by Helena Maeve
Robin stopped him short. “He has his claws into the meat of the beast. That’s all I need, someone who can argue our case.”
“You’re a fool if you think he’ll sway anyone.”
Ulysses’ hands shook around the neck of the gin bottle. Robin’s retort pierced his back like darts.
“Why are you worried? You’re covered. The autopsy report—”
“Sod the bloody report!” He slammed the bottle back down on the sideboard. “You’re dancing on a wire here, Robin. Sam… Whatever your name is.”
“Robin.” It was softly uttered, but without a hint of apology. Forbearance thinned his lips when he sighed.
Ulysses ignored the catch in his breath. “You’re playing a dangerous game. And I don’t understand why. They were tracking a murderer—”
“That’s what I am, remember? That’s what they made me.” Robin took a step closer and for the first time since they’d met, Ulysses was tempted to take one back.
He didn’t.
“I think you have the wrong idea about the kind of person I am, Ulysses.”
“I know what you are.” Who. I’ve danced to your tune, remember? “And I could live with that, but you make it sound as if they’re the bad guys…”
“They are.”
His vehemence made Ulysses’ mind up for him. “No… No, I’m sorry. I’ve covered Libya and Egypt. I was in Tahrir Square when they were fighting. I know what repression looks like. You want to talk despots, the SIS—”
“Is just another boot,” Robin said, cutting him short. “The only difference is that they’re not pressing down on your throat. Yet. For us, it’s a matter of survival. The assassin who shot the SIS agent in that theater understood. So does Manuel. And now I need you to understand.”
That plaintive note in Robin’s voice might have swayed him, had it come twenty minutes earlier, had it not been paired with Manuel’s off-the-cuff surrender.
If Cole and the rest of the SIS were the bad guys, then what did that make Robin when he surrendered Manuel to them?
Ulysses shook his head, but the thoughts hung fast, as cloying as grime.
“I can’t. I can’t be a part of this. I have to get up in the morning and believe that the cameras that follow me around are there for my own protection. I have to trust that my phone conversations are private, I can’t just…”
He didn’t realize that Robin was close enough to touch until he felt the touch of a warm hand on the back of his neck.
“I know,” Robin murmured, a tepid smile audible in his voice. “I don’t expect you to belly flop into my mess. It was fun, though. While it lasted…wasn’t it?”
The question summoned a vision of their bodies crammed into the back of a car that smelled of oil and plastic. The touch-memory of damp brick scraping against Ulysses’ spine as Robin wanked him off raced down his spine.
Ulysses closed his eyes against the thrill of lying on his bed and tasting every tremor in Robin’s body as he came.
Fun didn’t begin to cover it.
“You should go,” Ulysses replied, equally subdued.
“I should,” Robin agreed. He didn’t move for a long beat. By the time he retrieved his hand, Ulysses’ resolve was already threatening to crumble.
He snagged a hand on Robin’s wrist and tugged him back at the last moment. Their lips crashed together, a rough kiss fashioned out of clacking teeth and chapped lips. The scrape of stubble was par for the course.
Ulysses pulled away with mouth bruised and lungs burning. “I—”
“Goodbye,” Robin said, before he could change his mind.
The click of the front door was too soft, too final.
Ulysses fell back against the sideboard. It took him a moment to notice that the gin bottle had toppled and spilled all over the floor.
Chapter Ten
“Drinks after work?” Claudia suggested, pushing her glasses up into her hair.
“It’s barely noon.”
She tilted back in her chair. “I’m planning ahead. How else am I to get through a Monday?”
Ulysses mustered a smile on his way out the door. “Hope Downing Street provides us enough material for Friday?” It wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t a no, either. He’d always had trouble with commitment.
“Oh, those tossers’ll cock something up if we give them time!”
Claudia’s false cheer followed him out of her office but faded by the time he made it to his. He moved one stack of magazines from the desk to the windowsill, then peeked between the blinds at the rain-spattered street below.
London rain was a romantic cliché. Apathetic, Ulysses flopped into his swivel chair, already exhausted. Without the Moscow murder story to justify his month-long sabbatical, he’d had to make up the difference in puff pieces about frivolous scandals and self-evident news items that were nevertheless debated in fellow publications as though genuinely contentious.
It had been a busy six weeks since his return, but at last the workload was thinning again. Most MPs were away from Westminster again for the holidays. Most agitators seemed to have packed off and gone to Brussels. The prime minister hadn’t put his foot in it for a whole week.
At this rate, the season was shaping up to be a miserable succession of stories about Big Brother contestants and out-of-touch royals.
Ulysses checked the weather report on his phone for the umpteenth time. Cloudy with a chance of rain. Medicating the dismal news with liquor seemed as good a coping mechanism as any. He filed Claudia’s offer under a maybe.
Come eight o’clock that night, it had become a definite no.
“You sure?” she wheedled. “I can drop you off after.”
“Positive. I need to stop by Tesco to grab a few things.”
Scarcity had settled into his pantry. Only so many nights of take-away were admissible before his cookbooks started giving him the side eye.
Claudia squeezed his elbow, but didn’t press the point.
