before
Three months of recovery and physical therapy from the gunshot wounds meant I was cleared to go back. They made no secret of my mother’s influence, told me they could station me elsewhere if needed, but I wasn’t shirking my duty, not now that the war was officially a war. And I wasn’t missing my chance to go back to Ash.
He wrote me every day that he could, and I wrote him back. He started all his letters with Patroclus and ended them with short, matter-of-fact sentences about what he’d like to do to me when he saw me again. He wanted to gag me with his cock, he wanted to see how many times I could come in a night, he wanted to stripe my back with semen as I kissed his boot. It felt like I had a perpetual hard-on the entire time we were separated, and so it was with a huge sigh of relief and a lot of nervous excitement that I boarded the train to take me to his base.
Ash was all I could think about, all I could see in my mind, and so I didn’t notice the face of the man who took the seat next to me. In fact I didn’t notice him at all until he spoke in that polished English accent with its faintest trace of Welsh. “Lieutenant Moore,” Merlin said. “What an excellent coincidence.”
It took some effort to drag my thoughts away from Ash and all the depraved things he’d promised me, but I managed to face Merlin with a polite smile.
“Mr. Rhys,” I said, extending a hand, which he shook. “Pleasure to see you. Out on the Queen’s business again?”
“Sadly not, but the happy news is that I am working for your government currently, as a liaison for certain strategic directives. I have a meeting with Captain Colchester tomorrow.”
“I’m going to Captain Colchester too,” I said, perhaps a little too eagerly. “I mean, to his base.”
Merlin nodded, not saying anything for a minute. And then he said, “Do you think Captain Colchester is a hero?”
“He saved my life,” I answered. “He’s saved more lives than I can count. He always puts himself last, even as he’s thinking ahead. Yes, he’s a hero.”
“I agree with you,” Merlin said, as if I were the one who brought it up in the first place. “It would be a terrible thing, this war without Colchester.”
“I can’t imagine it.” I really couldn’t. I didn’t want to—it would be awful. “If we win this war, it will be because of him.”
It was a bold thing to say—some would say ridiculous in this day and age, when an army succeeded on their technology and strategy, and success didn’t depend on any one soldier. But anyone who’d fought with Ash knew better.
“So you would agree it would be an awful thing for Captain Colchester to leave the army?”
I stared at Merlin, baffled. “Of course.”
Merlin nodded, satisfied. “Then I can trust you’ll keep your relationship with him discreet.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. He knew about our relationship? How? “What?”
“I know about the emails,” Merlin said. “The ones he wrote to you and the ones you penned back.”
“You—I—those were private,” I said, my words crackling with anger along the edges. I burned with agony to think of the things a stranger—hell, who knows how many strangers—had read. “How dare you?”
Merlin wasn’t bothered by my anger in the slightest. “The contents are safe with me, and anyway, I only gave them the most cursory of reads. It’s my job to know these kinds of things, especially about Captain Colchester. He is crucial to this war, and I believe to what will follow after. I don’t begrudge you your ardor for each other, please believe that. This isn’t a moral issue for me. However,” he continued, voice deliberate and unmistakably clear, “I cannot say the same for your army. Even in wartime.”
I glanced away from him, troubled. I wasn’t an idiot, I knew we couldn’t have been in an open relationship in the Army, but to have it put in such stark terms, outlined with such heavy stakes. It was more than our jobs on the line, it was potentially the war. Colchester was simply too valuable to risk.
Finally, I nodded at Merlin. “I understand.” Resentment prickled my mouth as I said it, but as tempting as it was to hate Merlin for knowing things he shouldn’t know, for meddling where he shouldn’t meddle, I knew it wasn’t his fault. It was the world we lived in, a world that didn’t think twice about sending boys off to kill other boys but then cringed at the idea of boys falling in love with each other.
“It won’t be forever,” Merlin promised me as the train began to slow to pull into the station. “It will be a long time, certainly, and it may feel like forever, but it won’t be. And if you truly love him, then there’s nothing you can’t sacrifice.”
“Good to have you back, Lieutenant.” Ash shook my hand, put his hand on my shoulder, let go at the appropriate time. We were surrounded by the other soldiers on base welcoming the latest batch of newcomers, most of the men there grateful for any break from the incessant comings and goings to the outposts deeper in the mountains. A break from the war.
