But the moment I knew for sure came later, after I’d fucked her for the first time, after the shower. As I brought her back to bed, eased into her tender cunt, and she arched in pain underneath me.
“Does it hurt?” I asked, worried.
“Yes.” And then a big smile in the dark. “Do it harder.”
She was like me.
It was in the way she twisted underneath me. It was in the way she scratched and shoved at me, bit me, came like a shot when I bit her. She wanted the pain, she wanted the rough, she wanted the struggle. I wouldn’t know until later that she only wanted the struggle with me, that with Ash—just as I was—she was fully submissive. I wouldn’t know until later that with each other, we found something we couldn’t find with him.
I only knew then that something in her body, her heart, was identical to my own. And that’s when I knew I couldn’t let her go.
“Where’s Jenny?” I asked as Ash slid into his seat next to me. We were at a coffee house near our hotel; I’d called him the moment I’d woken up to an empty bed, my chest full of panic that my Chicago angel had melted away in the morning sunlight. But she hadn’t—in fact, she’d even left her number and her hotel address in a note—and in my relief, I discovered something new. Something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
Excitement.
I was excited about her.
And Ash was my best friend. I wanted him to know all about it, and if there was a small, spiteful part of me that also wanted him to witness my happiness without him, I didn’t admit it to myself.
Ash took a long time to answer my earlier question, looking over the pastry menu, and then he sat back. “I wanted to talk to you without Jenny here.”
For the first time, I noticed how haggard he looked, his eyes bloodshot as if he’d been drinking or up all night or both. “But I want to hear about this angel of yours,” Ash said, forcing a smile. “You wouldn’t have called me unless she’s amazing.”
Something was definitely off, something more than him being jealous of me with someone else, no matter how much I wanted that to be the case.
“Ash, is everything okay? You seem…” Hung over. Troubled. Miserable. “…off.”
He ran a hand over his face, palm and fingers passing over the scruff covering his cheeks and jaw. I shivered to remember what that scruff had felt like against the most intimate corners of my body.
“Do you remember those emails I kept with me when we were deployed in Carpathia?” he asked after a minute. “The ones I printed out?”
“The ones from the teenager?”
He looked down at the table. “I saw her yesterday.”
I saw everything I needed to see in his face. The defeat. The guilt. The shame.
The longing.
“Did you…?”
He looked up, his stare knifelike. “I didn’t fuck her, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No, I suppose you didn’t,” I said, giving it more thought. “You’ll be faithful to Jenny until death do you two part.”
He sighed. “Don’t say that. Because I did…touch her.”
I raised my eyebrows and he held up an unhappy hand. “Not like that. She was at the lunch Merlin brought me to. Seeing her was—it was a shock. Like touching a live wire. She’s twenty now, you know, and so much more beautiful than I remembered. I followed her out of the lunch and we talked. She’s fucking smart on top of being so fucking sweet and sub—” he stopped himself.
“Submissive?” I finished for him.
He closed his eyes. “In a public place, I wrapped her hair around my fist and yanked her head back. I shoved my cock into her belly. And she said, yes please.”
With his eyes closed, I could see it even more clearly. He wasn’t just stricken with the shame of wanting someone else, he was stricken with the real physical want of it, the keening deprivation of coming so close to something he needed so fundamentally and yet couldn’t have.
“The things she wrote to me, Embry,” he continued. “I knew she’d say yes, please. It always felt like she was made for me somehow. The way I used to feel about you.”
His eyes were closed, so he couldn’t see the way I flinched at that. The lacerations it left across my face.
It was because of those lacerations that I said it. “So you saw her and you’re all worked up. Get Jenny in bed and get it out of your system.”
His eyes opened, and he regarded me with a steady look. “That would be wrong.”
“Is it worse to be sitting here without her, squirming and hard over a twenty-year-old?”
“I’m not hard—”
I reached under the table and palmed his cock, which was thick and rigid down the left leg of his pants. We’d fucked for nearly three years—I knew when the man was hard—knew it the moment he closed his eyes and relived their meeting. Our table was in a corner and our seats were next to each other, so it was easy to do it discreetly.
When I wrapped my fingers around it through the thin fabric of his trousers, I could press my fingers against the underside and squeeze. He let out a soft hiss.
“Fuck, Embry,” he managed, but he didn’t try to shift away from my touch. Instead his eyes met mine and he opened his legs ever so slightly.
That was enough for me. It had been two years since I’d touched him like this, since I’d gotten to see the way his pulse thrummed in his throat and his pupils widened into black pools of lust.
“Don’t lie to me,” I said, all calm and polite above the table and all squeeze and shift below. “You feel something you haven’t felt since you last fucked me, and now you don’t know what to do. You thought you could live without it, but now you know you can’t. You can’t starve it out, Ash. It’ll always be there, hungry, waiting.” I began to move my hand back and forth, the pads of two fingers pressed against his frenulum, a small movement that no one in the coffee shop would notice.
He noticed, drawing in a sharp breath and opening his legs even wider.
“So why don’t you let me feed it?” I crooned quietly. “Why don’t you let me feed it just this once?”
