Page 86 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
With an animal groan, he’s up and straddling my hips, big hand tugging rough and fast on his cock and then without warning, he reaches for mine too. I gasp and arch, and then fuck fuck fuck—
I spurt all over my own chest and face as he does the same, and he gives a muttered curse as he shoots all over me—my stomach and chest and face and even in my hair, and our eyes are meeting, and I understand. I do. I just commanded everything about this moment, and yet somehow he’s looming over me while I’m covered in his pleasure.
Except it’s not even that. It’s not the postures or the visible traces of orgasm that tell me he was right—it’s how I feel, how he looks at me now and how I know I’m looking at him. I will always belong to him, and it was silly to think that conquering his body changed that for even a second. He let me conquer him because it was his pleasure to do so, but if at any moment he had gripped my jaw in his hands and told me he was going to master me right then and there, I would have let him. I would have fought, as I always fight, because I like the struggle—but I would have wanted him to win.
Ash leans down, kisses my lips. Semen smears between our mouths and I don’t know whose it is, and somehow that makes it better. And then he goes to get a washcloth for us, and we clean up in silence, passing the rag back and forth like old times. Once I’m finished, I wrap a sheet around my hips and sit against the headboard.
Ash starts to dress by the window, hiding the cock I worship and the ass I covet. And the more dressed he gets, the more tired and inscrutable he looks again.
“Are you angry with me for winning?” I ask him from the bed.
“No. Are you angry with me for losing?”
“Yes.”
That does seem to surprise him. He pulls his sweater on slowly, looking puzzled. “Why?”
“Why? Because you’re supposed to be strong. Because I’m not supposed to be able to hurt you. If I fight you and I win, it makes me feel…” I stop because I don’t know how to say it. I don’t even know if it can b
e said. “I want to win, I do, it’s just that it always seemed abstract, something I could want but which would be terrifying to have. And if you can be defeated, then maybe everything else I believe is wrong.”
“There are some flaws in your philosophy,” he says dryly, sitting down to pull on his shoes.
“And,” I say heavily, “I’m angry because I know why you lost.”
“Oh, you do?”
“I saw the Melwas thing on the news today.”
He stiffens for a moment, his motions slowing, and I know I’ve hit the mark.
“I knew it was you. That was the person you were talking to from Berlin, that was the trip you had planned. And so you sacrificed your energy, your sleep, your debate performance, all for something that you can’t tell anybody you did. Goddammit, Ash. It would have been one thing to have beaten you fair and square, but to know that you lost because you were off saving the fucking world beforehand sucks. It’s a cruel feeling.”
“I didn’t do it to be cruel to you,” he says, still in that dry tone, as he laces up his second shoe. “I did it to fix things.”
“It was stupid,” I say. “Ridiculous.”
“What do you want from me, Embry?” he asks as he stands up. “To apologize for losing? To apologize for solving the Melwas problem without violence?”
My cheeks heat, and I’m defensive. “You never told me that you had this secret plan—and it took years anyway—and I’m not ashamed of what I’ve built my campaign on—”
“It doesn’t matter,” he says, pulling my hotel keycard from his pocket and flicking it onto the bed. “It’s dealt with now. And check your email. I’ve had Agent Gareth compile a folder on all of your Carpathian threats, and she will send you a new briefing every morning until further notice. If Melwas is deposed, those threats directed at you might become real faster than you think.”
I sigh. “I’m not worried about it, Ash.”
“Well, I am,” he snaps. “You may not care about what happens to you, but I fucking do. You’re mine, no matter how far you run, and I’ll do everything under heaven to keep you safe.”
I stare at him, furious all over again, and he stares back, equally angry. Neither of us says a word, and then he’s walking to the door. He leaves with the quiet close of the hotel door and its lock—no door slams for Maxen Colchester. He has too much control for that. And despite the fight, despite the sex beforehand, I fall asleep fixated on one thing.
He didn’t kiss me goodbye before he left.
TWENTY-TWO
ABILENE
now
I hear that unhappiness is gray. A non-color, an in between thing, the feeling of flat clouds for weeks in the winter, the smell of tired water. It’s a damp, cold street under a damp, cold sky—not wet enough to shine or cold enough to ice over—nothing that real or beautiful. Just crumbling pavement and tire-smeared curbs with weeds pushing through the cracks. Just darkness half-heartedly lit by the blear of buzzing streetlights. Just the ruined jut of an aqueduct pressing up into sky.
