after
The helicopter touches down with a jolt, but Greer doesn’t wake. I don’t blame her—between the abduction and the rescue, the last four days have been hell for her—hell for all of us, really—but her most of all. I remember her face in the window as Melwas touched her. And I remember her tears and bound hands grabbing for me as I stood by her bed afterward.
I’d felt that once before myself, that disoriented rush of gratitude and fear and love and self-destruction. How could I refuse her when I’d demanded the same of Ash after I’d nearly died?
How could I refuse her when it meant refusing both the past and present versions of myself?
The Camp David helipad swarms as the rotors slow, and I expect Luc or some other agent waiting at the door. I don’t know why, because I should have known it would be Ash there, deep circles under his eyes and black stubble that’s moved past stubble and is now a thick, delicious scruff. He ducks his head to step in, and his face as he sees Greer slices right through me with every feeling I have—jealousy and love and pride. And anger, anger most of all. Not the oldest anger I own, but old enough. The war anger.
That slicing look on Ash’s face is because of Melwas. That single tear slipping down Greer’s cheek as she opens her eyes and realizes she’s safely home and her Sir is there to lift her into his strong arms—that tear lays at Melwas’s feet too. And it’s bullshit that a tear and look could have just as much weight as a bullet in my shoulder, as a burning village, as the bodies of the men I’d vowed to protect in those godforsaken mountains. But I don’t care. It just does, and I promise myself right then and there that Melwas won’t get to hurt the people I love ever again. Somehow I’ll make sure of that. Some way.
Ash unbuckles Greer and carries her out of the helicopter. I follow, feeling strangely out of place as we make for the big house. Early summer wind ruffles through her long white-gold hair, fluttering the collar of Ash’s button-down, and they are so beautiful together, an ideal couple, America’s Hero and America’s Sweetheart. Hand-drawn for storybook perfection.
And where does that leave me?
Ash dismisses everyone except for me from the house, and together we walk into the master bedroom. I sink into a stuffed chair in the corner, not realizing how beat I am until now. My entire body seems to melt into the upholstery; a defeated exhaustion creeps into me. I watch Ash set Greer gently on the edge of the bed. She looks up at him with gray eyes so empty and tired that I have to look away.
“Little princess. I’m going to undress you and wash you,” he explains, “and then you are going to sleep.”
She doesn’t respond, merely turning her head to look away from him.
He catches her chin, and when he speaks, his voice is as tender and deep as it was when he promised to love her in sickness and in health. “The answer is yes, Sir.”
The words bring a flicker of life to her face. She looks back to him, as if really seeing him for the first time, and with her chin trembling and her voice thick, she responds, “Yes, Sir.”
He glances over to me. “Wait here, Embry. We have things to talk about after I’ve cared for my wife.”
I nod, lean my head back against the chair, and it’s the last thing I know before the exhaustion takes me.
“Embry.”
My eyes open to see Ash standing above me, a strange expression on his face. His hair is wet and water drops still cling to his bare chest, but he’s put on a pair of sweatpants that hang low on his hips. I steal a look over at the bed and see a slender form piled high with blankets. In the late afternoon sun coming through the window, I see the glint of blond hair on the pillow.
“She fell asleep the moment I laid her down,” Ash says.
“You look like you could use some sleep too.”
Ash passes a hand over his face. “I can’t sleep without her anyway. Knowing the two of you were out there made it more than impossible.”
“She’s safe now.”
“And so are you. Let’s go to my office and let Greer rest.”
We go, closing the bedroom door quietly behind us and moving into Ash’s office, a wood-paneled room with a large desk and several heavily laden bookshelves. He bids me to sit on the couch near the large windows and he sits in the chair next to it. For a few moments, we both look out the window at the tall, leafy trees outside, aspens and maples and oaks, all green and summer and so different from the scrubby evergreens of Carpathia.
Then he moves his gaze from the window to me. “She has fresh bite marks on her,” he says.
I’m still trying to figure out how to answer him, when he says, “Tell me it was you, Embry. Tell me it was you and not him.”
I exhale. “It wasn’t him. I—after I found her—” the tiredness is not helping with the complicated swirl of feelings and fears right now, and guilt infects me. “We never talked about what would happen between the three of us. Rules. I didn’t think it was wrong because we hadn’t laid out any boundaries.”
