“Yes, that’s it,” he said shakily. “That’s the feeling you want to hold onto.”
“Little prince?”
“Yes?”
“Fuck me with it.”
“Christ. No, don’t with the dimple now, are you trying to kill me? I’ll go slow and then speed up.”
And that’s exactly what he did, with gentle twists and rocks of his hand. Slow, careful strokes that left me tingling and breathing hard, and then they turned deep and hard and rough, until the silicone was as warm as a real cock, until I was shaking and beaded with sweat. Until my stomach was clenched tighter than any fist, until my cock was harder than it had ever been and I knew when I came that I’d spray this entire bed with an embarrassing load of cum.
“God, Embry,” I moaned, rocking back into the toy, which was really an extension of his hand, which was really an extension of him. I could pretend right now, yes I could, and I told him that. “I’m imagining it’s you. All you.”
“Fuck,” Embry croaked, and I could hear his fist behind me beating his cock, the awkward tattoo of a left-handed jack as his right hand kept the dildo fucking my ass. “Are you going to come?”
“Yes, goddamn—” the orgasm was like nothing else, coming from somewhere in my body that I’d only barely known before, and it was Embry giving it to me, and I wanted to give him everything in return and I looked over my shoulder again. “Uncuff me, I want more, I want—shit.”
He uncuffed me, fumbling with the buckles long enough that both of us were swearing with dripping cocks by the end of it, and the moment he released me, I raised up to my knees and grabbed his hands. Somehow, despite the slide of the dildo and the tangle of his slacks and the length and width of muscled limbs, we ended up as I needed us to: his chest to my back, my legs folded outside and on top of his so that I almost sat in his lap, and both of his hands clenched tight on my cock, with my hands wrapped around his.
I fucked up into both his fists, each downstroke pushing the base of the dildo against him and back up into me, and so I was being fucked both ways, inside and out, and Embry’s face dropped onto my shoulder from behind. “I can’t,” he mumbled. “You’re going to kill me.”
“You’re going to kill me,” I gasped, because this orgasm was going to kill me, it was going to rip right through me, and then I gave a final thrust right into his tight double grip and slammed back into his lap, which shoved the dildo back into me hard.
And I ejaculated. Embarrassingly.
It erupted everywhere, huge thick spurts of it, all over Embry’s fists and all over Mark’s bed and all over my thighs and belly, rope after rope of cum, and Embry swore up a storm the whole time, as if I were personally torturing him by making him watch this, and it spurred me on, it spurred me on to think of his cock hard and aching behind me, of how it would feel to let him inside my ass.
But even in the heat of my clenching spurts, I remembered. He had to earn it.
So finally when my climax slowed, I rolled to my back. “You can come on me,” I offered. “You can rub yourself anywhere.”
Without hesitation, he rubbed himself everywhere. He bucked against my thighs, he used his cock to trace the place where the dildo still stretched my hole. And then finally he braced himself above me and rubbed his cock on my semen-wet abs and came in a few thrusts, surging a fresh wave of white over my stomach.
And then, like we were boys, we both started giggling. Not laughing, but giggling, high-pitched noises that had us both fighting for air and our faces hurting with giant smiles, and Embry collapsing on top of me and our stomachs sliding together in a sticky mess.
A few minutes later when our giggles had settled, I tangled my legs with his and guided his head to my chest. We laid there for a while after that, me stroking his hair, him pressing lazy kisses to my chest, our bodies still glowing with this pseudo-first of ours.
“Imagine,” I said gently, “how it will feel when it’s your body inside of me. I can’t wait.”
He looked up at me with the whole world in his eyes, and then he sighed. “You’re doing the dimple thing again. It’s evil.”
A few months later, Embry and I were walking around the edge of Vivienne Moore’s lake outside of Seattle. It was morning and chilly, despite only being September, and a low mist hung over the lake and threaded through pine trees. Above us, the same mist came down from the clouds, shrouding the mountains like a pale, gray cloak. It reminded me painfully of the day in that Carpathian valley when I’d proposed.
