American King (New Camelot #3)

by Sierra Simone

  Anything, anything, anything.

  I get to my own knees in front of my wife. I see the shock on her face when I turn my palms up towards the ceiling, the backs of my hands resting on my thighs as I sit back on my heels in an unmistakable submissive’s pose. This isn’t the spontaneous gesture of need and adoration from the Residence this morning, this is a deliberate posture of submission and humility and I’ve never assumed it in front of Greer.

  Psalm Fifty-One. The adulterer’s psalm. The psalm of a father mourning a son that should not have been conceived. That’s what I quote. “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it.”

  Greer stares at me with silver eyes in the dark.

  “You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings,” I continue. “My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart which You will not despise.”

  A single tear tracks down my queen’s cheek, and I don’t wipe it away. I let it fall as I keep my hands open and empty. “Do good to Zion in your good pleasure; rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Then you will delight in right sacrifices.”

  Another tear spills over onto my favorite face in the world, and my chest squeezes in shared pain. All the ways I’ve failed her and Embry, I won’t fail them any more. I won’t fail her. I will love her until the stars burn themselves out and hang like cold rocks in the lightless sky.

  Right sacrifices, I remind myself. The Lord only delights in right sacrifices. What a bleeding, sluggish world this would be if we all indulged in martyrdom; what a luscious fucking lure to bite—to brood and wallow and feel. But the world was not made to be bleeding and sluggish, and those lures are just baited traps for the moody and the vain. The world must spin, the battles must be fought, the grails and the quests won’t chase themselves. However tempting a sacrifice for its own sake might be, however tempting self-flagellation and melancholy and grasping, needy gloom—it is not a right sacrifice. It would only serve me, and I’m pledged to serve so many others.

  The world must spin.

  And yet…

  And yet for just a moment, I wonder what it’s like on the other side. I wonder what it’s like not to have to serve everyone else, what it would be like to chase my weakest impulses to their selfish ends. What it would feel like to give in. To yield. To—just for a moment—drop the crown and the sword to the floor and carry my heart in my hands.

  “I hold it inside of me as best I can,” I finally answer her. “And I’m afraid I’m not holding it very well right now. But I must, Greer, I must, even if it dissolves my bones and eats me alive. Even if I sometimes fantasize about not holding it at all.”

  “Let me,” she begs. “Let me hold it for you. Beat me or fuck me or anything you need.”

  Anything I need. Does she realize that’s everything right now? I need everything. I’m a gaping, sucking void of need.

  “Can we try something?” I ask. My heart thumps uncomfortably in my chest; my mouth feels dry. Clumsy. I feel like a boy asking someone on a date for the first time. “Can you…can we, I mean…I want—”

  I clear my throat, looking down at my hands resting on my thighs.

  “Tonight I want to be your submissive,” I say. “I know I prepared you to be mastered today, and I will keep my word to do so if you like. I just thought…” I falter, my words slipping away from me. I tilt my head all the way back and stare up at the ceiling. “I just want to know what it feels like. Not to be the one to carry it all.”

  Greer’s dress rustles, I hear her breathing. “I can try,” she offers. “But it won’t be—I’m not you, Ash. I’m worried it will feel awkward. Like a child pretending.”

  I drop my head to look at her. “You’re perfect,” I say softly. “Anything you do will be perfect.”

  She bites her lip and I read every uncertain flicker in her moon-sea eyes. She’s worried she’ll be clumsy, that I’ll inwardly be judging her performance, that she’ll fail to please me. And I understand—mastering is far more complicated than being mastered. A Dominant not only has to plan, but to assess, to read what a submissive needs in that scene, and they must adapt and adjust and continually monitor a submissive’s progress through pain and pleasure. It’s a heavy weight—a joyful and pleasurable one, often—but a weight nonetheless. And here I’m asking her to trade places in the middle of a day-long scene with no warning and no chance to prepare.

  But I’m ready to break and crumble, and if there’s any person on this planet I feel safe doing it in front of, it’s Greer Galloway Colchester.

