Ash had crossed his arms behind his head then, stretching out like a lion. “Clean it off me now,” he said, imperiously and a little dismissively. “With your tongue. Go ahead.”
And then he threaded his fingers through my hair and forced me when I hadn’t moved fast enough for his pleasure.
That had been the night before. Depraved and taxing, and I was walking gingerly, the ache from my marathon orgasm session spiking up through me without warning whenever I moved.
I was walking into the showers, grateful to see they were mostly empty, and also grateful that our new base had proper shower stalls instead of curtains. But then I heard a noise—the kind of noise that even stalls can’t keep private—and my heart missed a beat.
It was Ash. And that kind of noise—
But no, it was only his feet visible under the stall door. I let out a breath I’d been unconsciously holding and shook my head at myself. Did I really think Ash had been playing around with another soldier?
There was another noise. It wasn’t a groan, not as loud as that. More like a breathless grunt, a sharp exhale. And then a sound that every man knew well—a hand moving fast on a cock. Ash was jacking off.
I retreated to my room and decided to shower another time. Part of me was amused but I had to admit, a stupid part of me was a little wounded. Was last night not enough for him? Or did he think me too worn out to help him relieve tension if he needed it? Or—and it sounded madly paranoid to even think it, the worst kind of jealous thinking—was there actually someone else he wanted? A desire that his honor or orderly brain demanded he satisfy apart from me?
So I watched him, as any jealous lover would. Watched him with the other soldiers, watched his habits. We were afield so often that any deviation from routine was hard to pin down, but I began to notice small things. Checking his email more often than necessary on the rugged field laptop. A folded sheaf of papers he kept in his breast pocket. Slipping away at night, when everyone else was asleep. Except for me.
Only once did I see those folded papers out; we were in his room before dinner, door open, playing the part of casual friends. He went to the shared bathroom to brush his teeth and I saw the sheaf sticking out from under his pillow. It was underhanded and invasive and wrong, but since when had that ever stopped me? I lifted the pillow ever so slightly, listening for his footsteps in the hall, and gently unfolded one page. It was a printed email from half a year ago. Dear Ash, it said at the top.
My heart sank. Ash. The name he only gave to those close to him.
Dear Ash, it’s been six months since we met—
Footsteps in the hallway. With the ease born of too much practice, I replaced the object of my snooping and effortlessly assumed the position of a bored, innocent friend when he returned. We went to dinner, and I managed to talk and laugh and mime along, but the whole time, those words kept running through my mind. It’s been six months since we met…six months since we met…since we met. Did love letters sound like that? Ash and I had written to each other, but those letters were less about love than need and anticipation.
We’d never defined exactly what it was we were doing, other than sneaking around and fucking constantly. That conversation had been forestalled by my lie about what I wanted for my future. And if we hadn’t defined our relationship, did that mean that we weren’t necessarily exclusive?
Since the ambush at Caledonia, Ash had been a darling for the press, and because I was the object of his heroism and conveniently also good-looking and wealthy, I became a bit of a darling too. And consequently, I now had an international reputation as a playboy, although that was a bit unfair, as I hadn’t actually slept with anyone else since that first time with Ash. It was crazy what the press could invent from a handful of parties and a few off-color jokes. I’d never minded people thinking of me that way—it was true before Ash, certainly—but I did mind if Ash thought I was sleeping around.
I especially minded it if there was someone else in the picture.
I thought hard about how to bring it up, a way to casually introduce the subject, but even in my head, the words always came out wrong. Suspicious and ugly—and what claim did I have on Ash anyway? I’d been the one to tell him we didn’t have a future, as far as he knew I was the callous, noncommittal one. How could I interrogate him about some emails and jacking off in the shower?
It turned out I didn’t have to. One day not long after, there was an issue with a patrol scheduled to go out within the week, and I went to Ash’s office late that night to get it sorted. I found him on this laptop, typing out brisk responses to his emails.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” he asked, only taking his eyes off the screen to reference a marked up map of the valley.
“Dag is telling me that they never got the medical supplies they’re supposed to carry down the val—”
Ash’s laptop chimed, an email notification, and he clicked the mouse a couple of times, eyes sliding back and forth across the screen, stopping abruptly when they found what they were looking for. His face changed—focused to stunned to studiously blank—in the space of a second.
And I knew.
I just knew.
“Is there someone else?” I demanded. “Are you with—I mean—just. Is there another person?”
He lifted that studiously blank face to mine, closing the laptop with an efficient push of his hands. “No,” he said.
I paused, wondering if I got it all wrong, but then he continued. “Not in the way you think, at least.”
“You don’t know in what way I think,” I replied.
Ash gave me a sad sort of smile. “You think I’m fucking someone else or planning to. At the very least, you think we’re exchanging letters. But none of those things are true.”
Not good enough. “Is it someone you’d like to fuck? And they’re writing you emails? And you like getting those emails?”
He sighed. “The answer to all three of those questions is yes. But we aren’t ever going to fuck and I’m not ever going to write her back.”
