Forgiveness, she means.
He drops the plate on the table and seats himself, leaning forward to plant elbows on either side. Once, the fullness of his belly would have prevented this; now it sags between his knees. “Doesn’t change the past.” He plunges the fork into the egg.
“No,” she agrees.
“Then what does it mean?” More than anyone, she ought to understand the worthlessness of words. He reaches for the orange juice, only to realize he’s left it on the counter in the kitchen. With a growl of exasperation, he starts to shove back from the table.
She waves him back to his seat. “I’ll get it.”
He despises her small, practical kindness. He wants nothing from her, except the hate that is his due. Is that why he got into her truck? To offer her the opportunity for retribution? If he thinks that will make things right, he is a fool.
She sets the glass to the right of his plate and seats herself opposite him. “Aren’t you going to ask if I want some?” she asks, when he shoves the fork into his mouth.
He looks up. “Do you?”
“No,” she admits, with a half-smile. But she stretches an arm across the table and helps herself to a sip from his glass.
Teasing him. Fucking teasing him. He shoves the table. It shudders across the floor with a tooth-grinding screech.
She hops to her feet, narrowly avoiding the table’s edge. “Cyril, wait.” She extends an arm to halt his retreat.
“Don’t,” he snarls, and her wrist is in his hand. Her eyes go wide. If he squeezed, he could break it. A snap. He wants to hit her. To make her bleed. You see? This is the kind of man he is become. Perhaps it is who he always was.
Then her hand becomes a fist, and her tendons flex beneath his fingertips. She grins.
He shoves her away. “Keep your fucking hands off me, or I’ll—”
“What, break my arm?” She holds it up, unharmed. “You forget this goes two ways now—I know Tav’s letters by heart. Your letters. Remember the time I got stitches after I nicked my thumb with the power drill, and you wrote me two entire pages about how guilty you felt because you were the one who convinced me to pursue my passion for woodworking?” She snorts. “You’d die before you hurt a hair on my head.”
Harming her is not something he cannot do so much as a thing he would very much regret. If she pushes him, she will find there is a world of difference between the two. But when she reaches for him again, placing her hand with deliberate care on his doughy biceps, he cannot suppress a shudder. She already knows he is utterly undone by the flicker of fear in her eyes.
“You poor, miserable bastard,” she says, with a sympathetic laugh. “You're shaking.”
It’s not fair: that’s what he wants to say. Like a petulant child. But it’s entirely fair. He lived inside her head without permission for seven long years.
“What do you want from me?” He wants to grab her and shake, hard. “I know what I did. I can’t undo it. It’s done. So just—fucking tell me what you want. I’ll do it. And then you can make me go.” Because he can’t do it himself. Won’t. He cannot even pull himself free of her touch. He sucks in a long, rattling breath. “Please.”
She looks up at him. Her fingers squeeze his flesh, briefly, and then fall away. “I’m trying to tell you, Cyril, I want you—” She hesitates, and then releases a slow breath, as if in defeat. “To stay.”
Chapter 5.5
Five years ago
Tavis left a letter. It was the only one he’d ever personally written to his wife—and the idiot had entrusted it to Cyril’s keeping.
Here was the problem: Tavis couldn’t write for shit. It didn’t matter whether he’d used his final communication to confess the truth or take their secret to the grave—if Robin read it, she would realize her husband had been a fraud. To protect her, all Cyril had to do was light a match. Far better to have loved and lost the perfect man than discover he never existed at all.
But this asshole didn’t do that, did he? No. He delivered that fucking letter. He could say he’d been driven to it by guilt, or loyalty, or some combination of the two, but he didn’t give a shit about preserving Tav’s memory, or how devastating the truth might be to Robin. All that mattered was seeing her again.
When he found her at the cemetery, she just stood there, staring at her name written in Tav’s sloppy font. “Seriously?” she choked, as despair gave way to anger and loathing. She looked from the envelope to Cyril's face and back again. “He left this with you?” And then she snatched it out of his hand, stuffed it in her purse, and stalked away. Alone.
