Page 72 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
“Took you long enough,” he says.
“I came straight here.”
“I’m not talking about tonight.”
I don’t have an answer to that, and he knows it. He sets the scotch down and prowls towards me. Everything inside me is screaming to take a step back or to fly at him—to run or to attack.
I don’t do either of these things, but I feel the closed door behind me like an iron barrier, I feel cuffed and collared just by standing in front of him, and I hate that I still love it, that I miss it, that I want it. I hate myself. I hate him. I hate the lamps around the room that make him glow with an almost angelic radiance. I hate how good he looks with his tie loose and the city lights behind him. I hate how his green eyes burn for me as hotly as they burned in that Carpathian forest when he put his boot on my wrist.
“Why did you bring me here?” I ask, as if I don’t know. As if I’m not deliberately provoking him.
“Why do you think?”
“To fuck me.”
“You really think,” he says dangerously, coming close to me, “that you deserve to be fucked right now?”
“You would have been there with Greer last night,” I point out. “Why not, if not to fuck me?”
“If I’d been there with Greer last night, you wouldn’t have been able to sit down today, and your cock would still be hard. You don’t know what I would have done if I were there, but I guarantee you that you would be a lot less impudent to me tonight.”
I almost laugh. We just spent an hour and a half sparring over the most important issues facing our world today, and he whips out the word impudent? If I hadn’t felt unmanned before, I certainly feel unmanned now—my best efforts and all the Republican Party’s best money, and it’s just childish impudence to him? He might as well call me a brat.
“I can’t decide whether I want to hit you or kiss you,” I tell him honestly.
He steps closer. His shoes touch my shoes, and for a terrible moment, I remember every time that’s ever happened, the intimate knock of leather against leather. In the Army and during his first campaign. At his wedding to Jenny, when he asked for help with his boutonnière, and my toes bumped against his as I fiddled with the stupid flower pin and he stared at my mouth and I pretended not to notice.
“Funny,” he breathes, “I was just thinking the same thing.”
“You won,” I spit. “How can you possibly be thinking the same thing?”
“I won?” he demands. “Really? You call listening to you slander me for a year winning? Fighting you tonight—that’s winning for me?”
“You used to like fighting me,” I say sulkily. I know I’m being deliberately shitty, but I can’t stop myself, I can’t force myself past it, can’t stop it. It’s been two years since we’ve seen each other and all we’ve done tonight is argue publicly and now privately, and it’s stupid. It’s so fucking stupid, because all I wished for last night was for us to be alone and happy, and now all I want to do is choke him. Or be choked by him.
His nostrils flare, his jaw tightens.
My skin prickles with alarm, but I keep my chin lifted, my eyes narrowed. “And now you’ve won fair and square, in front of everyone, without even rumpling your suit. Surely that’s enough?”
I shouldn’t have said it, I realize that now, because the word enough is a bit of a trigger word between us, a word that dredges up memories of closets and cages and boundaries, the word I used a long time ago to tell him he was good enough to fuck but not to marry, and it was a lie, of course it was, but I sold it so fucking well.
The first time I used that word with him, he slapped me right across the face. This time, it’s worse.
He does nothing.
“Go ahead,” I dare him. “Slap me. Wrestle me. Fuck me. You won, so that’s what you get to do, right?”
“So that’s how you want it to be,” he says in a cold, slow voice.
“I don’t want it ‘to be’ any way, Mr. President,” I say with something between a smile and a snarl. “I’m just being impudent.”
“You,” he says grimly, “are asking for trouble.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“You don’t have a safe word.”
“I remember.”