Her. It was a her. For some reason that rankled all the more.
“Why aren’t you?” I asked.
Ash leaned back in his chair. “It would be wrong.”
“Because of me?”
“Not entirely.”
That answer stung, I had to admit. “Then why?”
He regarded me carefully. “Because she’s sixteen.”
I had no response to this. I opened my mouth, closed it, opened it again, and still—nothing. Except one thing. “You’re twenty-six.”
“I’m flattered you remember.”
“That’s a decade older than her.”
“Well spotted,” said Ash.
“That’s actually illegal. And morally dubious.”
Ash spread his hands wide, palms up. “I fucked you while you were bleeding from two different bullet holes, Embry. I’m not a moral man.”
I stared at him, shaking my head. “You’re the most moral man I know. Which is why it doesn’t make sense.”
“No,” he said, looking down at his hands. “It doesn’t make sense. But nevertheless…”
My jealousy, my irritation that he could be fooling around with a teenager for God’s sake, fed my curiosity. I had to know. “How? When?”
“Last summer, in London. Before Caledonia. Merlin had taken me to a cocktail party.” He smiled to himself, lost in memory. “She was on her knees when I walked in, trying to clean shards of glass from the floor where her cousin had thrown it in a tantrum. Her hair was like—” he searched for the right words “—water, if water were gold and white.”
I could almost see it then, the scene. This young woman kneeling in a pool of broken glass, Ash in his uniform, an English moon silvering the wet sky outside.
“She noticed I couldn’t sleep—I think she notices a lot of things, actually—and I helped her clean up the glass. And then…” his thumb came up to touch his lower lip.
“You kissed her.”
&
nbsp; “It was her first kiss,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ve been anyone’s first kiss before. But kissing her was like—” he looked me straight in the eye “—it was like kissing you. Different in most ways, but the same in the most important way: how it feels right to me.”
I wasn’t expecting that. I swallow, my eyelids burning for some reason I can’t identify.
“But I left without doing anything more than kiss her. She’s been writing me emails ever since, although tonight is the first one I’ve had in six months.” A labored smile. “I suppose her infatuation is burning itself out.”
“But yours isn’t.”
“But mine isn’t,” confirmed Ash.
I felt so helplessly frustrated. So jealous. “Why not? Why can’t you just be happy with—” I froze, but it was too late. Ash knew what I was going to say.
“With you?” he asked softly, and I couldn’t tell if his voice was soft with malice or with love. They often ran parallel tracks with Ash.
He stood up and came around his desk, checking that the office door was locked, and then he was squatting in front of me, searching my face. “I am happy with just you, little prince. You have to understand, when I met her, I hadn’t seen you in over three years and for all I knew I’d never see you again. And I met someone who made me feel—just for an hour—the way you always make me feel. I treasure that hour because it’s only the second time in my life I’ve felt it, and I don’t know that men like me are allowed much more than that.”
“Ash…”
“It might be premature to call that feeling love, but I can’t help the way I’m wired, Embry.” He took a breath, standing up and then looking down at me. “I know you don’t want promises from me, but I’m going to give you one anyway. So long as I’m fucking you, you’ll be the only one I’m fucking.”
His blunt promise of monogamy made my cheeks flush with flattered satisfaction, which cooled somewhat when he followed up with, “But there’s always going to be a tiny corner of my heart for this, Embry. A memory of an hour in London. If you and I were—” he closed his eyes as his breathing hitched and a muscle jumped in his cheek. I watched him regain control of himself “—if things were different between us, then I’d give it all to you, that London hour and all. But since you were honest from the beginning about what you would and wouldn’t give me, then I’ll be honest and tell you that I want to hold onto this for myself.”
I could object, I knew I could. I could tell Ash that I didn’t care what I’d been honest about, I wanted him to burn those emails, I wanted his heart and thoughts only on me. And he would’ve listened. But I was acutely aware of how unjust it was to ask him to surrender a single memory when I refused to surrender any part of my life—or so my lie had led him to believe.
“Okay,” I said.
“Do you want to know her name?” he asked.
“No.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
His hands went to his belt and slowly began to work it open. “Show me how fine it is then,” he said, and I did.
Two and a half years passed after I discovered Ash’s obsession with the girl with the water-hair, and things began to slip out of our control. Ash—once so good at keeping our arrangement a clean mix of soldierly fraternity and covert fucking—began to slip. He stroked my hair as I fell asleep. He saved the Skittles from his MREs for me. He talked about bringing me home to Kansas City to meet his mother and sister.
We both began—in the most tentative, almost accidental way—to talk about the future. Places we would go, the kind of apartments we liked or didn’t like, whether we wanted kids someday. It was all framed innocently enough—do you want kids—yes and yes—could you ever see yourself living out in the country—him yes and me no—where will you go after all this is over—neither of us knew.
