now

Tomorrow finds me alone.

Tomorrow finds me defeated.

I’m not surprised when I wake up alone, although that doesn’t make it sting any less. But I am surprised when Ash not only wins the debate, he trounces me. He destroys me.

Guts me and hangs up my head and my heart for the world to see.

He is the king, after all, and I have no one to blame but myself for forgetting.

* * *

I only remember flashes from the debate itself. The backstage at Hofstra University, crowded and jostling with people re-taping audio cords and adjusting camera settings and arguing about wi-fi. Searching for Ash as someone touched up my camera makeup. Searching for Greer. Seeing only strangers and lights. Going over my notes on my phone as Vivienne Moore texted me an unending stream of advice.

Look into the camera. Speak clearly. Don’t let him anger you.

Don’t fuck it up.

I remember stepping onto the stage first, waving and smiling at the intimate crowd. And then turning. And seeing him.

In person.

Up close.

Green eyes. Full, sharply peaked lips. Black hair shot through with strands of silver—so far apart that you think you’ve imagined them in the light. A suit cut so perfectly to his tall and masculine proportions that the tailor probably wept and came at the same time he cut it. A presence like a saint or a conqueror or a demigod, a presence that expands like heat from the wide shoulders and narrow hips and ruthlessly handsome face.

I remember shaking hands, his hand huge in mine, and rough and strong, and how are we shaking hands like strangers? We didn’t even shake hands when we first met, unless you’d call a forearm in your throat a handshake. And our eyes meeting, and I always forget I’m just that little bit taller, but somehow it doesn’t matter with Ash, I feel like I’m standing at the feet of Zeus and peering up in supplication. It’s that presence, and I’m helpless in the face of it, or I always have been, and then Ash cups my elbow and leans into my ear.

“I love you, little prince,” is all he says.

No insults.

No threats.

After I’ve spent the last year doing everything I can to undermine his power, to woo politicians and donors to my side, relentlessly stating and restating every single way I think he’s a bad leader, publicly forswearing our every bond and oath, trumpeting about his weaknesses, after all of that—all he wants to say to me is I love you?

Oh my God. I’m fucked. I’m done. I had prepared to debate in the face of his hatred, but I am nothing in the face of his love.

Nothing.

I pull back and look into those bottle-green eyes. “Achilles,” I manage in a whisper before the audience erupts in polite applause and the moderator exhorts us to take our podiums. His heart cracks open in his eyes when I say it.

I crack open too. Open and apart. Into nothing.

I remember taking notes as he and Harrison Fasse talked. I remember scribbling down points, and errors, and also just drawing nonsense lines because I needed someplace to look that wasn’t my king’s face, something to concentrate on that wasn’t his charred, melodic voice. It didn’t work though, because how could I not hear him? How could I not see him?

I remember making most of my points fairly well. I’m good at talking, I’m good at smiling. I’m persuasive. I’m from a liberal state with a Democrat for a mother and I’m also a decorated military vet, the perfect swirl of blue and red—not to mention young and handsome and smart. I’m an ideal candidate, as moderate and inoffensive as you can get. If I were running against any other person than Ash, this wouldn’t be a contest.

But it is Ash.

And he is the king.

To every question, he has a better answer. To every point, he has a better counterpoint. And it’s not only his eloquence, although that’s part of it, but it’s that clarity and honesty that spills through him like light, that radiates from him in a shine of equanimity and strength. It’s irresistible even to me, and I know the audience feels it, basks in it, takes it and holds it close because it’s the feeling of knowing someone good is in charge. Someone good is here and trying to make things better and they will do all the hard work and fighting for you, and all you have to do is believe them and trust them.

The terrible thing is that I know he doesn’t mean to do this, but without trying to, he paints a picture of me as overeager and inexperienced, unseasoned in a way that makes me feel clumsy, like a boy trying on his father’s suit.

And finally I remember Ash delivering the killing blow.

“Mr. Moore was my brother in arms, my running mate, and my dear friend. I still have nothing but respect and affection for him. But I will tell you that he swore to stay by my side through my first term, and he left to follow his ambition. Can you trust that he won’t do the same to you? That he won’t swear to serve you and then follow his ambition elsewhere?”

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.

“Took you long enough,” he says.

“I came straight here.”

“I’m not talking about tonight.”

