"I haven't forgotten my original point though," Greer says, her hair and dress put back to rights. She walks over to me and helps me button up my shirt. "Did you get what you needed?"
I think about the false sense of happiness I felt, about waking up from that happiness and realizing Greer was still unsatisfied. I think about right sacrifices. I think about the man I am, the man I will always be.
I won't lay down this crown until I know the world will be a better place for it.
I run my hands up Greer's arms and then catch her hands in my own. "I saw what I needed to see."
"Which is?"
"The right thing to do."
We emerge back into the gala, perhaps a little rumpled and flushed, but it's all too easy to blame that on the champagne and the crowded ballroom. Luckily, I'm required to step out of events frequently enough that no one seems suspicious that I disappeared for any reason other than a matter of state, and we were only in that gallery for an hour anyway.
It was worth the risk. Everything inside of me feels cleaner, better, less bruised. As if I've finally stopped bleeding. As if I can breathe again. And when Belvedere comes to my side and discreetly indicates that the long-awaited call from Berlin has come, I take the phone and think, for the first time in twenty-four hours, that I might do more than survive this.
I might be able to make the world a safer place for it. I might be able to win my prince back to my side.
I might once again be a king worth kneeling to.
Nine
Ash
then
When I was twenty-two, I met a prince. He seemed to be the exact opposite of everything I was—loud where I was quiet, smiling where I frowned, careless where I was careful, careful, careful. Embry joined the Army because Vivienne Moore wanted her son to craft the perfect politician's resume. I joined because it seemed like the place to continue my never-ending quest for honor; because becoming an officer in the Army had a certain cachet in my neighborhood; because I wanted to somehow cosmically return the favor for my college scholarship; because the structure and rigid hierarchy of military life appealed to me.
Most importantly, I joined because I knew Carpathia was the most dangerous place in the world at the time, and I felt needed there in a way I can't describe. It was like a barometric pressure that made my bones and teeth ache when I tried to resist it. I knew that I was supposed to be there in the same way I knew that God was real or that I was bisexual. It was a fact, even if it couldn't be seen.
And after all that, then I see this lieutenant refuse to break up a fight? When we were there on the brink of war and responsible for safekeeping innocents nearby? No. I wasn't an angry person, but I was a disciplined one, and the one thing I couldn't tolerate in other people was a lack of it.
I only meant to shake some sense into him, to tell him clearly and unmistakably that he wouldn't get away with that shit while I was around, but then he turned, and I saw his face for the first time.
And it was over.
Done.
One look at those winter-blue eyes and those delicate lips and I was finished. One glance at his lean, long body, and I was falling. Every part of me responded with heat and flush and wrenching want, like a hook had been fastened somewhere in my chest and was now giving an almighty tug, and the only thing to ease the ache would be to get closer, closer, closer.
I'd never seen a boy so beautiful. Haughty as he was, overindulged and so obviously dissolute, he was the loveliest person, boy or girl, I'd ever seen.
I still pinned him against the wall, though. And it was when I had him against the wall with my forearm on his throat and my body trapping his that he sealed his fate. As I was choking him, he looked at me with his whole world in his eyes.
To say I became preoccupied with my haughty co-officer is an understatement. He became something of a meditation for me—at night, I fell asleep mentally sketching the lines of his face; during the day, my focus settled on him as he worked. His body so slender and tempting as he did calisthenics, the sweat glistening on his throat as he ran. His easy smile and his careless, lavish charm. He had the face of a Regency novel hero, but his personality belonged somewhere in the twenties or thirties. Sebastian Flyte at Oxford. Gatsby in his mansion. An American expat in Paris merrily burning all his money on liquor and food and women…or maybe men. He made jokes sometimes, sly references that had the other men in his unit howling with laughter or shoving his shoulder in embarrassment, but it was impossible to tell from afar how much truth lay in his jokes and nudges and how much of it was just Embry performing some persona that I didn't quite understand.
