigh / Only in my mind?
There’s a line of bruises littering his upper thighs. Henry clearly hadn’t been very focused when Alex was sucking them into his skin, his mind too consumed with the fact that Alex, the man he constantly thought of late into the night, was finally in his bed. As ghastly and horrendously ornate as it was, he’d been there between his legs with the single goal of bringing Henry a maximum amount of pleasure.
He follows the pattern in the mirror, his right hand hovering above them before coming down to press into one.
Henry hisses. Fuck.
He does it again, this time with slightly less pressure. It takes him back to writhing bodies and deep groans and a soreness that will take days to fully disappear. Henry loves it. He relishes in it, turning the markings into a blanket in his mind that he can wrap around his soul and treasure on his darkest days.
Alex has claimed him with each punishing thrust of his hips and every misplaced kiss along his body. The first time had been wholly to spite his family in a closet at Wimbledon, but everything after was for them only. Light brushes down his throat and a finger pressed gently against his hole as he came. To Henry, it was a promise of something more. Something greater. Something that was his and his alone.
I dream of cracking locks / Throwing my life to the wolves / Or the ocean rocks
Henry is trapped in a golden cage with no way out. He tried, oh, how he tried, but it just wasn’t meant to be.
He’d left Alex naked and alone on the precipice of a confession too precious for his ears. Too holy for a man locked inside a palace at the mercy of his grandmother. It wasn’t fair to either of them, but he had no other option.
So, now he sits in his room all alone with dreams that had once become his reality and a desperate plea to be anywhere else. Anyone else. To be free from her overbearing gaze and manipulative plans. To live a life that he chooses with a man he loves. And, Christ, does Henry love him.
It’s the desire of a foolish man, one with options and a future not built by another before he was even born. A future not dictated by his status within society or the name of his home. A future that Henry will never have as hard as he tries.
Henry cries over the loss and only sleeps when his mind becomes so exhausted it refuses to stay awake for even a second longer. His eyes are more red than blue these days, bloodshot from tears and the lack of rest. It seems fitting for a man who has thrown it all away. A proper punishment for someone reaching blindly for the stars.
His few dreams are his only respite. Waking up is the worst kind of torture as that’s when he remembers, but for brief moments, he’s able to forget. Forget what he’s done and who he’s lost. Henry dreams about Alex and running away from the monarchy. Throwing himself from castle walls and into a life of freedom and love.
Yes, the aftermath is always destructive, but fantasies had once been all he’d had. And now, Henry has little choice but to cling to them again.
They’re gonna crucify me anyway / What if the way you hold me / Is actually what’s holy?
It occurs to him as Henry watches his brother eat plain toast that he’s not okay with a life that is simply fine. He’ll never be the heir his grandmother dreamed of and for the first time in years, he has something, someone, to stand by his side. To hold onto him and cherish him not despite who he was but because of it.
So he confesses this truth to a bare-chested Alex, all sleep rumpled and ruddy-faced, and he finds peace. They dance alone in a museum surrounded by centuries-old statues, Alex holding him close with his head nuzzling into Henry’s neck and his decision solidifies.
The public and his grandmother and their opinions aren’t what matter. This, right here, dancing with his love in the middle of a closed exhibit is what’s real and important and tangible.
That night, Alex pushes him into familiar bedsheets, devouring Henry with his gaze and teeth alike. Making his mark, and this time, doing so knowingly. They fall asleep cuddled into each other, Alex’s lean body splayed across his torso and arms wrapped tightly around his shoulders.
As he dozes off, Henry, for once, forgoes any guilt when fantasizing about their future. He lets go of the thoughts that have plagued him since he first set eyes upon the bright-eyed boy in Rio. He brushes his hand down the bumps of his spine, rising and falling with his methodic breaths, and dreams about afternoons spent at Alex’s father’s lakehouse and waking up next to each other and celebrating birthdays and anniversaries and it’s utterly overwhelming, but Henry wants it all.
If long suffering propriety / Is what they want from me / They don’t know how you’ve haunted me / So stunningly
They hate him. They’d rather Henry be unhappy and lie about his life than accept that their prince is a gay man.
His grandmother had placed the palace under a communications lockdown and he hasn’t touched his phone since Shaan promptly stole it after the news broke, but he’s seen the papers and their mocking headlines. He’s read back their sacred words splashed across bylines and paragraph headings. Words meant only for their eyes are now bared to the masses. Splayed open for judgment and harsh critique.
But they don’t know Alex like he does and they certainly don’t know their relationship. They’ve never heard the inquisitive tone Alex’s voice takes on when Henry rants about queer history or the way it softens when he can tell he’s having a bad day.
Alex has consumed him, mind, body, and soul, since that first day at the Olympics. He’s haunted his dreams and fueled his wildest fantasies. He’s surpassed every vision Henry had created in his mind and then some. Alex is good and kind and so beautiful it rips at his heart when he stares for too long.
Every part of the man calls to Henry on a cellular level and it’s unfathomable to think that a random person picking up a paper and perusing their emails could grasp even an ounce of that connection. That they could read his words and comprehend the hidden anguish and pain pretending to be someone he’s not has caused him.
“Sweetheart.”
Henry collapses. The man is still his. A fantasy turned into a forbidden tryst turned into a real and honest love.
He sighs. “Hi, love. Are you okay?”
And Alex laughs, wetly through the tears, but boy, does he laugh. It’s music to Henry’s ears.
I choose you and me / …Religiously
Henry has never been more proud in his entire life. Watching Alex, standing right off his shoulder, as he gives a speech to a nation. A speech about history and privacy and love and acceptance. He’s laying claim to their relationship and choosing Henry in front of an audience of millions. His heart skips right out of his body.
Years of fantasies and unrequited longing all brought him here, clinging to the love of his life in a hallway as the door closes to the press room. To passionate kisses and the race to say ‘I love you’ first. To wide grins and atrociously pink bedrooms that Alex should not be in. To whispered goodbyes and tight hugs and promises of next time.
The palace’s declaration comes in the form of royal suitor portraits. They’re stiff and unnatural, but they shout, “I choose this man. He is mine and I am his.” And in the end, that’s all that matters.
His announcement is more personal, a secret he’d been trying to keep for just them.
“You’re looking at the proud father of four worldwide soon-to-be shelters for disenfranchised queer teenagers.”
It’s once again Alex’s laugh, full of unbridled joy when he says this, and the nervous texts he sends on election day when Henry’s plane is diverted. It’s yellow roses on a new tie for good luck and most importantly, it’s a brownstone purchased in Brooklyn to be near his home. It’s a future for the two of them. It’s choosing Alex over everyone else. Each and every time. Religiously.