When the car pulls up, I’m ready. I’m so ready that I’m trembling, part of me wanting to run and hide and the other part of me wanting to run straight to the White House so I don’t have to wait a second longer. I’ve showered, shaved my legs, put on makeup, taken off the makeup because it felt like too much, then put a little makeup back on…and still there’s so much time to kill. I change outfits at least three times, settling for a short blue dress of embroidered cotton with a flared skirt and cap sleeves. The short hemline and the nude high heels I pair with it are just sexy enough to signal how I’d like the evening to go, but the high neckline and sweet blue color are enough to claim innocence in case I’m wrong about what he wants with me.
Wants from me.
I pray with every cell in my body that I’m not wrong.
But at the same time, I find myself hoping the car doesn’t show. Because if it shows, if I get in it, then it’s all over. I’ll go from being Greer Galloway the academic to Greer Galloway, Presidential mistress. And the Beltway will smell the Galloway in me and finally suck me down into its swamp once and for all.
Headlights sweep across the living room, and for a moment, I consider locking the door from the inside and refusing to go out. Sending a message to Ash saying, “Sorry, but I can’t be part of your world.” Continuing my life of solitude and study.
But then I look around my living room—clean wood floors and loaded bookshelves, and the well-used fireplace—and I see the decades stretching out before me. The new Greer with her scars and all her reserve living lonely and empty, while the old Greer—a girl who wrote a soldier halfway across the world her darkest thoughts—suffocates silently and dies slowly under a veil of dust and term papers.
I go outside to the car.
The Secret Service agent has a faint smile on his face as he opens the door for me. “Good evening, Ms. Galloway.”
“Good evening,” I say a bit breathlessly.
And that’s the last we speak for the entire drive.
Growing up as Leo Galloway’s granddaughter, I’m not intimidated by Secret Service agents necessarily, but I do wonder what this one thinks of me, since it must be painfully obvious what’s going on. But he acts as if there’s nothing abnormal about a young blonde being summoned to the President’s side this late at night.
And then I have a terrible thought, a thought that twists my stomach. What if it’s not abnormal? What if I’m just another in a long line of women secreted into the Residence, like some kind of modern-day concubine? What if all of Ash’s talk about being mine, about wanting me, is just the game he plays to get women into his bed? He hasn’t publicly dated anyone since Jenny’s death, but that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been seeing women privately. I mean, how likely is it that a man like Ash—sexy and powerful—would be celibate for more than a year?
I have no right to be upset about it, but I find that I am. It was hard enough knowing he was with Jenny when she was alive, that she got to be the one next to him, the one kissing him, the one who heard his murmurs and moans late into the night. But that there might have been any number of women since then…
Suddenly feeling very lonely, I pull my legs up onto the car seat and rest my chin on my knees, an old habit from when I was a girl riding with Grandpa Leo back and forth across Manhattan. But as much as I’d like to pretend I’m still a little girl safe with her grandfather, I can’t. Not with where I’m going. Not with who I will see when I get there. Even the city outside wants to remind me I’m not a child anymore, the sedate streets and stately parks a world away from the busy, messy capitalism of Manhattan.
It is beautiful, though, and I find myself lulled by the passing of gold and red trees, lamps wreathed by fog, sternly noble buildings rising together as we approach Pennsylvania Avenue.
And then the car is rolling through the gates, through the various security checks, and we come to a stop. I’m helped out by the taciturn agent and delivered to a young Hispanic man wearing a tweed jacket and horn-rimmed glasses waiting by the door.
There’s something about his boyish, bookish face that makes me trust him immediately. But even though he looks kind, capable, and discreet, my stomach still clenches at yet another person being involved. Another person who thinks that I’m—what? A mistress? A whore? A weak, lonely woman?
“Ms. Galloway?” he asks.
It’s only the memory of Ash’s lips on mine that nudge me forward. “Hello,” I say. “It’s nice of you to meet me.”
He waves my words away. “I’m here all the time anyway. This is the first time I get to do something fun for the President.”
His words give me the tiniest edge of relief; maybe Ash isn’t secretly fucking his way through Washington’s eligible women after all.
“I’m Ryan Belvedere, but everyone calls me Belvedere because there’s like four Ryans on staff,” he says, his words coming out in the fast pattered rush of the chronically busy. He sticks out a hand, which I shake. “I’m President Colchester’s personal aide,” he continues. “He wanted to be the one to greet you, but his meeting with his foreign policy staff has gone late. He sends his apologies, but it was necessary business after his meeting with the ambassador, I’m afraid.”
