Seth smiles like he’s been let in on a special secret. His eager face says he wants more—details, anecdotes about his father, whatever.
Hard pass.
Cyril runs a hand over his face. “Let’s do this before it gets too late.” He picks up the pen again and draws a rectangle at the top of a new page. “First thing you gotta do is make a character.” And for the love of God, please don’t let him ask what character his dad played. Bad enough Tavis is dead; if the kid wants to revive his childhood D&D character, Cyril is going to lose his shit.
Seth bounces on his knees, abruptly switching back to goofy-kid mode. “I wanna be a dragon.”
Cyril taps the pen against the legal pad. “That’s not one of the standard character races,” he explains. Seth would need to choose a race, like human or elf, although the fourth edition of D&D had introduced dragonborn—not dragons, per se; more like lizard people, without wings or tails. If Seth wanted his character to fly, a better option would be to choose a class—the character’s job, essentially—such as druid, which would allow him to shape-shift into various animals. “You couldn’t take dragon form right away, but if you level up enough you could gain that power.”
“Both,” Seth says, with a decisive nod. “I want both.”
Cyril talks him through the process of creating a backstory for this dragonborn druid, hastily named “Dragondude,” and then pauses to dig through the board games on the bookshelf until he finds a pack of cards, sorting out two suits so Seth can “roll” for ability scores. It’s hard to tell, honestly, if the kid is even listening to half of what he says. He slides back and forth on his chair, falls off a couple of times, but always scrambles back up, eagerly. Gradually he gets his wiggles worked out and settles in close, head pillowed on Cyril’s shoulder as they work through Dragondude’s stats.
“And that’s it,” Cyril tells him, finally. “Good job.”
Seth lifts his head, looking confused. “That’s... the game?”
Cyril chuckles. “No, that’s all we can do to prep. To play the game, you need a party. A group of players. Like I said, it doesn’t work with just one.”
“Oh.” Seth sits back, deflated.
“Well, I could give you a sample battle. You wanna fight some goblins?”
Of course he wants to fight goblins. Dragondude, however, has rolled a two for strength, so it doesn’t go as well as the kid hopes. He dies, actually, but when Robin pops her head in to tell them to wrap it up, Cyril finesses the outcome so it’s more of a close shave. The goblins aren’t too sharp, in any case, and spend most of the fight arguing amongst themselves. When Cyril awards Seth a couple of experience points and declares the session over, he whines in protest.
“Gimme a break, kid, my voice is going out.” Goblins are rough on the vocal cords. He pushes his chair back from the table. “Did you brush your teeth and pee?”
Seth looks at him like he’s lost his mind. “Yeah?”
“Right—you’re not four anymore.” He ruffles the exuberant orange fro and nods to the hall. “Off you go.”
Seth is gone just long enough for Cyril to slide his chair back from the table. “Kid,” he says, turning as the boy’s footsteps trot back out, “if you keep stalling, your Mom’s not gonna—”
“Just one thing!” He hugs a tablet to his chest. “Here.”
Cyril takes the device as it’s thrust at his face. “Is this—” It’s protected by a chunky sleeve of green foam, but he pries back one corner and finds that, yes, “This is the one I gave you.”
The kid nods enthusiastically, tapping and then swiping to bring the screen to life. After five years, it’s got plenty of scratches and a crack in one corner. “I'll go to bed, I promise. I just want to log into Minecraft so you can see my world.”
“You play Minecraft on this?” The kid has a Nintendo Switch hooked up to the television. “You know there’s a Switch version, right?”
Seth shrugs. “Yeah, I know.”
“You want me to set you up? It’d be easier to see your stuff if you played on the TV.”
Seth studies his face with almost comical gravity, and Cyril realizes he’s considering not the question itself so much as whether his reply will hurt Cyril’s feelings. Finally, he seems to decide honesty is best, and shakes his head. “I like the pad.”
“Why? I mean, it’s fine. I’m just curious.”
“Because you gave it to me.” Obviously, his expression adds.
