It helps they've given People an exclusive - a few generic quotes about how much Alex "cherishes" his friendship with Henry and their "shared life experience" as sons of world leaders. Alex thinks their main shared life experience is probably wishing they could set that quote adrift on the ocean between them and watch it drown.

As usual, the day guard at the Dirksen Building glares at him as he slides through security. She’s certain he was the one who vandalized the sign outside one particular senator’s office to read BITCH MCCONNELL, but she’ll never prove it.

After Secret Service misread an olive-based shouting match in 2017 and almost put the Residence on lockdown, they now each get their own pizzas.

Alex is taking notes in a policy lecture when he gets the first text.
This bloke looks like you.
There's a picture attached, an image of a laptop screen paused on Chief Chirpa from Return of the Jedi: tiny, commanding, adorable, pissed off.
This is Henry, by the way.
He rolls his eyes, but adds the new contact to his phone: HRH Prince Dickhead. Poop emoji.
He's honestly not planning to respond, but a week later he sees a headline on the cover of People - PRINCE HENRY FLIES SOUTH FOR WINTER - complete with a photo of Henry artistically posed on an Australian beach in a pair of sensible yet miniscule navy swim trunks, and he can't stop himself.
you have a lot of moles, he texts, along with a snap of the spread. is that a result of the inbreeding?
Henry's retort comes two days later by way of a screenshot of a Daily Mail tweet that reads, Is Alex Claremont-Diaz going to be a father? The attached message says, But we were ever so careful, dear, which surprises a big enough laugh out of Alex that Zahra ejects him from her weekly debriefing with him and June.

He just... Well, he gets told he's great a lot. He just doesn't often get told he's good enough.

But Nora makes friends, and Alex ends up with acquaintances who think they know him because they've read his profile in New York magazine, and perfectly fine people with perfectly fine bodies who want to take him home from the bar. None of it is satisfying - it never has been, not really, but it never mattered as much as it does now that there's the sharp counterpoint of Henry, who knows him. Henry who's seen him in glasses and tolerates him at his most annoying and still kissed him like he wanted him, singularly, not the idea of him.

"I'm not going to have a marriage of convenience with you if you're always embarrassing me with the way you eat burritos," Alex says, watching her chew. A black bean falls out of her mouth and lands on one of her keyboards.
"Aren't you from Texas?" she says through her mouthful. "I've seen you shotgun a bottle of barbecue sauce. Watch yourself or I'm gonna marry June instead."

"Does that help, Alex? My Bloody Mary is here and I need to talk to it about this phone call."

You're a mad, spiteful, unmitigated demon, and I'm going to kiss you until you forget how to talk.

"I know the feeling. Last summer I almost punched a guy at Lollapalooza because he tried to grab June's ass."
"But you didn't?"
"June had already dumped her milkshake on him," Alex explains. He shrugs a little, knowing Henry can't see it. "And then Amy Tased him. The smell of burnt strawberry milkshake on a sweaty frat guy is really something."

It's all bloody useless because when I'm not thinking about your face, I'm thinking about your arse or your hands or your smart mouth. I suspect the latter is what got me into this predicament in the first place. Nobody's ever got the nerve to be cheeky to a prince, except you. The moment you first called me a prick, my fate was sealed. O, fathers of my bloodline! O, ye kings of olde! Take this crown from me, bury me in my ancestral soil. If only you had known the mighty work of thine loins would be undone by a gay heir who likes it when American boys with chin dimples are mean to him.

Alex feels like somebody has probably warned him about private email servers before, but he's a little fuzzy on the details. It doesn't feel important.

The phrase "see attached bibliography" is the single sexiest thing you have ever written to me.

Should I tell you that when we're apart, your body comes back to me in dreams? That when I sleep, I see you, the dip of your waist, the freckle above your hip, and when I wake up in the morning, it feels like I've just been with you, the phantom touch of your hand on the back of my neck fresh and not imagined? That I can feel your skin against mine, and it makes every bone in my body ache? That, for a few moments, I can hold my breath and be back there with you, in a dream, in a thousand rooms, nowhere at all?

"Hi, love," he hears Henry say quietly, privately, right into the hair above his ear, and Alex's breath forgets how to do anything but laugh helplessly.

Alex forgets, momentarily, about the pancakes and everything else, not because he wants to do absolutely filthy things to Henry—maybe even with the apron still on—but because he loves him, and isn't that wild, to know that that's what makes the filthy things so good.

"Fuck you," Henry says, his voice breaking, and he gets a handful of Alex's shirt collar, and Alex knows he's going to love this stubborn shithead forever.

He reaches up and touches a thumb to Alex's cheekbone. "I'm not...good at saying these things like you are, but. I've always thought...ever since I knew about me, and even before, when I could sense I was different—and, after everything the past few years, all the mad things my head does—I've always thought of myself as a problem that deserved to stay hidden. Never quite trusted myself, or what I wanted. Before you, I was all right letting everything happen to me. I honestly have never thought I deserved to choose." His hand moves, fingertips brushing a curl behind Alex's ear. "But you treat me like I do."

Henry comes with his face turned into Alex's open palm, his bottom lip catching on the knob of his wrist, and Alex tries to memorize every detail down to how his lashes fan across his cheeks and the pink flush that spreads all the way up to his ears. He tells his too-fast brain: Don't miss it this time. He's too important.

Re: telling Philip, sounds like a great plan. If all else fails, just do what I did and act like a huge jackass until most of your family figures it out on their own.

But the first time I saw you. Rio. I took that down to the gardens. I pressed it into the leaves of a silver maple and recited it to the Waterloo Vase. It didn't fit in any rooms.

"But the thing is, jumping off cliffs is kinda my thing. That's the choice. I love him, with all that, because of all that. On purpose. I love him on purpose."

He's on the way back to the airstrip when he sees it, emblazoned on the side of a brick building, a shock of color against a gray street.
"Wait!" Alex yells up to the driver. "Stop! Stop the car!"
Up close, it's beautiful. Two stories tall. He can't imagine how somebody was able to put together something like this so fast.
It's a mural of himself and Henry, facing each other, haloed by a bright yellow sun, depicted as Han and Leia. Henry in all white, starlight in his hair. Alex dressed as a scruffy smuggler, a blaster at his hip. A royal and a rebel, arms around each other.
He snaps a photo on his phone, and fingers shaking, types out a tweet: Never tell me the odds.

Henry's pulling him and kissing him, sandy hair on a pink bedspread, long lashes and long legs and blue eyes, elegant hands pinning his wrists to the mattress. It's like everything he's ever loved about Henry in a moment, in a laugh, in the way he shivers, in the confident roll of his spine, in happy, unfettered sex in the well-furnished eye of a storm.