“My turn to what?”
“Tell me what you would do to me if you could. Tell me what would have happened last night if you hadn’t stopped it.”
“God,” Embry breathes. I can hear the sound of skin on skin, that pale aristocratic hand wrapped around his beautiful dick. “You would have…you were going to…”
I grunt as I close my hand around my own dick, giving it a few rough tugs. “Yes.”
“I would have bent you over your desk too, only…” He trails off, as if catching his breath. “I wouldn’t beat you. I’d spread your cheeks apart and kiss you where I wanted you. I would use my tongue where I want to use my cock. I’d tease you with my tongue, pull each testicle into my mouth, I’d cover each cheek with sucks and kisses. And then I’d turn you over onto your back and do the same to your belly and your thighs. You’d have your hand in my hair—because even though it’s supposed to be for me, you would still remind me that you’re in control. That you’re the one giving it to me.”
His words hook into the deepest pit in my belly, the pit that defines me. The idea of him worshipping the most hidden crevices of my body, cleaning them with his tongue, of making him do all that with my hand on his head as I deign to give him something I’ve cruelly denied him for years…
Fuck. I stop stroking for a moment, just so I don’t go off like a teenage boy.
“Then what would you want, Embry? To fuck me from behind? Hard and mean, to punish me for wanting to keep you? Or would you want to see my face and go slow, so you can mark every moan I make as you push inside of me?”
“Jesus Christ,” Embry says in a choked voice. “All of it. Both ways. Every way.”
“I’d want to see your face,” I tell him quietly. “I’d want to remember it for the rest of my life.”
“Ash, tell me you’re going to come too. I want to hear it.”
I hesitate. I’m desperate to come, so desperate that my cock is swollen and leaking, but I know how I’ll feel after I release into my hand. Empty. Hurt. Unsatisfied. The dark pit deep inside me still hungry and growling for something more elemental, something more powerful.
Scarier. Dirtier.
I can climax just fine without my lover’s surrender, without exerting my control, and I can even enjoy it in a fleeting way. But I can’t really finish without it; I won’t be sated and replete until I get what I need.
But this isn’t about what you need; or it’s not only about that. I promised to take care of him. Which means I need to put his needs above my own.
“Please,” Embry says, and I can tell he’s so very close himself. “Give me this one thing.”
“What haven’t I ever given you?” I sigh as I slide my cock back into my closed fist. I’ve given this man everything I could. My heart. My Greer. My entire life.
“Then this shouldn’t be hard to give,” he replies jaggedly. “Oh fuck, Ash. I’m gonna come. I wish I was inside you, filling you up—shit.”
He gives me a broken moan as he ejaculates, and I moan as well, imagining his fantasy. His face creased in pained pleasure as he thrusts into me, the feeling of owning him completely by giving him the very last slice of myself. Coming all over my own belly as I let him use my hole and then making him lick me clean.
“Ash, let me hear you,” he whispers. “It’s my last day in this office and I’ve got cum all over me and just—please. I want to hear you.”
I let him hear me, wedging the phone between my shoulder and my head so I can pull my pants down farther. I speed up my fist, tightening around my organ, beating off hard enough to make noise. The pressure behind my cock builds and builds, and it’s not what I want or what I need, but I won’t refuse Embry this. Not when I don’t know what the future will bring.
“What are you thinking about?” he asks. “What are you going to imagine as you unload?” His words are curious, his voice hungry, and I’m hungry for his hunger, jealous for his attention. I want all of him, always, mine and mine and mine forever.
“I’m going to imagine fucking you again. Greer is there, and she’s out of her mind watching us, her fingers buried deep in her cunt. You beg me to let you inside her, and you promise to be a good boy for me. The best boy.”
Embry groans. “God, Ash. You’re making me hard again.”
“And that’s how we finish, all three of us. You inside Greer’s tight pussy and me inside your ass.”
