American Prince (American Queen #2)

by Sierra Simone

  But that didn’t happen. After about fifteen minutes, Morgan started looking green and clammy, clutching at her stomach.

  “Bad schnitzel?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.

  She glared at me. “I don’t feel well,” she said delicately. Well, as delicately as anyone can when they’ve eaten bad schnitzel. “Excuse me.”

  She rushed out of our private cove to find the bathroom, leaving Colchester and me alone together, sitting in silence and watching the dancers.

  The knot in my chest felt alive and pulsing. This was the first time we’d been truly alone, just the two of us, and suddenly everything about him seemed more. The stubble thicker, the eyes greener, the large hands cradling his scotch glass even larger.

  I drained the gin and signaled the waiter for another.

  A few minutes passed like this, me power-sipping gin and Colchester holding his scotch, and then he said quietly, “I wish I knew how to dance.”

  This surprised me. Not that he didn’t know, but that he wanted to. “Why on earth would you want that?”

  He shrugged and rubbed his forehead with his thumb, looking a little sheepish. “I guess it just seems like the kind of thing a man should know how to do.” He turned to look at me. “Do you know how to dance?”

  Was he kidding?

  “I think I learned how to dance before I learned how to ride a bike. Morgan and I were Mother’s favorite political props—the sooner she could doll us up in formal clothes and show off how well-bred we were, the better.” I thought of those endless nights at Mother’s events, which grew more and more tedious the older and better-looking I got. By the time I was fifteen, women weren’t asking for dances out of motherly adoration any longer, and I’d go home with blisters on my feet and tiny bruises on my ass where all the Mrs. Robinsons had pinched me.

  I threw back the rest of the gin and stood up. What the hell. “Come on,” I said, holding out my arms. “I’ll show you.”

  He bit his lip once, blinked. And then he stood up, setting his glass aside and stepping close to me.

  “It’s probably easiest if I lead first,” I told him. “Until you get a feel for it.”

  “Okay,” he said, a little uncertainly. “I’m not sure what that means.”

  “It means I’m the man right now, and you’re the woman. And since this is a waltz, pretend you have a ball gown and you just found out your husband is sleeping with the nanny.”

  He laughed, his teeth looking extraordinarily white in the dim blue light of the room. I took one of those large, rough hands and put it on my shoulder, and then slid my own past his ribs so that it rested just below his shoulder blade. Then I took his other hand and held it, keeping our arms extended.

  “Viennese waltzes are not the easiest place to start,” I apologized. “Just think of it like a drill. A sequence. One, two, three, one, two, three. Slow, quick, quick. Slow, quick, quick.”

  The band had struck into a waltzed-up version of Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered, when I realized what song they were playing. “As if Batman Forever wasn’t bad enough, Seal had to go and record this song.”

  More white teeth from Colchester as he laughed at my joke, more knotting of my cherry-stem heart.

  “Okay,” I said. “What we’re about to do is called a box, except it swivels in the Viennese waltz, which is not boxey at all, but just follow the way I turn. We step together twice and then pause—my feet crossed and yours together—and then step together twice and pause again—now with your feet crossed and mine together. Yes, just like that.”

  Colchester was a quick learner. He grasped the steps easily, responded to my pressure on his back and hand readily. The only problem was that he had no sense of the music. Like, at all.

  “Okay,” I said, trying not to laugh. “You know how we do the slow, quick, quick? The music does that too. You’re supposed to do it at the same time.”

  He frowned. “I am.”

  Fuck, but his hand felt so big in mine, the other so heavy on my shoulder. It made it hard to concentrate. “You’re not, I promise. It’s okay, I know it’s a lot to remember. Three whole steps, after all.”

  That full mouth twisted. “It’s six, in total.”

  “Now,” I said, ignoring him, “you add in the posture and the vertical motion. We are going to rise and fall as we move and also” —God, I don’t know why I did it, except it had to be the gin— “tuck our hips in as our shoulders lean out.” And I yanked his hips into mine.