“We didn’t have time to lay out boundaries.” His gaze and voice are still filled with a cool kind of calm. I resist the urge to shiver or look away, knowing he’ll see. “You fucked her? Just the two of you?”
“It’s not what it sounds like, I swear. Melwas wasn’t able to rape her,” I say all in one breath, “but he touched her. If you’d seen her, Ash—”
He stands up and walks over to a window, pressing his forearm against the glass and leaning forward. The posture highlights the muscles in his arms and shoulders, the place where his sweatpants hang from his sharp hipbones and hug his firm ass.
“What, Embry?” he says, and it’s all in his voice, his wounded, bitter voice. “What would I have done if I’d seen her?”
The tiredness falls away, my place as Vice President falls away, everything falls away, and I do something I rarely ever do unless I’m wrestled into it. I go and kneel at his feet, lowering myself down to press my lips against the top of one foot. There’s a light sprinkling of dark hair near his ankle, the thick cords of tendons, and the clean soap smell of his recent shower.
He freezes as I do this, not saying a word, not moving. I switch to the other foot, letting my lips linger on his skin long enough to feel it warm under my mouth.
Finally he says in an almost indifferent voice, “Did you come? Did she come?”
“Yes,” I whisper against his foot.
“Did you think of me?”
“Goddammit, Ash, you know we did.”
“That’s Goddammit, Sir.”
“You might as well have been in the room with us. Sir.”
“Did you pretend to force her?”
The words puncture me, lodge in me, expertly shot arrows. I look up at him, desperate, and he takes pity on me, bending down to stroke his fingers through my hair. “It’s what she would have needed, little prince. Wanted too.”
I duck my eyes in shame.
“Ah,” he says. “And it’s what you wanted.”
My hands are shaking, and he gets to his knees and wraps my hands in both of his. They’re steady and warm, like him.
“I walked in and she was tied up—I mean, taped up. Ankles and wrists. A gag. She begged me, she cried—” My voice threatens to break, but I keep going, keep confessing my sins to my priest. My king. “I asked you for something like that once—how could I deny her? And she said she needed it, but Ash…I wanted it before I thought of all that. I wanted it the moment I walked into that dark room and my shadow fell across her body.”
“Did you have a safe word?”
“We agreed on snapping fingers because I…I put her gag back in her mouth.”
Ash nods, acknowledging that we’d done it safely, but his eyes are already growing distant. I wonder if he’s imagining it, picturing the lurid, fucked-up scene for himself. “Did you leave her taped up?”
“Yes.”
His sweatpants do nothing to hide his growing erection. “Did she fight you?”
Shame and arousal come in equal measure. “Yes.”
“And you fought back and won.” He closes his eyes.
I can barely breathe. “Yes.”
“Did you want that too?”
My words are ghosts. “I pretended to be you.”
His eyes snap open, and the green of them goes more vibrant than the forest outside. His breathing is ragged and so is mine. “I’m so jealous, little prince,” he whispers. “I’m angry with myself that I couldn’t be there to give my wife what she needed and I’m grateful to you, that you could give it to her. The thought of the two of you together like that…” His mouth twists up in a rueful smile and he lets me go to gesture at the outline of his cock pressing against his sweatpants. “Well, you know.”
I miss his touch. “Do you forgive me?”
The forest eyes soften the tiniest bit. “You saved her life, Embry. I’ll forgive you anything.”
I nearly perish with relief.
“Even if you’d mocked me and hated me the whole time you cuckolded me, I’d forgive you. Even if you reenacted every kink I’d ever done with her to erase the memory of me from her body, I’d forgive you. If you two had fucked and then both decided to leave me, I’d forgive you. But especially this. You took care of her in the way she needed.”
“I feel like shit about it,” I mutter, although the truth is more complicated that, and his lingering smile tells me that he knows it.
“I forgive you, so you need to forgive yourself. She asked and you said yes, because you knew she needed it. Because you needed something similar once. And because you wanted it. And because you knew I would have given her the same were I there.” He stands and offers me a hand, and I let him help me to my feet.
“Sit,” he says, pointing to the couch and walking behind his desk as I do. I’m feeling shaken, flayed open after my confession and submission and his forgiveness, and so I search for anything to talk about that isn’t what I’ve done with my lover’s wife.
