Page 65 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
I hear her make a scoffing noise in her room.
I walk through the bathroom to her doorway, stopping at the threshold and crossing my arms. I don’t come into her room as a rule, and she mostly stays out of mine, and her acceptance of my boundaries has been one of the reasons I’ve stayed sane over the last two years, even if she does try to push me on them every now and again.
“By the way,” I say mildly, “I hope you go straight to hell for that press statement you released yesterday.”
She looks up at me with a mock-innocent expression. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“It doesn’t matter that you fed the Times that story anonymously. Morgan and I know—and I’m certain Ash and Greer do too—that it was you. I just got off the phone with Morgan, and she’s furious.”
“Morgan will get over it, and so will you,” Abilene dismisses. “It will hurt Ash’s campaign far worse than ours.”
“I’m not concerned about the campaign,” I say incredulously. “I’m concerned about my fucking sister. My nephew. You’ve just single-handedly ruined their lives, and you don’t even care?”
“It was time,” she says, all nonchalant. “And they’ll get over it.”
“Fuck you.”
“I’ve been asking you to for a long time. Are you finally changing your mind?”
I stare at her for a moment, and she stares right back, no regret or shame anywhere in her face. I don’t even know why I looked for it.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she tells me. “Right now you’re thinking about how good it would feel to announce that you’re going to divorce me. To take Galahad and storm out of here.”
“It would feel very good,” I agree. I can almost taste the relief now, the sweet freedom, and I’ve daydreamed of divorcing her so often that I have an entire Rolodex filled with different fantasy scenarios. Leaving her in public or leaving her under the cover of night; having her served with divorce papers or tossing the papers myself onto her dinner plate. You name it, I’ve lived it inside my mind with unhealthy relish.
Abilene tilts her head at me in a way that’s uncomfortably sympathetic. “But you’re also thinking about all the reasons why you can’t do that. You can’t win this campaign in the middle of a divorce, and you know that I wouldn’t make it quiet or easy for you. I’d make i
t so messy and public that you’d not only lose the election, you’d never hold office again. There’s no end to the lies I could tell in divorce court, Embry. Drugs and drinking…prostitutes. Teenage prostitutes. That you also gave drugs to. And paid to have abortions. It wouldn’t be as hard to fake as you’d think.”
“Jesus, Abilene.”
She shrugs as she turns back to her mirror and ruffles her fingers through her hair. It shakes in perfect copper waves over her shoulders. “Still want that divorce?”
I don’t answer her, and I don’t bother telling her goodbye. I get my suitcase, cuddle Galahad for as long as he’ll let me, and tell Enid to text me if she needs anything.
Then I catch my flight to New York.
MY AIDE—A young white woman named Dinah—checks us into our hotel, makes sure I have all my notes and then we go our separate ways. Her up to her room and me up to mine, and it’s as I’m holding the hotel key against the door’s RFID pad that I notice there’s someone else in the hallway.
I don’t recognize the face, but I’d recognize that stance and suit and earpiece combination anywhere: he’s Secret Service. Which means…
I open my door and all the air is caught in my chest, trapped and sharp and urgent.
Greer is here.
Greer is here in my room, standing at the window and looking into the Manhattan skyline, and I can’t breathe, can’t even think. She turns to face me with a smile, the city lights twinkling behind her as if they love her as much as I do, as if they want to touch her as much as I do.
“This is kind of familiar,” she teases. “You walking into a hotel room, me standing at the window.”
And like that, all the heat and urgency in my chest arrows to my groin. Because it is familiar, and the last time this happened, she ended up sitting on my face in her wedding gown, and I ended up making a mess of the inside of my tux as her husband licked the taste of her off my lips. And she’s even wearing a white dress now, a short sweater-dress with long sleeves and boots up past her knees, making her legs look a million miles long, and shit. I need them around my waist, wrapped around my head, I need that sweater dress bunched up between our stomachs, yanked up to her neck so I can bite at her breasts.
But I stay where I am, slowly setting my suitcase against the wall and letting the door close behind me. “Why are you here?” I ask, struggling to keep my voice neutral, struggling to keep the two years of loneliness and longing hidden.
“Ash sent me,” she says, and of course he did, and I don’t know why that fills me with equal parts excitement and disappointment. Excitement because if Ash sent her, if she came here when he asked, that means there’s only one way tonight will end.
But then why isn’t he here too? Why not come himself, why not the three of us?
“He’s spending the night in Seattle,” Greer says softly, reading my face. “Lyr asked him to stay, and Ash would do anything for that boy.”