I also made sure to let go of Ash at the appropriate time, even though I wanted nothing more than to fist my hands in his shirt and crush my mouth to his lips. Shove my hips into his so he could feel what the sight of him did to me. But Merlin’s warning hung over me like a thundercloud, and seeing Ash here, surrounded by his men and these mountains, made that warning all the clearer.
Ash had to stay here. Ash had to have his career, his future. And my feelings were a very small speck in a seething world of pain and chaos. A world that needed his order and his control.
Late that night, as I laid in bed and my thoughts bounced from anxiety to anxiety, as I recalled in painful detail all the things I’d said to Ash that Merlin must have read, as I thought about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and wondered how big a risk it all actually was, my door opened. There was no knock, no permission, no greeting. My door opened and then it closed, and then Ash was on me, kissing and biting and impatiently pushing the blankets off my body.
“The bed squeaks,” I gasped into his mouth, and he grunted in response, hauling me off the bed altogether and onto the cold vinyl floor. His hands were trembling as he found the waistband of my boxer briefs and then he laughed to himself.
“I’m like a schoolboy,” he murmured, dropping a kiss onto my forehead. “I can’t decide what I want to do—or what I want to do first.”
“Do it all,” I whispered. “Do everything.”
“I’m going to, little prince. Don’t worry.”
But as he brought me in for a bruising kiss, the fear flared past the desire. I pulled away from his mouth. “Ash, we have to be careful.”
He followed me, leaning forward to kiss me again. “We will.”
“I mean it. No one can know. Your career—”
“I don’t care about that,” he said simply. “It would be worth it.”
My heart tore with fear, because he refused to be afraid for himself. “Don’t be ridiculous—”
“I’m not,” he said, sharpness creeping into his voice. “I’m serious, Embry. This—you—I’d rather have it than anything else. If there’s a cost, then I’ll pay it. I’ll sacrifice anything to be with you.”
His words were so close to Merlin’s—if you truly love him, then there’s nothing you can’t sacrifice—and suddenly I knew Merlin meant more than an uncloseted relationship. I was going to have to sacrifice something much, much worse.
I almost didn’t. There on the floor, my bare legs tangled with his clothed ones, I almost gave in and let myself be carried away by the reckless abandon with which he was willing to love me. After all, we might not be caught, and even if we were, there were so many levels of discretion between us and DADT protocol. Was the risk really so great?
I looked up at him in the darkness, his eyes dark and shining, the moonlight hitting the angles of his cheeks and jaw, the strong lines of his neck. And in the shrouded silver light, I saw not only the man he was now—powerful and smart and kind—but the man he would be. And that man took my breath away.
The air left my body as a new truth scratched itself on the glass of my mind: I would do anything to see that future man come to be. No matter how painful.
“I’m telling you that I’m not willing to sacrifice anything,” I lied, hoping the darkness masked my expression. He’d know I was lying, he was too perceptive for that. But maybe in the dark, and maybe with some distraction…I palmed his cock through his pants and squeezed.
He groaned and I took my chance. “I want to be with you,” I said, and that at least wasn’t a lie. “But I need you to understand that I can’t ever give you that kind of love. The kind that comes with a price.”
My voice was shaking, my hand on his cock was shaking. I was an accomplished liar and never one to feel guilty about any lie that made my life easier, but fuck, this was hard. My voice seemed to burn into Ash like a brand, he flinched at my final sentence, which was such a cruel echo of his own words. And in that moment, even though I was doing it all for him, I hated myself more than I’d ever hated myself before.
“I see,” he finally said. “I understand.”
No, you don’t, I wanted to yell. You can’t. God, I wanted to take it all back, beg forgiveness, expose it for the lie it was, because wounding him hurt me worse than anything I could have ever imagined. It gutted me to make him think I didn’t care as much as he did, that I didn’t want him as much as he wanted me. I cared more, if anything, I wanted him more, but he had to believe otherwise. Because if he knew that his future was my concern, he’d wave off any and all considerations about it. He’d lay it down like it was a burden he had never wanted, all so he could give me—fucking selfish, miserable me—a white picket fence?
No, I couldn’t allow that.
But if he thought it was about my future, my wants and desires…then he’d honor that. Even as it killed him.
He pressed his lips together and nodded, seeming to come to a decision. “Okay,” he said, and I could hear his heart closing up over the pain, the sound of it turning malignant in his blood. “I’ll take you any way I can have you.”
