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.

“Almost.”

“Where is she?”

She.  Our Greer.  Once again, I feel the hollow space in the bed where she should be, and I have a brief moment of amused anxiety, because if I can’t stand to be apart from her when she’s in the restroom, how on earth are the three of us going to survive the next two and a half years?  Or shit—six and a half years if Ash gets re-elected?

“She’s in the bathroom,” I say, trying to suppress this new awareness of how hard our future is going to be.  “I just woke up.”

Ash makes a noise in the back of his throat, and his hand moves on my stomach again.  Moves down, sliding past my navel.  My dick is hard now, hard and pulsing against the cool air.

“I love it when you first wake up,” Ash tells me, his voice no longer sleepy but still graveled and rough.  “Your eyes look darker with your pupils that wide, and your cheeks get flushed, and your body…” His wicked hand brushes over my crown, swollen and dusky in the dark.  “Your body always looks so willing for whatever I want.”

His hand closes over my shaft and squeezes, and I moan.

“So willing,” Ash repeats in a murmur, and then I expect him to flip me over and push into me, but he doesn’t.  Instead he lets go of my cock and climbs over me, lowering his heavy, hard body onto mine so that our cocks are pinned between our bare stomachs and our chests press together.  His lips pass over mine, the slightest brush, and then he does it again, smiling as I tilt my face up greedily to catch his mouth in a real kiss.

He teases me once or twice more, coaxing a frustrated whimper from somewhere deep inside me, and then he puts us out of our misery and lowers his mouth to mine, parting my lips with his and licking deep into my mouth.  His kiss is slow, but possessive, and he drives the pace and the depth.  I can barely breathe, he kisses me so deeply, but I don’t care. I don’t want to, don’t want any air that Ash himself hasn’t given me.  After a few minutes of this, he pulls back slightly and then presses his forehead to mine.

“Oh, Embry,” he says, his voice cracking.  “How much I’ve missed you.”

My chest cracks open along with his voice.  “Will you ever forgive me?” I whisper.

“For what?”

It’s hard to speak the words, even in the dark.  “For not marrying you.”

His breath leaves him.  “Embry…”

“You can be honest with me,” I say, wanting to be his brave little prince.  Just this once.  “I deserve it.”

His hands frame my face as he pulls back to meet my eyes.  “It will always hurt, Embry.  I can’t pretend that it won’t.  But surely you must know by now, and I’ve told you before…I’ll take you any way I can have you.  If all you’ll give me is a few stolen nights, then that’s what I’ll take.”