then

A year spanned the time between losing one wife and finding the next, between Jenny’s death and glimpsing a long fall of gold-white hair at Mass and feeling my heart roll worshipfully in broken glass all over again.

That year between wives was the hardest year of my life. Not even war could prepare me for the lingering, bone-deep grief of widowhood, and it certainly couldn’t prepare me for enduring that grief so publicly, so openly. Jenny’s death was the story of my election, my inauguration, my first one hundred days—all of it revolved around the wife who died young and pretty and in pain—and likewise, it was as if the world salivated over watching my pain. I often felt like a circus oddity in those days, people gathering with avid curiosity to see my red-rimmed eyes, the hurt etched around my mouth. It was as if they could see as I could the ghost of a sweet, happy woman whom I’d failed. I’d given her everything of myself that I could give, and still, I’d failed her. I’d watched the layers of her life peel away like an onion in those last weeks, until at the very last there was only the unselfish, bright soul I’d always seen shining through her amber brown eyes. And the sight of that soul shamed me beyond compare. I had loved her as gently and as thoroughly as I was able, and it still had been so much less than she deserved.

War had prepared me for one thing, however, and that was doing my work even as it felt like my world was ending. I was used to working without much sleep, with multiple crises, while the shock and confusion of a battle still stung my senses. And so I threw myself into the work after Jenny’s death too, I ate and drank and breathed my new job, I surrendered sleep to it, mental peace to it, leisure to it. So long as I worked and kept busy, the grief stayed where it belonged, until one day I looked up and it wasn’t quite so hideous to endure. I found I could feel sad, simply just sad, and miss her, and it didn’t flood me with an inky emptiness like it had before. I could pretend it was time that was healing me, or work, or some combination of the two, but I knew even then it was neither of those things.

It was Embry.

That night a week after Jenny’s funeral—the night Morgan took me to Mark’s club for the first time and let me flog her—it didn’t end at the club. It ended in Embry’s bed, with me desperate and him supple and willing, with every one of those seven years apart being mourned with bite marks and kisses over every inch of my beloved’s skin. It ended with him begging so beautifully—more and harder and make it hurt, make me feel you for days—and it ended with me knowing that it was wrong to take an old lover into my arms a week after my wife’s funeral…and also knowing that I wouldn’t stop.

I didn’t stop.

Whatever restraint and resentment had been corking the heat between us finally crumbled into the dark wine of our need, and it spilled everywhere. Stained everything with heat and urgency and a love that I’d never been able to quench, not even after a decade, not even after a war, not even after my wedding to someone else.

Let’s go public, I’d murmur to him. Let’s tell everyone. Because I wanted that, had wanted it before, had never stopped wanting it. It was stupid to deny ourselves a second time around—now when it was legal, now when I was already elected. Who cared? Jenny’s death had taught me in the most vicious, sawing way that no one had forever with the people they loved, there were no promises, there was only holding tight to what you had.

I just wanted to be able to hold tight to him in public finally, finally, finally.

But he’d flush and fidget and change the subject, pain thorny and defensive in his eyes, and I decided I wouldn’t push him yet. Because I was going to marry him, but I could be patient…for a while. Even if it meant sneaking around like our old Army days, with secret fucks and private smiles and hidden hearts. Every day and every night, any moment we could steal, any yank of his tie to bring his mouth to mine, any press of a thigh on a shared couch, any nip of an earlobe to tide us over until we were alone, and then when we were alone, nothing remained undiscovered, nothing remained undone.

Save one thing.

* * *

“Relax,” Mark said.

I nodded and pressed my eyes closed, trying to breathe, trying to stir up my sense of mastery over my own body, but it was difficult while I was flat on my back with my hands cuffed above my head and my knees pulled up to my chest.

I opened my eyes. Took a breath. Grounded myself in my surroundings—opulent, familiar, crowded with every imaginable tool for pain and pleasure imaginable. One of the rooms at Lyonesse, Mark’s private room in fact. The décor reflected his tastes: luxurious, careful, decadent. Like the court of a king of old.

“Okay,” I said. “I think I’m ready.”

Mark ran an appreciative hand over my naked body, smirking a little as I tensed. His hand lingered over my flaccid cock, rolling it against my stomach and giving it a teasing squeeze. It gave a half-hearted jolt—Mark was an incredibly handsome man, after all—but both the cold toy pressing against my pucker and the condescending dominance of his touch kept me mostly soft.