I squeezed and his eyes fluttered closed. “I don’t—it’s not right—” He was mumbling now, his coherence gone, the beast in him too hungry.
“Tell me more about her,” I said, and I didn’t know if I was trying to help him or destroy him. “Tell me what she looked like. What you would have done to her if you could.”
“Blond hair,” he mumbled, eyes still closed. “Silver eyes. Long throat. A small cleft in her chin that I want to bite. I would have done everything to her.”
The coffee shop noise bled away, leaving only his voice and a small alarm in the back of my mind.
“What’s her name?” I asked as casually as I could, still rubbing his cock through his pants.
“Greer,” he managed. “Greer Galloway.”
Time didn’t stop, my blood didn’t freeze. In a way, I realized I should’ve known—maybe I already knew. Her tears as she rushed through the lobby and ran into me. Her words in the Ferris wheel, we weren’t together in any real sense. But I still had feelings…no normal person would have feelings for four years with no encouragement…
It was fate, obviously, even though I didn’t believe in fate. But it felt fated: there could be nothing in my life that wasn’t connected to Ash.
The truth tumbled together with my anger. It welded and fused itself into a solid lead block. All these years Ash had been secretly in love with her, my angel, my Greer. She’d been the one to capture that corner of his heart that he’d refused to surrender to me; she’d been the one to enslave him with a handful of well-chosen words. And now that I’d met her, I understood. I understood why he couldn’t let her go.
For one terrible moment, I thought about telling him. I thought about making him know that I’d been the first person to be inside her, I’d been the one to wash the blood from her thighs afterward. I’d been the one to make her smile and sigh and squeal for more, I’d been the first one in the worl
d to taste her and to hold her after an orgasm.
Me. It had been fucking me and not him, and I was still hurt enough by his engagement to Jenny to tell him that, and I’m a terrible man, remember? Selfish and mean. This wouldn’t be beneath my level.
But I didn’t tell him.
I couldn’t.
Not because I was righteously overcoming my worst impulses but because I loved him too fucking much to hurt him on purpose. Still.
And I couldn’t hurt him by seeing her again. Even as her number burned a hole in my pocket and all those might-have-been fantasies of being her boyfriend danced in my head, I knew I couldn’t do it. I was too noble or too weak, and I didn’t know which.
I let go of Ash’s cock.
He groaned, dropping his head. “I don’t want you to stop,” he admitted.
“I don’t have to,” I said, pushing back the coffee I never touched and standing up. “You can tell me to go into that bathroom and wait for you on my knees, and I would. You could go find your submissive girl and blow your load all over her pretty blond hair, and she’d love it.”
His lips pulled into one of those things he thought was a frown but was really a pout. “There’s a ‘but’ coming?”
“But you won’t. You want to fuck my face. You want it so badly that I could finish you under this table with just another couple of strokes. You want that girl too. But you love Jenny and you’re too faithful to break off an engagement for the mere reason that she is the wrong person for you.”
The frown-pout deepened. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“It’s not, I promise.” I dropped a couple bills on the table and made to leave.
“Embry,” Ash said before I could go. “What about you? What about your angel? Your night with her?”
“It’s not important,” I said and walked away from the table. Walked right into a lie that would torment me for years to come.
After all, I’d given up everything else for Ash. Why not her too?
23
Embry
after
“You’re not doing enough.”
Ash turns to face me on his way over to his desk. “Enough is exactly what I’m doing, and frankly, exactly what you’ve already done.”
We’re in the Oval Office after a long morning in the Residence hammering out our media defense for the video. The defense was easy enough to plan—deny, deny, deny—although we all knew that denial would only get us so far. It was too good of a story, too salacious a video. With all the eagerness that the nation had welcomed Greer as its queen, they had already started eviscerating her. Online, on television, in the papers and soon in the magazines too. Trieste begged Greer not to go anywhere near the Internet until it blew over; Merlin already had Linette blocking off chunks of Greer’s schedule so that she’d be less visible for the next two weeks.
Greer took it all in stride, looking composed and contained in a knee-length skirt and boat-neck top, crossing her oxford-clad feet at the ankles as she listened to a room of people discuss a video of her fucking a man who wasn’t her husband. She calmly voiced her opinions, calmly responded to questions, calmly made it clear what she would and wouldn’t do to pander to the press.
She was born for it, I remembered after the second grueling hour talking over strategy and implications for the re-election campaign. She knew better than anyone else how the game was played, and she was playing it now. With cool dignity and impressive reserve.
And she commanded respect for it. Kay, Belvedere, Merlin, and Trieste all knew—and surely Linette could guess—that the video was real, but one cold look from Greer at the opening of the meeting when Trieste started to ask if it really was us in the video had silenced the room on the subject. Trieste had flushed and mumbled an apology and quickly moved on to the topic of defense, and no one else had dared to voice the obvious truth.
And if her eyes were slightly red-rimmed, if her concealer didn’t completely cover the bite mark on her neck, if she winced whenever she adjusted herself on the love seat she shared with Ash, then the room pretended not to notice. For his part, Ash sat back and mostly let the room talk around him, rubbing Greer’s hand with his thumb and occasionally leaning in to whisper in her ear.
