American Queen

by Sierra Simone

  I’m being hammered, I’m completely at his mercy, and he’s so big, it hurts, it hurts. Even I can’t tell if the whine from my throat is pain or pleasure, and then he changes the angle of his hips, and the entire world flips over. Suddenly, like before but even stronger, the pain joins forces with the building orgasm, rendering me senseless. Speechless. I’m nothing, I’m everything, I’m the light and the dark and the air and the void. Strong force, weak force, gravity, electricity, magnetism are all pinning me underneath this violent, tragic soldier, and as he fucks the literal breath out of me, and as I see stars and as I squirm in abject pleasure, I know everything is true. String theory, magic, multiple lives, miracles, God, parallel universes, it’s all true and it’s all real and it’s all happening inside me right now at this very instant as my climax detonates like a dying star inside me.

  It’s not a gratification, this orgasm, it’s gospel. It’s good news. It’s revelation and apocalypse. It’s joy and judgment and the answer to every question I’ve ever asked. Everything in my life has led to this one moment, this one exchange, this one feeling of my body shuddering uncontrollably under Ash’s.

  “Take it,” he’s saying into my ear. “Take your pleasure. Take me.” And I do, I do, I take my pleasure and I take him and I take me, and then like the most poignant sacrifice, like the most tender death, Ash pulls me close, and his body rigid and frozen over mine, erupts inside me. He’s got one hand cradling my head and the other holding my hip down, and his mouth hovers above my mouth, so every soft grunt and needy pant is warm against my lips. I feel every throb and every pulse, every hot spurt of him, and there’s so much that he’s spilling out of me.

  He keeps himself buried to the hilt until he’s finished, and then he kneels up without pulling out, stroking himself slowly with his tip still inside me, as if to milk himself of every last drop.

  The act is so biological, so possessive, that my cunt gives an involuntary clench, ready to come again. He chuckles at that and pulls out, leaning down to give my pussy a reverent kiss before he climbs off the bed.

  And then…and then I’m not sure what happens. He turns on a light and somehow he ends up undressed and in bed cuddling me and crooning to me, stroking my arms and hair and back, and murmuring words of gratitude and pleasure—he’s pleased with me, I think somewhere deep inside myself and the thought makes me happy. But I can’t speak. My hearing feels fuzzy, like I’m hearing everything through earmuffs, and my thoughts are nonexistent. Like I’m floating, blank and warm, but I’m also shaking, trembling like a leaf in the wind.

  Bit by bit, layer by layer, I swim up towards consciousness.

  “You,” I murmur to Ash. It was supposed to be I love you, but the words are so fleeting and so hard to form.

  “You,” he says back to me in a voice so filled with love that I ache. He wraps his body more securely around me and pulls the blankets tighter around us. My shivering slowly, slowly stills, but I become aware of the wet pillow underneath me, my cheeks cool against the air, and realize I’ve been crying.

  Ash holds me as my tears leak out, like a slow, dripping rain. “I love you,” he whispers over and over again. “I love you.”

  Eventually, after a few minutes or a few hours, my tears stop and I feel warm again. I roll over so that I can nestle into him, and he lets out a satisfied growl, as if it made him happy that I sought his comfort. “My princess,” he says, holding me tight. My world is this. My world is him. “My angel.”

  I nuzzle my face against his chest. “Will you hold me for a while longer?”

  He kisses my hair. “As long as you want. I could hold you for the rest of my life.” He lets out a small laugh. “And anyway, I’ve never seen someone drop that far and that hard into subspace before. I’m not letting you out of my sight until you’ve got both feet back here on planet Earth.”

  Subspace. It’s happened a few times after Ash and I have scened together at the Residence, but never like this. Never like a waking blackout, never to where I cry and shiver without feeling either.

  But as my mind returns to my body, it also returns to my worries from earlier.

  Namely to Embry.

  I should have told Ash as he was proposing, before we had sex. I should have told him six weeks ago. I should have told him that day at St. Thomas Beckett. I should tell him now.

