Chapter Text
Alex Claremont-Diaz had spent his whole life believing that big gestures were for rom-coms and presidential campaigns. And yet here he was, standing in the middle of his kitchen at stupid o’clock in the morning, clutching a half-empty jar of Nutella and muttering to himself about Céline Dion.
“It’s not tacky if it’s heartfelt,” he reasoned out loud. “It’s only tacky if you don’t commit.”
Commitment, unfortunately, was exactly the thing that made him feel like he was about to hurl. Not because he didn’t want to commit. God, he wanted to commit. He wanted Henry like Texas wanted barbecue, like the West Wing wanted a 27th Emmy. But the sheer weight of orchestrating something that would both surprise a literal prince and also not get them roasted by tabloids across different continents? That was…a lot.
He plunked the spoon back into the Nutella jar, closed his eyes, and tried to picture Henry’s face. That smile that always seemed like it was half-secret, like he was in on a joke nobody else knew. That laugh that cracked him open like sunlight breaking through storm clouds. The way he said Alex’s name, every syllable pronounced like it was a confession.
That was it. That was why he was doing this.
Which was why he had been secretly plotting for the better part of six months, roping in the kind of co-conspirators who were simultaneously invaluable and also deeply untrustworthy.
Yikes.
Nora, for instance.
She’d immediately agreed to help, but only after twenty minutes of relentless teasing about how Alex “finally stopped being allergic to monogamy” and “had reached full telenovela levels of extra.” June had cried with actual tears (!) which Alex hadn’t been prepared for, and then demanded that he give her veto power over the proposal plan “so you don’t accidentally propose on, like, a Jumbotron during the Super Bowl.”
Even Zahra had gotten involved, though reluctantly. She’d simply sighed and said, “If this circus leaks to Politico, you’re dead, Claremont-Diaz.” 😵
But the real problem was that Alex hadn’t landed on the how . He knew the why . He knew the who . He just didn’t know the exact set piece of the surprise. Until — three weeks ago — he’d been listening to Céline Dion in an Uber.
It had been pure accident. The driver had shuffled to a greatest hits playlist, and suddenly, there it was: that piano line, that voice, I Love You . Alex had sat there, forehead against the glass, and thought: Shit. This is Henry.
Because wasn’t that exactly how Henry had rearranged his whole internal wiring? Making him want things he didn’t even know he wanted — quiet mornings, soft kisses, the kind of forever that used to sound boring and now sounded like the only adventure worth chasing.
So yeah. Céline Dion was it. The plan.
Of course, Alex’s version of a plan was currently a series of half-legible Post-it notes on his desk and a Google Doc labeled “Henry pls say yes (final FINAL real version this time).”
⸻
Which was how he found himself, two days later, pacing around a corner of the White House garden like a man waiting to be arrested.
“I think it should be private,” he was saying into his phone, “but also kind of public? Like, not Times Square public, but…monumental public. But not so monumental that he panics and goes full Buckingham Palace statue. You know?”
On the other end, June said dryly, “You mean you want something meaningful but not overwhelming. Which you could have said in four words instead of whatever…that was.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, genius. So where?”
Alex hesitated. He’d thought of the obvious places: the lake at Kensington, the library where Henry kissed him for the first time, even the Victoria and Albert Museum (though he wasn’t sure proposing next to a taxidermy tiger was romantic or a felony).
Then his gaze drifted across the garden, where the roses were in full riot. Where, last year, Henry had sat on a wrought iron bench, knees pressed together, hands folded, eyes lit up like he’d never seen colour before. Where Alex had realised, with sudden clarity, that Henry wasn’t just a crush or an escape hatch or even a fairy tale.
He was it.
“The garden,” Alex whispered. “It has to be the garden.”
There was silence. Then June said, “Oh my God. You’re actually a romantic.”
“I’m not,” Alex said automatically. Then, quieter: “I just…want him to know.”
And suddenly the whole thing felt real in a way it hadn’t before.
