now

“Don’t, Dah-dee,” Galahad scolds, taking the wooden apple out of my hand and putting it back inside the suitcase lying open on the floor. “There,” he says, satisfied. “There, Dah-dee.” At less than two years old, his baby accent makes the th in there sound like a d. Dere. Dere, Da-dee. It makes my heart break with how fucking cute it is.

He makes my heart break with how fucking cute he is. Every day. Every minute. Since that first time I held him in the hospital, wrapped up like one of those Glo-Worm toys from my childhood, just a sleepy burrito of soft cheeks and dark hair peeking out from a hospital hat. If I thought I couldn’t live without Ash and Greer, I’d been wrong, but it was only because of Galahad, the son whose name Greer ultimately chose. From the moment I first saw him, so sweet and curious, I knew he was the Grail knight my queen had described, the kind of child that would grow up to see the face of God, and I didn’t care how ridiculous the name sounded. It felt right that he should be named by Greer. Necessary. (Abilene didn’t know that, of course; she assumed I’d picked the name myself, and I didn’t bother to correct her.)

“But if I bring the apple, then you won’t have it here to play with while I’m gone,” I explain. “Are you sure you want Daddy to take it?”

Galahad nods with baby conviction and then turns to leave the bedroom. He stops after a step and points back to the suitcase. “There, Dah-dee,” he says sternly. The meaning is clear: keep that fucking apple where I put it.

And then because he’s so cute toddling off with his little deck shoes and his little diaper butt under his corduroys, I run over and scoop him up, pretending to eat his belly while he laughs and laughs.

“I’m going to be late,” Abilene says, coming out of the bathroom behind me, still fastening an earring into her lobe. “Are you sure you don’t want to take a later flight and join me?”

I pause the noming noises I’m making against Galahad’s tummy and lift my head. “I’d rather be roasted alive,” I say cheerfully, and then resume tickling my son until he’s shrieking with delight.

Abilene rolls her eyes. If I had held any distant hope that she might reveal a secret maternal gene after Galahad’s birth, I’d been sorely mistaken—she’s just as Abilene as ever, although she’s surprisingly self-aware where our child is concerned. While she can’t muster the kind of parental affection that comes so easily to me, she’s never been anything but safe, organized, and determined about his life. She hired the best care when he was an infant—the most sought-after nanny in the District, a woman named Enid who I cannot pay enough money for being as warm and clever as she is—and aside from her incurable coldness, she’s never endangered him, never emotionally poisoned him, never even raised her voice around him.

It’s absolutely the least that should be asked of any parent, but yet I’m still grateful. Between Enid and me, I can harbor the faint hope that he might escape his childhood unscathed.

“It would be a good opportunity to schmooze the RNC donors,” Abilene is saying as she finishes with the earring and moves back to her room on the other side of our shared bathroom. “A last infusion of cash can’t hurt anything.”

“We already have too much cash,” I say, setting Galahad on his feet and watching him tear out of the door to find Enid. “And I told you, I’d like to spend the night before the debate preparing.”

I hear her make a scoffing noise in her room.

I walk through the bathroom to her doorway, stopping at the threshold and crossing my arms. I don’t come into her room as a rule, and she mostly stays out of mine, and her acceptance of my boundaries has been one of the reasons I’ve stayed sane over the last two years, even if she does try to push me on them every now and again.

“By the way,” I say mildly, “I hope you go straight to hell for that press statement you released yesterday.”

She looks up at me with a mock-innocent expression. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“It doesn’t matter that you fed the Times that story anonymously. Morgan and I know—and I’m certain Ash and Greer do too—that it was you. I just got off the phone with Morgan, and she’s furious.”

“Morgan will get over it, and so will you,” Abilene dismisses. “It will hurt Ash’s campaign far worse than ours.”

“I’m not concerned about the campaign,” I say incredulously. “I’m concerned about my fucking sister. My nephew. You’ve just single-handedly ruined their lives, and you don’t even care?”

“It was time,” she says, all nonchalant. “And they’ll get over it.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’ve been asking you to for a long time. Are you finally changing your mind?”