  “Please,” I whisper. I bow, moving so that my palms are flat on the floor in front of her knees and then I press my forehead to floor. “I want to feel free of it. Only for a few minutes.”

  “I’m nervous,” she admits. “I’ve…I mean, with Embry I sometimes can, but you aren’t him. With you, it’s like all of me responds with the urge to obey. It’s beyond my control.”

  I push aside the prideful sting that comes with hearing his name. She and I have endeavored not to have any secrets from one another, and so I know all about their times alone—Carpathia and her office at Georgetown chief among them—and I know that together, the two of them have a much more traditional dynamic. Giving and taking in equal measure, unspoken negotiations of power—the way equals fuck each other. I should be happy for them, happy that without me they can find some normalcy and intimacy in sex without resorting to degradation and a degree of suffering, and I am happy for them, but also I grieve. Envy curls. I got my teenage wish to become the Goblin King, but wars and sisters and lovers and my dead wife have finally planted all the guilt and shame I never used to feel about it, and sometimes I hate myself for the things I need. I resent my lovers for not always needing them. I hurt for wanting to hurt them. I want the other side of it, I want the other side of it right now.

  “Pretend, then, that I’m ordering you to do this. I’m ordering you as your Sir to take control, and you are simply obeying me.”

  “Okay,” she says, above me. And then she takes a deep breath and says clearer, louder, “Okay. Yes, Sir.”

  I see the froth of white and gold fabric move around me, and then I hear her stand, hear the click-thunk of her heels dropping from her feet and the pad of her steps on the floor. Then silence.

  I stay where I am, my eyes on the wood grain of the smooth floor, my body pulling uncomfortably in the unfamiliar posture. This is what it must be like for Greer. The waiting. The pregnant stillness. The creeping uncertainty. It takes so much willpower simply not to move, not to act, when moving and acting are my defaults.

  At the club I’d joined after Jenny’s death, they require all Dominants to undergo certain kinds of training in order to play there, and I’d done them all quite willingly, because I’d been eager to learn, I’d been eager to know how to do all the things I wanted to do safely. And in order to do that, I had to know how they felt. I’ve been whipped, cropped, paddled, flogged, edged, bound, gagged, and once—just once—fucked in the ass with a toy.

  And countless other things, but right now I’m remembering the very first time I was made to submit as part of my training, and it was something very like this. Kneeling with my head pressed to the floor for almost two hours while the Dominant training me watched. I’d just won the election and I was going to be the leader of the free world and I was spending my spare time getting beaten by a man named Mark. But in that room, it didn’t matter. Actual kings and queens had been there, crown royalty, billionaires, generals, dignitaries—secular power meant nothing in Mark’s kingdom, which was the entire point.

  Those two hours on my knees, it had felt like an academic exercise, like I was taking a tour. A visitor to the land of kneeling. And although I made notes in my head about how long it took for parts of my body to fall asleep, about the ways my thoughts wanted to stray, about what I could see and perceive from my deferential position, it never felt real. It never was real. It was research. A game.

  This is not a game.

  Every step Gree
r takes sends ripples of awareness through me, every brush of her dress against my legs turns into a blessing. I am noticed. I am touched. Each glance of her fabric is a gift. And when she finally deigns to run her fingers over the tuxedo jacket pulled tight over my back, I let out a ragged exhale of relief.

  “I want to see your face,” she murmurs. “Back up on your knees.”

  I raise myself back to my knees, not lifting my eyes until I’m expressly asked to, putting my hands palm-up on my thighs once again. A model submissive. It feels forced, but it feels nice as well. Nice not to have to worry about anything. Nice to be responsible for nothing but myself.

  “I—” she swallows. “I want your mouth on me. Lift your face.”

  I lift my face like she asks, catching her eyes with my own. She looks uncertain, concerned that maybe she’s doing something incorrectly, and I smile reassuringly at her. “Yes, Mistress,” I answer.

