I only remember flashes from the debate itself. The backstage at Hofstra University, crowded and jostling with people re-taping audio cords and adjusting camera settings and arguing about wi-fi. Searching for Ash as someone touched up my camera makeup. Searching for Greer. Seeing only strangers and lights. Going over my notes on my phone as Vivienne Moore texted me an unending stream of advice.
Look into the camera. Speak clearly. Don’t let him anger you.
Don’t fuck it up.
I remember stepping onto the stage first, waving and smiling at the intimate crowd. And then turning. And seeing him.
In person.
Up close.
Green eyes. Full, sharply peaked lips. Black hair shot through with strands of silver—so far apart that you think you’ve imagined them in the light. A suit cut so perfectly to his tall and masculine proportions that the tailor probably wept and came at the same time he cut it. A presence like a saint or a conqueror or a demigod, a presence that expands like heat from the wide shoulders and narrow hips and ruthlessly handsome face.
I remember shaking hands, his hand huge in mine, and rough and strong, and how are we shaking hands like strangers? We didn’t even shake hands when we first met, unless you’d call a forearm in your throat a handshake. And our eyes meeting, and I always forget I’m just that little bit taller, but somehow it doesn’t matter with Ash, I feel like I’m standing at the feet of Zeus and peering up in supplication. It’s that presence, and I’m helpless in the face of it, or I always have been, and then Ash cups my elbow and leans into my ear.
“I love you, little prince,” is all he says.
No insults.
No threats.
After I’ve spent the last year doing everything I can to undermine his power, to woo politicians and donors to my side, relentlessly stating and restating every single way I think he’s a bad leader, publicly forswearing our every bond and oath, trumpeting about his weaknesses, after all of that—all he wants to say to me is I love you?
Oh my God. I’m fucked. I’m done. I had prepared to debate in the face of his hatred, but I am nothing in the face of his love.
Nothing.
I pull back and look into those bottle-green eyes. “Achilles,” I manage in a whisper before the audience erupts in polite applause and the moderator exhorts us to take our podiums. His heart cracks open in his eyes when I say it.
I crack open too. Open and apart. Into nothing.
I remember taking notes as he and Harrison Fasse talked. I remember scribbling down points, and errors, and also just drawing nonsense lines because I needed someplace to look that wasn’t my king’s face, something to concentrate on that wasn’t his charred, melodic voice. It didn’t work though, because how could I not hear him? How could I not see him?
I remember making most of my points fairly well. I’m good at talking, I’m good at smiling. I’m persuasive. I’m from a liberal state with a Democrat for a mother and I’m also a decorated military vet, the perfect swirl of blue and red—not to mention young and handsome and smart. I’m an ideal candidate, as moderate and inoffensive as you can get. If I were running against any other person than Ash, this wouldn’t be a contest.
But it is Ash.
And he is the king.
To every question, he has a better answer. To every point, he has a better counterpoint. And it’s not only his eloquence, although that’s part of it, but it’s that clarity and honesty that spills through him like light, that radiates from him in a shine of equanimity and strength. It’s irresistible even to me, and I know the audience feels it, basks in it, takes it and holds it close because it’s the feeling of knowing someone good is in charge. Someone good is here and trying to make things better and they will do all the hard work and fighting for you, and all you have to do is believe them and trust them.
The terrible thing is that I know he doesn’t mean to do this, but without trying to, he paints a picture of me as overeager and inexperienced, unseasoned in a way that makes me feel clumsy, like a boy trying on his father’s suit.
And finally I remember Ash delivering the killing blow.
“Mr. Moore was my brother in arms, my running mate, and my dear friend. I still have nothing but respect and affection for him. But I will tell you that he swore to stay by my side through my first term, and he left to follow his ambition. Can you trust that he won’t do the same to you? That he won’t swear to serve you and then follow his ambition elsewhere?”