⸻
The weeks that followed were chaos. Nora hacked into the White House AV system to make sure he could pipe in Céline Dion at exactly the right moment. Pez volunteered to bring champagne and, inexplicably, three swans.
“Don’t ask. It’ll be art.”
June helped him pick a ring, small and elegant, something Henry could actually wear without making the monarchy combust.
And Alex…Alex rehearsed.
In the shower, in the car, while brushing his teeth. He whispered lines into his phone like a lunatic. He started sentences and abandoned them halfway through, groaning into his pillow.
“Henry, you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me—”
“Nope. Too cliché.”
“Henry, I love you more than Texas barbecue—”
“Jesus Christ, delete that.”
“Henry, I—”
He’d stop, because it wasn’t words he wanted. It was the feeling, the way his chest ached whenever Henry looked at him like he was something rare and impossible.
He wanted Henry to hear Céline Dion and understand: this is what you make me feel. Every day.
And if Alex had to embarrass himself in front of their closest friends and possibly three swans to get there, so be it.
Henry noticed first in the way Alex started using his “I’m absolutely not hiding anything” voice — a warm, exaggerated earnestness that usually preceded things like “I did not eat the last breakfast taco” and “I definitely read that briefing.” It arrived one Tuesday morning with Alex’s coffee, a shade too sweet, and a kiss pressed to Henry’s temple that lingered a beat too long.
“You’re unusually chipper,” Henry murmured, because that was the diplomatic way to say, What are you plotting, beloved menace?
“Democracy vitamins,” Alex said, grin bright enough to be a public utility.
Henry arched an eyebrow over the rim of his teacup. “And those come from…Nora’s desk drawer?”
“From my soul,” Alex replied, solemn as a judge and twice as suspicious.
If Henry was honest with himself — and he was, reluctantly, in the shower where nobody could see — he rather adored this version of Alex: combustible with possibility, a comet with perfect curly dark hair. But experience had taught him that comets leave debris, and the debris typically required an apology tour across at least two continents and three communications offices. So he observed. He catalogued. He made a spreadsheet in his head titled “Claremont-Diaz: Potential Shenanigans.”
Row one: Excessive affection. (No complaint; merely a data point.)
Row two: Frequent closed-door meetings with Nora and June. (Worrisome.)
Row three: A calendar event labeled “botanical review.” (Hilariously unconvincing.)
Row four: Pez texting a swan emoji, three times, no explanation.
The swan emojis were the tipping point. Henry showed his phone to Bea.
“Is this a threat?” he asked.
Bea squinted. “From Pez? Darling, if Pez threatened you, it would be in calligraphy on biodegradable paper and it would smell like bergamot or lavender.” She looked again. “Hmm. Or he’s planning performance art.”
Henry closed his eyes. He could see it: a tableau of Pez in a pastel suit, holding a lily, while a swan committed tax fraud in the background. “Right.”
The thing about Henry — he was not, by nature, a man who enjoyed surprises. His life had supplied enough of them already. The suddenness of duty, the suddenness of grief, the claustrophobic thunderclap of becoming a symbol before he’d quite managed to become a person. Surprises had usually meant loss. Until Alex.
Alex had been a surprise that kept unfolding: a riotous laugh, an improbable tenderness, a ladder out of a locked room. Even now, years after the disaster-cake of their first meeting and the long, humid slog toward their yes, Henry sometimes woke and found Alex drooling on his shoulder like a particularly handsome Saint Bernard, and thought: I get to have this. Me. His chest would go ridiculous and buoyant, as if someone had replaced his ribs with helium. It was alarming. It was also the only thing that had ever felt like freedom and home in the same breath.
So when Alex grew peculiarly careful — moving schedules around with the precision of a jewel thief, bracketing his phone screen with his hand when Henry entered a room — Henry did not prod. He let himself be curious the way one is curious about the future: hopeful, terrified, sure it would arrive without asking permission.