The last time she’d asked if he was still seeing his sorta-friend, Ulysses had moped for a whole day. They steered clear of the topic now, which Ulysses preferred. He didn’t want to think about Robin. He didn’t want to talk about Robin.
If he could just find a way to pretend Robin didn’t exist, the thought of him might not wake Ulysses in the middle of the night or intrude when he was in the shower.
He filled two grocery bags with produce on his way home, splurging for everything from organic asparagus to free-range chicken and hand-picked mangoes. The burden threatened to pull his arms out of their sockets as he maneuvered them from shop to tube and tube to home.
He was out of breath by the time he made it up the street, fingers scraped raw by the braided handles of the shopping bags. He hefted both into one hand as he wrested the door open—and nearly dropped the lot.
Tidiness was not Ulysses’ strongest suit, but he was fairly certain he hadn’t dropped a coaster on the shiny foyer floorboards before he left for work that morning.
And if he had, it probably wouldn’t bear black digits in spidery handwriting on the back.
No, he thought. They weren’t just digits.
Coordinates.
Groceries spilled out of the bags when Ulysses eased them down to the floor.
* * * *
Claudia came over for dinner, though it was ten o’clock when Ulysses rang and she was already in bed by the time she picked up. It wasn’t their first time burning the midnight oil together.
“Sounds risky,” she ruled, plucking another wilted asparagus out of the bowl.
Ulysses hadn’t had much time to prepare. Dinner was a touch charred, but edible. He’d over-salted the chicken and left the cauliflower mash a little too chunky. Between checking flights on his phone and swaying Google Maps into giving him a view of the location pinpointed by the coordinates on the back of the coaster, he had spent maybe ten minutes in the kitchen.
“Of course,” Claudia went on, “I’ve never known you to be reasonable about l
ife-threatening risks in the past, so… What exactly is it you want me to say?”
“That I shouldn’t go.”
Her eyes crinkled when she grinned. “Why would I do that? You’ve already made up your mind.”
“You need me at the office.”
“Not over the weekend,” Claudia volleyed back.
“I just got back from a long leave of absence…”
“One of the perks of having a financial stake in the business is that you technically don’t have to put in crazy hours to earn a paycheck.”
Ulysses scraped off the char from his breaded chicken. “This doesn’t work so well when you’re so laissez-faire.”
“Oh, I’m supposed to be your conscience, is that it? All right,” Claudia said, “I’ll play along. What’re you afraid of?”
“In general? Sharks, heights—”
“Don’t get cute.” Claudia propped her elbows on the table. “Worried you won’t come back?”
This was why their marriage had fallen apart. Claudia could read him too well to be lied to. She cut through his rubbish with surgical precision. After they’d divorced, Ulysses had sworn he wouldn’t let anyone so close again. He’d been convinced that once burned, he wouldn’t want to stick his fingers into the fire again.
The coaster lay on the table between them, proof positive that his self-destructive tendencies were alive and well.
“No,” Ulysses replied after a beat. “Not really…unless I’m dead.”
How many times had Robin told him he was a hatchet man? How many times did he have to prove that he tangled with some dangerous people before Ulysses got the message?
Claudia hummed as though considering his answer and rested her chin in her hands. “You think he’d go to all this trouble because he holds a grudge?”
“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know… You’re supposed to tell me I should stay away from basket cases.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve been waiting years for this. Call it payback.”
“For the divorce?” Ulysses guessed.
“Duh,” Claudia drawled. She held out her wine glass. “And the utterly shite dinner.”
Rather than argue, he poured her another drink.
* * * *
The first flight dropped Ulysses off at Newark. The second got him as far as Raleigh. It took a few more transfers before Ulysses was anywhere close to his destination. He checked his mobile periodically to make sure he was still on the right track. He was. The distance narrowed to miles, then yards, then a few measly feet.
Shirt stuck to his back with sweat and suit jacket draped over one shoulder, Ulysses looked up at the small beach cottage that blighted the seamless line between sandy bank and powder-blue sky. It didn’t fade like a mirage on approach, but it didn’t become any grander, either. The front porch beckoned with its cool sunshade and softly clicking wind-chimes.
The man dozing in the hammock didn’t hurt the view any.
Ulysses stood on the gravel path, bees buzzing around him and the distant surf whooshing in his ears, and let the moment simmer, fatigue siphoning the very last of his will.
“I know you’re there,” Robin muttered, loud enough to be heard.
“Is this how you greet all your guests?”
Robin smirked, his eyes still closed. “I don’t have guests.”
He only sat up when Ulysses’ travel bag landed in the dirt with a soft thump.
“I’m just wondering,” Ulysses said, “did you really go back to Criel-sur-Mer for this?”
He held up the coaster between two fingers. It bore the same bell and hammer emblem he’d seen in the pub that night, when he’d agreed to throw off his civic duty for the sake of following his conscience.
“Wouldn’t you like to know… How was your flight?”
“Which one?”
They could trade questions back and forth all day. Ulysses was weary at the sheer thought. With one last burst of energy, he hauled his feet up the three steps that separated him from Robin, up the creaking porch stair, and bent down over the hammock.
