“You don’t need to be sorry; I just need to know what’s going on,” he says, emphasizing the last bit.
“What do you mean?
“It’s been days, Delilah.”
“Very uneventful days,” I say but stare at the pastry. “You aren’t my keeper, Cody. You don’t have any responsibility to protect me.”
“What if I want to?” he asks.
With a slow inhale, I stare back at him and note the darkness under his eyes and the way his right hand rests palm up on the table. As if it’s waiting to be held.
“Any more letters?” he asks and I shake my head easily.
“No letters.” I decide to give him all of the truth from yesterday, but none from the night before. “I kept the monitor and the gun right beside me all day and didn’t leave my place.”
“And nothing?” he questions further, his brow knitting.
“My ass is flat and sore from the way I sat in bed, but no, nothing to report.” I hate the way the lie comes so easily.
“Do you remember the letter from the cases we were on in the beginning?” I ask him, treading into the murky waters with so many unanswered questions. “The ones the article mentioned from that bitch reporter who first got me suspended?”
Cody’s posture changes instantly. He remembers. We both know he does and unlike what I’ve been doing, he doesn’t lie to me. “Yeah. I remember.”
“One of the last FBI task force meetings … do you remember how I had to walk away for a moment?”
“The crime scene photos were awful,” he says and I nod, remembering how the graphic pictures of the victims nearly made me vomit on the spot and I walked off to be alone.
“Right, but it wasn’t because I got sick … I was crying. It was too much, the way the bodies …”
I can’t even begin to think of how he’d left them like that. Cody agrees, “It was brutal.”
“I swore I felt someone watching me back there when I stepped outside to get away from it all.” I dare to confess something I haven’t before when I add, “I thought it was you. I thought you followed me out … but now I wonder if it was him.”
An anonymous tip was left at the station later that night. “He said he’d stop and he did.”
“Yeah.” Cody nods in agreement and remembrance. “They couldn’t find anything on the note. No prints or residue. But they matched the handwriting.”
“After that the case went cold.”
“I remember. It was like he vanished. We knew he hadn’t, though.”
“So many cases went cold,” I say, recalling them all. All the faces of the deceased. It helps that Jill Tucker from the local eleven o’clock news happened to list them all not too long ago.
“We didn’t have the evidence we needed.” Cody gives the same excuse the DA gave. Evidence. It doesn’t matter what happened. All that matters is what we can prove.
“We knew, though,” he says.
“Yeah … we knew.”
When did he start keeping secrets for Marcus? The question echoes in my mind. I wonder if it was then. I swear I felt someone watching me then. It had to have been Marcus.
“I know I asked you before …” I trail off as nerves creep up, weakening my voice and I wish I could take it back, but I can’t. Instead I clear my throat and reach for the dewy glass for a quick sip of water instead of coffee. The cold beads of condensation on the side of the glass make it slip in my unsteady grasp.
“I asked you if there was anything you knew about Marcus that I didn’t,” I remind him and my nails press into the pads of my fingers as I anxiously fidget under the table. Marcus said Cody keeps his secrets. What secrets would he keep from me? Are they about the case? Cases that may get me disbarred if that reporter has her way. Or is it all about his brother. “If there was anything at all that you knew.”
“You did,” he says and I can see there’s more on the tip of his tongue but he swallows it. It wouldn’t have been a revelation. Judging by the look of condemnation on his face, it was an accusation. Probably something to the effect of, after you searched through a box of my dead brother’s belongings. He wouldn’t do that to me, though. He wouldn’t throw it in my face. That’s not the kind of man Cody is.
I wish he would. I wish he’d give me a reason to throw the truth at him just the same.
“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?” I ask him cautiously, reminding myself of the history we have together and the grace and protection he’s given me. “Even if you had secrets with Marcus?” My words are barely audible.
They hang in the space between us, joined by the flashes of memories that dance with shadows and illicit thoughts you’re only ever supposed to dream about, not live.
The waitress comes by with a smile but it vanishes when she pauses at our table, the tension palpable. “I’ll leave you to it,” she murmurs and taps the table. “If there’s anything you need, you just let me know.”
With nods from each of us, she’s gone.
“Even if you had secrets with Marcus, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?” I question him again, unwilling to give it up, and his response determines my next move.
“Of course I would,” he answers and then sips his coffee, but his voice is flat and so is the thud in my chest.
Like it’s given up.
It’s wrong, so wrong. Something is badly fucked up in my head knowing that I trust a beast like Marcus over Cody Walsh.
“I’m going to see my sister this weekend,” I say to change the subject. “And my mother.”
Cody only nods and the silence prolongs itself. There’s only the chatter of other patrons and a ding at the door when someone leaves.
“Did something change?” Cody asks with a hint of pain in his tone.
“It does feel different, doesn’t it?” I respond with my own question, my walls up and solid as stone.
“I don’t know,” he says then shakes his head and huffs, his thumb tapping on the side of the mug in front of him. “I don’t know if you’d even let me kiss you right now.”
Tink, tink, it’s the sound of a lifeline. The moment slowing between us and I’m so very aware that I’m the one left to make the deciding factor.
There’s one reason why I lean in and kiss the man who I’m certain is lying right to my face, as I’m doing to him.
It’s because I want to, because I love him. And more than anything I want him to know that he is loved. Even if we are lying to each other.
I want to pretend it’s only the shadow of a kiss, and that it will stay there on the black and white penny tile of a coffee shop, where our story can change with every new couple who sits in these seats. But it’s not. It’s the bittersweet, sad kind of kiss, the one where you don’t want to move away because it feels so final if you do move.
His lips are soft and his hand cups the side of my head, holding me there. I’m grateful for that, for all of it.
Everything up to this moment has felt like a lie, everything but this kiss and the next words spoke.
With his forehead resting against mine, he inhales in relief but exhales slower.