  His breath left him and his hand tightened in mine. “This is how we’re supposed to dance?” he asked. There was something in his voice, something shaky.

  Shaky, uncertain Colchester felt like a victory to me, and I seized my ground like a victor. “This is how we hold each other. Now we move. One, two, three…slow, quick, quick. Yes, that’s right.”

  “This is hard.”

  I almost made a joke, but I stopped myself when I saw his face. He looked puzzled, a little fretful, confusion and concentration marring that perfect forehead. He wasn’t used to being bad at things.

  So instead of joking, I took pity on him. “Forget the steps for a moment,” I said. “It’s about space. About presence and void. I’m taking my space and you’re yielding, my presence filling your void. It’s a chase, but it’s also a balance. Think of it like a chessboard, like boxing, even. I move into the openings you leave, even as you move away. The chase begins again. Taking, moving, taking, moving.”

  “But it’s not like chess,” Colchester said. His feet were moving a little better then, his upper body less stiff. “There’s no real winner.”

  “The dance is the winner,” I said.

  He gave me a skeptical look.

  “That sounds like a stale answer, but it’s true,” I insisted. “No matter how hard we worked or how elegantly we danced, we’d merely be spinning demented circles if we did it without a partner. But together, we create something worth watching.”

  The music faded, but Colchester’s hand didn’t move away from mine. He kept stepping, his lip between his teeth and his eyes on our feet. He wanted to get it perfect, exactly right, which was so like him.

  The band started into a waltz cover of Etta James’s “At Last,” and I resumed leading him again, trying to poke down the part of me that thrilled at having another three minutes of his body close to mine.

  We’d danced for about thirty seconds without talking when he said, “You know when I saw you tonight, I thought of Sebastian Flyte from Brideshead Revisited.”

  It was my turn to frown. “Because you’re fucking my sister?”

  He laughed. “Well, I suppose that comparison is inevitable, but no. Because you look so wealthy and princely in these clothes. Because you switch between brooding and charming so fast I can’t keep track of which version of you I’m talking to. Just like Sebastian.”

  “Oh. I thought it was the teddy bear I carried everywhere.”

  He smiled, and I felt his hips brush against mine. I hardened at the thought of his cock so close to mine, that all it would take was one accidental step to bring our groins all the way together…

  He was apparently oblivious to my carnal thoughts, and he kept talking, his voice low in my ear as we step-quick-quick-ed our way around the small room. “But I thought of something else. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Have you read it?”

  “Yes.”

  “The little prince in the book is so wise but so sad. Has so much to offer this world and yet he can’t stop pining for the one he loves.”

  Colchester looked right into my eyes and I couldn’t look away.

  His voice didn’t get quieter but it got deeper. “And it seemed so perfect. You are a little prince, Embry Moore, in every way I can imagine. Rich and spoiled, like Sebastian…and yet dreamy and sad, like the little prince from Saint-Exupery’s book.”

  Little prince.

  It should sound diminishing, condescending, and yet when he sa
id it…I don’t know, it felt like an honor. A compliment. It felt right, like it was my true name and had been my true name all along, simply waiting to be discovered.

  “Little prince,” I repeated, tasting the words on my tongue.

  “And what a prince you are.”

  I looked sharply at him, expecting to see that he was teasing me, but there was no trace of humor in his face. Only seriousness and honesty and—

  “I leave for thirty minutes and you two turn into a ballroom dancing how-to video?”

  We both stopped moving at the sound of Morgan’s voice, and I could feel my anger at her like a living thing, climbing onto my shoulders and ready to launch itself at her. But before I could speak or move or anything, she was next to us, physically pressing us apart. “I’m ready to go back to the hotel,” she said, very regally for someone who’d just had bad schnitzel. She dropped some euros onto the table before she slipped her arm through Colchester’s. And gallant man that he was, he let her, and did it with a smile, and thus whatever had just unfolded between us was closed back up.