But oh, how I wanted it to be true. Even though we hadn't talked since I'd thrown him against a wall, even though I could tell by his pointed avoidance of me that he was still pissed, I wanted him to like boys too. At college it had seemed so easy, so open, that common language of smiles and touches to signal availability and interest. But here everything was murkier, submerged beneath the masculine gloss of military life, hidden in subtexts inside subtexts.
There had been that look when I'd pinned him against the wall, so fleeting I might have imagined it…
Then came that day in the woods when I beat him at our drill, roundly annihilating his team and then having the pleasure of shooting him with the paint round myself. I'd been the one to see his eyes flare with pain as the bullet made contact, the one to see his eyes flare with something else when I put my boot on his wrist. I couldn't help but smile then, because it felt righter than anything ever had before; this one small thing was the closest I'd ever come to being truly myself with a person I was falling in love with. I didn't just want to put my boot on someone's wrist—I wanted him to want my boot on his wrist. And I didn't only want to stand over him and feel the tread of my boot pressing into his skin, I wanted to kiss the tread marks when I was finished. I wanted to feel his almost-curly hair beneath my fingers as I thanked him for letting me hurt him, and then I wanted to press my hand to his chest and feel the beat of his heart while I persuaded his lips apart and tasted his mouth.
I wanted to take him to bed.
The thought scared me as much as it excited me. I'd spent the last seven years very intentionally not bringing anyone into my bed because I wanted to be myself fully in that moment, and here was this decadent princeling of a boy whom I barely knew, and taking him to bed was all I could think about.
But then the moment faded, and he said, "You'd have to hurt me much worse than this if you want to hear me beg." And it didn't sound like a dare, it didn’t sound like the words of a man who wanted me to make him beg. It sounded very much like he hated me.
It thrummed through me, this hatred of his, unchaining my sense of honor, my dedication to consent. I couldn't take this soldier back to my room and cinch his wrists with my belt, I couldn't ask him to let me inside his body when he clearly felt that I was…that I was what? Some kind of bully? A heartless rival?
Realizing that's how he saw me stung. And maybe that's why I reacted the way I did to meeting his sister in the halls of our barracks later that day. Even now, I can't tell you whether it was purely hurt or a need to be close to Embry somehow—even if that was through Morgan—or some mixture of the two, but I decided right then and there that I was willing to take the sister if the brother wouldn't have me. It was a bitter decision, made in a bitter moment, and even now I think it hurt me more than it hurt him. And of course, the consequences of that decision have unfolded into a shameful chaos of tragic scale.
All because I thought this blue-eyed boy didn't want my boot on his wrist. For that one transgression, I sired a thousand more.
"Do you want to fuck my stepbrother?"
The question came sudden and blunt, too fast for me to school my reaction. Morgan took one look at me and said, "Ah."
It was our first night in Prague, and Embry, much to my disappointment, had vanished after we checked into our hotel. I knew he didn't want me, but it didn't stop me from wanting him,
even if it was just to watch him smoke cigarettes and quote Coleridge and Keats and Eliot and other boarding school poets until the fog swarmed the city and the streets were silent except for the sound of his voice. I craved him like I suppose addicts crave things; it was blood deep, restless, dangerous. I'd literally never felt that way about another human before, and had I once believed I was aromantic? Now I knew I was the opposite of aromantic, I was all romance, I was all gnawing emotion and pained longing and staring at cobbled streets hoping he would appear.
But he wouldn't appear. Morgan told me that he was already fucking his way through New Town and drinking the top shelves in every club dry. It was just us, and might be just us for the entire week. God, how I panged at the thought.
"Don't worry," she said. "I won't tell anyone."
"He hates me," I said, taking a stab at an offhanded tone and failing. "So it doesn't matter."
Morgan just smiled at that, a secretive smile that seemed almost feline in nature.
"And I don't even know if he likes men."
