Page 106 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
“Yes, my queen.”
Back to say goodbye.
TWENTY-SEVEN
ASH
now
Embry opens the door for me clad in only sweatpants, a glisten of sweat still stippling his collarbone. The contours of his arms and chest and stomach are on perfect, sweaty display, and I know he worked up that sweat by fucking my wife.
I have to take a deep breath to keep myself in control.
I want to lick that sweat right off him, I want to reach into those sweatpants and grip what’s mine by right. I want to shove him to the floor and give him everything he’s ever given me, all the anguish and the longing and the happiness, I want to hammer it back into his body until it becomes part of him forever…but that’s not why I came here tonight.
I came here for a goodbye. No matter how much I hope telling him the truth will save him, no matter how much I hope that all my diligence this past week has succeeded, I have to be prepared for tomorrow. In another life, I wasn’t prepared, I wasn’t ready, and when I died, I died leaving a kingdom in ruins.
This time will be different.
“Achilles,” Embry says as he closes the door.
“Patroclus.”
“Do you want a drink?”
I do, oddly enough, and I tell him so. Together we walk into his study, where he opens up a globe bar and pours us each a healthy glass of scotch. He leans against the edge of his desk and I lean against the doorframe, and I take a minute just to appreciate him. To savor the picture he makes. Those tight, flat muscles along his stomach and chest, the compact swells of his arms.
He’s always been like this—lithe and graceful, sculpted in the slender, idealized ways of a Greek statue—the kind of body built to make my heart pound and my cock ache. Where I’m rough with dark hair across my chest, he’s almost boyishly smooth, and where I’m curved and clad with muscular power, he is light and lean.
The differences and samenesses between our bodies fascinate me not because we are both men, but because we are both people, because he has a body and I have a body and we love each other with those bodies, and every secret of his body is fascinating to me because he is fascinating to me. I want to find every place where we are different and every place where we are the same and compose hymns to them both.
“I can’t think straight when you look at me like that,” Embry complains, taking a drink.
I smile at him, knowing it will flash the dimple that torments him so, and he groans. To think it might be the last time I hear him fret about my dimple has my stomach clenching in fear and grief.
You can’t stand here staring at him forever, I chide myself. Do what you came here to do. Say your goodbye in case there is no chance for it tomorrow.
“Have you ever wondered about what you had to do to make me say yes?”
The way his hand freezes in midair, the scotch glass hovering near his lips, tells me he knows exactly what I’m talking about. “Ash…”
“You see, at first, it was simply the delight of denying you, and after our night together in the woods, it was the only thing left to deny. But I never meant to deny you long. I thought,
soon enough, there will come a moment that will perfectly mark all this denial and waiting, and we’ll both remember it forever. You know how unhealthily obsessed I am with firsts.”
Embry doesn’t respond, those sooty eyelashes blinking slowly as he takes a drink, as he processes what I’m saying.
“And then that moment never came because I proposed and scared you off. But the second time—the second time, I made a real decision. I thought, when he says yes to me. When he says yes to me and there’s nothing left between us, then we’ll have our last first. That’s what I wanted you to do to earn it, Embry. I wanted you to say yes to me.”
I take a step forward, and he closes his eyes, looking pained. “Ash.”
“What I didn’t realize,” I say quietly, ignoring him as I take another step forward, “was that you were saying yes to me all along.”
The air between us seems to hum and throb, destiny again, fate, except there is no other memory of this, I never did this in my other life. This moment, in both of my lives, is happening for the first time.
“Ash.” Embry’s voice is strangled.
“Every time you gave me your trust, your obedience, and your surrender. Every time you fought me knowing you would lose, every time you carried me when I couldn’t limp along myself, and every breath and kiss you ever shared with me—it was all you saying yes, every moment of it. You’ve said yes to me so many times I’m surprised I could even hear the word no.”
