before
So Colchester couldn’t love me, and I shouldn’t love him. Morgan was right. He deserved someone who could give him what he needed, who could worship him without hating him at the same time. I was too selfish, too broken, too careless. Even if he were bisexual—and he’d given no sign that he was—there was no way in hell I’d be his first choice.
So I told myself I was taking Morgan’s advice. I told myself I was sparing us both the pain of incompatibility. But really, I was sparing myself the pain of rejection.
He was probably straight anyway.
The day after Morgan left, I went to the captain’s office and asked for anything, anything, to get me off base. Extended patrol, a raid in the next valley over, whatever it took to get me away from Colchester. Within eight hours, I was out in the Colchester-free air again, tramping through the brush and listening to Dag and Wu argue about the finer plot points of the movie Blade.
Volunteering for every off-base mission became a habit of mine—one my men didn’t appreciate—but one I couldn’t stop. Stopping meant seeing Colchester, talking to him, and on those awful, unavoidable moments when we were together, every word of his, every twitch of his gloved hand and squint of those green eyes in the mountain sunshine sliced me open. There’d be times when he’d clap me on the shoulder, playfully rub at my hair, and I’d stare at him and realize he had no idea. None at all.
Eight months passed torturously, painfully, and if I thought I could sweat Colchester out of my system by fighting more, soldiering harder, I was wrong. I wanted him more than ever, I longed for him, I practically rubbed my cock raw to thoughts of him. As the end of my deployment rolled toward me like a storm front, I found myself resisting the idea of leaving Colchester more and more. Avoiding him was one thing, but being apart from him, leaving this base and maybe never seeing him again…
The day before I left, I went looking for the source of my torment. The valley had been quiet and his platoon was on base, and even though I knew I might see him tonight at the going away party they were throwing me and my guys, I wanted to see him now, and alone.
I didn’t know what I was going to say. To him, I was just the guy whose sister he’d fucked last year. Just the troublemaker he’d once pinned against a wall. Did I even want him to realize there was anything more on my end?
It was spring again, with that strange brand of chill that lingered in corners and shady spots and retreated under the sun, only to return the moment the light began to wane. I found Colchester in the yard where we’d first met, wearing a tan T-shirt and combat pants, and talking to a tall man in a suit who I’d never seen before. The man was white and dark-haired and attractive in an angular sort of way, and he seemed to be ten or so years older than us.
I was about to turn away when I saw that Colchester was occupied, but he threw back his head and laughed—laughed! He hardly ever did that!—at what the stranger had said, and the sound was so rich and warm that it melted me on the spot. The T-shirt clung to his shoulders and back, showed off the narrow lines of his hips as it tucked neatly into his pants, and I allowed myself a lingering gaze on his ass and legs—all tight, tempting muscle. The want I felt, I felt it on a cellular level. Like it had fused itself to my DNA.
“Embry!” Colchester said, catching sight of me and beckoning me over.
I never could resist it when he said my first name. I went to him.
“This is Merlin Rhys.” Colchester introduced us, and I shook hands with the man in the suit. “He’s here doing some work on the Queen’s behalf. It looks like the Brits will be joining us soon.”
“Very soon,” Merlin said as our hands separated. “I expect in three months or so.” I noted that his posh accent was very slightly betrayed by his tapped rs—Welsh, perhaps.
“I’m Lieutenant Embry Moore,” I said. “It’s a pleasure.”
“Vivienne Moore’s son, right?” Merlin asked.
I didn’t bother hiding my surprise. “That’s right.”
“I keep up with American politics,” he explained. “She gave a rather moving speech about having a deployed son last month, didn’t she?”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. She did give that speech and to much fanfare. While I didn’t doubt that some of her sentiments were genuine, I also didn’t doubt that she displayed those sentiments in the most politically advantageous way possible. But I couldn’t say all that to this guy, so I just said, “Yes. She did.”
Merlin glanced down at his shoes—dress shoes with mud clinging to the shiny sides—and he kept his eyes there as he spoke. “And how is your aunt Nimue?”
“You know Nimue?”
He smiled and looked at me, and I recognized that look. I imagined I wore it a lot around Colchester. “Yes,” he said softly. “I know her.”
“Well,” I said, trying to smother my intense curiosity, “she had a baby a few months ago. A little boy. Lyr.”
“Lyr,” he said, his voice cradling the word. “A Welsh name. It means ‘from the sea.’”
“She lives in Seattle. She’s kind of a literal person.”
He laughed at that. “She is, isn’t she?”
“How do you two—”
He waved a hand. “It’s a long story, and fittingly enough, it involves your mother being rather angry with me. I’ll tell it to you someday. For now though, I should get on. Lieutenant Colchester, I hope very much we’ll be in touch soon. Lieutenant Moore, it was lovely to meet you and please tell your family hello from me. Or perhaps just your aunt—I don’t think Vivienne wants anything from me other than a goodbye.”
