American Queen

by Sierra Simone

  “Yes. But after that, we became much more than friends. Like brothers.”

  I turn just as Ash’s hands slide up my bare arms, warm and large and slightly rough.

  “I’m glad you got in that car,” he says, ducking his head to meet my eyes. “I was a little worried you’d change your mind.”

  “I was worried you’d change your mind,” I tell him. “This is still so surreal to me.”

  “That I want to spend time with you?”

  “That you remember me at all.”

  He gives me one of his smiles, the kind where his eyes crinkle up and his face opens into an expression of unimaginable warmth and joy. I’m reminded forcefully of Embry. Maybe the pair are only brothers in the emotional sense and not the biological, but they share the same weather-beaten, mischievous smile, and that smile is enough to get me to agree to anything.

  “Don’t move,” Ash says, and he disappears into his bedroom. He returns with a small wooden box. “Have a seat.” He gestures towards the end of the room.

  Thinking he means the sofa by the window, I move towards it, but he corrects me, and when he does, there’s a change in his voice. It gets sterner somehow, and the effect on my body is immediate. “Sit on the desk, facing the chair.”

  It’s a strange request, and there’s a moment when I want to ask why. But then I see the fire in his green eyes, the same fire I saw when I told him once upon a time that I liked the way he told me what to do with my body.

  It’s a test, I realize. And what’s more, it’s a test I want to pass, a test I want to do. Listening to Ash feels as natural as breathing, and after only a breath of hesitation, I walk over to the desk and slide myself onto it, careful to keep my skirt from riding too far up my thighs.

  I’m not sure what exactly I expect him to do, but when he comes and sits in the chair in front of me, it feels right. The way it’s supposed to be.

  “Thank you for listening to me,” he says. He keeps his gaze on my face.

  “I like listening,” I whisper.

  “Do you?” he asks, setting the box in his lap and leaning back. “How much?”

  “A lot,” I admit quietly. “It feels…natural…with you.”

  A small smile. “I’ll tell you a secret: I like it when you listen. That feels natural to me too.”

  I glance down at the box, wondering what could be inside. It’s about the right size for cigars, but Ash doesn’t strike me as much of a smoker. What else then? Something sexual? Condoms, maybe, or lube? Nipple clamps?

  Ash notices my wary look. “Nothing in there will bite, I promise.”

  So no nipple clamps then.

  “Do you remember at the church?” he asks, changing the subject. “When I told you that I ask a lot from the people I care for?”

  “I do.”

  “I meant that in more ways than one. I’m busy, for one thing, often traveling and always stressed, and I—” he stops himself, searching for the right words.

  I nudge his knee with my foot. “You won’t scare me away by being too direct. I promise.”

  “To answer before listening is folly,” Ash quotes, shaking his head, and then sighs. “It took a long time for us to be alone in a room together. Part of me thinks I should enjoy it before I ruin it.”

  “And the other part?”

  His eyes darken. “The other part of me thinks you should be more nervous.”

  I shiver. A good shiver, but a shiver nonetheless, and he doesn’t miss it, his eyes trailing from the pulse pounding in my throat to the goose bumps on my thighs. He looks at the wooden box a moment and then seems to make up his mind.

  “We are going to have a conversation now,” he says, “among other things. And we can stop at any time.”

  “I don’t want to stop.”

  “It’s hard to want to stop,” he says, running his fingers along the edge of the box. “It’s even harder to say the word when you know you should. Have you ever used a safe word?”

  For that one whole time I had sex? I laugh out loud. “No.”

  He doesn’t seem offended by my laughter. “Perhaps we should find one for you.”

  “I don’t think I need a safe word for a conversation. Even a conversation with unspecified other things. And especially not with you.”

  “You especially need one when you’re with me.” He says it calmly, evenly.

  And then suddenly I believe him.

