then

On a cool summer night in London, I let my heart drop to the floor. I let it roll in broken glass. I let every tiny shard and splinter pierce into me, because the piercing was like a form of worship, a religious experience. For one hour, I felt with this flaxen-haired princess what I thought I could only ever feel with Embry, and it meant so many things, for me and for her, for the man I thought I was and for the king I wanted to be.

For the first time in my adult life, I fully appreciated and understood the complicated and wonderful way I felt desire, the knots and loops of a heart braided this way and that over time; because while maybe I was born into queerness, I’d also shaped it myself, I’d also thrown it and spun it and fired it into what it was now. And every sojourn into sexuality, every dead-end trail or sheer drop, every path that widened into a road or climbed summits, every step had been my own and my choice, and at the age of twenty-six, I could finally look at that with clear eyes and a clear heart. Which is not to challenge the idea that sexuality can be connate, or at least partially so, and not to dismiss those who’ve had their choices taken from them. It’s only to say that in my own life, I’ve had the privilege of being an active participant in my own desire, and it took falling in love twice for me to see this and fully apprehend what it meant. To see where this bled into my need for power and for control and for unbridled devotion and surrender.

And this new truth ultimately evolved into the knowledge that this girl fit me, fed the most elemental and hidden parts of me, made me feel alive again in a way that I thought I’d been forever denied in Embry’s absence. It was opening my eyes after a long sleep, seeing the sun chink through the clouds after weeks of rain, and it felt like even more than that. Like for the first time, I could see myself as clearly as I’d always hoped to, and I could see everyone else that way too.

Greer did that for me.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned liked a child. When I became a man, I set aside childish ways. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then we shall see face to face.

The moment I saw her kneeling, the moment I licked the blood from her fingertip, the moment we kissed, I no longer saw through a dark glass, through mirrors and reflections. I saw face to face. I became a man.

* * *

Nevertheless. Greer was sixteen. I was twenty-six. I had kissed and pressed my aching cock against a sixteen-year-old girl.

That was wrong. That was not moral. I left the party obsessed with her and also hoping I never saw her again, because the temptation of her was too fucking much.

Anything, she’d said. I’ll let you do anything to me.

Jesus Christ.

If I saw her again, I’d take more than her first kiss, I’d take her first everything, I’d cuff her ankle and chain her to my bed like a pet, I would play with her hair and worship every corner and turn of her body. I’d marry her and build houses with her and walk beaches with her, and then I’d carry her in my arms to the darkest places I knew and open every part of her to me and myself to her, until my heart beat in her chest and her heart beat in mine.

I knew shouldn’t see her again. It was safer for her, better for her, certainly until she was fully grown, but maybe it was true that I’d always want too much from her young, open heart and so it was wiser for me to stay away indefinitely.

And as it was, the war flared up again. Krakow was bombed, and I went back to Carpathia, and then—God, how knotted and raveled my loyalties were about to become—Embry came back to me. Right after I’d fallen in love with someone else, however hopelessly, he came back and if I’d had any doubts about the nature of my desires after London, they were wiped away the moment he kissed my boot.

God, I still loved him. I loved him so much that it tore me open, and I wanted to tear him open, and Greer too, and I wanted to share everything, everything, everything, and how could I be one person and still feel so much, want so much, and was this how love was for everyone? Was it being queer? Kinky? Or was it just me and this new three-cornered heart I’d grown, and now that I’d grown it, had my craving and my lust simply swelled to fill the space?

Could I have ever loved just one person?

Was this a new problem? Or simply something I’d never needed to know about myself until now?

And I wasn’t supposed to love Embry, he made that painfully clear when he returned to Carpathia. He didn’t want my love, he didn’t want any future I could give him, but oh, if he would’ve said the word, if he would’ve pressed his lips to my bare chest and murmured, I changed my mind, love me, love me, then I would have loved him with all the corners of my heart, I would have. And maybe there would have always been a pang for the teenage girl who wrote me her darkest and brightest thoughts, but I would have ignored it for him, shoved it so deep and so far down that it would gather dirt and moss and vines.