He was hard though, and I couldn’t help but take a small amount of masculine pride in that. Even if I currently felt no desire and just wanted this lesson over with.

“It’s a shame you’re not submissive, or even a switch,” he sighed, giving my testicles a longing little fondle. “You are a very beautiful man. I’d like to fuck you very much. And how many men can say they’ve gotten to fuck the President?”

“Even if I were submissive, I’m afraid the Vice President keeps me too busy to share,” I said with a smile.

Mark smiled too, although his expression was still edged with hunger. “One day,” he murmured, hand gripping the heavy muscles of my thigh, “I’ll have to find a male submissive that reminds me of you. Get it out of my system.”

He cradled my testicles once more, pulling them gently upwards to keep my hole exposed. “With your own subs, you’ll want to dedicate some time throughout the week to anal play,” he said, back into teacher mode now. “I like to make my own subs wear plugs for the first part of a scene—or even in public or at home before we play, to heighten anticipation—but be careful not to plug them for more than an hour or two, even if they tell you they can do more. Otherwise you risk injury or ulcers, or compromising sphincter control. Speaking of, I’m going to press in again with the toy, so push back against me as I do.”

It was cold and hard and unpleasant, and even as I felt it slide in, I still felt like I was doing something wrong. “I thought it would feel better,” I said.

“It’s barely inside you,” Mark said. “We haven’t gotten to the good part yet.”

“There’s going to be a good part?”

His mouth quirked up at my words, and once again his gaze snagged on my soft penis, on my tense body. “Actually, wait a moment, will you?”

He pulled the toy out, and I heaved a giant sigh of relief as he left the room. For the last seven months, I’d been training at the club, learning how to channel my desires into safe, structured play. Not everyone agreed with Mark’s philosophy that a Dom should be willing to experience anything he or she would put a sub through, but I did, and frankly, most of it was fairly easy to endure. Maybe I couldn’t find release in pain as a sub could, but I enjoyed the strength and discipline it forced to the surface. Maybe I didn’t feel a dizzy sense of freedom while I was bound, but every moment in bondage was worth learning for all the ways I could later tease and torture Embry.

But this—this was the first time I was actively disliking my training, and despite how intensely I tried to peer at why, the answer wouldn’t show itself to me.

Was it the domination? Was I that fundamentally incapable of submitting to a man like Mark?

Or was it the penetration? God knew I’d only just started to pick apart the ways I’d internalized messages about masculinity and sex. But when I thought of Embry inside me, there was none of this cold tension, this gritting of teeth. There was only warmth and excitement, and oh fuck, how much it would mean to him, how much it would mean to me, to still have this first between us, a first that wouldn’t have to happen with blood and bullets, but with clear, open eyes and assenting hearts and with as much time as we wanted.

The door opened and then Embry walked in with Mark, obviously having come straight from his office, stress-tousled hair, flag pin, and all.

“I called him here earlier,” Mark said, “because I thought you might want the extra nudge. But of course, you can tell me to fuck off if you don’t want to do this in front of your sub.”

Embry had stopped right in front of the door, and as Mark was talking, I watched my lover’s face process what he was seeing. Me, stretched out and hands bound, legs parted. Toy, towel, lube.

I could see the minute his mouth went dry.

“No,” I said softly. “I want him to stay.”

Mark glanced between us and then smiled to himself. “You know, I think this might go better if I leave the two of you alone. Can I trust that you’ll carry out his lesson thoroughly?” This last he directed to Embry, who looked at Mark as if Mark had just asked him if blowjobs were any fun at all.

“Uh, yeah,” Embry mumbled. “Real thorough.”

“He needs to try both toys,” Mark said, canting his head toward the table next to the bed. There was the plug he’d been using on me earlier and a full sized dildo, veined and lifelike.

Embry swallowed. Hard.

“And in a few different positions,” Mark added, “although make sure he’s still bound for one or two of them, so he can experience it while being restrained.”

“Breathe, Embry,” I said from the bed, amused.

Embry’s voice was choked when he finally managed speech. “Okay. Okay. Yes—restrained. Toys. Positions. I can do that.”

