American Queen

by Sierra Simone

  “Okay. How can I help you, Mr. Moore?”

  He steps forward into the office, and I can smell him. Something with bite—pepper maybe. Or citrus.

  “Well, Ms. Galloway, I wondered if you were free for dinner tonight.”

  Oh God.

  I peer around him, and he waves a hand. “My security detail is waiting for me at the end of the hall. They can’t hear us.”

  I should ask him why he’s here, why he’s at Georgetown, in my office, at nearly midnight. I should ask why he didn’t call or email or have some secretary chase me down. Instead, I ask, “Isn’t it a little late for dinner?”

  He glances at his watch without uncrossing his arms. “Maybe, but I’m confident that any restaurant you’d pick would be happy to open up for me. Or open up for you—I’m pretty sure there isn’t anyone in this town that doesn’t still owe Leo Galloway a favor or two.”

  “I don’t throw my grandfather’s name around,” I say, a little reproachfully. “I don’t like the way it makes me feel.”

  “Just because you want to forget who you are doesn’t mean the rest of us can forget you.” His voice is soft.

  I take a step back. I swallow. A subdued and dignified anger, sculpted into a careful, quiet shape after five years, rises from its slumber. Because, of course, Embry had once been very good at forgetting me.

  “Why are you hiding away here?” he asks, uncrossing his arms and taking a step forward. His voice is still soft, too soft, the kind of soft that croons promises in your ear and then breaks them.

  I should know.

  “I’m not hiding,” I say, tilting my head at my desk, stacked high with papers and books and Moleskin journals. “I’m working. I’m teaching, I’m writing a book. I’m happy.”

  Embry takes another step forward, swallowing up the space in my office with one long stride. He’s close enough that I can smell him again, a smell that hasn’t changed after all this time.

  I close my eyes for a minute, trying to reorient myself.

  “You never were a good liar,” he murmurs, and when I open my eyes, he’s so close to me that I could reach out and run my fingers along his jaw. I don’t, turning my head away and looking out the window instead.

  “I’m not lying,” I lie.

  “Come to dinner with me,” he says, changing tactics. “We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

  “Five years.” The words are pointed, and to his credit, he doesn’t parry them away.

  “Five years,” he acknowledges.

  Strange that such a long time can sound so short.

  I sigh. “I can’t have dinner with you. If I’m seen out with you, then my face will end up on Buzzfeed and all over Twitter, and I can’t handle that.”

  Embry is listening to me, but he’s also reaching out to touch a strand of white-gold hair that’s fallen free from my bun. “That’s why we’re going late. To an unannounced place. No one will know but me and you and the chef.”

  “And the Secret Service.”

  Embry shrugs, his eyes starting to crinkle again. “They won’t write their tell-all memoirs until after they’ve retired. Until then, our dinner is safe.”

  I can say no. I know I can, although I’ve never been able to say it to Embry. But I don’t want to say no. I don’t want to go to the pristine townhouse, impeccably furnished and impossibly soulless, and spend another night alone in my bed. I don’t want to be staring up at the ceiling of my bedroom, replaying every moment, every glance, my hand stealing under the sheets as I remember the citrus-pepper scent and the way the shadows fell across Embry’s cheeks. I don’t want to be whipping myself for another wasted night, another missed chance…especially with him.

  Just for one night, I can pretend I’m someone else.

  “Dinner,” I say, finally conceding, and he grins. “But that’s it.”

  He holds up his hands. “I’ll be as chaste as a priest. I promise.”

  “I hear not all priests are that chaste these days.”

  “Chaste as a nun then.”

  I reach for my trench coat by the rack near my desk, and he grabs it for me, holding it open for me to step into. It’s attentive and intimate and charming while being dangerous—all the things I remember Embry being, and I can’t make eye contact as I step into the coat and belt it closed over my blouse and pencil skirt. For a moment—just a tiny, brief moment—I imagine I feel his lips on my hair. I step and turn, facing him and trying to keep my distance all at the same time.

  Embry notices, and his smile fades a little. “I’ll take care of you, Greer. You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

  Oh, but I am. And not a little bit afraid of myself.