“It’s for the best,” I supplied weakly.
He narrowed his eyes, the attention unbearable because it was paired with a look pleading and bleeding and lost.
I hated being alive in that moment. Hated it. And then his wounded scrutiny transformed into something else, something hot and violent and full of promise. It elated me. I craved his anger, I craved pain at his hands; I deserved it, didn’t I? And if he hurt me, if he used me, then maybe I could pretend to myself that the score was settled. The debt paid. I’d hurt him one way, he’d hurt me another.
Fair, fair, fair. It was fair.
I pushed him over the edge, and in that moment, I couldn’t have told you if it was to seal the decision I’d made for his own good or if it was to provoke the monster inside him to hurt me the way I’d come to crave. “It can just be this,” I said, pushing my hips against his, “and this is just as good as whatever you wanted.”
“This?” Ash asked, glancing down at our tangled legs. “This is what is going to be just as good for me?”
There was no mistaking the danger now. I welcomed it, with every cell, every molecule and atom.
Atonement.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “This is just as good.”
He slapped me. Hard, and right on the fucking face.
“Go to hell,” said Ash.
I rolled onto my back, hand pressed to my stinging jaw, my fist clenched. I was ready to fly at him, but the change in angle meant I could see the unshed tears in his eyes, threatening to spill over. Colchester, the great hero, the sadistically handsome man I’d given my heart to—he was on the verge of tears. Because of me.
And before I had a chance to react to this, I was forcibly flipped onto my stomach, something cool dripping into the divot at the top of my ass. An uncapped bottle of lube was tossed in front of my face, and then I felt two fingers, cruel and slick, shove into me.
“This is just as good, right?” he asked me, twisting his fingers in a way that made me arch in that particular kind of delightful pain. Wrong but good, dirty but right. “Answer me, goddammit. Isn’t this just as good?”
“Yes,” I moaned, but I didn’t know where the moan came from. My ass? My heart? My head, which still told me this was the right thing to do?
“Really?” he asked savagely, twisting his fingers again and moving behind me. I heard his zipper, and the sound of that metallic purr made my cock go from mostly erect to so-hard-it-hurts erect within the space of a few seconds. “Do you really believe that?”
His fingers left me, replaced almost instantly by the thick head of his cock, pushing in without warning. I cried out and he clapped a hand over my mouth.
“I’ll stop,” he said, “if you want me to. But then you have to admit this isn’t just as good. You have to admit you’re wrong.”
He shoved in another two or three inches and I groaned against his palm. Fuck me, but that was rough…and so fucking hot. I’d never be able to explain that to him, though. Not even if I had a thousand years, because I couldn’t explain it to myself. Because of course furtive fucking would never be as good as loving him the way I goddamned wanted, of course not. But being brutalized like this, subsumed by Ash and his indomitable will and his indomitable cock—well it wasn’t bad. If my consolation prize for saving Ash’s future was this, well…
I mean, it was hard to complain about in any way more than in an abstract sense.
I licked the inside of his palm—which in my mind is the only consent stronger than the word yes—and he groaned, bracing his knees on either side of mine and pushing all the way in. The pressure was insane, not quite like being shot, but not quite unlike it either, and the moment he curved out of me and then pushed back in, I felt it. The elemental, orgasmic glow of it.
“Fuck,” I marveled against his hand.
He ignored me, moving his hand from my mouth to the back of my head, pressing my face into the floor as he fucked me the way he wanted, deep, piercing thrusts that bottomed him out and left me seeing spots. “Come,” he ordered. “I want you to come all over this dirty fucking floor, and after you do, tell me it’s better this way.”
So I did.
I came from being pounded into the vinyl, from squirming my hips against the hard floor as a massive dick drilled into me, and when I was finished, Ash grabbed my by the hair and spun me to face him, his own cum dripping out of my ass.
“It’s better this way,” I told him.
A flash of sadness, a flash of anger. “Then this is what you get to have,” he said, yanking me up and bending my over my bed, cruel fingers back inside me. “It’s better this way,” I told him after I’d come all over my sheets.
“It’s better this way,” I told him after he made me wash his cock and then choked me with it for an hour.
“It’s better this way,” I whispered as the orange-peel light of dawn crawled through the window and he left my room.
And it was. Better this way.
I almost believed it myself.
