Chapter Text
You say you gotta go and find yourself
You say that you’re becoming someone else
Don’t recognize the face in the mirror looking back at you
Alex crushes the note that Henry left into a ball in his palm until the tension in his hand leaves it throbbing. He storms into the bathroom, bracing either hand on the sink as bile rises in his throat. He sucks in air like a drowning man in the middle of the ocean, no raft for safety or sanctuary, squeezing his eyes tightly shut and swallowing hard. Thankfully, the wave of nausea eventually subsides, and he reaches with the hand that isn’t crushing the small piece of paper and turns on the faucet. He leans forward to drink from the tap, small sips, before allowing the cool water to run over his cheek, washing away hot tears that he didn’t even realize were falling.
As he leans back up and turns off the water, he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. Bloodshot eyes, tear-streaked cheeks, and a mess of tangled dark curls…but still Alex. Always Alex. Sometimes the charming, handsome young bachelor that America has come to love. Sometimes the future politician, all intellect and professionalism. And sometimes a kid who wears glasses when no one can see him and wonders how all of this managed to become his life. But always, at the end of it all, Alex.
He wonders, for a moment, who Henry sees when he looks in the mirror. Does he see the perfect, polished Prince Charming that the world expects him to be? Or does he see the person behind the golden mask, the poet who wants but has been taught to place duty before desire? Or perhaps he sees a blend of the two, colors and shapes morphing into someone that he doesn’t recognize at all in the reflection. Suddenly, Alex feels sick again.
He wants to storm Kensington Palace and liberate Henry from his gilded prison, scream that he loves him and that’s all that should matter and that the rest will fall into place somehow. But he can’t. Because it isn’t all that matters, as much as both of them may want it to be. Henry has to find himself before they can find out who they are together. He has to be able to look in the mirror and see himself staring back.
Alex hopes that he can.
You say you’re leaving as you look away
I know there’s really nothing left to say
Just know I’m here whenever you need me
I’ll wait for you
The silent hours turn to days, which quickly turn to weeks, months, and finally years. The note is the last correspondence Alex has with Henry…at least directly. Indirectly, Alex has set up all possible Google alerts that might encompass news of Henry’s life, and in doing so, learns more than he cares to know about the royal family. He catches glimpses into the reasoning behind Henry’s self-imposed walls in paparazzi snapshots of Henry walking David, countless articles speculating on Henry’s latest relationship status with a revolving door of women paraded through the palace doors at all hours of the day and night, and even a fanfiction or two inserting Henry into the role of a literal Disney prince that he quickly clicks out of.
Every new alert that features Henry’s face or name steals Alex’s breath from his lungs, cutting into him like a newly sharpened blade. But he doesn’t stop. Somewhere deeper than that blade can pierce, Alex knows that Henry loves him. He may never have said the words out loud, but Alex could see them written in his eyes, could feel them in every touch of his hands. And even if the burden of the crown never leaves him, Henry is the only person that Alex will ever - could ever - love as certainly and as profoundly.
So, Alex waits. He shifts gears after graduation, making the decision not to plunge into politics immediately the way he’d always thought he was meant to do. He attends law school, studies his ass off and passes the bar, crossing all the Ts and dotting all the Is, and becomes Alexander Claremont-Diaz, Esq. The person he sees when he looks into the mirror is more often the same now, less a shifting identity and more settled. Tamed curls, glasses now worn regularly, a suit and tie, and a smile that doesn’t quite meet his eyes. Satisfaction of purpose without joy. He’s still waiting for joy.
He moves home to Texas, purchasing his family’s Austin house from his parents and turning it into less a monument to his childhood, frozen in time, and more a refuge for his tired mind and body at the end of exhausting days trying to help as many people as he possibly can, all while carrying the knowledge that there will always be one person beyond his help. He’d give anything for the power to change that person’s destiny. But a law degree does not a miracle worker make.
Take your time I won’t go anywhere
Picture you with the wind in your hair
I’ll keep your things right where you left ‘em
I’ll be here for you
During the late nights sitting up at his desk with the light of a single lamp glowing feebly in the dark, Alex will often pull out his phone and flip through photos of Henry. Press photos of their fake friendship at the beginning of it all. Selfies snapped to commemorate perfect moments in time, before everything went so wrong. Even new photos of an older Henry that Alex’s fingers ache to touch again, purple circles beneath blue eyes he wishes that he could soothe before blessed sleep, the crease at the corner of his lips that once had begun to smooth but is now more pronounced than ever.
