then

Belvedere tells me that things have changed since I was his age, but well into the early 2000s, I’d encountered this insidious idea that bisexuality was a phase, a transient place. A stage of ghost queerness. And after a few years, you would realize that you were truly gay or truly straight, and then you would end your experiments and move on to a real life and a real identity, whatever that meant. The idea that you could truly remain bisexual into mature adulthood seemed only academically possible—even David Bowie settled down and married Iman, after all, and if David fucking Bowie could tame his sexuality, then clearly anyone could—or at least so the subliminal messaging seemed to say.

If you were gay, then be gay; if you were straight, then be straight. Anything in between was denial and make believe.

Of course, that’s all normative nonsense, and we’ve redefined queer paradigms to include bisexuality as a real space. But on a diet of MTV and VH1 and all the cultural mainstays of the eighties and nineties, there was enough of that old thinking to leak into my brain, and so I found myself in an uncharacteristic stage of unrest after Embry left Carpathia. Embry was the first person I had ever loved, and surely that meant something crucial about me? Maybe bisexuality had just been a stepping stone and I was a gay man after all, one who’d muddled to the realization after years of sampling and research. Perhaps all that clarity I’d felt as a bisexual teenager had simply been the blind certainty of youth, because I knew, as I watched Embry leave the barracks in the gray light of dawn, that I would love him until the day I died. And because he was the first, I assumed that he would be the only, and I rearranged my soul to accommodate this new belief. I wasn’t bisexual. I could only ever love Embry Moore.

And it felt true for a long time.

Until London.

Until Greer.

* * *

I dragged around a broken heart for three years. I carried it like a wounded soldier, limping and bloody to a destination that looked close but felt far. I nursed it, fed it even, though I had no real reason. Embry and I had shared…well, what exactly? A dance once? A kiss in the woods? How was that enough to make me feel this way? And how was he the one I could fall in love with when so many others had tried, and arguably he’d given me little more than disdain, mixed signals, and a waltz?

Nevertheless, it was enough and he was the one, and for three years, I tended my love for him like a garden. I searched for him online whenever I could, asked mutual friends about him constantly. I even went back to my pre-Morgan practice of pseudo-abstinence. I fucked no one, because no one was Embry except Embry and he didn’t want me. And the aftermath of the shameful mess I’d made of Morgan’s emotions was a powerful reminder—fucking belonged with feelings. Maybe it didn’t have to be love but at the very least affection and respect.

But after three years with no word from Embry—with rumors of his sexual exploits reaching me even overseas—something had grown brittle inside my control and then that something finally snapped. It wasn’t that I stopped loving him—never that—it was just that I was twenty-six and I hadn’t even kissed anyone since him. I’d been fucking my own fist for so long, turning away interested men and women out of a principle that grew more and more abstract every day, and I was lonely.

Or maybe lonely isn’t the right word. It was more like I was anemic or starved for something or stuck in the darkness so long that my body cried out for the sun at a cellular level. I had known what it was to unleash myself with Morgan. I had kissed the man I loved with the knowledge that he would let me do whatever I wanted. I had felt intimate, aching power, and there was no unfeeling it after the fact, no way to forget.

And the longer I went without it, the more listless and unhappy I became. That and the insomnia—this blood and mud-filled fog of memory that replaced my sleep—were twin millstones around my neck, dragging me to the ground.

There was a month gap between a posting in Krakow and yet another deployment to Carpathia, and it felt pointless to go home. I missed my mother and I missed Kay, but at least in Europe there were always new things to do and see, and if I went home to Kansas City, I knew I’d just succumb to the dull misery that seemed to follow me wherever I went. It was better to stay busy.

And then Merlin found me, pulling up in a sleek black car as I waited at the bus stop closest to the Krakow base. He rolled down the window. “Shouldn’t they be driving you to the airport?”

I gave him a genuine smile. He had become a real presence in my life over the last few years, writing and visiting frequently, and often with incredibly valuable advice and wisdom. I thought of him something like a mentor, but also as a friend. “I told them I’d take the bus into the city,” I said. “I wanted to see Krakow some more before I left. And it’s good to see you.”

He nodded. “It’s good to see you too.” He tilted his head at me, giving me an appraising look. “How would you like to go to London with me?”

Which is how I ended up in England.

