Her fists sweep downward. “I want you to remember.”
“Okay. Yeah. I can... definitely do that.”
“I just—” She sucks in a breath and lets it out again, slowly. Her face softens. “I need someone to have seen me while there are pieces still left.”
And then she turns and walks out of the kitchen. He follows her with his eyes, gaze fixed upon the twin dimples which mark the transition from the cello curve of her spine to her tight, muscular ass.
Chapter 14
There is no time for awkwardness in the morning. Only the rush of breakfast and getting the kids dressed and making sure they each have all the stuffed animals and clothes and toiletries they’ll need for the next few days. At some point Robin tosses a bulging duffel at Cyril and tells him to “Add whatever you need. Including deodorant, please.” Five minutes before distance learning starts, they’re all piling into the truck. “Buckle up, guys!” Robin calls over one shoulder, peeling out of the drive.
His seatbelt won’t reach.
“Well,” she says, drily. “That didn’t take long.” At the next stop she leans over him, using an elbow to shove his belly out of her way, and pops open the glove compartment. In addition to a vehicle manual, napkins, and a tangle of electrical cords, it contains a seatbelt extension.
It’s not new. “You kept this?”
“Guess I’m just sentimental like that.”
At Greta’s, Robin hops out and pops the driver’s seat forward so the kids can squeeze out of the cab. Seth leans over the center console to throw his arms, awkwardly, around Cyril.
“You gonna be okay, kid?” The children had been surprised, but not crushed, by the news that they wouldn’t be living it up bachelor-style with Cyril. Greta’s house is familiar and secure, which Cyril has to concede is probably best for their emotional wellbeing right now.
“Yeah.”
“Lemme out!” Nora gives her brother’s rear a shove.
“Quit it!” The boy leans forward once more, quickly, to whisper into Cyril’s ear. “Take care of Mom.”
Cyril thumps him on the back. “I’ll do my best.” Hopefully, that will be enough.
Nora sticks her tongue out at him before following her brother out and up the front porch steps, where Greta waits to shoo them inside. “Log on,” she says, brusquely. “You’re already late.” Robin follows, arms loaded with the kids’ backpacks and travel bags. Greta hesitates, her gaze flicking to his window, and then shuts the door.
It opens again almost immediately.
“That was fast,” Cyril says, as Robin climbs back into the cab.
“Morning meetings. They were distracted. Probably better that way.” She offers Greta one last wave as she pulls away from the curb. “We’re getting good at good-bye.”
“Do their teachers know what’s going on?”
She lifts one shoulder. “They’ll figure it out.”
She might not care what teachers or other parents think about her, but there is a kind of security in her indifference. Robin has always been a lone wolf, and nothing he’s seen in the past two weeks tells him that’s changed, but the network she’s established here is strong enough that she can depend on others to fill in the gaps. She is seen.
She glances at him as she merges onto the freeway. He is already looking at her. Has been, for most of the morning.
“I know what you’re doing,” she says.
“What, picturing you naked? I mean, that’s what you asked me to do.”
“Is that what I said? I feel like I remember it a little differently.”
He shrugs. “You don’t want me to think about you being naked, don’t show me your tits.”
Her eyebrows go up. “My—”
“Figure of speech.”
She levels a finger at him. “That was good,” she says. “You almost got a rise out of me there.”
“Say you’re going to the pharmacy,” Robin tells him, when they line up to enter the hospital.
“What? Why?”
“Trust me, it’s easier. Oh, and give me the bag.” She yanks her duffel out of his hands and slings it over one shoulder. “Holy cow, what did you put in here, bricks?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you.” Then they’re at the table set up in the entryway. “Uh—pharmacy,” he says, when the security guard asks whether he’s had any symptoms in the past week and what he’s doing there now. He follows the man’s outstretched arm to the hallway on the right.
