American Queen

“Maybe he’ll be good in bed?” I suggest.

She looks at me with a smirk. “With all those muscles, he better be, although it’s usually the pretty ones who are the worst lays.” She pauses. “I take that back. It’s the senators who are the worst lays. Three pumps and a gasp, and then you’ve got a sweaty fifty year old on top of you who’s already feeling guilty about lying to his wife.”

I laugh. “It only happened that one time, Abi. Hardly a real data set.”

“One time was enough,” she mutters, back to the papers.

“Maybe try an ambassador next. At least they have accents.”

“How do you know I haven’t tried them already?” she challenges playfully.

She’s always been like this about sex, regaling her friends with her exploits over cocktails, casually referencing men she’s slept with or expensive hotel rooms she didn’t have to pay for. Only I out of all her friends know the truth—that Abi has never taken a man to bed that she didn’t respect or who didn’t respect her. That the hilarious blind dates and furtive one night stands with politicians are few and far between, and most of her lovers have been men she felt genuine affection for, or at least genuine attraction. To Abi, sex is something to be taken or consumed, and then mostly forgotten, like a good cup of coffee. But like most coffee connoisseurs, Abi is still choosy about what she drinks.

I sigh. “I wish I were like you.”

She tosses her hair in that joking, faux-smug way of hers—a move perfected from watching Emma Stone interviews—and shrugs. “Of course you do. What is it today that’s made you realize the obvious?”

I lean back in the chair, running a finger along the dark wood of the armrest. I think about waking up with Ash, his words as he left the room. It’s what we both need, isn’t it? “I wish I could be as comfortable with sex as you are. As confident and, well, casual isn’t the right word. But I guess it’s the closest word I can think of.”

“Honey, you can have all the casual sex you want. Any bar in the District—I can find you a lawyer in less than two minutes. A rich one in less than five.”

I shake my head, smiling. “I know I can do that, but it’s not what I need. I need it to be…” God, how can I describe this in a way that won’t make me sound like I’m into tentacle porn or something? Just use the right words, Greer. If you do it in bed, you should be able to say the words. “…I need it to be, um, controlling. Dominating and submitting. That kind of thing.”

Her blue eyes light up. “I knew it!” she crows. “I knew you were secretly kinky. You are totally in the right city, my freaky cousin. I mean, it’s not my scene, but I know everyone in this town and I can get you anything you like. Congressmen who like being whipped, pegged, electrocuted, you name it.”

I can’t help the small giggle that escapes, and I’m waving my hand for her to stop. “No, no, I don’t need someone—” I was going to say, I don’t need someone who wants to be whipped, I want to be the whip-ee, because I know that Abilene wouldn’t immediately guess I’m submissive. She may not be into kink, but she’d be a Domme for sure if she was, and she would assume I’d be too, simply because that’s how her mind works.

But maybe it’s something in my tone or my face, because she misinterprets my sentence and by doing so, correctly interprets everything else. “Because you’ve met someone already?” Her eyes go wide and she scans my body, from my knee-high boots to my sweater to my face. “You have, haven’t you? You have that glow! Oh my God. Have you had sex? Is it someone powerful? Why didn’t you tell me the minute it happened?”

My stomach flips with nervousness, and I smooth my skirt over my gray tights. “It just happened this week. It’s really new…or I guess, it’s kind of old too. And we haven’t had sex yet. We agreed we would take our time with it.”

Abilene smirked. “What is he, religious?”

“Sort of. I mean, yes, but I don’t think he’s a monk or anything. He lost his wife recently.”

She leans forward. “A widower? Greer, is this an older man?”

Tell her. You have to tell her now. My stomach flips again, and I want to lie. I detest lying, and yet telling the truth seems so unnecessarily awkward and provocative…

But then I remember the State Dinner this week. If I don’t tell her myself, she’ll hear about it anyway, and that will be so much worse.

I take a breath. “Do you remember that party in London, the one Maxen Colchester was at?”

She looks a little thrown by the change in subject. “Yes, but what does that—”

“I kissed him,” I interrupt. “In the library. After you and I fought, he came in from the balcony, and we talked and then we…kissed.”

Abilene’s eyebrows rise and her mouth gapes. “What?”

“We kissed, and then after that, I was going to tell you, I swear, but you seemed so taken with him and I didn’t want you to be angry with me, especially when I thought I’d never see him again. It wasn’t worth it. So I didn’t tell you.”

She blinks. I’ve never seen her this stunned, this slow in gathering an emotional response. The vacuum of anger—anger I know will explode out of her at any second—gives me the courage to finish.

“And in Chicago I saw him again, and we had a moment…but it didn’t matter because then we all saw that he was with Jenny. That night, the man I slept with who never called me back? It wasn’t some random guy I met at the party. It was Embry Moore.”