American Queen

I’m ready to draw blood, but then I see how tired he looks. His jacket is off and thrown carelessly over the bed, his bow tie unknotted. He’s balancing a tumbler of scotch on his knee, and something about the color in his cheeks tells me that it isn’t his first. And the weariness in his face is so profound, so deeply etched, that I can’t bear to add to it, which irritates me. How dare he be tired when I need him to be strong? When I need him calm enough to weather the storm I want to scream into existence?

He looks up at me, green eyes nearly liquid with exhaustion. “You’re angry about something,” he comments.

I don’t ask how he guessed, because even if it weren’t written all over my face, he’d still know. “Yes.”

“We have a few things to talk about then.” He takes a sip of his scotch and then waves over toward the bar. “You want something to drink?”

“Actually, I think I do.”

As Luc leaves and we’re left alone, I make myself a small glass of single malt, walk over to the chair across from him and sit down. I don’t choose to sit at his feet, a choice he notices but doesn’t remark on.

A choice that hurts me more than it hurts him, I think.

But still, stubborn and cranky, I stay perched on the chair, refusing to give him anything until he gives me some answers.

“I think you should go first,” he says, twirling the glass on his knee. Even slumped back in his chair, he looks powerful. Even exhausted he looks in charge. It’s both marvelous and terribly unfair.

“Fine,” I say. “Okay.”

And then realize I have no segue into the things we need to talk about, no warm-up. I just have to dive in. I take a deep breath and look Ash square in the face.

“Embry told me he loves me tonight.”

“I believe I told you he loves you tonight as well, only you didn’t believe me.”

“I told him I love him too.”

Ash takes this like a blow he knew was coming but still wasn’t entirely prepared for. A look of hurt—real, awful hurt—crosses his face, and he lifts his glass to his lips and drains the entire thing in a few practiced swallows. When he’s finished, he sets the glass on the table next to him and looks at me with eyes the color of pain. “So you did,” he says softly. “And then what did he say?”

“Not much of anything, because right after I told him that, I told him that I saw you two kissing on Christmas Eve.”

The blood drains from Ash’s face. This he hadn’t expected, he hadn’t seen coming. “Oh my God, Greer,” he says in a horrified voice, “why didn’t you say anything?”

I nearly explode. I shoot straight to my feet, towering over him in my stupidly tall heels. “Why didn’t I say anything? Why didn’t I say anything about my fiancé cheating on me? Why didn’t I say anything about the only men I’ve ever been with, the two men I love, being in a secret relationship for ten fucking years?”

I don’t know what I expected Ash to do, but it wasn’t to grab my hips and yank me down onto his lap. His arm is an iron bar around my back, his hand implacable and heedless of my carefully styled up-do as he fists my hair to make sure I’m looking at his face.

But his face isn’t angry. It’s hurt and regretful and tired, but not at all angry, and for some reason, this unlocks my own hurt and tiredness, my own regret. My anger ebbs away like the tide, leaving behind a dirty residue of confused betrayal.

“When I saw you two under the mistletoe,” I whisper, “I thought my heart was literally breaking. Like my aorta had twisted and my valves had clamped shut. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.”

“You have every reason to hate me,” he says, his eyes locked on mine. “Every reason to be angry. I have asked you to trust me, and then I betrayed that trust in the worst way possible. I’m sorry, Greer. I’m so very, very sorry. If this…changes…things between us, I completely understand. I’m at fault, and I deserve whatever you want to do to me.”

Normally, I’d applaud a man who apologized without excuses, without desperate defenses of himself, but right now? Tonight? I want to know what Ash was thinking that night under the mistletoe, what he was feeling. I want him to fight and rage, argue and plead, so that my own tangle of emotions won’t feel so alone and outsized compared to this graceful defeat.

“No,” I say. “I want more. You’re not supposed to give up. You’re not supposed to submit. You’re supposed to fight for me! You’re supposed to explain all this away and make me feel better!”

His eyes search mine. “But I can’t explain it away. I did kiss Embry. I kissed him, and I enjoyed it. I kissed him because I’d just learned about you two sleeping together, and when I saw him that night, all rumpled and lost-looking under the mistletoe, I just…” He stops and shakes his head. “I’m not going to try to justify what I’ve done. It was wrong to kiss him that night, and it was wrong not to tell you. I’m so, so sorry.”

I want to hit him. I want to scream at him. I settle for glaring. “Stop saying you’re sorry. I don’t want your sorry.”

His eyebrows pull together. “Then what do you want?”

“You. Him. Us. I want it all to make sense. Do you love him?”

He blinks, the act making him look younger, more vulnerable. “Greer…”

“I saw you that night, Ash. You weren’t kissing him like he was a friend or an old fuck, you were kissing him like you needed it. Like you’d been waiting months for it. You were trembling, and you looked at him like…like you look at me sometimes. Like you can’t decide whether you want to eat me or be eaten.”