He did, however, install a quiet watchfulness for Alex’s tells. One afternoon in the residence, Alex was sprawled on the sofa, allegedly reading an article about agricultural subsidies. The article in question was upside down.
“Ah,” Henry said mildly, “and how go the soybeans?”
Alex jolted. “So…soy. Good. Beans. Also good.” He flipped the tablet the right way up like a man disarming a bomb. “You’re very judgmental for someone who puts milk in tea.”
Henry leaned his head back against the cushion and smiled. “I’m British, my love. We invented judgment.”
Alex laughed, quicksilver and bright, then sobered. He closed the tablet and looked at Henry with a softness that always ruined Henry’s composure. Sometimes love was a choir. With Alex, sometimes love was a held gaze across a room and the single note of it vibrated in Henry’s bones.
“I’m…working on something,” Alex said, in a thread of sincerity that tugged at Henry’s ribs. “And I want it to be right.”
“I never worry about your right,” Henry replied. “Merely your dramatic flourish .”
A beat. “So you’re saying if I rented a biplane…”
“No,” Henry said, alarmed. “No biplanes.”
“Duly noted,” Alex said, in the tone of a man unduly noting forbiddances as challenges.
⸻
This is how the days stacked: small, conspiring details, like the choreography of swallows over a river.
Zahra intercepted Henry in a hallway, thrust a nondisclosure agreement at him, and said, “Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to, Your Royal Sparkle.”
Henry signed. He’d learned early that the best way to survive Zahra was to offer no sudden movements and always have a pen.
June whisked Henry off for a “brotherly-sisterly errand,” which turned out to be trying on suits under the pretense of a magazine feature. “You look like a scandal I’d read twice,” she declared, adjusting his lapel. “Don’t tell Alex I said that; his head will become a weather balloon.”
“Alex’s head,” Henry said, amused, “already has its own tide charts.”
June kissed his cheek. She’d cried on their first real hug, in a quiet kitchen, and Henry had loved her immediately for loving his Alex so fiercely. “Wear the midnight blue,” she said. “Trust me.”
Back in the residence, Nora kept appearing in doorways with an expression Henry recognised from the war rooms of his youth: the face of a woman quietly running five simulations at once. She had a clipboard. She had a headset. She had, at one point, a pocket laser pointer. “Don’t mind me,” she said, not meaning it. “Just testing light levels for no reason in particular that you should interrogate.”
Bea, who was visiting for a charity gala and a much-needed break from London’s labyrinth of expectations, folded into the mischief as if she’d been born there. She started taking Polaroids of Alex and Henry doing ordinary things — brushing their teeth, arguing about whether the best breakfast carb was a bagel (Alex) or crumpet (Henry), reading on the floor because the sofa was “too linear for my soul” (Alex, again). She stuck them into Alex’s palm with a soft, conspiratorial wink.
“For later,” she said.
“For when?” Henry asked.
“For the inevitable moment when you two forget that ordinary magic is still magic,” Bea said, philosopher-princess. “Consider it protective amulets.”
Henry tucked the Polaroid of Alex frowning at a toaster into his wallet. He kept reaching for it like a worry stone. It soothed him in a way that felt both foolish and correct.
⸻
The night before the “botanical review”, Henry found Alex on the balcony, shoulders bent against the dark. Washington spread out below like a map engraved in silver. The air smelled of river and summer, that humid, humming thing that made one’s skin feel like it remembered the ocean.
“You’re thinking loudly,” Henry said, sliding his arms around Alex’s waist.
Alex exhaled against Henry’s cheek. “I am in a committed relationship with catastrophic hypotheticals.”
“Ah.” Henry pressed a kiss to the hinge of Alex’s jaw. “Tell me a few. I’ll rate them.”
“Okay. Worst case: a rogue sprinkler system drenches us and I’m forced to propose while we both look like otters. Slightly less worst case: someone leaks the surprise to the press and we get scooped by Page Six ; my mother kills me and then resurrects me to yell at me again. Number three: Pez’s swans unionise.”
