Page 32 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
"Yes, God." The thought of replacing my fingers with my cock into that wet, hot place had me nearly wild. "Do I need a condom?"
"I'm on the pill," she said, "and I'm clean. And we both know you're clean."
"I'm sorry if I hurt you," I told her, my hand already on my belt.
She gave a full-throated laugh at that. "No, you're not."
I laughed back because she was right, and the freedom of it felt vast and immense. That I could have someone like this and that they could want it—like the roll of a blue sky before the nose of an airplane. Limitless and thrilling.
Morgan was tall for a woman, so I could sling her leg over my arm to open her up to me. It was dark and all I could see was the place between her legs where she got darker, but it was enough to make me groan again. With fumbling eagerness, I found her wet slit with my penis, using the tip to slip and rub and explore until we were both trembling. The pressure of the air on my skin was too much, like the atmosphere had thickened, like gravity had tripled, and it was that same heavy feeling I felt when I pulled the sword from the stone at the carnival, that same feeling in my bones that this was important somehow, that this would mark an indelible moment in my life. This was a thing that could not be undone.
At the time, I took it as confirmation rather than as a warning, and for that mistake, I have paid dearly, but all of that was ahead of me then. I only knew the slick invitation of her body, the novelty of
not having to stop. The joy of hearing someone ask for more and harder and everything, give me everything. So I did, I gave her everything. For the first time in my life, I pushed inside another person's body and took my pleasure there.
I HAVE ASKED myself numberless times since if some part of me knew or suspected. It's been almost two years since Jenny's funeral—that cheerless day when I both put my wife in the ground and learned about the incest I’d committed in ignorance—and so I've had plenty of time to go over the events in Prague time and again. Surely I must have noticed? Surely there must have been something, an inkling, an unconscious familiarity, some signal from her DNA to mine that we shared a mother?
But there wasn't.
Perhaps if I'd been older, I would have been wiser. I would have made familial connections, I would have sensed that something other than mutual attraction connected us. Or perhaps if I hadn't been a virgin, if I'd been well seasoned and worldly, I would have been able to slow down and think about it. Maybe I wouldn't have slept with her at all.
But I wasn't older and I wasn't worldly. I was young and eager and fervid. I was like an animal in rut, and once I'd felt what it was like to fuck someone, I was mindlessly keen to do it again. And again. And again. Morgan had laughed at me that week, at my appetite, which only grew as it was fed, and at my impatient willingness to do anything she wanted, so long as it meant I could fuck her again.
There was more than fucking that week too. She showed me how to spank her, how to hold her over my lap and alternate swats with teasing rubs to her clit. She showed me how to tie someone to a bedframe, how to push my cock into an open throat, how to paddle an ass with a hairbrush. She showed me how to make a woman come as I rode her, how to fuck sitting and how to fuck standing and how to fuck lying down in a bed.
There was one moment when I had her standing in front of the bathroom mirror with her hands braced on the sink, when I was fucking her from behind and staring at the slide of my erection in and out of her vagina. She looked up at the mirror and I did too, and we both stared at our reflection, which was striking not only in its carnality, but in the way we matched. Black hair, green eyes. Full lips and high cheekbones and noses slightly Roman at the bridge.
"We look good together," she said.
Perhaps that was the moment I should have noticed. The moment I should have asked myself if there was any chance in the world that things were not as they appeared. But then Morgan said, "You know you can spank me while you're inside me," and the moment burst like a soap bubble, making room for my palm on her bare ass and the gasping orgasm that followed.
We only saw Embry the once that week, the night he taught me how to dance, but he was on my mind constantly. Even as I fucked Morgan, even as I spanked her and bit her, my thoughts bent towards him. Was he on the other side of the wall right now, fucking someone he'd picked up at a club? Was it a boy or a girl? If it was a boy, did he pretend it was me?
Did he think about our little waltz as often as I did? Was he humming Strauss as he got dressed, was he touching his own shoulder to remember the feeling of my hand there? I was almost driven to madness with the lack of him, with the lack of hope for our future, and Morgan offered relief. With her body, with her attention. She offered me a glimpse of myself that I'd never had before, and for that I will always be thankful. Even knowing what I do now, I can't ever erase that gratitude. She gave of herself generously, unselfishly, while she must have known the entire time that I would never feel for her the way I felt for her brother.
Glein happened, the first and most disastrous test of my leadership skills. The war picked up; I barely saw the spoiled prince I'd fallen in love with, and I got the distinct impression he was avoiding me. But the moments when we did see each other, the times I was able to talk to him and joke with him and touch him under the pretext of playful fraternity, there sometimes seemed a glint of thaw in those haughty blue eyes. It sometimes seemed as if he was looking at me when he thought I wouldn't notice, that he closed his eyes just a beat too long when I touched him. That he caught his breath whenever I said his name.
It gave me hope. Hope that he didn't hate me. Hope that he felt even a sliver of what I felt, hope that he had the same glass splinter in his heart as I did, shimmering and deep.
The day before he left, I'd only meant to tell him that I'd miss him. That I hoped he'd stay in touch, that we'd see each other again. But then, somehow, I'd admitted the terrible truth.
Yes. I wish you belonged to me.
I wished he was mine to keep safe, mine to discipline, mine to cherish and to fuck, and finally saying it out loud to him had knocked something loose. My common sense, I suppose, or my sense of propriety. And that's how I ended up on top of him, and if I had ever doubted that he wanted me, all my doubts were erased in that moment. He opened his mouth for me, arched his back in mindless response, rubbed his hard dick along the length of mine. He kissed me back with a fervor that matched my own. And when I told him, a little shyly, that I'd never felt this way about another man before, what I meant was that I'd never felt this way about another person, that I used to think I was missing the part of my soul that could fall in love with another soul, but now I knew differently. For the first time in my life, I knew what it was to be consumed with someone else. He was my Patroclus and if he ever left me, my world would darken until it crawled with shadows and blighted every promise of spring.
He did leave me.
And the shadows crawled.
TEN
GREER
now
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
My cousin stands in the doorway of my Georgetown office, polished and glossy as always, a dress of robin’s egg blue highlighting her slender figure and the small swell of Embry’s unborn child. The sight is like a slow stab in my own belly, going deeper and deeper every minute she’s in front of me.