I don’t have an answer to that, and he knows it. He sets the scotch down and prowls towards me. Everything inside me is screaming to take a step back or to fly at him—to run or to attack.

I don’t do either of these things, but I feel the closed door behind me like an iron barrier, I feel cuffed and collared just by standing in front of him, and I hate that I still love it, that I miss it, that I want it. I hate myself. I hate him. I hate the lamps around the room that make him glow with an almost angelic radiance. I hate how good he looks with his tie loose and the city lights behind him. I hate how his green eyes burn for me as hotly as they burned in that Carpathian forest when he put his boot on my wrist.

“Why did you bring me here?” I ask, as if I don’t know. As if I’m not deliberately provoking him.

“Why do you think?”

“To fuck me.”

“You really think,” he says dangerously, coming close to me, “that you deserve to be fucked right now?”

“You would have been there with Greer last night,” I point out. “Why not, if not to fuck me?”

“If I’d been there with Greer last night, you wouldn’t have been able to sit down today, and your cock would still be hard. You don’t know what I would have done if I were there, but I guarantee you that you would be a lot less impudent to me tonight.”

I almost laugh. We just spent an hour and a half sparring over the most important issues facing our world today, and he whips out the word impudent? If I hadn’t felt unmanned before, I certainly feel unmanned now—my best efforts and all the Republican Party’s best money, and it’s just childish impudence to him? He might as well call me a brat.

“I can’t decide whether I want to hit you or kiss you,” I tell him honestly.

He steps closer. His shoes touch my shoes, and for a terrible moment, I remember every time that’s ever happened, the intimate knock of leather against leather. In the Army and during his first campaign. At his wedding to Jenny, when he asked for help with his boutonnière, and my toes bumped against his as I fiddled with the stupid flower pin and he stared at my mouth and I pretended not to notice.

“Funny,” he breathes, “I was just thinking the same thing.”

“You won,” I spit. “How can you possibly be thinking the same thing?”

“I won?” he demands. “Really? You call listening to you slander me for a year winning? Fighting you tonight—that’s winning for me?”

“You used to like fighting me,” I say sulkily. I know I’m being deliberately shitty, but I can’t stop myself, I can’t force myself past it, can’t stop it. It’s been two years since we’ve seen each other and all we’ve done tonight is argue publicly and now privately, and it’s stupid. It’s so fucking stupid, because all I wished for last night was for us to be alone and happy, and now all I want to do is choke him. Or be choked by him.

His nostrils flare, his jaw tightens.

My skin prickles with alarm, but I keep my chin lifted, my eyes narrowed. “And now you’ve won fair and square, in front of everyone, without even rumpling your suit. Surely that’s enough?”

I shouldn’t have said it, I realize that now, because the word enough is a bit of a trigger word between us, a word that dredges up memories of closets and cages and boundaries, the word I used a long time ago to tell him he was good enough to fuck but not to marry, and it was a lie, of course it was, but I sold it so fucking well.

The first time I used that word with him, he slapped me right across the face. This time, it’s worse.

He does nothing.

“Go ahead,” I dare him. “Slap me. Wrestle me. Fuck me. You won, so that’s what you get to do, right?”

“So that’s how you want it to be,” he says in a cold, slow voice.

“I don’t want it ‘to be’ any way, Mr. President,” I say with something between a smile and a snarl. “I’m just being impudent.”

“You,” he says grimly, “are asking for trouble.”

“And that’s a problem?”

“You don’t have a safe word.”

“I remember.”

His hand slams hard at the wall next to my head; I can’t help but flinch. “Give me a fucking safe word, Embry,” he growls. “Right the fuck now.”

“We’ve never needed one before.”

“I,” he says, finally taking that last step forward, and oh fuck, he’s hard, and his whole body is hot and so deliciously firm, and then his nose runs along my jaw and his lips are at my ear, “have never needed a safe word with you before.”

“And why is that?”

I feel him inhale, smelling my skin; his cock swells even harder against my hip. My own cock is a fucking lost cause, hard enough to pop like a fucking jack-in-the-box, leaking all over the inside of my pants.

“Because I’ve never needed you to be able to stop me before.”