He doesn’t even mean to see the photo of Henry on a random beach, one foot hovering in mid-air as he walks from the water, his skin glistening beneath some tropical island sun. His shoulders are a pleasant pink, but the face hidden beneath a pair of thick, dark sunglasses gives away no signs of the relaxation such a trip ought to bring. In fact, the pinched wrinkles in his forehead and the tight clench of his jaw remind Alex so much of that night at the lake house that he curls up in bed with his hands pressed tightly to his chest, silently wondering if this is what a heart attack feels like before he remembers that his heart hasn’t been inside his body since that night. Henry may as well have plucked it from beneath the skin and muscle, still beating and dripping both blood and lake water, and stuffed it into his carry-on.
It takes him almost a month before he can bring himself to look back at the magazine, thrown against the wall in the corner of his bedroom, where he’d first seen the photo. Vogue. What should have been a celebration of Alex’s solo cover story about stepping into the fashion world, starting with the Gucci jacket he chose to wear on election night, and unexpectedly, the revelation of his bisexuality. It was never his intention to formally come out, resolving to make a clear but quiet Instagram post someday, to tell the world his truth without turning it into a spectacle.
But when Vogue approached him about becoming the first solo male to ever be featured on the cover, explaining that this was his opportunity to tell his story, he quickly realized that it was a story worth telling. A story he wanted the world to know. And a part of him knew that his words would find Henry, and maybe the raw emotion and love infused in the ink would soak into Henry’s skin from an ocean away, reminding him that he, too, has a story worth telling. His own. Theirs together.
So Alex speaks. About the metaphorical slap in the face that led to his realization. About his family’s support, and Nora’s advanced knowledge, and the freedom that his own knowing has given him. He speaks of truth and of confidence and of love. He weaves it into the fabric of the same jacket that he wore on election night, dusted off and pulled back out for the cover shoot. He casts it across the miles, hoping that when he finally chooses to pull it back, that Henry and his heart will come with it, tangled so hopelessly together that it’s impossible to know where one ends and the other begins.
The day comes, with a box full of advance copies for him to distribute or keep or frame for his wall, and he stares down at the glossy cover with unexpected tears, wishing that the young prince that once gazed up at him from another, much older magazine, could have had this. He turns to his article, and one of the pages bends at just the right angle for him to spy a familiar golden ring in a photo tucked into the corner. Curiosity carrying him further than caution ever could, he allows the page to settle before him. The 10 Most Eligible Royals. If only they knew, if only all of them knew, that the golden-haired man with ocean blue eyes they’d deemed the single most eligible royal in the world held Alex’s own heart in his calloused hands even now.
He quietly retweets Vogue’s posts boasting about the popularity of his issue, convinces June to take a posed shot of the magazine and post it to his Instagram on his behalf, working her magic on the perfect caption, and fields as many emails as he can from journalists begging for a comment on the story that he’s only read in drafts. But he doesn’t look, carefully sliding the box beneath his bed amidst the dust bunnies and his old lacrosse stick. The first, discarded version, lying face down on the wood floor, remains, until Vogue makes a request for him to sign a few exclusive copies for social media giveaways. It’s only then that he takes it with trembling hands from its resting place and turns it over, nearly ripping out pages in his haste to find his article without rediscovering more, and reads a brilliantly composed account of everything he’d hoped to say to Henry, laid out before him in black and white.
“And if you could speak to the person that might someday capture the heart of the charming Alex Claremont-Diaz, what might you say?"
“I’d say that I know it isn’t an easy task, loving a tornado like me. But I’m grateful. I’d tell them that a life with me will never be boring, and they might find themselves a bit lost in all the chaos at times, but that the stars will always be there to guide them home. Back to me.”
I can’t get close if you’re not there
I can’t get inside if there’s no soul to bare
I can’t fix you
I can’t save you
“Your Royal Highness?” the interviewer asks. The bright red number of unread work emails continues to climb as Alex sits transfixed by Henry on his computer screen.
“Ah, yes, forgive me. I was…” Henry trails off, waving his hand halfheartedly in the air as if to explain but providing nothing further. “Can you repeat the question?”
