American King

by Sierra Simone

  I think of being between the two of them, of being so in love and blown open that I forgot who I was. I think of holding Greer and kneeling before Ash, and I think of the long days ahead with none of that. With a cold bed and a lonely heart, shut off from the only two people I ever want to love, and tonight was a painful blessing, with every high underscored by the bitterest low.

  “It was cruel to give it to me.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And kind.”

  His thumb rubs at the back of my hand. “Yes.”

  “Because you love me.”

  His eyes look like captured shadows in the dark. “Because I love you.”

  His fingers move to the band of metal around my ring finger, rotating the ring and caressing the skin around it.

  I don’t know how it makes me feel to have his fingers on that ring. Not when that ring should have been his. It always should have been his, and I can’t even imagine how he feels right now, touching something that should belong to him.

  I swallow. “Why did you invite me over, Ash?”

  “You said it yourself,” Ash replies, still playing with the flat gold band. “To be cruel and to be kind. Because I love you.”

  “But why tonight?”

  Ash sighs, releasing the ring and threading his fingers through mine. “You can guess.”

  “You were jealous. My wedding night should have been yours.”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  He props his head up on his other hand, staring at me. “And what, Embry? What more do you want me to admit? Of course, I was fucking jealous. Of course any wedding night of yours should have been mine too.”

  He stops, his jaw setting and his throat working and his eyes glassing with unshed emotion, and then he regains control. Blinks. Breathes. “But my jealousy isn’t important, and I can’t change the past, so instead I wanted to give you something. No bridegroom should be alone on his wedding night. Especially not my little prince.”

  My throat tightens and I can’t speak and all I can do is raise Ash’s hand to my mouth and kiss it. Let him feel the tears slipping down my face. Because no matter how jealous he was, no matter how possessive and bitter and sadistic, I know that ultimately he always intended tonight as a gift. He knew tonight would be one of the loneliest nights of my life, when for most people it’s one of the happiest, and he wanted to make it better for me. He wanted to help me shoulder the burden for as long as he could, and I know without a doubt that he would take it all from me if I asked. If I told him I couldn’t bear it alone, I couldn’t live with all these hooks tethered in my soul, he would lay down down his heart and his life to make me happy.

  In fact, I am certain he would do it even as I ran a campaign against him. He would let me into his arms at night even as I fought him during the day, he would love me and keep me even if I refused to stop running against him. All I have to do is ask, and it’s done. Forgiveness would be mine, and I’d have a place at his feet and in his bed once again.

  But…I can’t. The thought is as bitter as it is true; I can’t deny it even as it slices a fresh gash across my already scarred heart. I can’t do it because it wouldn’t be fair to Ash. For me to demand his care and love with one hand while I fight him with the other, for me to solicit his protection and adoration while I smear and malign him when we’re apart. To make him love me as I try to steal everything from him.

  Even I’m not that selfish.

  He rubs his hand across my tear-wet cheek, along the early morning stubble roughing the edge of my jaw, and then brings his hand back to his face. I wonder what he’s doing and then I see the part of his lips and the slide of his tongue. He’s tasting my tears. Something I’ve seen him do a hundred times, and yet every time is as sexy and sweet and terrible as the last.

  I can’t help it, I let out a groan as I watch the dart of his tongue and the press of his mouth. “You make me crazy,” I whisper, and I mean it in every good way and every bad way and every way in between.

  He pauses, his hand still at his mouth and his eyes glittering in the dark. And then I see his throat working again, a clench and swallow against some powerful emotion. Somehow I know, I just do, what he’s going to say.

  “Embry,” he starts.

  “Don’t,” I say. “Don’t ask. Please.”

  “Why?” he asks in agony. “Why can’t I even have the asking?”

  I could lie. I know I could, just as I know that he would recognize it for what it was immediately—and just as I know he would let me lie to grant me whatever shreds of dignity I wanted to grasp at.