“Did our deception work? Keeping her abduction quiet?”
Ash nods as he looks through one of the deep drawers of the old desk. “As far as anyone knows—save for a trusted few—Greer and I have been here on our honeymoon and you have been taking a much-needed vacation at your mother’s lake house. Although I don’t know how much longer I could have kept it up. The press is ravenous for pictures of Greer and me.” As always, he sounds puzzled with the media’s fascination with him.
“It must be Greer,” he concludes, opening another drawer. “They all adore her—rightfully so—and seem to be obsessed with her. The wedding coverage and the post-wedding magazine covers and Internet articles…I couldn’t turn on the television without seeing clips from my own wedding. Couldn’t do anything without seeing her face.” He takes a deep breath, looking up at me. “Thank you, Embry. If you hadn’t brought her back, if you hadn’t come back…”
The sun moves out from behind a cloud, filling the windowed room with green-gold light, highlighting the silver near his temples and the faint lines around his eyes. He’s only thirty-six, just now entering the prime of his life, but for a moment, I can see the toll it’s all taken on him—the war, the presidency, Greer and me. It all rests on his shoulders and it always has, and normally he wears it so easily, but I can see now how much he’s come to rely on Greer for strength. And maybe even me too.
But then he straightens up, clutching something colorful in his large hand, and he’s back to power. Back to easy strength and calm. He walks back over to me, running the colorful thing through his hand, the thick shape of his cock so deliciously visible through his sweatpants. I can’t stop staring at it, staring at the black line of hair running down from his navel and into the waistband, the barest peek of more black hair beneath that.
He stops in front of me. “See something you like, Patroclus?”
I snap my eyes up to his face and see a smile dimpling his cheek. I’m about to say some smart remark, but then I see what’s actually in his hand. “Is that…is that a novelty tie with Mount Rushmore on it?”
“A present from Belvedere. I promised him it would never see the light of day…but I’m bending that promise a little now.” He leans down and wraps the tie around my eyes, knotting it securely at the back of my head. “Can you see anything?”
The ugly tie blocks out all the light, the silk of it actually quite smooth and cool against my tired eyes. “What are you doing?”
Two rough fingertips press against my mouth. “You’ll see. Head back and arms along the back of the couch. You aren’t permitted to move unless I say so.”
I do as I’m told, my erection already pressing painfully against the seam of my pants, my heart racing. So much of our brief, torrid affair between Jenny’s passing and dating Greer had been spontaneous, violently so, just a collection of stolen interludes in abandoned corners of the White House. But this—the prolonged and planned dominance—I hadn’t had this in years, since before Jenny. Since before the first time I refused to marry him.
I missed it.
I missed it the way you miss the sun after a long stretch of cloudy days, where you begin to forget the cloudiness, forget to miss the sun, and then one day it comes back so hot and clear and bright that you wonder how you ever lived without it. I missed the uncertainty of it, the way I can’t see a damn thing through my blindfold. I missed the awareness of it, the way my skin prickles with every brush of air, straining for hints of him.
It’s funny how my posture appears to be the epitome of relaxed anticipation, but I immediately feel the strain of keeping my hands still as Ash’s hands find my fly. I jolt as the backs of his fingers brush against my erection through my pants and I can practically hear him smile.
“Don’t move,” he warns, his sure hands tugging my zipper down, down, down.
“And what happens if I do?” I ask, grabbing the couch frame behind the cushions to keep myself from touching him, from reaching for his cock or reaching for my own.
“Consequences.” The word is a no-man’s land between playful and deadly serious, and I shudder with undefined want. I haven’t had premeditated consequences in a very long time, and I’m surprised at how viscerally the idea excites me. “Now, no more words out of your mouth unless it’s to say thank you, Sir or please, no more, Sir.”
I snort. “Will you actually stop if I say please?”
“No.” Now I can definitely hear the smile in his words. “Take off your shirt, Embry; you are allowed to move for that. Then put your hands back where they were.”
I obey, and the minute I settle back to where I was, the sharp snap of a rubber band stings across my left nipple. I gasp.
“Guess what else was in my desk?” Ash says in an amused voice. A second snap against the same nipple and I’m arching my back, the pain sizzling quickly into a very different kind of heat. “Those were warning snaps. Any more lip from you and I will see how red those nipples can get. And there are worse places I can use this rubber band, Embry, don’t forget.”