I choke on the air I’m breathing. It’s terror and lust and possession. And a tiny voice that tells me not to give him a safe word because if I don’t give it to him, then I know he won’t touch me. Even in his wrath, he is too loving (once again like his Catholic god,) and if I tell him no, he will listen, and even if I don’t say no, if I say nothing, he will take a step back, he will drawn in a breath, he will fist his hands at his hair and tell me in a choked voice to leave. If I don’t give him a safe word, I could crawl in front of him naked, I could present any hole, my weeping cock, and he’d be stone.

And I hate him for being so safe. For being so good. I hate that he will still take care of me in the same moment that he wants to rip me limb from limb. I want him to destroy me, even if it’s just one more thing to hate him for.

“You give me one,” I say. “Give me a safe word and it’s mine.”

His eyes flare. “You’re supposed to choose.”

It’s my last petulant stand. “No.”

“No? Unoriginal, I suppose, but workable.”

“You know that’s not what I—”

But it’s too late, his hand is fisted at the neck of my shirt and I’m being shoved down to my knees, and I expect his other hand to fall to his zipper, I expect my mouth to get fucked, I expect anything other than the door opening with an electronic whirr and click and Greer walking in, looking nothing like the autumn princess of last night and every bit a queen. Black cigarette pants hug her hips and ass, and she’s wearing a matching black shirt with suit-like lapels and a neckline so low that I can see the inner slopes of her breasts. Sandaled heels showcase her delicate Barbie-like feet, her blond hair waves silkily over one shoulder, lipstick the color of sin stains her lips.

For a ridiculous minute, Ash and I are frozen, just staring at her. Ridiculous not because she shouldn’t be stared at, but because I’m on my knees, because Ash’s hand is at my neck, because both of us are flushed and dilated with angry hunger. She sets her black clutch purse on a nearby table and steps towards us, her face keen with carnal delight.

“What are my boys doing without me?” she asks.

I can’t speak. Adrenaline and God knows what other hormones are surging through me, along with all the shame and rage from earlier. Ash speaks for us.

“I won,” he explains simply. “So I get to do what I want with him.”

“Oh,” she says, the apples of her cheeks going rosy with interest. “Are you going to fuck him?”

“He doesn’t deserve to be fucked.”

“You could fuck his mouth.”

“He doesn’t deserve that either.”

I try to clear my throat—not in an I’m right here noise—but in actual nerves, in actual discomfort, because I’m scared and angry and horny and I actually don’t know which feeling is which any longer. They’ve all blended together, mashed and pulped into the same thing.

It’s as if the noise reminds Ash that I’m still here, still kneeling at his feet with his hand gripping the back of my neck. He looks down at me.

“I think I know,” he says softly. “I know exactly what to do with you.”

“Go fuck yourself,” I say.

“That, my little prince, has never, ever been the plan.” And then he’s dragging me towards the bed like a dog, too low for me to stand, too fast for me to crawl, and I know I’ll have bruises on my knees, I can hear rips in the fabric of my suit, and for minute, I think about just standing up and saying it.

No.

No, I’m not playing this game with you tonight. No, I’m not your pet, your boy, your plaything. I’m not your lover. I’m not your prince. I’m your enemy and you said you loved me tonight and then you drowned me in your power, you held me under until I was clawing at my own throat and the blood vessels exploded in my eyes and all I could taste was you.

It would be so easy to say it. So easy to stop.

So why am I not stopping it? Why am I letting him throw me on the bed? Crawl over me? Yank off my jacket and tie and shoes as if they’ve offended him somehow?

It was less terrible when I didn’t have a safe word, when I didn’t have any agency in my own humiliation. When I could fight back knowing that Ash would win, pretending I didn’t have a choice. But now, I have the easiest word of all—no—and the mere existence of the word is driven into me like a nail, like a spear into my heart and I’m leaking blood and water around it. It can’t kill me because I’m already dead, or at least my self-respect is, because I could stop this, but I won’t.

I won’t, I won’t.

I’m disgusted with myself.

I’m stripped bare, and the moment my cock springs free from my boxer briefs, Ash gives it a punishing slap, making me cry out and arch. My cock responds in the most embarrassing way, bobbing and leaking merrily, my balls drawing up tight to my body as if they’re ready to spill their load at any moment.

He slaps it again, and his answering erection is so massive right now. He gives it a thoughtless, impatient shift to readjust it, too busy making me feel bad to make himself feel good.