Merlin took me to meetings and dinners and parties, introducing me variously as his assistant or as a family friend or as a military liaison—whichever excuse held the most weight at the time—and for the first time in my life, I saw how war worked on the top end of things. I saw how people in expensive suits at expensive restaurants made decisions for tired, freezing soldiers thousands of miles away, I saw the almost careless tabulation of mortalities and morbidities as an impersonal inventory instead of the bleeding, screaming things they actually were. I saw the incremental and subtle currents of diplomacy, how one slight at a dinner or one misstep in a memo had powerful ramifications for the men and women actually fighting the war.

It bothered me.

Merlin could see it bothering me, and he let me unspool all of my tangled feelings about it when we were alone, encouraging me to find the reasons underneath the reasons I could articulate, and that was the real beginning, that month in London. The first time I was forced to confront the intersection of politics and war, and to want both of those things to be better. The first time I began to search for the strands of international and domestic power and decipher where the answer lay in the web of it all.

I didn’t know it was the beginning of anything then, obviously. All I knew was that I’d spent the last four years of my life with bullets and mud, and the last three without the man I’d fallen in love with, and even London, teeming with bustle and energy as it did, couldn’t do anything to transmute my restlessness into anything productive or good. All I had was a blunted ache of loneliness and zero hope for the future of this war as I watched the arcane and stupidly blithe rotations of Merlin’s sphere.

And one night, it was just too much. The war, Merlin’s world, the familiar ache of wanting Embry. I sat drinking at a gin bar down the street from Merlin’s flat where I was staying, and I decided that I was going to drink until I couldn’t find my way out the door. I was going to drink until both Embry and the war didn’t exist any longer.

At least, I was going to until a man sat down next me at the bar. It was a rather impersonal, trendy kind of place—in one of those perpetually-building-overpriced-flats part of London, and obviously had been opened to cater to the young City types who lived around the neighborhood. And the man was dressed to fit the scenery, as all the City types were when they went out at night (as if needing to sartorially prove that they were so busy working late and making money that they didn’t have time to change into ‘going out’ clothes.)

Or maybe he really was just working late and wanted to cool off with some gin before he went up to whatever glass-balconied tower he lived in. Either way, he was handsome and brimming with the sleek confidence of a man in his twenties already making lots of money, and the way his suit pulled at his arms and back when he turned to look at me was quite arresting.

He smiled. He was Indian, with skin a burnished shade of golden brown, near-black eyes, and meticulously tended scruff.

“All right?” he said, by way of greeting.

“Yeah.”

His eyes sparkled with interest. “Are you American?”

I nodded.

“Here on holiday?”

“Sort of.” I looked down at my glass of pricey pear-infused gin. “I’m in the Army. Between assignments right now.”

“Oh, a military man,” he said, and I didn’t miss the way his eyes traced over the button down shirt and flat-fronted slacks I wore, lingered on the places where the slacks hugged my thighs. “First time to England?”

“First time I’ve stayed for any length of time.”

“Seeing the sights?”

I gave him the same lingering look he’d just given me and was rewarded with him biting his lip. “You could say that,” I finally replied. “Can I buy you a drink?”

He leaned forward, bracing some long-toed, hand-tooled shoe on the bottom of my barstool. “I’ve got an even better idea. How about I make us both drinks at my place?”

I glanced back down to my gin, making up my mind about something. Because what the fuck did it matter if this man bolted from me when I told the truth? I was in a different country, and it’s not like I’d ever see him again, and he wasn’t Embry, so it would never matter.

“I’d like that,” I said carefully. “The thing is I—well. I like to be in charge. Is that something you can be comfortable with?”

He grinned again, teeth white against his sweet brown lips and dark scruff. “You’re new to this, yeah?”

It didn’t make me feel defensive, but I wanted to clarify. “New to what?”

“Pulling men at bars. Pulling men at all.”

“I’ve been in the Army,” I pointed out. “I’m certainly new to doing it like this.”

He laughed. “Yeah, all right. Well, I’m flattered to be your first English pull, and for what it’s worth, I definitely can be comfortable with you being in charge. In fact…” He reached out and clasped my upper arm. To the people around us, it might have looked like a fraternal clap on the shoulder, but I could feel the teasing way he squeezed at my muscles. “In fact, Mr. Army, there’s nothing I think I want more than for you to be in charge right now.”

That brittle thing inside me snapped. I dropped some coins on the bar and stood.

“Lead the way.”

He led the way. His place was just around the corner, and indeed the glass-balconied status flat I’d assumed, and he did indeed want me in charge. He went to a sleek bar niche to make those drinks, but when I crowded in behind him, my hands teasing at the lapels of his suit jacket, he leaned back against me with a moan that I liked very much. Almost as much as I liked how pliant his body became, and the way he ground his ass into my hips.

