Page 15 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
I'm going to do it even if it's the last thing I do.
"Embry, I am sorry," I say softly. "For whatever it's worth. I wish I'd known what you'd given up for me. I would have spared you that."
"I know you would have. But there's more at stake now; you understand that, right? This is about Melwas and Carpathia, about our country, about Greer—not just you and me."
I stare at my hands, scarred and big on the gleaming desk in front of me. Those are things I can't apologize for, and he knows I won't. Two good men on either side of a moral swamp, and there's no bridge. Not even my love, sure and strong and bedrock, can bridge it for us. All I can do now is try to fight for both—to be a king and to be his king—and to hope I get it right.
"I'll see you around, Embry."
"Yeah. You too."
And with the hollow click of the line going dead, I accept that this fight is coming whether I want it or not.
FIVE
ASH
then
How does a man end up loving two people?
As a young child—years before I felt desire as a bodily thing—I found myself fascinated with Jareth and Sarah from the movie Labyrinth. Him, supple and almost feline, lithe and dangerous, and drenched in a kind of knowledge that I could only barely begin to apprehend, and her so clear-eyed and rosy-mouthed and strong, this contradiction between delicacy and iron will.
Yes, both of them enraptured me as a little boy, and when I saw the movie again at the awkward, unfurling age of thirteen, watching both characters made me flush hot. I remember checking the basement—paneled in fake wood and studded with scratchy chairs and an even scratchier sofa—to make sure I was completely alone, and then I let myself feel the creeping edges of that flush all over my body.
Later that night, alone in my room, I rolled onto my stomach and pressed my hips into the mattress, mindlessly rubbing into the soft sheets. My mind was a jumble of ideas and images and thoughts: the sleek lines of David Bowie’s body, oozing invitation; Jennifer Connelly’s pink, pretty mouth. But more than all of those things, I thought of one scene in particular, one line. A part when Jareth says to Sarah, just fear me, love me, do as I say…and I will be your slave.
Those words had rung through me like a gong, calling awake something new and sleepy-eyed and hungry and eager. I wanted to touch and be touched by Jareth, but that was only the edge of my lust; I wanted to be him. I wanted to find someone with a pretty mouth and demand her obedience and affection in return for my heart. I wanted to own the world like Jareth owned his kingdom, I wanted to be so powerful that I could make someone smile or cry or dance with me, not out of coercion, but because they loved me so much they’d surrender everything just to endure the whims of my attent
ion.
And if they did that…I’d be undone. Theirs. My heart in their hands forever.
The first time I ever gave myself an orgasm, this was what I was thinking of.
LIKE EMBRY, I knew that I wanted both boys and girls in my bed from a fairly early age.
Unlike Embry, I didn’t live in a city where that was common, at least not in the nineties, and so there were several years when I didn’t know what to do with my desires—both the queer and the kinky. Not because I was tormented by them; I felt too much clarity—and if you can excuse the spiritual overtones—too much rightness for that. Nothing in Althea’s home or within myself ever painted my desires as aberrant or immoral.
If I liked boys as well as girls, then that was how I needed to live. If the idea of power seeped into me like sunlight and grew a crop of desires so fretfully preoccupying that I could barely make it through reading The Taming of the Shrew in class without getting hard, then that was how I was made. If I sometimes had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from biting the good Catholic girls I dated, if I had fist my hands as they crawled onto my lap to keep from spanking and grabbing and bruising, then that was fine too.
And if there weren’t boys ripe for plucking in my working-class neighborhood, well, then I could also live with that…at least until I left the neighborhood for the greener pastures of college. It wasn’t in my nature to brood or wish for something out of reach, or at least it wasn’t in my nature then.
College came, and with it, for the first time, boys. A kiss stolen in the back of a liquor store, a drunken Princeton rub at a frat house—even a professor once, right there in his office, his glasses falling off his face and my skin stinging with the feel of his beard as we kissed against his bookshelf. There were flashes of connection, even something like a boyfriend for a few short weeks, but nothing stuck. I began to consider that maybe I wasn’t capable of love or romantic connection—that I could fool around but not feel, that I could spend hours learning someone’s mouth with my own but have no desire to learn their mind. Maybe every college boy was the same as me, or maybe I was broken, but whatever the reason, I spent those years alone, the occasional impersonal fumble lighting up my landscape like a flash of lightning and then plunging me back into darkness.
That all sounds so grim, and I don’t mean it to be, because I wasn’t depressed or lonely. I had friends, I had fun, I didn’t feel the lack of passion like a weight or a burden. It was only at night, my homework done and my eyes tired, when my mind wandered back to Jareth’s words, back to the fear me and love me and do as I say. I wanted to own, I wanted to possess, I wanted to bruise willing flesh with rough fingers and push someone down to their knees and have them like it.
I wanted someone to look up at me with their whole world in their eyes.
In my human sexuality class, we learned the term aromantic, and so I thought I’d figured it out. I was an aromantic bisexual, and I could be content with my life, with friendships and meaning beyond romance, and it would be fine. Surely it was telling that I hadn’t fallen in love by the time I’d finished college? Surely it was a sign that the only thing that made my heart beat faster, that made me think of things like vows and forever, involved kneeling and arched throats and the most sinful kinds of discipline? That wasn’t romance—not at all, it was just what I had to think about in order to climax when I fucked my fist in the shower.
The problem was that the two things were—and still are—hopelessly tangled together for me: my capacity for love and my craving for power. And those in turn were, and are, tangled with my bisexuality. Did I fool around with more boys than girls in college because they liked the rougher stuff, even if it still wasn’t as rough or cruel as I wanted? Did I date more girls in high school because it was so easy to indulge in small exercises of power? Picking the restaurant? Driving the car? Paying the check? All of it was rooted in culture, in how society told me the ways boys should be with boys and the ways boys should be with girls. Yet so much of it was rooted inside me as well, in this tangle I couldn’t unravel, and wouldn’t attempt to unravel at the expense of a lover’s comfort or safety. It might seem laughable for a devout Catholic to indulge so guiltlessly in debauchery but balk at power exchange—but I’ve always believed the heart of Christian sexual ethics was consent and respect. And so with every lover, I poured all of my energy into those two things. Negotiating consent. Engaging respectfully. Even my hottest, dirtiest encounters started with questions and answers.
Is this okay?
God, yes.
Can I see how wet you are?