Robin catches up with him before he reaches his ostensible destination. “This way.” She grabs his arm and leads him past the pharmacy to a lobby with three elevators, using a knuckle to push the “up” arrow before stepping into the first set of doors that slide open. “I cleared you with my surgeon, but they’re not gonna know that at the front desk.”
The elevator pings and opens into another broad lobby decorated in beiges and minty-greens. Every other chair in the waiting area has a laminated sign affixed to the seat warning patients to practice responsible social distancing. That doesn’t seem hard, since there are only three other people in the room. All of them are alone. Robin hangs the duffel bag on his shoulder and nods to one of the upholstered benches lining the wall. “Have a seat.”
He watches as she approaches the long front desk and waits in the designated spot until one of two women behind the plastic shield motions her forward. Rhinestones glued to the woman’s long false nails flash as she accepts Robin’s medical card through a slot, swipes the magnetic strip, and taps a few keys before printing out a plastic bracelet with a bar code. Robin slips her hand through the slot, and the glittering nails snap the band snugly around her wrist. The woman says something, eyes flickering over Robin’s shoulder to Cyril.
Robin shakes her head and replies—not angry, but insistent. They exchange a few more words, and when Robin points to the phone on the woman’s desk she rolls her eyes and picks up the receiver, using a knuckle to dial. She waits, speaks, and then listens for a minute before nodding and waving Robin toward the waiting area with a weary sigh.
Robin blows a breath out as she drops down next to him. “Well. That’s taken care of. I think.” She holds up a sticker that says “visitor” in big blue letters, then peels it off and slaps it on the front of his shirt. It has a barcode that looks like it matches the one on her bracelet. “I’ll have to go in alone when they call me back, but then they’ll call you in. Standard procedure in case I need to tell someone my boyfriend’s been beating me.”
It takes him a moment, mentally, to get past her casual drop of the word boyfriend, even if it is sarcastic. “And if you do?”
She considers a moment before shrugging. “Dunno. Let’s test it out.”
“While I’d love to get the hell out of here, I’d rather not do it in handcuffs.”
“Here I thought that was your kink.”
He gives her a long, half-lidded look. “What are you, fifteen?”
“Just messing with you. Which is my kink, by the way.”
Nervous, is what she is. He gets it—bullshitting is better than crying. Maybe that’s why she wanted him here: to keep her strong.
The door at the opposite end of the waiting area opens, and a woman in pink scrubs double-checks her clipboard. “Matheson?”
Robin touches his arm, briefly. “Also, you have to take a COVID test. See you soon!”
“Son of a—”
It doesn’t matter that he’s already had it. There are still too many unknowns. More importantly, it’s hospital policy. So he grits his teeth and lets a nurse jam a swab up both sides of his nose. “When can I go back?” he asks, as she’s slotting the extra-long cotton swab into a test tube and popping a cap on it. She shrugs. It’s not her job.
The technician who calls him back, finally, instructs him to sanitize his hands to the elbows and put a hospital-issued mask on over his standard cloth variety. Only then is he permitted to follow the man down a wide corridor lined with gurneys and wheeled carts in a
variety of dimensions. A brief word on an intercom gets them buzzed through a fire door, after which the tech makes a hard right, shoves in one half of a set of double doors, and stands back, waiting for Cyril to enter.
The pre-op holding area is a broad, oddly bare room with a nurse’s station against one wall and a lengthy row of gurneys on the other, separated by thin curtains hanging on rails. Most are pulled back against the wall, revealing a room which is mostly empty.
Robin sits on the edge of the third gurney in a rough cotton hospital gown, one hand out-held for the muscular, tattooed nurse putting in her IV. “Hey,” she says. “I didn't realize you’d have to wait so long. The anesthesiologist was already here when they brought me back, and she wanted to go over everything immediately so she could run back to her office for some—” She cuts herself off with a hiss of pain.
“There we go,” the nurse says, clearly satisfied with his work as he tapes off the line snaking out of her hand.
Cyril dumps the duffel bag on the end of the gurney. “‘There we go?’ You fucking hurt her, asshole. Or are you stupid and deaf?”
