American Queen

by Sierra Simone

  But I could not ignore Ash’s voice. I was almost to the elevator, almost to freedom, when I heard him call my name. “Greer?”

  I didn’t want to look back and yet it was the only thing in the world I wanted. My head swiveled of its own accord, and I glanced at him over my shoulder. He was looking back towards Merlin in the far corner, and as he turned back to face me, confusion and a dawning realization were written all over his face. He took a step toward me, his eyes begging me to stop, but I couldn’t. Not even for him would I draw out this public gutting.

  I turned around and stabbed at the elevator button several times in quick succession. Luckily, it opened for me right away, and I stepped inside. I refused to look up, kept my eyes only on the door-close button, and jammed it in so hard that the knuckle on my thumb turned white. Out of my periphery, I could see him say something to Jenny and then walk toward me, and panic flared in my chest.

  By the grace of God, the elevator doors slid shut then, leaving me all by myself. With a gentle lurch, the elevator started going down, and I slumped against the mirrored wall and finally allowed myself to cry.

  When the elevator doors opened to the hotel lobby, I was still crying. In fact, my tears had escalated into very loud, very embarrassing sobs, the kind that leave you sucking for air, the kind that contort your face into something ugly and wrung out. And my phone was buzzing insistently in my coat pocket, and I was fumbling for it as I exited the elevator, trying to hold in my sobs and failing, trying not to make eye contact with any of the hotel guests in the lobby, and then I pulled out my phone and saw texts from Abilene on the screen, coming in almost too fast to read.

  Abilene: r u okay?

  Abilene: did you just leave the party

  Abilene: like, it looked like you were running for the door

  Abilene: maxen *is* here but fuck he’s with some girl

  Abilene: some lawyer

  Abilene: r u coming back up? come back up so we can figure out what do about this lawyer girl with max

  Goddammit, Abilene. I tried to wipe at my eyes so I could see the phone’s screen to type an answer, but there were too many tears, and then I was jostling against a stream of people walking into the lobby, and for the third time tonight, I walked right into another person.

  “Fuck,” I swore, already swerving to push past him and reach the door.

  “My favorite word,” said a smoothly pleasant voice, and that voice was hypnotic in its charm. Almost against my will, I looked up into the face of one of the handsomest men I’d ever seen. Maybe the handsomest on purely looks alone, since so much of Ash’s attractiveness came from who he was as a person. But this man, with his ice-blue eyes and cheekbones even God would be jealous of, he’d be stunning no matter what kind of person he was.

  I was halfway to smiling at him through my tears when I realized I’d seen those blue eyes and those cheekbones before, and my smile froze in place.

  He was Embry Moore, and he was Ash’s best friend. And that association was enough to jump-start my body again, if not my mind, because the last thing I could handle was a protracted interaction with someone close to Ash.

  “Pardon,” I mumbled, the tears coming out thick and hot and garbling the word. I moved around him and reached the wide revolving door that led to the sidewalk outside, and then I was free to the warm evening air and the impatient honks of taxis and the sound of sirens somewhere in the distance.

  I took a deep breath, trying to stave off the tears for long enough that I could come up with a cogent plan. There was Abilene to think about, of course, and also questions from my grandfather I wanted to avoid, which he would certainly ask if he came home from his meeting and found me home early, crying into a pillow.

  I could fake sleep, though. And there was no way I could stay here.

  I would just have to tell Abilene I was going home, and then I would hide until I could find a way to lie about what happened tonight, or at least hide it. But when I reached for my phone, I couldn’t find it anywhere—not in either of my pockets or the inner pocket of my jacket—and that’s when I heard the footsteps.

  I turned around to see Embry Moore walking to me, my phone held in his outstretched hand. Like Ash, he wore a fitted button-down shirt, but unlike Ash, he’d layered a gray vest and gray blazer on top—both the shirt and jacket sleeves rolled up to the elbow. With the cuffed sky-blue pants and loafers, he looked like a playboy let loose from his yacht, and even in my current emotional state, I couldn’t help but appreciate his graceful and lanky male form as he strode confidently toward me.