A wet sound tells me Embry is jacking off again, using his own ejaculate like lube. That image on top of everything else makes my stomach clench, my dick flare with sudden, heavy heat. It all flashes fast and dirty through my mind: Embry’s thick organ, smeared and wet with himself; the feeling of his hole so fucking tight around me; the firm rounds of his ass against my hips every time I push into him; Greer’s pussy so wet I can see her thighs glistening; her nipples rosy and needy and erect; Embry’s back rumbling against my bare chest as he groans out his release; the three of us in one sweaty, needy, forceful tangle, stealing pleasure and rubbing friction.
My boy and my girl, my prince and my princess. Mine and mine and mine forever.
“Yeah,” Embry says. “I’m gonna come again, I’m gonna—” he bites off his own words and gasps, and it’s the image of cum spurting all over his hand and pants and tie that does me in. Yanking my pocket square from my suit just in time, I hold it in front of my cock, and I release with a grunt, ejaculating into the silk with heavy, unending spurts.
“Embry,” I manage. “Fuck. Embry.”
“Yeah?” he breathes. “Yeah?”
“God, it feels—wish you were here to see—fuck.” It’s like I can’t stop coming, and I feel each contraction at the base of my spine with unabashed pleasure, watching my thick length judder and jerk as I spill my seed. So much, so much, and I want it to keep going forever, to share this sticky, dirty moment with Embry forever, just the two of us with our needy cocks and even needier hearts.
But all too soon it’s over, my cock slowly going still, my pocket square ruined, Embry still breathing hard on the other end of the line. It comes faster than I thought it would—the unsatisfied restlessness, the emptiness, the heat pooling deep in my groin letting me know that I’ll be hard up for it until I can slake my thirst. I close my eyes and lean back in my chair, trying to breathe through it. It’s okay that it’s not enough, I tell myself. It was about what Embry needed, not me, and God knows few things are enough for me.
“I’m still hard,” Embry says, bringing me back into the present. “It’s like you’re some kind of cock-magician.”
“I’m not a magician,” I say softly. “I’m the king of your body, and your body knows it. It won’t rest until it’s mine again.”
And mine won’t rest either.
A long-suffering sigh. “The reason I didn’t meet you face to face is because I didn’t want to end up ashamed and covered in my own semen,” Embry replies. “And yet.”
“And yet.”
“I know I’m doing the right thing, Ash, and I’m doing it for the right reasons. I can want you and fight you at the same time.”
“I know that,” I say heavily. “You’ve been doing it since the day we met.”
“Are you furious with me?” he asks.
I finish cleaning myself off and drop the pocket square into the trashcan. I tuck my still-hard cock into my pants and zip up, and I buckle my belt, and I check my tie for stains. And then I finally answer. “I’m lots of things right now.”
“But furious is one of them.”
“Yes. But I’m also guilty and worried and hurt, and hurt is the biggest one by far. I love you, and you’re leaving me. You’re leaving me because you think I’m a coward, and that I don’t love my wife enough to keep her safe. And by extension, you think you must love her more because you’re willing to put innocents at risk to protect her.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth,” he says. His voice is surly when he answers, and it almost makes me smile. Still the same petulant, pretty lieutenant I pinn
ed against a wall all those years ago. “You think you’re so noble and so fucking stoic, but it just means that you choose honor over emotion every time you start to feel something.”
“I just confessed to an entire list of things I do feel, Embry.”
He sighs. “That’s not what I mean. I mean that you’re never vulnerable; I mean that you never bend, you never break, sometimes you’re as inaccessible as the sun, and I used to worship you for it. I still want to.”
“Then don’t leave,” I say. Beg. I’m not above begging, if that’s what he wants. If he wants to see his king on his knees, weeping and tearing his clothes, I’ll do it, I’ll do anything. “Stay. I can’t do this without you.” I take a deep breath. “I never could, you know. You are my strength. My courage. And I need you.”
“I can’t,” Embry says joylessly. “It’s what I have to do in order to live with myself. It’s what I believe in.”