“I thought so. See you two later,” Mark laughed, and then he left us alone.

Embry drifted over to the side of the bed, pulling absent-mindedly at his tie knot and blinking fast as his eyes moved between my naked thighs and the table of toys. I was having so much fun watching him that I’d almost forgotten to be unhappy about my upcoming lesson.

“Stop dimpling at me,” he grumbled. “This is hard enough to handle as it is.”

I couldn’t stop dimpling at him, though. He was just so fucking cute, stripping off his tie and jacket with shaking hands, his teeth digging into his bottom lip as if he couldn’t trust himself even to speak. It was like watching a child glimpse the presents under the tree at Christmas, except a thousand times better because it was a grown, vigorous man who was glowing with uncontrollable excitement.

Embry finally managed to pull off his jacket and tie, and after dropping them in a crumpled and expensive mess on a nearby chair, he rolled up his sleeves and managed his first real breath since he walked in. He put a knee between my spread legs to climb onto the bed, and I never thought I’d enjoy the sight of him crawling toward me fully clothed—especially not while I was naked and bound—but my breath caught regardless. Maybe with Embry it didn’t matter what we were doing. Or maybe it was because it all felt like something I was allowing, something I was giving, rather than something he was taking. Either way, my cock was stiffening, going thick. The moment he saw it, he froze.

“Shit,” he muttered, closing his eyes. He appeared to be counting to ten. Even from down the bed, I could see the ridge of his own erection shoving hard against his pants.

“Okay,” he said after a minute. “Okay.”

He finished climbing onto the bed and knelt fully between my legs, close enough that I could feel the fabric over his knees brushing against my inner thighs. He put his hands on the tops of my legs, his thumbs brushing the sensitive skin where my adductor muscles creased into my groin, and my cock stirred, giving a lazy bounce up before coming back to rest on my belly. Embry’s head dropped between his shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “This is just a lot to take in.”

“Me tied up? Or that you get to use toys on me?”

“Don’t forget your stupid dimple, you asshole. Okay. I can do this. Without coming in my pants. I think.” He reached for the plug and a little more lube.

“Have you done this before?” I asked, watching him. “The toys, I mean?”

He flushed a little again. “There’s not a lot I haven’t done, I guess. Yes, I’ve used toys on someone before.”

“Does it always get you this hot?” I asked curiously. I would definitely be filing away this information for later.

He gave a very cosmopolitan shrug, at least as much as he could shrug while expertly swirling a dab of lube around the end of a butt plug. “It’s always fun, but—” he leveled a look at me “—you know this is different.”

I dropped my head back on the pillow. “I’m glad. It’s different for me too.”

“Ash, I…”

I looked back up to see him swallowing again, this time from something other than unabashed lust. My own throat tightened, and I wanted all of a sudden to beg him again—no matter how ridiculous it was with me naked and tied up and him with a butt plug in his hand—just to marry me, just to fucking marry me, and to hell with everything else.

“Thank you,” he continued. “For trusting me enough to do this. For giving me this.”

“Of course.”

“No,” he said, closing his eyes again. “I mean it. I…don’t feel worthy of it.” He opened his eyes and it felt like there was no other color in the room. Just blue, blue, blue, and it would be the only color I’d ever be able to see again.

“I want you to have all of me,” I said simply. “It doesn’t mean that I don’t feel like you’re still my little prince as we do it; I do. All it means is that I want to allow you everything, I want to share everything, I want nothing left undone between us.”

Embry gave me a hopeful look. “Does this mean I’ve earned it?”

I couldn’t help but smile again at his eager expression. “No,” I teased, not because no was the real answer, but because I decided right then and there that he’d earn it the minute he said yes to me. The minute he let me marry him, we’d mark that minute with our last first. Him inside me.

My cock surged at the thought, and he laughed. “It turns you on to say no to me?”

“No,” I said seriously. “It turns me on to think about when I’ll say yes to you.”

Embry froze again. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “You can’t say shit like that right now, or it’s just going to be embarrassing for me.” Then he managed this thing where he peered up at me through his eyelashes somehow, even despite being above me. “So you know what I’ll have to do to earn it? What will make you say yes?”

“I do.” It’s you saying yes to me, say yes, Embry, be mine, be my husband and I’ll make sure you never regret it. I’ll make sure you’re the happiest man alive, just say yes.