  Except as we walked into our hotel lobby, as I peeled away from the happy couple to spend a couple lonely hours at the hotel bar, Colchester turned to me and said, “Goodnight, little prince,” with that rare smile I only saw if he was dancing with me or hurting me.

  And I shivered.

  And shivered and shivered, no matter how many drinks I drank to warm me up, no matter how hot I turned up the water in my shower, and when I finally gave in to the itchiness, the hate, and the memory of his body pressed against mine, when I finally closed my eyes and began fucking my fist and imagining it was Colchester’s large, rough hand instead of my own, well…I shivered then too.

  6

  Embry

  before

  Something had changed for me. But only for me.

  Morgan and Colchester spent the rest of the week like they had before the dinner—before Colchester said those words to me—and fucked like rabbits next door. It was just as well, because finally allowing myself to think of him in that way had unlocked some hungry door inside of me, and I don’t know how I would have behaved if I’d had to face him then. As it was, I went looking for people to scratch the Colchester-shaped itch inside me. Dark-haired boys, tall boys with broad shoulders, boys that looked serious and stern even in the bright lights of a dance club. And then I’d let myself pretend as I fucked them, as I slicked up my cock and pressed into them. It was Colchester I was fucking, it was his arrogant, perfect body under mine. And when they fucked me, I pretended the same, that he’d snuck into my barracks late at night and clapped one of those large hands over my mouth as he used me. Or maybe he’d defeated me in another drill, and right there in the forest, he’d pinned me to the ground and took what was his.

  But then those Czech boys would smile the wrong way or speak in the wrong voice, and the illusion would pop like a soap bubble, and I’d feel itchier and more miserable than ever. What did I think would happen? That these boys would transform as I fucked them, whisper little prince into my ear as they came?

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  And how was I supposed to live with this, this…problem, on base? I had at least nine months left of this deployment, and it was too much to hope Colchester would disappear on his own. No, I would just have to shove it down and pretend it away. That was the only answer.

  Soon it was time to go back to Ukraine, and we bid Morgan goodbye at the train station. She and I shared a brief hug, and I kissed her on the cheek out of habit, but with Colchester, she lingered longer in his arms, kissing him on the mouth and keeping his face close to hers with a hand on his neck as she said goodbye. She’d traded her morning beauty routine for more time in bed with Colchester, and with her loose, messy hair and those unusually flushed cheeks, she almost looked like a different woman. A woman who smiled genuinely, who looked at the world with bright eyes. And as I paced away to have a cigarette and give them some privacy, I marveled that both brother and sister should fall so hard for the same man.

  Surely he realized that. Surely he saw it, the way we both acted around him.

  And it was when the wind blew around us and Morgan’s skirt fluttered up around her thighs that I saw the welts there, red and scattered, mingled with marks that looked a few days older, and I began to understand a little. Not all the way—that would take years—but I began to see that Colchester’s attention would be a dangerous, painful thing to have.

  Which of course made me want it all the more.

  The fighting began in earnest. They didn’t call it war for four more years, but it didn’t matter what they called in Washington, D.C. It was war.

  We all knew it, our allies knew it, our enemies knew it. Even the hills seemed to know it, rain and fog turning the area around our base into a shrouded quagmire. The week after Colchester and I returned, my platoon and I were patrolling a series of paths on the other side of the low mountain closest to base. There’d been reports of separatists using the nearby valleys to hide from the Ukrainian and Romanian land forces, and it was our job to flush them out. So far, we’d turned up nothing, but the longer we stayed out there, the more time I had away from Colchester, and so I pushed Dag and Wu and the others to go deeper with me into the mountains. The trails were so steep and jagged they could only be navigated by foot, and it was while we were finding our way past a snarl of rocks and fallen trees that it happened.

  It sounded like a snap, like a small branch had cracked.

  Except it wasn’t a branch.

  “Get down!” I yelled. “Down! Down!”