But that’s not how it happened. I loved him anyway, but I tried to hide it, for his sake and for mine because it hurt too much to love so nakedly when I knew it was unwanted. And I kept thinking of Greer, of her large gray eyes and her hair like light. How prettily she bled and how sweet her blood had tasted on my lips, how she wanted to kneel, and how she wanted to be dragged into the darkness and bared there. It never diminished, my burning for her. I read and reread her emails, I printed them out as if I were sixteen and not twenty-six, I carried them around for years as a kind of amulet of protection and personal pornography all in one.

I heard the questions hidden in the subtext of her very last email to me, the unwritten underneath the written.

Do you get hard when you think of me?

Do you come?

Do you want my name on your lips as you do?

Yes, yes, yes. Yes, even the sight of her name on my laptop got me hard, the serifed boat of the capital G, the pretty rill of the following rs and es. Yes, I came, I came so much for her and she’d never know, never even realize there was a soldier across the continent who worshipped the memory of her with his fingers and his palm. Yes, I said her name, out loud when I was alone, silently and in the inside my mouth if others were nearby.

It didn’t escape my notice that the only two times I’d fallen in love were in laughably limited situations—Embry after a mock battle and a waltzing lesson, Greer after a single kiss—but I didn’t care. For the first time since my days as a cocksure teenager, I knew what I wanted and what I felt, and I accepted it. Perhaps the only thing I couldn’t accept was not loving who I loved, which was how I found my walls weakening around my little prince. How our vicious fucks slowly transformed into power exchanges so intimate and breathless that we were both left shaking afterwards. During our little trips together—

away from the public eye and the army, where we could be two anonymous lovers in a Europe that didn’t care—gradually I began to slip. Taking his hand as we walked through a Florentine piazza, standing behind him as we waited in line for gelato and resting my chin on his shoulder. Ordering for him at restaurants, kissing him whenever I felt like it, staring at him instead of the paintings and sculptures and buildings we’d come all this way to see.

And he let me.

He let me, and he squeezed my hand when I took his, he leaned back into me when I stood behind him. When he caught me staring, he’d wink and murmur something dirty enough to have me hauling him by the arm to the nearest alley or bathroom and making a mess of him.

Slowly, I realized he loved me too. He loved me like I loved him, and when I looked in his eyes, I saw everything I felt. I saw a future we both wanted and he wouldn’t let himself have, and I was foolish enough to think I could persuade him to want it, to take it, if only I proved how deeply I wanted it too. I thought maybe he was simply frightened of moving forward, or maybe he was worried I didn’t understand the social implications of loving another man, or maybe it was a mixture of both.

I waited a long time. I prayed about it, thought about it, studied his every word and sigh and smile, and when the opportunity for promotion came up, I knew I had to act. I had to show him that I didn’t want a job over him, I didn’t want anything over him, not a rank or a place or a piece of paper in City Hall, nothing. I only wanted to love him as my own soul for as long as I lived, and for him to let me. That was all. Please, please, and with my gun pushed to my back and my knee in the cool Carpathian soil and a small velvet box in my hand, I asked him, let me be the one, let me stay with you. Let me and I will.

And Embry said no, like it was absurd that I’d even asked.

* * *

“There’s a small project I’m starting,” Merlin said one afternoon almost a year later. We were in Chicago where he was living at the time; I was on a short leave of duty and he’d invited me to stay with him for a few days. We were currently on the balcony of his sleek Gold Coast condo with a bottle of good London gin and the remains of our dinner.

“What is it?” I asked, idly swirling my glass and listening to the noise of water and waves below.

“I want to start a new political party in America and I want it to win the Presidency within the next ten years. Five would be ideal.”

“That’s not a small project, Merlin,” I said, amused. “That’s an impossible one.”

“I’m not finished,” he said, completely serious. “I want you to lead it.”

I laughed. “Merlin,” I said. “I’m flattered, but aside from the fact that I already have a job, I’m not a politician. I have no political background and no interest in acquiring one.”

“I’m not asking you to be a politician,” he said mildly. “I’m asking you to change things for the better.”

“Merlin—”

“When this war ends, America will be at a crossroads, and we need the right person to steer her to a real and stable peace. Who better than the hero of the war himself?”

The word made me uncomfortable. “I’m not a hero.”

“It’s just a word, Maxen. It’s a word that means that you’re brave and ethical and good. And that’s the kind of person we need in the White House.”

