American Queen

“How have you been?” Embry finally asks, sitting back in his chair. I try not to notice the way his shirt strains around his muscular shoulders, the way the lines of his neck disappear into the bleach-white collar of his shirt, but it’s impossible. He’s impossible not to notice, he’s impossible not to crave; even now, my fingers twitch with the imagined feeling of running them along his neck, of slowly unbuttoning his shirt.

“I’ve been fine,” I finally manage. “Settling into my new job.”

He nods, the candlelight at the table catching on his eyelashes and casting shadows along his cheekbones. “So it seems. I bet you’re an amazing teacher.”

I think of my lonely classroom, my silent office, my pervasive restlessness.

I change the subject. “And your job? Being Vice President? There’s more to it than being photographed with a different woman every night, I’m sure.”

The old Embry would have laughed at this, grinned or winked or started bragging. This Embry sits forward and stares at me over his cocktail glass, his hands coming together in his lap. “Yes,” he says quietly. “There is more to it than that.”

“Mr. Moore—”

“Call me that one more time, and I’ll have you arrested for sedition.”

“Fine. Embry…what am I doing here?”

He takes a deep breath.

“The President wants you to meet with him.”

Off all the things he could have said…of all the reasons I thought I might be sitting across the table from a man I haven’t spoken with in five years…

“President Colchester,” I say. “Maxen Colchester. That President?”

“As far as I know, there’s only the one,” he replies.

I take a drink from my cocktail, trying to keep my motions controlled and my expressions blank, although I know how pointless that is with Embry Moore. When I first met him, he was a servant to his emotions, impulsive and moody. But in the last five years, he’s become the master of deliberate, studied behavior, and I know by the way his eyes flicker across my face that I’m not fooling him at all.

I set down my drink with a sigh, abandoning all pretense of calm. Like he said before, I’ve never been a good liar and I hate lying anyway.

“I’m a little confused,” I admit. “Unless the President wants to talk about the influence of Anglo-Saxon poetry on Norman literary traditions, I don’t see why he’d want to talk to me.”

Embry raises an eyebrow. “You don’t?”

I glance down at my hands. On my right pointer finger, there is the world’s smallest scar—so small it can’t be seen. It can only be discerned in the way it disrupts the looping whorls of my fingerprint, a tiny white notch in a tiny white ridge.

A needle of a scar, a hot knife of a memory.

The smell of fire and leather.

Firm lips on my skin.

The warm crimson of blood.

“I don’t,” I confirm. I have hopes, I have fantasies, I have a memory so powerful it punishes me nightly, but none of those things are real. And this is real life right now. This is the Vice President, that is the Secret Service over there, and I have a stack of papers waiting to be graded at home.

I’m not sixteen anymore, and anyway, I told myself that I was putting that other man in a box and burying him.

“He saw you at your church last week,” Embry finally says. “Did you see him?”

“Of course I saw him,” I sigh. “It’s hard to miss it when the President of the United States attends Mass at your church.”

“And you didn’t say hello?”

I throw up my hands. “Hello, Mr. President, I met you once ten years ago. Peace be with you, and also the left communion line is the fastest?”

“You know it’s not like that.”

“Do I?” I demand, leaning forward. Embry’s eyes fall to my chest, where my blouse has gaped open. I straighten, smoothing the fabric back into place, trying to ignore the heat in my belly at Embry’s stare. “He was surrounded by Secret Service anyway. I wouldn’t have been able to say hello even if I wanted to.”

“He wants to see you,” Embry repeats.

“I can’t believe he even remembers me.”

“There you go again, assuming people forget about you. It would be sweet if it wasn’t so frustrating.”

“Tell me why he wants to see me.”

Embry’s blue eyes glitter in the dim light as he reaches for my hand. And then he lifts it to his lips, kissing the scarred fingertip with a careful, premeditated slowness. Kissing a scar that he should know nothing about.

My chest threatens to crack open.

“Why you?” I ask, my voice breaking. “Why are you here instead of him?”

“He sent me. He wants to be here so badly, but you know how watched he is. Especially with Jenny—”

Darkness falls like a curtain over the table.

Jenny.

President Colchester’s wife.

Late wife.

“It’s only been a year since the funeral, and Merlin thinks it’s too soon for Max to step out of the ‘tragic widower’ role. So there can’t be any emails or phone calls,” Embry says. “Not yet. You understand.”

I do. I do understand. I grew up in this world, and even though I never wanted to be part of it, I understand scandal and PR and crisis management as well as I understand medieval literature.