The nurse kicks back on the rolling stool. “Well! You’re every bit as spicy as she said you’d be.” He casts a glance at Robin. “But I’m sorry if that hurt. I know it’s uncomfortable, I was just glad I could get the line in your hand so we didn’t have to stick you anywhere else.”
“I know.” Her eyes flicker to Cyril, but return to the nurse almost immediately, watching as he cleans plastic cannula wrappers off the bed and packs up his phlebotomy kit. The man’s entire right arm is devoted to service—Marines, Operation Iraqi Freedom, the local fire department, even a memorial to his fucking bomb-sniffing dog. “Cyril, this is Pablo. I always ask if he’s available because he’s the best at finding my veins. Which are pretty shot at this point.” She gives the nurse’s hand a quick squeeze and a look of beatific gratitude that sears Cyril’s guts with rage. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure.” Pablo offers a polite nod and turns to leave, pausing just long enough to meet Cyril with a cold, not-quite-unprofessional stare. “Be careful, my friend.”
Cyril wants to follow the guy into the hall and punch his fucking lights out. He could, if he wanted; the nurse might be ripped, but he’s got nothing on Cyril for sheer size. Throwing his weight around was something he’d learned in prison.
But he can’t leave Robin.
“If you could not burn all my bridges while I’m in surgery,” she says, “that would be great.”
“I’m just—”
“Being an overprotective asshole, I know. Stop it. They will absolutely kick you out. I think Pablo’s looking forward to it, actually.” She gives the IV line a gentle shake to work out a kink before moving it out of the way. “I know these people, Cyril. They got me through this the first time. They’re good at what they do.”
“Apparently not good enough.”
Her laugh trails off into a melancholy sigh. “Well. Yes. I am here again, so I’ll grant you that.” A sudden shudder runs down her spine, and she hugs her elbows, careful of the line in her hand.
He’s an idiot. She is sitting there in nothing but a paper gown, five minutes shy of having some cocksure surgeon rifling through her guts. She doesn’t need him marking his territory, or whatever it is he thinks he’s doing. There is a starched blanket folded over the end of the gurney, and he lifts the duffel to pull it out.
She shakes her head. “It won’t help.” She taps the pole holding up her saline drip. “It’s this. Chills me from the inside out.”
He drops the blanket and glances down the sorry row of pre-op patients waiting for the privilege of vivisection. None of them have chaperones. There aren’t even any chairs. “What the hell am I here for, then?”
She gives him a look that is equal parts irritation and amusement. “Cyril, I—” She struggles for words, then shakes her head, laughing softly, and extends a hand. “Here.”
He looks at her open palm. What does she want, his phone?
She leans forward and snatches his fingers. “You are one seriously dense motherfucker, you know that?”
He looks at her hand, feeling the roughness of her palm in his, a strange contrast to the perfect sliced-almond ovals of her fingernails. “You just want me to... stand here.”
“Yeah.”
“And hold your hand.”
“Yeah.”
Like holding his clammy palm is a thing anyone could want. “Fine,” he says, “I can do that.”
So he stands there like an idiot, holding her hand. Nurses and doctors go by. Machines whirr and beep. One of the other patients is taken to the OR.
“I think I forgot to pack earplugs,” Robin says.
“Do you want me to—”
“No.” Her grip tightens. “If you leave, they won’t let you back in again. And then—”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says. She’s scared. She’s good at holding herself together, but the cracks are starting to show.
A nurse from the station on the other side of the room approaches. “Dr. Effler is scrubbing in right now. We’ll take you back in just a minute.”
Robin nods, releasing Cyril’s hand to scoot backward up onto the gurney. “I gave Greta your number. She’ll probably text you tonight. She might want to know—”
“Look, I’ll take care of it.” His reply is more clipped than he intends. He shoulders the duffel and then her purse, when she lifts it off a hook on the back of the gurney and holds it out.
She slips her feet under the stiff cotton blanket. “Without being an asshole?”
