Page 57 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
We end up in my office, alone, and Belvedere hands me a folder while he steps outside to order me a cold can of sparkling water and my
usual lunch of grilled chicken and kale. It’s too easy to eat like shit on the campaign trail—the travel and the dashing from one place to the next—and most of my staffers have succumbed to the seductive ease of room service and greasy delivery. I refuse, as much as I refuse to curtail my morning workouts or my evenings alone with Greer, and in any case, Belvedere takes a strange delight in finding me healthy food no matter where we’re at, a trait I exploit relentlessly.
I’m flipping through the folder as he walks back in with my lunch and his own—a cup of oatmeal and a smoothie. I start eating as he talks.
“It’s the latest notes from Uri and Trieste for the debate Thursday. They’ve also asked if you want to prep one more time against someone pretending to be Mr. Moore, or if you also want to prep against someone doing Harrison Fasse.”
Fasse is the Democratic candidate facing Embry and me, and a clever young man, if sometimes hot-blooded and stubborn. But while he’s a good candidate overall, Embry and I are polling too close to each other for Fasse to be my main focus.
Embry has to be my main focus.
My fork pauses ever so slightly above my plate, and then I resume eating. You’d think after all this time that I’d be able to think of Embry without that reflexive flinch, without that cold puncture of pain in my chest, but no. Not even after all the practice I’ve had over the last seventeen years of having my heart broken by him. It never stops hurting.
“We don’t need to practice against Fasse,” I tell Belvedere. “We’ll have Uri do Embry again.”
Belvedere makes a note. “Tomorrow evening then. We could also do a practice run the day after, on the day of the debate itself?”
I finish eating and go back to the folder, skimming over the notes. This debate is focused mainly on energy and the economy—two places where my administration has excelled—and also two places where Embry and I hold only mildly different beliefs. Most of Merlin and Trieste’s debate strategy is focused on clarifying those differences, and illustrating how I’ve already implemented my ideas. As debates go, it shouldn’t be truly difficult.
The most difficult thing will be Embry himself…and the two years hanging between us.
Two years. Two years since he left my bed on a chilly October morning and never looked back, and he hasn’t so much as texted me since then, not even after the campaign began in earnest. Not a word, spoken or written, not an accidental meeting of eyes in a crowded room, because of course he’s taken great pains not to share any kind of room with me.
“That won’t be necessary,” I say. “I’m solid on the issues and on Embry’s position. The only difficult thing about the debate will be seeing him, and nothing can prepare me for that except for him.”
Belvedere nods, but I don’t miss the slight catch of his lower lip on his teeth. The mention of Embry’s name has an effect on him too.
Three times in the last two years, I’ve sent Belvedere to him, just like I did on the night of his wedding to Abilene, and three times Belvedere has returned alone. I sent Belvedere to him a fourth time, with different instructions, and was rewarded with my aide coming back rumpled and flushed, and newly freckled with bites and sucks.
He was my body man in a literal sense that night, a gift to Embry, since my little prince wouldn’t come to me. I knew from my occasional conversations with Morgan that Embry has been strictly chaste since our last night together—refusing even to relieve his needs with a mistress or a lover, and as much as I wished he would come to me, I couldn’t bear the thought of him being lonely. Of his body starving for the simple touch of a bed partner. And Belvedere was willing, eager, squirming and hard when I asked him to do this thing for me, and so I sent him, and when he returned several hours later, well-used and glowing, I made him tell Greer and me every sordid detail.
It was wrong of me, I suppose, for a host of reasons. Firstly, even though I’d introduced Belvedere to Lyonesse a year before and he was training formally as a submissive, he wasn’t my submissive, and there was the small complication that I think he wanted to be. That, in addition to the yearning looks I’d seen him give Embry, meant there were enough emotional snags between us to make it a cruel thing to ask. And a cruel thing to give Embry, because I knew he wouldn’t be able to refuse. It’s one thing to hold a lover at a distance; it’s another thing when that lover comes to you already dripping with temptation. Even if that lover is using the mouth and hands and body of someone else.
It’s a testament to Belvedere’s faithfulness that our strange night never changed anything. I still treated him as fondly and respectfully as I ever had, and he never betrayed a hint of longing or frustration that none of the events had repeated themselves. I’ve asked him more than once about it, checking in with him to see if he’s grown to resent that night—or me. It’s a form of aftercare, of course, and also I do genuinely care. I wouldn’t have asked him if I wasn’t certain the task would have excited him, and he gave me clear and eager consent that night—but still. It’s not an everyday thing, fucking your boss’s old lover…and even less everyday to deliver the kind of gifts Embry and I exchange. But my instincts about Belvedere were right, and we’ve only ever been richer for the experience.
“So you’ll touch down in Portland in an hour, and then we’ll do our meeting with the fishing and game lobby right after, which means we’ll have to move fast to get you to the rally after that—” Belvedere, who was in the middle of sliding a fresh piece of paper across the desk, pauses as his phone buzzes on the table…at the same time as mine also buzzes.
There’s a knock on the door, and Greer steps into the office, closing it behind her. Even after two years of marriage, my blood still heats at the sight of her, my chest still goes tight with intense love and possession. Right now, she’s that adorably bookish and clever version of Greer that I love more than almost any other: her hair’s up in a messy bun, stabbed through with a pencil, and she’s barefoot with a highlighter still in hand. She’d taken the semester off from Georgetown to campaign with me more easily, but she’s in the final rounds of edits on her book, and she’s spent every free moment working on the manuscript.
But it’s not western concepts of kingship or power in the Dark Ages that’s driven her inside my office now.
“Angel?” I ask as she leans against the door.
“Ash,” she says quietly. “Have you seen it yet?”
I glance down to see the call I just missed from Merlin and several unread text messages. I scroll down quickly as I hear Belvedere swear under his breath.
I catch a few words:
Lyr.
Public statement.
Press.
This is bad, Maxen, really bad.
“She did it,” says Greer. “Abilene went public about Lyr.”