Another slap. There’s pre-cum on my belly again, my toes are digging into the covers, and Greer is slowly undressing by the side of the bed, her eyes glued to the sight of my punished cock.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask on a groan.

“Because maybe you’ve forgotten after two years apart,” he says, “but you belong to me.”

Another slap. My erection is mottled in shades of red, and I’m shivering with the sudden endorphin rush from the pain.

“You could say no,” he says. “Right now. Tell me that you don’t want to me to touch you. To speak to you. To look at you.”

I close my eyes. “Fuck you,” I whisper.

“That’s not your safe word.” Another slap, this time lighter but right against my testicles. I grunt in pain. “Do you need help remembering it? It starts with n and ends with o. Say no to me, Embry. Say it right now. You’ve never had trouble saying it to me before.”

“I hate you.”

“I love you and I’m going to make you cry tonight if you don’t say no to me.” My nipples are twisted with savage speed, I’m rolled over and spanked so hard on the ass that I feel it reverberating through my hair follicles, spanked on that tender spot where my thighs meet my butt, spanked so hard that I know he must have ruptured blood vessels in his palm.

I grunt into the covers, my body rigid. It hurts like fuck, but he can beat me till I scream and I still won’t cry for him. Not tonight, not ever again.

“Goddammit, Embry, just say it,” he seethes. His palm is like a hail of fire behind me; Moses himself has never seen fire like the kind Ash is burning into my ass, and he doesn’t stop, he won’t stop until he wrenches that safe word from me, but he won’t get it—or my tears—he doesn’t get to parade victory in every corner of my soul tonight. No fucking way.

“I hate you,” I mumble again into the sheets, and then there’s the cool, slim fingers of Greer’s hand on my neck, running through my hair. I feel her curling over me, her hair soft and whispering against my skin, and I’m distantly aware that she’s naked too, and that she’s murmuring gentle things into my ear as Ash lays blows on my ass like I’ve never had before. It’s okay and you’re so brave, so good to him to let him do this and you’re so handsome right now, I’m so wet over you, Embry, so wet.

“Say it,” Ash growls though gritted teeth. “Fucking say it.”

“You can’t make me safe out,” I gasp. “And you can’t make me cry.”

“And you can’t make a liar out of me. You’ll cry.”

“You already lied,” I say petulantly into the bed. “You said you loved me before the debate.”

The spankings stop; the bed dips as he climbs over me, and the fabric of his trousers on my bare, spanked ass is so cruelly abrading. “I do love you,” he murmurs into my ear.

“Liar.”

“Do you really think that I can’t be angry and in love at the same time?”

“What do you want from me?”

He unknots his tie and it drops ominously next to my face. I feel him unbutton and shrug off his shirt. I feel him unzip his pants and tug them down his hips, and then he’s flipping me over and straddling me. I moan as he leans forward and our naked cocks knock together, which makes him smile wickedly.

“What I just said,” he breathes, leaning down to run his nose along my jaw again. “For you to know that no matter how far you run, no matter how hard you fight, no matter how much you think you hate me, you will always belong to me.” He bites my earlobe, straightens up, and then rubs his cock along the abused length of mine.

“Shit,” I gasp. “Holy shit.”

He does it again, hot velvet skin on hot velvet skin, and all the tender spots on my cock are singing, weeping, thrilling with ecstasy. Pain and pleasure sizzle up my spine. My skin sparks into the very air.

“Greer,” he says, his hands bracing by my head, and holy shit, he’s moving his entire body over mine, moving over me like a man fucking another man below him, but he’s not fucking, he’s teasing. Cock against cock, heat against heat, hard against hard. Shit, it shouldn’t feel so good, but it does, it does.

Greer is perched in nude perfection next to me, her legs kicked out to the side and bent a little in an adolescent display of indolence that shouldn’t be as sexy as it is. Her hard nipples peek through the tumbled veil of hair over her breasts and her hands are fisted in the blankets.

“Yes?” she answers Ash.

“Hand me my tie.”

She does, holding one end of it while he pushes off my body and I groan with the loss. And then he’s measuring, studying, the length of silk and my penis and my testicles—no tailor or architect was ever as serious or as focused as Ash right now with this fucking tie—and then I feel the cool silk rubbing against my balls, my inner thighs, my frenulum. I writhe and whine.

“You know what I’m going to do with this, Embry. Tell me not to.”