He shook our hands and left, his carefully tailored suit and precise gait so out of place in our grimy pre-fab Army base that I couldn’t help but shake my head. “What did he want with you?” I asked Colchester.
Colchester shrugged those powerful shoulders. “No idea, but he asked the captain for me by name.” He frowned. “I hope I’m not in trouble.”
“Why would you be in trouble? You’re the hero, everybody’s golden boy.”
“Oh stop.”
“I mean it. I hope we all make it into your memoir when it comes out.”
“I’m not writing a memoir.”
“You will before you run for office,” I said.
“One day that joke is going to get old,” he warned me.
“Never.”
He considered me a moment and then asked, “Do you want to take a walk?”
My mouth went dry. “Yes,” I said. “That would be nice.”
The spring chill hovered under the trees as we kicked our way up the narrow path away from the base, but the birds trilled and hopped around anyway, and tiny flowers pushed their way out of the soil wherever a patch of sunlight fell through the trees.
We didn’t go far—although we were both technically dismissed from duties that day, there’d been enough separatist activity in our valley to make being out of sight of the base a dicey prospect. Instead, we found a ridge that overlooked our compound and sat, feet dangling over the valley floor.
“So you’re leaving tomorrow,” Colchester said, looking down over the base. “Going home.”
“For as long as they’ll let me.”
“I wish I could’ve seen more of you,” he said, and my chest tightened.
I couldn’t bear him saying things like that, couldn’t bear it, and so I tried to redirect him, blunt the intensity. “And seen more of Morgan, I’m sure.”
He shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. I really enjoyed the time I spent with Morgan—every moment of it—but I don’t need to see her again. And when you go…I’m going to feel very much like I need to see you again.”
And my chest tightened even more. “Colchester—”
He glanced at me, a flash of green framed by long black lashes. “My closest friends call me Ash.”
“I thought your first name was Maxen.”
“And so it is, but…” He chewed his lip for a moment, as if deciding how much to tell me. “I never knew my biological parents. There’s no father on record and my birth mother named me, but a name was all she was willing to give, I guess. And so Maxen—Max—was what I was called until Mama took me in when I was four. The day I moved into her house, she let me pick out my own name, a new name, one that I could use with my new life and my new family.” He smiled. “She was the kindest, sweetest person I’d ever met—there wasn’t a time that I could go to her that she wouldn’t pick me up and cuddle me. I told her I wanted to have the same name as her, and she laughed. She said she wouldn’t let a little boy be named Althea but that I could have her middle name. And when I was officially adopted a few years later, we made it official. No longer Maxen Smith, but Maxen Ashley Colchester. Ever since then, I’ve thought of Ash as my real name. The name given to me out of love and not—” he waved a hand at nothing in particular “—abandonment.”
I was fascinated by this glimpse into his history, this legacy of pain. “And you’ve never tried to find your birth parents?”
Bitterness clung to his mouth. “Why would I? They didn’t want me.”
I want you. “So I should call you Ash?”
He smiled at me, the dancing smile, the bruising smile, wide and dimpled with white teeth and lips that looked firm and soft all at once. “I’d like that,” he told me.
Hypnotized by that smile, I echoed, “I’d like that too.”
“Embry, have you been avoiding me?”
I tore my gaze away from his warm, handsome face. I sensed he’d know if I was lying, but I didn’t want to admit to it, couldn’t admit to it because then he’d ask why and I wouldn’t be able to refuse him the truth.
“Is it because I slept with your sister?” he pressed. “Or is it because I didn’t keep sleeping with her?”
“No, Colchester—”
“Ash,” he corrected.
“—Ash. That’s not why…or I don’t know, that’s not all of the why.”
“Because I missed you,” he said quietly. “I wanted to see you more.”
“I really did think you hated me.”
“You’re spoiled and self-destructive and relentlessly careless. The only thing I hate about you is that you’re not one of mine, so I can’t discipline you.”
And despite what Morgan told me, despite what I thought about myself, the moment he said the word discipline, the hairs rose up on my arms and the muscles tensed in my thighs. An unfamiliar part of me wanted to beg him to discipline me now. “And you wish I was one of your men.”
“Yes. I wish you belonged to me.”
Belong. It was never a word I considered sexy, never a word I considered emotionally weighted; it was a word for things, cars and guns and possessions. But God, in that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be his possession, his thing. To belong to him.
I couldn’t believe I was asking this, but the words left me anyway. “What do you think about when you think about disciplining me?”
He shivered.
He actually shivered.
Much to my disappointment, he didn’t answer my question, asking instead, “Do you know the story of Achilles and Patroclus?”
“I went to an all-boys boarding school,” I reminded him. “So yes.”