We kissed, and then we drank, and then we properly made out, toeing off shoes and pulling at shirt buttons and hair, falling onto his bed, and then I unknotted his tie and slid it from around his neck.

“I’d like to bind your wrists,” I told him. “But I’ll keep it loose enough that you can free yourself, since you don’t know me.”

“You are the politest, Mr. Army. Do it,” he said, holding out his wrists for me, and so I did it. And then I found his cock with my palm, rubbing it and rolling the heel of my hand along the underside until he was writhing underneath me.

I unbuttoned his pants. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he said back. And then I freed his cock and took him in my mouth.

It was old and it was new at the same time. It was not the first cock I’d sucked, but it was the first time I’d had the man tied up, the first time I’d been driving the scene rather than simply taking part in an urgent tug-of-war. Not to mention how long it had been since I’d had any sexual contact at all.

I worked his pants all the way off, then I began stroking him below his testicles, along the fleshy line leading to his entrance.

“Okay?” I asked.

“Okay,” he moaned.

And then with a finger inside him, bound by his own tie, he came in my mouth, panting and long. And when I pulled up, he was smiling dazedly at me. “There’s lube and condoms in the drawer. I, ah—” and his skin was too warmly brown for me to see a blush, but I imagined his cheeks would feel hot against my fingers if I touched them right now “—ah, I don’t mind staying tied up for the next part. So you know.”

I was hard. I was hard, and this was a willing man, all pretty and full-lipped, already tied up for me.

And yet.

He wasn’t Embry.

It had been three years, and still I could not do this. I couldn’t bring myself to do it—and yes, by that time, I was beginning to understand that my constructions around honor and penetrative sex were problematic—but the understanding wasn’t enough in that moment. In that moment, all I could think of was how much I’d wanted my first time fucking a man to be with Embry, and it didn’t matter how submissive or handsome or available this stranger was…he was no Embry. And I couldn’t give that first to a stranger. The idea of firsts at all is flawed, I know, but it was too late for me. They were important and they are important to me still, and so I untied the pretty stranger’s hands without moving to the drawer.

“I think I’m good, but thanks,” I told him. “And thank you for letting me…you know. Take charge.”

He gave me a sad smile. “All right?”

“Yeah.”

And I went back to Merlin’s with an aching cock and a miserable heart.

What was wrong with me? I’d found a hot, respectable guy, and—more than being handsome and normal and willing—he’d wanted that part of me. So why had it felt so wrong? I had done everything the way I thought an emotionally healthy gay man would do it, but then when I’d gotten to the most crucial moment, I’d still felt something missing.

Which meant it had to be more than the kinky and the queer that I was searching for. But then what?

I didn’t know.

And I still didn’t know the next morning when I woke up from a fractured, nightmare-filled sleep, cock rigid and annoyed that I’d wasted last night. I stroked off thinking of Embry as I always did, showered and dressed, and then found Merlin reading a paper on his own glassed-in balcony, so like the stranger’s from last night. Merlin gave me a look I didn’t understand, a look that seemed full of reluctant worry, a look I dismissed, because Merlin had zero reason to worry over me.

He folded his paper down. Somewhere along the nearby Thames there was the crash and boom of a construction site.

“There’s a party I want you to go to tonight,” he said. “Wear your uniform.”

* * *

All that night, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Or maybe wrong isn’t the word I mean, but that something was different. Something was heavy in the air, and it wasn’t the silver moon or that strange brand of wet summer coolness that crowded against the windows of the cab. I chalked it up to the night before and my aborted attempt at meeting someone new. I chalked it up to frustration over politics and heartache over a boy I kissed once.

It wasn’t until much, much later that I realized it was the same feeling I’d had when I’d fucked Morgan and when I’d put my boot on Embry’s wrist. The same feeling I’d had when I pulled the sword from the stone. A feeling like something deep inside of me was alchemically changing, a feeling like this moment marked some sort of fresh stroke on my canvas that could never be painted over.

No, at the time I just assumed it was smothered libido and impatience with Merlin’s scene. An assumption that was reinforced inside the party itself, which was full of the requisite political types, all being as obtuse and oblivious to the real effects of their actions as ever, and even though I knew Merlin had brought me here to make introductions and schmooze, I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear another second with these people, I was stifled by their ignorance and pointlessness and callous disregard for actual human life, and it was so easy to find an empty room that led to an empty patio and just breathe for a moment. Just stare at the fresh, silver moon and wonder what Embry was doing at this very moment.