Cyril is not expecting this answer—though he should have—and all he can do is grab the kid’s head and press him tight against his chest until he can breathe again.
Seth’s arms encircle his neck. “I missed you,” he whispers.
Cyril would do anything for this kid. Fuck. “Yeah. Me too.”
He is wandering through the digital landscape of Seth’s imagination, blunting his emotions with an ice cream sandwich, when Robin wanders out of the hall and turns left into the kitchen. He ignores her.
Touches of humor—blue sheep, fields of wheat carefully shaped into smiley faces—grace skillfully constructed farms, houses, rivers, castles, cathedrals, giant cathedrals, and underground caverns, all in crude voxel-block detail. Seth’s current project appears to be an amusement park for chickens. About twenty of them are stuck on a looped minecart rollercoaster, clucking incessantly as they are whisked round and round. Minecraft is meant to be played as a survival game, but Seth clearly prefers to spend most of his time in the peaceful “creative mode.” He prefers building. Creating. Like his mother.
The microwave hums, and a minute later he hears vigorous popping. The scent of artificial butter follows, and then a telltale ping.
Robin shakes the steaming paper bag as she carries it into the living room, holding it by the corners. She stops in front of the couch, looking down at him, her bathrobe open to reveal her usual bedtime attire of jogging shorts and a tank top.
“So,” she says, pulling the corners of the popcorn bag to release steam. “You’re still here. Which I’m going to take as some kind of yes.” She uses her knee to give his knee a shove, which sends a ripple through his belly. “Move.”
She waits, teasing out the first few piping hot pieces of popcorn, as he sets the iPad aside and grabs one arm of the couch, rocking himself to the right. The back of his shirt rides up and he twists, awkwardly, trying to tug it down over the exposed roll of flesh.
“I’m gonna sit next to you,” she informs him, munching an exploded kernel. “And we’re probably gonna touch.”
It is not a question: she hands off the bag of popcorn before planting herself next to him, then tucks her legs up and reaches for the remote. “I figure we’ve both got about five years of quality entertainment to catch up on,” she says, flipping to the Netflix dashboard. And then she passes the remote to him. “You pick. Something we’ll both like. I mean, as much as you like anything.”
He tosses the crumpled ice cream sandwich wrapper toward the coffee table. It bounces and lands on the floor. “I’m not a fucking mind reader.”
“Not,” she adds, stretching for the bottle of lotion on the end table, “something you think Tavis would think I’d like.”
He is not interested in playing stupid games. Nevertheless, he scrolls through the menu, willfully ignoring her as she pumps cocoa butter into one hand, rubs her palms together, and runs a hand down the length of each bronze arm. Netflix’s recommendations, based on what she’s previously watched, contain mostly documentaries. Not interested. Orange is the New Black seems a little too on the nose. Chapelle, likely too coarse even for Robin. He pauses, finally, on Jessica Jones. He looks to her for an opinion, but cannot stop his eyes from flickering downward, to the hand now smoothing lotion over her bare leg.
She lifts the bottle by the neck, letting it swing toward him. “You wanna do it?”
“No.”
She grins and gives him a nudge with her knee. “Liar.”
When isn’t he lying? “Look, do you wanna watch the g
oddamn show, or—”
“Yeah.” She returns the bottle to the end table. “Go for it.”
He presses play, and the intro begins with a slow, drunken stumble of notes. Robin helps herself to some popcorn. He tries to hand her the bag, but instead of taking it she scoots closer. They watch the goddamn show.
At some point, the knee touching the side of his belly becomes a leg, and then an arm. He reaches into the bag, not for the first time, but the popcorn is gone.
She rests the flat of her hand on his stomach, smoothing his shirt, and leans her head on his shoulder. He smells the tang of panic in his own perspiration.
“No,” he says.
She sits up. Hits pause. “No... what?”
He shakes his head. “I can’t.” No rationale, no explanation. He just—can't.
Her lower lip disappears between her teeth. “We’ll take it slow.”