  “Ash,” I say, keeping my face away from his. “There’s something I need to say.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Try me.”

  I have no choice. It has to be done. “You know the man who I slept with before? My first time?”

  He stiffens around me. “Yes.”

  “It was Embry.”

  The world seems to freeze, time ticking on as everything waits in bated stillness. And then Ash says in a wooden voice, “I know.”

  He knows.

  He knows.

  Shit.

  Fuck.

  He kicks the blankets off his legs to climb out of bed. I feel his warmth pull away from me, watch his naked form as he pads into the ensuite bathroom and flips on the light. I hear the sink running.

  Panic squeezes my throat like a sadist, choking off enough air that I feel dizzy, but keeping me conscious enough to witness the almost-certain end of my relationship with Ash.

  Ash comes back out of the bathroom with a glass of cold water, which he hands to me. “Drink.”

  Even though we just had the raunchiest, roughest sex imaginable, I still cover my body with a sheet as I sit up. I drink and he sits on the side of the bed, watching me with his President eyes, the ones that miss nothing. His war eyes. I can’t read his face.

  I finish drinking and move to set the glass down on the end table, but he reaches forward and takes it from me. For a moment, he looks at the imprint of my lips on the rim of the glass, a muscle ticking in his jaw.

  “You know?” I finally ask, my fingers knotting in the sheet.

  “I guessed,” Ash admits softly.

  “How did you guess?”

  He pulls his lower lip into his mouth and then releases it. “Let’s start at the beginning and work our way up to that. When?”

  “Chicago,” I answer.

  He nods, as if this is confirmation for something he already knows. Maybe it is. Maybe Embry did tell Ash about us, and I just didn’t know about it. He rotates the glass in his hands a few times and then sets it down on the table himself.

  “It didn’t mean anything,” I start, but he holds up a hand.

  “Don’t lie to me. Please.”

  His tone is guarded, but there’s something starkly exposed in his words. As if he wants to beg me for something, but doesn’t know how or what or even why he needs it.

  I take a deep breath and start over. “It meant something to me. How could it not? It was my first time, and it was so good—” I stop and pivot, realizing Ash probably doesn’t want to hear about how good that night was. “—But Ash, he never even called me after. I left my number and everything, and I heard nothing for years, not until you sent him to me. It must have been the worst lay of his life,” I try to joke.

  The joke falls flat because Ash is already frowning. “It wasn’t.”

  “Well, that’s kind of you to say—”

  “I’m not being kind,” he snaps. “I know it for a fact.”

  I stare at him. “How?”

  He runs a hand through his raven hair. “Embry called me that morning, wanted to grab coffee. He wanted to tell me all about this…angel…he had in his bed. He thought he was in love, even though it’d only been one night. If I had known that his angel was my angel, that it was you, I would have thrown myself in front of a train.”

  “But you didn’t know?”

  A bitter smile. “Before he could tell me about his night, I told him about mine. About how this girl I’d met four years before had shown back up in my life. About how I’d been too much of a coward to tell her about Jenny right away, and then
she’d discovered it in the worst way possible. I told Embry that this was Email Girl, that those letters I’d kept in my breast pocket all those years in Carpathia had been from her, the letters he caught me reading time and time again. I told him this girl’s name.”

  My mind spins. Embry had known my name too. Which meant…

  “And after I finished, and tried to be a good friend and ask him about his angel, he changed the subject. And he never mentioned that night again.”

  “That’s why he didn’t call, didn’t try to find me…” I trail off.

  “How selfless of him.”

  “Back to you guessing. How? We’ve never…we haven’t done anything other than what you wanted us to do that night of the State Dinner. We haven’t kissed, haven’t even hugged.”