“You used to believe in me,” I say, and just saying those words out loud rips open something new underneath my ribs. I didn’t know how much I relied on that belief until it was gone. How much I craved his trust and his faith. It makes me want to do anything to be worthy of it again, anything, but then I remember that I can’t. Remember that I can’t say fuck everything and make winning Embry back my sole aim. I’m in charge of keeping an entire nation safe, the people who believe in me and the people who don’t, and I can’t risk war and death for just one.
As much as that seems like a good idea right now.
“Will you say goodbye to Greer for me?” he asks, breaking the silence. “I…I don’t think she’ll want to talk to me after she finds out I’m going to run against you.”
“And that you’re marrying the woman who arranged for her abduction.”
He exhales, as if he’d forgotten. “And that.”
“No.”
“Ash—”
“I won’t talk to her for you, Embry, and here’s why: we made vows on my wedding night. The three of us. Together. We promised each other that we would try, that we wouldn’t run away.”
“I also said we had to be honest the minute it stopped working.”
“We said we would love each other as long as we could, in all the ways that we could, as best as we could. Maybe you’ve stopped loving me, but have you stopped loving Greer?”
“I haven’t—” My heart jolts hopefully, but then he interrupts himself, and I feel the meaning of his next words like a halberd through the chest. “I still love Greer.”
I rub my thumb across my forehead, counting one breath, then two. Yes, I’m still alive. Yes, I heard him make sure not to say that he loved me. And yes, I can do the right thing even though all I want is to storm over to his office right now and refuse to leave until we’re both covered in sweat and cum.
“If you still love Greer, then I don’t consider you released from your vows to her. You still owe it to her to try.”
“You’re not the keeper of my vows,” he mumbles.
“Fine. Then I’m reminding you of them. You want to be free of any promise to love me? You can be free. But I’m not freeing myself from my vow of loving you, and I doubt Greer will either, once she comes to terms with it all.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that maybe we aren’t a three right now, and maybe we’ll never be again. But you and Greer still have my blessing to love each other as fully as you used to.”
“Are you…condoning our infidelity?” He sounds so suspicious, and that almost makes me smile too, despite everything, because it’s so very Embry Moore to be suspicious. I can easily picture those blue eyes narrowed in wariness, that mouth pulling into a doubtful frown.
“I’m a jealous lover, Embry, and an even more jealous husband. I will be jealous and it will hurt, but at the end of the day I don’t consider it cheating, not really. I was there in that room too; I knew what it meant to promise what we did. And to me it means that we all still try as hard as we can to love each other.”
“So if Greer and me…?”
“Yes.”
“And you and Greer…”
“Will continue to live as man and wife.”
There’s a pause before he asks it, and I feel that pause with every cell in my body. “And us?”
I try to keep my voice steady as I ask, “What about us?”
“God, you know what I’m asking.”
“Not loving you isn’t on the table for me, Patroclus.”
Embry doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t have to. I didn’t say it expecting an answer, I only said it so that he would know. My cell phone buzzes in my pocket and I pull it out to check it.
Mrs. Colchester’s plane just landed, says Belvedere’s text. She’ll be at the White House in forty minutes.
Greer.
Something deep inside me unlocks for the first time since last night, clicking open walls and doors that I didn’t even know I’d slammed shut. Letting out mercies and honesties and tendernesses that I would have kept hidden out of hurt or guardedness just moments before.
But that hurt and guardedness has to stop. I’m here in this chair listening to Embry resign because I’ve taken too much for granted, his love and his faith and his loyalty, and today is the day when that changes. I'm going to do better, love him harder, prove over and over again that I deserve his devotion and trust, and I'm going to do it even if it still means he won't ever come back.
I'm going to do it even if it's the last thing I do.
"Embry, I am sorry," I say softly. "For whatever it's worth. I wish I'd known what you'd given up for me. I would have spared you that."
"I know you would have. But there's more at stake now; you understand that, right? This is about Melwas and Carpathia, about our country, about Greer—not just you and me."