I stare at her for a moment, and she stares right back, no regret or shame anywhere in her face. I don’t even know why I looked for it.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she tells me. “Right now you’re thinking about how good it would feel to announce that you’re going to divorce me. To take Galahad and storm out of here.”

“It would feel very good,” I agree. I can almost taste the relief now, the sweet freedom, and I’ve daydreamed of divorcing her so often that I have an entire Rolodex filled with different fantasy scenarios. Leaving her in public or leaving her under the cover of night; having her served with divorce papers or tossing the papers myself onto her dinner plate. You name it, I’ve lived it inside my mind with unhealthy relish.

Abilene tilts her head at me in a way that’s uncomfortably sympathetic. “But you’re also thinking about all the reasons why you can’t do that. You can’t win this campaign in the middle of a divorce, and you know that I wouldn’t make it quiet or easy for you. I’d make it so messy and public that you’d not only lose the election, you’d never hold office again. There’s no end to the lies I could tell in divorce court, Embry. Drugs and drinking…prostitutes. Teenage prostitutes. That you also gave drugs to. And paid to have abortions. It wouldn’t be as hard to fake as you’d think.”

“Jesus, Abilene.”

She shrugs as she turns back to her mirror and ruffles her fingers through her hair. It shakes in perfect copper waves over her shoulders. “Still want that divorce?”

I don’t answer her, and I don’t bother telling her goodbye. I get my suitcase, cuddle Galahad for as long as he’ll let me, and tell Enid to text me if she needs anything.

Then I catch my flight to New York.

* * *

My aide—a young white woman named Dinah—checks us into our hotel, makes sure I have all my notes and then we go our separate ways. Her up to her room and me up to mine, and it’s as I’m holding the hotel key against the door’s RFID pad that I notice there’s someone else in the hallway.

I don’t recognize the face, but I’d recognize that stance and suit and earpiece combination anywhere: he’s Secret Service. Which means…

I open my door and all the air is caught in my chest, trapped and sharp and urgent.

Greer is here.

Greer is here in my room, standing at the window and looking into the Manhattan skyline, and I can’t breathe, can’t even think. She turns to face me with a smile, the city lights twinkling behind her as if they love her as much as I do, as if they want to touch her as much as I do.

“This is kind of familiar,” she teases. “You walking into a hotel room, me standing at the window.”

And like that, all the heat and urgency in my chest arrows to my groin. Because it is familiar, and the last time this happened, she ended up sitting on my face in her wedding gown, and I ended up making a mess of the inside of my tux as her husband licked the taste of her off my lips. And she’s even wearing a white dress now, a short sweater-dress with long sleeves and boots up past her knees, making her legs look a million miles long, and shit. I need them around my waist, wrapped around my head, I need that sweater dress bunched up between our stomachs, yanked up to her neck so I can bite at her breasts.

But I stay where I am, slowly setting my suitcase against the wall and letting the door close behind me. “Why are you here?” I ask, struggling to keep my voice neutral, struggling to keep the two years of loneliness and longing hidden.

“Ash sent me,” she says, and of course he did, and I don’t know why that fills me with equal parts excitement and disappointment. Excitement because if Ash sent her, if she came here when he asked, that means there’s only one way tonight will end.

But then why isn’t he here too? Why not come himself, why not the three of us?

“He’s spending the night in Seattle,” Greer says softly, reading my face. “Lyr asked him to stay, and Ash would do anything for that boy.”

My pain deflates a little, replaced by the sharper pain of loving that man so fucking much. Of course he would want to be with Lyr right now, of course he’d be sacrificing anything he could for his son.

Greer bites her lip as she watches me process this. “It’s been two years,” she says in a quiet voice. “If you want me to leave, say the word.”

“And if I don’t want you to leave?” My blood is thrumming hot through my body, and my cock pushes against my zipper like it’s trying to split the metal teeth apart.

Greer releases her lip from her teeth with a small lick and big smile. “Then my safe word is Maxen.”