Henry considered. “The swans are already unionised.”
Alex pulled back to look at him. “Are you…serious?”
“No,” Henry said, deadpan. “But it fits emotionally.”
Alex laughed, but there was something brittle at the edge. “I want it to be good,” he whispered, and in the word good Henry heard a barge of dearer cargo: worthy, safe, unforgettable.
Henry’s first instinct, always, was to offer steadiness, the ballast of himself. “You could propose to me while we’re both in old pajamas holding mismatched mugs,” he said. “And I would still say yes so quickly I’d sprain my mouth.”
Alex blinked at him, lashes wet, and then, of course, made a joke rather than cry. “Hot,” he said. “Gross, but hot.”
Henry tucked his hands under the hem of Alex’s shirt and rested them against warm skin. “You do not have to make a cathedral to convince me I’d like to live there,” he said. “I already brought my books and plants.”
Alex swallowed, throat flexing. “I love you,” he said, like a vow he kept finding new syllables for. “I love you so much I feel like my bones have turned into swing sets.”
“Yours is a very American skeleton,” Henry murmured, smiling. “Loud and recreational.”
“Say you’ll come tomorrow,” Alex said, suddenly boyish, suddenly the Texas sun distilled into a single pleading look. “Just—come. Wear the midnight blue. Pretend not to notice anything weird.”
“I never notice anything weird,” Henry said gravely. “That’s my defining trait.”
Alex kissed him slow, like a permission slip. When they parted, their foreheads stayed pressed together. The city hummed. Somewhere below, a siren wrote a red line across the night.
“Tomorrow,” Alex said.
“Tomorrow,” Henry echoed, and swallowed the tremor in it.
⸻
The next day unfolded with the extra-saturated colours of a dream that suspects it might be real. Henry woke to find a note slid under his door in Alex’s indecipherable scrawl: BOTANICAL REVIEW: 18:30. Dress code: If the moon would flirt with you in it, wear that. There was a doodle of what might have been a fern or a sea monster.
It was difficult to tell.
Henry spent the afternoon performing princely duties — a video call with a London arts council, a carefully bland statement about a naval charity — while his insides behaved like a flock of starlings. He could not, for the life of him, keep tea in his mouth; it kept evaporating between cup and lip. June checked in with a text: Hydrate. Also: Do you have tissues? Bea sent a photo of Pez holding a clipboard, looking like a benevolent wedding planner who’d been trapped inside a sherbet. Caption: He says the swans are “method.”
At 18:10, Henry stood before the mirror, fingers steady on his cufflinks, heart pounding in the throat. The midnight blue suit glowed like ink. He thought of the boy he’d been: a knot of properness and panic. He thought of the man he was: still prone to panic, yes, but now with a hand to hold when it arrived. He pressed the Polaroid in his wallet, felt the whisper of Alex’s ordinary face beneath his thumb, and went to the garden.
The sun had begun its practiced descent, the sky’s colour doing something euphoric and indecent — gold flirting with apricot. The roses were wild with themselves, and the air held that faint, spicy sweetness that insists even beauty has thorns. Along the path, small lanterns had been tucked into the hedges, their light a quiet hush.
Nora’s voice pinged in Henry’s ear from somewhere unseen: “No questions. Follow the lights.”
He followed. A momentarily treacherous part of him wondered: What if this is all a misunderstanding? What if Alex is about to reveal a surprise pop quiz on agricultural subsidies? Then he saw the bench — that bench — dressed not in pomp but in care: a blanket folded just so, a small vase with a single white rose notched into place as if it had always meant to be there.
Music drifted, almost imperceptible at first, like memory arriving from another room.
Henry’s breath caught. He knew the song without needing to hear a single lyric. The opening piano, the long reach of the melody — he’d once caught Alex singing badly to it in the shower, and had fallen in love with the audacity of that, too.
He turned.