I make a show of pressing my lips together. “Good boy,” Ash says, and his hands return to my pants, parting the fly and tugging my pants and boxer briefs down far enough to release my dick. I’m so stirred up that even the caress of the air-conditioned air is too stimulating; I resist the urge to squirm, knowing there will be consequences, although I almost wish for them.
“Historically, monarchs would give faithful servants gifts upon their return. Sometimes it was land or a castle or a ship; the Anglo-Saxon kings would give their retainers rings and necklaces of gold. Sometimes even a night with the queen.” A firm hand wraps around my shaft and the sensation shudders through me. “But I don’t have any gold, and you already get to share my wife. So what could I give you? For serving me so well? For rescuing my queen?”
The hand glides down and then back up, whispering over the taut, silken skin of my erection. A low groan rumbles through my chest. Fuck, that feels good.
And then something unexpected happens: my tip is engulfed in something warm and wet.
“Oh fuck,” I groan and then realize my mistake. “Sorry, sorry, sorry—don’t—”
It’s too late and the rubber band comes back, stinging across my nipples and down my stomach, snap snap snap. I freeze in paralyzed pleasure-pain, mentally begging the rubber band not to go any lower and half hoping it will.
It doesn’t, and a soothing hand runs up my stomach, warm and rough against the small welts. “Nod your head if you want to keep going,” Ash says, and when he speaks, I can feel his breath on my dick and stomach. It takes everything I have not to shove up into his mouth, but knowing him, he’d deny me altogether if I did that, so I hold still. Barely.
I nod my head, feeling a faint trickle of sweat run down from my temple into the tie. My skin is alive with welts and want, my body begs for his touch.
And then it happens again, a slow, almost tickling warmth. So wet. So fucking wet and hot, and then his lips close over my crown and he sucks.
“Mmphh,” I moan, managing to keep it from being a word at just the last moment. “Mmphh.”
He laughs, the laugh vibrating through my cock and deep into the pit of my stomach, which clenches in response. He draws me deeper, and God, how I wish I could see him! See that dark, proud head bent over me, those broad shoulders folded in between my legs. He claims he isn’t a true sadist, but denying me this sight, this visual memory, is more than enough evidence for a healthy sadistic streak.
He takes me so deep that I feel the back of his throat, and then when I begin rocking my hips against his face, he settles a forearm across my lower stomach to hold me still. Pinning me down so that he can suck me the way he wants, take his time licking around my base and swirling around the tip, mixing in nips and kisses and gentle fingertips against my perineum. As if even when going down on me, it’s still for him. All for him.
He moves my pants farther down so he can run a wandering hand across the skin of my inner thighs, trace the lines of muscles and tendons around my upper thighs and stomach, pinch the juts of my hipbones. He lets me squirm now, lets me roll my hips against him. There’s a brushing noise and it takes a moment for me to realize that it’s the sound of my shoes against the carpet as my legs move restlessly around him.
He keeps at me though, refusing to let my desperation dictate his pace. In fact, he goes even slower, sucking me in long deep pulls, licking up with the flat of his tongue, and holy fuck, it’s such torture not seeing this. Not being able to capture it in my memory forever, because he’s jerked me off countless times, fucked me just as many, and there were a handful of times when he’d put his mouth on me to tease me or edge me, but never has it been this. Never has it been this tender or thorough or drawn-out.
“This is my thank you,” I hear him murmur. His mouth drops kisses on the muscled lines of my belly, on my hips, my navel. “My appreciation.” A quick hard suck on my tip leaves me panting. “My eternal, bottomless gratitude.”
My fingers are digging into the couch, and I perversely wish I were bound—it’s almost worse to be responsible for my own control, to know that there’s nothing between this moment and burying my fingers in his hair but my nonexistent self-discipline. All I want to do is touch his head as he moves over me, trace those lips where they wrap around my cock. Capture one of those wandering hands and slide it up to my chest where it can lay flat against my heart.
The point of no return comes agonizingly slowly, building deep and low in my groin. My blindfolded world has shrunk down to the satin heat of Ash’s tongue, the tight grip of his throat, the pressure building behind my cock. My legs keep moving around him, my shoes still sliding on the carpet, and my thighs and abs are so tense, so fucking tense—
“Would you like to come in my mouth, Embry?”