  Despite that open, handsome face, despite the historic building I’m standing in and the elegant antique furniture all around us, I believe him. I can’t tell if it’s something in the cool way he says it or something in the flare of light in his eyes, or if it’s the remembered shards of that night, of the way he said good girl to me when I obeyed his order, or the way he licked the blood from my fingertip…

  “All those times you’ve asked me if I was scared of you, you were serious?”

  “It was with good reason.” He leans forward. “I’m not trying to tease you or frighten you unnecessarily. But I’m hard on the people I love. It took me a long time to learn that, and you are too important to me for me to treat that lightly. You have to know that you can stop anything about me—my words or my body—at any time. You have to know that you can leave me at any time.”

  I’ll never want to leave. The thought appears unbidden and I shove it aside. But it’s harder for me to shove aside the word love, as if I’m one of the people he loves, because to be loved by Ash…I’ve wanted that since I was sixteen.

  “If you don’t have a word in mind, you can use my name—my first name.”

  “Maxen?”

  He nods. “You say that when we’re alone together and everything stops. For a break—if you need one—or completely, if that’s what you need instead.”

  I think for a moment. The kind of pornography I watch and the kind of books I read—well, I’m definitely no stranger to this kind of thing. In fact, certain facets of this lifestyle have been the subject of my fantasies since I was old enough to have fantasies. But faced with the reality of a relationship like this, I find myself shy. Not out of fear necessarily—although there is a little fear and I’d be foolish not to be at least a little wary—but out of an acute awareness of how little I know. Of how meager my experience with any kind of romance or sexuality is. When I speak next, my voice is hesitant. “Does all this make you…the kind of person who dominates people?”

  Another nod. “Yes.”

  “Are you going to whip me or something?” I ask, suddenly nervous.

  “Not all Dominants are sadists, Greer. I won’t always want pain or humiliation, but I will always want control.”

  “But you will want pain and humiliation sometimes?”

  He leans back again, his face thoughtful. “I’m approaching this wrong. You’ll have to forgive me…it’s been six years since I last initiated a relationship with someone, and I’m out of practice. And in any case,” he says, rubbing his forehead with his thumb, “I didn’t know enough about myself then to warn Jenny.”

  It’s Jenny’s name that galvanizes me. It’s a sick urge, to want to show up a dead woman, to prove I’m as good as she was, but it’s an urge I can’t fight in time to control myself.

  “Show me,” I say. “Show me what you need to warn me about.”

  9

  The Present

  “Show me,” I repeat.

  His eyes lift to mine.

  “You said we were going to have a conversation among other things, right? Let’s do it. I know what to say to make you stop. I trust you.”

  “You barely know me,” he points out.

  “You’re a war hero and the President of the United States. If I can’t trust you, I can’t trust anybody.”

  He smiles again at that. “You make a specious case, given how many manipulative Presidents there have been, but I want to be convinced, so I’ll allow it.” He reaches down and slips a high heel off one of my feet, repeating the action on the other foot, rubbing gently at the red lin
e left above my toes. “Why you act afraid of pain when you already wear these is a mystery to me.”

  I giggle a little, and the look on his face at the sound of my laughter is electrifying. Belvedere, Embry, me…the President seems to love the laughter of others. The realization strikes me with a chord of melancholy. What loneliness and darkness does he carry in his heart that he needs such people around him?

  He places my left foot on the arm of the chair he’s sitting in, and as soon as I see that he’s going to do the same with my other foot, I instinctively pull it back, since that would entail me spreading my legs in this short skirt. He doesn’t react, other than to look up at my face, and I realize that he’s waiting to see if I’ll say his name. My new safe word. I bite my lip and force my body to relax.

  I place my foot back in his hands, and he sets it on the other arm of the chair. I’m grateful that our relative heights mean that he’s at eye-level with my chest and not my pelvis, but that gratitude disappears when he says, “Pull your skirt back for me.”

  My hands shake when I obey, partly from excitement and partly from nervousness. I wasn’t lying when I told him it felt natural to obey him, but I’ve also never exposed myself so brazenly, so intimately and deliberately. Despite the impassive look on Ash’s face, I can see that he’s fascinated, aroused by bossing me around like this, and that bolsters me.