He kept doing the peering thing, the Jane Austen hero glancing sidelong across the ballroom thing—if an Austen hero had been obsessed with fucking another man in the ass. “Are you going to tell me what it is I have to do?” he asked. “Or will we be in our nineties before I get to top you?”

“First of all, fucking is not the same as topping, which you’ll find out when the time comes. Second of all, I’ve just decided that I’m not going to tell you.” I grinned at him. “I think you’ll figure it out for yourself fairly quickly though.”

And God, I did think that. I was so certain of it. He’d realize when I proposed how vulnerable I’d been with him always, how willing I was to surrender myself and my pride and my heart and how it had been that way for fourteen years and how it would never change. How I wasn’t asking for anything but a yes. Just agree, just agree, and I would turn over everything to him.

Embry narrowed his eyes at me. “You are being coy tonight,” he said. “Somehow, even with a butt plug in the equation, you are managing to be coy. This must be some kind of skill they teach at the G8.”

“Just do it,” I said, spreading my legs farther apart, and the way Embry’s gaze hooded as I did that was worth every heartbreak it took to get to this moment.

“Okay,” he said, one hand dropping to my inner thigh. A single thumb stroked up my seam and I shuddered, fluid leaking out of my flared, needy tip and onto my stomach. “Breathe out and bear down against it.”

“Okay.”

The hard tip of the toy pressed against me, cold and alien, and then Embry said quietly, “Look at me.”

I looked at him.

Eyes like the sky, lips on the aristocratic side of thin, refined cheekbones and nose, that almost-curly Regency hair that just begged to swoop over his forehead in the most endearing manner. And his expression was everything—rapt, awed, eager, desperate. He wanted this as much as I did, if not more, and that fact transformed everything. It made this for him, about him, and the moment it became about him, it could be about me. Even now I can’t articulate precisely what that meant or how it happened, just that his pleasure allowed me to take pleasure. Suddenly, like a switch had been flipped, it began to feel good. The tip probing at the aperture of my body warmed, pushed against the nerve endings in the pleated skin there in all the right ways, and when it finally penetrated me, the feeling was so breathtakingly dirty that I moaned.

“Fuck,” Embry breathed, watching my face. “Yes. Holy shit, Ash. Yes.”

He moved the plug with expert care—enough strokes not to force the issue and slow enough that there was no pain, but fast enough that I was chasing the edge of discomfort the whole time. And the discomfort itself was fascinating, the way it forced openness, the way it forced trust, the way it made me feel a kind of shame I hadn’t felt in years.

Then the plug was fully seated and Embry sat back on his heels, his eyes glued to my ass. “How does it feel?” he asked.

I squirmed in response. “Full.” As I squirmed, my cock slapped against my stomach, veined and rigid and wet at the head.

Embry groaned. “I don’t know if I can watch you wiggle around like this.”

“Do you need to touch yourself?”

“Oh god, yes please,” he moaned, hand already yanking at his belt, and then I had the double stimulation of his plug in my ass and his beautiful cock on display. He gave it a few rough tugs as he watched me.

“Do you want to try a few positions?” he asked, once he’d tamed the urgent edge of his need.

“I suppose we’d better,” I managed, even though at this point it was hard to fathom how I could breathe, much less move with this fullness. But move I did, with his helpful thumb keeping the plug seated as I flipped over onto my elbows and knees with my wrists still cuffed.

Embry made a noise behind me, and again I felt a flash of masculine pride. That I could make a man as handsome, as charming, as sought after as him moan simply by presenting my body to him.

“You can touch me,” I told him over my shoulder. “In fact, it might help me if you did.”

He was on me like he’d been barely holding himself back before. His knees on the inside of my knees, his hands trailing up the sides of my hips, the crown of his unguided cock bumping clumsily into the backs of my thighs.

“Can I do the bigger toy now?” he asked in a whisper.

“Yes.”

The plug slid out and then I felt the adept twirl and crook of his finger. “More lube,” he explained. “Just a bit more.” And then the new toy was there and I felt a sudden tension ripple through me as I realized how much bigger this felt against my asshole than the plug, and Embry was running a calming hand down my back. “It may feel like pain at first,” he told me, “but you just have to keep reminding your body that it’s not pain. It’s pressure. It’s pressure and remind yourself that you want it.”

