American Queen

He sighs. “Please don’t call me that. Not here. Not now.”

I try to force myself to say his name aloud—the name that I wrote a thousand times in looping cursive during my high school classes, the name that I sighed to myself in my shower with my hand between my legs—but my decorum was forged in the crucible of The Party and it’s so hard not to use the title I know I should use.

He leans in, and I smell the fire and leather smell of him. It makes me dizzy.

“You can call me ‘sir,’ if you like,” he murmurs. “But only when we’re alone.”

I have to close my eyes.

He guides me into the aisle, and then we’re walking past the altar to a door at the side of the church. We walk by stone-faced Secret Service agents and go out into the church garden, his hand moving from my arm to the small of my back, steering me where he wants us to go. The gesture is possessive, peremptory, as if he assumes he has prerogative over my body.

I want him to. I want him to have every prerogative over my body.

I don’t see any agents in the garden, even though I know they must be there, but for the moment, it feels as if we’re alone among the rustling red and gold trees and wilted fall flowers, and he stops us in the middle of a flagstone-paved clearing, next to a bleached-white statue of the Virgin.

“I won’t waste your time. God knows I have little enough of my own. But I couldn’t—” he pauses, the famously eloquent soldier at a loss for words. “I couldn’t wait any longer,” he finally says in a low voice.

He is so close, and all I can smell is leather and leaves and I force myself to take a step back. I have to think, I have to use my brain, because my body and my heart are screaming so loudly that I can’t hear anything else, and what they’re screaming is yes please yes please yes please even though a question hasn’t been asked yet.

The President—Ash, I mentally correct myself—lets me step back, but his eyes are on me like hands, still possessing me, still steering me.

“I don’t think I understand,” I say. “I don’t understand why you wanted to meet with me.”

He runs a hand through his hair, a gesture I recognize from that night. “That’s fair, I suppose,” he says, his eyes on the leaf-covered ground as he frames his next statement. “And I don’t want to scare you away by being too…direct.”

“I mean, I’m still shocked that you remember me. We met only the once.”

“Twice,” he corrects me. “Chicago, five years ago. Remember?”

Flames lick my cheeks and I take a deep breath. “I remember.” It was the night I lost my virginity, after all. Girls usually remember that sort of thing. “Twice then. We’ve talked twice.”

And then I bite my lip, remembering something I’ve managed to forget for several years, because it’s not exactly true that we’ve only talked twice. I have talked to Ash more than that, though he never talked back.

The emails.

My face flushes even hotter, this time with humiliation.

God, the emails. Why was I so young and stupid? So ready to attach meaning to the things adults do without thinking twice about it?

“They were very memorable,” he says. “Two times in ten years might not sound like a lot, but it was to me…” He trails off, and my heart squeezes.

But I breathe a silent sigh of relief that he doesn’t mention the emails. I never did get a response to any of my messages, and I had assumed for years that he’d never received them, since he had been actually fighting a war at the time. The younger Greer spent too many hours brooding in the dark about those unread messages, but now as an adult, I pray he’s never even seen them.

“Something’s wrong,” he says, reaching out to tilt my face up to his. I realize that I was staring off into nothing.

Lie. Just lie.

But I hate lying. I try to find an answer that isn’t the whole shameful truth. “I’m embarrassed. Of how I acted when I was younger.”

A smile, surprisingly tender. “Is that all this is? Why you’re acting like you don’t understand why I want to see you?”

“I just…I thought about that kiss so much,” I whisper. “But I knew there was no way you would remember it. Why would you? You were an adult, a man, and I was just a child. And you’ve gone on to live this incredible life, to be a hero and now a leader, and you had your beautiful wife—”

Fuck! I swallow the rest of my words, wishing I could swallow up my own idiocy along with them. Of all the things I shouldn’t bring up, the late Jennifer Colchester was at the top of the list. And sure enough, Ash winces at the word wife. Just the tiniest bit.

“I loved Jenny,” he says quietly, letting go of my chin. And it’s then I notice the dark smudges under his eyes, the telltale signs of exhaustion in his face. He still has trouble sleeping, even after all this time. “And I miss her. It hurts me still that she died so young and in so much pain. But Greer, I won’t pretend that I ever stopped thinking about you. I can’t pretend that.”

“It was one kiss,” I say, shaking my head. “Why would you—”

He holds up a hand to stop me, and I fall silent. “I’m not going to let you do that,” he tells me. “You’re not allowed to dismiss what happened or tell me that it wasn’t worth remembering. I did remember. I do remember. And I won’t forget any second of that night.”