American King

by Sierra Simone

  And here I am, about to burn all of that down.

  It is funny, I think as I pull the tuxedo out of the cleaner’s bag and start dressing, that even though I know I’m butchering everything we hoped and wished for that night, I’m still resentful that I’m alone before my wedding. Ash should be here. Even if it were to scowl at me, growl at me, mark me until I bled, I’d take it, because I’m so lonely without him and Greer, and I’m scared of what I’m doing today.

  This is for Greer. This is for everyone, I remind myself. I have very good reasons for doing this.

  Just.

  It hurts.

  As I’m sitting down to pull on my shoes, the door opens without a knock, and I don’t bother looking up. Out of all the women in my life, Greer is the only one who would knock, which means that it’s either my mother or my sister or my future wife, and therefore someone I’m not really in the mood to see.

  “Embry,” Vivienne Moore says, and I sigh and look up at my mother.

  “Yes?”

  Vivienne Moore clicks over the marble floor to sit at dressing table nearby, perfect as always in a beaded dress of silver, her rich brown hair pulled back into a severe knot. Gray threads artistically through the rich brown, and the fine wrinkles near her eyes only make her look more stately and graceful. There are no smile lines around her mouth of course, because Governor Vivienne Moore only smiles for cameras and donors.

  “Mother, I’m supposed to come seat you. That’s how it works.”

  My mother glances up at the clock hanging on the wall. “We have fifteen minutes. I wanted to speak to you privately before we went out.”

  I finish knotting my shoelaces and stand up. “If you’re here to talk me out of this, don’t bother. Morgan already tried.”

  “I wouldn’t be so foolish,” my mother says calmly. “This is the only way to clean up the mess you’ve made, and the best chance you have at protecting your future. But I need to know a few things first.”

  “There’s nothing to know—”

  Vivienne Moore holds up a hand and I fall silent. “Please. Firstly, I need to know that you’ll send that baby to me the moment you feel he’s unsafe. Yes, I see you bristling at that, and no, I’m not insulting your ability to protect your son. I’m reaffirming it—if that baby is in any danger at all, the safest place is across the country, with his grandmother. Understood?”

  She’s right, as defensive as I feel about it. I give her curt nod.

  “Second, I need to know this purely for my own curiosity. That video of you and Greer Galloway Colchester…was it real?”

  I flush, hating that I’m thirty-six and my mother makes me feel like a teenager. “Mother, that’s private.”

  She stares at me with blue eyes that match my own. “I suppose that’s my answer, then. It was easy enough to see that you were in love with her, but whether the consummation actually happened, I couldn’t perceive. The third question, however—the one I’ve asked myself for years—is the most important one. Are you in love with Maxen Colchester?”

  “Mother.”

  “Both at the same time?”

  “Mother.”

  She lifts a shoulder. “It’s not unheard of, and I’ve encountered stranger things. But how on earth do you plan on running against a man you love?”

  I lean against the window frame, looking out onto the pretty churchyard outside. “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

  “I don’t approve,” she says, standing. “This is all far too disheveled for my liking. Sloppy. I can’t be certain that any of us will come out unscathed.”

  She extends an arm and I thread it through my elbow. “Still,” she says as we leave the dressing room, “you have all the help and power at my disposal. We’ll see you through this, Embry. Somehow.”

  I DON’T PAY attention to most of the things said during my wedding ceremony. None of it is important, none of it means anything. It’s a stark act done out of a need to survive, and I treat it as such. Like killing hostiles during the war or smearing a perfectly nice political opponent. I don’t enjoy it, I find it distasteful and repulsive even, but the choices have been taken away a long time ago. It’s this or a future I have no control over, and I’m done with that.

  I will control what happens next.

  The only part of the ceremony that rouses me from my stupor is Morgan’s voice from the lectern as she gives a reading from Ephesians, one of those readings that’s at almost every wedding. “For this reason,” she is saying in her deliberate, cool voice, “a man will leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery—”

  Her voices fades in my mind, and for some reason I am thinking of my own voice quoting soft in a Berlin hotel, this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.

  Fingers in my hair, a firm stomach against my cheek. He still loves Ophelia.

  How do you know?

  Because he’s cruel to her. The fingers had tightened in my hair to prove his point. The strongest love comes with pain.

  Two soldier boys in love. The princess they both wanted. How close we were to our happily ever after, how near it seemed. And now…

  I recite vows that mean nothing, and I don’t bother to pretend they mean anything. My face is blank as I say the old words, my voice is toneless as I look into Abilene’s eyes and promise to care for her in sickness and in health. She is both sickness and health all at once. She looks the perfect flush and bloom of radiant motherhood now—at five months pregnant, her slender form perfectly showcases the plumping nest of our child, her skin glows, her hair shines, her lovely face tips into a beatific smile—but her eyes betray the truth. They flash between lifeless and all too lively, between heartless and an emotional mania that unnerves me.

  There’s none of that mania today, not for me. I’m beginning to think that I bore her, that the deep pool of her hatred is kept in reserve for Greer, her animated obsession kept in reserve for Ash, and all I’ll get from her now is the lazy satisfaction that she won a crucial battle.