“Of course. I asked how you’re feeling, to see your sister getting married.” Henry pauses, pretending to carefully consider when Alex knows he’s had the answer to this question written in his head and heart for far longer than he’ll ever let on.
Alex could almost convince himself that he’s pulled up an old interview from the day of Philip’s wedding. Henry is dressed in the very same clothing that was once smeared with thick globs of buttercream…so probably not the exact same clothing, Alex thinks with the smallest of fond smiles. But to look at Henry’s face, at the hollowed out expression in his eyes, his sunken cheeks, the gray tinge to his skin that not even the royal makeup artists could cover, is more than enough to indicate that this is not the same prince Alex once had convinced himself he hated with every fiber of his being. This shell of the Henry he knew, the Henry he still loves, is suffering under the weight of his family’s legacy.
“I couldn’t be happier for Bea. If anyone deserves a lifetime of happiness, it’s my sister.”
“And yourself?” the interviewer asks, just as Henry moves to step away. He stands frozen, then, the untested sole of a shoe so brilliantly polished that the reflection of the camera capturing the moment is clearly visible in its reflection hovering just above the ground.
“I’m not certain I understand the question. If you could elaborate,” Henry says, carefully setting his foot back on the carpet and shifting his weight back to center. The camera slowly zooms in, leaving a frame of only Henry’s chest to slightly above his head. Alex presses a hand absently to his own chest, reminding himself that he’s still drawing breath.
“With your brother and sister now spoken for, it seems the spotlight falls on you as the world wonders when a new princess will be added to the family legacy.”
If there were any color in Henry’s cheeks to drain, Alex suspects it would be seeping slowly from beneath his skin. He pulls his lips into an even tighter line, concealing any semblance of emotion from view. Alex watches his arms shift, as if he may be reaching for his signet ring, but he quickly plasters them back to his sides, straightening his spine once more and pushing his chin a bit further out. Alex’s eyes track the movement of a long, arduous swallow down Henry’s neck, the muscles working their way through the motion as if the action is taking every bit of energy he possesses.
“Ah, yes, well…today is my sister’s day,” he says, finally breaking the silence with the ghost of a smile threatening to curve his lips. “So I’m going to spend some time celebrating her love first, before seeking out my own.”
Alex slams the laptop screen closed and buries his head in his hands, squeezing his eyes tight as fresh tears drop onto the notepad atop his desk, blurring the lined paper in round splotches. He hiccups a quiet sob before pressing his fist into his mouth to stifle the sound just as his phone begins to buzz. Blowing out a quick, steadying breath, he picks it up and answers without looking at the caller.
“Yeah?” he asks, with a bit more gruffness than he means.
“Alex?” a familiar voice says, and he sits bolt upright in his desk chair, pulling the phone from his cheek and confirming that the voice on the other end is actually the person he already knows it is. He’d recognize that accent anywhere.
“Bea? Why the hell are you calling me on your wedding day?” She heaves a deep sigh in his ear, as if she wasn’t expecting the only logical question he could have asked.
“I know you probably don’t want to hear from me. Or any of us. But Alex, I didn’t know who else to call. He won’t listen to me.”
“He being…Henry,” Alex chokes on his name, his vocal cords seizing at the first time it’s left his lips since shortly after the lake house. After he had to explain to everyone why Henry was gone, without truly knowing the answer himself. After he sobbed it into June’s shoulder as she pulled him in tight to her chest and he trapped her arms at her sides with his own, knowing that she’d wanted to cradle his head the way she always had when they were kids, but the thought of anyone’s hand in his curls except Henry’s was too much to bear.
“It’s like he’s a ghost, Alex. Far more than Mum ever was when Dad…” she trails off. “Even Mum came out of her fog to try to pull him out of his. But he’s lost, Alex. And I don’t think there’s anyone in the world who can find him but you.”
“Bea, I–” Alex starts, but she quickly cuts him off.
“He loves you, you know,” she says, and Alex’s stomach drops. Despite knowing, despite feeling, despite all of it, to hear it spoken by someone who knows Henry better than anyone else is real. Too real.
“Bea, I’m sorry,” Alex goes on, pushing through the words before he loses the resolve to say them and boards the next flight to London to pull Henry in by a fistful of his ridiculous royal sash and kiss him until the color returns to his cheeks and his heart resumes its beating. “But I can’t be the one to save him. Only he can make that choice.”
