American Queen

by Sierra Simone

  A few heavy minutes pass as snow blows against the window next to us.

  “Okay,” I say in a whisper after I can’t stand the quiet any longer.

  “Okay what?”

  “I think I understand now. You and him. Us.”

  His hand leaves my hair and traces a warm trail from behind my ear to my shoulder. “I deserve the worst, Greer, but I don’t want it. I don’t want you to leave me.”

  I startle. “Who said anything about leaving?”

  He frowns. “You were so angry—and with good reason—I just thought—”

  “That I’d leave you? Like Embry did?”

  “Yes,” he confesses.

  I squeeze his hand. “I’m angry. I need to be able to be angry sometimes. I need to be able to demand answers. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to stay.” A deep breath with the next admission. “Especially because I love Embry too. He and I haven’t…please believe me, Ash, we haven’t touched since that night in Chicago.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” Ash says in a voice I feel down into the pit of my stomach. “That’s something neither of you could hide from me, not face to face.”

  “So what happens now?” I ask. “Where do we go from here?”

  “I don’t know,” he admits.

  “Where do you want to go from here?”

  He looks up at me, and then all of a sudden he’s standing with me in his arms and we’re walking toward the bed. He lays me gently on my back and crawls over me, brushing the hair out of my face as his hips settle into the cradle of mine. I try to stifle my moan at the feeling, but it doesn’t work.

  “What else were you feeling that night?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “On Christmas Eve. You said your heart was breaking, but what else did you feel when you watched Embry and me? Did you feel…” his fingers dance down from my face to my breast, where my nipple hardens instantly through the soft chiffon “…curious? Did you wonder what it might feel like to be in between us? Did you wonder what it would look like to see Embry’s mouth wrapped around my dick?”

  I don’t know how to answer, I don’t know which answer is best for our future or what he wants to hear, so I tell him the truth. “Yes. Yes, I was curious. I was—” Ash’s fingers are moving down to my hip now, burning warm trails through the fabric, and it’s hard to concentrate “—I was turned on.”

  “Did it make you wet?”

  “Yes,” I whimper.

  “Are you wet right now?”

  But he doesn’t wait for me to answer. He finds out for himself, and I can tell by his pleased grunt that he likes what he’s found. I spread my legs wider for him, and within a few heartbeats, he’s got his flushed erection in his fist, stroking it and kneeling up over me.

  “On your stomach,” he orders. I flip over, shivering when I feel my dress dragged up over my ass, and shivering even more when I feel the fat tip of his cock against my folds. He pushes in, just the right amount of rough, and I practically purr with the sensation of his thick shaft spearing me.

  He brings his body down over mine, his lips near my ear and his arm under my breasts so he can grab and squeeze all he likes. Only his hips move, deep and powerful, all muscle and deliberate, unhurried strokes.

  “I don’t know what the future looks like,” he says, his breathing still calm and even, as if he were sitting on a couch and not shoving eight inches of hungry flesh inside me. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do next. The three of us are never going to stop loving each other and we’re never going to stop being jealous. But at least we all know now.”

  He shifts the angle of his hips and I gasp, and then the hand that was plumping my breast slides down to my clit and starts rubbing. I bury my face in the covers and moan.

  “Would you like it if Embry were here right now?” Ash asks. I can hear the smallest ragged edge in his voice, as if he’s aroused by his own words. “Underneath you while I’m on top? The two of us pressing against you, demanding satisfaction and attention? And when we’ve taken everything we can from you, would you like to watch us fuck each other? You should see how fast Embry comes when he’s being fucked, Greer, it’s really quite something.”

  I’m moaning almost non-stop now, squirming into the blanket, the image of the three of us fucking too much for me to bear. The image of Ash buried in Embry’s ass lighting me on fire. I come suddenly and hard, clenching around Ash’s cock as my hands claw at the blankets.

  “Oh, so you do like that,” comes Ash’s voice in my ear. I can tell by the erratic thrusts of his hips that he’s getting close himself. “I like it too. The thought of you two together makes me so fucking hot—” He breaks off and pulls out, and the bed shakes as he strokes himself to a hard, furious finish.

  He lets out a rough groan, and wet heat shoots onto my ass and the small of my back, and I realize I’m smiling into the blankets. I don’t know if it’s the catharsis of Ash and I coming clean with each other or the mild display of dominance or just the good old-fashioned sex hormones, but all the feelings from earlier tonight are washed clean and hung out to dry. Still there, not vanished, but no longer so dirty and unsettling, no longer secret.

  Something cool and silken dabs at the semen on my skin, and I turn my head to look up at Ash. “What are you using to do that?” I ask scoldingly. “It better not be your bow-tie.”

  Ash gives me a sweetly sheepish look and tosses the stained bow-tie onto the ground. “Oops.”

  “Oops?”

  “Shh.” He crawls up next to me, sliding a hand under my stomach and turning me so that I’m facing into his chest and his strong arms are wrapped around me. “Stay here with me a moment.”

  “My shoes are still on,” I protest. “And we’re sideways on the bed.”