And I’m on her. It takes me several long strides to eat up the distance between us, but I’m there, I’m against her, I’m slamming her against the wall and sealing my mouth over hers.

“I can’t wait,” I mumble against her lips.

“Then don’t,” she says, and I spin her and push her back on the bed, and I don’t even give her time to move up to the pillows, I don’t give her time to catch her breath. I curve my body right over hers and fumble with my zipper between us, and the back of my hand touches bare wet skin as I do.

“You’re not wearing anything under that dress,” I growl, pausing work on my zipper to shove her dress up and see for myself. “You needed to be fucked that badly?”

She’s arching now, trying to roll her hips against me, but I pin her to the bed with a hard hand on her hip and just look. Just look at the sleek rift between her legs, the tiny parabola of her mound silhouetted against the chunky knit fabric of her dress, the bevels and curves where her cunt meets her thigh, where her thigh meets her ass. The tiny pink rosebud of her ass and the plump little berry of her clit peeking out between her lips. And she’s wet already, so wet that it’s on the outside of her, and all of her private skin is so flushed and so needy.

“Embry,” she moans. “Put it inside me. Please. I can’t wait any longer.”

Fuck, I can’t either. “It’s going to be fast, sweetheart,” I mutter apologetically, bracing my hand on the bed, my other hand digging my cock out of my pants. It’s going to be pointlessly fast, but I’m too ashamed to tell her that. Embry Moore, once known up and down the West Coast for his god-like prowess in bed, is going to come after a single thrust…if that. It’s been more than a year since I’ve had anything other than my hand and a silicone toy I bought in a fit of frustration while my eyes burned with stupid tears and my room was illuminated by the blue glow of my laptop screen. I’ve only had that one night with Belvedere to disrupt my celibacy, which means I’m practically a fucking monk now, and in the face of a willing, spread-open woman, I don’t even know how to make myself last. My balls are already drawn up so fucking tight, ready to pump her full.

I push the head of my cock against her and suck in a breath. Even Greer’s slick heat at my tip feels like too much, far too much.

“Can I go in bare?” I manage to say through gritted teeth, and the little minx laughs at my desperation, her fingers wrapping around my tie and tugging playfully.

But then she gets serious as sin. “Make me messy,” she says, in that haughty little voice she uses sometimes, her queen voice. “I want all the cum you’ve been saving for me. I’ve been thinking about it all day, how it would feel to be full of you. Dripping with you.”

Shit yes. None of the I just want to feel all of you stuff that lovers sometimes say about going bare, none of the pretense of delicacy. Just the raw, crude biology of it, the physical release and natural purpose of it.

The angle is fucked, with her legs still half off the bed and my upper thighs still cinched with my flat-fronted suit pants, but I don’t even care. I yank her hips to mine, breach her wet split with the first inch of me, and then give her the other seven in a rough, grunting shove. She’s so wet that it takes almost nothing to push inside, and I press a forbidding hand to her lower belly to keep her still as I reach underneath us and tug down on my balls to stop the orgasm already strangling every muscle and vein and pipe of me.

Despite my hand hard on her belly, she’s still arching, the raw contact after two years so fucking incredible, and she’s saying, “God, I missed you, I missed you, I missed you,” as I finally let go of myself and pull out to the tip.

“I missed you more,” I breathe as I push inside, and holy fuck, there are stars crowding the edges of my sight, actual fucking stars—supernovas and white dwarfs and goddamn pulsars shooting beams of pure energy across my field of vision—and then I’m fully inside her, hunched over her like a fucking teenager, tangled in my clothes, marveling at the press of my balls against her ass like it’s the eighth wonder of the world.

Every muscle in my body is clenched so hard that I might snap in two, but I’d rather snap in two than miss this, than rush this gift that I didn’t expect but that I need so, so badly. I love her, I love her—

“I love you,” I mumble, kissing her roughly on the mouth, biting at her jaw. “I love you.”

“Embry,” she murmurs, “there’s going to be more. I’ll be here all night. Use me quick, and then I’ll use you slow, but don’t hold back. You don’t ever get to hold back with me.”

