American Queen

Yours,

Greer

Dear Ash,

It’s my seventeenth birthday today. It’s been exactly one year since we met, and while you’ve fought in several crucial battles and saved countless lives, I’ve completed a year of high school. The two don’t really compare, do they? I told myself after my last email that I wouldn’t bother you again, both for your sake and for my pride, but tonight I feel strange. Restless, I guess. It’s hot for England, even for May, and muggy. I have the windows thrown open and a fan blowing, but I can’t seem to cool down. Every part of me feels flushed. And Abilene is gone from our dorm room and I found a bottle of Prosecco stashed in her mini fridge, and so I’m tipsy and alone, on top of being restless and hot.

It feels like the kind of night to make a bad decision. I think normally girls my age find boys my age to make their bad decisions with—at least that’s what Abilene is out doing right now—but I don’t want that. There’s something really pedestrian about the kind of fun Abilene seeks out, and this is not me trying to force morality onto her, because I don’t think there’s anything immoral about having sex, but it’s more of an…aesthetic…thing, I guess. I don’t want boring, common ways of being bad. I want ways that rattle me to my bones, that send me to my knees in repentance, I want to be the kind of bad that leaves me wrung out with bite marks blooming purple on my body. I want to go the brink of not knowing myself, I want someone to take me there and hold me by the neck and make me stare at an entire reckless realm of possibility. What’s the point of sex if you don’t feel like every dark crevice of your soul has been exposed to the light? If someone doesn’t take your lust and your shameful thoughts, and twist them into a spell that leaves you panting like a dog for more? I think I want that for myself. I want a normal life too—I want an education and career and my own house and to make all of my own decisions—but whenever I think about sex, about what sex would be like when I’m older, I don’t ever imagine the Titanic hand-hitting-the-car-window thing. I want to feel like my veins are being sliced open by the sheer desire of someone powerful, I want to be handled and cherished and used and worshipped. I want a man or woman to claim me as their equal partner in every way—until we’re alone. Then I want to crawl to them. I can have that someday, right?

Right now, as I type, I’ve got one leg slung over the arm of my computer chair because it’s so hot, but also because it makes it easy to tease myself in between writing sentences to you. I do this a lot when I’m thinking about you. (I am guessing you probably don’t know that, and tonight, for some reason, it just feels like I should tell you.) I started by running a fingertip under the lace of my panties, imagining it was you. Imagining that we are back in the library and we were never interrupted by Merlin. I imagine you pulling up my skirt after I tell you that you were my first kiss, because you want to know if I’m a virgin. You want to feel if I’m still intact, if I’m wet for you, you want to know what I’d feel like wrapped around your dick.

God, I’m so wet right now. I wish it were your fingers inside me, your thumb on my clit. You’d be so good at that. I can’t stop thinking about your hands, how big and strong they are. I bet your eyes would burn green as you rubbed me, I bet you would lick your lips at the thought of tasting me, of being the first man to ever taste me. I think about what it would have been like if you’d fucked me that night, right there against the wall maybe, or on the large desk in the corner. Abilene says boys should always wear condoms, but I wouldn’t have wanted you to. I would have wanted to feel your skin, if it was hot and if it was smooth and silky. I would have wanted you to feel me. I would have wanted you to whisper in my ear how good I felt, what a gift I was giving you, how you could stay inside me forever and ever if only I’d let you.

What noises do you make when you come? Do you gasp? Groan? Whisper names? I think I’d like you to whisper my name. Sometimes I imagine you in your cot on base, your hand beneath the blankets trying to be quiet, and then when you come, you have to bite your lip so you don’t say my name aloud. I imagine you fucking your fist in the shower, wishing it was me instead of your hand. I imagine you imagining me in every different way a man can be with a woman, sweet and rough and slow and angry and loving. And right now, I’m going to stop typing and finger myself until I come, and when I come, it will be your name I say.

I don’t know if this will ever be read. If it will go straight to spam or into some folder marked ‘Crazy Girls with Vice Presidents for Grandfathers’. I almost hope you never see this, but it couldn’t go unwritten. Not tonight. But this will definitely be the last time I write to you. Tomorrow, I’ll wake up hung over and ashamed, although hopefully with that dark excitement that comes with making the best kinds of bad choices. You won’t hear from me again, and I’m sorry if any part of this made you uncomfortable or irritated. But you should know that even if I’m not writing you emails any longer, I’ll still be thinking of you every time I dig my fingers into my pussy.

Be safe.

Yours,

Greer

7

The Present

Ten years separate me and that moment in the library. Ten years encompassing wars and illness and the entirety of my adult experience, and yet somehow it all shrinks to a pinprick point and disappears as I walk into St. Thomas Becket Church. It’s erased and there’s nothing between me and the man kneeling near the front of the sanctuary, his head bowed. There’s no air, no time, no different versions of ourselves…I could be sixteen right now, walking up this aisle, and he could be twenty-six.