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.