The room is thick with tense silence, and the moderator turns to me. “Mr. Moore, a rebuttal?”
I remember stammering something out about my conscience and Carpathia—a topic this debate hadn’t even touched—and how I was called to run out of service for my country, the same service I’d given of myself during the war.
And even caught by surprise, even being flattened by the king, I know I gave my answer well and with enough charm that I wouldn’t walk off this stage worse off than when I walked on. But I knew that I’d lost. That he’d painted my leaving him in the worst way, and that the damning part of it all was that he wasn’t entirely wrong. That the truth in his words would find purchase in so many undecided voters. And actually, fuck the undecided voters.
The worst thing is that they found purchase in me.
I remember walking off the stage and Dinah handing me a fresh bottle of water, I remember craning my neck to see where Ash went. I remember Morgan stepping forward and saying, “What the fuck was that?”
I remember Belvedere waiting patiently behind her and Dinah until he could slip in close, and then pressing a hotel keycard into my palm.
“If you’re available, President Colchester would like you to come to his room tonight.”
And I remember thinking fuck him, fuck him as I pocketed the key card and asked Dinah to arrange my ride to his hotel.
My phone won’t stop on the way back to Manhattan. After the Post news alert declaring Ash the winner and after the sixty-seventh text from Vivienne Moore, I throw it onto the seat next to me and press my fingertips into my eyes, ignoring the Secret Service agent sitting in the row behind me.
Humiliation runs through me like hot tar, it’s sticking in my throat, it’s muffling all noise and searing away any taste that’s not the taste of shame.
I lost.
I did my best and I lost.
Ash won.
Hempstead passes by, then Queens, and finally we are over the East River, heading to Ash’s hotel. I watch the concrete and steel morass of the city flit by with the weary distaste of a native Seattlite, and the hot tar feeling grows stronger and stronger the closer I get to the man who just outmaneuvered me on national television. The man who smashed me into splinters like a ship against sharp rocks. How ironic that this is so agonizing, so dishonoring somehow, when I’ve let him beat me with any manner of whips and paddles, fuck me into unconsciousness, taunt me into hardness, jeer me into ejaculating, use my soul and my heart as brutally as he likes to use my body.
But I’d rather be whipped. I’d rather be fucked raw and bleeding, I’d rather be tied up and led around by the cock than be suited and made up and so carefully prepared, and then to still be so easily outperformed. And I was good, I know I was. I know that if it had just been Harrison Fasse and me on that stage, I would have walked off the handy winner.
But Ash will always be better.
Fuck him, fuck him.
How can he love me and still crush me? What kind of love is that?
It’s his own kind of love, I think bitterly. His love is so like his cruel Catholic god’s—the god who punishes you for your sins at the same time he bleeds to forgive them. Eternally tender and coldly just. A contradiction I used to cherish and now I despise because it has made me despise myself.
My SUV pulls up to the back of the hotel, I tell my driver to get a room for the night and make himself comfortable, and then my agent and I are walking through the service entrance and to the elevator. The key burns a hole in my pocke
t, a plastic rectangle that might as well be my thirty pieces of silver. But whom am I betraying?
Ash?
Myself?
Neither?
Both?
My Secret Service agent—a hard-faced white woman named Leonella—says nothing to me in the elevator on the way up, for which I’m profoundly grateful. Even the smallest question, the shortest remark, would have poured another barrel of hot tar over me, and my skin is blistered and peeling with shame as it is. I’m sick and shaking with it when we make it to the top floor and the doors open. Ash’s agents are expecting me.
They are familiar. I know their faces, their names, their children’s names.
They know that I’m the opponent here to visit the incumbent—the incumbent that I quit on, the incumbent that just thrashed me on television—and I’m here to visit him by myself. And sex might be the least awkward reason that I could be here, and I find myself avoiding their gazes as I press the keycard against the door and let myself inside his room.