Carpathia, I thought. He’s had serious news about Carpathia from the Polish ambassador.
“I completely understand,” I say.
“I knew you would. You’re Leo Galloway’s granddaughter, huh? What was that like?”
“What’s it like working here?”
Belvedere glances around the nondescript entrance we’re standing in. “Less glamorous than the brochure.”
“Then you’ve got your answer.”
He laughs and starts walking, gesturing for me to follow. “It can’t be all that bad. And it made it really easy for them to do your background check tonight—you’ve had so many already over the years.”
“I’m still not sure they didn’t do one on me before I was born,” I say and he laughs again. He seems quick to laugh…I could see why Ash would have chosen him to be his right-hand man.
We walk down a hallway, and then down another hallway, up and around a maze of stairs and doors and into a room lit with a handful of soft, low lamps and studded with sofas, end tables and bookshelves, with a desk at one end. The wall color and furniture have changed since the last time I was here with Grandpa Leo, but I know exactly where I am. My stomach twists and all my doubts rise again. Do I really want to be here in the Residence? Practically throwing myself at the mercy of the dead-eyed, forever glad-handing gods of political life?
“President Colchester has invited you to make yourself at home,” Belvedere says, interrupting my unhappy thoughts. “I would suggest in the living room here or…in his bedroom.” Belvedere’s eyes twinkle. “It’s just through those doors.”
I can’t stop the rush of blood from going to my cheeks. What am I doing? I’m inviting trouble, I’m inviting the inevitable Internet storm once it gets out that I’m here.
“I’m sorry,” Belvedere says, his eyes still sparkling. “I shouldn’t tease. It’s just, we’re all really excited.”
“Excited?” I ask warily.
“About the President having a date with you tonight. We’ve been trying to coax him into moving on for months. It’s time for him to have some sort of companionship, and frankly, he needs to get laid bad.”
I let out a shocked laugh. “You can’t talk about the President that way.”
“The hell I can’t. You haven’t seen him like I have, and I’m telling you with all the male authority I have, he needs a woman.”
I hate myself for asking such a leading question, but I can’t help it. “Surely he doesn’t need a date for that to happen? To be with someone?” Please tell me what I want to hear, please please please.
Belvedere shrugs as he walks towards the entrance to the hallway that will lead him back to the West Wing. “Maybe not, but it hasn’t happened. At least that I know of, and I’m around him constantly.”
“So I’m…the first? Since Jenny?”
Belvedere pauses and looks at me. The smile on his face is less gleeful now and more understanding. “He’s not the kind of guy who does casual sex, and it’s too risky in his position anyway. Add that to his grief over Jenny and his drive for this job…well. We all understand why he’s waited. But we’re also excited that you’re here. He needs someone for him, someone who can be there only for him, and I really hope you can be that someone. Even if it’s just for one night.”
The aide’s words touch me, and underneath all my misgivings, I find the truth. “I think I hope I can be that someone too,” I say, and I mean it.
It takes another hour for Ash to return to the Residence, an hour which I’ve spent exploring and fiddling with my phone and checking my hair in the bathroom every ten minutes. The sitting room is generously decorated in pale creams and minty greens, the antique furniture giving the room a very traditional, very postcard-from-The-White-House feel, making me think that an interior designer did most of the choosing.
But when I get brave enough to crack the bedroom door and look inside, I see only Ash’s hand. Lots of muted grays and deep charcoals, a small array of understated furniture and a rigid adherence to geometry. No soft angles, no unnecessarily decorated furniture. Everything is deeply functional, solidly built, and free of ostentation. A room for a soldier.
My eyes light on the large four-poster bed, and my breath catches. Will I lay on that bed tonight? Will I wake up there tomorrow morning? Or will I be packed off while it’s still dark, sent away under the cover of night to avoid the press?
The thought makes me anxious, and I go back to the bathroom to smooth my hair one more time, staring blankly at the woman in the mirror.
I see a slender neck and a delicate jaw. Breasts that are high and firm, a narrow waist, and slender hips. In the low light coming from the sitting room, the shallow cleft in my chin and the beauty mark on my cheek seem exotic and striking, my lips full and pink, and my eyelashes long and dark. The mass of white hair—which is slowly darkening to gold in the chilly fall weather—currently pinned back into a sleek knot.