  “Don’t be so conformist. And about the shoes…” I hear a clunk followed by a second clunk as he toes off his dress shoes, and then he tugs off my high heels with his feet. “Better?”

  I flex my toes. “Much better.”

  “Good.” He pulls me tight, kissing my hair, and for a few moments we just hold each other and listen to the wind blowing off Lac Léman.

  I press my lips to the exposed slice of skin near his collarbone. “What are we going to do?” I ask again, my whisper barely audible over the wind.

  Ash’s hands rub my back, and when he speaks, he speaks slowly, like he’s still figuring it out for himself. “I don’t think we can decide that without Embry. Whatever happens next, it should be a decision between the three of us, something that the three of us can agree on and live with. If you’re still going to have me as a husband and I’m still going to have him as my Vice President, then we’re stuck together. We have to all be in agreement or we’re going to be miserable for a very long time. And I think until that conversation happens, we should make sure there’s nothing physical or even verbally sexual transacting between anyone other than the two of us. Embry is off limits until we sort this out.”

  I nod against him. He’s right. He’s almost always right.

  “Also—until we can find a time for all three of us to talk, I want the two of us to be honest with each other. I made the mistake of hiding and lying before, and I don’t want to do that again.”

  “Honest like…?”

  “Like when we’re thinking of him, we tell each other. No more hiding our feelings for him, even if it feels wrong to admit them out loud. Because really, who would understand better than me how you feel?”

  I sigh-laugh. “I guess that is true.”

  “I know it is.”

  “Okay,” I agree. “I trust you, and I think you’re right. You and I will be honest and we’ll only be sexual with each other until we talk with Embry.” I chew on my lip. “Does that mean…after we talk, you want to be sexual with him?”

  “Honestly? I want the three of us together. But I also want you all to myself. And I want him all to myself. My feelings are very intense and wildly inconsi
stent about this. All I know is that it’s not only up to me. And not only up to you or Embry. It has to be together or not at all.”

  Tiredness hits my body all at once. There’s been so much to unpack tonight, so much that I’ll still be processing it for weeks to come, and there is so much work ahead. But if that work means the three of us could—

  No. I refuse to entertain fantasies about it or about Embry until things are settled. I’m engaged to Ash, and even if we have a non-traditional dynamic beginning to flourish, I’m still determined to remain emotionally dedicated to him until we openly decide otherwise.

  I yawn and Ash starts stroking my back again. “There’s one more thing,” he says, and he sounds as tired as I feel.

  “What is it?” I ask over another yawn.

  “I want you to be careful around Abilene.”

  I definitely wasn’t expecting that. “Abilene?”

  I can feel Ash hesitate next to me, his body going still as he searches for the right words. “She accosted me tonight at the dinner, after I’d spoken to Merlin. She…well, this is uncomfortable and awkward to say, but I think she has feelings for me. She tried to kiss me and she told me—it’s not important what she told me, actually, but it gave me the impression that she’s not going to look out for your best interests.”

  Oh, Abilene. No wonder she seemed so nervous when I went to pick up my suitcase.

  “What did she say?”

  “Greer—”

  “Please, Ash. She’s my cousin and my best friend and if she’s harassing you or disparaging me, I need to know.”

  He relents with a sigh. “She said she’d make a better wife to me than you would. That she could make me happier. And I told her that simply wasn’t possible. You are the perfect woman, objectively speaking, and also the perfect woman for me, and I told Abilene that. She was understandably upset, and I’m guessing humiliated. She left me without another word.”

  “Oh my God.” I roll away from Ash to stare up at the ceiling. “I’m so mortified. And I’m so sorry.”

  “You had nothing to do with it.” Ash is still on his side, and he twirls a tendril of my hair around his finger. “And I am endeavoring to forget about it. But I thought you should know that she seems to harbor some deep resentment of you. I tried to make it unequivocally clear that I loved you and nothing would change that, but I don’t know if it will be enough.”

  “I don’t know either,” I say, thinking of the way Abi has nursed her obsession with Ash through the years. “She can be quite determined when she wants to be.”

  Ash’s lips are on my hair now, and then on my face, and then on my lips. “She’s not more determined than I am. Rest assured, she holds no allure for me.”

  That does rest my mind a little, although I’m still uneasy about this latest development. It almost seems unhinged, unstable, especially for a woman who’s spent years trying to perfect the most charming, put-together personality imaginable.

  But then Ash’s hands are back under my dress, his stiffening cock warm against my hip, and everything else slowly bleeds away.

  26

  It turns out that finding a time for the three of us to talk is harder than it sounds. The rest of our stay in Geneva is busy, with Ash and Embry gone from six in the morning to one o’clock the next morning, and all the hours between are filled with helping Kay put out fires back home.

  Abilene avoids me so expertly that I don’t see her until we fly home, and when we board the plane, she apologizes for her absence, blaming it on the Carpathian man she spent her days with. I watch her eyes as she tells me about him, as she asks me how much I’ve seen or talked to Ash since the dinner, and I realize she doesn’t know I know.

  It’s dishonest, but I feed that belief, telling her everything she wants to hear. I act innocent, I act like I have no idea she’s still in love with Ash or that she tried to kiss him at the dinner, and it makes me a little sad to see how easily she swallows what I say. I think about the way she acted when I first told her about Ash and me, about the way she lied about something as trivial as how I looked in a dress.