“I want it because you’re the one giving it to me,” I told him honestly, and he groaned a little.

“Please stop saying stuff like that or I’m going to come all over the back of your legs,” he said a bit irritably. “Okay, breathe out and push against me and remember that it might take your mind a moment to rewrite the feeling.”

He pushed the dildo against me, and I did as he said, and he was right. It did hurt a little at first, and I found myself having to force back against the pain, having to breathe into my stomach to move past it. But then I looked over my shoulder at him, at his face as he slowly fucked my ass with this toy, and the pain shimmered into a brighter version of itself. A more interesting version of itself. Until the moment the crown of the silicone cock grazed against a place deep inside and I let out a shattered moan, and Embry exhaled as if he’d been struck.

“Yes, that’s it,” he said shakily. “That’s the feeling you want to hold onto.”

“Little prince?”

“Yes?”

“Fuck me with it.”

“Christ. No, don’t with the dimple now, are you trying to kill me? I’ll go slow and then speed up.”

And that’s exactly what he did, with gentle twists and rocks of his hand. Slow, careful strokes that left me tingling and breathing hard, and then they turned deep and hard and rough, until the silicone was as warm as a real cock, until I was shaking and beaded with sweat. Until my stomach was clenched tighter than any fist, until my cock was harder than it had ever been and I knew when I came that I’d spray this entire bed with an embarrassing load of cum.

“God, Embry,” I moaned, rocking back into the toy, which was really an extension of his hand, which was really an extension of him. I could pretend right now, yes I could, and I told him that. “I’m imagining it’s you. All you.”

“Fuck,” Embry croaked, and I could hear his fist behind me beating his cock, the awkward tattoo of a left-handed jack as his right hand kept the dildo fucking my ass. “Are you going to come?”

“Yes, goddamn—” the orgasm was like nothing else, coming from somewhere in my body that I’d only barely known before, and it was Embry giving it to me, and I wanted to give him everything in return and I looked over my shoulder again. “Uncuff me, I want more, I want—shit.”

He uncuffed me, fumbling with the buckles long enough that both of us were swearing with dripping cocks by the end of it, and the moment he released me, I raised up to my knees and grabbed his hands. Somehow, despite the slide of the dildo and the tangle of his slacks and the length and width of muscled limbs, we ended up as I needed us to: his chest to my back, my legs folded outside and on top of his so that I almost sat in his lap, and both of his hands clenched tight on my cock, with my hands wrapped around his.

I fucked up into both his fists, each downstroke pushing the base of the dildo against him and back up into me, and so I was being fucked both ways, inside and out, and Embry’s face dropped onto my shoulder from behind. “I can’t,” he mumbled. “You’re going to kill me.”

“You’re going to kill me,” I gasped, because this orgasm was going to kill me, it was going to rip right through me, and then I gave a final thrust right into his tight double grip and slammed back into his lap, which shoved the dildo back into me hard.

And I ejaculated. Embarrassingly.

It erupted everywhere, huge thick spurts of it, all over Embry’s fists and all over Mark’s bed and all over my thighs and belly, rope after rope of cum, and Embry swore up a storm the whole time, as if I were personally torturing him by making him watch this, and it spurred me on, it spurred me on to think of his cock hard and aching behind me, of how it would feel to let him inside my ass.

But even in the heat of my clenching spurts, I remembered. He had to earn it.

So finally when my climax slowed, I rolled to my back. “You can come on me,” I offered. “You can rub yourself anywhere.”

Without hesitation, he rubbed himself everywhere. He bucked against my thighs, he used his cock to trace the place where the dildo still stretched my hole. And then finally he braced himself above me and rubbed his cock on my semen-wet abs and came in a few thrusts, surging a fresh wave of white over my stomach.

And then, like we were boys, we both started giggling. Not laughing, but giggling, high-pitched noises that had us both fighting for air and our faces hurting with giant smiles, and Embry collapsing on top of me and our stomachs sliding together in a sticky mess.

A few minutes later when our giggles had settled, I tangled my legs with his and guided his head to my chest. We laid there for a while after that, me stroking his hair, him pressing lazy kisses to my chest, our bodies still glowing with this pseudo-first of ours.