Alex stood at the edge of the path, hands in his pockets as if he hadn’t spent months engineering a minor miracle. His expression was a kaleidoscope: terror and delight and a tenderness so exposed that Henry had to swallow or drown in it.
“Botanical review,” Alex said hoarsely.
“Very thorough,” Henry managed.
Alex took a breath that looked like it used every inch of his lungs. He stepped forward, the music rising around them like a tide. For the first time in days — weeks? — Henry’s worry went quiet, as if someone had put a hand over its mouth and said, Shh. Watch.
Alex reached him, reached for him, and the world contracted to that reach.
“Hi,” Alex said.
“Hi,” Henry said.
“Before anything else,” Alex blurted, “I just need you to know that if a swan shows up, it’s not my fault.”
Henry blinked. Then, wonderfully, he laughed — that startled, unguarded laugh Alex cherished like a superstition. The kind of laugh you can’t engineer, only earn.
“Understood,” Henry said. He could feel it: the moment tipping, the heart’s gravity reasserting its law.
The song swelled; the lanterns softly brightened; the roses held their breath. And Henry, finally, did not try to guess the end. He only stood very still in his midnight blue, ready to be surprised by the shape of joy.
Alex’s palms were damp, which he really hoped wasn’t the first detail Henry noticed when he took his hands. Not the lanterns, not the roses, not Céline Dion crooning her immortal magic into the evening air — no, Henry would absolutely zero in on the clammy, sweaty grip of America’s very own chaos gremlin.
“You’re shaking,” Henry murmured, voice low, intimate, a tether against the sprawling night.
“Not shaking,” Alex lied immediately. “Just…vibrating at a higher frequency. Like a sexy washing machine.”
Henry’s mouth quirked, fond and exasperated all at once. “You are utterly ridiculous.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, breathless, “and you love me for it.”
The thing about Alex Claremont-Diaz was that for all his swagger, all his conviction, he had never been good at slowing down. He ran at life like it was a race and the prize was the sun itself. But here, now, standing in front of Henry with the universe’s most dramatic love song curling through the roses, Alex felt something strange: the luxury of pause.
He looked at Henry — really looked. Midnight blue suit cut to perfection, eyes like a storm and sanctuary both, the faintest flush on his cheeks from laughing at Alex’s nonsense. And he thought: I want to pause here forever. I want this frame of the film to never end.
“Henry,” Alex began, and then promptly forgot every single line he’d practiced for six months.
Not one word about cathedrals, or swing-set bones, or democracy vitamins survived the head-on collision with Henry’s gaze. All that survived was the truth.
“God, I had a speech,” Alex said, half to himself, “but of course my brain’s like, ‘Nope, good luck, buddy.’ So…” He swallowed. “I’ll just tell you what I know.”
Henry’s hand squeezed his — encouragement, not rescue.
“I know,” Alex said, voice shaking but steadying, “that every time you look at me, it feels like I’m being seen for the first time. I know that you make me want to be softer, and braver, and quieter in ways I never thought I could. I know that you are my best friend, my partner in crime, the calm I didn’t even realise I was starving for. And I know—” His voice broke, a laugh slipping through, wet and helpless. “I know that you’re it for me. Like…capital-I-It. The whole damn story.”
The song surged, Céline holding that impossible note, and Alex dropped to one knee. His heart was pounding like he’d swallowed fireworks. From his pocket, he pulled the ring — simple, elegant, a band of gold with a glint of sapphire, like a secret sky.
Henry’s lips parted. His hand flew to his mouth. For a flickering second, he looked like he might actually faint in the roses.
Alex grinned, teeth flashing, eyes bright with terror and devotion. “So, Henry George Edward James Hanover-Stuart-Fox —”
Henry made a strangled laugh. “Oh God, all of them? ”
“Every damn one,” Alex said. “—will you marry me?”
The world stopped. The garden went holy. Céline Dion carried the silence like a chalice.