  “I’ve never done this before,” I admit as I finish pulling my skirt up. Cool air wafts around my inner thighs and against my lace-covered pussy.

  “Which part?” Ash asks, keeping his eyes on my legs, on the sliver of lace between them.

  “Listening to someone. Showing myself off. I’ve only ever had sex once,” I confess.

  His head snaps up. “Only once?”

  I nod, swallowing. “When I was twenty.”

  He groans, resting his head against my knee. “You mean I’m going to be the second man who’s ever been inside you?”

  “You sound so certain that you’re going to take me to bed,” I tease, but my teasing comes out breathier than I mean for it to. It’s the way his dark head looks as it leans against my bare thigh, the way his legs are spread all strong and casual in the chair…yes, he should be certain that he’s going to take me to bed. I’ll take myself there if he doesn’t.

  “It’s my job to be certain of things, Greer.” I feel the movement of his lips against my thigh as he speaks, and it makes it impossible to sit still. “Tell me—why haven’t you been with more men? Or women?”

  “I’ve been asked out a lot,” I say. “Men, and yes, a couple of women. But I say no to them all.”

  “Did someone hurt you the first time you had sex? Or was it otherwise unpleasant somehow?”

  I think of Embry’s long, muscled body moving over mine, of his strong hands digging into my hips. “It was amazing. But it was the second time I had kissed someone and then had my heart broken, so I decided not to repeat that pattern.”

  “And that’s why you haven’t kissed anyone since then,” Ash says, a question in his face. “You’re worried if you kiss a new person, that new person will also break your heart?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I won’t break your heart,” Ash promises.

  “Again.”

  Another groan. He seems to like being reminded that he had that power over me. He lifts his head. “Pull your panties aside. I want to see your pussy.”

  “Okay,” I whisper, and I do as he says. It’s almost frightening how easy it is to listen to him, how easy it is to do something as unlike myself as spread my legs on a desk for a man I barely know, but dammit, it feels right. It feels good. It feels like another Greer—a Greer I put to sleep and buried in the backyard of my mind—is slowly waking up. The Greer who wrote those emails to Ash, the Greer who bit Embry’s shoulder and trailed scratches down his back as he moved between her bloody thighs. She is loving waking up to this, she wants to preen like a cat as Ash draws in a long breath once he sees the already-wet flesh of her pussy.

  His hands slide up the outside of my calves, the rough skin tickling my knees and then my inner thighs as he braces his hands there and pushes me wider apart. I feel myself opening, feel his eyes on the part of me only one other man has seen. One other man who happens to be his best friend. And the Vice President of the United States.

  “Beautiful,” Ash says, a hint of awe in his voice. “Just…beautiful.”

  I’m chewing hard on my lip, my thighs quivering, because as excited as the old Greer is about this, I can’t help the new Greer’s litany of worries—if I look too wet or not wet enough, if he can smell me, what I’ll taste like if he wants to taste me.

  “Look up at the ceiling and breathe in and out in counts of four,” Ash tells me. “It will help calm you down.”

  I’m surprised he can read my body so easily, but then maybe I shouldn’t be. He can perceive the meanings behind the faces of dignitaries and the words of politicians—why not a woman’s body? I tilt my head back and breathe like he told me to, in and out.

  One two three four…

  one two three four…

  one two three four.

  “Some Dominants don’t like to sit with their head below the head of their partner,” Ash says conversationally below me, his fingertips beginning to trace circles and loops on the inside of my thighs. “Because it’s demeaning. But look at us right now. Who is the demeaned one?”

  I look down from the ceiling and right into the mirror hanging behind the desk. I see a young woman with flushed cheeks and wide eyes, the tops of her naked thighs visible within the frame. And Ash’s silhouette in the chair, those powerful shoulders and that strong neck. And then I look down at him, with his sleeves rolled up and his tie still perfectly straight and clipped to his shirt with a slim silver bar.