She’s jealous of you, you know.
All those years ago, that’s what Ash had said to me. I hadn’t known what he meant, was unable to conceive of any universe where Abilene had anything to be jealous of. It took a few years for me to finally realize what everyone else saw the night of my sixteenth birthday, but even I eventually had to admit that I was no longer the ugly duckling I’d branded myself as. I’m maybe not the sensual, exuberant swan that Abilene was and still is, but I do have a beauty all my own.
To kill time, I wander to the far edge of the sitting room, looking out over the dark veldt of the South Lawn. In the distance, the Washington Monument pierces the midnight air, the squatly elegant dome of the Jefferson Memorial close by. I’ve never seen this particular view at night, and it hits me, really hits me, that I’m standing in the White House waiting a few feet away from the President’s bedroom door. Waiting for exactly what, I don’t know, but I’m so ready. So very ready.
I turn away from the window and walk a perimeter around the room, feeling my high heels press deep into the thick carpet, and I’m stopped by a large framed photograph on the wall, the subjects initially difficult to make out in the dim light. But my pulse speeds up as I realize who’s in the picture.
It’s Ash and Embry, somewhere deep in the mountains of Carpathia, wearing their Army fatigues with guns and helmets and armor. They have their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, and the way they smile at the camera makes it seem like they have some kind of secret, like they’d just gotten away with something. There’s so much friendship in the picture, so much brotherhood and trust, and I remember that it was Embry whom Ash saved that day in a Carpathian ambush, Embry that he faced down an entire squad of enemy shoulders to save. But of course there were more battles after that, four or five more, where Embry and Ash both emerged as heroes—Ash the brilliant tactician and Embry the reckless brawler who flung himself heedlessly into every storm of bullets he encountered. I may have stopped writing to Ash the year I turned seventeen, but it didn’t mean that I stopped searching for his name in the news, which meant that I also searched for Embry’s. My intense feelings for Ash never went away, but they had been joined by new feelings for the handsome, rakish face that joined his in every newscast and online article.
What girl wouldn’t have fallen in love with those two?
I touch my fingertips to the glass, as if I could touch both of those men at the same time, and even just the thought of that, of touching Embry and Ash at the same time, makes me light-headed.
Be careful, I caution myself. If you do this thing with Ash, there will be no escaping Embry either. You’ll be playing with fire.
“That was after the village of Caledonia,” Ash says from behind me. “The one where Embry was injured and I had to carry him out.”
Trying not to act startled, I drop my hand, still feeling the cool glass against my fingertips. “Were you friends before then?”
“Yes. But after that, we became much more than friends. Like brothers.”
I turn just as Ash’s hands slide up my bare arms, warm and large and slightly rough.
“I’m glad you got in that car,” he says, ducking his head to meet my eyes. “I was a little worried you’d change your mind.”
“I was worried you’d change your mind,” I tell him. “This is still so surreal to me.”
“That I want to spend time with you?”
“That you remember me at all.”
He gives me one of his smiles, the kind where his eyes crinkle up and his face opens into an expression of unimaginable warmth and joy. I’m reminded forcefully of Embry. Maybe the pair are only brothers in the emotional sense and not the biological, but they share the same weather-beaten, mischievous smile, and that smile is enough to get me to agree to anything.
“Don’t move,” Ash says, and he disappears into his bedroom. He returns with a small wooden box. “Have a seat.” He gestures towards the end of the room.
Thinking he means the sofa by the window, I move towards it, but he corrects me, and when he does, there’s a change in his voice. It gets sterner somehow, and the effect on my body is immediate. “Sit on the desk, facing the chair.”
It’s a strange request, and there’s a moment when I want to ask why. But then I see the fire in his green eyes, the same fire I saw when I told him once upon a time that I liked the way he told me what to do with my body.
It’s a test, I realize. And what’s more, it’s a test I want to pass, a test I want to do. Listening to Ash feels as natural as breathing, and after only a breath of hesitation, I walk over to the desk and slide myself onto it, careful to keep my skirt from riding too far up my thighs.
I’m not sure what exactly I expect him to do, but when he comes and sits in the chair in front of me, it feels right. The way it’s supposed to be.
“Thank you for listening to me,” he says. He keeps his gaze on my face.
“I like listening,” I whisper.