My hands grab everywhere even as my hips and dick are so still that I could be a photograph, a sculpture. The slightest twitch will throw me over the edge, and I don’t want it yet, except I do want it, I want it to last forever at the same time that I want to blow all this pent-up pressure inside her and show her exactly how chaste I’ve been. Exactly how much I’ve missed her.

I have to touch every part of her, press and squeeze every inch that has only known her husband’s touch over the last two years. Her slender waist, her pert breasts, even her fucking shoulders I have to clutch and rough up and clasp.

Her shoulders.

And then my hands are on her head, threading through her hair as I cradle her face and kiss her, kiss her, kiss her. And it’s not even her sweet pussy that sends me over the edge, it’s the slide of her tongue silky and wet against my own, just so fucking intimate and naked.

“I’m gonna come,” I grunt into her mouth.

She kisses me back even harder in answer, and then fuck it, it’s coming, my first real orgasm since I fucked a Presidential Aide a year ago; and it’s a hard, angry throb jabbing deep into my balls and then I’m groaning low in my throat as I spill into Greer’s warm cunt. It feels like it’s being yanked out of me, tugged, forced even, and my forehead rolls against hers as the entire lower half of my body is caught in a merciless, vicious storm. I come, and I come, and I’m almost embarrassed to feel how much is leaking out around us, but she’s not embarrassed at all, she’s reaching down to smear her fingers around where we’re joined, and it’s too much to take on top of everything else. I collapse fully on top of her, finishing out the painfully sweet emptying with our stomachs and chests pressed hard together and my hips pumping as worthlessly as any green boy’s.

Finally, after what feels like hours, I’m done and drained. I grab Greer’s hand where it wanders in bawdy curiosity between us, and then I feed it back into her mouth and make her lick off the mess. Her eyes glow like molten silver when I do it, and it spikes heat through me all over again.

“You like that, dirty girl?” I ask breathlessly.

She nods, cum-covered fingers in her mouth, her eyes so wide and innocent and fuck me—

“You’re fucking filthy,” I tell her, pulling out and then dropping to my knees in front of the bed without bothering to pull up my pants. I take her ass in my hands and raise her up to my mouth, feeling the leather kiss of her booted calves slide against my shoulders. I give her one long, dirty lick from her ass to her clit, tasting the mix of the two of us—bitter and sweet—and it’s so damn fitting that we should taste this way together. Bittersweet, messy and mingled, just like our lives and just like our love.

Her thighs squeeze tight around my head, and I can feel the heels of her boots on my back as I kiss and suckle at her, as I lick and dart my tongue and taste everything, all of it, all of her and me, and it’s not long before her hands are fisting at the hotel bed covers, her wedding ring winking in the light of the bedside lamp as she writhes and squeals. I can’t stop staring at it, at the gold and diamond flash of it as she chases her orgasm, and then at my own ring as I wrap my arm over the top of her thigh and press on her pubic bone to keep her still. Twin glints of dull gold, visible stamps of other people’s ownership. She is somebody else’s wife and I am somebody else’s husband, and God, that thought shouldn’t be so fucking wrong and thrilling that I’m getting hard all over again.

But it is.

And I am.

Her hand tangles through my hair and holds me hard to her cunt, and with my tongue and teeth working like I’d never get to eat a woman again, she comes so fucking hard that her thighs tremble and shake against my cheeks and her boots gouge and scrape at me, and I know I’ll have bruises and ruptured blood vessels dusted across my back in decoration.

The thought is like a cold drink on a hot day. A relief. Thank God, let her mark me, let her mark me, let there be proof that tonight is real.

Please.

Slowly, the flutters and contractions subside against my mouth and the hand in my hair loosens. I lift my face from between her legs, loving how I can feel her wet on my lips and chin, and even my cheeks, and she whimpers at the sight, her booted feet falling to the floor with twin, carpeted thumps.

“Holy shit,” she pants. “Holy fuck.”

“Yeah.”