  But I won’t lie. Morning is almost here, and the truth is edging at the horizon with the sun, ready to shine a pale, weary light on us anyway.

  “Because,” I say, fighting back more tears. “If you ask, then I won’t be able to say no.”

  He rubs at his face with his hand, spending a long time with his fingertips against his eyes. “All you’ve ever done is say no when I ask you things. I don’t see why now is any different.”

  His bitterness stings. “I suppose I deserve that,” I say.

  “I’m sorry, ” he says, his voice tired. He drops his hand from his face and looks at me. “I want you, and I want to have you, and to keep you, and for fifteen years, I’ve been trying. And I can’t tell what’s the best way to love you, whether it’s trying to catch you or to let you go.”

  “I’ll always want to be yours,” I say. It should be embarrassing, it should feel weak to admit it, but it doesn’t. Not here in the dark with our tears and our sweet Greer warm between us. “Always. But…” I trail off.

  “But you can’t allow yourself that,” he finishes for me.

  “It’s how things have to be, Ash. You know why.”

  “I suppose.”

  And we go quiet. The air is unsettled, painful, and just when I start thinking it’s time for me to leave, Ash gets off the bed and comes around to my side, crawling under the covers behind me and wrapping his big body around my own. His knees tuck behind mine and his arm snugs in across my waist, and his groin presses against my ass. He nuzzles his face against the back of my neck.

  “You have to kiss me goodbye when you leave,” he murmurs.

  “Yes, Achilles.”

  And despite the oncoming dawn, I fall asleep in his arms, knowing that when I wake up and kiss him goodbye, it will be for real, and probably for always.

  And it will kill me.

  PART TWO

  THE CROWN

  FIFTEEN

  ASH

  now

  TWO YEARS later

  “MR. PRESIDENT,” Belvedere says, coming up behind me.

  I turn from the journalist interviewing me to nod at him. “Ten more minutes?”

  He gives us a wincing look and glances down at his watch. “You’ve only got five, sir. I’m so sorry,” he apologizes to the journalist. “We’ll of course be happy to set up a call to pad out anything else you need for the piece.”

  The journalist—a short and jowly bulldog from Time Magazine—sighs at Belvedere’s words but doesn’t push back. When the bulldog glances down at his notes, I wink at Belvedere, who gives me a little smile back. He’s my keeper—he keeps me, and most importantly, he keeps my time. He plays the bad cop whenever it’s time to bustle me away from eager crowds and curious reporters, and he’s got the “apologetic but firm” performance down pat.

  I finish my five minutes with the reporter—it’s for one of those campaign profiles they will inevitably cover with a close-up shot of my face, shadowed and serious—and then Belvedere whisks me back to my office on Air Force One, expertly fending off some milling members of the press corps who are not pleased their usual time with me has been cut short because of the Time feature, and shepherding me past my personal photographer, who has been begging for more candid shots on the plane.

  We end up in my office, alone, and Belvedere hands me a folder while he steps outside to order me a cold can of sparkling water and my
usual lunch of grilled chicken and kale. It’s too easy to eat like shit on the campaign trail—the travel and the dashing from one place to the next—and most of my staffers have succumbed to the seductive ease of room service and greasy delivery. I refuse, as much as I refuse to curtail my morning workouts or my evenings alone with Greer, and in any case, Belvedere takes a strange delight in finding me healthy food no matter where we’re at, a trait I exploit relentlessly.

  I’m flipping through the folder as he walks back in with my lunch and his own—a cup of oatmeal and a smoothie. I start eating as he talks.

  “It’s the latest notes from Uri and Trieste for the debate Thursday. They’ve also asked if you want to prep one more time against someone pretending to be Mr. Moore, or if you also want to prep against someone doing Harrison Fasse.”

  Fasse is the Democratic candidate facing Embry and me, and a clever young man, if sometimes hot-blooded and stubborn. But while he’s a good candidate overall, Embry and I are polling too close to each other for Fasse to be my main focus.

  Embry has to be my main focus.

