He was apparently oblivious to my carnal thoughts, and he kept talking, his voice low in my ear as we step-quick-quick-ed our way around the small room. “But I thought of something else. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Have you read it?”

“Yes.”

“The little prince in the book is so wise but so sad. Has so much to offer this world and yet he can’t stop pining for the one he loves.”

Colchester looked right into my eyes and I couldn’t look away.

His voice didn’t get quieter but it got deeper. “And it seemed so perfect. You are a little prince, Embry Moore, in every way I can imagine. Rich and spoiled, like Sebastian…and yet dreamy and sad, like the little prince from Saint-Exupery’s book.”

Little prince.

It should sound diminishing, condescending, and yet when he said it…I don’t know, it felt like an honor. A compliment. It felt right, like it was my true name and had been my true name all along, simply waiting to be discovered.

“Little prince,” I repeated, tasting the words on my tongue.

“And what a prince you are.”

I looked sharply at him, expecting to see that he was teasing me, but there was no trace of humor in his face. Only seriousness and honesty and—

“I leave for thirty minutes and you two turn into a ballroom dancing how-to video?”

We both stopped moving at the sound of Morgan’s voice, and I could feel my anger at her like a living thing, climbing onto my shoulders and ready to launch itself at her. But before I could speak or move or anything, she was next to us, physically pressing us apart. “I’m ready to go back to the hotel,” she said, very regally for someone who’d just had bad schnitzel. She dropped some euros onto the table before she slipped her arm through Colchester’s. And gallant man that he was, he let her, and did it with a smile, and thus whatever had just unfolded between us was closed back up.

Except as we walked into our hotel lobby, as I peeled away from the happy couple to spend a couple lonely hours at the hotel bar, Colchester turned to me and said, “Goodnight, little prince,” with that rare smile I only saw if he was dancing with me or hurting me.

And I shivered.

And shivered and shivered, no matter how many drinks I drank to warm me up, no matter how hot I turned up the water in my shower, and when I finally gave in to the itchiness, the hate, and the memory of his body pressed against mine, when I finally closed my eyes and began fucking my fist and imagining it was Colchester’s large, rough hand instead of my own, well…I shivered then too.

6

Embry

before

Something had changed for me. But only for me.

Morgan and Colchester spent the rest of the week like they had before the dinner—before Colchester said those words to me—and fucked like rabbits next door. It was just as well, because finally allowing myself to think of him in that way had unlocked some hungry door inside of me, and I don’t know how I would have behaved if I’d had to face him then. As it was, I went looking for people to scratch the Colchester-shaped itch inside me. Dark-haired boys, tall boys with broad shoulders, boys that looked serious and stern even in the bright lights of a dance club. And then I’d let myself pretend as I fucked them, as I slicked up my cock and pressed into them. It was Colchester I was fucking, it was his arrogant, perfect body under mine. And when they fucked me, I pretended the same, that he’d snuck into my barracks late at night and clapped one of those large hands over my mouth as he used me. Or maybe he’d defeated me in another drill, and right there in the forest, he’d pinned me to the ground and took what was his.

But then those Czech boys would smile the wrong way or speak in the wrong voice, and the illusion would pop like a soap bubble, and I’d feel itchier and more miserable than ever. What did I think would happen? That these boys would transform as I fucked them, whisper little prince into my ear as they came?

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

And how was I supposed to live with this, this…problem, on base? I had at least nine months left of this deployment, and it was too much to hope Colchester would disappear on his own. No, I would just have to shove it down and pretend it away. That was the only answer.

Soon it was time to go back to Ukraine, and we bid Morgan goodbye at the train station. She and I shared a brief hug, and I kissed her on the cheek out of habit, but with Colchester, she lingered longer in his arms, kissing him on the mouth and keeping his face close to hers with a hand on his neck as she said goodbye. She’d traded her morning beauty routine for more time in bed with Colchester, and with her loose, messy hair and those unusually flushed cheeks, she almost looked like a different woman. A woman who smiled genuinely, who looked at the world with bright eyes. And as I paced away to have a cigarette and give them some privacy, I marveled that both brother and sister should fall so hard for the same man.

Surely he realized that. Surely he saw it, the way we both acted around him.

And it was when the wind blew around us and Morgan’s skirt fluttered up around her thighs that I saw the welts there, red and scattered, mingled with marks that looked a few days older, and I began to understand a little. Not all the way—that would take years—but I began to see that Colchester’s attention would be a dangerous, painful thing to have.

Which of course made me want it all the more.

The fighting began in earnest. They didn’t call it war for four more years, but it didn’t matter what they called in Washington, D.C. It was war.