Page 71 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
The room is thick with tense silence, and the moderator turns to me. “Mr. Moore, a rebuttal?”
I remember stammering something out about my conscience and Carpathia—a topic this debate hadn’t even touched—and how I was called to run out of service for my country, the same service I’d given of myself during the war.
And even caught by surprise, even being flattened by the king, I know I gave my answer well and with enough charm that I wouldn’t walk off this stage worse off than when I walked on. But I knew that I’d lost. That he’d painted my leaving him in the worst way, and that the damning part of it all was that he wasn’t entirely wrong. That the truth in his words would find purchase in so many undecided voters. And actually, fuck the undecided voters.
The worst thing is that they found purchase in me.
I remember walking off the stage and Dinah handing me a fresh bottle of water, I remember craning my neck to see where Ash went. I remember Morgan stepping forward and saying, “What the fuck was that?”
I remember Belvedere waiting patiently behind her and Dinah until he could slip in close, and then pressing a hotel keycard into my palm.
“If you’re available, President Colchester would like you to come to his room tonight.”
And I remember thinking fuck him, fuck him as I pocketed the key card and asked Dinah to arrange my ride to his hotel.
MY PHONE WON’T STOP on the way back to Manhattan. After the Post news alert declaring Ash the winner and after the sixty-seventh text from Vivienne Moore, I throw it onto the seat next to me and press my fingertips into my eyes, ignoring the Secret Service agent sitting in the row behind me.
Humiliation runs through me like hot tar, it’s sticking in my throat, it’s muffling all noise and searing away any taste that’s not the taste of shame.
I lost.
I did my best and I lost.
Ash won.
Hempstead passes by, then Queens, and finally we are over the East River, heading to Ash’s hotel. I watch the concrete and steel morass of the city flit by with the weary distaste of a native Seattlite, and the hot tar feeling grows stronger and stronger the closer I get to the man who just outmaneuvered me on national television. The man who smashed me into splinters like a ship against sharp rocks. How ironic that this is so agonizing, so dishonoring somehow, when I’ve let him beat me with any manner of whips and paddles, fuck me into unconsciousness, taunt me into hardness, jeer me into ejaculating, use my soul and my heart as brutally as he likes to use my body.
But I’d rather be whipped. I’d rather be fucked raw and bleeding, I’d rather be tied up and led around by the cock than be suited and made up and so carefully prepared, and then to still be so easily outperformed. And I was good, I know I was. I know that if it had just been Harrison Fasse and me on that stage, I would have walked off the handy winner.
But Ash will always be better.
Fuck him, fuck him.
How can he love me and still crush me? What kind of love is that?
It’s his own kind of love, I think bitterly. His love is so like his cruel Catholic god’s—the god who punishes you for your sins at the same time he bleeds to forgive them. Eternally tender and coldly just. A contradiction I used to cherish and now I despise because it has made me despise myself.
My SUV pulls up to the back of the hotel, I tell my driver to get a room for the night and make himself comfortable, and then my agent and I are walking through the service entrance and to the elevator. The key burns a hole in my pocket, a plastic rectangle that might as well be my thirty pieces of silver. But whom am I betraying?
Ash?
Myself?
Neither?
Both?
My Secret Service agent—a hard-faced white woman named Leonella—says nothing to me in the elevator on the way up, for which I’m profoundly grateful. Even the smallest question, the shortest remark, would have poured another barrel of hot tar over me, and my skin is blistered and peeling with shame as it is. I’m sick and shaking with it when we make it to the top floor and the doors open. Ash’s agents are expecting me.
They
are familiar. I know their faces, their names, their children’s names.
They know that I’m the opponent here to visit the incumbent—the incumbent that I quit on, the incumbent that just thrashed me on television—and I’m here to visit him by myself. And sex might be the least awkward reason that I could be here, and I find myself avoiding their gazes as I press the keycard against the door and let myself inside his room.
The first thing I notice is that Greer isn’t there. Her absence is distinct, touchable almost, like she’s left a hole in the very room, a reverse imprint of herself.
The second thing I notice is that Ash is a fucking god, and I hate myself for wanting him, yearning for him, even as I’m a defeated worm curling over the toe of his shoe. He’s by the window, a glass of scotch dangling carelessly from his fingertips, although it’s not careless with him, nothing is, and I know he has as firm a grip on it as he does on everything. His jacket is off, his tie loosened, his sleeves rolled up, and his expression as he turns away from the window is furious and hungry.