  The woods lit up with bullets after that, just like our drills, but these weren’t paint bullets this time, this was real. I thought of Colchester’s words the first time we met, they don’t have fake bullets, Lieutenant Moore, and I thought of our drill in the forest when he’d shot me in the arm.

  I thought about his fingers on my arm, cruel and gentle in turns.

  But the drill… “They’re in the stream bed,” I shouted into my radio, thinking of Colchester and his men coming up over the lip of the creek. “Concentrate fire there.”

  We did, with Dag and I leading the way. Pop, pop, pop went the gunshots as they echoed through the trees. I heard men shouting, talking, running and reloading, and I anxiously took stock of them every minute or so, shooting into the creek bed and then dodging behind a tree and counting all the crouching, uninjured bodies that were under my protection.

  It was the first time I ever exchanged live fire. The first time I ever shot my gun knowing I could kill someone. The adrenaline rush was violently potent, the kind of intoxication that there aren’t words for. And once we’d driven the separatists off, found a safe place to shelter down until we could catch our breath and double-check that everyone really was unscathed, I closed my eyes and let the adrenaline take me. The fear and the exhilaration. There was no self-loathing here, no Colchester. Just me and a cocktail of hormones honed by evolution to make me see life for the pulsing, vibrant thing it was. The birds seemed louder, the wildflowers more fragrant. The fog seemed alive, sparkling and benevolent. Even the mud seemed magical.

  I wasn’t the only one affected, either. Dag and Wu—normally both quiet men—were joking and laughing almost giddily. Other men sat and stared into the fog-laced trees or down at their boots, looking dazed and a little lost, as if they’d just woken up.

  I wondered which kind of man Colchester would be after a fight. Amped and antsy? Quiet and stunned? Neither?

  But there wasn’t time to think about it after that. I went from seeing Colchester every day to seeing him not at all as our captain struggled to adjust to the new level of hostility. Getting shot at became a regular pastime of ours, our walks through the villages became shadowboxes of jumpy distrust and tension, and the whole company was scattered in those early days, doing patrols, establishing outposts, spooking the rebels in the woods. We still thought we could scare them off back then. A few bullets, the might of the U.S.
military standing behind the allied forces in the region, cue a few fighter jets flying overhead, and we thought they’d just drop their ancient Russian guns and run.

  They didn’t.

  Three months of this blossoming hell had worn deep paths in the hills and scarred the tranquil groves with grenades and artillery shells, and still nothing had essentially changed. The separatists hadn’t gained any ground, but they hadn’t lost any either. There had been countless firefights and a handful of hospital-worthy injuries, but no deaths. The civilians in the area kept doggedly living their lives as usual—farming sugar beets and oats, logging trees and mining coal. We doggedly shot and were shot at and nothing made any difference.

  We all lived in a Mobius strip of a life—press forward, fall back, fight in the valley, fight on the mountain, fight in the valley again. I slept on the ground more than I slept in my bed. I got good at smelling danger; I got smarter about protecting my men. And if there were moments when I closed my eyes and thought only of Colchester reaching across a train table to touch a bruise, then no one needed to know.

  The Mobius strip tore one day when the captain called me into his office and I saw Morgan sitting there, looking as polished and expensive as ever. I nearly laughed to see her there in her nude heels and cigarette pants, looking all ready to shoot a Chanel ad (or Dior or whatever the fuck it was she said.) But she was also the prettiest, cleanest thing I’d seen in three months, the first non-war thing I’d seen in three months, and even without all that, she was kin, whatever coldly loyal thing that meant in our family. I stopped my laughter.

  Instead, I dropped into a chair next to her and crossed my legs. “Only you would show up in the middle of a war dressed like this.”

  Morgan arched a perfect brow, crossing her legs to match mine. “I’m here on business actually. Well, and I wanted to see you.”

  But the way her foot traced anxious circles in the air betrayed her. She wouldn’t be anxious if this were about business—hell, she wouldn’t be anxious if I dragged her out on a patrol right this minute, armed only with her Burberry trench coat and a slingshot.