I stare at my hands, scarred and big on the gleaming desk in front of me. Those are things I can't apologize for, and he knows I won't. Two good men on either side of a moral swamp, and there's no bridge. Not even my love, sure and strong and bedrock, can bridge it for us. All I can do now is try to fight for both—to be a king and to be his king—and to hope I get it right.
"I'll see you around, Embry."
"Yeah. You too."
And with the hollow click of the line going dead, I accept that this fight is coming whether I want it or not.
Five
Ash
then
How does a man end up loving two people?
As a young child—years before I felt desire as a bodily thing—I found myself fascinated with Jareth and Sarah from the movie Labyrinth. Him, supple and almost feline, lithe and dangerous, and drenched in a kind of knowledge that I could only barely begin to apprehend, and her so clear-eyed and rosy-mouthed and strong, this contradiction between delicacy and iron will.
Yes, both of them enraptured me as a little boy, and when I saw the movie again at the awkward, unfurling age of thirteen, watching both characters made me flush hot. I remember checking the basement—paneled in fake wood and studded with scratchy chairs and an even scratchier sofa—to make sure I was completely alone, and then I let myself feel the creeping edges of that flush all over my body.
Later that night, alone in my room, I rolled onto my stomach and pressed my hips into the mattress, mindlessly rubbing into the soft sheets. My mind was a jumble of ideas and images and thoughts: the sleek lines of David Bowie’s body, oozing invitation; Jennifer Connelly’s pink, pretty mouth. But more than all of those things, I thought of one scene in particular, one line. A part when Jareth says to Sarah, just fear me, love me, do as I say…and I will be your slave.
Those words had rung through me like a gong, calling awake something new and sleepy-eyed and hungry and eager. I wanted to touch and be touched by Jareth, but that was only the edge of my lust; I wanted to be him. I wanted to find someone with a pretty mouth and demand her obedience and affection in return for my heart. I wanted to own the world like Jareth owned his kingdom, I wanted to be so pow
erful that I could make someone smile or cry or dance with me, not out of coercion, but because they loved me so much they’d surrender everything just to endure the whims of my attention.
And if they did that…I’d be undone. Theirs. My heart in their hands forever.
The first time I ever gave myself an orgasm, this was what I was thinking of.
Like Embry, I knew that I wanted both boys and girls in my bed from a fairly early age.
Unlike Embry, I didn’t live in a city where that was common, at least not in the nineties, and so there were several years when I didn’t know what to do with my desires—both the queer and the kinky. Not because I was tormented by them; I felt too much clarity—and if you can excuse the spiritual overtones—too much rightness for that. Nothing in Althea’s home or within myself ever painted my desires as aberrant or immoral.
If I liked boys as well as girls, then that was how I needed to live. If the idea of power seeped into me like sunlight and grew a crop of desires so fretfully preoccupying that I could barely make it through reading The Taming of the Shrew in class without getting hard, then that was how I was made. If I sometimes had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from biting the good Catholic girls I dated, if I had fist my hands as they crawled onto my lap to keep from spanking and grabbing and bruising, then that was fine too.
And if there weren’t boys ripe for plucking in my working-class neighborhood, well, then I could also live with that…at least until I left the neighborhood for the greener pastures of college. It wasn’t in my nature to brood or wish for something out of reach, or at least it wasn’t in my nature then.
College came, and with it, for the first time, boys. A kiss stolen in the back of a liquor store, a drunken Princeton rub at a frat house—even a professor once, right there in his office, his glasses falling off his face and my skin stinging with the feel of his beard as we kissed against his bookshelf. There were flashes of connection, even something like a boyfriend for a few short weeks, but nothing stuck. I began to consider that maybe I wasn’t capable of love or romantic connection—that I could fool around but not feel, that I could spend hours learning someone’s mouth with my own but have no desire to learn their mind. Maybe every college boy was the same as me, or maybe I was broken, but whatever the reason, I spent those years alone, the occasional impersonal fumble lighting up my landscape like a flash of lightning and then plunging me back into darkness.
American King (New Camelot #3) Page 4