“I feel a little bit like…like I’m not going to be able to fight once you’re gone,” Colchester—Ash, now—admitted. “Like Achilles after Patroclus died.”
“You?” I laughed. “You’re the best soldier here!”
“Something about you makes it easier. Knowing that if I do my part right, you might be safer when you’re out on your own missions.”
His words were pinching at my heart—too kind, too meaningful—and they couldn’t possibly mean what I wanted them to mean, but then all of a sudden I was on my back, rocks and pine needles poking through my shirt, and he was on top of me, straddling me, leaning over me with my shirt in his fist.
I couldn’t help it; I whimpered, a soft little moan from the back of my throat. His body had looked tightly muscular from afar, but actually on top of me, he was heavy and firm and so fucking powerful, all that soldier and intensity pressing my body into the rocks.
“In Aeschylus, Achilles laments Patroclus when he’s dead,” Ash whispered, leaning close enough that I could smell him—leather and fire. “He accuses Patroclus of being ungrateful for Achilles’ frequent kisses. How could he not be ungrateful if he died instead of staying with Achilles? And night after night I’ve been thinking of you leaving here, leaving me, but I wouldn’t be able to accuse you of being ungrateful for anything, unless…”
I could barely breathe; his long eyelashes swept up and down, his thighs shifted against my hips, my dick was growing hard underneath all that moving muscle. “Unless what?” I asked, desperate to break the tension.
Ash didn’t answer with words. Instead, he leaned down and kissed me.
The kiss was hard—harder than I would have expected for someone as publicly polite and orderly as Ash, but just as hard as I would expect from the man who liked standing with his boot on my wrist. I arched underneath him, needing the pressure on my cock, wanting to offer my throat, and he gave and took in return, shifting his hips so that I felt his erection against mine, moved his hand from my shirt to my neck, where he gripped me tightly. His other hand slid under my head, and I realized it was to cushion me from the rocks.
“You will be grateful for my kisses, won’t you?” he demanded, nipping at my jaw. “You won’t leave me and never come back?”
In twenty-two years, no one, no one, had ever made me feel like this. Not just claimed, but like that claim was literally staked into my flesh, anchored to my bone. We were both so young then—him only a year older than me—but he dominated and overwhelmed me so naturally, as if he’d spent years doing it.
And yet when I searched his face, I didn’t find the perfect control of someone experienced, but the desperate, possessive anger of a twenty-three-year-old about to lose someone he wanted. Those dark eyebrows were drawn together, those deep jade eyes frantic on my face.
“Embry,” he begged. “Promise me you won’t just disappear.”
I was still trying to catch up with the last thirty seconds. “I didn’t know you wanted this,” I said. “I thought…I guess I thought you wouldn’t want me.”
He kissed me again, and again, and again. He parted my lips with his and our tongues came together, and it was such a warm, wet, intimate feeling that I shuddered underneath him, which made him groan into my mouth.
“I wanted you since the first day,” he confessed, breaking our kiss. “I wanted to keep you pinned against that wall for hours.” His expression turned a little shy, something novel and quite sweet on that usually serious face. “It’s the first time I’ve ever felt this way about another man.”
“But Morgan…” I shouldn’t have said it. I don’t know why I did.
“Yes,” he sighed. “Morgan.”
And her name from his lips broke the spell.
What am I doing? Did it change anything that Ash wanted me the way I wanted him? Did I really think I could be with a man who needed to discipline and mark, who needed his lovers to belong to him? As much as my whole body screamed yes, yes we can do that, I had to think with more than my dick. All my relationships either had a completely even balance of power or I was in charge, and that didn’t even delve into the complicated realities of my emotional health. Didn’t delve into the complicated realities of our job.
He saw the shift in my face. “Say this isn’t the end, Embry. Say you’ll keep teaching me to dance. Say you’ll be my little prince. Please.”
His hand still cradled the back of my head, still protected me from all pain except what he wanted to give to me himself. I pressed my eyes closed; every single part of me wanted to say yes, and yet…little princes couldn’t play with kings. They’d be destroyed.
“We should get back to base,” I said, opening my eyes but not looking at his face. If I saw those green eyes flash with hurt, that square jaw tense with pain, it would be over. I would cave and let myself get sucked into something I would inevitably turn toxic and awful, because that’s what I did best.
Ash slid off me and stood, offering me a hand, which I didn’t take.
We walked back to the base in silence, parted ways without a word, though I could feel him looking at me the entire time. I feigned illness for the going away party, thinking that was the last time I’d have to see Colchester, though I knew even then that I’d never be free of thinking about him.
And that morning when I left my room with my bags, I found a small gift outside my door, a wrapped package. I forced myself to wait until I boarded the train at Lviv to open it, and when I did, it felt like someone had buried their Glock in my ribs and pulled the trigger.
A copy of The Little Prince. From Ash.
I pressed my forehead to the train window and willed myself not to cry.