“Do you still love him?” she asks softly, and Alex presses the heel of his hand to his forehead, willing the pounding behind his eyes to stop.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Alex, of course it matters. It’s the only thing that matters.”
“Congratulations on the wedding, Bea. You’re going to look so beautiful. Pass on my regards to the family,” he says before hanging up and heaving his phone across the room. It hits the carpeted rug and slides, not even having the audacity to shatter. The pieces of his heart among shards of broken glass would have been a pretty fitting metaphor. Something Henry might have written about in a poem. Something that maybe he already has.
So, I'll let you go
I'll set you free
And when you see what you need to see
When you find you
Come back to me
It’s raining when Alex pulls into the driveway of his home. The same home with a painted-over crack in the wall of his childhood bedroom, now turned office, in the perfect shape of Alex’s small, twelve-year-old fist. He’d plunged his knuckles into the drywall, pulling back strips of torn off wallpaper when he retreated, after his mother had stood at the foot of the stairs, kneeling before him to tell him that his father had left and wasn’t coming back. That his heart would forever be split down the middle, teetering on the edge of the chasm between the life he’d always known and something foreign to him.
He softly presses the ridges of his knuckles against that spot in the wall now, his much larger hand overtaking the small dent that he’d never told anyone about, even to this day.
He knows loss, now. Knows it with the same familiarity that he knows his own soul. He’s stood toe to toe with loss on multiple occasions and still, he stands. Sure, his heart has been fractured into a few more pieces than the single organ he’d been born with. There’s a chipped-off piece still embedded in the wall before him, and another laying among the rocks and pebbles at the bottom of a lake not far from here, slowly broken down by the water, until someday it will be no larger than a grain of sand among countless others, soft beneath his feet, should he ever choose to venture back there.
-
His neck slips forward and he wakes with a start from where he must have dozed off on the couch in the living room. His phone, which had been clutched in his hand as he tried desperately not to pull up live coverage of the wedding, has somehow found its way under the couch, no doubt falling from his grip at some point while he slept. It’s then that he hears a knock on the door, and he realizes what suddenly woke him originally.
Standing and wiping at his eyes to clear the haze of unexpected sleep, he glances at the illuminated clock on the oven to see that it’s 3am and immediately tenses, uncertain if he ought to dig out his lacrosse stick before answering the door for an unannounced visitor in the middle of the night. It’s then that a flash of lightning outside the window is followed by a crack of thunder so loud that he jumps, and the knock comes again, just as gentle as the first two times, with no impatience or insistence indicated by its pattern or volume.
Deciding to take the chance that if there is an attacker at the door, they’re likely fairly tame if their knocking style is to be trusted, Alex unlocks the deadbolt and pulls the door gently open, curling his fingers into a fist as he does. Just in case.
What he finds just beyond the threshold is the very last sight he ever expected to see, and is in fact so unbelievable that he wonders briefly if he’s still dreaming and he’s about to wake up to an empty house and a violent storm still raging without and within.
Henry’s still wearing the same outfit he’d been in hours before, during the interview before the wedding, only rather than the fabric sagging under the weight of buttercream, it hangs from his limbs, soaked entirely through with Texas rainwater. His golden hair, where earlier it was slick and styled, is plastered to his head and dripping onto the tip of his nose. His eyes practically glow in the dead of night against his abnormally pale skin, and Alex thinks he spies a flash of lightning in them at the very same moment it carves a crack in the sky above.
He says nothing, only opens the door wider and steps back so that Henry can enter. Before the prince does, however, he turns and immediately retches into the rose bushes. Alex steps forward to place a steadying hand on Henry’s arm as his body heaves with the expulsion of his stomach contents, Alex suddenly feeling a wave of nausea of his own at the first cold, wet touch of Henry’s body since that night in the water. He wants to rip his arm back and stuff his fingers into the pockets of his sweatpants where they’ll be warm and safe, but it’s as if the magnetic pull that’s always drawn him into Henry’s orbit has only grown in strength in his absence.
He feels each finger curling around Henry’s bicep before he’s even made the conscious decision to move, waiting until Henry spits one final time into the shrubbery before he moves towards the door, seemingly unaware of Alex’s grip. His socks slosh in his shoes and squeeze a torrent of water out on the entryway floor as he crosses the threshold. He merely stares down at the puddle now forming at his feet before Alex slips down the hall to grab several towels from the linen closet, seizing the opportunity to frantically dry his own fingers before turning back to Henry and extending them towards him.