  “You dropped this,” he said in that sophisticated purr, a purr that belied money and education and privilege.

  “Thanks,” I muttered, taking the phone with one hand as I tried to wipe my face with the other.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, ducking his head a little so he could look into my downturned face.

  “I’m fine,” I snapped, turning and starting to walk again. It was unbelievably rude to leave him like that, I knew, but I couldn’t help it. It was just a testament to how fucked up tonight had become.

  After a few steps, my tears finally started to slow. I had a plan—I had my phone back—and if I could just make it back to Grandpa’s hotel, I could cry until my pain dried up and my body went limp. I just had to make it there was all, and that started with getting a cab.

  I swung towards the road, and to my utter shock, Embry Moore was right behind me, his hands jammed into the pockets of his ridiculously blue pants. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked, concerned. “I feel constitutionally unable to leave you alone like this.”

  “I’m fine,” I said through gritted teeth. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  “But what is anyone’s business, really?” Embry mused philosophically. “That’s the first question man ever asked God, you know. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper’?”

  I snorted, the derision somewhat undercut by the tears and snot that accompanied it. “It was a rhetorical question asked by a murderer to stall a missing persons investigation. I wouldn’t start with Cain as your entry point into the fundamentals of humanity.”

  “John Steinbeck did. Are you saying Of Mice and Men is a bad book?”

  “I’m saying that the parallels to be drawn from the world’s first murder to migrant farm brotherhood to us standing on a Chicago curb right now are nonexistent.” But despite myself, I found my lips tugging up into a smile.

  “Well, now you’re just being deliberately uncreative,” he pouted. It was an unfairly sexy look on him.

  “Also, Steinbeck once ended a book with an adult breastfeeding scene,” I pointed out, needing to say something before I started staring at his perfect, full mouth.

  “To illustrate the human condition!” he exclaimed with mock frustration. “Who hasn’t breastfed a little bit to understand the dehumanizing depths of poverty and displacement?”

  “Me. I haven’t done that.”

  “Well, me either, but maybe if I buy you a couple drinks tonight we could change that for each other.” He waggled his eyebrows, and the whole thing was so ridiculous that I giggled.

  “I’m not letting you breastfeed from me,” I said, wondering how this conversation got so strange and funny, and also wondering when I’d stopped crying, because I realized I had.

  “Get your mind out of the gutter,” he said with a pitying shake of his head. “I obviously meant that you would breastfeed from me.”

  I giggled again. “I didn’t peg you for the kinky type.”

  “You aren’t pegging me at all. That’s our current problem.”

  And it was a joke, and he said it with that crooked dimpled grin, but suddenly my mind was filled with the image of Embry underneath me, moaning and panting, and heat filled my cheeks.

  He was still talking. “Can I tell you about my actual kink?”

  I nodded a little uncertainly, realizing that I’d stepped away from the curb and was facing him completely now.

&nb
sp; “Well, the kink that really gets me off is taking gorgeous strangers to get hot dogs on Navy Pier. Sometimes if I’m really kinky, we ride the Ferris wheel too.”

  Was he saying that he wanted to do those things with me? “I imagine the porn for that particular kink is woefully lacking.”

  “It is. I only get my fix in real life.” He stepped closer to me and offered his arm, and even through the shirt and blazer, I could see the firm swells of muscle. “What do you say? You, me, hot dogs and more Steinbeck-bashing?”

  Yes.

  It was incredible that as much as I wanted to hide away, as much as I wanted to cry and wail and gnash my teeth, as much as Ash filled every breath and thought with his face, I wanted to say yes. Embry was so funny and smart and effortlessly charming, and I felt better just for these last five minutes with him. Not to mention how flattering it was after everything that someone as famous and interesting as Embry wanted to spend time with me.

  Also, he was so fucking hot.