“Go to hell,” I pant, bucking my hips against the touch of the tie. It’s too much, too soft and it feels too good and it’s so demeaning, and oh Jesus, I’m going to come if that tie slips against my skin one more time…

But it never comes. Instead he makes good on his word and begins binding up my erection and my balls, and a heartless cinch around my sac means the orgasm building behind my dick is mercilessly yanked away. And then more cinches and Ash says, in a voice so gruff with wonder and excitement that I almost do manage to come despite my bound cock, “Look at you. Look at you.”

I look. I look at my cock so fucking swollen and dusky-red and sad. I look at Ash hovering over me, pants yanked down to his hips, his own dick so rigid and thick that it points straight up to the ceiling, his chest moving in deep, excited breaths. I look at Greer next to us, wearing nothing but red lipstick and flushed cheeks.

“Ash,” I beg. “Don’t leave me like this. Please.”

“That’s getting closer to your safe word, but yet you’re still missing the mark. It’s no, remember? You say, no, Ash, don’t tie up my cock and tease me. And if you don’t say that, then you say yes, Sir.”

“Or else what?”

“Or else,” he says with an evil look, reaching for Greer, “you don’t get to taste Greer’s cunt.”

I drop my head back with a growl. “That’s cheating.”

Ash raises Greer to her knees, not answering me. Instead, he asks her, “What’s your safe word, precious?”

“Maxen,” she replies promptly.

“And do you have any objection to torturing Embry with me?”

She sends a coy smile down at me and my cock throbs. I growl again.

“I want nothing more.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” He helps her move over me, and in a moment’s work, she’s got her knees astride my head and her hands on the headboard, and her pussy unfurls like a flower in bloom right above my face. On instinct, I lift my head to suckle at her, but I’m stopped by Ash’s hand cupping her, his fingers now firmly between my mouth and her wet skin.

More growling.

“Say it. Say yes, Sir, and that cunt is yours to eat.”

“Embry,” Greer pleads, my name dripping with honey as it leaves her lips. “Please eat me. Please.” And it’s the sweet sound of her helpless need and the little wiggle of her hips—as if she’s trying to press against Ash’s hand and get closer to my mouth at the same time—that undoes me.

Ash has me and he knows it, and he was right earlier, I do belong to him and I want to belong to him, and I love him just as much as I hate him, and I only hate him because he’s better than me, because he’s the third side of our triangular heart, because I can’t live without him.

Monster.

“Yes, Sir,” I say. And then I’m broken forever.

Ash makes a low, satisfied noise at the verbal signal of my inner destruction and pulls his hand away from Greer’s pussy. Faster than a spark flying from a fire, my hands are digging at her hips and tugging that beautiful cunt to my mouth. I give her a long, dirty lick, just like I did last night, and then I trace every crease of her with my tongue, I dart tasting licks into her vagina, I suck her clit between my teeth and work it like it’s my job. I hold nothing back, not even when she is riding my face and all I can breathe is her.

“That’s it,” Ash approves. “I know you’ve missed our princess, and one night wasn’t enough, was it?”

And then he is astride my chest, his hands resting large and demanding over mine on Greer’s hips, and there’s almost no warning when he wedges his cock at her entrance and pushes inside his wife. Greer cries out from being filled, and Ash lets out a vicious exhale as my tongue traces along his shaft, as I gently suck on his sac.

“Yeah,” he mutters. “Yeah.”

That’s how we move, with me flat on my back, cock bound and leaking, and Ash and Greer astride me, my mouth searching to service them both.

“Lick me, Embry,” Greer begs in a whisper. “Lick me, lick me. Make me come, oh please, oh please—”

She comes on Ash’s cock and my tongue at the same time, all while I’m mindlessly writhing against the air myself, my ass and thighs and cock one continuous clench and ache, and then as she comes down, she looks over her shoulder to Ash, whose eyes are gazing down at where he and his wife join, at where I’m running the flat of my tongue along the underside of his cock every time he pulls out.

“You said he didn’t deserve his mouth getting fucked,” she says, voice still honeyed with arousal. “But maybe he’s done enough to earn your cum.”

Ash’s hand drops underneath Greer’s ass to cup the back of my neck. “Would you like that?”

Where’s the shame in admitting it now?

He’s won.

He’s won, he’s won.