"Oh," she said with a coy look, "Embry likes everyone. Boys and girls."
"And anyway," I said, taking a long drink of the Czech pilsner in front of me and then realizing as I set it down that I was a little drunk, "I haven't actually ever fucked anyone. So me wanting to fuck him doesn't mean much."
Her green eyes widened. I'd actually surprised her. "You're a virgin?"
"Embry would laugh for hours if he knew," I said, half wryly, half unhappily.
She shook her head. "I don't understand, and you're going to have to explain this to me—how does a person go to war a virgin?"
I fiddled with the beer bottle on the table, spinning it in slow circles. "I…I have a way that I want to be with people. I'm not ashamed of it, but I refuse to be that way with someone unless they want it. And I won't sleep with someone until I can be that way, because I believe it's immoral to share something like that if I can’t do it honestly. If I have to close my eyes and pretend in order to finish."
I kept my words purposefully vague—mostly out of respect for the fact that Morgan and I barely knew each other and it was hardly appropriate for me to force my sexual baggage on her—but also because I didn't have the language to describe it all yet and I didn't know exactly how to convey what I meant. And I didn't think she'd be interested in my rehashing the plot of Labyrinth to explain it to her.
But even so, she understood immediately what I meant. I know now it was because she'd already spent years flirting with kink, but at the time it seemed almost eerie how quickly she grasped my meaning. "Does this have anything to do with you touching Embry's bruise on the train?"
I kept my eyes on the bottle as I admitted the truth. "Yes."
"Were you hard when you did it?"
I didn't answer.
She sat back, that satisfied cat's smile on her face again. "Maxen Colchester. Baby Dominant."
"Baby what?"
"There are words for what you like," she said. "There are words for what you are. And there's a whole world of people who like it."
I looked at her. At her long, bare legs, at her elegant throat and long black hair. Her violently green eyes and full mouth. She was beautiful, and even if she didn't make me sore with wanting like Embry did, I was still attracted to her. "And are you one of the people who like it?" I asked carefully.
Her smile deepened. "I am."
"I see."
She leaned forward, her smile turning into something more serious. "Can I show you something tonight?"
"What do you want to show me?"
"How it could be. And if you like how it could be, I'll show you more.”
I didn't have a response right away. Everything I'd ever believed about sex and desire had revolved around it being organic, genuine, and deep, and this was undoubtedly transactional and arranged. There'd be no emotional intimacy to underscore our joining, and that had always been important to me.
And then, with a bitter taste in my mouth, I remembered that Embry was out in Prague somewhere at this very moment, enjoying any number of transactional intimacies. I remembered his face as I asked him if he hated me on the train.
Yes, he'd answered.
What did it feel like to want someone who hated you? It felt like hell.
"Show me," I told Morgan.
Cat's smile. A long arch of her back as she stretched her arms. I watched the fabric of her dress pull tight around her small tits and ride up the smooth skin of her legs. It had been a long time since I'd seen a woman in civilian clothes and I had to admit I'd missed the sight. The curves, the soft graces, the inviting hollows of a woman's body: the space between breasts, the luscious cleft of an ass, the hidden, wet place between the thighs. My body responded exactly as you'd imagine.
I tried not to think of how Embry looked strolling to our hotel in the fog, his coat highlighting the breadth of his shoulders and his eyelashes dark on his cheeks as he lit a cigarette. I tried not to think of how it would feel to see his thighs instead, dusted with hair and sculpted with lean muscle, how it would feel to see his nipples harden under my stare rather than Morgan’s.
"So first," she said, after she finished stretching, "say you wanted to take my hand across the table. As if we were on a date."
I extended my hand, enfolding hers within my own. "Like this?"
"Yes. Now hold my wrist instead."
I slid my hand from hers to cover her wrist, and the moment I circled the delicate joint there with my fingers, something changed inside my mind. It shoved roughly into place, like a carpentry joint.