  She nods, almost absent-mindedly, and for a moment I consider taking pity on her and ending this pointless request of mine. It was selfish to ask for and there’s no reason Greer needs to suffer for my broken insanity, but then she steps close to me, raising her dress, and her bare, wet pussy is right in front of my face, like something out of a dream. Framed by white and gold, the barest glimpse of pink peeking out from her cleft, and I can smell her. My cock strains against my pants, fully hard since the first time I knelt, and for a second I relish the unfamiliar sensation. To be hard and to be kneeling.

  It’s strange but not unpleasant. Like driving someone else’s car.

  “Eat me,” my wife says, and I keep my eyes on hers as long as I can as I slide my hands up the back of her thighs to steady her. My instincts are still to take care of her, to make sure she’s safe, and it’s jolting to realize I can still do this from my knees, perhaps as well as I can as when I’m standing.

  I press my mouth against the soft lips of her cunt, which she keeps bare at my asking, and then I part my lips the tiniest bit and let my tongue tickle against her clit. I feel her knees weaken and nearly collapse at the touch, and I smile to myself and do it again. Her skin is so soft, almost like satin against my lips, and she smells like the delicate lavender soap she uses until I nuzzle my nose into her and inhale. And then she smells like herself, sweet and warm, if warm can be a scent.

  I press my face harder against her, angling so that my tongue can begin sweeping lines along the folds of her slit, and a whimpered Ash drops from her lips. I relish it, this sign of her pleasure, and I slide my hands up to her ass and over her hips and down her thighs again. She’s all silky skin and garters and stockings, and then when my hands find her from the front and gently spread her lips apart, she’s all wet, quivering flesh. Flesh I’ve been fucking and denying all day, and the thought of her carrying all that slippery need around in public, just tucked up inside her all aching and heavy, has me so fucking hard.

  This position too, has a certain kind of intimate appeal. Normally I enjoy her cunt while she’s tied to my bed, or perhaps bent over a table with a spreader bar between her legs. Normally, I use my fingers to part her as wide as I please, exposing her sweet hole and the firm berry of her clit and the tight pleats of her anus. I lick and taste at my leisure, I nibble and I suck at whatever pace I deem fit, all while she’s wide open for me like the good girl she is.

  But this is so much more immediate, so much more desperate. Even with my hands helping, I have to nuzzle and force to get at her most secret spots when she’s standing like this. There’s barely any part of my face that goes untouched by her—her thighs against my cheeks, my nose buried in her mound, my chin wet and glistening, and then her hands are in my hair, yanking and pulling and she’s rubbing against me, grinding her face against me. She and Embry did this, I remember. In her office at Georgetown. I made her tell me all about it as I fucked her afterwards, I made her tell me exactly how Embry looked with his face between her legs, exactly how his expensive suit bunched and strained as he stayed on his knees for her, exactly how hard she came on his tongue. How wet his face was after.

  I don’t like admitting to myself how much jealous pleasure I feel in overwriting this experience for her; it’s a toxic tendril of satisfaction knowing that whenever she thinks of having a man on his knees, she’ll have to think of both of us now. There’s nothing he can do to her that I can’t also do—no pleasure he can give that I can’t also give. Even now, with this huge hole ripped in our lives, I’m still jealous of him. I’m still so possessive of her that my bones threaten to crack with it. She is mine. Mine against my mouth, mine on my tongue, mine as I fuck her and beat her and cherish her in every way that a man can cherish the keeper of his own soul.

  I don’t know how it happens, exactly, except that maybe thinking of Embry triggers it, but somehow I end up taking control. On my knees, my face buried in between my wife’s legs—and buried there at her command, no less—the Jareth inside me takes over, and my hands move the way I want them to move, digging points of pain into the tender flesh, finding all the places where I can push and press, all the places that resist. The lips of her pussy, the silky skin running back from her slit to her rear entrance, the hard cords of tendon connecting her thighs to her pelvis. The firm swell of pubic bone and the plush handfuls of her ass.