“Imagine,” I said gently, “how it will feel when it’s your body inside of me. I can’t wait.”

He looked up at me with the whole world in his eyes, and then he sighed. “You’re doing the dimple thing again. It’s evil.”

* * *

A few months later, Embry and I were walking around the edge of Vivienne Moore’s lake outside of Seattle. It was morning and chilly, despite only being September, and a low mist hung over the lake and threaded through pine trees. Above us, the same mist came down from the clouds, shrouding the mountains like a pale, gray cloak. It reminded me painfully of the day in that Carpathian valley when I’d proposed.

The lake water lapped quietly at the rocky shore, and Embry made a contented sigh.

“You’re happy here,” I observed.

“Of course. It’s home.”

“You know that anywhere you wanted to live, I would live.”

He stopped walking then, staring out over the fog-crowned water. “You don’t have a choice about where you live. Not for the next seven years.”

I stopped next to him and threaded my hand through his. He didn’t look over at me, but I felt his body respond to my nearness all the same. “I don’t have to run again, you know,” I told him. “And I wouldn’t, if that’s what you wanted.”

He made a noise. “And why would I want that?”

“Any reason. All reasons.”

He didn’t answer.

Despite his silence, a happy, nervous excitement was curling in my belly, and it had been all morning. Ever since we’d woken up and Embry had wanted to go on a walk, and we’d forced the Secret Service agents far enough back for some real privacy. The ring—the same one from all those years ago—burned a hole in my pocket, and I wanted to do it here, now, with his favorite lake at his feet and the fog wrapping us in an otherworldly blanket.

There was a large dry log set off from the shore a little, and I went to go sit on it, tugging Embry’s hand to make him join me. And after I sat, planting my feet wide enough to make space between them, I nodded my head at the rocky place I’d left between my shoes. Embry flashed me a hot look, but even with his evident grumpiness, he still settled on his knees in front of me.

“Such attitude,” I murmured as he finished kneeling and looked up.

“Maybe one day you’ll find someone who actually wants to be a sub,” he said in a surly voice.

I laughed a little at that, using the toe of my shoe to prod the hardening cock in Embry’s pants. “This looks an awful lot like you like it to me.”

He sighed plaintively, but I didn’t let him say anything else. I took his face in my hands and kissed him, as soft as the rocks were hard under his knees. I kissed him so softly that he moaned into my mouth, so gently that his anger at being mastered melted away, as it always did. “You forget that I know you,” I whispered against his lips. “You want to fight it, but this is where you’re happiest. This is where you belong.”

A wounded sound came from somewhere in his chest, and then he was nodding against me, emotion thrumming through him, and I allowed him to nuzzle into my neck, my chest, to rub his cheeks against my thighs and my erection. “It is where I’m happiest,” he said with his face against my thigh. “God help me.”

The nervous excitement leapt at that. Because now was the time, and I knew he wouldn’t say no, I knew he wouldn’t, how could he when he’d just admitted this was where he was the happiest? When he admitted that this was where he belonged? And surely this last year together had made him as happy as it had made me?

I pulled the ring out of my pocket, and there was a perfect moment—as perfectly golden as that ring—when he hadn’t seen it yet. When his face was still against my thigh, all trust and surrender and devotion, when the asking was close enough to thrill at but the words hadn’t been said yet, and everything hovered in anticipation and joy.

And yes, there was a small voice that asked me if I was ready to hear no. If I could survive Embry refusing me a second time, and the answer was that I didn’t know if I could. But I did know that it was more noble to love openly and honestly than to hide out of fear, I knew that loving takes courage and vulnerability, and if I had to expose my beating heart for Embry to scorn a thousand times to earn his love, then I’d do it, it would be worth it. A million times. A billion.

“Embry,” I said softly.

“Yes, Ash?” He looked up at me, and suddenly I felt so young, and he seemed so young too, we were just boys barely crossed over into manhood with all our fresh hopes and desperate love pressing up into everything.

I couldn’t help it; I kissed him again. Kissed him while I was gripped with a feeling so fierce that it made my throat constrict and my eyelids burn. “Please,” I mumbled against his lips. “Please.”

I pressed the ring into the palm of his hand.

