Page 89 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
Come, come, it seems to say. This way. We have business this way, you and I.
The gelid water gnaws at my nerves, but I persist, pushing forward until my hair swirls dark in the dark water and I can’t fight the current any more. My feet dance along the bottom as I struggle for balance and turn back to look at the shore, and for a moment, there’s a vision of another life, another Abilene. She forces back against the current and pushes to shore, she strips out of her dress like a selkie from her skin and stumbles gleaming and numb-footed to her car. Maybe she finds a way to love the little blue-eyed toddler and the blue-eyed husband whom she wrung the baby out of. Maybe this other Abilene can forget Maxen. Maybe she makes her way back to her house and starts her life over, a kind of frigid Potomac baptism that births her anew.
But even as I see the vision of the other Abilene, I despise her. I despise her for living without Maxen, for living without the hope of him, and I’m just as cursed as that Lady of Shalott poem Greer teaches.
The curse is upon me, the Lady of Shalott says when she falls in love, and I am the same. I am cursed. I am not well with my love.
I turn away from the shore, and for some reason all I can think of is my mother’s face below the rippling mirror of her bath, pill bottles bobbing like strange dead fish in the water, the elegant curve of the abandoned wineglass. I had screamed for my father, had struggled with a child’s hands to pull her back into the air, had saved her life, and for that, I was sent away yet again, flicked away like a terrible, ugly bug.
There’s no one to scream for me now. Whatever my failings, I’ve spared Galahad that at least.
And I’ve been flicked away for the last time.
The cold is curling into something else now, and my limbs are heavy and light all at once. The current pulls at my dress the way I wanted Maxen to, with affection and gentle insistence, and I let it, the way I would have let Maxen. I let it pull me down and forward, I part my legs to let the cold water inside me where he should have been. I let it tug on my nipples, nurse from me the way his child would have, if he would have allowed me to have his child. I let the river lick my throat and my lips; I part my mouth so it can stroke against my tongue.
My cold river lover is everywhere, cradling me, caressing me, going into my most private places, and yes, yes, yes, it’s what I wanted, to be fully his so that I wouldn’t have to be mine any more, so that I would be wanted, so that there would be love waiting for me at the gates of at least one person’s heart. The water is tender with me, companionable.
Eternal.
And I let it kiss my eyelids goodnight.
TWENTY-THREE
ASH
then
A year spanned the time between losing one wife and finding the next, between Jenny’s death and glimpsing a long fall of gold-white hair at Mass and feeling my heart roll worshipfully in broken glass all over again.
That year between wives was the hardest year of my life. Not even war could prepare me for the lingering, bone-deep grief of widowhood, and it certainly couldn’t prepare me for enduring that grief so publicly, so openly. Jenny’s death was the story of my election, my inauguration, my first one hundred days—all of it revolved around the wife who died young and pretty and in pain—and likewise, it was as if the world salivated over watching my pain. I often felt like a circus oddity in those days, people gathering with avid curiosity to see my red-rimmed eyes, the hurt etched around my mouth. It was as if they could see as I could the ghost of a sweet, happy woman whom I’d failed. I’d given her everything of myself that I could give, and still, I’d failed her. I’d watched the layers of her life peel away like an onion in those last weeks, until at the very last there was only the unselfish, bright soul I’d always seen
shining through her amber brown eyes. And the sight of that soul shamed me beyond compare. I had loved her as gently and as thoroughly as I was able, and it still had been so much less than she deserved.
War had prepared me for one thing, however, and that was doing my work even as it felt like my world was ending. I was used to working without much sleep, with multiple crises, while the shock and confusion of a battle still stung my senses. And so I threw myself into the work after Jenny’s death too, I ate and drank and breathed my new job, I surrendered sleep to it, mental peace to it, leisure to it. So long as I worked and kept busy, the grief stayed where it belonged, until one day I looked up and it wasn’t quite so hideous to endure. I found I could feel sad, simply just sad, and miss her, and it didn’t flood me with an inky emptiness like it had before. I could pretend it was time that was healing me, or work, or some combination of the two, but I knew even then it was neither of those things.
It was Embry.
That night a week after Jenny’s funeral—the night Morgan took me to Mark’s club for the first time and let me flog her—it didn’t end at the club. It ended in Embry’s bed, with me desperate and him supple and willing, with every one of those seven years apart being mourned with bite marks and kisses over every inch of my beloved’s skin. It ended with him begging so beautifully—more and harder and make it hurt, make me feel you for days—and it ended with me knowing that it was wrong to take an old lover into my arms a week after my wife’s funeral…and also knowing that I wouldn’t stop.
I didn’t stop.
Whatever restraint and resentment had been corking the heat between us finally crumbled into the dark wine of our need, and it spilled everywhere. Stained everything with heat and urgency and a love that I’d never been able to quench, not even after a decade, not even after a war, not even after my wedding to someone else.
Let’s go public, I’d murmur to him. Let’s tell everyone. Because I wanted that, had wanted it before, had never stopped wanting it. It was stupid to deny ourselves a second time around—now when it was legal, now when I was already elected. Who cared? Jenny’s death had taught me in the most vicious, sawing way that no one had forever with the people they loved, there were no promises, there was only holding tight to what you had.
I just wanted to be able to hold tight to him in public finally, finally, finally.
But he’d flush and fidget and change the subject, pain thorny and defensive in his eyes, and I decided I wouldn’t push him yet. Because I was going to marry him, but I could be patient…for a while. Even if it meant sneaking around like our old Army days, with secret fucks and private smiles and hidden hearts. Every day and every night, any moment we could steal, any yank of his tie to bring his mouth to mine, any press of a thigh on a shared couch, any nip of an earlobe to tide us over until we were alone, and then when we were alone, nothing remained undiscovered, nothing remained undone.
Save one thing.
“RELAX,” Mark said.
I nodded and pressed my eyes closed, trying to breathe, trying to stir up my sense of mastery over my own body, but it was difficult while I was flat on my back with my hands cuffed above my head and my knees pulled up to my chest.
I opened my eyes. Took a breath. Grounded myself in my surroundings—opulent, familiar, crowded with every imaginable tool for pain and pleasure imaginable. One of the rooms at Lyonesse, Mark’s private room in fact. The décor reflected his tastes: luxurious, careful, decadent. Like the court of a king of old.
“Okay,” I said. “I think I’m ready.”