  She shudders above me, the slight tease of pain ratcheting her tighter against my face and wetter against my tongue, and all of her body seems to twist into me, towards me, tugged on a tide that formed between us the moment we met. She opens and peels apart when I treat her like this, and it’s more than the pain—although admittedly the chemicals released by the pain help. But it’s me she responds to—my ownership, my possession. My desire pouring over her like water, like darkness, my heart pushing up naked and needy against her own, and demanding her heart in return.

  And so we end up with her edged against a display case, one leg slung over my shoulder, with her barely hanging on for the ride and me tasting and touching her exactly like I know she needs. And what she needs is how I give it—a little demeaning, a little authoritative, a lot selfish…at least selfish in that imperial, demanding way she loves so much. I’ve got her folds spread apart, and I’m holding her open for me to lick in the way that satisfies me: deep inside to taste her, down to her anus to make her squirm in embarrassment, up to her clit to make her moan.

  And then that word I dread hearing.

  “Maxen.”

  Eight

  Ash

  now

  Her safe word.

  Her escape.

  Everything stops. My mouth, my hands. My heart. I lower her leg carefully and make sure she can stand, and then I drop back onto my heels, hands up and open. My stomach knotting in guilt. We have the safe word so it can be used, but the idea of having done something to force her to use it…it tears at my conscience. I’d rather eat my own liver than harm her, and normally I’m so careful about reading her body and her face when we scene, and I must have missed something, some sign—

  “Ash, look at me.”

  When I look up into her face, I don’t see the face of a woman who’s hurt. Instead, she looks concerned, like I’m the one hurting, and she drops her fingers to play with the hair near my right temple.

  “You asked to submit,” she says softly. “But you weren’t submitting just then.”

  I’m on my knees and my chin and lips are wet with her, and she’s right.

  I wasn’t submitting.

  “It only works if you want it to work,” she says, twining her fingers into my hair and pulling. On instinct, I turn my head and nip at the inside of her wrist. She laughs, but her face goes serious.

  “Do you want it to work?”

  Did I want this to work? I thought so, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe it’s impossible for me to yield, even as some sort of twisted emotional rehearsal for yielding on a larger scale. Maybe it’s impossible to be any other man than I am.

  Except even the thought of it being impossible stiffens my spine. I don�
��t believe anything is impossible. Not for someone who is brave or disciplined or honorable or blessed, and I want desperately to be all of those things.

  “I want it to work,” I whisper. I catch her hand again, not to bite this time, but to kiss each and every fingertip, lingering long with scrapes of my teeth and brushes of my lips until she’s shivering and pressing her legs together under her dress. “But you have to help me. It is hard to be anything other than what I am.”

  Which is why I need to feel it, I think, peering up at her and hoping she can see the reckless anguish in my face. I have to know what it feels like, at least once. How can I rule if I don’t know what it feels like to be ruled?

  Greer examines my face a moment more, her red lower lip caught between her teeth. I see the thoughts and decisions flit through her eyes like determined birds. “Okay,” she says. “Stand up and undress for me.”

  I do.

  It is a foreign feeling, to undress in front of her like this—at her command, at her pleasure. As I shuck off my jacket and toe off my shoes, I have to remind myself that this was what I wanted. This mirror of our normal lives, this reflection of our marriage, the one where she undresses and I watch. Now it is her standing, swathed in silk like armor, and it is me slowly laying my own armor aside. I tug my cufflinks off with practiced care, I slide the bow tie off with deliberate focus. Like a good submissive, I take enough time to put everything away neatly, but I move fast enough for my mistress’s pleasure.

  And it’s her pleasure indeed that I hear as I pull off my shirt and expose my bare torso. It’s pleasure coming from her mouth as I unzip my pants and my cock pushes through the placket, still hard and dark and thick. It’s pleasure panting through her body as I straighten up to my considerable height and permit her to see almost every inch of my naked flesh.