It wasn’t a particularly good kiss, too much teeth, too little patience, but after two months of getting by on guilty daydreams, it was divine. Robin’s back hit the gray siding of the house with a dull thud. Ulysses followed, trapping him with his body. He couldn’t get enough of Robin’s mouth, couldn’t stop hungering for his kiss.
Robin brought his hands to Ulysses’ flanks, quietly turning his head away. “You taste like airport coffee.”
“Should’ve thought of that before you had Jules ask me over.”
That had Robin glancing back, a deep crease between his eyebrows. “How do you know it was Jules?”
Ulysses didn’t bother dignifying the question with an answer. He hadn’t known, but he’d suspected. Robin’s methods were becoming less and less opaque by the day.
He kissed him again, gentler this time, trying to work his way back to that fragile, easy pace they’d found in France—and later, over the course of one reckless, doomed evening, in his home. He knew he was on the right track when Robin moaned against his mouth.
“Not quite the reunion I anticipated,” he murmured, as they parted for breath.
“You were so sure I’d come?”
When Robin shook his head, their noses brushed.
“Hoping, then?” Ulysses needed to hear it, he craved confirmation. Tell me I’m not the only one clinging to a memory. He’d have an easier time plunging headfirst if he knew Robin was right there in the mire with him.
Robin fisted both hands in his shirt. That was answer enough.
Chapter Eleven
“You weren’t kidding about the ocean views,” Ulysses muttered, later, as he lounged on Robin’s back porch with a towel wrapped around his waist and a bottle of something vaguely alcoholic that Americans apparently called beer. He took a meditative sip. “It’s lovely.”
The house was a font of surprises. Despite the distance from the nearest town, it was well appointed—not luxurious, but comfortable. Minimalist, he would’ve called it, though from what he’d seen, it was less so by design than pure accident.
The claw-footed bathtub had already won him over.
“Told you you’d come around,” Robin crowed and clinked their bottles together.
Ulysses didn’t offer contradiction.
Evening had begun to leach the sticky heat from the air as shadows fell over the waterfront. The dividing line between purple sky and sea was almost impossible to distinguish.
If not for the steady lapping of the waves against the shore, Ulysses might have forgotten there even was a sea. Everything was dark, both ahead and behind them, the house engulfed by shadows. The lights remained switched off, as though they were still sneaking around, trying to avoid detection.
“How long have you lived here?” Ulysses wondered. “I mean…how did you find this place? It must’ve cost a fortune…” The rim of his beer bottle balanced on his lower lip. “Oh, sorry. Forgot who I was talking to.” My very own James Bond.
Robin flashed him a sheepish smile. “How are things back home?”
“You mean have I had any spooks follow me around lately?” Ulysses shook his head. “Not since you and Cole had that little pow-wow in my living room.” Not that I know of, anyway.
“Good.”
“And…Manuel? Any news?”
Robin nodded. “Every day at noon. They’re treating him well.”
“Saltines and Earl Grey?”
“I’m given to understand he enjoys the occasional McDonald’s.”
Ulysses affected a gasp and shudder. “That’s downright inhuman, that is.”
The beer wasn’t so bad that he stopped drinking before the bottle was empty. He set it on the porch step between them, sand grains crunching under the dented base.
“You’re not going to tell me what really happened in France, are you?”
“I thought we agreed you weren’t going to print—”
“Not for the magaz
ine,” Ulysses interjected. “For me.” He was curious. He felt as though he’d been dealing with more unknowns since he’d met Robin than any other time in his life. Some gave him palpitations. Others simply turned the way he was used to looking at the world on its head. That didn’t have to be a bad thing.
Except, of course, that he was talking to a spy.
In Robin’s world, need-to-know was the rule.
His silence seemed to confirm it.
Ulysses winced. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“How much do you want to know?” Robin wondered.
Because you’d tell me the truth? Ulysses mulled that over, wiping a hand over his lips. He didn’t have an easy answer. “How much is there?”
“A cast of characters that stretches back over a decade. Some terrible mistakes we made.” Robin shrugged. “License to kill.”
“Okay. Start there.”
Robin cocked an eyebrow.
It was difficult to get the words out, but Ulysses forced himself. “What’s it like? Wet work,” he added, when what he meant was cold-blooded murder.
A dark cloud settled over Robin’s features.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Are you asking me if I’ve killed or how many?” To Robin’s credit, he didn’t look away.
“Both. Either.”
Robin sucked his cheeks in as though trying not to smile.
“Is it hard?” Ulysses wanted to know.
“At first. As morally bankrupt as you can be, something in you abhors the deed. But you do it because you’re under orders… Then, if anything, it’s surprising how easy it gets. How quickly.” Robin picked at the label on his bottle. “How much…fun. It’s the power to play God. You can’t imagine—”
“Stop.”
Robin jerked up his gaze. “But I wouldn’t. If you’re worried. Not to you. Ever.”
“I’m not.”
“What I do now, it’s… I’m trying to keep that from happening again.”
“You’re in the cover-up business?” Ulysses tried to make a joke of it, but he couldn’t quite disguise the cold stab of fear in his gut.
