Chapter Text
Now
‘Oh my god,’ Henry murmurs, ‘Alex.’
Alex blinks, and there’s still a fire burning in his eyes. ‘Yeah, look, dude, I told you that book is mine. I’m Alex. That’s my book from when I was a kid and I don’t know how the fuck it’s here, but it is and it’s mine, and please. I’m… you can ask Bug— June. It’s mine. Please, I’m like— I’ll give you whatever you want for it.’
A noise bursts from Henry’s lips – a half startled laugh and a gasp, a slightly choked sob all in one. He’s such an idiot. ‘Alex.’
‘Yeah, I’m Alex. I just said—'
‘Alex,’ Henry says again, biting down on his lip to try and contain all the feelings bursting inside of him.
Alex freezes and looks at Henry again. Maybe it’s written so clearly across Henry’s face because his breath catches. Henry sees the understanding settle on his face. ‘Oh my god,’ he whispers, looking from Henry clutching the book tight to his chest and around the room, at the foxes painted on the wall. ‘Henry.’
‘Yeah,’ Henry says, and he’s still not entirely sure what’s happening – how and why Alex, his Alex, is here and in his shop and in New York, or what happened to the book and why that’s here in his shop too.
‘Fox Tales,’ Alex says distantly. ‘Fox… Like your dad.’ He meets Henry’s eyes again.
Henry nods. ‘Yes.’
‘Oh my god.’ He looks at the book in Henry’s hands. ‘I— I lost it,’ he says quietly. ‘I… my parents split up that summer and I came home from camp one weekend and they’d basically packed everything up and my dad was gone. We moved to a different house in Austin with Mom because she wanted a fresh start, and I didn’t realise until we unpacked that it was gone. She’d put it in the wrong box and sent it off to a yard sale. I guess they must have sold it eventually too and—’
‘You moved,’ Henry says dumbly.
‘Yeah. God I’m so sorry, I never wrote down your address because you always wrote it on the envelope and your last one, it was inside the book and—’
‘You didn’t get my letters because you moved. I thought— I don’t know, I thought that maybe—’
‘As if I’d ever have stopped replying to you by choice, sweetheart.’
Henry huffs out a disbelieving laugh. He feels Alex’s eyes on him again, taking him in anew.
‘You got—’ Alex catches himself. ‘Tall.’
Henry looks at him again. Of course it’s Alex. He looks at him now and wonders how he could possibly have ever thought he was anyone else. ‘Wish I could say the same,’ Henry replies with another breathless, disbelieving laugh.
Alex barks out a laugh. Henry feels delirious. He feels like he might be about to wake up from a very specific, very unbelievable, slightly convoluted dream.
Henry lets himself look. Alex is… he’s so unmistakably Alex. His dark eyes are the ones that have appeared in Henry’s dreams for years, full of mirth and humour and something that looks a little bit like entranced, disbelieving wonder. His hair is longer now, curling around his ears, and he still has that stupid, perfect little dimple in his chin. He’s wearing chinos and a shirt. Henry wants to know if this is what he wears every single day or if he’s been somewhere today he had to dress up for. He wants to know what Alex does, what he likes, who he is now.
‘I can’t believe it’s you,’ Alex says. ‘I can’t believe you’re … you.’
‘Well, yes. Last I checked, I am me,’ Henry says, but his voice sounds far away. He can’t believe this is Alex either. He can’t believe the skinny boy with scraped knees and the biggest heart he’s ever known is the same guy that has been stuck in Henry’s head for weeks, has had him looking up and doing double takes at every glimpse of dark curly hair coming through the door in the desperate foolish hope that it might be June’s brother coming back.
Who June’s brother really is though, is so much better than he could ever have imagined.
‘Do you— would you maybe want to get dinner or coffee or something? I— I don’t know, catch up? I—’
Henry is still smiling. He’s not sure he’s stopped smiling since he realised that this is Alex – his Alex – and that he didn’t forget him. It’s like there’s a hazy film all around him, a sun washed filter around this entire moment, freezing them in time. He nods. ‘I’d love dinner.’
‘Okay, cool,’ Alex replies, a smile on his own lips. ‘Jesus Christ. Man, look at you. In my head you’re still like, twelve, which I know is insane because like, I’m not a kid anymore so I know logically you can’t be either but you’re actually like… tall and grown up and…’
‘Excuse me,’ a voice says from behind Henry. ‘Can I pay please?’
Henry snaps back to the present and turns to look at her. The filter fades as he looks around the store. ‘Right, yes of course. Sorry.’
He looks to Alex, then back to the woman and the impatient look on her face. ‘Just—’ Henry says, ‘over here.’
He takes her over to the counter and puts the book in his hands on the side, and starts to ring up her books and pack them away into a bag.
He watches from the corner of his eye as Alex moves through the store looking at everything more closely. When he looks up, Alex is standing in the children’s section – now empty of the Rivera kids who have gone home with their sister – looking up at the ceiling.