He snorts. “Right.”
Two men in scrubs—he can’t tell if it’s two nurses or two doctors or one of each—come through a set of double doors at the far end of the room, making a beeline for Robin. The one on the left says, “Robin Matheson? For your hysterectomy?”
Cyril turns. “How is that even a question?”
“They triple check everything.” Robin holds her arm out toward the first man, who swipes a handheld barcode scanner across her bracelet like she’s a goddamn piece of merchandise. “It’s so nobody amputates the wrong leg. Chill.”
The other guy slips behind the gurney and kicks a lever, releasing the wheels. “Ready?”
“Yeah.” She lays back, not looking relaxed at all. “Let’s do this.”
“Chica—” Suddenly, there is a lump in his throat, but he is not going to lose his shit.
“Yeah?” She offers a hand. The nurses pause.
He gives her fingers one hard squeeze. He wants to yank her off the gurney, toss her over one shoulder, and get her the hell out of here before these butchers can do her any more harm. Instead he says, “Don’t you fucking die on me.”
She cocks an eyebrow. “What’ll you give me to pull through?”
“I—what?”
“What’s my motivation, here?”
“Like, aside from your children? Jesus, I dunno.”
She studies his face, or whatever’s visible of it above the double layer of masks. “Give me something, big guy.”
“What do you want?” He knows exactly what she wants. It’s written in her unflinching eyes.
The eyes crinkle, slightly, at the corners. “How stupid do you think I think you are?”
“I’m sorry,” the guy at the foot of the gurney says. “We need to get going—”
“Shut the fuck up.” He grits his teeth. “Chica, I—” Three words. That’s all she wants. They both know it. And he can’t even manage that. Even here and now, it would cost him too much. “I—”
She snorts. “Just say it, you incredible ass.”
“Chica, don’t—” Her hand slips from his grasp. The nurse, now in a hurry, starts pushing the gurney toward the doors at the end of the room. Robin, facing backward, fixes her eyes upon his. He shrugs. “Don’t feel too bad about the tits. Your best asset was always your ass.”
“Oh my God,” she exclaims, with an incredulous laugh. The head of the g
urney bumps into the doors, pushing them open. “I'm gonna kill you, you—you ridiculous piece of—”
He raises a hand in farewell. “When you come out, Chica. Alive.”
And then she is gone, and he stands there staring at the doors as they swing in shorter and shorter arcs and then stand still.
Chapter 15
Corresponding with Robin through Tavis had granted Cyril access to a relationship he’d never have had otherwise, even if only in his imagination. In prison, his ability to lose himself in alternate worlds had become a survival skill. Now, it’s emotionally convenient to pull out his phone and slip into a parallel universe where Robin is not having her stomach sliced open. Or where he will not be spending the next day or two locked in a labyrinth of boxlike rooms and sterile halls which too-closely resemble prison.
Fortunately, the waiting room has decent wifi.
He’d hoped for a couple more responses from his old contacts, but his ProtonMail account is nothing but crickets. So much for legit work. It’s not a surprise, but at least he can say he’d given it a shot.
Checking the handful of private forums where he’s left a trail of breadcrumbs, on the other hand, yields a flood of messages. At least half of them come from angry users accusing him of being a poser and threatening to get him kicked off the platform (and, in fact, he has been booted entirely from one forum). There are also plenty convinced he’s undercover FBI, which is hilarious. A handful of Alt-right shills and men’s rights activists looking to recruit unsuspecting noobs, and... well, not much else.
It’s tempting to out himself. Prior to prison, his reputation had always guaranteed him his pick of gigs, legal or otherwise. Now, it would also make him a target—if not for actual FBI securities agents, then for kids looking to earn a few bucks or a nasty reputation by stabbing him in the back.
Remaining anonymous is safer, but only just. Even if all he wants is greyhat work, rebuilding a rep from scratch means participating in shit he absolutely should not be doing.
Cyril in the Flesh Page 17