  “I know,” Ash says. He crawls forward on the bed and slowly pulls the sheet down, baring my breasts to him. My nipples harden the minute they touch the cool air. “It was that night that helped me see it. He was obviously attracted to you, but…well, there was something else there. Something deeper. And after that, you two were so careful around each other. Never getting too close, never talking too long. Never alone. People who aren’t in love with people they aren’t supposed to be in love with don’t do that, Greer.”

  “I’m not in love with Embry.”

  “I told you not to lie to me.” The sheet is all the way pulled down now, and then his hand slides up my sternum to circle my throat. He doesn’t squeeze or press, but he makes a collar of his fingers, a collar not of leather or metal, but flesh and blood. You’re mine, the hand says. You’re mine and not his.

  I’m fiddling with my new engagement ring without realizing it, and then his other hand comes down on top of both of mine. “Stop,” he says. “You’re not giving that back to me. You’re not taking it off. As long as you still want it, I will be your husband.”

  “Yes, Sir,” I say, relief pricking at my eyelids. He doesn’t hate me now, he doesn’t want to end our relationship. If nothing else, I can live with that.

  His hand presses at my throat, forcing me to lie back.

  “How did he do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “How did he fuck you that night?” Ash is kneeling over me right now, his cock rock-hard and angry looking. “Did he flip you over so he could see your ass? Take you up against the wall because he couldn’t wait?”

  Maybe I shouldn’t answer that. But I do. “It was…like this. Him on top.”

  Quick as lightning, Ash is stretching his body over mine, his cock pressed against my clit. I can’t stop the moan that I let out.

  “What else?” Ash asks. His voice is rough. Rougher than I’ve ever heard it. And his eyes are so dark, no longer green but black.

  “He, um, he sucked on my breasts. Bit them. Like he was nursing, but hard and kind of desperate.”

  Ash lowers his head and nips at the tender curves of my breasts, sucking and teething and kissing, and within half a minute, I’m panting.

  “What else?” Ash growls against my tits. “What else did he do?”

  “I didn’t tell him I was a virgin until he was trying to get inside. And when I did tell him, he got…mean. Like it turned him on too much for him to control himself.”

  In the here and now, there’s a wide cock pushing against my folds and then Ash stabs inside so hard I gasp. “Mean like this?” he asks, punctuating his question with several savage thrusts.

  “Yes,” I cry out. “There was blood. He liked it. I liked it.”

  Ash stills, his cock quivering. “There was blood?”

  “A lot. It hurt, and Embry liked looking at it on his dick, seeing it smeared on his hips and my thighs. I came so hard.”

  “I bet you did,” Ash says, jabbing in again. “It should have been me, my cock. That blood and pain should have been mine, but I was such a fucking idiot.”

  “You have me now, Mr. President.”

  “Yes, I do,” he growls, rolling his hips and grinding against my clit. I make a low keening noise. “How did he come—on you? Inside you?”

  “Inside me,” I say, my voice breathless. “He wrapped his arms behind me and put his weight on me. Oh God, yes, just like that.”

  Ash feels entirely different than Embry—wider, stronger, more deliberate—but in this position, I can so easily summon the memory of Embry’s body over mine. I can so easily pretend.

  “I want to feel what he felt,” Ash tells me, his lips against the place where my jaw and my neck meet. “I want to pretend I’m him. Are you pretending, angel?”

  “I…I don’t know.” And I don’t. One moment it’s Ash over me, the next moment it’s Embry, and the moment after that it’s both of them, and I’m the center of a hurricane of hands and mouths and eager flesh.

  “I believe you,” he says, his hips rolling so perfectly in and out. This third orgasm is like a key turning in a lock; there’s a sudden shift and sudden everything in me is open and ready, and the climax rushes in, vicious and cruel, each pull so painful and bright that I can’t catch my breath. It’s my orgasm that sends Ash over the edge, and he gives a rough grunt and releases, this time fucking his way through the orgasm with those slow rolls, his entire body shaking.

  And then he moves off me, disappearing into the bathroom and returning with a washcloth. He cleans me gently, meeting my eyes.

  “Are you okay?”