The shop is quiet and it’s almost closing time. Rosa seems to have disappeared without a word at the end of her shift, because it’s just the two of them.
Henry walks over to Alex’s side slowly.
‘Stars,’ Alex says quietly, eyes still fixed on the ceiling, looking up at the midnight sky painted with tiny white stars in constellations.
‘Yeah,’ Henry replies with a small smile. ‘After I moved back home,’ he says quietly, ‘and I went off to school, I used to spend a lot of time looking out of the window. I’d look up and see them and I’d wonder about whether you might also be looking up at the same ones. There was something nice in that – the idea that even though you were thousands of miles away, that you were still looking up at the same sky as me.’
‘I’m sorry I didn’t write back,’ Alex says quietly. ‘I… I cried for days after Mom told me about the book and that she’d lost your address. I went back through all the letters to see if you’d ever said the name of that fancy school you went to, because I couldn’t remember it but I couldn’t find it. I tried to see if your dad had an agent or a fan page or something to try and track you down a few years later, but I couldn’t find anything. I googled you. I thought that you had a pretty unique name like how many Henry Mountchristen-Windsors can there be?’
Henry smiles. ‘Dad retired a few years after we moved back so he stopped working with an agent and then…’ Henry swallows. ‘He passed away when I was seventeen. It was… well, it was fairly awful.’
Alex nods and Henry thinks maybe Alex already knew this. His father was beloved enough that his death had made the news. There had been an outpouring of love from people who had known him and even more who hadn’t. Henry hadn’t known how to feel about that – all these strangers saying he’d changed their lives when they hadn’t even known him.
‘I started going by Fox after he died – we only ever had Mum’s names because they didn’t want people to put two and two together and work out we were his kids and hound us, but… I’ve always sort of hated that side of the family and they’ve never much liked me either. I just wanted to feel closer to him after and— well, this whole place is for him really. He’s the one who always loved stories most. It was one of the first things I wanted to do in here, this sky. Pez painted it for me. He spent ages on it, getting all the constellations right. You can’t see the stars properly here,’ he says quietly. ‘I think all kids should get to see the stars sometimes.’
Alex doesn’t say anything, he just nods and traces the constellations on the ceiling with his eyes.
‘I never looked for you,’ Henry says quietly. ‘I was too nervous of what I might find, I suppose. I don’t know if I was more scared that I might not be able to find you if I tried or what I would do if I did. It seemed easier just… not to look.’ Henry looks up, and his tongue darts out to wet his lip. ‘I have a question,’ he says.
‘I’ve got a lot of them, sweetheart,’ Alex says, looking at him with a wide grin, and Henry’s heart catches in his throat.
‘June?’
Alex nods, brow furrowed slightly, as though he’s not sure what he’s asking and then he laughs and grins. ‘Oh my god. She… she was still Catalina then, wasn’t she?’ He shakes his head. ‘You know Bug. She goes through phases like the moon. She was starting high school and said she didn’t want to be Catalina anymore, she wanted to be June now. Mom and Dad had always flicked between calling her both anyway and always Dad called her CJ as a kid, so she uses that for her pseudonym. She and Nora got married last year. It was a tiny, kind of spontaneous city hall thing but it was pretty perfect for them. So she uses Nora’s last name for personal stuff and keeps ours for her journalism. Says it works for her, she gets to have them both and keep them separate.’
Henry nods. ‘So… CJ Claremont-Diaz.’
‘Catalina June,’ Alex confirms.
Henry lets out a slightly wounded laugh and shakes his head. ‘I can’t believe I’ve employed your sister for months and I had no idea. There was always something that felt right about her. Like, I knew I trusted her and she felt so immediately familiar but I couldn’t put my finger on why. I suppose by the time we left, she was so much closer to Bea anyway and— god, I can’t believe you’ve been right here.'
‘Hey, you’re one to talk,’ Alex says with a laugh, ‘this is my country at least. You moved back to England and now you’re— you’re here.’
Henry nods. ‘I needed some space from England… New York seemed as good as anywhere. I didn’t want to go back to Texas. Too close, I suppose. Besides, you can hardly talk, New York is hardly Austin.’
Alex nods. ‘Yeah well, Bug is here and I’m doing… Law School.’
Henry blinks and smiles. ‘Law School, really? Still on track for President by— what was it? Thirty-five?’
Alex grins a bashful laugh. ‘We’ll see. Maybe not.’
Henry can feel the heat from Alex’s own body next to him, the way his eyes keep catching his.
‘Hey,’ Alex says, turning to him, conspiratorially, his voice half a whisper. ‘Do you think I can have my book back now?’
It startles Henry and he barks out a laugh. ‘I suppose so,’ Henry says with a grin. ‘It is yours after all.’
‘Can you go get it then?’ he says, and Henry feels something confusing and heavy in his chest at Alex’s impatience.
He walks back through the quiet shop to the till and picks up the book, and then brings it back to Alex who takes it with a nod, and opens it up to the first page.