Days passed. He waited for an angry phone call, or a fist pounding on his door. Nothing. He had waited like this when Tavis and Robin had first begun dating, convinced that she’d see through the charade. She never had. Was it possible, now, that she could still be so blind?
Every night, he squeezed himself behind the wheel of his Datsun and hit up a drive-through before parking in front of her house. Hours ticked by as he sat, watching the darkened façade, where, occasionally, a light upstairs might flick on or off. Once, she came out the side door to take a bag of garbage to the can. For ten minutes she stood in the dark, head bent as if in prayer. Weeping.
Knowing she was so close, and yet so unreachable, was torment.
At home, he pored over the intel he’d downloaded from USMC’s classified servers, sifting it like powdered sugar. When Tavis had gotten him into the system, he had taken everything he could get his hands on. Anyone who detected the breach would have to think twice about confronting him, knowing the damage he could do with a single Wikileaks dump. But not one byte of all that data offered the slightest clue as to the kid’s whereabouts. Tavis had given his life for an exploit doomed to fail.
Invariably, Cyril circled back to Tav’s personal email account, re-reading his correspondence with Robin and composing anguished, grief-stricken letters that she would never read. The drafts folder had spilled onto two pages before the obvious solution presented itself: why couldn’t Tavis have stockpiled a set of letters to be delivered in the event of his death? If Robin found him out, it wasn’t as though she could leave him any more alone.
He hit send.
And she showed up at his door.
He’d thought the jig was up—until he'd glanced down to find Seth standing on the threshold. Robin had apologized—to him!—for the interruption and explained that her three-year-old insisted upon being friends with his father’s best friend.
And suddenly he was babysitting the kid and Robin was in his house, in his life, breaking down in his fucking bathroom when she found out she was pregnant with her dead husband’s second child. She still hated Cyril—that hadn’t changed—but it didn’t matter. He could write to her—in a careful, roundabout way—and say all the things she so desperately needed to hear.
But the more time he spent with Seth, the more he couldn’t stop thinking about that little Afghan boy. The data made it clear that the kid’s abduction by an ostensible ally on the ground in Afghanistan was part of a personal spat between local leaders. USMC had decided that overlooking the matter was necessary to the success of an overall strategy involving several less-than-ethical components. Civilian deaths, questionable interrogation methods, etc. Cyril didn’t have access to the specifics, but... he was sitting on a horde of classified intel so massive that leaking it would be a media bombshell. If he packaged the information in the right way, he could shape the narrative into a story the press couldn’t ignore. Tavis had taken half a dozen videos of Shafik, and he was a cute little bugger with a million-watt-smile. His would be the face CNN would play on a loop as political commentators and war correspondents discussed evidence of corruption and mismanagement within USMC command. The clickbait potential was irresistible.
The administration would have no choice but to deal with the fallout, and the most effective way to divert public attention—assuming Cyril managed to capture it—would be to find the kid. Command knew exactly who’d
done the kidnapping, so retrieving him wasn’t so much impossible as it was tactically undesirable. Make a big enough stink, and “rescuing” Shafik would suddenly become top priority. They’d trot him out for press photos with the hero soldiers who’d located him, then send him home with a scholarship fund or something. Just enough of a win to make the public feel like they could, in good conscience, look away. No need to worry about underlying systemic corruption, move along, move along.
Cyril could save the kid. All it would cost was his freedom.
It wasn’t much of a sacrifice. At six hundred pounds, quality of life wasn’t significantly better in a studio apartment than a prison cell. He even rigged a literal kill switch, which seemed hilarious in a gallows humor kind of way. All he had to do was hit the big red button, and everything went public, immediately. And then he sat on it. For weeks. Months. It was always the same excuse: Just one more afternoon with Seth. One more brief interaction with Robin. Somehow, without quite understanding what had happened, it was not just Robin he loved, anymore. It was Robin and Seth, inseparable. And leaving Seth would break his heart.