  I nod. “Are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He returns the washcloth, and to my great relief, joins me back in bed, wrapping me in his arms. “Are you mad at me? At Embry?” I ask.

  He lets out a long breath, his chin resting against my head. “No.”

  “But you’re feeling something.”

  “Oh yes,” he answers. “Definitely that.”

  “Jealousy? Because you don’t need to be jealous, I swear to you.”

  “I know you believe that.” A hand sweeps up my back and strokes along my spine. “Jealousy is such a limiting word, isn’t it? Because there’s so many kinds of jealousy. There’s feeling possessive, which I do of you…but then again, I also feel possessive of Embry. There’s insecurity—that maybe Embry was able to give you something I can’t, and that you’re able to give Embry something that will change his relationship with me. And then there’s this strange kind of desire—thinking about you with him makes me hard. I don’t know why. It just does. And I know desire doesn’t always make logical sense, that it’s inherently politically incorrect, that sometimes we crave depraved things.”

  The hand moves to my hair, loving and lazy and indulgent. “But even knowing all that, I couldn’t have predicted how I would actually feel knowing that he fucked you. Desperate and hard and a little angry and scared and…excited. Jealousy on its own can’t hold all of those feelings, but I don’t know what other word can. So I suppose it’s good enough for now to say that yes, I am jealous. Of both of you.”

  I know how that feels, don’t I? To be jealous of Embry and Ash at the same time, jealous of them having each other in a way that I’ll never have, with their war history and fraternity and close working relationship. It’s a circle I’ll never be inside of, and it stings, stings, stings.

  “Go to sleep, Greer. We have all the time in the world to think about this.”

  I want to protest, want to resist him, because there’s no way I can fall asleep after our first time having sex, after he learned about Embry and me. No way at all, no matter how languid my limbs are, how thoroughly and utterly wrecked my body is, no matter how warm Ash’s arms are and how steady and reassuring his breathing is…

  I wake up alone, the bed cool next to me. Ash must have gotten up to work—is it morning already? I blink at the clock on the nightstand for a moment, waiting for the numbers to make sense. 11:13 p.m. I’ve been asleep for three or four hours, and my stomach reminds me that I didn’t eat before that. I sit up and stretch, and then hunt through the room for pajamas and slippers.

  I won’t bother Ash if he�
�s working, but I plan on bothering the shit out of some crackers and cheese. I open the door and head out towards the living area, seeing the twinkly-gold light of the Christmas tree spilling out around the corner. There’s nothing better than that light on cold winter nights. Cozy and quiet and joyful.

  I turn the corner with a smile on my face and then freeze.

  Ash is standing underneath the mistletoe.

  Kissing someone.

  My blood pounds in my ears and my throat is immediately tight with pain, but I can’t look away and I can’t interrupt. I’m as useless as a pillar of salt, doomed by my inability to look away.

  Ash is wearing a thin T-shirt and low-slung pajama bottoms that highlight his flat stomach and narrow hips. His hair is tousled and even from here, with only the light of the Christmas tree, I can see the stubbled outline of a day-old beard. His hand is fisted tight in the shirt of the person he’s kissing, yanking that person close and holding them there.

  And when they turn I see that the person is—inevitably, fatefully, tragically, wonderfully—Embry. Still in his sweater and jeans, barefoot and rumpled, with his hands underneath Ash’s shirt and digging into the small of his back.

  The kiss is so slow and lingering and deep. They meet and explore, and then their lips pull apart and there’s fluttering eyelashes and long breaths, and then they’re kissing again. There’s both a familiarity and a hesitation there, as if they’re relearning something they used to know. Ash will come in, his lips a breath away from Embry’s, his body and face painted with longing, and then Embry will press forward, all passion and no thought, kissing hungrily until Ash slows him down, his hand going flat on Embry’s chest and his mouth pulling back just the tiniest bit until Embry cools off. And then Ash moves in again, these soft, gorgeous noises coming from his throat.