She gives a breathless laugh, and then I’m on top of her again, hauling her up to the pillows and yanking her tight into my chest, our legs tangled and our clothes tangled and her hair tangled all around us.

“God, I missed you,” I say, my lips against her head and my words coming out muffled and faint. “So fucking much.”

“I know,” she sighs, her arms sliding around my waist. Her face is buried in my chest and it feels so perfect, all of it so perfect, that I wonder how I’ve been alive so long without it. I wonder what the fuck kind of love this is that it can survive two years of starvation and then still devour me alive the first chance it gets.

Greer must be thinking the same thing because she says, “I kept thinking that maybe I had started to invent how you made me feel, like I was embellishing it in my memory, but…” She tilts her head and looks up at me with a smile that could make stone sing. “It’s just like it was in Chicago, just like it was on my wedding night and in Carpathia. I’ll always be that girl in falling too hard for her knight in shining armor.”

“Shit yes, you will be,” I growl, bending my head to kiss her. “I’ll fucking make sure of it.”

* * *

We fuck again in the shower, and this time—God and his saints be praised—I last long enough to make her come first and to be able to look at myself in the mirror after. And then I fuck her against the window, watching the city lights kiss at her still-wet skin, and then she uses me like she promised she would, shoving me into an armchair and riding me until we both glisten with sweat and we can barely breathe. She comes as my toes dig into the carpet, as her fingers scratch at the arms of the chair, and then I hold her hips over mine and fuck up into her until she screams with another climax and I empty whatever I have left into her.

Which necessitates a final shower—no sex this time, just the gentle wash and touch of contented lovers—and then we slide in between the sheets, tucked in close in the dark.

“I’m glad Ash sent you,” I say, my arms tight around her and my chin on the top of her head. “I can’t—it…I’m just glad, is all. Grateful.”

Greer draws idle circles on my back. “How long has it been? Since you’ve been with anyone?”

“Belvedere,” I confess, and I feel her surprise.

It makes me a little…well, maybe resentful isn’t the right word, but weary. That anything other than rank promiscuity on my part is counted as a shock. “Is that so surprising?” I ask her, unable to smother all the irritation I feel at her response.

She moves to look up at me. “It’s painful,” she says quietly. “To think of you alone so much. I knew you wouldn’t sleep with Abilene, but I thought…had hoped…that you weren’t lonely.”

I sigh, my defensiveness settling back into my bones and going quiet. “The old me wouldn’t have stayed lonely. And at first, with the campaign and with Galahad—it just seemed like the smart thing for the time being. Lie low, keep my pants zipped. I didn’t need another skeleton in my closet when election time came around.”

“And then?”

I trace the arches of her eyebrows, the line of her nose. “And then, there were times when I could have fucked someone subtly, safely, and I found I couldn’t. Not even just that I didn’t want to, but that I actually couldn’t. My body would turn cold at the very thought, and eventually I realized that you and Ash had ruined me for anyone else. Once we became a three, I didn’t—I can’t be anything else with anyone else. The night Belvedere came to me was the only time I was able to take someone to bed, because it felt like I was taking you and Ash to bed.”

“Did you have to pretend it was Ash?” she asks.

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “It’s hard to describe…like the whole time I was fucking him, I wasn’t pretending it was anyone other than Ryan Belvedere, but that was because I didn’t need to. Because it had been you and Ash acting through Ryan, so fucking him was like fucking you.” I pause, remembering that night. Sweaty and rough and long. “Did Ryan tell you about it later?”

“He did,” Greer answers with a smile. “Ash was so eager to mount me after Belvedere described it for us that he didn’t even wait for the door to close.”

My tired cock gives an instinctive jolt against her thigh as I imagine it.

“Ash fucked me on the floor until I screamed. Then he spanked my ass and fucked me again. We were thinking of you and Belvedere the whole time.”

I groan. “My dick hurts too much to fuck again but I’m hard.”

“I can help,” Greer says sweetly, and in an instant she’s climbing over me, settling her wet cunt over my face as she sucks my sore erection into her mouth. And I’m back to zero stamina again, but luckily she is too, and after a few pulling sucks, I’m jetting down her throat as she’s fluttering against my tongue.