Henry doesn’t take them, instead gazing absently at the space between his body and Alex’s, the towels hanging down and swinging in the air. With a shaky breath in through his nose that brings the still-potent scent of fresh grass and clean linens into his lungs and threatens to choke him from the inside out, Alex tosses the towels onto the back of the couch just inside the living room and slowly starts to remove Henry’s soaked clothes as he remains unmoving in the entryway.
Each elegant royal button undone is a pinprick to his heart, each sopping wet slap of clothing on the wood floor a dagger plunged into his back as Henry suddenly stands bare before him, shivering in the darkened doorway of his childhood home. Alex doesn’t dare look below his neck, instead choosing to watch his face, as if the entirely empty expression there could possibly hurt any less than seeing an expanse of skin, the planes of muscles, and the ridges of a spine that have haunted his dreams.
He quickly retreats into the guest room, pulling a hoodie and pair of oversized sweatpants out of his dresser before returning to find Henry exactly where he’d left him, icy blue eyes still frozen to the floor beneath his now bare feet. Draping the clothes over the couch and retrieving the towels, Alex tosses one over the puddle, watching the fabric darken as the water begins to soak in, and he lowers himself to his knees on it before starting the process of drying Henry from head to toe.
He keeps his efforts soft and gentle, careful not to startle or hurt Henry as he goes, though Henry makes no indication of even realizing that Alex is there as his blue eyes dart up and over Alex’s head to gaze down a dark, empty hallway. He slides the towel up over each of Henry’s calves, taps it on the back of his kneecaps to silently encourage Henry to unlock his knees or risk passing out, and tries desperately not to look as he moves over his thighs, noting the loss of muscle mass beneath his touch.
Even with the towel serving as a barrier and his eyes averted, the map of Henry’s body comes into sharp focus in his head. Polo playing thighs, atrophied from what must be years out of practice. Each ridge of his spine, sharp and jagged edges that jut out of his pale skin, once soft to the touch but now threatening, as if Henry’s body has become as treacherous to traverse as the space inside his mind and his locked-away heart.
He slowly stands, dragging the towel from Henry’s wrists up his arms to his shoulders, following the familiar curve of his neck, before ending in his hair. He covers Henry’s head, shielding his eyes, and runs the towel thoroughly through his still-dripping hair before depositing the wet towels to the side and helping Henry into the dry clothes.
He reaches his hand out and back, clenching it into a fist several times in quick succession before finally working up the courage to touch Henry once more on the small of his back, guiding him step by agonizing, shuffling step into the living room. He slowly presses on Henry’s shoulders until his knees bend and he’s sitting on the couch before Alex lights the lamp on the table beside and retreats into the kitchen to put on a pot of tea. He opens the cabinet where he keeps a variety of types of coffee, from the instant stuff made for desperate situations in which he needs an infusion of caffeine and doesn’t care where it comes from or how it tastes, to a few, more upscale varieties he’s collected throughout his travels. A large shaker of cinnamon sits at the very front, always ready to be sprinkled in, no matter the brand name on the side of the coffee.
Straining to reach, he digs his arm into the very back of the cabinet where he keeps a container of Earl Grey, telling himself he buys it regularly in case he were to ever receive a visitor who likes tea while knowing that the truth of the matter is, he’ll sometimes brew a pot just to inhale the familiar scent of it in the kitchen, carrying a steaming mug to the bedroom and setting it beside him in bed on nights when insomnia haunts him a bit deeper than others.
As he waits, he slumps onto a chair at the small table in the kitchen, burying his head in his hands and drawing in a shaky breath. He thought…or rather, he hoped, that there might come a day when he’d open the door to see Henry standing on the other side. In this dreamscape that he’d played out in at least a million different ways behind his eyes each night before sleep overtook him, the reunion was always joyful. Like coming home. Sometimes, he pulled Henry in by the collar of a soft, blue sweater and crushed their lips together, feeling the spark of a slowly dying flame ignite back to life beneath his touch. Other times, they talked before the inevitable kiss, catching up on all of the time they’d lost. But always, always, it ended the same.
