Page 94 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
He sighed plaintively, but I didn’t let him say anything else. I took his face in my hands and kissed him, as soft as the rocks were hard under his knees. I kissed him so softly that he moaned into my mouth, so gently that his anger at being mastered melted away, as it always did. “You forget that I know you,” I whispered against his lips. “You want to fight it, but this is where you’re happiest. This is where you belong.”
A wounded sound came from somewhere in his chest, and then he was nodding against me, emotion thrumming through him, and I allowed him to nuzzle into my neck, my chest, to rub his cheeks against my thighs and my erection. “It is where I’m happiest,” he said with his face against my thigh. “God help me.”
The nervous excitement leapt at that. Because now was the time, and I knew he wouldn’t say no, I knew he wouldn’t, how could he when he’d just admitted this was where he was the happiest? When he admitted that this was where he belonged? And surely this last year together had made him as happy as it had made me?
I pulled the ring out of my pocket, and there was a perfect moment—as perfectly golden as that ring—when he hadn’t seen it yet. When his face was still against my thigh, all trust and surrender and devotion, when the asking was close enough to thrill at but the words hadn’t been said yet, and everything hovered in anticipation and joy.
And yes, there was a small voice that asked me if I was ready to hear no. If I could survive Embry refusing me a second time, and the answer was that I didn’t know if I could. But I did know that it was more noble to love openly and honestly than to hide out of fear, I knew that loving takes courage and vulnerability, and if I had to expose my beating heart for Embry to scorn a thousand times to earn his love, then I’d do it, it would be worth it. A million times. A billion.
“Embry,” I said softly.
“Yes, Ash?” He looked up at me, and suddenly I felt so young, and he seemed so young too, we were just boys barely crossed over into manhood with all our fresh hopes and desperate love pressing up into everything.
I couldn’t help it; I kissed him again. Kissed him while I was gripped with a feeling so fierce that it made my throat constrict and my eyelids burn. “Please,” I mumbled against his lips. “Please.”
I pressed the ring into the palm of his hand.
Embry didn’t move, and for a si
ngle second, as my eyes opened from my kiss to look into his, I saw an expression of dazzling, vivid joy. My own joy surged in response, my heart jumped, my blood spiked, and oh I’d let him fuck me right here on this shore, rocks digging into my back and everything, because he’d said yes, he would marry me, he would be mine.
And then, slowly and with the burning fall of a spark, the moment fizzled into pain.
Embry put the ring back in my hand. He wouldn’t look at me. “Don’t.”
I couldn’t make words come out at first, they were still trapped behind the joy, queued behind the happier words and kisses that were supposed to come next, and now I couldn’t make any noise at all.
He swallowed. “We can’t, Ash. You know we can’t.”
“Why?” I finally forced out the word.
“Because,” Embry sputtered, straightening up and looking at me, “you’re the fucking President!”
I stared at him, not sure if he was being serious or not. “I can’t be gay and be the President?”
“Exactly,” he snapped. “And certainly not like this. If they’d elected you knowing you were gay, maybe it would be different—”
I was growing angry now. “Well, I am elected now, so what does it matter who I want to marry? They can’t impeach me for being gay.”
“They could probably find a reason to impeach you for fucking your vice president though. Or something else. They’ll find something, Ash. It won’t just be re-election you’re kissing goodbye, it would be this term too.”
“They’ll have to fight me for it, and I’ve always won every battle I fought as long as I had you by my side.” I caught his chin in my hand, forced him to look at me. He was like a wild animal right now, a spooked horse, skittish and rearing. “Embry. Stop this…this bullshit. You fooled me the first time, but I’m not letting it happen a second time. I know you love me, I know you want to be with me. Nothing else matters.”
Embry bucked against my hand, trying to pull free. “Everything else matters, Ash. God, I so fucking wish it didn’t. I wish that we could just vanish from this world and never have to care about anything other than each other, but we can’t. I promised—” And here he broke off, as if catching himself saying something he shouldn’t.
I dropped my hand from his chin. “Promised what, Embry? Promised who?”
And the way he looked at me then, I somehow knew that this was bigger than this private moment by the lake. This was about everything somehow, and if he answered me, then I’d know, I’d finally know why I’d spent so long hurting for him.
But his look changed, grew guarded and careful. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t sacrifice my career for you,” he said, and his eyes screamed lies, but I couldn’t turn them over in my mind properly because everything just stung and burned so fucking much. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t stop chasing what I wanted, which is my own turn in the White House someday. Maybe you’re comfortable being openly bisexual in politics, Ash, but I’m not yet. I’m sorry.”
There was nothing to be said to that. The lake spoke for us, gentle and timeless, brushing clear rolls of water across the rocks.
“I don’t suppose I can command you to marry me,” I said after a while.
Embry wrapped his hand around my fist, the one that still clutched the ring that was supposed to be his. “I wish so many things, Ash, but sometimes I wish nothing more than that we’d never met so I wouldn’t have to say no to you.”
“Am I so awful?” I asked in a broken voice. “Am I so much worse than anybody else that you can’t marry me?”