The lake water lapped quietly at the rocky shore, and Embry made a contented sigh.
“You’re happy here,” I observed.
“Of course. It’s home.”
“You know that anywhere you wanted to live, I would live.”
He stopped walking then, staring out over the fog-crowned water. “You don’t have a choice about where you live. Not for the next seven years.”
I stopped next to him and threaded my hand through his. He didn’t look over at me, but I felt his body respond to my nearness all the same. “I don’t have to run again, you know,” I told him. “And I wouldn’t, if that’s what you wanted.”
He made a noise. “And why would I want that?”
“Any reason. All reasons.”
He didn’t answer.
Despite his silence, a happy, nervous excitement was curling in my belly, and it had been all morning. Ever since we’d woken up and Embry had wanted to go on a walk, and we’d forced the Secret Service agents far enough back for some real privacy. The ring—the same one from all those years ago—burned a hole in my pocket, and I wanted to do it here, now, with his favorite lake at his feet and the fog wrapping us in an otherworldly blanket.
There was a large dry log set off from the shore a little, and I went to go sit on it, tugging Embry’s hand to make him join me. And after I sat, planting my feet wide enough to make space between them, I nodded my head at the rocky place I’d left between my shoes. Embry flashed me a hot look, but even with his evident grumpiness, he still settled on his knees in front of me.
“Such attitude,” I murmured as he finished kneeling and looked up.
“Maybe one day you’ll find someone who actually wants to be a sub,” he said in a surly voice.
I laughed a little at that, using the toe of my shoe to prod the hardening cock in Embry’s pants. “This looks an awful lot like you like it to me.”
He sighed plaintively, but I didn’t let him say anything else. I took his face in my hands and kissed him, as soft as the rocks were hard under his knees. I kissed him so softly that he moaned into my mouth, so gently that his anger at being mastered melted away, as it always did. “You forget that I know you,” I whispered against his lips. “You want to fight it, but this is where you’re happiest. This is where you belong.”
A wounded sound came from somewhere in his chest, and then he was nodding against me, emotion thrumming through him, and I allowed him to nuzzle into my neck, my chest, to rub his cheeks against my thighs and my erection. “It is where I’m happiest,” he said with his face against my thigh. “God help me.”
The nervous excitement leapt at that. Because now was the time, and I knew he wouldn’t say no, I knew he wouldn’t, how could he when he’d just admitted this was where he was the happiest? When he admitted that this was where he belonged? And surely this last year together had made him as happy as it had made me?
I pulled the ring out of my pocket, and there was a perfect moment—as perfectly golden as that ring—when he hadn’t seen it yet. When his face was still against my thigh, all trust and surrender and devotion, when the asking was close enough to thrill at but the words hadn’t been said yet, and everything hovered in anticipation and joy.
And yes, there was a small voice that asked me if I was ready to hear no. If I could survive Embry refusing me a second time, and the answer was that I didn’t know if I could. But I did know that it was more noble to love openly and honestly than to hide out of fear, I knew t
hat loving takes courage and vulnerability, and if I had to expose my beating heart for Embry to scorn a thousand times to earn his love, then I’d do it, it would be worth it. A million times. A billion.
“Embry,” I said softly.
“Yes, Ash?” He looked up at me, and suddenly I felt so young, and he seemed so young too, we were just boys barely crossed over into manhood with all our fresh hopes and desperate love pressing up into everything.
I couldn’t help it; I kissed him again. Kissed him while I was gripped with a feeling so fierce that it made my throat constrict and my eyelids burn. “Please,” I mumbled against his lips. “Please.”
I pressed the ring into the palm of his hand.