He looks down at the vast, pooling spread of his stomach. At the absolute mess he has made of himself, because he did not think he would ever be here. Does not belong here. He heaves all six-foot-five, four-hundred-fifty pounds of himself to his feet and lumbers into the kitchen, out of breath by the time he gets there not only because he’s huge but because he’s about to lose his shit.
“Is... this about Tavis?” Her voice, in the living room, is uncharacteristically small.
He laughs, bitterly. “No,” he says, but with a sarcastic twist he knows she will assume means yes. This is how he does things. How he held her captive for seven years without so much as penning a single untruth. It’s all in the implication. The omission. The blanks he knows she will fill. Even now, knowing what he did to her, what he is capable of, still she does not see.
She does not want to see.
What she wants is to feel sorry for him. She wants to believe that between the two of them, he and Tavis, they had managed to cobble together Robin’s ideal husband. That Tavis hadn’t been content with that. That he’d wanted to prove himself a hero in Robin’s eyes, to have her for himself. Cyril wasn’t getting anything out of the deal—except freedom, maybe—but for the sake of his friend he’d helped try and save the kid. And now here he is, the lonely, broken remainder of one functional human being. So sad. Right?
Right.
Or maybe the tortured survivor narrative is just the story he, Cyril, wants Robin to believe.
Maybe none of this was a mistake.
Maybe everything went according to plan.
He takes the leftover linguine out of the refrigerator, pulls back the plastic wrap, and makes it disappear. A tub of potato salad is next.
“Bring it in here, if you want,” she says.
He ignores her. This is not about Tavis at all. At least, not the way she thinks.
When that kid went missing, two weeks before the end of Tav’s last tour? The idea of saving Shafik hadn’t come from Tavis, even if he would have sworn it had. Let’s not be coy—Cyril is nothing if not a master manipulator. He knows perfectly well how to say exactly the right thing at precisely the wrong time. All he had to do was leave this sentence unfinished, or ask that rhetorical question. Maybe he’d known exactly how Tavis would fill in the blanks.
It’s possible that all he’d intended, at the outset, was to convince Tavis to re-up just one more last time. To maintain the status quo for just a little longer, because Cyril needed time to let go of the woman who was never really his. Sure. Anything’s possible. Maybe he never meant to put something into motion which, once begun, he couldn’t stop.
Who knows—maybe it was all about the score. The high of teasing passwords from the people with the right clearances at Cooke’s company; of talking Tavis through linking a laptop to the air gapped network on the ground in Afghanistan, cracking the system wide open. The rush of swimming through oceans of raw data, letting it sift through his fingers like glittering jewels. Maybe, just then, he hadn’t cared about Tavis or Robin or anyone at all.
Maybe it was only once he’d begun to digest the forbidden intel, as the million and one pinpoints of data had begun to arrange and sort themselves in his mind’s eye, that everything had come into sudden sharp focus. He’d seen all the moving parts and understood, with crystal clarity, how the machine worked. Shafik was one small sacrificial pawn in a much broader strategy to maintain stability in the region, preserving resources and saving American lives. And he’d understood, without a shadow of a doubt, exactly how far those in leadership would be willing to go to protect that plan.
He should’ve told Tavis to pull out. Should’ve stopped him from recording interviews with locals on his downtime, trying to trace the breadcrumbs leading to the child’s whereabouts. Scrub the whole operation and suffer the consequences, if he was caught.
But he hadn’t.
“You coming?” Robin still sits on the couch where he left her; the actress on the television screen is frozen, her mouth open in a silent “o” of understanding.
He tosses the empty tub of potato salad into the sink and reaches into the fridge. Breakfast sausages? He’d cooked them all this morning, with the intent to reheat them for the kids’ breakfasts. It’ll do.
Robin waits for him. Fucking waits for him to eat.
And—Jesus Christ, when he can stomach no more, he brings her a cookie.
“Thanks.”
He sits. It hurts. After five years of relative abstinence, his body has grown unaccustomed to this abuse.
“Look,” she says, “you don’t have to do anything. Okay? Just... be.”
She touches his arm. He doesn’t move. She slides her hand under the sagging flap of flesh that contains his elbow and settles against him. Fresh and clean and warm.
