Page 30 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
Done.
One look at those winter-blue eyes and those delicate lips and I was finished. One glance at his lean, long body, and I was falling. Every part of me responded with heat and flush and wrenching want, like a hook had been fastened somewhere in my chest and was now giving an almighty tug, and the only thing to ease the ache would be to get closer, closer, closer.
I'd never seen a boy so beautiful. Haughty as he was, overindulged and so obviously dissolute, he was the loveliest person, boy or girl, I'd ever seen.
I still pinned him against the wall, though. And it was when I had him against the wall with my forearm on his throat and my body trapping his that he sealed his fate. As I was choking him, he looked at me with his whole world in his eyes.
TO SAY I became preoccupied with my haughty co-officer is an understatement. He became something of a meditation for me—at night, I fell asleep mentally sketching the lines of his face; during the day, my focus settled on him as he worked. His body so slender and tempting as he did calisthenics, the sweat glistening on his throat as he ran. His easy smile and his careless, lavish charm. He had the face of a Regency novel hero, but his personality belonged somewhere in the twenties or thirties. Sebastian Flyte at Oxford. Gatsby in his mansion. An American expat in Paris merrily burning all his money on liquor and food and women…or maybe men. He made jokes sometimes, sly references that had the other men in his unit howling with laughter or shoving his shoulder in embarrassment, but it was impossible to tell from afar how much truth lay in his jokes and nudges and how much of it was just Embry performing some persona that I didn't quite understand.
But oh, how I wanted it to be true. Even though we hadn't talked since I'd thrown him against a wall, even though I could tell by his pointed avoidance of me that he was still pissed, I wanted him to like boys too. At college it had seemed so easy, so open, that common language of smiles and touches to signal availability and interest. But here everything was murkier, submerged beneath the masculine gloss of military life, hidden in subtexts inside subtexts.
There had been that look when I'd pinned him against the wall, so fleeting I might have imagined it…
Then came that day in the woods when I beat him at our drill, roundly annihilating his team and then having the pleasure of shooting him with the paint round myself. I'd been the one to see his eyes flare with pain as the bullet made contact, the one to see his eyes flare with something else when I put my boot on his wrist. I couldn't help but smile then, because it felt righter than anything ever had before; this one small thing was the closest I'd ever come to being truly myself with a person I was falling in love with. I didn't just want to put my boot on someone's wrist—I wanted him to want my boot on his wrist. And I didn't only want to stand over him and feel the tread of my boot pressing into his skin, I wanted to kiss the tread marks when I was finished. I wanted to feel his almost-curly hair beneath my fingers as I thanked him for letting me hurt him, and then I wanted to press my hand to his chest and feel the beat of his heart while I persuaded his lips apart and tasted his mouth.
I wanted to take him to bed.
The thought scared me as much as it excited me. I'd spent the last seven years very intentionally not bringing anyone into my bed because I wanted to be myself fully in that moment, and here was this decadent princeling of a boy whom I barely knew, and taking him to bed was all I could think about.
But then the moment faded, and he said, "You'd have to hurt me much worse than this if you want to hear me beg." And it didn't sound like a dare, it didn’t sound like the words of a man who wanted me to make him beg. It sounded very much like he hated me.
It thrummed through me, this hatred of his, unchaining my sense of honor, my dedication to consent. I couldn't take this soldier back to my room and cinch his wrists with my belt, I couldn't ask him to let me inside his body when he clearly felt that I was…that I was what? Some kind of bully? A heartless rival?
Realizing that's how he saw me stung. And maybe that's why I reacted the way I did to meeting his sister in the halls of our barracks later that day. Even now, I can't tell you whether it was purely hurt or a need to be close to Embry somehow—even if that was through Morgan—or some mixture of the two, but I decided right then and there that I was willing to take the sister if the brother wouldn't have me. It was a bitter decision, made in a bitter moment, and even now I think it hurt me more than it hurt him. And of course, the consequences of that decision have unfolded into a shameful chaos of tragic scale.
All because I thought this blue-eyed boy didn't want my boot on his wrist. For that one transgression, I sired a thousand more.
"DO you want to fuck my stepbrother?"
The question came sudden and blunt, too fast for me to school my reaction. Morgan took one look at me and said, "Ah."
It was our first night in Prague, and Embry, much to my disappointment, had vanished after we checked into our hotel. I knew he didn't want me, but it didn't stop me from wanting him, even if it was just to watch him smoke cigarettes and quote Coleridge and Keats and Eliot and other boarding school poets until the fog swarmed the city and the streets were silent except for the sound o
f his voice. I craved him like I suppose addicts crave things; it was blood deep, restless, dangerous. I'd literally never felt that way about another human before, and had I once believed I was aromantic? Now I knew I was the opposite of aromantic, I was all romance, I was all gnawing emotion and pained longing and staring at cobbled streets hoping he would appear.
But he wouldn't appear. Morgan told me that he was already fucking his way through New Town and drinking the top shelves in every club dry. It was just us, and might be just us for the entire week. God, how I panged at the thought.
"Don't worry," she said. "I won't tell anyone."
"He hates me," I said, taking a stab at an offhanded tone and failing. "So it doesn't matter."
Morgan just smiled at that, a secretive smile that seemed almost feline in nature.
"And I don't even know if he likes men."
"Oh," she said with a coy look, "Embry likes everyone. Boys and girls."
"And anyway," I said, taking a long drink of the Czech pilsner in front of me and then realizing as I set it down that I was a little drunk, "I haven't actually ever fucked anyone. So me wanting to fuck him doesn't mean much."
Her green eyes widened. I'd actually surprised her. "You're a virgin?"
"Embry would laugh for hours if he knew," I said, half wryly, half unhappily.
She shook her head. "I don't understand, and you're going to have to explain this to me—how does a person go to war a virgin?"
I fiddled with the beer bottle on the table, spinning it in slow circles. "I…I have a way that I want to be with people. I'm not ashamed of it, but I refuse to be that way with someone unless they want it. And I won't sleep with someone until I can be that way, because I believe it's immoral to share something like that if I can’t do it honestly. If I have to close my eyes and pretend in order to finish."
I kept my words purposefully vague—mostly out of respect for the fact that Morgan and I barely knew each other and it was hardly appropriate for me to force my sexual baggage on her—but also because I didn't have the language to describe it all yet and I didn't know exactly how to convey what I meant. And I didn't think she'd be interested in my rehashing the plot of Labyrinth to explain it to her.