I nod, my body pulling as taut as a bowstring, ready to snap.
“Say please.” The tip of his tongue flutters across the head of my cock, taking extra time to lick inside my slit.
“Oh fuck. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.”
“You’re pronouncing please wrong.”
“Please, fucking please, please—”
I’m engulfed once more, and he works me so hard and deep that my toes are curling in my shoes and it feels like everything in my pelvis is about to snap and shatter, and then the first wave hits with the strength of a two-ton bomb. I cry out, arching my back and twisting to the side all at once, and he curls his fingers around my hips to hold me still, as if I’m interrupting something for him.
The second wave hits and then I’m releasing into his mouth, pumping my orgasm onto his wide, strong tongue. I’m pulled deeper again, my swollen head squeezed by the tight swallows of his throat as I continue to shudder and pulse and spurt. He swallows it all, fingers still clamped around my hips and firm lips still wrapped around me until I’m completely drained, and then he pulls back.
I expect him to stand up, I half expect cruel fingers yanking my chin forward so he can fuck my mouth next, but instead I hear a sigh and feel something I can’t remember feeling before—his head resting against my leg. And that, so much more than the blowjob, is what I’m desperate to see, because who knows if it will ever happen again? Ash kneeling in between my feet, resting his head against me.
I reach for the blindfold, and he says quickly, “Don’t. Leave it on for a moment.”
I curl my fingers against my palm, they’re so itchy to disobey, but I finally force my hand back to the couch. I feel and hear him sigh. “Just a moment longer. I know this is supposed to be for you, but I want this…just a moment longer.”
His hand reaches up to stroke my stomach, and then finally rests where I wanted it earlier, flat against my heart. A seedling of a thought works its way through the soil of my mind. Maybe not even a thought, more like a sense or an instinct, that somehow, despite the novelty of it, Ash kneeling and servicing me isn’t that much different than anything we’ve done in the past. Because maybe he’s the one on his knees, the one swallowing my cum, but he’s still the one in control. The one silently indicating that he still owns my heartbeat.
“I love you, little prince,” he whispers, palm warm against my chest. Underneath my blindfold, I squeeze my eyes closed in something like pained rapture. After all these years, those words still haven’t lost their power over me. Their power to thrill me, and their power to terrify me, because being loved by a man like him is no small burden.
“You don’t have to say it back. I don’t want to push you.”
“You know I love you,” I say, and it’s a little petulant, because Ash has every right to doubt the depth of my feelings and I know it. But how can I make him understand? That every time I pushed him away, it was for his own fucking good? And not for his own good in some vague, moralistic sense, but for his practical, concrete advancement? If he’d married me, we wouldn’t be in the private office at Camp David right now. There wouldn’t be a pile of reports waiting for him on that desk. He wouldn’t have left the Army as a Major. Nothing that made him the man he is today would have been possible if he’d been publicly bisexual, and I hate that as much as anyone, but it’s the fucking truth. I sacrificed myself, my own happiness, because anyone could see that people like Maxen Colchester weren’t born every day. Anyone could see he was meant for great things—and again, not in the vague, Eat, Pray, Love “we’re all the universe’s children” kind of way, but actual great things. Historic things. Affecting millions of lives for the better kind of things. It wasn’t fair to me or to him, but necessary things aren’t always fair.
Something I know now more than ever.
He lifts his head from my leg and moves his hand away from my heart, and my soul wilts. He stands and unties the blindfold, and his face is the first thing that comes into focus when I can finally open my eyes against the daylight. His brow is slightly furrowed, a tragic pull to his mouth, and he looks at me like he wants me to say something, anything more than I already have.
But what can I say? After all, it was my choice to martyr myself for his future. He would have martyred his own future to be with me, which is why the bitterness never stays for long. And it’s also why I can’t tell him the truth about the reasons I said no. He’s suffered enough without me adding guilt to the pile.
“We should go check on Greer,” I say, and something in his face closes, like a door. He nods.
I stand up and fasten up my pants. “Thank you for my thank you,” I say, trying to give him the crooked grin that I know he can’t resist.
A little warmth comes back into his eyes and a small smile appears. “If you want to thank me for real, you can be waiting for me in the shower after I check on my wife.”
Well, I don’t have to be told twice.
