Page 61 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
SIXTEEN
ASH
then
Belvedere tells me that things have changed since I was his age, but well into the early 2000s, I’d encountered this insidious idea that bisexuality was a phase, a transient place. A stage of ghost queerness. And after a few years, you would realize that you were truly gay or truly straight, and then you would end your experiments and move on to a real life and a real identity, whatever that meant. The idea that you could truly remain bisexual into mature adulthood seemed only academically possible—even David Bowie settled down and married Iman, after all, and if David fucking Bowie could tame his sexuality, then clearly anyone could—or at least so the subliminal messaging seemed to say.
If you were gay, then be gay; if you were straight, then be straight. Anything in between was denial and make believe.
Of course, that’s all normative nonsense, and we’ve redefined queer paradigms to include bisexuality as a real space. But on a diet of MTV and VH1 and all the cultural mainstays of the eighties and nineties, there was enough of that old thinking to leak into my brain, and so I found myself in an uncharacteristic stage of unrest after Embry left Carpathia. Embry was the first person I had ever loved, and surely that meant something crucial about me? Maybe bisexuality had just been a stepping stone and I was a gay man after all, one who’d muddled to the realization after years of sampling and research. Perhaps all that clarity I’d felt as a bisexual teenager had simply been the blind certainty of youth, because I knew, as I watched Embry leave the barracks in the gray light of dawn, that I would love him until the day I died. And because he was the first, I assumed that he would be the only, and I rearranged my soul to accommodate this new belief. I wasn’t bisexual. I could only ever love Embry Moore.
And it felt true for a long time.
Until London.
Until Greer.
I DRAGGED around a broken heart for three years. I carried it like a wounded soldier, limping and bloody to a destination that looked close but felt far. I nursed it, fed it even, though I had no real reason. Embry and I had shared…well, what exactly? A dance once? A kiss in the woods? How was that enough to make me feel this way? And how was he the one I could fall in love with when so many others had tried, and arguably he’d given me little more than disdain, mixed signals, and a waltz?
Nevertheless, it was enough and he was the one, and for three years, I tended my love for him like a garden. I searched for him online whenever I could, asked mutual friends about him constantly. I even went back to my pre-Morgan practice of pseudo-abstinence. I fucked no one, because no one was Embry except Embry and he didn’t want me. And the aftermath of the shameful mess I’d made of Morgan’s emotions was a powerful reminder—fucking belonged with feelings. Maybe it didn’t have to be love but at the very least affection and respect.
But after three years with no word from Embry—with rumors of his sexual exploits reaching me even overseas—something had grown brittle inside my control and then that something finally snapped. It wasn’t that I stopped loving him—never that—it was just that I was twenty-six and I hadn’t even kissed anyone since him. I’d been fucking my own fist for so long, turning away interested men and women out of a principle that grew more and more abstract every day, and I was lonely.
Or maybe lonely isn’t the right word. It was more like I was anemic or starved for something or stuck in the darkness so long that my body cried out for the sun at a cellular level. I had known what it was to unleash myself with Morgan. I had kissed the man I loved with the knowledge that he would let me do whatever I wanted. I had felt intimate, aching power, and there was no unfeeling it after the fact, no way to forget.
And the longer I went without it, the more listless and unhappy I became. That and the insomnia—this blood and mud-filled fog of memory that replaced my sleep—were twin millstones around my neck, dragging me to the ground.
There was a month gap between a posting in Krakow and yet another deployment to Carpathia, and it felt pointless to go home. I missed my mother and I missed Kay, but at least in Europe there were always new things to do and see, and if I went home to Kansas City, I knew I’d just succumb to the dull misery that seemed to follow me wherever I went. It was better to stay busy.
And then Merlin found me, pulling up in a sleek black car as I waited at the bus stop closest to the Krakow base. He rolled down the window. “Shouldn’t they be driving you to the airport?”
I gave him a genuine smile. He had become a real presence in my life over the last few years, writing and visiting frequently, and often with incredibly valuable advice and wisdom. I thought of him something like a mentor, but also as a friend. “I told them I’d take the bus into the city,” I said. “I wanted to see Krakow some more before I left. And it’s good to see you.”
He nodded. “It’s good to see you too.” He tilted his head at me, giving me an appraising look. “How would you like to go to London with me?”
Which is how I ended up in England.
Merlin took me to meetings and dinners and parties, introducing me variously as his assistant or as a family friend or as a military liaison—whichever excuse held the most weight at the time—and for the first time in my life, I saw how war worked on the top end of things. I saw how people in expensive suits at expensive restaurants made decisions for tired, freezing soldiers thousands of miles away, I saw the almost careless tabulation of mortalities and morbidities as an impersonal inventory instead of the bleeding, screaming things they actually were. I saw the incremental and subtle currents of diplomacy, how one slight at a dinner or one misstep in a memo had powerful ramifications for the men and women actually fighting the war.
It bothered me.
Merlin could see it bothering me, and he let me unspool all of my tangled feelings about it when we were alone, encouraging me to find the reasons underneath the reasons I could articulate, and that was the real beginning, that month in London. The first time I was forced to confront the intersection of politics and war, and to want both of those things to be better. The first time I began to search for the strands of international and domestic power and decipher where the answer lay in the web of it all.
I didn’t know it was the beginning of anything then, obviously. All I knew was that I’d spent the last four years of my life with bullets and mud, and the last three without the man I’d fallen in love with, and even London, teeming with bustle and energy as it did, couldn’t do anything to transmute my restlessness into anything productive or good. All I had was a blunted ache of loneliness and zero hope for the future of this war as I watched the arcane and stupidly blithe rotations of Merlin’s sphere.
And one night, it was just too much. The war, Merlin’s world, the familiar ache of wanting Embry. I sat drinking at a gin bar down the street from Merlin’s flat where I was staying, and I decided that I was going to drink until I couldn’t find my way out the door. I was going to drink until both Embry and the war didn’t exist any longer.
At least, I was going to until a man sat down next me at the bar. It was a rather impersonal, trendy kind of place—in one of those perpetually-building-overpriced-flats part of London, and obviously had been opened to cater to the young City types who lived around the neighborhood. And the man was dressed to fit the scenery, as all the City types were when they went out at night (as if needing to sartorially prove that they were so busy working late and making money that they didn’t have time to change into ‘going out’ clothes.)
Or maybe he really was just working late and wanted to cool off with some gin before he went up to whatever glass-balconied tower he lived in. Either way, he was handsome and brimming with the sleek confidence of a man in his twenties already making lots of money, and the way his suit pulled at his arms and back when he turned to look at me was quite arresting.
He smiled. He was Indian, with skin a burnished shade of golden brown, near-black eyes, and meticulously tended scruff.