Embry didn’t move, and for a single second, as my eyes opened from my kiss to look into his, I saw an expression of dazzling, vivid joy. My own joy surged in response, my heart jumped, my blood spiked, and oh I’d let him fuck me right here on this shore, rocks digging into my back and everything, because he’d said yes, he would marry me, he would be mine.
And then, slowly and with the burning fall of a spark, the moment fizzled into pain.
Embry put the ring back in my hand. He wouldn’t look at me. “Don’t.”
I couldn’t make words come out at first, they were still trapped behind the joy, queued behind the happier words and kisses that were supposed to come next, and now I couldn’t make any noise at all.
He swallowed. “We can’t, Ash. You know we can’t.”
“Why?” I finally forced out the word.
“Because,” Embry sputtered, straightening up and looking at me, “you’re the fucking President!”
I stared at him, not sure if he was being serious or not. “I can’t be gay and be the President?”
“Exactly,” he snapped. “And certainly not like this. If they’d elected you knowing you were gay, maybe it would be different—”
I was growing angry now. “Well, I am elected now, so what does it matter who I want to marry? They can’t impeach me for being gay.”
“They could probably find a reason to impeach you for fucking your vice president though. Or something else. They’ll find something, Ash. It won’t just be re-election you’re kissing goodbye, it would be this term too.”
“They’ll have to fight me for it, and I’ve always won every battle I fought as long as I had you by my side.” I caught his chin in my hand, forced him to look at me. He was like a wild animal right now, a spooked horse, skittish and rearing. “Embry. Stop this…this bullshit. You fooled me the first time, but I’m not letting it happen a second time. I know you love me, I know you want to be with me. Nothing else matters.”
Embry bucked against my hand, trying to pull free. “Everything else matters, Ash. God, I so fucking wish it didn’t. I wish that we could just vanish from this world and never have to care about anything other than each other, but we can’t. I promised—” And here he broke off, as if catching himself saying something he shouldn’t.
I dropped my hand from his chin. “Promised what, Embry? Promised who?”
And the way he looked at me then, I somehow knew that this was bigger than this private moment by the lake. This was about everything somehow, and if he answered me, then I’d know, I’d finally know why I’d spent so long hurting for him.
But his look changed, grew guarded and careful. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t sacrifice my career for you,” he said, and his eyes screamed lies, but I couldn’t turn them over in my mind properly because everything just stung and burned so fucking much. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t stop chasing what I wanted, which is my own turn in the White House someday. Maybe you’re comfortable being openly bisexual in politics, Ash, but I’m not yet. I’m sorry.”
There was nothing to be said to that. The lake spoke for us, gentle and timeless, brushing clear rolls of water across the rocks.
“I don’t suppose I can command you to marry me,” I said after a while.
Embry wrapped his hand around my fist, the one that still clutched the ring that was supposed to be his. “I wish so many things, Ash, but sometimes I wish nothing more than that we’d never met so I wouldn’t have to say no to you.”
“Am I so awful?” I asked in a broken voice. “Am I so much worse than anybody else that you can’t marry me?”
“God, Ash, no. Fuck.”
“I would give up anything for you, Embry. Just say the word. Kink, the Presidency, even my life—I’d lay it down at your feet if you would only love me like I love you.”
Embry’s head dropped onto our joined hands and I felt his tears, warm as the lake was cold. “It’s not enough,” he mumbled into our hands. “And I made a promise.”
“Is this…is this like last time?” I asked, my voice already going tight with pain. “You’re going to end it between us now, aren’t you?”
“I think it’s for the best,” he whispered.
“I—”
But now the words really were gone, my throat too balled up and watery to speak.
Embry stood up and brushed the rocks off the knees of his pants. “It’s for the best,” he repeated, as if trying to convince himself. “It was fun though, yeah?” He gave me a pained smile. “While it lasted?”
I stared up at him, and I knew he could see all of my pain and I didn’t even have the desire to shield him from it. Let him see it, let him see my hurt, and if he won’t walk away with my ring, maybe he’ll walk away with my pain in his heart and that will be something at least.