  But— “Don’t you have a birthday party to be at?”

  His eyebrows pulled together, puzzlement sliding into understanding. “Ah. I’m guessing if you know who I am and what party I should be at, you came from there yourself?”

  I looked back toward the street, not wanting to talk about it. “Yes.”

  “Ah.” And then he thankfully, thankfully left it at that. “So what do you say? I mean, if you can play hooky from the party, so can I.”

  “I don’t know…” I kept my eyes on the road because I knew if I looked at him, it would be all over. “I had planned on going back to my hotel. Calling it an early night.”

  “What a waste that would be,” he said softly, taking a step toward me.

  I allowed myself to glance at his feet, the cuffed pants showing the barest glimpse of dark brown hair just above his ankles. I wondered what that dark hair looked like on his calves and thighs, if it looked dusted on or if it grew thick and manly. If it matched the hair stretching from his navel to his cock. I wondered what it would feel like under my fingertips or rubbing against my own legs.

  “You don’t even know my name,” I stalled.

  “I know that you’re beautiful. I know that you know your twentieth-century American lit. I know that you’ve been crying and I would do anything to see you smile instead. I’d say that’s enough for a hot dog and a Ferris wheel ride, wouldn’t you?”

  My resistance, already crumbling, caved completely, a pile of hesitation and good intentions now resting at my feet. I looked up into those glacially blue eyes and knew that something was about to change. Maybe it had already started to change.

  “My name is Greer,” I said.

  “Sweet Greer.” My name sounded so heavenly on his lips. I wished he would say it over and over again. “Let me take you out for bad food and neon lights. I don’t know what happened to make you leave Merlin’s party in tears, but I don’t want it to have the final say in tonight. I think we should have the final say, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, and I slid my hand onto Embry’s arm.

  He grinned down at me, and the world was never the same.

  13

  Five Years Ago

  Two hours later, Embry and I were swinging high above the ground in an enclosed car, alone, our mouths sweet from cotton candy and our bodies warm from wanting each other. I could smell him now, something with citrus and heat, like pepper, a smell that made my toes curl in my shoes, a smell that made me restless with the urge to kiss him.

  On one side of us there was the relentless glow of the city, and on the other the relentless black of Lake Michigan, and Embry and I were two twilight figures in the middle, half in shadow and half in the heady light of the city and carnival rides below us. We sat on the same side of the car, our bodies near but not near enough, and just a minute before, Embry had taken my hand in his. There had been some accidentally-on-purpose brushes of fingers and shoulders throughout the night, a moment where he’d smilingly wiped a pink smear of candy from the corner of my mouth, but there was something so deliberate and intentional about the way he reached for my hand and placed it firmly against his own. Then our fingers interlaced, and my heart flipped over.

  The only other man I’d held hands with had been Ash, and that had been four years ago. I’d forgotten what it felt like, palms sliding against palms, large male fingers stretching and squeezing against my slender ones. I’d avoided romance and sex in any form since Ash, for reasons I didn’t entirely understand myself, and now because of a moment of weakness, I found myself alone with a man who seemed to be romance and sex personified. Even his flaws were attractive: the occasional scowl and frown as we talked about our pasts—me staying studiously away from the topic of Ash or my grandfather and him even more studiously avoiding talk of battles and Carpathia; the somewhat presumptuous way he flirted so filthily and with such confidence; the fleeting giddy grin when we talked about the future and the places we wanted to go and see.

  He felt like a real person, a person who exuded confidence but had moments of insecurity, a person who laughed because he knew no other way to drive out the darkness, a person who craved connection but couldn’t let go of something inside of himself in order to reach for it.

  In other words, with all of my gifts of perception and analysis, I couldn’t escape the feeling that he felt a lot like me.

  And the entire night, through all our wandering talks about Cambridge and literature and the beautiful corner of the Olympic Peninsula where he’d grown up, he hadn’t once asked me about the party. Hadn’t asked why he’d found me crying and gin-soaked and trying to hail a cab. And for that I was eternally thankful. So thankful that I found it possible to confess the events of the party to him, even if only in vague terms.

