after
Two days later and I’m in Vivienne Moore’s mansion, drinking gin and looking out over the lake. The summer wind in Washington is still cool, still accompanied by clouds and drizzle, and I’m thankful for the roofed balcony and my light jacket as I watch rain dimple the lake. I check my phone, fire off a couple short emails. I’m technically on a family trip, a vacation, and so my chief of staff has been limiting how much she sends my way, but I crave work more than I crave leisure. It’s a welcome distraction after the rescue and the reunion. The forced separation.
But Merlin was clear on that, and as much as I resent it, I agree with him.
“This,” he said at Camp David the second day after we rescued Greer, “can’t be obvious.”
Ash had set the tone when Merlin walked in, tucking Greer into his side and clasping my hand unabashedly in his own. I clasped tightly back. After the abduction, everything felt so fragile, so tenuous, that we needed to cling to each other. More than that, it felt strangely nice to stand together so openly in front of someone, to face someone with honesty, to say I love two people and they love me.
Besides, Merlin knew the history between Ash and me. It wasn’t paranoia to think he’d deduce our unconventional arrangement eventually.
Merlin, somewhat predictably, wasn’t fazed by the sight of the three of us. He nodded once, and then started in on his usual litany about public perception, which always began with If you want to be re-elected to this office…
We had to be careful, he said. We had to be more than discreet, in fact we had to make discretion itself seem audacious in comparison. Not a word, not a whisper. No rumors about me and Greer, none about Ash and me. The world had to keep believing Greer was America’s Sweetheart, me America’s unrepentant playboy, and it was up to us to craft that perception, cultivate it like a crop. Trieste the Press Secretary would have to be brought into the loop, that Kay and Belvedere would know was inevitable, but absolutely no one else could learn about our triad.
Ever.
Not if Ash wanted another four years in office, at least.
I saw Ash bite his lip at Merlin’s words, and I yanked my hand out of his. “Don’t you dare,” I warned him.
He looked at me with a mild expression. “Don’t I dare what?”
“You know,” I said irritably. “You know exactly what. You gave up everything to be here and so did I—and you’re not finished yet.”
“He’s right,” Greer added quietly. “Think of all the things you’re still working on. Renewable energy, overhauling veteran support, public education—not to mention Carpathia. You won’t be finished after another two years, Ash. You need more time, and this country deserves it from you.”
“But it’s something to think about,” Ash said carefully, looking at each of our faces. “Another…what, six years of hiding?”
“Six and a half,” Merlin interjected. Ash ignored him, continuing to look at us.
“Is that really fair to ask of ourselves?”
Greer, the political royalty in the room, put her hand against Ash’s face. “You’re asking the wrong question about fairness. Is it really fair to this country for you to step down for a personal sacrifice we’ve already agreed to? We have the rest of our lives. We can spare six years.”
“Six and a half,” Merlin corrected again.
Ash sighed but didn’t answer.
“A baby,” Merlin said out of nowhere. “A baby would help too.”
We all swiveled our heads to look at him.
Merlin nodded at Greer, at her hand still on Ash’s face. “We’re going to have to keep churning out lots of pictures just like this, but imagine how much better they’ll look with Greer pregnant.”
Ash and I both looked at Greer, and I knew we were picturing the same thing—our bride, her stomach swollen with our child. It wouldn’t even matter whose child, I thought to myself, my eyes tracing the flat firmness of her stomach through her sundress. The child would be ours, the joy would be ours, the—
Except it wouldn’t, would it? Not in the White House, not with the eyes of the world on us. I’d be relegated to the role of bachelor uncle, a spectator, even though the child might even be biologically mine. My heart ached preemptively at the thought.
The blood drained from Greer’s face, and Merlin seemed to take some pity. “Not right away,” he assured her, “but optimally during the re-election campaign.”
She was shaking her head. “No, it’s not what you said…I mean yes, but…” Her silver eyes found mine and Ash’s. “I haven’t taken my birth control since the day of the wedding. I just, in all the things that I happened, I didn’t…”
She looked like she was about to cry. Weirdly, I felt that way too, but I wasn’t sure why. Fear? Excitement? How many times had Ash and I come inside her since then? What were the odds? Were they vast?
Did I want them to be?
Thinking about it again now, the next day and on the other side of the country, I still can’t figure that out. If Greer’s pregnant, it changes everything. If she’s not already, but the three of us decide she should have a child, it changes everything.
Don’t forget your date, Trieste texts me.