Henry stared, as if trying to decide whether he’d slipped into a dream too sweet to be trusted. Then the tears came, sharp and sudden, cutting silver trails down his cheeks.
“Yes,” Henry whispered, and then louder, surer, his whole body behind it: “Yes. Yes, you bloody lunatic, yes.”
Alex was on his feet before the word had fully left Henry’s mouth. The kiss was instant, ferocious, clumsy with joy — teeth clashing, noses bumping, laughter spilling between them. Henry clung to him like a drowning man to shore, and Alex thought: No, not drowning. Flying.
Around them, the lanterns flickered like applause. From the hedges, there was an unmistakable honk — Pez, triumphant, unleashing the swans.
Henry tore his mouth away, half-sobbing, half-laughing into Alex’s neck. “Did you—did you actually involve waterfowl?!”
“I told you it wasn’t my fault!” Alex gasped, laughing so hard he nearly dropped the ring. Which reminded him — oh God, the ring. He pulled back, fumbling, and slid it onto Henry’s hand with the reverence of a man crowning a king.
It fit perfectly, of course. June had measured Henry’s ring size with the stealth of a jewel thief. The sapphire caught the lantern light, blue fire against Henry’s skin.
Henry stared at it, breath hitching, then at Alex. His voice was wrecked, ruined with joy. “You absolute menace,” he said, choking on a laugh. “You wonderful, impossible menace. I love you.”
Alex framed Henry’s face with both hands, forehead pressed to his. “I love you too. More than barbecue, more than Texas, more than every headline and every vote and every impossible thing I thought I wanted. You’re the thing I didn’t even know I needed.”
Henry kissed him again, softer this time, their lips moving slow, like the world had finally agreed to keep pace with them. Céline’s voice soared into the final chorus, and Alex thought: God, if every love song was secretly about us, this is the one that proves it.
From the shadows, a champagne cork popped. Nora’s voice yelled, “Finally!” followed by Bea’s delighted squeal and Pez shouting, “Release the backup swans!”
“Absolutely not!” Zahra’s voice snapped somewhere in the dark. “I swear to God, if a single feather hits the President’s roses—”
But Alex barely heard them. He was too busy memorising the taste of yes on Henry’s mouth.
Too busy realising he’d pulled it off.
Too busy learning what forever felt like in the palm of his hand.
The garden was chaos. Which was, frankly, the most on-brand conclusion to anything Alex touched.
Swans honked indignantly at their handlers. Pez was attempting to “interpretive dance the concept of eternal union,” which looked suspiciously like lunges in a pastel suit. Nora was documenting everything on three separate devices, muttering about “archival integrity.” June was crying again, dabbing her cheeks with a tissue while shouting, “I told you the midnight blue, didn’t I?” Zahra had commandeered a bottle of champagne and was drinking directly from it with the expression of a woman who had accepted her fate.
And through it all, Alex and Henry stood at the center, orbit locked, as if the universe had shrunk to the radius of two joined hands.
Henry kept staring at the ring like it might vanish if he blinked too hard. Every time Alex caught him, Henry flushed, ducked his head, then peeked again. Like a schoolboy with a crush. Like a prince who had somehow stumbled into a miracle.
“Do you like it?” Alex asked softly, pulling him closer so their shoulders brushed.
Henry’s laugh was wet, breathless. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever worn. And I say that as a man who’s been forced into ceremonial uniforms with actual ostrich feathers.”
“Hot,” Alex murmured, leaning in for another kiss.
Henry kissed him back, tender, lingering, then rested his forehead against Alex’s temple. “I don’t think I’ll ever take it off.”
“Good,” Alex said, voice low, “because I don’t have a return receipt.”
Henry huffed a laugh, the kind that felt like a secret shared. His thumb traced circles on Alex’s palm. “You truly are hopeless, you know.”
“Hopelessly devoted, maybe.” Alex waggled his eyebrows. “Yes, that was an Olivia Newton-John reference . No, I won’t apologise.”
Henry groaned, but his smile was helpless.