‘Sorry, I kind of ruined it,’ he says, and Henry feels something entirely different in his chest because if Alex is the one who put the book into this state then that means— ‘I read it like, every single night for ages. Took it like, everywhere with me. I guess it took me a while to get why, you know? Like, I thought it was just because you gave it to me, but then I read all these other books I remembered you loving trying to chase that feeling and well, pretty sure now that it was always more than that. You’ve always seen me, I guess.’
Henry bites down on his lip. ‘I think I was just trying to find a way to tell you something about myself that I was starting to figure out. I thought… well, I didn’t know if you’d understand it in that way then but I thought you wouldn’t mind but I just didn’t have the words for it then.’
Alex nods. ‘And now?’
Henry lets out a laugh. ‘Oh, I’m very, very gay. In case that wasn’t clear already,’ he says gesturing around him.
Alex nods again. ‘I’m bi,’ he says in a rush. ‘I’ve… I haven’t said that before but pretty sure that’s probably not news to you,’ he says slowly, wrinkling his face just slightly.
‘I ah, well, I had a suspicion you might be working some things out,’ Henry says, smiling softly. Alex shrugs and grins, but it’s not embarrassed or tentative anymore. It’s comfortable, easy. From the corner of his eye, he sees someone peering in through the window. ‘I just… sorry, I need to lock up. Will you wait for me? I’d still like to do dinner or something. If you’d still like to.’
Alex looks back at him and nods. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
Henry locks up quickly and clears out the till. He’ll cash up tomorrow. He has far, far more important things on his mind right now. Namely, learning everything about Alex he’s missed in the last decade.
Alex is still staring up at the stars when he comes back.
‘Hi,’ Henry says, coming to stand next to him again.
‘Here,’ Alex says, and Henry looks down to find that Alex is holding the book out to him.
His brow furrows slightly, but he takes it gently. He turns the first page and beneath his own childish handwriting, there’s a new inscription:
I loved it, but I don’t need it anymore. I still know it by heart too.
Call me.
Still your best friend (if you’ll have me)
Alex
And then, his phone number written beneath. ‘It’s yours. It’s always been yours,’ Alex tells him.
Henry exhales a breath. ‘Alex, I—’
‘I didn’t want to be too presumptuous and ruin your favourite book if you like, I don’t know, have a boyfriend or you’re married or if you’re actually only into 6 foot tall rugby players or something but… can I— fuck, Henry I’ve thought about you literally every day of my life since I was like seven years old. And I feel like an idiot for not recognising you sooner because like you’re tall and blonde and British and of course it’s you… but I think a part of me did, because there was something that pulled me in here in the first place and something that kept pulling me back, making me think of you all the time these last few weeks and… it’s you. It’s always been you.’ He looks at Henry with wide dark eyes, gleaming and a little bit wet, and Henry watches as he swallows. ‘I think I’ve been in love with you my entire fucking life. I want to take you on a date. A proper one with like, stars and candles and shit. I want— I’ve know only had you back for like thirty fucking minutes or something but I don’t want to let you go again. I want— I don’t want to be just your best friend – like, I want that too, but I want to be more than that.’
Henry thinks he must be dreaming. All of this must be a ridiculous fever dream. If it is, he hopes he never wakes up because he’s with Alex again, and it’s more than he ever could have dreamed of.
Henry has never believed in fate but for that book to end up here, for Alex to end up here after all these years, he doesn’t know how it could possibly be anything else. He reaches out again, just like he did all those years ago on the last night and takes Alex’s hand in his. It’s steady and warm. It feels like coming home.
‘I think I’d like that,’ Henry says quietly. ‘I’m not sure there’s anything in the world that I’d like more than that.’
Alex grins up at him, brighter than any star Henry has ever seen, and stretches upwards on his tiptoes. He reaches a hand to Henry’s cheek and traces the line of stubble on his jaw. Henry presses his skin against Alex’s palm. Under a starry sky, Alex Claremont-Diaz presses his lips to Henry’s and he kisses him. He kisses him gently and hesitantly – it’s so much sweeter than Alex has ever been, and Henry kisses him back, just like he’s always wanted to. He wraps his arms around Alex and pulls him closer.
When Henry leaves the store that night with the book and Alex’s phone number tucked into the pocket of his coat right next to his heart, he still feels the warmth of Alex around him. It’s just like the hug from all those years ago which travelled all the way home to London with him. This time though, it doesn’t need to travel anywhere because Alex squeezes his hand as they walk and Henry feels it flood through him all over again. The warmth stays right there next to him like a roaring fire and never fades. Alex looks over at him and grins widely. Henry thinks he’s probably convinced him of the virtues of a happy ending.
See attached bibliography:
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S Lewis
Venetia by Georgette Heyer
Emma by Jane Austen
Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Lot by Bryan Washington
The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo
Autumn by Ali Smith
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Time of Doves by Mercè Rodoreda
Tin Man by Sarah Winman
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The Song of Achilles by Madeleine Miller
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot
The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants by Ann Brashares
Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Black Spartacus by Sudhir Hazareesingh