Staring at the same moon, thinking of me?

Ha, went a bitter voice in my mind. Right.

Feminine laughter stirred me from my thoughts, and then a male voice that was sing-songy with persuasion and—ah yes, an Italian accent—and I heard the two of them crowd into the room I’d just walked through, the unmistakable sounds of kissing and fondling echoing out onto the small patio where I was now trapped, hedged in by a stone railing and a pretty garden.

Ah, fuck.

I edged my head around the corner, just to verify that I couldn’t sneak past them, and alas, yes. The library was too cluttered with furniture to make any path other than the main one, which was currently occupied by one of the diplomats I’d been attempting to escape and a girl who looked young enough to be his daughter. She was very pretty though—sleek red hair and long limbs set off by a bright blue dress—and she certainly didn’t seem to mind the diplomat’s attention, so I suppose I couldn’t fault him for anything other than inconvenience.

With a sigh, I turned back to the patio and resigned myself to staring at the moon some more. Maybe when these two finished, Merlin would be ready to go—or at least, be neutral to my leaving early. There was no point in me being here. There was hardly any point to anything, except the war, which seemed to be the last place in my life where I could matter to anyone or anything. Too bad the war was also the reason I couldn’t sleep.

I’d finally managed to lose my thoughts in the moonlight once more when I heard the library door open and hesitant footsteps. Someone else had come into the library, walking in on the kissing couple. But I only had a minute to feel relieved that I wasn’t the one in the awkward position of intruding on the couple before I heard a high-pitched yell.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?”

And then I realized I was in the significantly more awkward position of eavesdropping on what sounded like an incredibly vicious and passionate argument between two young women. The man, it seemed to my ears, had fled the scene, and God, I couldn’t blame him. I stared at the well-groomed garden outside the patio railing, trying to will a Narnia-like door into existence.

It didn’t work. And the fight went on and on, and I couldn’t stopper my ears to it, as much as I wished I could.

“You can’t fix it,” the loudest voice said scathingly. “Just stay away—”

“I’m not going to do that, I can’t do that—”

“Just leave me alone!” And then the sound of glass fracturing, a musical rain that startled me more than any gunshot. What was wrong with that girl? Who broke a glass at a fucking party?

I heard the second, quieter girl whisper something, and then there was the brisk staccato of high heels and a slammed door. Someone had left the room, or both of them, and either way, I felt a compulsion to go clean up the mess they had left. It was the right thing to do, and while I might have done so many wrong things in Carpathia that I couldn’t sleep without sweating through my sheets, I still tried to be a good man. One who did the right things…like cleaning up a broken glass at a party.

Except when I rounded the corner into the room, I saw that someone else had beaten me to it.

* * *

I saw two things first, and those two things nearly brought me to my knees.

The first was a spill of hair over her shoulder, a cascade of platinum white silk which was like nothing I’d ever seen. It promised thickness and softness and light; I had half a mind that if I touched it, I’d be struck dead. It seemed like the kind of hair mortals weren’t allowed to possess, which meant that she had to be some kind of demi-goddess. When she moved to reach for a shard of glass, the warm light of the room moved through her hair like water—or maybe it was her hair that was like water, gold and white, rippling and fluid.

The second thing: she was kneeling.

In a pool of broken glass.

It was like a fantasy I’d never known enough about myself to have, but once I saw it, I knew nothing could ever be the same. I was being rewritten, reshaped, or something better—like I was being reshaped to find out that it had been my true shape all along. Some door inside me swung open, some key slid easily into an old lock, and the air sang with heavy fate.

This beautiful creature, on her knees. Suffering for someone she loved. Pain and strength in every line of her body, in every duck of her head and stretch of her hand as she plucked splinters of glass one by one off the parquet.

And I was drowning in it. I didn’t know her face, I didn’t know her name, but in an instant, it felt like I knew her. It felt like she slid into the empty places inside me.

Embry was the only other time I’d felt that, and I had to take in a breath as I realized what that meant. My cock—slowly stiffening in response to the sight of this person kneeling—was hardening for a woman. My chest was tight for a woman. My mind was abuzz with ideas about every way I could make this woman my own, my little one, for always.

There was no time to sift through the personal and cultural implications of this, and even if there had been, I wouldn’t have needed to anyway. The speed at which I rearranged my beliefs about myself matched the speed in which I found myself fascinated by this girl. Matched the speed at which I made a decision.

I stepped into the room.

“You’ll hurt yourself if you’re not careful,” I said.