Page 107 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
Embry’s head is ducked down; he’s breathing hard. “Stop,” he begs. “Please.”
“You were saying yes, Embry, and I wasn’t listening. But I’m listening now.”
He looks up at me, and I’m close enough to touch him now, so I do. I take his right hand, and from my pocket, I pull out the ring I’d wanted to throw into the lake three years ago but couldn’t bring myself to. And I slide the ring on his finger, an older, slightly different twin to the one on his left.
He watches as I do it, his jaw tight, his chest shuddering with every breath, and when I’m finished, I bring the finger wearing my ring to my mouth. “You are just as much mine as Greer is,” I tell him. “And I am just as much yours as I am hers. I wish to God it hadn’t taken me so long to see, that I could have told you this years ago. That I could have given you this years ago.”
He watches my lips against his finger with something like agony. “Given me this ring?”
“No. What comes after.”
“Our last first?” he asks raggedly.
“Our last first.”
And then he’s on me, grabbing at my tie and yanking me to his mouth, and we kiss like we used to kiss in the early days—hard and searing and uncertain—and then we’re both stumbling out of the study and up the stairs, kissing frantically as we climb, and Embry’s hands are so eagerly stripping away my jacket and belt that I have to laugh, and then we’re in his bedroom.
“Galahad is with my mother,” he says. Then he shakes his head. “Not that it matters—if he was here, I’d just close the door and fuck you anyway. Do you have any idea how fucking much I want this?”
I laugh again because I do have some idea. His erect penis is straining hard at his pants, his chest is flushed a very appealing shade of red, and his fists are clenched at his sides.
He glares at me. “It’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
More glaring. “You’re a bastard and an asshole.”
“All true,” I say, “although I was hoping to hear the word ‘asshole’ in another context tonight.”
His mouth twitches in a way that makes my chest tight. What if this is the last time I get to see that smirk, that smile of secret amusement? “Shit, I can’t laugh now,” he says. “It will ruin the moment. Take off your clothes.”
“Am I your submissive tonight?” I ask as I unknot my tie and unfix my cufflinks.
“No,” he says immediately, softly. “No. You will always be my king. That’s how I want it.”
An uncomfortable warmth chokes at my throat. “Little prince.”
He steps forward and takes my cufflinks from me, sets them on his dresser and returns to me to help me peel off my shirt. “You asked me two years ago how I wanted it,” he says after we’ve bared my chest. He drops down to untie my shoes, and the sight of him kneeling at my feet and tending to me sends an extra—and unnecessary—jolt of heat to my cock. I’ve been hard since the moment I saw him, but I’m leaking now. Pulsing and needy.
Embry tugs off one shoe, then moves to my other foot. “For a long time, I thought I’d want to fuck you the way that you fucked me sometimes. I would be the man and you would be the youth, I would be the king and you’d be the knight kneeling in supplication. But after the last debate, I realized—” the other shoe comes off and he moves to my socks “—that’s not what I really want. At all.”
“What do you want?”
He stands up, taking my hand and then curling it around the back of his neck and pulling our foreheads together. “To serve you.”
It’s my turn to breathe raggedly now; I can’t even remember how to breathe. “You know it’s all pretend, Embry. Every bit of it—the kneeling, the bruising, the humiliation. It’s a game. Make believe.”
I’m telling the truth.
“Liar,” he breathes, stepping in so that our stomachs and chests press and heave together. “I told you before, everything has been real with you from the very start.”
And he’s telling the truth too.
Maybe that’s why so many people don’t understand kink, because we’re both right. It’s real and it’s make believe, it’s deadly serious and sinfully playful, the truest expression of ourselves and also an elaborate game of pretend. Both, both, both, and to forget either is to forget the reason behind the kink, which is to be intentionally and vulnerably and happily…human.
That’s it, that’s the heart of it. To be human.
He kisses me again, gently this time, taking care to kiss around the edges of my mouth, to kiss the special spot behind my ear, to rub his cheek against my own. He sighs as my stubble chafes his still-smooth cheek. “The first time I saw you, I knew you were a man who couldn’t keep his shave.”
