Page 39 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
“Mother.”
“Both at the same time?”
“Mother.”
She lifts a shoulder. “It’s not unheard of, and I’ve encountered stranger things. But how on earth do you plan on running against a man you love?”
I lean against the window frame, looking out onto the pretty churchyard outside. “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
“I don’t approve,” she says, standing. “This is all far too disheveled for my liking. Sloppy. I can’t be certain that any of us will come out unscathed.”
She extends an arm and I thread it through my elbow. “Still,” she says as we leave the dressing room, “you have all the help and power at my disposal. We’ll see you through this, Embry. Somehow.”
I DON’T PAY attention to most of the things said during my wedding ceremony. None of it is important, none of it means anything. It’s a stark act done out of a need to survive, and I treat it as such. Like killing hostiles during the war or smearing a perfectly nice political opponent. I don’t enjoy it, I find it distasteful and repulsive even, but the choices have been taken away a long time ago. It’s this or a future I have no control over, and I’m done with that.
I will control what happens next.
The only part of the ceremony that rouses me from my stupor is Morgan’s voice from the lectern as she gives a reading from Ephesians, one of those readings that’s at almost every wedding. “For this reason,” she is saying in her deliberate, cool voice, “a man will leave his father and his mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery—”
Her voices fades in my mind, and for some reason I am thinking of my own voice quoting soft in a Berlin hotel, this was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.
Fingers in my hair, a firm stomach against my cheek. He still loves Ophelia.
How do you know?
Because he’s cruel to her. The fingers had tightened in my hair to prove his point. The strongest love comes with pain.
Two soldier boys in love. The princess they both wanted. How close we were to our happily ever after, how near it seemed. And now…
I recite vows that mean nothing, and I don’t bother to pretend they mean anything. My face is blank as I say the old words, my voice is toneless as I look into Abilene’s eyes and promise to care for her in sickness and in health. She is both sickness and health all at once. She looks the perfect flush and bloom of radiant motherhood now—at five months pregnant, her slender form perfectly showcases the plumping nest of our child, her skin glows, her hair shines, her lovely face tips into a beatific smile—but her eyes betray the truth. They flash between lifeless and all too lively, between heartless and an emotional mania that unnerves me.
There’s none of that mania today, not for me. I’m beginning to think that I bore her, that the deep pool of her hatred is kept in reserve for Greer, her animated obsession kept in reserve for Ash, and all I’ll get from her now is the lazy satisfaction that she won a crucial battle.
Not for the first time in the last two months, I consider the irony of leaving Ash so I could keep Greer safe, all while I’m marrying the greatest threat to her safety I could possibly imagine. But that only stiffens my resolve to control this, to keep Abilene close. If she’s close, then I can keep an eye on her. I can stop her from hurting Greer again.
A Sanctus is sung, we kneel, we take communion, we stand and finally the kiss. I hear the shutter of several cameras as my lips touch hers. Her skin is warm to the touch, her lips soft with whatever lipstick she’s painted on, and her breath is pleasant, scented with some kind of mint. I have no physical reason to hate every instant of the contact, and yet I do. I pull away too fast, and I see the irritation flick over her face before she schools her expression back into a happy smile. I might pay for this later.
The rest of the day is as detestable as the ceremony, but I manage to achieve an anesthetic sense of distance about it all, a dull dispassion that more or less keeps me sober and pliable as the photographers take their pictures at the church and we head for the reception venue (a large flat boat on the Potomac, filled with too much champagne and too many people I’d rather not see.)
Abilene is far from perturbed by my detachment. If anything, she seems amused by it, perhaps marking it as some sort of victory. I don’t care. I don’t care what she thinks or what anyone else thinks or whispers about. All I want is for this beastly day to be over.
It’s only once, as we’re doing the first dance, that I see her mask slip a bit. She slides her hand around the back of my neck to pull me closer.
“I saw you booked another room for yourself at the Four Seasons.”
“Don’t worry,” I reply. “I’ll be discreet about our sleeping arrangements.”
“You know there’s no need, right?” She looks up at me with eyes the color of fading light between trees, an ominous, lifeless blue. “I’m
already pregnant with your child, Embry. Greer is lost to you. Why not take pleasure where you can? You certainly didn’t seem to mind fucking other people a year ago.”
It’s true. When Greer and Ash were falling in love for the second time, I’d kept my bed warm with an almost grim relentlessness. But it brought me no real relief then, and I know it won’t bring me any relief now, because it’s not what I really need. What I need is mythological and painful and holy, an ecstatic mix of lust and grief and eternity that only Ash and Greer can give me, and if I can’t have that, then there’s nothing for me in the impersonal fucks I used to have. I would feel no better after than I had before, and I might feel worse, the cheap transaction tawdry and pale when contrasted with my sweaty, golden memories of Ash and Greer.
“No, Abilene. You’ve won enough. You won’t win that as well.”
She sighs. “Fine. Have it your way for now; just remember I have an entire honeymoon to change your mind.”
God, that sounds unbearable. I’m technically unemployed at the moment, but I wonder if I can find a plausible reason to cut our trip short. Create enough photo ops to slake the press’s thirst for gossip about the First Lady’s cousin and me, and then vanish back home and spend my days looking at my mother’s lake instead of my new wife.