I sigh. My fucking date. An old booty call I’d take out to dinner, get photographed with, and then drop off at her doorstep without so much as a kiss. After what Greer, Ash, and I have shared since the wedding—Christ, has it only been a week?—the idea of sleeping with someone else is beyond ridiculous, past distasteful. I don’t want anyone else. Period. The end. But in a cruel twist of fate, I have to pretend to want other people in order to stay with the ones I love.
Wouldn’t miss it for the world, I text back, hoping the text hides how fucking surly I am about this.
Trieste’s response is placating. You know I don’t like all this hiding and faking, but Merlin is the best at what he does. Normally, I’d always advocate for being honest, but in your case…
Trieste was born as Tristan, and as the first openly transgender member of a Presidential Cabinet, she knows more than most about the cost of being open. She also knows about the freedom and clarity that comes from living an open life, something I’m incredibly jealous of. But fucking your best friend’s wife is a little less heroic than Trieste’s struggle, not to mention Trieste never had a choice about who she was. And everything about my sordid affair with my best friend and his wife is a choice.
Which means there’s nothing left to do but nobly suffer through my date and hope I don’t have to do it again for a while.
Trieste texts me again. Ash and Greer are playing nice for the pictures too.
A picture comes through on my phone, time-stamped from just an hour ago. Ash and Greer on a sandy beach, holding hands. Ash is laughing at something Greer has said, his head thrown back, and Greer is smiling too, white-gold hair loose and tousled, her lean curves highlighted by a red retro bikini. My heart jerks at the sight of it. I want to be there. I want to be with them. A part of me is hurt by how happy they look without me, hurt by how good they look together, with their firm bodies and thick hair and catalog smiles. They are the perfect couple, America’s Couple—the New Camelot as the press has dubbed them—and even I find myself sucked into the fantasy. Into the urge to idolize them. Their love is so infectious, their joy in each other is so seductive, and I wonder if I was on that beach instead of Ash if people would think the same about Greer and me. Could I ever be that transparently joyful? More importantly, could I ever make another person that transparently joyful?
I don’t know if I could. I’m too flawed, too fucked up, too selfish, and not remorseful enough by half. I don’t deserve joy or beaches or a New Camelot.
I deserve a shitty fake date. That’s what I deserve.
I don’t bother texting Trieste back to tell her that there’s a difference between newlyweds playing nice and me playing nice—they want to be together, they don’t have to fake anything—but I do send a text to Ash asking him how their trip south went, if the press is buying the story that they’re capping off their honeymoon with a few days in the Bahamas after spending the week holed up at Camp David.
They are buying it and the trip was fine, comes his immediate reply. It would have been better with you. We miss you.
I start to type out I miss you too and then I stop. I don’t know why, something about that carefree picture maybe, or maybe it’s the memories of the last time we were together, of that intense connection Ash and Greer shared as we fucked. He knew exactly what she needed and she cried in his arms afterwards. His care for her, his handling of her body and mind, made my little scene in Carpathia feel amateurish and fumbling in comparison.
How can I compete for Greer’s love with a man like that? A king?
And how can I compete for Ash’s love when he finally has what he always wanted—someone who’s truly submissive and pliant, who doesn’t have to be cajoled or forced into kneeling or serving? No matter how much I love it afterwards and no matter how much we both enjoy the fight, Greer will always fit him better. Easy as that.
I let a long a breath and send instead, any news about Carpathia? Melwas?
A pause. I wonder if he was hurt that I didn’t respond with something more emotional, if he shared that hurt with Greer.
He should be used to me disappointing him by now. I’ve done it long enough.
Finally, their propaganda machine seems to be stirring, but nothing specific and no military movement. Melwas has been staying at the house where he kept Greer.
I wish we could drop a fucking bomb on it right now and wipe that house—and its subhuman occupant—from the map. But we can’t, and the West’s new treaty with Carpathia expressly forbids offensive military action unless they’re attacked. Melwas can’t wage a war over his lost prize, as much as I wish he would try so we could destroy him.
Three dots appear on my screen, then disappear, like Ash wants to say something but is thinking better of it. Then the dots reappear. We found traces of foreign malware on Greer’s laptop. It looks like it’s of Carpathian origin, though we won’t know for sure yet. But we do know it was planted a few days ago…after she got back.
Worried rage makes my hands shake as I type back, This isn’t over for him, Ash. He’s obsessed with her, and he’ll try to take her again.
I won’t give him the chance. I can hear his firm voice through the texted words.