Everything in me was reluctant and defensive. I didn’t want to be a politician, I never had, that kind of pen and paper power always seemed so ordinary to me, so clichéd. Not to mention self-seeking and hollow. Hadn’t I just spent the last few years despising every politician who puppeteered wars from the safety of their carpeted offices? Hadn’t I been disgusted at their lack of consistency and drive?

No. Everything about who I was and who I wanted to be rejected the idea…

…everything except this tiny, infinitesimal sliver that buried itself into my denial and resistance. What if? the sliver seemed to ask. What if?

Merlin seemed to sense that little voice, and said, “If you can make a difference in the world, you should.”

I stared down into my gin, thinking.

“Don’t answer me yet. In fact, don’t even answer me soon. I want you certain.”

What if?

What if?

But I couldn’t ask myself any what ifs without thinking of the what ifs that really haunted me. What if Embry had said yes? What if I found Greer Galloway and she remembered a soldier from four years ago and she still meant everything that she’d written to me? What was the point of considering Merlin’s wild scheme when the only two things I really wanted were so far away from me?

I looked up to find Merlin watching my face.

“There’s someone I’d like you to meet tomorrow,” he said.

I had no interest in meeting any new men or women. I’d fuck my fist to memories until I died, I’d spend my nights with an aching chest and thoughts that pinged wildly from longing to gratitude that I’d at least known love on my terms—and that was how I preferred my life. But I also didn’t have the energy to fight Merlin on this tonight. I’d meet this person for his sake, feel as I always felt about people who weren’t Embry or Greer, and then apologetically explain to Merlin that we didn’t hit it off, I was so sorry, he or she was a lovely boy or girl.

Except the next day when I met Jenny, I did feel something. It wasn’t dark or brutal or strange, it wasn’t transformative or heady or fateful. I didn’t feel as if a veil between heaven and me had lifted, like I was somehow closer to understanding God for loving this person—like I had with Greer and Embry.

It was familiar though, in a way that was newly fresh too. Jenny talked and smiled like normal people talked and smiled, she flirted subtly and gracefully, with no subtext of hunger or despair. It made me feel normal to flirt back in the same manner, it made me feel whole again after the void Embry had ripped through me.

Will God ever forgive me for loving her because it was easy? Loving her asked nothing of me but denial, and denial felt like a relief after all the vulnerability I’d given Embry, all the honesty and the hope. A relief after kneeling on a mountain and having my heart broken. I could pretend to be a normal man, I could pretend to want what everyone else wanted.

And had I said I was happy with memories and my fist earlier? Then I lied, because I wasn’t happy, I was the furthest thing from it, and here with this kind, smart, thoroughly vanilla woman, I saw a chance.

More than a chance at my own happiness, I saw that I could make her happy, and the only cost would be my suffering. But after I had to let Greer go, after Embry refused me and we were both miserable, being able to make someone happy with the mere act of loving them how they wished to be loved felt like a gift.

When she asked me if I’d like to grab a drink later that night, I agreed, and when we kissed later in the sparkling dark of a street corner, I let her press her lips to mine without fisting her hair, without biting, without growling or grabbing. And if it felt muted and subdued and quiet compared to the dizzying heights I’d known before, then it was reassuring. Heights only meant a fall, when you really thought about it, and it was safer to love this way.

Gently.

Without cruelty. Without raw, open need.

It would be easy, in retrospect, to believe that my love for Jenny was any less real or valid than what I had with Greer and Embry. It would be tempting to say that I only thought I loved her, or that it was a constant, painful struggle to care for her without caring for her as a Dominant would, with firm discipline and tender affection. I did love her and I did desire her, and it was only hard sometimes. Like a barometric headache that came and went, the occasional reminder that I would always be who I was. Embry made it difficult, unknowingly on his part. Being so close, being so him, and there’d be these moments when our thighs might touch on the couch as we watched TV or our fingers might graze as we reached for something, and it would rise up in me, the loving of him and the particular ways I wanted to love him until he wept with it.

But still, despite him, despite the torment of that day in Chicago when I saw Greer—when the force of loving her punched a hole straight through me once again—despite it all, I did love Jenny. I loved her with all but one part of me. I stayed faithful, I served her happiness with all my energy, and her death was the harshest hell I’d ever known. And when she died, not only did she leave me when I needed her gentle, sweet love the most, but she took the part of me that could have been capable of that kind of love again.

When Jenny died, she succeeded where war and rejection had failed, and I was truly, utterly destroyed.