Ironically, it was the letters that did him in. USMC hadn’t a clue that Tavis had a partner, but they brought in the Feds to comb through his shit, trying to patch any holes he’d left in the system. When they turned up the emails Cyril was sending from Tav’s account, they confronted Robin.
Even then, the magnitude of the thing was too much for her to comprehend. She assumed he had stepped into Tav’s shoes posthumously. That revelation alone was more than enough to break her. Certainly it was enough for her to cut him out of her life.
The only thing left, then, was to leak that goddamn intel.
He wasn’t stupid enough to imagine, as Tavis had, that saving the kid would redeem him in her eyes. And it didn’t. But it was enough for her to invite him back into her children’s lives when Nora was born. That, and the fact that he came with an expiration date. They let him out on bail (because where was a six-hundred-pound man planning to go?) and after that it was only a matter of months before the lawyers hashed it out and he went to prison. Until then, he cooked and cleaned and read to Seth for hours, and, when the boy nodded off, took the night shift with an ever-colicky Nora so Robin could rest. She ate his food with relish and, occasionally, as she passed by, placed an errant hand upon his arm. Somehow, miraculously, he had blundered into his own personal fantasy. Well—sans sex, but you couldn’t have everything. It was enough.
She drove him to Taft herself. She hugged him. She cried. He let her go.
“No,” she said, rummaging in her purse. “Wait.”
And then, right there at the finish line, she pulled out the envelope. Worn and slightly crumpled, with her name scrawled across the front. She’d kept it with her, always, but hadn’t had the courage to open it. Until now. Here, with him, at the very end.
I didn’t write any of the letters, Tavis had penned. You’re smart, Robbie, so I am pretty sure you can guess who did.
Chapter 6
Now
“You want me—” He glances at the dining table and snorts. “You want me to stay. Here.”
“Well, you know, probably the couch.” She shrugs. “But... yeah. Here.”
There is a knock.
“Oh—” Her eyes go to the clock on the stove. “That’s the kids.”
He lifts an arm, too late to stop her as she sweeps around his circumference and heads for the entryway. “Wait,” he calls, with force.
She pauses, hand on doorknob, eyebrows raised.
“The kids. What are you—” In her shoes, even this asshole would not have let her children within five miles of him, forgiveness or no. They are wholly innocent, these biological byproducts of his best friend and the woman he wants to fuck. He may hate her as much as he doesn’t want to love her, but the kids share none of that baggage. They do not deserve him.
“What? You’re not gonna eat them. At least I hope not.” And she opens the door. They rush her, shrieking and jumping with such enthusiasm that they seem like many more than two. “Hold on guys, hold on.” She laughs, bending to dispense hugs as they leap into her strong arms.
I want you to stay.
He expects the kids to be chaperoned by Robin’s mother, but the woman standing on the porch is not the small, birdlike woman of his memory. This one is in her fifties, easily six feet tall, with the muscular bulk of a linebacker. She is white, but olive-toned, perhaps of Latin extraction. The frown permanently stamped on her unmasked face grows deeper as her eyes rise from the children to his face. She knows who he is. What he has done. Not just the misdeeds which are public record, but his private sins. The things he did to Robin.
Before this asshole can hurl a snide comment in her direction, Seth’s attention breaks from his mother. The boy seems taller than his nine years warrant—all knees and elbows, like his father at the same age. His face contracts into a puzzled frown when he sees Cyril, and then his eyes go wide.
The little sister—an infant, last Cyril held her—dashes toward the kitchen, oblivious to his presence until she nearly plows into his thigh. She performs an impressive about-face, poof-ball pigtails bobbing as she barrels back toward the door wailing “Mooommy!”
“Nora,” Robin says, attempting to pry her daughter’s arms away from her legs, “we talked about this, remember? It’s okay!” She glances up, flashing a slightly exasperated smile.
Seth crosses the floor more slowly. He stops a few paces away, gazing up at Cyril with his mother’s bottomless brown eyes. It does not even occur to him to be bashful or shy.