We skated around the real questions inside our spoken questions, but only just. His thoughtful attentions and orgasmic abuses were too much to withstand; what person could resist having Captain Maxen Ashley Colchester in love with them? Really? Who could have done it?
And late at night, after I’d been bruised and bitten and ridden, we’d talk about the war. Sometimes it was in my room at the base, sometimes it was in a scanty freezing outpost or out on patrol when the other soldiers were asleep, but it was always at night, always in the dark, with our faces tilted up to the ceiling or the sky. We talked about the things we’d do better or differently, the things we’d do the same if we were Congress or the President or NATO or the U.N.
I don’t know why I goaded him so much about going into politics then. Partly it was because I always knew I was going to be a politician and misery loves company—much in the same way married couples try to goad unmarried couples into getting wed. But partly it was because it just seemed like such a waste for someone as fundamentally moral and intelligent and charming not to go into politics. It was obvious he was born for it, molded and shaped for it, and the thought of Ash sitting in an insurance office or teaching high school government made me want to smash my head against a wall.
“Maybe I’ll just be career Army,” he’d say often enough when I brought up what we’d do after the war.
“You won’t,” I would promise him. “You love fixing things too much.”
He would scoff, and then I’d roll myself on top of him and murmur, “You fixed me.” And then the conversation would stop while I let him fix me over and over and over again.
And, in a strange way, I’d also grown comfortable with the corner of his heart that harbored the memory of someone who wasn’t me. His fierce attachment to this emails never waned, and there were countless times I’d see him coming out of the shower with color in his cheeks and hooded eyes. I realized that it was his way of keeping things separate—how he lived with himself—as if by taking care of his lust alone, he wasn’t betraying me by it. And once, just once, when we had a week’s leave and were drunk in Berlin, I leaned over to him in the hotel bar and whispered, “I want to pretend I’m her.”
His eyes had flashed then, and he’d searched my face for several long seconds. But we were both drunk and stupid and full of the unspoken feelings between us, and he’d brought me upstairs. The memory of the things he did to me that night still makes me ache.
There was also something attractive in having something to be jealous over, something to hurt for, that wasn’t my lie or our hidden relationship. How much easier it was to lie in my bed and pang over some teenager on the other side of the continent than it was to think about how I was putting Ash’s career and mine in danger, how I was denying Ash and me what we both really wanted.
Because even as we began to grow complacent about our boundaries in private, in public we were both model closeted men. We were careful about our assignations, how we interacted in front of the other soldiers. I made a point to go on plenty of fake dates, brought women to all the events I went to at home, partied with clouds of eager, young co-eds whenever I had the chance. Everything was fine on the surface. More than fine, it was good. As good as they get with an unwinnable war and bad food, at least.
All until the day Ash came into my room and said, “I’ve been selected for a promotion.”
I had been kicked back on my bed, reading Brideshead Revisited for the trillionth time since Ash had compared me to Sebastian Flyte all those years ago, and didn’t understand the importance of his words at first.
And then I did.
“To the rank of Major, if you were interested,” Ash clarified in a cool voice as I sat up.
“You’d have to go to Command School,” I said, thinking. Panicking. “How long?”
“Ten months.” His expression changed, softened a little. “It’s back home in Kansas. Fort Leavenworth.”
But my home is wherever you are, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. Because I could hear Merlin’s voice as clearly as I could hear my own. The voice telling me to sacrifice. All of the hiding for all this time—it had been for this.
“I’m happy for you,” I forced out. “Congratulations. You’ll make an excellent major.”
He sighed and sat on the edge of my bed. “I think I’m going to decline it. I want to stay here. Fight here. It would be irresponsible to leave.”
“Ash, you can’t be serious. Think of how much good you can do at the major level.”
He looked at me, and somehow I knew what he was going to say next. “Embry…”
“Don’t.” The word came out choked. “I mean it. Don’t.”
He did anyway. “It’s been almost three years. I’ve loved you for seven. If we retire from the Army after the war, there’s nothing stopping us from being together.”
I looked down at the old paperback in my hands, dog-eared and wavy-paged. Ash always teased me for reading in the shower, but I’d discovered it in a second-hand bookshop in Portland, and I maintained it had been this way when I found it. Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews stared out from the cover with their fresh faces and dapper clothes, Anthony Andrews holding tight to Sebastian’s trademark teddy bear.
Ash put his hand over the cover. “You’re not going to die drunk and alone, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I was thinking that even Evelyn Waugh knew the best things don’t last. Nothing gold can stay and all that.”
“Wrong book, little prince.”
I pulled the book out from under Ash’s hand and tossed it on the end table. I couldn’t talk about this with him. I couldn’t look him in the face and lie, not tonight. If he pressed me, I was going to cave and tell him everything, that I wanted him for the rest of my life, I wanted the white picket fence, I’d even move to the country for him. “I should get some sleep,” I said, flicking off the cheap bedside lamp.
Ash stood. “This conversation isn’t done,” he told me, and left.
I went to sleep almost hoping it wasn’t.
American Prince (American Queen #2) Page 21