"Oh," I said.
"Yeah," she said.
I gave it a small squeeze—not hard enough to bruise, just hard enough to test the give of her skin—and the tiny flinch she gave at the unexpected pressure was better than any kiss. Then she laughed. "You’re a quick learner. Let's keep going."
And we did, as we moved from restaurant to bar to hotel. I ordered for her at the bar; when we crossed the street and I instinctively put my hand at the small of her back, she guided it to the back of her neck instead. When I kissed her for the first time in an alley beside the bar, she said, bite me, bite me, and I did, and I felt like the entire world was spinning around my feet. My cock throbbed and leaked all over itself as my teeth dug into the warm flesh of her neck, the heat in my blood was making me fevered and delirious as she panted and mewled as I bit. And then she guided my hands under her skirt, and said, "See? See how wet you make me?"
I groaned into her neck, my fingers covered with evidence of how much she liked it. She wanted it, wanted me, all of me. All the parts of me I'd kept hidden out of decency and fear for so long.
"Can I show you the rest now?" she asked breathlessly.
"Yes, God." The thought of replacing my fingers with my cock into that wet, hot place had me nearly wild. "Do I need a condom?"
"I'm on the pill," she said, "and I'm clean. And we both know you're clean."
"I'm sorry if I hurt you," I told her, my hand already on my belt.
She gave a full-throated laugh at that. "No, you're not."
I laughed back because she was right, and the freedom of it felt vast and immense. That I could have someone like this and that they could want it—like the roll of a blue sky before the nose of an airplane. Limitless and thrilling.
Morgan was tall for a woman, so I could sling her leg over my arm to open her up to me. It was dark and all I could see was the place between her legs where she got darker, but it was enough to make me groan again. With fumbling eagerness, I found her wet slit with my penis, using the tip to slip and rub and explore until we were both trembling. The pressure of the air on my skin was too much, like the atmosphere had thickened, like gravity had tripled, and it was that same heavy feeling I felt when I pulled the sword from the stone at the carnival, that same feeling in my bones that this was important somehow, that this would mark an indelible moment in my life. This was a thing that could not be undone.
At
the time, I took it as confirmation rather than as a warning, and for that mistake, I have paid dearly, but all of that was ahead of me then. I only knew the slick invitation of her body, the novelty of not having to stop. The joy of hearing someone ask for more and harder and everything, give me everything. So I did, I gave her everything. For the first time in my life, I pushed inside another person's body and took my pleasure there.
I have asked myself numberless times since if some part of me knew or suspected. It's been almost two years since Jenny's funeral—that cheerless day when I both put my wife in the ground and learned about the incest I’d committed in ignorance—and so I've had plenty of time to go over the events in Prague time and again. Surely I must have noticed? Surely there must have been something, an inkling, an unconscious familiarity, some signal from her DNA to mine that we shared a mother?
But there wasn't.
Perhaps if I'd been older, I would have been wiser. I would have made familial connections, I would have sensed that something other than mutual attraction connected us. Or perhaps if I hadn't been a virgin, if I'd been well seasoned and worldly, I would have been able to slow down and think about it. Maybe I wouldn't have slept with her at all.
But I wasn't older and I wasn't worldly. I was young and eager and fervid. I was like an animal in rut, and once I'd felt what it was like to fuck someone, I was mindlessly keen to do it again. And again. And again. Morgan had laughed at me that week, at my appetite, which only grew as it was fed, and at my impatient willingness to do anything she wanted, so long as it meant I could fuck her again.
There was more than fucking that week too. She showed me how to spank her, how to hold her over my lap and alternate swats with teasing rubs to her clit. She showed me how to tie someone to a bedframe, how to push my cock into an open throat, how to paddle an ass with a hairbrush. She showed me how to make a woman come as I rode her, how to fuck sitting and how to fuck standing and how to fuck lying down in a bed.
American King (New Camelot #3) Page 10