And then she’s snuggling back into my arms like nothing happened, nuzzling against my chest. If I were a big cat, I’d be purring right now. Warm and sex-sleepy, with my mate all warm and sex-sleepy herself against me.

“Embry,” she says as I start to drift off. “There’s something you should know. About Abilene.”

That kills my purr instantly. “What is it?”

I can’t see Greer’s face because it’s still cradled against my chest, but I sense her hesitation. “A while ago, I met with Dr. Ninian.”

Dr. Ninian. The White House doctor who helped Abilene drug me the night Galahad was conceived. Ash had fired her discreetly, although he’d wanted to do much worse, but he’d stopped at termination because I asked him to. Because I couldn’t have something like that hanging over my head during the campaign.

“She’s agreed to go to the police, after I threatened to on her behalf. But I’d been stalling, because I didn’t want to drag it into the open during the election.”

“But then Abilene went public about Lyr,” I guess.

“She has to be stopped, Embry. And even if you refuse to press charges, the tampering with medical records and collusion to commit a crime might be sufficient to send her away. At the very least humiliate her enough that people stop trusting her.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I tell Greer. “If she goes to jail, if she’s humiliated and friendless—she will always be dangerous. Isn’t it safer to keep her satisfied for now?”

“I’m not asking your opinion on this,” Greer replies. “I’m just warning you that it’s coming. Maybe in the next couple of weeks. I don’t want to hurt your campaign, but I don’t have a choice—I don’t know what she’ll do next, and sometimes I worry that she might do something extreme. Hurt someone like she tried to hurt me through Melwas.”

My arms tighten around her. “I won’t let that happen. I have her watched, Greer, I have every possible communication line tapped and observed. She can’t hurt anyone while I’m still around.”

Greer doesn’t answer, and I know it’s because she doesn’t believe me, and I’m trying to think of something else to say to reassure her—and also to dissuade her from any scheme of going to the police—when she speaks again. “I saw the protestors outside the hotel tonight.”

I roll to my back and groan up at the ceiling. “I know.”

“Embry, please be careful. Those Carpathian extremists—they’re dangerous.”

It was Carpathian extremists who murdered her parents when she was a child; she has every right to be nervous about them. And I wish I could say something to reassure her, but what can I say? I intentionally adopted an aggressive anti-Carpathian platform. It’s what I believe in, it’s what I am running on, even though I knew it would make enemies both abroad and at home. The protestors here at home are not a real bother; they’re the usual protesting types, holding up signs about warmongering and the military-industrial complex and xenophobia and whatever else. It’s the Carpathian extremists that perhaps I should worry about.

I mean, I don’t actually worry. For one, my Secret Service protection starts tomorrow, and for another, it’s a long stretch from online threats to real danger. I spent several years with their bullets and bombs and ruined towns full of trip-wire explosives. I’m not worried about a few assholes venting on Twitter.

“Please, Embry,” she says, her fingers running along my hairline, following the topography of my temples and ears and cheeks. “You’re not invincible.”

“I know I’m not.”

She makes a noise. “I forgot. It’s not that you think you won’t get hurt, it’s that you don’t care if you get hurt.”

“Now you sound like Ash.”

I hear her temper flare in her words. “Because I have the audacity to care about you? The audacity to want you alive?”

“You’d be the only one,” I mumble, not because it’s true, but because she’s pushing buttons I don’t want pushed and so it’s easier to hide behind self-loathing.

“Oh, shut up,” she says, and she’s annoyed, but I hear amusement in her words too. “You can’t pout your way out of being loved. Not with me or Ash…or Galahad.”

I soften at the mention of my son’s name. At the sound of his name on Greer’s lips. With an urgency that’s just as heartbreaking as it is selfish, I want them to meet. I want to see her holding him, reading to him, giggling with him. I want to see if he makes her light up the way he makes me light up, I want to see if she’s just as blown away by his sweet and shy curiosity as I am.