  Maybe Ash is right to say I shouldn’t trust her.

  But once we get back home and settle into the fast-paced rhythm of work and life, I settle back into loving her. She’s just Abilene—passionate and fierce and impulsive. And I’m the last woman to judge another for making mistakes because of a man like Ash. I forgive her, go on loving her and having weekly lunch and sometimes grabbing cocktails after work on Thursdays, although I try not to bring Ash up around her any more than I have to, which seems to work for her just fine. She even acts happy when I ask her to be my maid of honor, though I can see the brittle displeasure in her face when she thinks I’m not looking.

  But what can I do?

  The wedding consumes every waking minute. There’s the planning, of course, but then there’s the endless rounds of interviews and photo shoots that Merlin and Trieste—the Press Secretary—keep signing me up for. Overnight, I’m transformed into America’s Sweetheart, the daughter of a former Vice President marrying the youngest President in history. My face is everywhere in print and online, to the point where I’m recognized on the street and where students I don’t know stop me on campus for Snapchat selfies. It’s flattering the first few times, but slowly it becomes a nuisance and then a real burden. All the work I did, all the choices I made to build a life of quiet solitude, it’s all undone in a matter of a few weeks. Even Grandpa Leo calls me to warn me about the dangers of constant press attention.

  Both Embry and Ash are incredibly busy too, and it’s only once or twice a week that I get to sneak into Ash’s bed, and it’s only on Sundays that all three of us are together for church and sometimes football. But I’m usually grading papers or working on the book, and Belvedere and Kay and Trieste and Merlin are constantly in and out, and the moment just never comes, that moment where the three of us are alone and have unlimited time to just talk.

  At first it’s agony, every missed day that turns into a missed week that turns into a missed month. Ash and I keep our word to each other and we both act carefully around Embry. He acts carefully around us in return, especially after Ash tells him that we need to wait to do anything until the three of us can talk. Ash tells me that Embry agrees to that, and I smile at the irony that we have all talked about talking but still haven’t talked.

  I wonder if Embry knows how often we bring him up when we’re alone, sometimes as we’re having sex, but other times as we’re falling asleep or even as we’re simply working in silence together. Ash will set down his pen and rub his forehead and say my name in the kind of pained, quiet voice I know means that right now he’s missing Embry. And I’ll crawl onto his lap and whisper me too me too me too, and kiss him until we both feel better again.

  And so the days pass, interminable and yet blinding in how quickly they fly by, until I find myself holding Ash’s hand as Air Force One touches down in Kansas City the day before our wedding, a warm day in May. Ash’s mother greets us with a big hug on the tarmac, and then we begin the painstakingly photographed dance of the rehearsal and the rehearsal dinner. All the while being achingly aware of Embry watching us, of Embry there like the unseen shadow of our future marriage.

  He said it was hell watching Ash and me. Was watching us walk through the ceremony worse than hell? Is there anything worse than hell?

  Yes, I decide as we make our toasts and speeches at the rehearsal dinner. Loving two men but only marrying one—that's worse than hell. Watching Embry quietly die is worse than hell. Watching Ash watch Embry, and wondering if he wishes he was walking down the aisle with him instead of me—that is much, much worse than hell.

  Ash and I part that night with a chaste kiss. And I go to bed in my own room, staring up at the ceiling and wondering what new hell tomorrow will bring.

  27

  The Wedding Day

  Abilene went to find the veil and some lunch, and so for the moment, I’m alone. I stand in my hot
el suite, which also serves as my bridal dressing room, so silent and calm after all the rustling of tissue paper and the chatter of women and the noisy comings and goings of every single female relative Ash or I have. I turn to the mirror for the thousandth time, and for the thousandth time, a cold dagger slices through my heart, slicing it right in two.

  One side, still red and healthy, pulses with joy. The other side, black and frozen, feels nothing but icy despair.

  It’s really happening.

  It’s really happening.

  The one thing I want most in the world—to marry Ash—and the one thing I want least in the world—to be separated from Embry.

  I can’t cry—I spent too many long hours in the makeup chair for that—so instead I smooth my hands along the expensive fabric of the dress and turn away, the huge skirt of my wedding dress turning with me.

  Don’t look in the mirror, I tell myself. You’ll only want to cry again.

  Most women wouldn’t cry to see themselves as I look right now. Custom gown embroidered with Swarovski crystals and silver thread. My white-gold hair coiled into a sleek ballet knot at the nape of my neck. Diamonds glittering at my ears and throat. There is a princess in that mirror…and I can’t bear to look at her.

  I walk over to the window and press my hands to the glass. The hotel room looks out on an unfamiliar skyline, a healthy and contained cluster of skyscrapers, old brick warehouses and architectural oddities. Kansas City’s skyline. Ash’s skyline.

  Ash.

  Has any woman loved a man like I love my Ash? If he ceased to love me or I ceased to love him, my entire world would shrink to a singularity and then explode. I need him like I need air, like I need the sun or like I need God.