“No,” he whispers, or thinks he does.
Get away, he wants to warn her. Danger, Robin Matheson. For the love of God, run.
If she gets too close—if he touches her—not even the inertia of his mass will be enough to protect her from harm.
Robin presses play.
Here is the truth: for five days Cyril sat on that horde of data, while Tavis continued to snoop around on the ground in Afghanistan. For five days, Cyril peered through the keyhole window of his monitor as the buzzards circled. Emails flew. Tav’s command realized they had been compromised. That someone had accessed the system. And then they went dark. Mostly. Cyril had retained backdoor access to a few key email accounts—and he was sitting at his computer, fingers deep in the digital cookie jar, at the exact moment that the commanding officer of Tav’s commanding officer delivered the order that would remove Tavis from his normal detail and put him in a certain tank on a certain deserted road at a very certain time. “That should take care of our problem,” the officer had written.
Cyril had stared at the text on that bright white screen until the words had burned themselves onto his retinas. And then, for the first time in a very long while, he shut off his computer and hauled his massive ass out of his apartment—to go for a walk.
Four blocks, from his house to hers. Slow going, back then, for a guy who had to take a breather in the way to his own mailbox. He stopped on the sidewalk outside the big picture window in front. It was evening, and the curtains were drawn, Robin and Seth illuminated like shadow puppets by the light that shone from within. He stood there, watching, for a long time.
And then he went home. He composed a warning to Tavis.
By the time he hit send, he already knew it was too late.
Robin snorts and laughs at something on-screen. She glances at him to share the moment, and realizes he is somewhere else. Her smile fades. “Hey, big guy,” she says softly, putting a hand on his chest. “It’s okay.”
He is breathing hard.
Chapter 8
Cyril is whipping up a second round of bacon and eggs the following morning when Robin appears in the doorway. She tilts her head to one side, using an old t-shirt to pat her hair dry. Behind her, in the dining room, the kids are squabbling over the ketchup bottle. “Morning,” she says, and offers a symp
athetic smile. “You sleep all right?”
After having what was essentially a fucking panic attack? “Yeah. Fine.” He keeps his eyes on the pan. “I need your computer again.”
“Oh?” She wads the t-shirt into a ball and chucks it toward the laundry room. It lands with a soft plop on the plywood floor. “Miss something the first time?”
He uses the spatula to tick items off his fingers. “Phone. Car. Apartment.”
“Oh.” She glances over her shoulder, just long enough to say, “Guys, that’s enough.” The kids keep arguing, and she steps into the kitchen, around him, so his mass eclipses her view of the children. There’s a plate on the counter and she picks it up, holding it out for two eggs over easy. “That’s it, then? We’re done?”
“Pretty much.”
“Bacon!” Nora shouts. “I need more bacon!”
Robin nods to the plate in her hand, and Cyril loads it up with four sizzling strips. She starts to turn away, and then stops. “Look.” He feels the breath of her words on his arm. “Don’t... feel like you have to rush out of here. Wait until you get your feet under you. Cook. Clean. Have fun with the kids.” She holds up the plate, forcing a bittersweet smile. “I mean, really, go to town.”
Playing house. Like he had before the feds caught up with him and sent him to prison. Back when, as far as she knew, they were merely friends. “No.” He can’t go back. But there’s no forward, either. “I mean—I will. I just.” He rubs his forehead with the back of a hand, leaving a streak of bacon grease. “Shit.” What he needs is to get out.
She tugs a dish towel from the oven handle and offers it. “It’s okay. Not what I was hoping for, but... I understand.”
“Right.” Because she was so hoping he’d sleep on her couch forever.
Unfortunately, there’s no swift route to extricating himself from Robin’s life. Not unless he wants to hemorrhage money on takeout and motel rooms, anyway—and even finding an apartment is no guarantee of success. His house had been auctioned off to pay for trial fees and prison commissary, and the twenty K he’s got left in the bank is going to evaporate quickly if he doesn’t get off his ass and find some steady work, and soon.
Cyril in the Flesh Page 9