The first thing I notice is that Greer isn’t there. Her absence is distinct, touchable almost, like she’s left a hole in the very room, a reverse imprint of herself.
The second thing I notice is that Ash is a fucking god, and I hate myself for wanting him, yearning for him, even as I’m a defeated worm curling over the toe of his shoe. He’s by the window, a glass of scotch dangling carelessly from his fingertips, although it’s not careless with him, nothing is, and I know he has as firm a grip on it as he does on everything. His jacket is off, his tie loosened, his sleeves rolled up, and his expression as he turns away from the window is furious and hungry.
“Took you long enough,” he says.
“I came straight here.”
“I’m not talking about tonight.”
I don’t have an answer to that, and he knows it. He sets the scotch down and prowls towards me. Everything inside me is screaming to take a step back or to fly at him—to run or to attack.
I don’t do either of these things, but I feel the closed door behind me like an iron barrier, I feel cuffed and collared just by standing in front of him, and I hate that I still love it, that I miss it, that I want it. I hate myself. I hate him. I hate the lamps around the room that make him glow with an almost angelic radiance. I hate how good he looks with his tie loose and the city lights behind him. I hate how his green eyes burn for me as hotly as they burned in that Carpathian forest when he put his boot on my wrist.
“Why did you bring me here?” I ask, as if I don’t know. As if I’m not deliberately provoking him.
“Why do you think?”
“To fuck me.”
“You really think,” he says dangerously, coming close to me, “that you deserve to be fucked right now?”
“You would have been there with Greer last night,” I point out. “Why not, if not to fuck me?”
“If I’d been there with Greer last night, you wouldn’t have been able to sit down today, and your cock would still be hard. You don’t know what I would have done if I were there, but I guarantee you that you would be a lot less impudent to me tonight.”
I almost laugh. We just spent an hour and a half sparring over the most important issues facing our world today, and he whips out the word impudent? If I hadn’t felt unmanned before, I certainly feel unmanned now—my best efforts and all the Republican Party’s best money, and it’s just childish impudence to him? He might as well call me a brat.
“I can’t decide whether I want to hit you or kiss you,” I tell him honestly.
He steps closer. His shoes touch my shoes, and for a terrible moment, I remember every time that’s ever happened, the intimate knock of leather against leather. In the Army and during his first campaign. At his wedding to Jenny, when he asked for help with his boutonnière, and my toes bumped against his as I fiddled with the stupid flower pin and he stared at my mouth and I pretended not to notice.
“Funny,” he breathes, “I was just thinking the same thing.”
“You won,” I spit. “How can you possibly be thinking the same thing?”
“I won?” he demands. “Really? You call listening to you slander me for a year winning? Fighting you tonight—that’s winning for me?”
“You used to like fighting me,” I say sulkily. I know I’m being deliberately shitty, but I can’t stop myself, I can’t force myself past it, can’t stop it. It’s been two years since we’ve seen each other and all we’ve done tonight is argue publicly and now privately, and it’s stupid. It’s so fucking stupid, because all I wished for last night was for us to be alone and happy, and now all I want to do is choke him. Or be choked by him.
His nostrils flare, his jaw tightens.
My skin prickles with alarm, but I keep my chin lifted, my eyes narrowed. “And now you’ve won fair and square, in front of everyone, without even rumpling your suit. Surely that’s enough?”
I shouldn’t have said it, I realize that now, because the word enough is a bit of a trigger word between us, a word that dredges up memories of closets and cages and boundaries, the word I used a long time ago to tell him he was good enough to fuck but not to marry, and it was a lie, of course it was, but I sold it so fucking well.
The first time I used that word with him, he slapped me right across the face. This time, it’s worse.
He does nothing.
“Go ahead,” I dare him. “Slap me. Wrestle me. Fuck me. You won, so that’s what you get to do, right?”
“So that’s how you want it to be,” he says in a cold, slow voice.
