Page 71 of Zero Divergence
“Never,” Royce had vowed.
Marcus tipped his head to the side and studied Royce. “Promise?”
“Yes,” Royce had replied without hesitation. He might get mad, he might wrestle with feelings of betrayal, but he would always love Marcus. He would forgive his best friend because that’s what you did when you loved someone.
Marcus had risen to his feet, making the boat pitch from side to side. Royce gripped the aluminum vessel with both hands, trying to steady it.
“What are you doing?” Royce had asked.
“It’s time to rock the boat,” Marcus had said, using his weight to make it bob from left to right.
“Cut it out, Marcus.”
“Just listen to the damn tape, Ro. And by the way, I really like Sawyer.”
Marcus dove into the water, leaving Royce floating in the middle of the lake all by himself. That’s when he woke up, his stomach swaying just like the boat had.
Son of a bitch. Some dreams were so damn real. Glancing at the time on his phone, Royce nearly snorted out loud when he noticed it was three a.m. The Devil’s Hour. Oh, the irony. Marcus had been right. It was past time for him to grab the demon by its horns and cast it back to hell where it belonged, then deal with repercussions from hearing Marcus speak his secrets out loud. There’d be no more plausible deniability going forward. Royce snorted. Who the fuck was he trying to kid? It was much too late for that anyway.
Royce quietly opened the bedside drawer and removed the mini-tape player, the cassette box that felt more like a ticking bomb, and Marcus’s cell phone. Royce hoped seeing Marcus’s smiling face would help ease the pain from whatever he discovered about his best friend.
He carried those things to Sawyer’s office and started to close the door, but Bones darted through at the last minute. By keeping the beast close, he wouldn’t wake up Sawyer and rat him out as Bones had done a few weeks ago when Sawyer stayed up too late looking at case files.
The hint of citrusy furniture polish reminded Royce of Sawyer’s aftershave, and he took comfort in the familiar scent. Sawyer wasn’t physically in the room with him, but he still managed to calm the rioting emotions brewing inside Royce.
Bones leaped up on the loveseat next to him. “You’re not supposed to be on the leather furniture,” Royce said, picking the fluffy beast up and setting him on his lap. “And now you no longer are.” Bones purred as Royce scratched his ears, rubbed beneath his chin, and stroked his back.
Bones curled into a ball on his lap after a few minutes, and Royce could no longer justify delaying the inevitable. With a trembling hand and racing heart, Royce removed the cassette from its case and popped it into the player. He blew out a shaky breath and hit play.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been six months since my last confession,” Marcus softly said. A broken sob followed his words.
It had been months since Royce had heard Marcus’s voice, and he expected him to sound like he had in the dream. That was the Marcus he remembered. He stabbed the button to stop the tape as tears filled his eyes. God, how did he have any tears left?Just breathe.After collecting himself, Royce restarted the recording.
Father David spoke in a calm voice as he recited passages by rote, guiding Marcus through a litany of sins, starting with small things like white lies until he reached the big whopper.
“I’ve been unfaithful to my wife, Father David,” Marcus said softly, then began to cry harder. “Candi and I have struggled hard lately, and we fight all the time about everything. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I love her and hurting her is the last thing I want to do.” Marcus groaned. “This is so embarrassing.”
“I can’t help you if you’re not willing to be honest with yourself and God, son,” Father David said.
“I went to a bachelor party two months ago and met a stripper. How cliché, right, Father?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Father David replied.
Bachelor party? Whose? No one in their unit had ever held one at The Alley Cat nor had they invited strippers to a private gathering that Royce had ever attended. For fuck’s sake, Marcus hadn’t even told him this much. The reason for his silence was quite apparent, considering it was where he met Amber, or Crystal, as Marcus knew her.
“It was for my cousin Todd,” Marcus said. “His best friend hosted the party and hired some strippers from a local club to, um, entertain the groom and his guests. I was uncomfortable and pissed no one had warned me what was going down, or else I wouldn’t have attended. Candi and I came to an agreement early on in our relationship that those kinds of activities don’t belong in committed relationships. The idea of some guy rubbing his junk on my wife makes me irrationally angry. What a hypocrite.”
“Why didn’t you just leave, then?” Father David asked sensibly.
Marcus exhaled a deep breath. “I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. It’s one thing to agree with my wife that I had no business hanging out with strippers, but it didn’t mean I wanted the guys to know Candi had me by the short and curlies. Oh, sorry, Father. I didn’t mean to be crude.”
“It’s quite all right, my son.”
“I thought I could just fly under the radar and watch the festivities without getting my hands dirty.”
“Ah,” Father David said. “You didn’t count on the paths your mind took.”
Marcus sighed. “Now, I understand why you’re always telling us that avoiding temptation means not putting ourselves into the path of things that will trip us up. Yeah, this one girl caught my eye. She was the sexiest woman I had ever seen. I wanted to touch her in indecent ways but shield her from the others at the same time.”