The Kingmaker

The thought sprints through my head so fast I can barely catch it. I envision him dropping me, and my belly hollows out like I’m already falling.

The thick muscles of his arm bulge and strain with the effort of keeping me suspended. Despite his obvious strength, he’s struggling to hold my weight and I feel his fingers on my neck s

lipping. His skin peels under my clawing nails. Tears fall over my cheeks, my body’s desperate response to the torturous grip at my throat.

His face wavers as my strength fails and my arms drop. Thoughts, images flood my mind. My father bent over his papers, glancing up, love in his eyes, to find me standing at his office door. Mena sprinkling sacred pollen across my cheeks and plunging me into the cold, cleansing river. Kimba and Vivienne, stretched out under spring sunshine, our laughter floating over the Amstel river.

Maxim.

Oh, God, Maxim.

“Doc.”

His name sputters over my lips on a choking moan. Sobs rack my thrashing, gasping body dangling over a fatal fall. The tangled brush of the landscape below tilts as my consciousness surrenders. Behind my eyes dawns an unlit sky, a blanket of darkness that smothers all sight and every sound. A thousand images my mind and heart have hoarded tattoo themselves behind my eyelids as they fall closed.

Meeting Maxim for the first time amid a spray of rubber bullets in the Arizona desert. Finding him again on a moonlit night in Amsterdam. Lost with him, found with him in a labyrinth of hedges, rediscovering us after years apart. A squandered decade. Will I ever get to make up for lost time? To tell him I love him? God, I love him so much and he doesn’t even know.

And now . . . now it’s too late.