Exhilarating quotes

Pleiade

Another Red, White, and Royal Blue. This is embarrassing. But this book is GREAT.

"When he's tired of being touched by strangers : Come back to me when you're done being flung through the firmament you lost Pleiade."

First and foremost I love this because Alex was going back to Henry's emails when he needed a pick up. Now lets over analyse things.

We're given two other examples of Alex going back to look at the emails but this is the one that stuck with me. I think, at first, purely because of how beautiful the sentence itself is, and then because I kept thinking of Alex's graduation and all the people who knew him by name that he had never spoken to, all the people who asked for photos just so they could say they had a photo with the First Son, all the people that got to come to the parties and dinners that he threw with June and Nora because they were supposed to invite them even if they didn't know them, all the people who felt entitled to a piece of him just because he was the president's son. And I thought of how he thought of Henry asking him "come back to me" when people made him feel like he didn't own all of himself.

But mostly, mostly I though of Merope, The Lost Pleiade. How she, unlike any of her 6 sisters, married a mortal - Sisyphus, how the seven of them were turned to stars and Merope shone the faintest and how some myths say it was because she was hiding her face in shame for being with a mortal. I though of Henry seeing himself as Sisyphus, destined for eternity to push a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down as soon as he reached the top, the same way Henry was destined to live a lifetime knowing what it felt like to be with Alex, while also knowing he would never get to have him, and Alex would come back to him in his dreams but never again in real life. Henry seeing Alex as Merope, willing to be with him so long as no one could see, or he'd certainly hide away in shame too. And so he tells Alex come find me when your world lets you, come to me when you get tired of it because I'll be waiting for you even if you don't want this the way I do.

"When have I ever, since the first instant I touched you, pretended to be anything less than in love with you?"

Well he certainly wasn't lying