Embry didn’t move, and for a single second, as my eyes opened from my kiss to look into his, I saw an expression of dazzling, vivid joy. My own joy surged in response, my heart jumped, my blood spiked, and oh I’d let him fuck me right here on this shore, rocks digging into my back and everything, because he’d said yes, he would marry me, he would be mine.

And then, slowly and with the burning fall of a spark, the moment fizzled into pain.

Embry put the ring back in my hand. He wouldn’t look at me. “Don’t.”

I couldn’t make words come out at first, they were still trapped behind the joy, queued behind the happier words and kisses that were supposed to come next, and now I couldn’t make any noise at all.

He swallowed. “We can’t, Ash. You know we can’t.”

“Why?” I finally forced out the word.

“Because,” Embry sputtered, straightening up and looking at me, “you’re the fucking President!”

I stared at him, not sure if he was being serious or not. “I can’t be gay and be the President?”

“Exactly,” he snapped. “And certainly not like this. If they’d elected you knowing you were gay, maybe it would be different—”

I was growing angry now. “Well, I am elected now, so what does it matter who I want to marry? They can’t impeach me for being gay.”

“They could probably find a reason to impeach you for fucking your vice president though. Or something else. They’ll find something, Ash. It won’t just be re-election you’re kissing goodbye, it would be this term too.”

“They’ll have to fight me for it, and I’ve always won every battle I fought as long as I had you by my side.” I caught his chin in my hand, forced him to look at me. He was like a wild animal right now, a spooked horse, skittish and rearing. “Embry. Stop this…this bullshit. You fooled me the first time, but I’m not letting it happen a second time. I know you love me, I know you want to be with me. Nothing else matters.”

Embry bucked against my hand, trying to pull free. “Everything else matters, Ash. God, I so fucking wish it didn’t. I wish that we could just vanish from this world and never have to care about anything other than each other, but we can’t. I promised—” And here he broke off, as if catching himself saying something he shouldn’t.

I dropped my hand from his chin. “Promised what, Embry? Promised who?”

And the way he looked at me then, I somehow knew that this was bigger than this private moment by the lake. This was about everything somehow, and if he answered me, then I’d know, I’d finally know why I’d spent so long hurting for him.

But his look changed, grew guarded and careful. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t sacrifice my career for you,” he said, and his eyes screamed lies, but I couldn’t turn them over in my mind properly because everything just stung and burned so fucking much. “I promised myself that I wouldn’t stop chasing what I wanted, which is my own turn in the White House someday. Maybe you’re comfortable being openly bisexual in politics, Ash, but I’m not yet. I’m sorry.”

There was nothing to be said to that. The lake spoke for us, gentle and timeless, brushing clear rolls of water across the rocks.

“I don’t suppose I can command you to marry me,” I said after a while.

Embry wrapped his hand around my fist, the one that still clutched the ring that was supposed to be his. “I wish so many things, Ash, but sometimes I wish nothing more than that we’d never met so I wouldn’t have to say no to you.”

“Am I so awful?” I asked in a broken voice. “Am I so much worse than anybody else that you can’t marry me?”

“God, Ash, no. Fuck.”

“I would give up anything for you, Embry. Just say the word. Kink, the Presidency, even my life—I’d lay it down at your feet if you would only love me like I love you.”

Embry’s head dropped onto our joined hands and I felt his tears, warm as the lake was cold. “It’s not enough,” he mumbled into our hands. “And I made a promise.”

“Is this…is this like last time?” I asked, my voice already going tight with pain. “You’re going to end it between us now, aren’t you?”

“I think it’s for the best,” he whispered.

“I—”

But now the words really were gone, my throat too balled up and watery to speak.

Embry stood up and brushed the rocks off the knees of his pants. “It’s for the best,” he repeated, as if trying to convince himself. “It was fun though, yeah?” He gave me a pained smile. “While it lasted?”

I stared up at him, and I knew he could see all of my pain and I didn’t even have the desire to shield him from it. Let him see it, let him see my hurt, and if he won’t walk away with my ring, maybe he’ll walk away with my pain in his heart and that will be something at least.

“I’ll see you at the house,” Embry said, shoving his hands in his pockets and then setting off across the shore.

Me, I stayed there for a long time, until the fog was gone and the sun hot above, and then I stood up and cocked my arm, ready to throw that hateful ring into the lake where it could never, ever torment me again.