Before and after.

I’m a married man now, in a way. In a ridiculous, insane, beautifully fucked-up way that no state or church would ever recognize. But that doesn’t make it any less real. That doesn’t make it any less true. The moment Greer, Ash, and I all held hands and promised—promised something we didn’t even entirely understand but we knew we couldn’t fight anymore—that moment was my wedding. It was all my wedding, actually, that and what came after: the sweat and the tears and the spilled semen, some kind of ancient ritual that we instinctively knew how to perform, a dance we had never learned but had already mastered.

I had thought today would be my perdition. My punishment for being a bad, selfish man, a man who made Ash suffer, who made Greer suffer, who’s made so many countless others suffer in the thirty-five years I’ve been alive. I had walked down that aisle with Greer’s cousin Abilene holding my arm, and all I could think about were the missed chances I had for this to be my own wedding. Ash would have forsaken his precious Catholic church, his career, his future, just to see me walk to him, just to see his ring on my finger, and I’d said no.

Twice.

And this was my penance. That I would walk down the aisle, and instead of standing across from him, I would stand next to him, his bite marks on my neck and his future wife’s taste still in my mouth, and I would have to watch them smile and cry and kiss. I wouldn’t get the man I loved or the woman I loved; instead, they would have each other and I would have no one.

That was what I had to endure. That was what I had to accept.

Except…I didn’t. Somehow, some way, my penance had been paid, my sins lifted from me. Ash wanted me. Greer wanted me. And they wanted to open their hours-old marriage to me—imperfect, awful me. I should have said no. For their sakes, for the sake of my soul. But I couldn’t. I just wanted it—wanted them—too fucking much.

I wanted to hope that it would work. That we could work—the three of us, somehow. Because fifteen years of knowing Ash and five of knowing Greer had shown me that I was never getting past this…this itch, this needy pain for them. I was ruined for loving anyone else, and call it fate or bad luck or genetic compatibility or psychological trauma—whatever it was, I was bound to them like rust to metal, a collision of particles and forces that changed us all irrevocably. There was no going back.

These are the thoughts stirring through my mind as my eyes flutter open in the dark. There have been times in my life when I’ve woken up in a new place, disoriented and terrified, waiting for Carpathian bullets to start raining down on me, but now I wake up in a warmth of lazy contentment. Sweet excitement. Lingering hunger.

There are no bullets here.

Instead, there’s a warm hand on my naked stomach, large and slightly rough, a familiar and unfamiliar feeling all at once. I open my eyes all the way, the light from the bathroom limning the muscular frame of the sleeping President. The sheet is partially twined around his lean hips, dipping low enough to expose the dark line of hair running down from his navel and thin enough to reveal the heavy curve of his penis. In sleep, his full lips are parted ever so slightly and his long eyelashes rest against his cheeks, and the solemnity that usually clings to the corners of his mouth and eyes is erased. He looks younger, almost like that angry young man that once pinned me to a wall on an Army base. Younger and more vulnerable.

My heart twists. Because I love him, because he’s beautiful, and because I can’t remember the last time I saw him truly, actually sleeping. There’ve been catnaps on planes, the occasional doze in the car, but as for deep-breathing, relaxed, limbs-sprawling sleep…not since that first tour of duty in Carpathia. Greer has been good for him.

I try not to feel jealous about that.

Speaking of Greer, I realize that she’s not in bed between us any longer, and she’s not nestled behind me or Ash. I stretch and blink more clearly at the light spilling in from the crack in the bathroom door. Ash and I rode her hard last night…I’m not sure exactly what kinds of things women do to take care of themselves after sex, but Ash has abused my willing body more than enough times for me to have an idea. I decide to give her privacy, although the bed feels strange without her. The rightness of the three of us, the way we fit and breathe together… Even after only a few hours, her absence makes the weight of the air uncomfortable on my skin, makes the bed feel hollow and cold.

My stretching stirs Ash, and he stretches too, the sheet pulling down to reveal his hip and the top of one hard thigh. His hand flexes against my stomach, and the feeling is shocking, the intimacy both new and not new. Despite all the rounds we went tonight—or technically last night, judging from the faint blue light peeping in from behind the curtains—my cock jumps at his touch, stiffening and hardening from nothing more than the graze of his palm across my stomach.

Ash opens his eyes and gives me a sleepy smile. It’s such an unfamiliar look on him, both the openness of it and the happiness, and I stare into his face, drinking it in like a man dying of thirst. After Carpathia, after Morgan, after me, after Jenny—I never could have believed that I would see Ash breathe and smile without all that torment suffocating him. Seeing it, if only for a few minutes, feels like some kind of gift, an unearned blessing. I reach out and trace his jaw, predictably already rough with stubble, and then run the pads of my fingers over his sleepy smile.

“Is it morning?” he asks. My cock jumps again at the sound of his voice. It’s always a little rough around the edges, like someone took sandpaper to his words, but right after sleep, his voice is pure gravel, masculine and hungry.