I put my phone down, hands still shaking. How does Ash not see that chance is irrelevant? They got past the Secret Service to take her the first time, why should I believe she’s any safer today? He didn’t see her being pawed by that monster, didn’t see her bleakly resigned face in the window, couldn’t understand how she’d only avoided atrocity by a razor’s breadth.
“Embry?”
I look up to see a young man stepping out onto the balcony. He’s tall and slender with an untidy mass of shiny black curls on his head, and with his youth and his cut-glass features, he looks like a young knight from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. With that hair and those long eyelashes, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already got a fan club at his school. But Lyr is the last young man to want his own fan club, even at the awakening age of fourteen. He wants to read and study, to be left alone.
“Hey,” I say, smiling at him. “What’s up? Is your mom here?”
“She dropped me off for the weekend. She’s shifting her research from structural racism in retirement communities to structural racism in local fraternities, and I declined to be her research assistant on this trip.”
Lyr pronounces the word fraternities with the same scorn one might pronounce the word roadkill or Nickelback or turkey bacon. I have to laugh at the disdain written all over his young face.
“You know I was in a fraternity at Yale,” I tell him. “They’re not all bad.”
He looks at me with a gaze both serious and piercing, like I’m a complete stranger to him now. For some reason, his expression makes me feel nostalgic for something, although I don’t know what. Maybe just for being fourteen and so certain of everything that you hate and that you love. For the feeling that all the adults around you are clueless of the workings of your wholly original and complex inner life.
“Besides, what guy your age doesn’t want to spend the weekend on a college campus? There’s more than fraternities there, you know. There’s sororities too.”
Lyr rolls his eyes. “That’s not any better,” he explains as if I’m an idiot, which makes me laugh again. “Plus it’s summer, so there are hardly any people on campus anyway. And I’d be there with my mother.”
“I suppose that would hurt your game with the college girls—or is it boys?”
Lyr levels his gaze at me, a very serious frown on his face. “That’s personal.”
His stern expression strengthens the nostalgia—or is it deja vu? “Oh come on, you can tell me. I know you’ve heard stories about my misspent youth, surely you can’t be shy when you know all the things I got up to. Still get up to,” I amend, remembering how recently I’ve misbehaved.
“I don’t want frivolous attachments,” he says with dignity.
“You’re a teenage boy. That should be all you want.”
He shrugs, suddenly looking very young again. “I don’t even know what to say to girls anyway.”
“Aha! So it is girls!” But before I can dispense my (questionable) wisdom on the matter, my mother appears in the doorway of the balcony, impervious to the cool breeze in a white samite shift.
“Lyr,” she chides. “I sent you to get Embry ten minutes ago. What have you been doing?”
“Talking about college girls,” I say, just to irritate her.
It works. It doesn’t matter than I’m considered a war hero, that I’m the Vice President now. To Vivienne Moore, I will always be the troublemaking youth perpetually sneaking girls and boys into my room—sometimes both at the same time.
“Please don’t infect my nephew with your dissolute habits,” she says. “I owe my sister that much.”
Now it’s my turn to roll my eyes.
“And speaking of sisters, yours is waiting for you in the library. Which is what Lyr was supposed to tell you.”
“Morgan’s here?”
“Yes, she just walked in the door fifteen minutes ago,” my mother says. “And she was fairly urgent about seeing you, so I imagine it’s about work.”
With a sigh, I stand up and go to find Morgan.
“Oh, and she had someone with her,” Mother calls after me. “An event planner, I believe.”
An event planner? That makes no sense, and I plan on telling Morgan just that when I get to the library. I’ll tell her that and then I’ll tell her that I have a date tonight, so I don’t have time for any of her—
I freeze when I walk into the library, the awareness of danger prickling along my skin just like it had all those times in the mountains, except this time there are no bullets, no bombs or fire. Just my stepsister sitting stiffly on the sofa, a glass of something clear in her hand, which I’d wager it isn’t water.
And there’s someone else in the room. A young redhead I’ve thought of often since the wedding.
Abilene Corbenic. Greer’s cousin.
Abilene smiles at us both, and my skin keeps on prickling, my blood heating in my veins. She’s danger, pure and simple, and when she says, “Mr. Vice President, if you wouldn’t mind closing the door before we get started,” I know it for certain. It’s not the kind of danger I faced in the mountains—there’re no weapons under that tight bodycon dress—but it’s a danger I’ve faced more times than I can count in the Beltway.
Ambition.
I close the door and turn back to face the room, noticing for the first time how red and swollen Morgan’s eyes are, as if she’s been crying.
“Now,” Abilene says, still wearing a sharp smile. “Let’s start with why you’re going to do exactly as I say from now on.”