  “Me,” I say, swallowing. “I’m the demeaned one.”

  “And how does that make you feel?” His tone is still casual, still distantly curious, as if he’s asking me about a book I’m reading.

  “A little excited. A little ashamed.”

  “Why ashamed?”

  I close my eyes. “I like this more than I should.”

  “There are no shoulds when you’re with me,” Ash says. “The only things you worry about are the things I tell you to worry about. Understood?”

  “Yes.”

  Fingers skate up to the place where my legs join my hips, and I bite my lip again. “Now,” Ash says, leaning down to press his lips to the inside of my thigh, “would be a good time to call me Sir.”

  “Yes, Sir,” I breathe.

  “And since I’m in charge of you while we are alone together, I also want you to know that you’re not allowed to worry about pleasing me. It might seem like there’s a lot to learn, a lot to know, but there’s not. I’ll tell you everything you need to know, and you will only have two responsibilities—surrendering to me and saying my name aloud when it would hurt you physically or emotionally to continue. Understood?”

  “Yes, Sir,” I say again, and who am I right now? Agreeing to something so extreme with a man I’ve only been in the same room with a handful of times? But I don’t care. I want this, I want this, I want this. I don’t care how insane or how demeaning it might seem. Right now, it only feels quiveringly, perfectly right.

  “Good,” he says, a smile in his voice. “You have no idea how much it pleases me to have you here. I’ve fantasized about this moment for so long.”

  “You have?”

  He sits up and reaches for the box balancing on his thigh. “Here. Open this.”

  Curious, I wrap my fingers around the proffered box and pull it closer. Ash leans back as I examine it, smoothing his tie and looking faintly amused. “There’s nothing dangerous in there,” he tells me.

  Still, I take my time opening it, wondering what could be so important that he had it in his bedroom, at the ready. I have no idea what to expect—bullets or military badges or mementos of his dead wife even—but it’s none of t
hose things. I swing the lid all the way open and pull out a stack of papers folded into quarters, papers that are dirty and soft from repeated handling.

  I glance at Ash with a confused look, and he inclines his head toward the papers in a silent invitation. He wants me to read them.

  With hesitant fingers, I unfold the paper. It’s computer-printer-sized, looks like it had once been bright white with fresh black printer ink. But the black of the words have faded and dulled, and the paper is smudged with what looks like oil and dirt and blood.

  Dear Ash,

  It’s my seventeenth birthday today. It’s been exactly one year since we met…

  My eyes snap to his. “My emails,” I say, a little numbly. “I thought you never got them.”

  “I got them,” he replies. “I got them and I read them a thousand times and then I printed them out so I could read them wherever I went.”

  “But you never wrote back, never even once. Not even to tell me to stop writing to you.”

  “You were seventeen, Greer. Was I supposed to write back and tell you that yes, I did fuck my fist every night thinking of you? That every time I read your emails I had to jack off, that even the mere sight of your name on my computer screen got me hard? I hated myself enough for having those feelings for a girl that age. I couldn’t make it worse by reaching out to you.” He gives me a rueful smile. “But I also couldn’t bring myself to tell you to stop. To block your emails. God, I wanted you so much and it was the only way I could have even this little piece of you. So I kept reading. Kept coming to fantasies of you fingering yourself at your desk as you wrote to me.”

  “Ash,” I say, stunned.

  “I have them memorized, you know. Word for word. I don’t want boring, common ways of being bad,” he recites, his hands once again warm and rough on my inner thighs. “I want to be the kind of bad that leaves me wrung out with bite marks blooming purple on my body. I want someone to hold me by the neck and make me stare at an entire reckless realm of possibility. I want to crawl to them.”

  My cheeks are flushed as he says my own words back to me. I’m so embarrassed and yet…that he memorized my words, touched himself thinking of them, that he carried my words with him wherever he traveled…