“I don’t want it ‘to be’ any way, Mr. President,” I say with something between a smile and a snarl. “I’m just being impudent.”
“You,” he says grimly, “are asking for trouble.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“You don’t have a safe word.”
“I remember.”
His hand slams hard at the wall next to my head; I can’t help but flinch. “Give me a fucking safe word, Embry,” he growls. “Right the fuck now.”
“We’ve never needed one before.”
“I,” he says, finally taking that last step forward, and oh fuck, he’s hard, and his whole body is hot and so deliciously firm, and then his nose runs along my jaw and his lips are at my ear, “have never needed a safe word with you before.”
“And why is that?”
I feel him inhale, smelling my skin; his cock swells even harder against my hip. My own cock is a fucking lost cause, hard enough to pop like a fucking jack-in-the-box, leaking all over the inside of my pants.
“Because I’ve never needed you to be able to stop me before.”
I choke on the air I’m breathing. It’s terror and lust and possession. And a tiny voice that tells me not to give him a safe word because if I don’t give it to him, then I know he won’t touch me. Even in his wrath, he is too loving (once again like his Catholic god,) and if I tell him no, he will listen, and even if I don’t say no, if I say nothing, he will take a step back, he will drawn in a breath, he will fist his hands at his hair and tell me in a choked voice to leave. If I don’t give him a safe word, I could crawl in front of him naked, I could present any hole, my weeping cock, and he’d be stone.
And I hate him for being so safe. For being so good. I hate that he will still take care of me in the same moment that he wants to rip me limb from limb. I want him to destroy me, even if it’s just one more thing to hate him for.
“You give me one,” I say. “Give me a safe word and it’s mine.”
His eyes flare. “You’re supposed to choose.”
It’s my last petulant stand. “No.”
“No? Unoriginal, I suppose, but workable.”
“You know that’s not what I—”
But it’s too late, his hand is fisted at the neck of my shirt and I’m being shoved down to my knees, and I expect his other hand to fall to his zipper, I expect my mouth to get fucked, I expect anything other than the door opening with an electronic whirr and
click and Greer walking in, looking nothing like the autumn princess of last night and every bit a queen. Black cigarette pants hug her hips and ass, and she’s wearing a matching black shirt with suit-like lapels and a neckline so low that I can see the inner slopes of her breasts. Sandaled heels showcase her delicate Barbie-like feet, her blond hair waves silkily over one shoulder, lipstick the color of sin stains her lips.
For a ridiculous minute, Ash and I are frozen, just staring at her. Ridiculous not because she shouldn’t be stared at, but because I’m on my knees, because Ash’s hand is at my neck, because both of us are flushed and dilated with angry hunger. She sets her black clutch purse on a nearby table and steps towards us, her face keen with carnal delight.
“What are my boys doing without me?” she asks.
I can’t speak. Adrenaline and God knows what other hormones are surging through me, along with all the shame and rage from earlier. Ash speaks for us.
“I won,” he explains simply. “So I get to do what I want with him.”
“Oh,” she says, the apples of her cheeks going rosy with interest. “Are you going to fuck him?”
“He doesn’t deserve to be fucked.”
“You could fuck his mouth.”
“He doesn’t deserve that either.”
I try to clear my throat—not in an I’m right here noise—but in actual nerves, in actual discomfort, because I’m scared and angry and horny and I actually don’t know which feeling is which any longer. They’ve all blended together, mashed and pulped into the same thing.
It’s as if the noise reminds Ash that I’m still here, still kneeling at his feet with his hand gripping the back of my neck. He looks down at me.
“I think I know,” he says softly. “I know exactly what to do with you.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I say.
“That, my little prince, has never, ever been the plan.” And then he’s dragging me towards the bed like a dog, too low for me to stand, too fast for me to crawl, and I know I’ll have bruises on my knees, I can hear rips in the fabric of my suit, and for minute, I think about just standing up and saying it.
American King (New Camelot #3) Page 24