I want you to stay.
She could have spoken those words a thousand times, and he wouldn’t have believed her. But here, with her children, she has handed him her heart.
Why?
He, Cyril, pulls out a dining chair and sits. Not so much to bring himself to the boy’s level as to keep his knees from buckling beneath the weight of the universe. He clears his throat. “Hey, kid.” It comes out cool and dry. He is good at this. Pretending not to care.
Seth’s mouth spreads into a slow grin, wide and as pleasantly toothy as his mother’s. But it won’t hold. His lips quaver. Tears drop like pearls from his lower lids.
And then this asshole is holding Robin’s precious child in his arms, accepting his tearful welcome like a soldier home from battle. Just one of many priceless gifts he has stolen from his best and only friend.
“I knew it,” the boy sobs. “I knew you would come home.”
I want you to stay.
“If you’re having second thoughts”—this comes in a low voice from the older woman, still standing on the threshold—“I can keep them for another—”
Robin interrupts her with a laugh. “He’d never hurt the kids. Not in a million years.” How can she possibly have such confidence in him?
The crease between the woman’s eyebrows deepens, as if she’s asking herself the same question. “And you?”
“Oh,” Robin says, clapping a hand to the woman’s shoulder as she ushers her out the door, “don’t worry. I can take care of myself.” She glances at him, then, and the twitch at the corner of her smile says, Don’t make me regret this, Cyril.
They both know, without a shadow of a doubt, that he will.
Lunch. Robin’s daughter stares him down across the table. “Why are you so big?”
“Shoulda seen me before prison, kid.”
“Nora,” Robin warns, shaking Cheetos from a bag onto Seth’s plate. “Let’s be nice.”
“That’s just Cyril,” Seth says around a mouthful of grilled cheese, his earnest, overly-patient tone suggesting his little sister might be dumb as rocks. In the two hours he’s been home, Seth has worn a path from the dining table to his bedroom and back again, a one-kid parade of tiny treasures for Cyril’s examination. Sticks in just the right shape. Objects unearthed in forgotten corners of the schoolyard. Drawings. Stuffed animals. Lego creations. T-shirts from a selection of fairs and summer
camps and theatrical productions. A binder of meticulously organized Pokémon cards. It is as though he is attempting to account for every hour they have lost. Time that Tavis will never have.
“But he’s fat.” Half her brother’s height, Nora is a condensed, chipmunk-cheeked facsimile of her mother. Her voice, however, is the same unmodulated shout that Seth’s was, at that age, tuned to an even higher pitch. She peels the two slices of bread apart and uses her nails to scrape the melted cheese.
“Everyone’s different,” Seth insists. He’s sliding half-off his chair, bouncing on the ball of one foot. No longer four, but still perpetually in motion. “Some people are tall, some people are short, some people are brown, some people are beige. That’s just how it is.”
Nora holds up an index finger and then levels it, accusingly, at Cyril’s gut. “But he’s really fat.”
“Nora!” Robin puts a hand on her daughter’s arm and gives it a downward shove, favoring Cyril with a sour eye-roll. “And you thought I was a great parent.” She plops herself into a seat and helps herself to a handful of Cheetos directly from the bag. “Turns out it’s just luck of the draw.”
“Yeah,” Seth agrees, affably. “Nora’s kind of a jerk.”
Nora twists her face into a scowl and screeches. Her gappy baby teeth look like they’ve been filed to points. Despite her efforts to prove otherwise, or perhaps precisely because of them, she is intensely adorable.
Robin rubs her eyes with her fingertips. “Nora, do you need a time out?”
“No!” She slumps back in her chair, thrusting out a lower lip.
“And Seth, I know Nora can be difficult, but can you please—”
“I know,” he says. “Sorry.”
“Thanks, buddy.” Robin lifts her soda can and peers into it before taking a swig, perhaps wishing for something stronger. Corona had been her elixir of choice, back in the before-times.
Cyril in the Flesh Page 4