  Not for the first time in the last two months, I consider the irony of leaving Ash so I could keep Greer safe, all while I’m marrying the greatest threat to her safety I could possibly imagine. But that only stiffens my resolve to control this, to keep Abilene close. If she’s close, then I can keep an eye on her. I can stop her from hurting Greer again.

  A Sanctus is sung, we kneel, we take communion, we stand and finally the kiss. I hear the shutter of several cameras as my lips touch hers. Her skin is warm to the touch, her lips soft with whatever lipstick she’s painted on, and her breath is pleasant, scented with some kind of mint. I have no physical reason to hate every instant of the contact, and yet I do. I pull away too fast, and I see the irritation flick over her face before she schools her expression back into a happy smile. I might pay for this later.

  The rest of the day is as detestable as the ceremony, but I manage to achieve an anesthetic sense of distance about it all, a dull dispassion that more or less keeps me sober and pliable as the photographers take their pictures at the church and we head for the reception venue (a large flat boat on the Potomac, filled with too much champagne and too many people I’d rather not see.)

  Abilene is far from perturbed by my detachment. If anything, she seems amused by it, perhaps marking it as some sort of victory. I don’t care. I don’t care what she thinks or what anyone else thinks or whispers about. All I want is for this beastly day to be over.

  It’s only once, as we’re doing the first dance, that I see her mask slip a bit. She slides her hand around the back of my neck to pull me closer.

  “I saw you booked another room for yourself at the Four Seasons.”

  “Don’t worry,” I reply. “I’ll be discreet about our sleeping arrangements.”

  “You know there’s no need, right?” She looks up at me with eyes the color of fading light between trees, an ominous, lifeless blue. “I’m
already pregnant with your child, Embry. Greer is lost to you. Why not take pleasure where you can? You certainly didn’t seem to mind fucking other people a year ago.”

  It’s true. When Greer and Ash were falling in love for the second time, I’d kept my bed warm with an almost grim relentlessness. But it brought me no real relief then, and I know it won’t bring me any relief now, because it’s not what I really need. What I need is mythological and painful and holy, an ecstatic mix of lust and grief and eternity that only Ash and Greer can give me, and if I can’t have that, then there’s nothing for me in the impersonal fucks I used to have. I would feel no better after than I had before, and I might feel worse, the cheap transaction tawdry and pale when contrasted with my sweaty, golden memories of Ash and Greer.

  “No, Abilene. You’ve won enough. You won’t win that as well.”

  She sighs. “Fine. Have it your way for now; just remember I have an entire honeymoon to change your mind.”

  God, that sounds unbearable. I’m technically unemployed at the moment, but I wonder if I can find a plausible reason to cut our trip short. Create enough photo ops to slake the press’s thirst for gossip about the First Lady’s cousin and me, and then vanish back home and spend my days looking at my mother’s lake instead of my new wife.

  The reception mercifully ends, and we take a limousine back to the Four Seasons, Abilene scrolling through her phone for social media mentions of our wedding, seeming satisfied with what she finds. I stare out the window the entire way, promising myself a bottle of gin when I get back to my hotel room. I won’t even bother with a glass.

  Abilene’s assistant has already checked us in, and some lackey of Vivienne’s has furnished me with the key to my solo room. We make a production of getting into the elevator together, but part ways after a couple of floors.

  “Are you sure?” Abilene says as the doors open and I am about to step out.

  I look back at her. She’s not purring or cooing or preening or anything as obvious as that. She’s asking in the same tone of voice she might ask a business partner or colleague. Almost indifferently. It’s only that weird twilit hue in her eyes that reminds me that her motives and feelings will always, always be too slippery for me to grasp. Assuming indifference on her part carries its own danger.

  So I keep my voice polite when I say, “Yes, I’m sure. Sleep well,” and step off the elevator. It’s only after I hear the gentle lumber of the doors closing and the ding of the elevator leaving this floor that I can breathe for the first time since I woke up this morning.

  At least until I turn a corner and see Ryan Belvedere leaning against my doorframe, his thumbs flying over his phone screen. I’m so starved for Ash and Greer that even just seeing his personal assistant has my breath stitching under my ribs.

  “I’m flattered, but it’s not really customary for the groom to fuck someone from his old job on the wedding night.”

  Belvedere looks up with a smile at my joke, his floppy dark hair brushing the top rims of his glasses. He impatiently shakes the hair out of his face. “Congratulations, Mr. Moore.”

  “How many congratulations do you think are in order, given that you’re standing outside of my private room?”

  “Fair point. I’m sorry I couldn’t come to the ceremony, by the way.”

  “You have a demanding boss.”

  He nods. “He sent me here.”

  Hope lifts in my chest, refuses to settle its wings. “He did?”

  “Yes. He’d like me to take you to your wedding present.”

  Now hope is stirring somewhere else, somewhere lower and deeper. I have experienced the kinds of wedding presents Ash likes to give.

  “And where are we going?”

  Belvedere smiles and tilts his head toward the service stairs, where I presume a discreet car is waiting. “To the White House.”

