Royally Screwed - Lynn Van Dorn Page 0,91

of cameras, he'd announce the change of heir. So, for the short run, he was forced to pretend he was sicker than he really felt.

The news from Yuri had been spotty, as well. Everyone told him things would be fine, but he wasn't certain they realized that without Yuri in his life, nothing would be fine ever again.

It was strange. He’d previously gone days, weeks, and sometimes even months without talking with or seeing Yuri. It had been less than a week since he’d been with Yuri and yet he was as restless as a tiger in a cage.

For all of his life, Angelo had thought of Yuri as an inevitability, like death or taxes. He had chafed sorely knowing that Yuri was his only possible fate and fought against it. He’d done his best to make Yuri as unhappy with the arrangement as he’d been. He’d begun purposefully antagonizing Yuri when they’d been children, and that had gone a step further in their teens. He hadn’t known, when he’d spanked Yuri that very first time, what would eventually come of it, but even then, he knew they’d crossed a line and there was no going back. He’d pretended to himself that it was all one-sided, that Yuri took and Angelo gave, but the truth was that, from the very beginning, Angelo had liked their secret game.

He had, in fact, come to crave it nearly as much as Yuri seemed to. Angelo didn’t exactly understand how he and Yuri had ended up where they now were, but that also seemed inevitable. He’d tried spanking with a few girls who’d seemed game, but had quickly dropped it. It hadn’t been the act he’d begun to crave. It was that the act was performed with and on Yuri. He was the important component.

His very last girlfriend had accused Angelo of having an affair with Yuri while being with her. It was nonsense, which he’d told her, and that had been the truth. Whenever Angelo had a girlfriend, his game with Yuri had stopped. Or perhaps a better word was paused. Angelo had protested that firstly, he wasn’t a cheater, and secondly, he wasn’t gay. That her accusation was completely baseless.

“If that’s the truth,” she’d said, each word sounding like it had been etched in ice, “then tell me that you’re not going through with that archaic and ridiculous betrothal. Tell me that you don’t intend to follow through.”

Angelo had stared at her, speechless. Not follow through with his betrothal to Yuri? The idea was impossible. “No,” he finally said. “I can’t break it off.”

“Can’t or won’t, Angel?” Before he could answer, she’d rushed on. “What exactly were you planning to do once this crazy marriage thing goes through? Have you thought about it at all?”

He had, after a fashion. He’d seen himself tied to Yuri for the rest of his days, the two of them next to each other at political and society functions, doing the royal thing side by side. What he’d never thought of, or never allowed himself to think of, was the after, when the two of them were alone. What they would do. He saw them talking, and eating meals together, and watching movies. Things they’d done together their entire lives. But then something else popped into his head and it made him catch his breath.

Angelo saw himself and Yuri in his elegant room in the royal palace in Tanzhir. He sat on the side of his bed with a naked, squirming Yuri on his lap. Angelo spanked the prince until he cried and then came, as he had so many other times before, but in this fantasy, after it was over, Angelo gathered Yuri to him and they lay in each other’s arms, skin to skin, Yuri’s scent filling his nose.

The fantasy hadn’t gone any further in his imagination, but even that had given him an erection—one that his girlfriend had noticed and acidly remarked upon. They’d broken up shortly afterward and Angelo hadn’t sought to replace her.

That, he now realized, was the day he had his first real idea that he wasn’t quite as straight as he’d always said. Angelo couldn’t quite bring himself to say he was bisexual, however. It seemed to him that he was Yuri-sexual. Yuri was his fate, had been so since before his birth, and the accident of his gender had had no bearing on Angelo’s destiny. Yuri was his and Yuri would always be his. That Yuri’s body was male,