Page 14 of American Prince (New Camelot Trilogy 2)
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.