  I looked down to where our hands were linked, up to his face, which was watching mine with an expression of interested but reserved hunger, the way a cat looks when you toss a toy their way but before they pounce to get it.

  I took a breath. “There was someone at the party tonight.”

  He nodded, as he’d been waiting for me to speak these words all night. “A man someone?”

  “A someone I had feelings for. And yes, it happened to be a man.”

  I could tell from the amused quirk of his lips that he was fighting back the urge to banter about heteronormativity with me, and I appreciated it. I liked bantering with Embry, but I wanted to get this off my chest more.

  “It’s been years since he and I…well, we weren’t together in any real sense. But I still had feelings. We met unexpectedly this afternoon, and there was a moment where I thought maybe he felt the same way. But then I saw him at the party tonight with someone else, and it hurt. It hurt and I was so furious with myself for feeling hurt, because I had no right. No normal person would have feelings for four years with no encouragement, no interaction to bolster them, and then feel wounded at the actual proof that there was no hope of a relationship.”

  I leaned my head back against headrest of the seat and concluded, “I’m disgusted with myself.”

  Embry’s hand left mine, and for a painful second I wondered if I’d disgusted him too, if something about my story conveyed neediness or clinginess or delusion, but then he was on the floor of the car kneeling in between my legs and taking both my hands in his. The car had a glass floor, and beneath Embry’s blue-clad knees, I could see the dizzying spin of the carousel far below, the tiny toy-people moving and shopping and eating like miniature dolls in a miniature dollhouse.

  Embry moved my hands to his face, and I needed no encouragement to slide my hands over the carved lines of his jaw and cheekbones, to run my fingers over the strong ridge of his straight nose and up the swell of his proud forehead. My hands roamed through his sandy-brown hair, thick and soft, almost curly, and then down to his neck, where I stroked the warm skin along his collar.

  “Sweet Greer,” he murmured, closing his eyes and leaning his head against my knee. “I’m disgusted with myself
too.”

  My hands paused as I absorbed his words.

  “I know exactly how you feel. There’s a someone for me—they’ve been a someone for me for years—but they aren’t my someone. No matter how much I plead, no matter how much—” his breath catches “—how much I give of myself. I’m wrecked with it, so much that I think it’s never possible I’ll find another someone and I’m doomed to be miserable forever.”

  My fingers resumed their stroking, my heart breaking for him and for me and for both of us, and then he caught my wrists and gave the inside of each one a gentle kiss. On the second one, I felt the faintest flicker of his tongue, right over the blueish veins, and something deep inside my body clenched. I was the girl who’d written those emails once again, the girl who wanted bad, who wanted wrong, and wanted it in the most soul-thrumming, reckless ways possible.

  “I don’t want to be miserable tonight,” I whispered, and Embry lifted his head, his blue eyes unreadable in the shadows. “I don’t want to feel doomed or disgusted. I don’t want to think about him.”

  “I can do that for you,” he said, his voice low. “If you ask me.”

  Everything smelled like him in that moment. Pepper and lemon and promise.

  The brave Greer spoke for me. “Then do it.”

  Ash would have hesitated, not out of disinterest, but out of caution, out of a need to establish consent and boundaries, because Ash was—is—a self-aware monster. Acutely aware of the marks he would leave on his lovers’ souls and bodies, of exactly how dangerous he was.

  Embry didn’t hesitate. He didn’t ask for clarification, for hard limits, for a safe word. He didn’t ask what I needed in bed or what I wanted, how many people I’d been with, whether I wanted him with a condom or bare. He left all of those questions unanswered, unasked, and with a searing kiss, showed me the thrilling joy of abandoning safety and leaping feet-first into passion. I kissed him back, not forgetting Merlin’s chains, but intentionally throwing them off, intentionally abandoning them.