Page 8 of American Prince (New Camelot Trilogy 2)
“I win,” Colchester said. His other boot was gently pressing against the wrist that held the gun I tried to shoot him with. “Now don’t move.”
“Fuck you.”
Colchester smiled, that dickhead, his firm mouth parting into a grin and revealing the faintest dent of a dimple in his left cheek. His boot pressed harder against my wrist—not hard enough to truly hurt me, but hard enough to be uncomfortable—and he used the muzzle of his M4 to nudge at the paint splatter on my arm. “You okay, Lieutenant? I know those things sting.”
It did sting. It stung like a motherfucker, and I didn’t even want to think about the ugly bruise it would leave on my arm. But when I glanced up into Colchester’s face, I couldn’t bring up the right words to tell him that. I couldn’t even muster another fuck you. In that instant, I felt the viscid weight of every moment leading up to this, of all the itchy nights I’d spent drinking and staring at the stars. I felt unmoored from myself, from everything that wasn’t Colchester’s boot on my wrist and green eyes on my face.
And I didn’t imagine what happened next. At least, I don’t think I imagined it, but it’s hard to tell with everything that happened afterward, what Rubicons were crossed when and how. But Colchester looked down at his boot on my wrist, at my panting chest as I struggled to regain the breath that had been knocked from me by the fall, and something unshuttered in his face. For a single moment, it seemed like we were breathing in tandem, as if he were mirroring my gasping breaths or maybe I was trying to mirror his steadier ones, and then he moved his boot off my wrist, replacing it with his knee as he knelt down next to me. The pine needles rustled under his boots. From somewhere in the trees came the plaintive churr of a turtledove.
Colchester took off his helmet, and the gesture felt strangely medieval, like a knight taking off his helm. A prince kneeling next to the glass coffin of a sleeping princess…if that princess were a spoiled playboy from the west coast.
And of course, no fairy tale prince ever said what Colchester uttered next.
“It’s a shame I’ve already shot you,” he said softly. “I would have so liked to hear you beg.”
&nbs
p; All around us, soldiers were stirring, chafing at their new bruises or laughing or playfully shoving the brothers who’d just “killed” them moments earlier, but Colchester and I were worlds apart from them, existing in a bubble of time that had been frozen in that forest for centuries.
I was too apart from myself to be anything other than truly honest. “You’d have to hurt me much worse than this if you want to hear me beg.”
I expected bluster, I expected a snappy, aggressive response where he’d promise to hurt me the next time he had the chance. Hell, I almost wanted it. But he didn’t do that. Something in my words seemed to turn him inward, upon himself. He blinked, bit his lip. It was the first time I ever saw him uncertain and without answers.
“I want to do more than hurt you,” he finally said, looking troubled as he said it. And then he stood up and walked away, leaving me to puzzle over what he meant by those words…and what I wanted them to mean.
I went straight to the showers. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. I went straight to the showers and stripped off all the sweaty, muddy clothes, stood under the spray turned up as hot as it could go, and tried to rinse off the smell of pine needles and gunpowder. Tried to rinse away the feeling of Colchester’s boot on my wrist.
I would have so liked to hear you beg.
Make me, I should have said. Or maybe that would have been the wrong answer too. But I didn’t know the right answer.
And the problem wasn’t that I had a certain kind of appetite that excluded Colchester—I had every appetite. I went to an all-boys boarding school and had sex with the boys there; I came home and slept with the rich girls summering on the coast. I was lucky with my parents, lucky in the Northwest—no one seemed to mind. Once or twice there had been the insinuation that I wasn’t able to “make up my mind” about who I liked to fuck, but that was ridiculous. I knew exactly who I liked to fuck, and it was everybody.
So it wasn’t that I found Colchester attractive that bothered me. No.
It bothered me that he was perfect.
It bothered me that I hated him.
It bothered me that I hated him and he still made me feel itchy and out of control.
It bothered me that he put his boot on my wrist and I liked it.
Curtained stalls lined the shower room and I heard more men come in, joking and complaining about the mud and chill, and I couldn’t bear to think about Colchester while surrounded by other people. I finished up and went back to my room to be alone.
But there was no solitude to be had. When I opened the door, there was a woman sitting on my bed.
I dumped my dirty clothes on the floor and walked over to the cheap wooden dresser where my clean clothes were stored, tugging the towel off my waist so I was completely naked.
“Really?” Morgan asked with distaste.
“This is my room,” I reminded my stepsister. “If you don’t like it, don’t look.”
She rolled her eyes, but ended up turning around. “I don’t even get a hello? A ‘how was your trip?’”
“Hello, how was your trip, why are you here? We agreed to meet tomorrow at the train station.”
“I wanted to see you.”