  My fork pauses ever so slightly above my plate, and then I resume eating. You’d think after all this time that I’d be able to think of Embry without that reflexive flinch, without that cold puncture of pain in my chest, but no. Not even after all the practice I’ve had over the last seventeen years of having my heart broken by him. It never stops hurting.

  “We don’t need to practice against Fasse,” I tell Belvedere. “We’ll have Uri do Embry again.”

  Belvedere makes a note. “Tomorrow evening then. We could also do a practice run the day after, on the day of the debate itself?”

  I finish eating and go back to the folder, skimming over the notes. This debate is focused mainly on energy and the economy—two places where my administration has excelled—and also two places where Embry and I hold only mildly different beliefs. Most of Merlin and Trieste’s debate strategy is focused on clarifying those differences, and illustrating how I’ve already implemented my ideas. As debates go, it shouldn’t be truly difficult.

  The most difficult thing will be Embry himself…and the two years hanging between us.

  Two years. Two years since he left my bed on a chilly October morning and never looked back, and he hasn’t so much as texted me since then, not even after the campaign began in earnest. Not a word, spoken or written, not an accidental meeting of eyes in a crowded room, because of course he’s taken great pains not to share any kind of room with me.

  “That won’t be necessary,” I say. “I’m solid on the issues and on Embry’s position. The only difficult thing about the debate will be seeing him, and nothing can prepare me for that except for him.”

  Belvedere nods, but I don’t miss the slight catch of his lower lip on his teeth. The mention of Embry’s name has an effect on him too.

  Three times in the last two years, I’ve sent Belvedere to him, just like I did on the night of his wedding to Abilene, and three times Belvedere has returned alone. I sent Belvedere to him a fourth time, with different instructions, and was rewarded with my aide coming back rumpled and flushed, and newly freckled with bites and sucks.

  He was my body man in a literal sense that night, a gift to Embry, since my little prince wouldn’t come to me. I knew from my occasional conversations with Morgan that Embry has been strictly chaste since our last night together—refusing even to relieve his needs with a mistress or a lover, and as much as I wished he would come to me, I couldn’t bear the thought of him being lonely. Of his body starving for the simple touch of a bed partner. And Belvedere was willing, eager, squirming and hard when I asked him to do this thing for me, and so I sent him, and when he returned several hours later, well-used and glowing, I made him tell Greer and me every sordid detail.

  It was wrong of me, I suppose, for a host of reasons. Firstly, even though I’d introduced Belvedere to Lyonesse a year before and he was training formally as a submissive, he wasn’t my submissive, and there was the small complication that I think he wanted to be. That, in addition to the yearning looks I’d seen him give Embry, meant there were enough emotional snags between us to make it a cruel thing to ask. And a cruel thing to give Embry, because I knew he wouldn’t be able to refuse. It’s one thing to hold a lover at a distance; it’s another thing when that lover comes to you already dripping with temptation. Even if that lover is using the mouth and hands and body of someone else.

  It’s a testament to Belvedere’s faithfulness that our strange night never changed anything. I still treated him as fondly and respectfully as I ever had, and he never betrayed a hint of longing or frustration that none of the events had repeated themselves. I’ve asked him more than once about it, checking in with him to see if he’s grown to resent that night—or me. It’s a form of aftercare, of course, and also I do genuinely care. I wouldn’t have asked him if I wasn’t certain the task would have excited him, and he gave me clear and eager consent that night—but still. It’s not an everyday thing, fucking your boss’s old lover…and even less everyday to deliver the kind of gifts Embry and I exchange. But my instincts about Belvedere were right, and we’ve only ever been richer for the experience.

  “So you’ll touch down in Portland in an hour, and then we’ll do our meeting with the fishing and game lobby right after, which means we’ll have to move fast to get you to the rally after that—” Belvedere, who was in the middle of sliding a fresh piece of paper across the desk, pauses as his phone buzzes on the table…at the same time as mine also buzzes.