“Do you?” he asks, setting the box in his lap and leaning back. “How much?”
“A lot,” I admit quietly. “It feels…natural…with you.”
A small smile. “I’ll tell you a secret: I like it when you listen. That feels natural to me too.”
I glance down at the box, wondering what could be inside. It’s about the right size for cigars, but Ash doesn’t strike me as much of a smoker. What else then? Something sexual? Condoms, maybe, or lube? Nipple clamps?
Ash notices my wary look. “Nothing in there will bite, I promise.”
So no nipple clamps then.
“Do you remember at the church?” he asks, changing the subject. “When I told you that I ask a lot from the people I care for?”
“I do.”
“I meant that in more ways than one. I’m busy, for one thing, often traveling and always stressed, and I—” he stops himself, searching for the right words.
I nudge his knee with my foot. “You won’t scare me away by being too direct. I promise.”
“To answer before listening is folly,” Ash quotes, shaking his head, and then sighs. “It took a long time for us to be alone in a room together. Part of me thinks I should enjoy it before I ruin it.”
“And the other part?”
His eyes darken. “The other part of me thinks you should be more nervous.”
I shiver. A good shiver, but a shiver nonetheless, and he doesn’t miss it, his eyes trailing from the pulse pounding in my throat to the goose bumps on my thighs. He looks at the wooden box a moment and then seems to make up his mind.
“We are going to have a conversation now,” he says, “among other things. And we can stop at any time.”
“I don’t want to stop.”
“It’s hard to want to stop,” he says, running his fingers along the edge of the box. “It’s even harder to say the word when you know you should. Have you ever used a safe word?”
For that one whole time I had sex? I laugh out loud. “No.”
He doesn’t seem offended by my laughter. “Perhaps we should find one for you.”
“I don’t think I need a safe word for a conversation. Even a conversation with unspecified other things. And especially not with you.”
“You especially need one when you’re with me.” He says it calmly, evenly.
And then suddenly I believe him.
Despite that open, handsome face, despite the historic building I’m standing in and the elegant antique furniture all around us, I believe him. I can’t tell if it’s something in the cool way he says it or something in the flare of light in his eyes, or if it’s the remembered shards of that night, of the way he said good girl to me when I obeyed his order, or the way he licked the blood from my fingertip…
“All those times you’ve asked me if I was scared of you, you were serious?”
“It was with good reason.” He leans forward. “I’m not trying to tease you or frighten you unnecessarily. But I’m hard on the people I love. It took me a long time to learn that, and you are too important to me for me to treat that lightly. You have to know that you can stop anything about me—my words or my body—at any time. You have to know that you can leave me at any time.”
I’ll never want to leave. The thought appears unbidden and I shove it aside. But it’s harder for me to shove aside the word love, as if I’m one of the people he loves, because to be loved by Ash…I’ve wanted that since I was sixteen.
“If you don’t have a word in mind, you can use my name—my first name.”
“Maxen?”
He nods. “You say that when we’re alone together and everything stops. For a break—if you need one—or completely, if that’s what you need instead.”
I think for a moment. The kind of pornography I watch and the kind of books I read—well, I’m definitely no stranger to this kind of thing. In fact, certain facets of this lifestyle have been the subject of my fantasies since I was old enough to have fantasies. But faced with the reality of a relationship like this, I find myself shy. Not out of fear necessarily—although there is a little fear and I’d be foolish not to be at least a little wary—but out of an acute awareness of how little I know. Of how meager my experience with any kind of romance or sexuality is. When I speak next, my voice is hesitant. “Does all this make you…the kind of person who dominates people?”
Another nod. “Yes.”
“Are you going to whip me or something?” I ask, suddenly nervous.
“Not all Dominants are sadists, Greer. I won’t always want pain or humiliation, but I will always want control.”
“But you will want pain and humiliation sometimes?”
He leans back again, his face thoughtful. “I’m approaching this wrong. You’ll have to forgive me…it’s been six years since I last initiated a relationship with someone, and I’m out of practice. And in any case,” he says, rubbing his forehead with his thumb, “I didn’t know enough about myself then to warn Jenny.”
It’s Jenny’s name that galvanizes me. It’s a sick urge, to want to show up a dead woman, to prove I’m as good as she was, but it’s an urge I can’t fight in time to control myself.
“Show me,” I say. “Show me what you need to warn me about.”