⸻
Later, when the swans had been wrangled, when Nora had finished her field notes, when Pez had finally stopped lunging, the garden emptied back into quiet. The roses exhaled. The lanterns flickered soft and steady. Céline Dion’s song had long since ended, but it lingered in the air like perfume.
Alex and Henry stayed behind.
They ended up on the bench, shoulder to shoulder, Henry’s hand turned so the ring gleamed with every tilt of light. Alex sprawled the way only Alex could sprawl, long legs everywhere, but his arm curled firmly around Henry, holding him close like an anchor.
Henry tipped his head to rest against Alex’s shoulder. “You realise this will set off an entire year of headlines. ‘Prince Betrothed to First Son.’ ‘American Chaos Marries British Tradition.’ ‘Royal Wedding Features Rogue Swans.’”
Alex grinned. “Bet they’ll make a Netflix series.”
Henry groaned. “Promise me we won’t let Ryan Murphy anywhere near it.”
“Cross my heart.” Alex turned, kissed Henry’s hair. Then, quieter: “You okay?”
Henry closed his eyes, inhaled roses and Alex, the two scents hopelessly entwined. “Better than okay.” His voice softened. “Alex…I never thought I’d have this. Not really. Marriage wasn’t—possible. Not in the way I needed it to be. And then you…” He trailed off, throat thick.
Alex squeezed his shoulder. “I know.”
“No, I don’t think you do,” Henry said, tilting his head so their eyes met. “You crashed into my life like a—like a bloody meteor. Messy, inconvenient, catastrophic. And somehow you made all the broken pieces line up into something I’d never dared to imagine.”
Alex’s grin wavered into something tender, fragile. “Henry…”
“You gave me more than love,” Henry whispered. “You gave me a life I want. A future I believe in.” His voice caught, but he pressed on. “So yes, Alex. A thousand times yes. Today and tomorrow and every impossible day after.”
Alex kissed him then, slow and reverent, like he was sealing every word into both of them.
⸻
Hours later, long after the lanterns had guttered and the champagne bottles had been cleared, Alex and Henry lay tangled together in the quiet of the residence. Shoes abandoned, ties undone, shirt buttons half-forgotten. The ring glinted faintly in the low light, catching whenever Henry shifted, as though the universe kept winking at them.
“Still vibrating at a higher frequency?” Henry murmured into Alex’s collarbone.
“Yeah,” Alex admitted. “But now it’s more like…a sexy purring cat.”
Henry laughed, muffled against his skin. “You’ll be insufferable about this, won’t you?”
“Absolutely. I’m gonna introduce you as my fiancé to every single person we meet, even like—” Alex lowered his voice, mock-formal. “‘Hello, Madam Prime Minister, have you met my fiancé, Henry?’”
Henry groaned. “Fiancé. God, that sounds…” He trailed off, rolling the word around his mouth like chocolate. “It sounds very good.”
Alex grinned into his hair. “Yeah. It does.”
Silence stretched, easy, their breaths syncing. Alex traced idle patterns on Henry’s arm, Henry’s fingers resting lightly over Alex’s heart.
“You know,” Henry said after a while, “Céline Dion was an inspired choice.”
“Obviously,” Alex replied. “Gay canon.”
“Also devastatingly romantic.” Henry’s voice softened. “I’ll never hear that song again without thinking of this.”
“Good,” Alex said, eyes fluttering shut. “That was the point.”
Henry smiled against his chest, heart thudding steady and sure. “I love you, Alex.”
Alex tilted his head down, kissed the crown of Henry’s hair. “I love you too. More than barbecue. More than Texas. More than every messy plan I’ll ever come up with.” He chuckled, half-asleep. “You’re the only plan that matters.”
Henry’s eyes closed, his last thought before sleep that this — this bench, this song, this boy who loved him loud and impossible — was the kind of forever he’d once thought existed only in books.
And somehow, impossibly, it was his.
TBC in Chapter 2 💒