  There’s a knock on the door, and Greer steps into the office, closing it behind her. Even after two years of marriage, my blood still heats at the sight of her, my chest still goes tight with intense love and possession. Right now, she’s that adorably bookish and clever version of Greer that I love more than almost any other: her hair’s up in a messy bun, stabbed through with a pencil, and she’s barefoot with a highlighter still in hand. She’d taken the semester off from Georgetown to campaign with me more easily, but she’s in the final rounds of edits on her book, and she’s spent every free moment working on the manuscript.

  But it’s not western concepts of kingship or power in the Dark Ages that’s driven her inside my office now.

  “Angel?” I ask as she leans against the door.

  “Ash,” she says quietly. “Have you seen it yet?”

  I glance down to see the call I just missed from Merlin and several unread text messages. I scroll down quickly as I hear Belvedere swear under his breath.

  I catch a few words:

  Lyr.

  Public statement.

  Press.

  This is bad, Maxen, really bad.

  “She did it,” says Greer. “Abilene went public about Lyr.”

  ***

  IN SOME WAYS, I should be grateful that it took Abilene so long to unleash the truth. It didn’t haunt my last two years in office, and with that freedom, I managed to get almost everything on my ambitious list done. Merlin told me it wasn’t possible, practically dared me, in fact, but here I am two years later, triumphant. Even if I lose this election, there will be no undoing so much of work. This country is safer, smarter, and richer—and that would not be true if the scandal about Lyr had been hanging over my head.

  In other ways, I’m not grateful at all. For this to happen two days before the first debate is not ideal timing, which is surely what Abilene intended. Wholesale destruction and distraction.

  But mostly, I’m worried for Lyr. Despite the election, Morgan still hasn’t given me permission to meet my son, she still hasn’t told him the truth. I’ve begged and cajoled, reasoned and pleaded, but she’s been adamant that she doesn’t want him to know. And I recognize that it’s not only about me—if I confess my paternity to him, she’ll be forced to explain her maternity, and there’s no doubt that it will sting very much for him to learn that his mother gave him up as an infant, even if she remained nominally in his life as a cousin.

  What t
hat means now, however, is that Lyr is learning it all from the news instead of from us, publicly instead of privately, which was just as I feared.

  Fuck.

  I do the fishing talk, I do the rally. The reporters are relentless, and I can see the questions on the faces of the people I meet with. Is it true? Is it real? Can I really be Penley Luther’s son and the sister of Morgan Leffery and the father of some incestuous love child?

  Merlin tells me on the phone to say nothing, as does Trieste, so I say nothing about Lyr or Morgan, I stick to the topics at hand. Belvedere hustles me through my events, and then I’m sitting next to Greer on Air Force One, clenching a warm glass of scotch in my hand as the plane streaks through the dark to Seattle.

  Seattle, because I’m not waiting any more. Because I deserve to look my son in the eye and explain everything.

  Not for the first time, I think of Embry and his son. Even with as little as I watch the news, there’s been no escaping the photographs of the little boy, the video clips of them playing together in the leaves or running after the family dog. And there’s every order of jealous hurt inside me as I think of Embry as a father—mostly because I’d dreamed for so many years of us being fathers together, and now here we are, each with sons we love but didn’t plan for. How much I want all those moments I missed with Lyr, and how much I want all the moments I missed watching Embry become a parent. I missed his eyes as he held his child for the first time, I missed the awe and the wild happiness and the exhaustion and the worry.

  There’s now a part of Embry entirely separate from me, a part of him that was born alongside his son, and perhaps it stings so much because that part of me never had a chance to be born at all. I not only missed Embry becoming a father, but I missed it myself as well.

  “Sir.” Belvedere comes up, looking apologetic. “It’s Berlin. Should I say it’s a bad time?”

  Berlin. Shit.

  All I want to do is drink and run my fingers through my wife’s hair. All I want is to have just an hour to think about what’s waiting for me in Seattle, to think about what I’m going to say to my son when I have the chance.