American Queen

And then…and then I’m not sure what happens. He turns on a light and somehow he ends up undressed and in bed cuddling me and crooning to me, stroking my arms and hair and back, and murmuring words of gratitude and pleasure—he’s pleased with me, I think somewhere deep inside myself and the thought makes me happy. But I can’t speak. My hearing feels fuzzy, like I’m hearing everything through earmuffs, and my thoughts are nonexistent. Like I’m floating, blank and warm, but I’m also shaking, trembling like a leaf in the wind.

Bit by bit, layer by layer, I swim up towards consciousness.

“You,” I murmur to Ash. It was supposed to be I love you, but the words are so fleeting and so hard to form.

“You,” he says back to me in a voice so filled with love that I ache. He wraps his body more securely around me and pulls the blankets tighter around us. My shivering slowly, slowly stills, but I become aware of the wet pillow underneath me, my cheeks cool against the air, and realize I’ve been crying.

Ash holds me as my tears leak out, like a slow, dripping rain. “I love you,” he whispers over and over again. “I love you.”

Eventually, after a few minutes or a few hours, my tears stop and I feel warm again. I roll over so that I can nestle into him, and he lets out a satisfied growl, as if it made him happy that I sought his comfort. “My princess,” he says, holding me tight. My world is this. My world is him. “My angel.”

I nuzzle my face against his chest. “Will you hold me for a while longer?”

He kisses my hair. “As long as you want. I could hold you for the rest of my life.” He lets out a small laugh. “And anyway, I’ve never seen someone drop that far and that hard into subspace before. I’m not letting you out of my sight until you’ve got both feet back here on planet Earth.”

Subspace. It’s happened a few times after Ash and I have scened together at the Residence, but never like this. Never like a waking blackout, never to where I cry and shiver without feeling either.

But as my mind returns to my body, it also returns to my worries from earlier.

Namely to Embry.

I should have told Ash as he was proposing, before we had sex. I should have told him six weeks ago. I should have told him that day at St. Thomas Beckett. I should tell him now.

“Ash,” I say, keeping my face away from his. “There’s something I need to say.”

“Yes?”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Try me.”

I have no choice. It has to be done. “You know the man who I slept with before? My first time?”

He stiffens around me. “Yes.”

“It was Embry.”

The world seems to freeze, time ticking on as everything waits in bated stillness. And then Ash says in a wooden voice, “I know.”

He knows.

He knows.

Shit.

Fuck.

He kicks the blankets off his legs to climb out of bed. I feel his warmth pull away from me, watch his naked form as he pads into the ensuite bathroom and flips on the light. I hear the sink running.

Panic squeezes my throat like a sadist, choking off enough air that I feel dizzy, but keeping me conscious enough to witness the almost-certain end of my relationship with Ash.

Ash comes back out of the bathroom with a glass of cold water, which he hands to me. “Drink.”

Even though we just had the raunchiest, roughest sex imaginable, I still cover my body with a sheet as I sit up. I drink and he sits on the side of the bed, watching me with his President eyes, the ones that miss nothing. His war eyes. I can’t read his face.

I finish drinking and move to set the glass down on the end table, but he reaches forward and takes it from me. For a moment, he looks at the imprint of my lips on the rim of the glass, a muscle ticking in his jaw.

“You know?” I finally ask, my fingers knotting in the sheet.

“I guessed,” Ash admits softly.

“How did you guess?”

He pulls his lower lip into his mouth and then releases it. “Let’s start at the beginning and work our way up to that. When?”

“Chicago,” I answer.

He nods, as if this is confirmation for something he already knows. Maybe it is. Maybe Embry did tell Ash about us, and I just didn’t know about it. He rotates the glass in his hands a few times and then sets it down on the table himself.

“It didn’t mean anything,” I start, but he holds up a hand.

“Don’t lie to me. Please.”

His tone is guarded, but there’s something starkly exposed in his words. As if he wants to beg me for something, but doesn’t know how or what or even why he needs it.

I take a deep breath and start over. “It meant something to me. How could it not? It was my first time, and it was so good—” I stop and pivot, realizing Ash probably doesn’t want to hear about how good that night was. “—But Ash, he never even called me after. I left my number and everything, and I heard nothing for years, not until you sent him to me. It must have been the worst lay of his life,” I try to joke.

The joke falls flat because Ash is already frowning. “It wasn’t.”

“Well, that’s kind of you to say—”

“I’m not being kind,” he snaps. “I know it for a fact.”

I stare at him. “How?”

He runs a hand through his raven hair. “Embry called me that morning, wanted to grab coffee. He wanted to tell me all about this…angel…he had in his bed. He thought he was in love, even though it’d only been one night. If I had known that his angel was my angel, that it was you, I would have thrown myself in front of a train.”