Page 23 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
I was even listening to Strauss when he came to me last night, when I saw him standing in the doorframe of my office, looking beautifully brooding, as only he can. God how I love him, and it took only one blue glance before I was coming toward him, pressing against that firm, flat chest of his and guiding his long, elegant fingers to the place that waited for him. One blue glance before I was completely open and undone for Embry Moore, just as I have always been, just as I have been since the first day I saw him spoiled and scornful in the mountains of a strange land. I would walk barefoot over every jagged rock of that cursed country if it would bring Embry back to me. I would crawl.
“I’d be a fool if I planned on a second term; I’m not owed it,” I finally say to Merlin. “I’m not entitled to anything more than what I’ve earned here and now. I have to get as much done as I can in case I have to leave.”
“Poverty, sexual assault, education, climate change, stability overseas—you think it’s merely a matter of willpower and focus to effect those changes? No, these are projects that require huge amounts of bipartisan leverage and cooperation and favors—not even Penley Luther himself could have done it.”
“I’m not my father,” I say with perhaps more sharpness than necessary.
“And I thank God for that every day,” Merlin responds blandly. “Nonetheless, it can’t be done. Give up this idea of cramming six years of work into two, and focus on getting elected again.”
I look over at Merlin, and I’m surprised to see something almost goading in his face, although it’s not truly goading…a challenge, maybe? A dare?
But that’s not quite right either. It’s almost less like a dare and more like he’s delivering lines from a script. There’s something mechanical in the way he insists it cannot be done. It’s cursory, an actor running through the kinds of expository lines that require little emotion or effort. Like he knows he must say these things to provoke me into saying the opposite, but when I examine his face, all of that vanishes, and he is the picture of polite and reserved calm once again.
I can’t resist the script either, if scripted this moment is, and I find myself saying exactly what would have been laid out for me on the page. “I’m doing it, Merlin. Even if it kills me.”
THE SECOND THING remarkable about tonight is my wife. Her dress—some strapless confection of gold and white—renders her into a shimmering vision of light, a drop of sunlight playing over water, and she draws people to her simply by existing as she does, sublime and sovereign. I catch glimpses of her face—kind, serious, almost tormentingly lovely—through the crowd as I make my way to her, and I’m reminded of a John Collier painting I saw once in England of Queen Guinevere gathering flowers on May Day. Like the painting, she is clad in white and gold and surrounded by a crowd; like the painting, there is something aching and lonely in her face.
I had once teased her that one man wasn’t enough—that she needed both Embry and me to feel loved—and she had shaken her head and pressed her hand flat against where my heart beat in my chest.
Don’t you see? she’d implored. It is because I love you that I love Embry. We fell in love with each other by loving you.
It was just as well. My love was—and is—implacable and cruel to those it chose. I had been glad that they could take comfort in one another, however envious the idea made me. And I feel quite the same now, although my wife’s face reminds me that she may not get any comfort from Embry any time soon. His absence has gouged a hole in our marriage just as surely as it’s gouged a hole in our three.
When I reach Greer, however, and take her wrist in my hand while she’s talking to the governor of New York, that lonely look vanishes and is replaced with something so warm and yielding that I have to kiss her on the mouth, lipstick and onlooking governor be damned.
“Mr. President,” she says, half laughing and half gasping under my mouth.
“Mrs. Colchester,” I return, lifting my head but pulling her into me. “I’m so sorry, Governor Jarrett, do you mind if I steal my wife away for a few moments?”
The governor waves an amused hand. “By all means, save me from this gorgeous, interesting woman,” she says. “It was unbearable company anyway.”
We laugh, we say goodbye, we make more excuses as we squeeze together through the crowd, and then Luc is escorting us out of the ballroom into the small art gallery off the north wing of the Luther Center.
“We’re not to be interrupted,” I tell him at the door after I send Greer inside.
“Yes, sir,” Luc says, his expression betraying nothing.
I clap him on the shoulder. “Good man,” I say, and then follow Greer through the doorway and close the door behind me.
Inside, the world is small and quiet. A wall of windows frames a spill of Georgian buildings and thick trees; beyond the rise of stone and leaves, the white finger of the Washington Monument presses into the purple-clouded night sky. Huge canvases of modern art stud the all-white walls, shadows leak from the windows onto the blond wood floors, the noise of the gala is a muffled memory.
We are alone at last.
When Greer hears my footsteps, she turns to face me and the lights from the city outside catch on the gold of her dress and in the gleam of her hair. She sinks to her knees in a cloud of tulle and silk as I approach, her neck arched as gracefully as a swan’s as she trains her eyes on the floor.
I take a minute to enjoy her, strolling around her kneeling figure with my hands in my pockets, taking in the elegant line of her neck and shoulders, her perfect posture, the delicate curve of her collarbone. The corona of white and gold silk around her knees. The excited heave of her breasts under her bodice. The ring glinting off her finger, better than any collar. A thousand possibilities scorch through me all at once—my cock down her throat; her face in the floor; the nylon tie of a stocking around her wrists. The sound of her begging voice echoing off the empty walls.
Without saying anything, I cup the back of her head with my hand as I stand beside her, and she leans her head against my thigh. Not kittenishly rubbing or bucking as before, but merely resting, enjoying the simplicity of the contact. I enjoy it too, standing above her, looking down on her with pride and pleasure. Both of us exactly where we need to be, and how we need to be.
If only…
If only my little prince were here.
I allow myself the grief and the splintered hurt, even as
I refuse to vent it on Greer. If only Embry were here. If only it were the three of us in this gallery, the only entrance guarded, our privacy secure. I’d make him watch me fuck my wife, and I’d fuck her slow, slick, grinding, so that he would see every slide of me inside of her, every quiver of her stomach, every gasping part of her pretty lips, and know that it was me doing it. I’d make him lick her clean after. I’d make him beg like a dog, I’d make him cry for me. I’d leave a bruise for every minute I loved him that he didn’t love me back.
I’d spread him out and kiss every inch of him. I’d spread Greer’s hair over his flat, muscled stomach just to see the contrast, I’d tickle the soles of his feet until he laughed, I’d press and nuzzle into every corner of him—elbows and in between toes and the hollows under his arms—until he knew that every part of me belonged to him. I’d pin Greer between us and together we would love her the way she needed to be loved, I’d spread her legs and allow him to take his pleasure there, and then when he came inside of her, I would watch and my heart would be full.
