Page 77 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
Next week, Germany, some kind of meeting or conference? I filter through my brain, flipping through my internal database of schedules and events, because surely I’d know if Ash was going to Germany next week, sure that would have been on my radar?
I hear Ash ask in German how the person is doing, if their cold has cleared up, if they need any help with anything, and I’m surprised more by his tone than by his late night diplomatic call. If this were truly just business, then I know exactly the voice he’d use. Strong, clear, and kind in the way that weather is said to be kind, not because of its unpredictability, but because of its distance. It’s so easy to earn Ash’s respect, his good nature, his earnest collaboration—but his genuine affection and warmth? You might as well try to cup a sea-reflection of the moon in your hands. You’d feel foolish for even hoping.
But right now, on the phone in the dark, speaking German and making plans, his voice is gentle and concerned. Not how he is with his prince and princess, but how I remember him being with the victims in the war. Vy v bezpetsi, vy v bezpetsi, you are safe, you are safe.
Who the fuck does he know in Germany who deserves that kind of voice?
He ends his call and stands for a long time at the window, looking out at the city spread below. I know what he sees. It’s a model train world of overnight janitors and ambling cabs and trash men coming for the trash mountains that sprout on New York sidewalks after midnight. Small and twee and twinkling from so high up, and also so big and so busy as to inject even the most extroverted person with a dose of pure, existential loneliness.
“You don’t have to pretend to be asleep,” says Ash after a while. “I wouldn’t mind the company.”
I get up, and I’m past caring that I’m naked, past caring that my body bears every bruise and slap and suck of my defeat tonight, and I go to stand next to him.
He looks at me. “I don’t suppose if I asked you to kneel, that you would?”
I study his profile in the multi-hued city lights, the silver threads in his hair and the fine lines hidden around the edges of his mouth and eyes. It’s a joke that the Presidency ages the men and women who bear that burden, but it doesn’t feel like a joke to me right now. Not when I can recall that virile young man from the mountains, not when I remember that for the last two years I’ve only added to his burdens. “Do you need me to?”
“Just for a moment.”
I kneel. And I feel him relax the moment my knees touch the carpet, the moment my head bows, as if he’s remembered how to breathe simply by watching me humble myself. He runs a fond hand over my hair, once, twice, letting it stay heavy and benevolent at the crown of my head on the third time over, and we stay like that for a long time. Hotel carpet pressing into my knees, Manhattan glowing lambent and drowsy outside.
And after the silence has become comfortable and close, he whispers, “Look up at me.”
I look up at him.
In this light, he is half-real, shadowed and masculine and powerful, like the deer-horned god my aunt Nimue is so fond of, and I can’t be sure he’s not that, not some kind of pagan infusion of greening life force into the body of an energetic and potent man. It’s a silly notion, beyond silly, and I would tell anyone as much in the daylight when there were miles between Ash and me—but right now, at his feet and in the gloamy city dark, the notion doesn’t seem silly at all, and I have the strangest sensation of knowing this moment already, of this exact same feeling, like deja vu, except I can’t pinpoint where the deja vu comes from. I just know that it’s real, that somehow I’ve lived this same scene before, kneeling in a cloud of my own betrayal before a weary king and thinking he is part god, he is more than just a man, and if he is just a man, then he is the best man ever to have lived.
Ash looks down at me looking up at him, and his entire face seems to melt in relief at whatever he sees. He breaks into a smile so heartbreakingly beautiful that I can’t bear it.
He murmurs something so quietly that I can barely hear it, but hear it I do.
“Still the whole world,” is what he says.
And together we fall through this moment, a king and a prince and the whole world, until we land with abrupt pain in the light of day and I sneak out of his room, bruised and shamed, and back to a campaign only a few steps behind his.
No man can keep the whole world forever, after all. Which is why it’s better to burn it down before it slips away.
NINETEEN
ASH
then
On a cool summer night in London, I let my heart drop to the floor. I let it roll in broken glass. I let every tiny shard and splinter pierce into me, because the piercing was like a form of worship, a religious experience. For one hour, I felt with this flaxen-haired princess what I thought I could only ever feel with Embry, and it meant so many things, for me and for her, for the man I thought I was and for the king I wanted to be.
For the first time in my adult life, I fully appreciated and understood the complicated and wonderful way I felt desire, the knots and loops of a heart braided this way and that over time; because while maybe I was born into queerness, I’d also shaped it myself, I’d also thrown it and spun it and fired it into what it was now. And every sojourn into sexuality, every dead-end trail or sheer drop, every path that widened into a road or climbed summits, every step had been my own and my choice, and at the age of twenty-six, I could finally look at that with clear eyes and a clear heart. Which is not to challenge the idea that sexuality can be connate, or at least partially so, and not to dismiss those who’ve had their choices taken from them. It’s only to say that in my own life, I’ve had the privilege of being an active participant in my own desire, and it took falling in love twice for me to see this and fully apprehend what it meant. To see where this bled into my need for power and for control and for unbridled devotion and surrender.
And this new truth ultimately evolved into the knowledge that this girl fit me, fed the most elemental and hidden parts of me, made me feel alive again in a way that I thought I’d been forever denied in Embry’s absence. It was opening my eyes after a long sleep, seeing the sun chink through the clouds after weeks of rain, and it felt like even more than that. Like for the first time, I could see myself as clearly as I’d always hoped to, and I could see everyone else that way too.
Greer did that for me.
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned liked a child. When I became a man, I set aside childish ways. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then we shall see face to face.
The moment I saw her kneeling, the moment I licked the blood from her fingertip, the moment we kissed, I no longer saw through a dark glass, through mirrors and reflections. I saw face to face. I became a man.
NEVERTHELESS. Greer was sixteen. I was twenty-six. I had kissed and pressed my aching cock against a sixteen-year-old girl.
That was wrong. That was not moral. I left the party obsessed with her and also hoping I never saw her again, because the temptation of her was too fucking much.