  Teller’s is a small Italian restaurant a few blocks away from campus, and it’s one of those delicious tiny places that’s been around forever. Embry doesn’t seem surprised when I suggest it, and after a few phone calls and a very short trip in a black Cadillac, we are inside the old bank building being seated. We’re the only ones there, the waiter’s footsteps echoing on the cold marble floor and the lights dimmed except for those around our table, but the chef and the servers are nothing but polite and happy to feed us. The Secret Service find discreet and distant points in the dining room to stand, and for a moment, without them in sight, with Embry’s suit jacket thrown carelessly over the back of a nearby chair, I can pretend that this is normal. A normal dinner, a normal conversation.

  I take a small drink of the cocktail on the table, trying to wash away history, drown it in gin. My history with Embry is hopelessly tangled up in my history with someone else, and as long as I let that someone else cast a shadow over our dinner, there’s no way I can hope to have a conversation that isn’t strained with pain and regret. The only answer is to put everything in a box and shovel gravel on top and bury it until it suffocates.

  “How have you been?” Embry finally asks, sitting back in his chair. I try not to notice the way his shirt strains around his muscular shoulders, the way the lines of his neck disappear into the bleach-white collar of his shirt, but it’s impossible. He’s impossible not to notice, he’s impossible not to crave; even now, my fingers twitch with the imagined feeling of running them along his neck, of slowly unbuttoning his shirt.

  “I’ve been fine,” I finally manage. “Settling into my new job.”

  He nods, the candlelight at the table catching on his eyelashes and casting shadows along his cheekbones. “So it seems. I bet you’re an amazing teacher.”

  I think of my lonely classroom, my silent office, my pervasive restlessness.

  I change the subject. “And your job? Being Vice President? There’s more to it than being photographed with a different woman every night, I’m sure.”

  The old Embry would have laughed at this, grinned or winked or started bragging. This Embry sits forward and stares at me over his cocktail glass, his hands coming together in his lap. “Yes,” he says quietly. “There is more to it than that.”

  “Mr. Moore—”

  “Call me that one more time, and I’ll have you arrested for sedition.”

  “Fine. Embry…what am I doing here?”

  He takes a deep breath.

  “The President wants you to meet with him.”

  Off all the things he could have said…of all the reasons I thought I might be sitting across the table from a man I haven’t spoken with in five years…

  “President Colchester,” I say. “Maxen Colchester. That President?”

  “As far as I know, there’s only the one,” he replies.

  I take a drink from my cocktail, trying to keep my motions controlled and my expressions blank, although I know how pointless that is with Embry Moore. When I first met him, he was a servant to his emotions, impulsive and moody. But in the last five years, he’s become the master of deliberate, studied behavior, and I know by the way his eyes flicker across my face that I’m not fooling him at all.

  I set down my drink with a sigh, abandoning all pretense of calm. Like he s
aid before, I’ve never been a good liar and I hate lying anyway.

  “I’m a little confused,” I admit. “Unless the President wants to talk about the influence of Anglo-Saxon poetry on Norman literary traditions, I don’t see why he’d want to talk to me.”

  Embry raises an eyebrow. “You don’t?”

  I glance down at my hands. On my right pointer finger, there is the world’s smallest scar—so small it can’t be seen. It can only be discerned in the way it disrupts the looping whorls of my fingerprint, a tiny white notch in a tiny white ridge.

  A needle of a scar, a hot knife of a memory.

  The smell of fire and leather.

  Firm lips on my skin.

  The warm crimson of blood.

  “I don’t,” I confirm. I have hopes, I have fantasies, I have a memory so powerful it punishes me nightly, but none of those things are real. And this is real life right now. This is the Vice President, that is the Secret Service over there, and I have a stack of papers waiting to be graded at home.

  I’m not sixteen anymore, and anyway, I told myself that I was putting that other man in a box and burying him.

  “He saw you at your church last week,” Embry finally says. “Did you see him?”

  “Of course I saw him,” I sigh. “It’s hard to miss it when the President of the United States attends Mass at your church.”