In response I open my mouth, tongue over my bottom teeth, my cock threatening to split open merely at the idea of being used like this.

“Fuck,” Ash groans, unravelled by the sight of my mouth waiting for his cock, and he lets loose into Greer with a flurry of hard, brutish thrusts, and from down here, I can see how powerful he really is, how sculpted those thighs and how tight that stomach, how wide and hard his cock. I can see the intimate, practical biology: the stretch of her cunt around his erection, the sway of his balls, the wet glisten of aroused skin.

“Open wide, little prince,” Ash grunts, and then he pulls of out Greer’s tight pussy and into my open mouth, shoving down into my throat and erupting with a groan that I can feel everywhere in my body, the kind of groan I’ll remember for the rest of my life. Primal and male and triumphant.

Hot semen pours down my throat, and he’s coming so hard I can actually feel the pulse and throb of his organ as my lips stretch around him and I can feel the contractions that clench all the inner workings of this cock I love so much.

“Oh, you have such a pretty mouth,” he growls, his thumb running along the corner of my lips to gather up a pearl of leaked cum, and then he licks it off his thumb as he keeps pumping his hips and fucking through the last spurts of his orgasm. “So fucking pretty. I want to fuck it every day.”

He leaves my mouth with a faint pop noise, but he doesn’t move. Instead, he uses his fingers to guide his cock back into my mouth and to rub it around my lips.

“Greer,” he says. “I know what you want, and you can have it. And as for you,” he says, fingers pressing down on the top of his cock to push it between my lips again. “Clean me off.”

Greer is scampering down to my cock like a happy little bunny, and then she’s moving, and oh, fuck, oh fuck, she’s on top of me, she’s touching me, she’s sinking down onto my aching, abused penis and taking it inside her body. I can’t help but to arch and buck and whimper around Ash’s cock, and he loves it, his eyes are glowing with heat and amusement—and goddammit, even with love—and Greer rides me hard and fast, her fingers at her clit, and her wetness everywhere, ruining Ash’s tie, but who cares, who fucking cares—

“Suck it,” Ash says darkly, shoving his cock into my throat again, and then it’s as I’m choking on his cock and Greer is shaking in a fresh orgasm that I come, and it’s the worst and best thing ever to happen, so fucking painful and so fucking brilliant that I’m sure I lose consciousness, just as I’m sure that Ash keeps fucking my mouth for the half second that I fade out, and then he pulls out as Greer and I both shudder to stillness and completion. And with a massive hand around that brutal organ, he jerks off hard and angry, fists a hand in my hair, and marks my face with his cum.

* * *

The shower is silent.

What is there to say?

But even with the stain of the election, we can’t stop touching, can’t stop wanting, and in silence Greer sets her foot up on the shower bench and reaches for me, and in silence, Ash and I share her. He takes her ass, I take her cunt, and she takes both of us, both our devotions and both our hearts. These two people I love so much that I’m dead with it, and a disconsolate voice inside my head wonders if it would have been better if we’d never met at all. If I’d never had to feel surrender and union and real marriage of souls—because then I wouldn’t have to feel its absence or live inside the hollow of what might have been.

Once more is not enough—when it is it ever?—so then there’s twice more, three times more, the final time a joining of such excruciating sweetness that when the three of us meet mouths to kiss and to taste and to simply breathe together, I do cry.

Ash wins.

I cry and Ash tastes my tears and Greer nuzzles into me with her own face tear-soaked, and he tastes her tears too. And it’s a strange thing to orgasm as tears drip down your face, but it’s beautiful too. To climax in joy is such a common, ordinary thing—but to come in anguish, in torment and in sorrow, what a rare jewel indeed. Faceted and flashing. Unforgettable.

Just like two years ago, we cradle Greer between us, and I fall asleep with the gentle swell of her chest against mine, the cool kiss of her hair twined through my fingers, the steady, metronomic sound of Ash’s breathing. And like last night, I fall asleep dreaming of a different place, a different life. It’s us and Galahad and all the other children we can grow, and a puppy maybe, why not a puppy?—and every betrayal, every tragic misunderstanding and missed opportunity is gone forever. There’s only what should have been from the beginning, which is this love the three of us have found like a city in the desert, strange and holy. Empty and waiting just for us.

