Page 78 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
Anything, she’d said. I’ll let you do anything to me.
Jesus Christ.
If I saw her again, I’d take more than her first kiss, I’d take her first everything, I’d cuff her ankle and chain her to my bed like a pet, I would play with her hair and worship every corner and turn of her body. I’d marry her and build houses with her and walk beaches with her, and then I’d carry her in my arms to the darkest places I knew and open every part of her to me and myself to her, until my heart beat in her chest and her heart beat in mine.
I knew shouldn’t see her again. It was safer for her, better for her, certainly until she was fully grown, but maybe it was true that I’d always want too much from her young, open heart and so it was wiser for me to stay away indefinitely.
And as it was, the war flared up again. Krakow was bombed, and I went back to Carpathia, and then—God, how knotted and raveled my loyalties were about to become—Embry came back to me. Right after I’d fallen in love with someone else, however hopelessly, he came back and if I’d had any doubts about the nature of my desires after London, they were wiped away the moment he kissed my boot.
God, I still loved him. I loved him so much that it tore me open, and I wanted to tear him open, and Greer too, and I wanted to share everything, everything, everything, and how could I be one person and still feel so much, want so much, and was this how love was for everyone? Was it being queer? Kinky? Or was it just me and this new three-cornered heart I’d grown, and now that I’d grown it, had my craving and my lust simply swelled to fill the space?
Could I have ever loved just one person?
Was this a new problem? Or simply something I’d never needed to know about myself until now?
And I wasn’t supposed to love Embry, he made that painfully clear when he returned to Carpathia. He didn’t want my love, he didn’t want any future I could give him, but oh, if he would’ve said the word, if he would’ve pressed his lips to my bare chest and murmured, I changed my mind, love me, love me, then I would have loved him with all the corners of my heart, I would have. And maybe there would have always been a pang for the teenage girl who wrote me her darkest and brightest thoughts, but I would have ignored it for him, shoved it so deep and so far down that it would gather dirt and moss and vines.
But that’s not how it happened. I loved him anyway, but I tried to hide it, for his sake and for mine because it hurt too much to love so nakedly when I knew it was unwanted. And I kept thinking of Greer, of her large gray eyes and her hair like light. How prettily she bled and how sweet her blood had tasted on my lips, how she wanted to kneel, and how she wanted to be dragged into the darkness and bared there. It never diminished, my burning for her. I read and reread her emails, I printed them out as if I were sixteen and not twenty-six, I carried them around for years as a kind of amulet of protection and personal pornography all in one.
I heard the questions hidden in the subtext of her very last email to me, the unwritten underneath the written.
Do you get hard when you think of me?
Do you come?
Do you want my name on your lips as you do?
Yes, yes, yes. Yes, even the sight of her name on my laptop got me hard, the serifed boat of the capital G, the pretty rill of the following rs and es. Yes, I came, I came so much for her and she’d never know, never even realize there was a soldier across the continent who worshipped the memory of her with his fingers and his palm. Yes, I said her name, out loud when I was alone, silently and in the inside my mouth if others were nearby.
It didn’t escape my notice that the only two times I’d fallen in love were in laughably limited situations—Embry after a mock battle and a waltzing lesson, Greer after a single kiss—but I didn’t care. For the first time since my days as a cocksure teenager, I knew what I wanted and what I felt, and I accepted it. Perhaps the only thing I couldn’t accept was not loving who I loved, which was how I found my walls weakening around my little prince. How our vicious fucks slowly transformed into power exchanges so intimate and breathless that we were both left shaking afterwards. During our little trips together—
away from the public eye and the army, where we could be two anonymous lovers in a Europe that didn’t care—gradually I began to slip. Taking his hand as we walked through a Florentine piazza, standing behind him as we waited in line for gelato and resting my chin on his shoulder. Ordering for him at restaurants, kissing him whenever I felt like it, staring at him instead of the paintings and sculptures and buildings we’d come all this way to see.
And he let me.
He let me, and he squeezed my hand when I took his, he leaned back into me when I stood behind him. When he caught me staring, he’d wink and murmur something dirty enough to have me hauling him by the arm to the nearest alley or bathroom and making a mess of him.
Slowly, I realized he loved me too. He loved me like I loved him, and when I looked in his eyes, I saw everything I felt. I saw a future we both wanted and he wouldn’t let himself have, and I was foolish enough to think I could persuade him to want it, to take it, if only I proved how deeply I wanted it too. I thought maybe he was simply frightened of moving forward, or maybe he was worried I didn’t understand the social implications of loving another man, or maybe it was a mixture of both.
I waited a long time. I prayed about it, thought about it, studied his every word and sigh and smile, and when the opportunity for promotion came up, I knew I had to act. I had to show him that I didn’t want a job over him, I didn’t want anything over him, not a rank or a place or a piece of paper in City Hall, nothing. I only wanted to love him as my own soul for as long as I lived, and for him to let me. That was all. Please, please, and with my gun pushed to my back and my knee in the cool Carpathian soil and a small velvet box in my hand, I asked him, let me be the one, let me stay with you. Let me and I will.
And Embry said no, like it was absurd that I’d even asked.
“THERE’S a small project I’m starting,” Merlin said one afternoon almost a year later. We were in Chicago where he was living at the time; I was on a short leave of duty and he’d invited me to stay with him for a few days. We were currently on the balcony of his sleek Gold Coast condo with a bottle of good London gin and the remains of our dinner.
“What is it?” I asked, idly swirling my glass and listening to the noise of water and waves below.
“I want to start a new political party in America and I want it to win the Presidency within the next ten years. Five would be ideal.”
“That’s not a small project, Merlin,” I said, amused. “That’s an impossible one.”
“I’m not finished,” he said, completely serious. “I want you to lead it.”
I laughed. “Merlin,” I said. “I’m flattered, but aside from the fact that I already have a job, I’m not a politician. I have no political background and no interest in acquiring one.”
“I’m not asking you to be a politician,” he said mildly. “I’m asking you to change things for the better.”
“Merlin—”