  “And you didn’t say hello?”

  I throw up my hands. “Hello, Mr. President, I met you once ten years ago. Peace be with you, and also the left communion line is the fastest?”

  “You know it’s not like that.”

  “Do I?” I demand, leaning forward. Embry’s eyes fall to my chest, where my blouse has gaped open. I straighten, smoothing the fabric back into place, trying to ignore the heat in my belly at Embry’s stare. “He was surrounded by Secret Service anyway. I wouldn’t have been able to say hello even if I wanted to.”

  “He wants to see you,” Embry repeats.

  “I can’t believe he even remembers me.”

  “There you go again, assuming people forget about you. It would be sweet if it wasn’t so frustrating.”

  “Tell me why he wants to see me.”

  Embry’s blue eyes glitter in the dim light as he reaches for my hand. And then he lifts it to his lips, kissing the scarred fingertip with a careful, premeditated slowness. Kissing a scar that he should know nothing about.

  My chest threatens to crack open.

  “Why you?” I ask, my voice breaking. “Why are you here instead of him?”

  “He sent me. He wants to be here so badly, but you know how watched he is. Especially with Jenny—”

  Darkness falls like a curtain over the table.

  Jenny.

  President Colchester’s wife.

  Late wife.

  “It’s only been a year since the funeral, and Merlin thinks it’s too soon for Max to step out of the ‘tragic widower’ role. So there can’t be any emails or phone calls,” Embry says. “Not yet. You understand.”

  I do. I do understand. I grew up in this world, and even though I never wanted to be part of it, I understand scandal and PR and crisis management as well as I understand medieval literature.

  “And so he sent you.”

  “He sent me.”

  I look down at my hand, still held tightly by Embry’s. How did I end up tangled with these two men? The two most powerful men in the free world?

  This is real life, Greer. Say no. Say no to Embry, and for God’s sake, say no to the President.

  I breathe in.

  Fire and leather. Blood and kisses.

  I breathe out.

  “I’ll see him. Tell him I’ll see him.”

  I don’t miss the pain that flares in Embry’s eyes, pain that he quickly hides.

  “Consider it done,” he says.

  4

  Ten Years Ago

  “You have to hold still,” Abilene fussed at me. “I keep messing this one up.”

  I sighed and forced my body to stay still, even though I was so excited I could barely breathe. In just a few minutes, a hired car would pull in front of the London hotel Grandpa Leo had put us up in and take us to a large party in Chelsea, a party with adults and champagne. There would be diplomats and businessmen and maybe even a celebrity or two—a world away from the stale beer and crackling speakers of the hill parties back at school.

  It was my sixteenth birthday, and as a special treat, he’d allowed us to tag along with him to the party. Or rather, he’d invited me and only reluctantly allowed Abilene to tag along—he could hardly invite one granddaughter and not the other, but we both knew (even if we didn’t say it aloud) that bringing Abilene to something like this carried a significant risk of embarrassment. She’d nearly been thrown out of Cadbury multiple times for a host of crimes—drinking on the premises, breaking curfew, a nasty incident that led to another lacrosse player with a black eye—and every time, Grandpa Leo had quietly paid the right money and pulled the right strings to keep her installed there.

  The last thing he wanted was for her to disgrace him at a party full of his friends, but I promised him that I’d keep her on her best behavior. I promised him that I’d keep her from drinking too much, from talking too much, from flirting too much, just as long as he’d let her go, because she would be so hurt if I was able to come along and she wasn’t.

  And Grandpa Leo, who used to terrorize senators and petroleum executives, who helped shape the strongest environmental legislation on record and publicly excoriated his enemies on a daily basis, relented to my pleading with a gruff smile and let Abilene come along.

  And that’s why Abilene and I had spent our evening in an expensive hotel getting ready, why I was currently trying not to squirm in a chair as Abilene carefully pinned my final curl in place.

  When she finished and I stood up to give myself a final once-over before strapping on my high heels and going downstairs, she made a noise behind me.

