Page 79 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
“When this war ends, America will be at a crossroads, and we need the right person to steer her to a real and stable peace. Who better than the hero of the war himself?”
The word made me uncomfortable. “I’m not a hero.”
“It’s just a word, Maxen. It’s a word that means that you’re brave and ethical and good. And that’s the kind of person we need in the White House.”
Everything in me was reluctant and defensive. I didn’t want to be a politician, I never had, that kind of pen and paper power always seemed so ordinary to me, so clichéd. Not to mention self-seeking and hollow. Hadn’t I just spent the last few years despising every politician who puppeteered wars from the safety of their carpeted offices? Hadn’t I been disgusted at their lack of consistency and drive?
No. Everything about who I was and who I wanted to be rejected the idea…
…everything except this tiny, infinitesimal sliver that buried itself into my denial and resistance. What if? the sliver seemed to ask. What if?
Merlin seemed to sense that little voice, and said, “If you can make a difference in the world, you should.”
I stared down into my gin, thinking.
“Don’t answer me yet. In fact, don’t even answer me soon. I want you certain.”
What if?
What if?
But I couldn’t ask myself any what ifs without thinking of the what ifs that really haunted me. What if Embry had said yes? What if I found Greer Galloway and she remembered a soldier from four years ago and she still meant everything that she’d written to me? What was the point of considering Merlin’s wild scheme when the only two things I really wanted were so far away from me?
I looked up to find Merlin watching my face.
“There’s someone I’d like you to meet tomorrow,” he said.
I had no interest in meeting any new men or women. I’d fuck my fist to memories until I died, I’d spend my nights with an aching chest and thoughts that pinged wildly from longing to gratitude that I’d at least known love on my terms—and that was how I preferred my life. But I also didn’t have the energy to fight Merlin on this tonight. I’d meet this person for his sake, feel as I always felt about people who weren’t Embry or Greer, and then apologetically explain to Merlin that we didn’t hit it off, I was so sorry, he or she was a lovely boy or girl.
Except the next day when I met Jenny, I did feel something. It wasn’t dark or brutal or strange, it wasn’t transformative or heady or fateful. I didn’t feel as if a veil between heaven and me had lifted, like I was somehow closer to understanding God for loving this person—like I had with Greer and Embry.
It was familiar though, in a way that was newly fresh too. Jenny talked and smiled like normal people talked and smiled, she flirted subtly and gracefully, with no subtext of hunger or despair. It made me feel normal to flirt back in the same manner, it made me feel whole again after the void Embry had ripped through me.
Will God ever forgive me for loving her because it was easy? Loving her asked nothing of me but denial, and denial felt like a relief after all the vulnerability I’d given Embry, all the honesty and the hope. A relief after kneeling on a mountain and having my heart broken. I could pretend to be a normal man, I could pretend to want what everyone else wanted.
And had I said I was happy with memories and my fist earlier? Then I lied, because I wasn’t happy, I was the furthest thing from it, and here with this kind, smart, thoroughly vanilla woman, I saw a chance.
More than a chance at my own happiness, I saw that I could make her happy, and the only cost would be my suffering. But after I had to let Greer go, after Embry refused me and we were both miserable, being able to make someone happy with the mere act of loving them how they wished to be loved felt like a gift.
When she asked me if I’d like to grab a drin
k later that night, I agreed, and when we kissed later in the sparkling dark of a street corner, I let her press her lips to mine without fisting her hair, without biting, without growling or grabbing. And if it felt muted and subdued and quiet compared to the dizzying heights I’d known before, then it was reassuring. Heights only meant a fall, when you really thought about it, and it was safer to love this way.
Gently.
Without cruelty. Without raw, open need.
It would be easy, in retrospect, to believe that my love for Jenny was any less real or valid than what I had with Greer and Embry. It would be tempting to say that I only thought I loved her, or that it was a constant, painful struggle to care for her without caring for her as a Dominant would, with firm discipline and tender affection. I did love her and I did desire her, and it was only hard sometimes. Like a barometric headache that came and went, the occasional reminder that I would always be who I was. Embry made it difficult, unknowingly on his part. Being so close, being so him, and there’d be these moments when our thighs might touch on the couch as we watched TV or our fingers might graze as we reached for something, and it would rise up in me, the loving of him and the particular ways I wanted to love him until he wept with it.
But still, despite him, despite the torment of that day in Chicago when I saw Greer—when the force of loving her punched a hole straight through me once again—despite it all, I did love Jenny. I loved her with all but one part of me. I stayed faithful, I served her happiness with all my energy, and her death was the harshest hell I’d ever known. And when she died, not only did she leave me when I needed her gentle, sweet love the most, but she took the part of me that could have been capable of that kind of love again.
When Jenny died, she succeeded where war and rejection had failed, and I was truly, utterly destroyed.
TWENTY
ASH
now
