Page 64 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
“You can’t fix it,” the loudest voice said scathingly. “Just stay away—”
“I’m not going to do that, I can’t do that—”
“Just leave me alone!” And then the sound of glass fracturing, a musical rain that startled me more than any gunshot. What was wrong with that girl? Who broke a glass at a fucking party?
I heard the second, quieter girl whisper something, and then there was the brisk staccato of high heels and a slammed door. Someone had left the room, or both of them, and either way, I felt a compulsion to go clean up the mess they had left. It was the right thing to do, and while I might have done so many wrong things in Carpathia that I couldn’t sleep without sweating through my sheets, I still tried to be a good man. One who did the right things…like cleaning up a broken glass at a party.
Except when I rounded the corner into the room, I saw that someone else had beaten me to it.
I SAW TWO THINGS FIRST, and those two things nearly brought me to my knees.
The first was a spill of hair over her shoulder, a cascade of platinum white silk which was like nothing I’d ever seen. It promised thickness and softness and light; I had half a mind that if I touched it, I’d be struck dead. It seemed like the kind of hair mortals weren’t allowed to possess, which meant that she had to be some kind of demi-goddess. When she moved to reach for a shard of glass, the warm light of the room moved through her hair like water—or maybe it was her hair that was like water, gold and white, rippling and fluid.
The second thing: she was kneeling.
In a pool of broken glass.
It was like a fantasy I’d never known enough about myself to have, but once I saw it, I knew nothing could ever be the same. I was being rewritten, reshaped, or something better—like I was being reshaped to find out that it had been my true shape all along. Some door inside me swung open, some key slid easily into an old lock, and the air sang with heavy fate.
This beautiful creature, on her knees. Suffering for someone she loved. Pain and strength in every line of her body, in every duck of her head and stretch of her hand as she plucked splinters of glass one by one off the parquet.
And I was drowning in it. I didn’t know her face, I didn’t know her name, but in an instant, it felt like I knew her. It felt like she slid into the empty places inside me.
Embry was the only other time I’d felt that, and I had to take in a breath as I realized what that meant. My cock—slowly stiffening in response to the sight of this person kneeling—was hardening for a woman. My chest was tight for a woman. My mind was abuzz with ideas about every way I could make this woman my own, my little one, for always.
There was no time to sift through the personal and cultural implications of this, and even if there had been, I wouldn’t have needed to anyway. The speed at which I rearranged my beliefs about myself matched the speed in which I found myself fascinated by this girl. Matched the speed at which I made a decision.
I stepped into the room.
“You’ll hurt yourself if you’re not careful,” I said.
SEVENTEEN
EMBRY
now
“Don’t, Dah-dee,” Galahad scolds, taking the wooden apple out of my hand and putting it back inside the suitcase lying open on the floor. “There,” he says, satisfied. “There, Dah-dee.” At less than two years old, his baby accent makes the th in there sound like a d. Dere. Dere, Da-dee. It makes my heart break with how fucking cute it is.
He makes my heart break with how fucking cute he is. Every day. Every minute. Since that first time I held him in the hospital, wrapped up like one of those Glo-Worm toys from my childhood, just a sleepy burrito of soft cheeks and dark hair peeking out from a hospital hat. If I thought I couldn’t live without Ash and Greer, I’d been wrong, but it was only because of Galahad, the son whose name Greer ultimately chose. From the moment I first saw him, so sweet and curious, I knew he was the Grail knight my queen had described, the kind of child that would grow up to see the face of God, and I didn’t care how ridiculous the name sounded. It felt right that he should be named by Greer. Necessary. (Abilene didn’t know that, of course; she assumed I’d picked the name myself, and I didn’t bother to correct her.)
“But if I bring the apple, then you won’t have it here to play with while I’m gone,” I explain. “Are you sure you want Daddy to take it?”
Galahad nods with baby conviction and then turns to leave the bedroom. He stops after a step and points back to the suitcase. “There, Dah-dee,” he says sternly. The meaning is clear: keep that fucking apple where I put it.
And then because he’s so cute toddling off with his little deck shoes and his little diaper butt under his corduroys, I run over and scoop him up, pretending to eat his belly while he laughs and laughs.
“I’m going to be late,” Abilene says, coming out of the bathroom behind me, still fastening an earring into her lobe. “Are you sure you don’t want to take a later flight and join me?”
I pause the noming noises I’m making against Galahad’s tummy and lift my head. “I’d rather be roasted alive,” I say cheerfully, and then resume tickling my son until he’s shrieking with delight.
Abilene rolls her eyes. If I had held any distant hope that she might reveal a secret maternal gene after Galahad’s birth, I’d been sorely mistaken—she’s just as Abilene as ever, although she’s surprisingly self-aware where our child is concerned. While she can’t muster the kind of parental affection that comes so easily to me, she’s never been anything but safe, organized, and determined about his life. She hired the best care when he was an infant—the most sought-after nanny in the District, a woman named Enid who I cannot pay enough money for being as warm and clever as she is—and aside from her incurable coldness, she’s never endangered him, never emotionally poisoned him, never even raised her voice around him.
It’s absolutely the least that should be asked of any parent, but yet I’m still grateful. Between Enid and me, I can harbor the faint hope that he might escape his childhood unscathed.
“It would be a good opportunity to schmooze the RNC donors,” Abilene is saying as she finishes with the earring and moves back to her room on the other side of our shared bathroom. “A last infusion of cash can’t hurt anything.”
“We already have too much cash,” I say, setting Galahad on his feet and watching him tear out of the door to find Enid. “And I told you, I’d like to spend the night before the debate preparing.”