“Have you…will you ever forgive me for him?” I ask, my mouth dry. Suddenly I need to know, need to know right away. “Will you ever be able to forgive him for his mother?”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” she says, and her voice is all clarity, all warm honesty and earnest truth. She guides my hand to her stomach, which is flat and narrow. “I wish—I mean, there aren’t enough wishes in the world for how much I want to have a child with you and Ash, but I do wish for it. I’ve lit about every candle in St. Thomas Becket, I’ve prayed to every patron saint of women and childbirth and children. I can’t say I still don’t feel a stab of jealousy when I think of him, because I do. I do feel that, but I also feel like I want to love him and there’s nothing that will ever make me stop loving you. And whatever Abilene’s done, she’s still my cousin, which means Galahad is my family too.”

“We’ll find a way for you to meet,” I promise. “You need to know him. And I—well. I need you to know him.”

“I’d like that,” she says. “And Ash…Ash should meet him.”

My eyelids burn and I blink fast. “Yes.”

“Do you remember that first time after you brought me back to Camp David? The three of us?”

“Yes, of course.”

“There was this moment, when you told me you loved me, do you remember? You said it so only I could hear.”

My mind is still thinking of Ash’s strong arms carrying my son, and it takes me a minute to process what she’s saying, but then when I do, guilty heat warms my face. I remember that moment well, and I’m not proud of it. “Yes, I did.”

“Why?”

I chew on my lip, searching for the right words. The honest ones. “I wanted you to know that I loved you, that I wasn’t loving or fucking you through my love for Ash…and I wanted you to know because I was jealous of him. Of how you looked at him that day. Even though I’d just brought you home, it seemed like child’s play compared to how well he took care of you after. Like he was doing the real rescuing. And Ash is so—he’s so everything—he’s like water and he fills up every space—and I had this moment where I wanted just this one thing for myself. Loving you.” I inhale. “And I know that Ash and I have years and years of history, that it would be easy to think that what I felt for him was more than what I felt for you, but you needed to know that it wasn’t true. There was a part of me that was only just for you. That still is.”

She lets out a breath, nodding. “I know,” she replies. “I mean, that’s what I thought you might say.”

“Why are you asking about this?”

She takes a long time to answer, and when she does, her voice is soft. “Because sometimes I wonder if we would have lasted as a three, even if you hadn’t left. We love each other so much, but we’re all so tangled up and snarled together, how could it have ever worked?”

“Ash,” I say. “It would have worked because of Ash—and because of us. I believe that, Greer. I really do. That no matter how jealous we were, how broken and how messy, we would have made it.”

“And if we had made it, what then?”

“I would have been in your bed every night,” I say with a smile. “And there every morning to feed you coffee and pet you awake. And eventually after all the politics were done, we’d find a nice place out in the country and fill it with babies and grow old together.”

“Babies,” she smiles. “That sounds nice.”

“Maybe I got you pregnant tonight.” I barely dare to say it, but I’m too caught up in what our lives could have been like to stop myself. “Maybe it’s happening right now.”

“Oh Embry,” she says, rolling on top of me. Her hair is everywhere, sweet-smelling and soft. “I hope so. I hope so with all my heart.”

And we don’t say much after that, letting the hopeful thump of our hearts and the slow swells of our breath carry us to someplace dark and peaceful. Someplace where the woman I love can hold my son, where her belly is full of a child we made together. Ash is there too, and the four of us are happy and laughing and expansive and safe, and in this place, there’s only us and our love and the family we grow together.

There’s no Carpathia.

No Abilene.

No election and no debate.

There’s no balling dread that I might take the stage against Ash and fall to my knees before he ever says a word.

There’s no tentative, prickling excitement that I might take the stage against him and hold my own, that I might win, that I might find myself stronger and smarter, at least for that one crucial hour.

There’s no fear that I’ll wake up to an empty bed, with only the boot-heel shaped bruises on my back and the lingering smell of fresh shampoo to remind me that it wasn’t a dream.

No fear that tomorrow will find me alone.

And defeated.