“Since when did you buy into it?” Alex spits. “You, me, my family, the people we run with—we were gonna be the honest ones! I have absolutely zero interest in being a politician with some perfect veneer and twopoint-five kids. Didn’t we decide it was supposed to be about helping people? About the fight? What part of that is so fucking irreconcilable with letting people see who I really am? Who you are, Raf?” “Alex, please. Please. Jesus Christ. You have to leave. I can’t know this. You can’t tell me this. You have to be more careful than this.” “God,” Alex says, voice bitter, his hands on his hips. “You know, it’s worse than trust. I believed in you.” “T know you did,” Luna says. He’s not even looking at Alex anymore. “I wish you hadn’t. Now, I need you to get out.” “Raf—” “Alex. Get. Out.” He goes, slamming the door behind him. Back at the Residence, he tries to call Henry. He doesn’t pick up, but he texts: Sorry. Meeting with Philip. Love you. He reaches under the bed and gropes in the dark until he finds it: a bottle of Maker’s. The emergency stash. “Salud,” he mutters under his breath, and he unscrews the top. BAD METAPHORS ABOUT MAPS A 9/25/20 3:21 AM TO HENRY h, i have had whiskey. bear with me. there’s this thing you do. this thing. it drives me crazy. i think about it all the time. there’s a corner of your mouth, and a place that it goes. pinched and worried like you’re afraid you’re forgetting something. i used to hate it. used to think it was your little tic of disapproval. but i’ve kissed your mouth, that corner, that place it goes, so many times now. i’ve memorized it. topography on the map of you, a world i’m still charting. i know it. i added it to the key. here: inches to miles. i can multiply it out, read your latitude and longitude. recite your coordinates like la rosaria. this thing, your mouth, its place. it’s what you do when you’re trying not to give yourself away. not in the way that you do all the time, those empty, greedy grabs for you. i mean the truth of you. the weird, perfect shape of your heart. the one on the outside of your chest. on the map of you, my fingers can always find the green hills, wales. cool waters and a shore of white chalk. the ancient part of you carved out of stone in a prayerful circle, sacrosanct. your spine’s a ridge i’d die climbing. if i could spread it out on my desk, i’d find the corner of your mouth where it pinches with my fingers, and i’d smooth it away and you’d be marked with the names of saints like all the old maps. i get the nomenclature now—saints’ names belong to miracles. give yourself away sometimes, sweetheart. there’s so much of you. fucking yrs, a p.s. wilfred owen to siegfried sassoon—1917: And you have fixed my Life—however short. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me. I spun round you a satellite for a month, but shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze. RE: BAD METAPHORS ABOUT MAPS HENRY 9/25/20 6:07 AM TO A From Jean Cocteau to Jean Marais, 1939: Thank you from the bottom of my heart for having saved me. I was drowning and you threw yourself into the water without hesitation, without a backward look. The sound of Alex’s phone buzzing on his nightstand startles him out of a dead sleep. He falls halfway out of bed, fumbling to answer it. “Hello?”