  Worried, I spun around to the mirror. “What is it? Is my bra showing?” I tried to turn this way and that, positive that Abilene had seen something potentially disastrous.

  “No. It’s…it’s fine.” Her voice sounded choked. “Let’s go. Grandpa’s waiting.”

  I shrugged and sat down to pull on the strappy heels that matched the blush pink gown Grandpa had bought me earlier that week. The tulle and organza dress had a narrow waist and form-fitting bodice, a delicate sash in back, and a skirt that erupted from sedate layers into luxurious drapes and loops. With a matching tulle flower set into my hair and metallic pink heels, I felt like a princess, even though I knew I wouldn’t look like one compared to Abilene.

  Tonight, she wore a tight dress of electric blue, with a keyhole in the center of the bodice displaying a swath of creamy-pale skin, and her glossy red hair was down in loose waves. She looked years older than she was, mature and sophisticated, and I stifled the usual pang of weary resignation that came along with seeing Abilene dressed up.

  I was used to being in her shadow, after all, the companion to her Doctor, the Spock to her Kirk, and so it shouldn’t bother me tonight. Even if it was my birthday. Even if I was in the most beautiful dress I’d ever worn. But after looking at her, so polished and alluring, it was impossible to look at my reflection and see anything other than the faint cleft in my chin, the ridiculous beauty mark that refused to be covered up, the flatness of my eyes even after the most strategic uses of mascara and eyeliner.

  So I did one final check to make sure my strapless bra wasn’t showing, that I hadn’t accidentally smeared pink lipstick across my face or sat on Abilene’s half-eaten Galaxy bar, and then opened the door. Abilene pushed past me without a word and refused to speak to me on the ride down to the lobby.

  The mirrored doors opened, and she strode out of the lift, her heels clicking on the marble floor. “Are you angry with me?” I asked.

  I racked my brain trying to think of anything I could have done to make her mad and came up wi
th nothing. But sometimes that didn’t matter with Abilene. For all the times she hugged me out of nowhere, made sure I was invited to a party, or defended me to her friends, there were other times when she’d plunge suddenly into a dark, sullen mood, when her stare would burn like acid and her words char my skin like fire. I’d learned not to negotiate with these moods or try to appease them, even though they seemed to happen more and more frequently. There was no point—you couldn’t argue with a storm cloud, you could only wait for it to blow past.

  “I’m not angry with you,” she said, still walking fast. I could make out the stout shape of Grandpa Leo through the front doors and, overlaid on top of him, our reflections: Abilene all scarlet and sapphire, and me shell-pink and gold.

  She must have seen it too, because she froze, staring at the door. Then she turned to me. “Just stay out of my way tonight,” she mumbled. “Just stay away from me.”

  Stung, I watched her walk through the doors as the doorman opened them for her and give Grandpa Leo a big hug, a fake smile plastered onto her face. I wanted to yell at her, tell her that I was the only reason she was going to the party in the first place. I wanted to scream and kick, because couldn’t I have one night, just one, that wasn’t all about her, that she didn’t upstage or steal or poison with her drama?

  And most of all, I wanted to cry, because Abilene was my best friend, maybe my only friend, and the whole world felt off-kilter when she was like this with me.

  But what could I do? What could I say or scream or beg that would make her understand?

  So I did what Greer Galloway usually did.

  I quietly followed in her footsteps.

  I went through the doors and into Grandpa’s arms and then climbed into the car with her. We sat shoulder by shoulder, my skirt overflowing onto hers, her soft hair brushing against the skin of my arm, and we didn’t say a word to each other the entire drive.

  Within minutes of arriving at the party, Abilene disappeared. I made to go find her, but Grandpa Leo held me back with a hand on my arm and a shake of his head. “She’ll be fine after a few minutes,” he promised. “Some space to cool down will do her good, and besides, I’d like to introduce you to a few of my friends.” I knew introduce was Grandpa Leo-speak for planting me as his spy, that he would want me to circulate and listen, or stand by his side and observe people while he talked, and I wanted to do that, I really did, but I also wanted to fix whatever was wrong with Abilene and me before the night grew any older.