What he hadn’t imagined, not in any scenario, was this. Henry, sitting as still as a statue on his couch in a nearly catatonic state while he did anything he could think of to bring him back and to keep his hands and heart busy while doing it. Henry, apparently abandoning his sister’s wedding to fly to Austin to…what? Alex doesn't have an answer, and that, more than anything, terrifies him.
He doesn't know if this is the reunion he’d spent so many hours dreaming of, or the goodbye that Henry never gave him.
The sound of the kettle whistling its completed efforts draws him back out of his own thoughts as he chances a glance in the living room, at the back of Henry’s head as he remains straight-backed and stiff on the couch. He stands and retrieves the pot, pouring out a mug and blinking away the hot tears that form in his eyes at the all-too-familiar scent as he carries it carefully into the living room. He sets it on the coffee table to cool before kneeling in front of Henry and finally, for the first time, taking Henry’s hands in his so that they’re touching skin-to-skin.
It’s that. A single touch that breaks whatever spell Henry was under as his blue eyes fill with tears that stream down his cheeks. Heavy, gasping sobs rack his body as he falls forward into Alex’s chest, burying his face in Alex’s shoulder. Maneuvering them both until Alex is seated next to Henry on the couch, he slides his hand up into the damp hair curling at the back of Henry’s neck and cradles his head as tears of his own finally leak from his eyes, retreating into the fabric of Henry’s borrowed hoodie.
Two handfuls of Alex’s t-shirt are clenched tightly in Henry’s fists as he clings to Alex like he might float off if he lets go. As if he’s some sort of ghost made flesh. Alex knows the feeling.
As Henry’s sobs fade into soft hiccups, Alex pulls back out of his embrace to look at him, cheeks flushed and raw, blue eyes glittering, and every bit as beautiful as the first time he saw him, all those years ago, just a boy in a magazine.
“I’m so sorry,” Henry croaks feebly, his lip trembling as he says it, and keeps saying it, over and over again. Alex silences him with the pad of his thumb brushing gently over his lips before cupping Henry’s cheek in his hand, anchoring his fingers around Henry’s ear. “Are you alone? I didn’t even ask before I came barging in. You probably have someone–” Henry starts, unable to stop the words now that they’ve started.
“Shhh,” Alex soothes with another pass over Henry’s quivering lip. “It’s just you and me.”
“It was the c-cake,” Henry stammers as Alex slides his hands down to squeeze Henry’s tightly, stilling the shaking. “I saw it, and then I saw you . And I couldn’t bloody do it anymore, Alex. I couldn’t pretend to be anything but the person who once fell head-over-arse into a pile of buttercream and in mad, desperate love with you all at the same moment. So I left.”
“You left,” Alex echoes, drawing small circles on the back of Henry’s hands with his thumb, and clocking for the first time that Henry’s signet ring is nowhere to be found.
“And I knew it was daft. I kept telling myself that surely you’ve moved on. That you’ve found someone worthy of you by now. Not a bloody coward. But then I found out that you were living here, in…in Austin, and I let myself hope that maybe…maybe you were–” he cuts himself off, not allowing Alex to hear the conclusion of his thought, though Alex suspects he might be able to fill in the blanks well enough.
“...waiting for you?” Alex finishes as Henry’s head snaps up to meet his gaze. “Building a life here that I hoped one day you might be a part of? Wishing that you were across the ocean, loving me, and once you found yourself, you’d come back to me?” Henry’s lips are slightly parted in his shock, and suddenly Alex no longer has the strength left not to press his own against them as he closes the space and pulls Henry in by the nape of his neck.
Dream scenario, be damned. The spark of Henry’s mouth on his is more than he ever could have dreamt, in a million versions over countless years. It consumes him entirely, burning away the charred remains of what was left of his heart the night that Henry left to expose the still-beating organ beneath. It’s a flood, pulling him under the waves and daring him to come up for air, a request he doesn’t ever plan on honoring. It’s the storm still raging outside the windows, a spiderweb of lightning spreading across the sky above before an angry clap of thunder expresses its impatience at being asked to wait as they dance together in the heavens, never one without the other.
It’s Henry who pulls back first, breathless, pressing his forehead firmly into Alex’s and inhaling deeply through his nose, eyes closed, as if committing every detail of this moment to memory.
Alex drops his neck back, demanding Henry’s eyes drift open once more to meet his in the soft, warm glow of the lamplight.
“Welcome home, baby.”