It wasn’t fair that it was Greer’s reputation that would need the most defending; I would have chained myself to a rock and had my liver pecked out if it meant I could bear the brunt of this. It was my fault this video even existed—I should have known there would be cameras, I shouldn’t have fucked her there at all, I should have known Melwas wouldn’t have given up so easily. It wasn’t fair that the people in the room barely glanced at me as they stared hard at her; it wasn’t fair that she was already being excoriated publicly as a faithless whore when next to nothing was being said about me.
But as hard as it was, it was easy enough. The issue was that I’d flown to D.C. with a different problem than Melwas’s video.
A problem I needed to talk to Ash about as soon as possible, except we also had to deal with this video and then the topic of Melwas in general. And by the time the meeting about the video had ended and we were walking into the Oval Office, I was distracted.
“What do you want me to say?” I ask him now in the office. “That I’m fucking sorry? I am, Ash, truly fucking sorry. I would do anything for this not to be happening right now.”
Ash moves past me to shut the door and to tell Belvedere outside that he isn’t to be disturbed. Then, door closed, he walks over to a chair by the fireplace and throws himself into it, his broad shoulders and long, muscular legs still dominating the space despite his tired posture.
“I don’t know what I want you to say,” he replies heavily. “You couldn’t have known there would be cameras. You couldn’t have guessed Melwas would have done this. But it’s happened, and once again the people I’m supposed to protect are being exposed to harm.”
I sit in the chair across from him. “We can weather this, Ash. It’s awful, but Greer is strong and perfect, and she’ll survive this. And I don’t give a shit about myself. But I told you that this wasn’t over for him.”
“I know you did.”
“It’s still not over. There will be more.”
Ash pinches the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “So what then? What do you want me to do?”
“I don’t care, but do something. Assassinate him, sanction him—anything.”
“You think that any of those things won’t lead to war?” Ash drops his hand to gaze at me. “You think it’s moral to provoke a man who is desperate for any reason to fight us?”
“It’s not provocation,” I say as I lean forward. “It’s holding your ground. It’s keeping your wife safe.”
“I have duties to more people than my wife, Embry. Three hundred and twenty million more people, actually. I can’t drag a country into war to keep one person safe. It’s not right.”
“No one is safe while Melwas is free to do whatever he pleases!”
Ash stares hard at me. “Do you remember Glein? Caledonia? Badon, where Dag died and there was so much blood it turned the ground into a muddy swamp?”
Memories of Badon—the last battle of the war—flicker before my eyes and I wince. “Stop.”
“I won’t. You held Dag as he died, remember? He asked you to call his sister and there was no reception but you kept trying until he couldn’t hear you anymore.”
“Stop.”
“How many men did you lose at Badon? Seventeen out of seventy-one? Two of them had babies about to be born at home, remember? Eight of them were fresh out of basic training. How many flags did you fold after? How many widows did you hug? How many children did you kneel down and look into their eyes and say, your papa died a hero when you knew their papa died in screaming agony without anyone to so much as hold his hand while he—”
I’m on my feet now, furious. “Fuck you,” I spit.
“I’m sorry if reminding you of war made you lose your taste for making it,” Ash sa
ys mildly. “I had no idea you would react so strongly.”
We stare at each other for a few long moments.
Ash is the first to speak. “You saw what I saw. Embry, they may have elected us because they think we’re heroes, but I swore the day I took office that I would never let those things happen again. The brutalized women, the orphaned children, the dead children. The hungry and homeless, all those bombed out houses and bags full of dried rice…if the only thing I accomplish in my life is stopping that from happening again, then I can look God in the face when I die. I’m not attacking Melwas, and that’s fucking final.”
I turn away and then back towards him, running my hands through my hair. “I don’t agree with you.”
“Good thing I’m the President then and not you.”
I start pacing. “Tell me she’s safe. Tell me he can’t hurt her any more.”
“You know I can’t promise that.” Ash’s voice is calm from behind me, but when I turn, I see the pained pleading in his eyes. “She’s as safe as I can make her. As safe as she can be.”
“I want her even safer than that.”
Ash sighs, smoothing his tie. “Embry.”
“Do you trust all her Secret Service agents? All her friends?”
“I don’t trust her cousin.”
And there it is. The problem I flew to Washington with, the blistering riddle I’ve been carrying in my hands since that I day I walked into my mother’s library and saw my sister crying. I stop pacing, and Ash notices.
“Embry?”
I sit down. I don’t look at him. I think of Morgan’s red eyes, of Abilene’s sharp smile. Let’s start with why you’re going to do exactly as I say from now on.
God, of all the things…
I clear my throat. “I think Abilene was involved with Greer’s kidnapping.”
“As do I. But I don’t have proof. Do you?”
I shake my head. “No, she hasn’t—no. I don’t. But she hates Greer, and she’s dangerous. That’s proof enough.”
Ash doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, just watches me. I think of all the things Abilene wanted me to do, all the lies she wanted me to tell, and I think about my sister hunched and defeated.
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