“I’ll see you at the house,” Embry said, shoving his hands in his pockets and then setting off across the shore.
Me, I stayed there for a long time, until the fog was gone and the sun hot above, and then I stood up and cocked my arm, ready to throw that hateful ring into the lake where it could never, ever torment me again.
Twenty-Four
Ash
now
“Embry, it’s Ash. I know it’s late…or early, I guess. Greer just told me about Abilene, and I wanted to tell you that if you need anything, I’m here. I love you, little prince.”
I end the call and toss the phone on the table in front of me, Abilene’s death like a millstone around my neck. Even though I don’t regret finally confronting her, I do regret her death. Less for her sake than for Greer and Embry’s, who will have to sift through all the complicated holes her suicide will leave in their lives. For the sake of a little boy named Galahad, who no longer has a mother.
How funny life is, I think, spinning the phone idly on the table with one finger. That both Embry and I should have found ourselves widowed in the crucial moments leading up to an election. And I know exactly the circus it will become. Within an hour or two, the news will be frenzied with it, and Embry will have to give a statement, he will have to perform a grief he might not feel, and it will dog his steps for the rest of the campaign.
At least it means the press will turn their attention away from Lyr.
I stand up and stretch for a moment, looking around my hotel suite, feeling so tired and lonely for a moment that I almost just want to go straight to the airport and fly back home. After speaking with Abilene, Greer and I had both flown out in the dark hours of the morning to separate campaign events, and now I’m in Kansas City having done a rally, a speech, and dinner with my mom, and then spending the remainder of the night restless and alone. When Greer called at four a.m. to say that they’d found Abilene’s body in the Potomac, I gave up on sleep. After making sure my wife was okay, I called Embry, and now here I am, awake and alone in my hometown.
I open my hotel door and call for Luc. “I’d like to go for a drive,” I say.
“Yes, sir,” he says, as if there’s nothing unusual about me wanting to go somewhere in the freezing pre-dawn cold. “Tell me where and we’ll get it ready for you.”
So an hour later, I’m bundled in a coat and scarf and walking through the dark leafy hollows of a nature trail I used to enjoy as a young person. The agents are fanned out
around me, but they give me space, and after a while, it almost feels as if I’m alone. Just me and the crisp darkness of early morning, the bright splash of a stream running next to the path.
The water sounds so happy, so lively, so different than the cold Potomac, and I feel a chord of pity for Abilene. She tried to have Greer killed, she blackmailed Embry, she exposed my son to the worst kinds of public censure and ridicule—and yet, I do still pity her. She only knew love as a mangled, mechanical thing, she never knew it for the extraordinary gift from God it is, and for all the times my heart has been broken for this gift, at least I can say I’ve lived with it in abundance.
“I thought you might come here,” a voice says from behind me. I turn to see Merlin, lean and at home in the murky woods. Through the branches, the hazy blue light of dawn casts a net of shadows over his face. The shadows move as he walks towards me, and for a moment, I feel as if I’ve seen this before, as if I’ve dreamed it. Yes, it would have to be a dream, because when I saw it before, he wasn’t wearing a wool coat and a fashionable scarf and even more fashionable glasses. He’d been wearing something else, something ancient, but the net of shadows had been the same, a cold forest that looked much the same as this…and had there been a cave?
How strange.
Just a dream.
“I suppose you’ve heard about Abilene Corbenic?” Merlin asks, interrupting my thoughts.
“I have.”
“A sad thing,” he says, and together we start walking down the path again. “A very sad thing.”
“She said she loved me,” I say. “I feel culpable somehow, although I wouldn’t have done anything differently.”
“What did you say to her when you saw her the night before last?”
I push a branch out of the way as we walk. “That I wouldn’t choose her. That I wouldn’t forgive her. I told her to stay away from my family.”
American King (New Camelot #3) Page 31