My sleep is light and troubled, and when I surface to Ash’s voice, it almost feels like I haven’t been asleep at all, save for the lingering memories of a place that doesn’t exist and children that haven’t been born, and an easy joy that could never, ever be mine. Greer wakes too, but like a cat stirring when someone leaves the room. She stretches, yawns with an apathetic glance around her, and then falls right back asleep.

I don’t.

Ash is at the other end of the suite, speaking German in a low voice, and I only catch a few words in my hazy state. Berlin is one, gipfelkonferenz is another—a word my high school German skills weakly translate to a summit or meeting—and then nachste woche. Next week.

Next week, Germany, some kind of meeting or conference? I filter through my brain, flipping through my internal database of schedules and events, because surely I’d know if Ash was going to Germany next week, sure that would have been on my radar?

I hear Ash ask in German how the person is doing, if their cold has cleared up, if they need any help with anything, and I’m surprised more by his tone than by his late night diplomatic call. If this were truly just business, then I know exactly the voice he’d use. Strong, clear, and kind in the way that weather is said to be kind, not because of its unpredictability, but because of its distance. It’s so easy to earn Ash’s respect, his good nature, his earnest collaboration—but his genuine affection and warmth? You might as well try to cup a sea-reflection of the moon in your hands. You’d feel foolish for even hoping.

But right now, on the phone in the dark, speaking German and making plans, his voice is gentle and concerned. Not how he is with his prince and princess, but how I remember him being with the victims in the war. Vy v bezpetsi, vy v bezpetsi, you are safe, you are safe.

Who the fuck does he know in Germany who deserves that kind of voice?

He ends his call and stands for a long time at the window, looking out at the city spread below. I know what he sees. It’s a model train world of overnight janitors and ambling cabs and trash men coming for the trash mountains that sprout on New York sidewalks after midnight. Small and twee and twinkling from so high up, and also so big and so busy as to inject even the most extroverted person with a dose of pure, existential loneliness.

“You don’t have to pretend to be asleep,” says Ash after a while. “I wouldn’t mind the company.”

I get up, and I’m past caring that I’m naked, past caring that my body bears every bruise and slap and suck of my defeat tonight, and I go to stand next to him.

He looks at me. “I don’t suppose if I asked you to kneel, that you would?”

I study his profile in the multi-hued city lights, the silver threads in his hair and the fine lines hidden around the edges of his mouth and eyes. It’s a joke that the Presidency ages the men and women who bear that burden, but it doesn’t feel like a joke to me right now. Not when I can recall that virile young man from the mountains, not when I remember that for the last two years I’ve only added to his burdens. “Do you need me to?”

“Just for a moment.”

I kneel. And I feel him relax the moment my knees touch the carpet, the moment my head bows, as if he’s remembered how to breathe simply by watching me humble myself. He runs a fond hand over my hair, once, twice, letting it stay heavy and benevolent at the crown of my head on the third time over, and we stay like that for a long time. Hotel carpet pressing into my knees, Manhattan glowing lambent and drowsy outside.

And after the silence has become comfortable and close, he whispers, “Look up at me.”

I look up at him.

In this light, he is half-real, shadowed and masculine and powerful, like the deer-horned god my aunt Nimue is so fond of, and I can’t be sure he’s not that, not some kind of pagan infusion of greening life force into the body of an energetic and potent man. It’s a silly notion, beyond silly, and I would tell anyone as much in the daylight when there were miles between Ash and me—but right now, at his feet and in the gloamy city dark, the notion doesn’t seem silly at all, and I have the strangest sensation of knowing this moment already, of this exact same feeling, like deja vu, except I can’t pinpoint where the deja vu comes from. I just know that it’s real, that somehow I’ve lived this same scene before, kneeling in a cloud of my own betrayal before a weary king and thinking he is part god, he is more than just a man, and if he is just a man, then he is the best man ever to have lived.

Ash looks down at me looking up at him, and his entire face seems to melt in relief at whatever he sees. He breaks into a smile so heartbreakingly beautiful that I can’t bear it.

He murmurs something so quietly that I can barely hear it, but hear it I do.

“Still the whole world,” is what he says.

And together we fall through this moment, a king and a prince and the whole world, until we land with abrupt pain in the light of day and I sneak out of his room, bruised and shamed, and back to a campaign only a few steps behind his.

No man can keep the whole world forever, after all. Which is why it’s better to burn it down before it slips away.