  TWELVE

  EMBRY

  now

  The White House is quiet as Belvedere and I walk up the stairs to the Residence; it goes even quieter as Belvedere tactfully melts away before I reach the living room.

  Strauss is playing, softly enough that I can hear Greer’s laughter floating above it, along with the unmistakable clink of ice cubes in a silver bucket. There’s a low husk of male laughter that has my chest going hot and tight, and when I reach the threshold of the living room, I don’t walk in. I just lean against the doorframe and watch the charming scene inside.

  Greer and Ash are dancing.

  She’s wearing a simple white top and a caramel-colored skirt that shows off her long legs, her feet bare and her white-gold hair tugged to the side in a messy braid. He’s in a white button down and black slacks, also barefoot, his shirt rolled up to expose his sculpted forearms. I don’t know why, but there’s something so fascinating to me about the way his forearms narrow into his wrists, the way his wrists widen into those large, rough hands. Perhaps it was all those years at war, his hands in half-finger tactical gloves and hidden from sight. Maybe it’s just the masculine perfection of it all—the muscle, the bones, the hair. The dormant power.

  I watch as those hands run over Greer’s arms, as they move back to a proper waltz position—one extended, the other at her waist. And as they dance, I watch the light catch in Greer’s hair, which is every shade of gold from white to honeyed to dark—just as it always gets in the fall. I remember the way it looked spread across my pillow in a Chicago hotel, how it gleamed in the moonlight when I rescued her from Melwas, and my breath catches.

  Both of them. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

  In only a few seconds of observing, it becomes apparent why they were laughing. Ash keeps throwing off the swiveling box of the waltz steps, his movements as clumsy and stiff as a wind-up soldier’s. He never could find the music, never could let go of his mind long enough for his body to move on instinct. And I have to wince a teacher’s wince when I watch him attempt the dance, his feet crowding Greer’s delicate ones, his deliciously narrow hips moving barely at all.

  I suppose all those dancing lessons during the war were in vain, I think. But then I remember the feel of him under my hands, the tinny echo of a CD player against stark mountain trees, how often he’d end up yanking my body flush against his and kissing me with ferocious, possessive kisses. Screw the dancing, he’d mumble, and within minutes there would be teeth and sweat and fingertips digging into muscle. I think I still have scars on my knees from all those impromptu mountain fucks; God knows I can still recall the blushing shame of asking the quartermaster for yet another uniform repair kit to patch the knees in my pants, and I have hardly ever blushed with shame in my life.

  For a minute I allow myself to forget today, forget the last two months. The wedding, the blackmail, the green hurt in Ash’s eyes when I told him I was leaving him. I allow myself to believe that I’m just coming up to my wife and my husband after a long day at the office, that this sweet waltzing laughter is what I come home to every night, that when they catch sight of me, I will be rewarded with kisses both firm and soft.

  In my little fantasy, I don’t have to wonder why Ash brought me here. In my fantasy, he brought me here because he misses me.

  He brought me here because he loves me.

  Greer finally catches sight of me as they turn, and her delighted smile lights a bittersweet flame in my chest. I give her a tentative smile back, my heart racing, and then I slide my gaze over to Ash.

  A slow, warm smile spreads across his face. “Embry,” he says. “You came.”

  I answer simply, “You asked me to come.”

  His smile twists up ruefully. “If only it were that easy all the time.”

  Before I can respond and spoil the moment, he bends down and murmurs something to his wife. It sounds like, “Go greet our guest.”

  Her eyes flick up to his, as if silently asking a question, and then he nods, letting go and watching her cross the space between him and me.

  And I’m entranced. It’s hard not to be entranced with Greer—th
ere’s something about the way she carries herself, about the careful reserve of that exquisite face. Like no matter how you open her up and turn her pages, you’ll never know all of her. You’ll never read every secret; there will always be something out of reach and held apart. You could spend your entire life trying to learn every glow and shadow of her heart and mind and still never finish.

  It’s been two months since her grandfather’s funeral, two months since I’ve been in the same room with her, and I’d forgotten. Forgotten the power of her moonlight eyes and sunshine hair. Forgotten how she makes my bones ache and my blood hot just by looking at me. All those shameful nights since Abilene drugged me, alone in my bed with nothing but memories and internet searches, jerking off to pictures of Greer—it’s almost blinding to be confronted with the real woman again, and not the ghost.

  I stay completely still as she approaches, blood thundering everywhere and making me hot and full in the part that has missed Greer and Ash most. I’m not sure what to say or what to do or even why I’m here, but I do know that I want it. Whatever it is. Abuse, recrimination, punishment—if they want to spend the next hour yelling at me, it would be the sweetest symphony, and if they want to beat me, it would feel like a thousand beloved caresses. I’m starving for them.

  Greer stops just in front of me. Slowly, she puts her hand flat against my chest, right over my heart. I realize I’m still in my tuxedo, my unknotted bow tie hanging rakishly around my neck. I feel ashamed of it, ashamed of my wedding clothes, ashamed to be here in such a visible reminder of what separates us.