Afterward, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.
These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.
Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.
The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar
and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.
Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when
the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self
lay lightly down, and slept.
After Love
By Maxine W. Kumin
It wasn't the words on the papers that made her blood boil. It wasn't even the fact that the papers had been thrown on her desk while she had been out at lunch with little Kazuhiro. It was the fact that he didn't have the decency to give her the papers himself.
It was the fact that after almost six years of marriage, he was not man enough to come tell her face to face that he wanted a divorce.
In all truth, it was a long time coming. What they had, had never been love. They had common interests. They had the ability to tolerate one another. They had the human desire to be held in the dark of night. When Kazuhiro was born, he gained an heir and she gained someone who she could finally bestow the full force of her love upon. Kazuhiro had been exactly what his parents had needed.
But once they had him, they realized several things that they had been pretending not to miss from their relationship.
When Kazuhiro had asked for a little brother or sister, his father walked out of the room. His mother had looked at him with tears in her eyes and gone to sign him up for a playgroup in the hopes that having friends would diminish his desire for siblings.
When Kazuhiro said goodnight to his parents, he asked why they didn't hold hands like his friends' mommies and daddies did.
When Kazuhiro did well in school, he asked why mommy and daddy arrived to the award ceremonies separately.
Their son's innocent remarks were daggers in Reiko's heart. She wanted so badly to make his life everything that it should have been. She went as far as going off of her birth control and trying to seduce Seto into having his way with her. She tried to wait for Seto to come home before putting Kazuhiro to bed. Or before taking him to the movies, or the zoo, or to playgroup, or any other place where parents would usually travel together.
When Kazuhiro saw his parents, he did not see any love between them. For being so young, he was very perceptive.
Little Kazuhiro was almost five years old now. Reiko was on the eve of her thirty-second birthday. So much time had passed and yet so little had changed. Reiko dialed a familiar phone number, trying to keep her anger under wraps until she was face to face with Seto.
"Mokuba here." She sighed as Mokuba picked up promptly – a habit that he'd learned from watching Seto for years.
"Hey Mokuba, uh …" Reiko suddenly felt awkward. She had just received news of her husband filing for divorce and the first person that she had called had been her brother-in-law. Not her mother, not her father, not any of the few friends that she had left.
She put her head in her hands and put the phone on speaker. The full force of what was happening crashed over her like a cold, cold wave.
"Oh God, he went through with it, didn't he?"
Reiko looked up at the phone; she gawked as though Mokuba was sitting right in front of her.
"Fuck Reiko, I'm so sorry. He, well he thinks that Kazuhiro – "
She let out a snarl and Mokuba stopped talking. "He doesn't know what's best for Kazuhiro. He has no idea that all the little boy wants is to see his mother and father together. "
Mokuba was quiet for a moment, but when he finally spoke up, Reiko wished he hadn't. "But Rei, Kazuhiro knows that you and Seto have problems."
It was then that a sob finally broke through and she felt like she was choking. Fuck. He was going to ruin her life. Fuck. She was going to lose her baby boy; there was no way Kaiba was going to let go of his heir.
When she finally regained control of her voice, she told Mokuba what she had intended to tell him from the start. "Please pick up Kazuhiro from his playgroup. He gets out in an hour and I told him that I would take him to the movies tonight, but …"
"No worries Reiko, I've got it covered. I'll make sure that he doesn't hear or see anything. Seto is being really careful about all this." He paused for a long moment before adding, "He really thinks he's doing the right thing."
She ended the call without saying goodbye. Mokuba had always been so proud of his brother, of course he couldn't see the selfish reasons behind the divorce. Reiko didn't want to be the one to break it to him, but she knew that he'd find out soon enough.
Seto's affairs were never very secret. They started almost immediately after he found out that she was pregnant. Up until now, they hadn't really been a problem for her. Seto was classy and he knew how to keep his paramours under the table and out of the eye of the paparazzi. It did help that Reiko was a main consultant for all of the Kaiba Brand PR and was able to filter out the messages being sent to the media.
She saw his slip-ups though. These had started recently. She was sure that this latest woman was the reason for her divorce. Seto was being careless now. He didn't change his shirts before coming home from the "office." He didn't brush his teeth after his escapades with that vile woman. She had found a pair of lacy underwear in the limo when she and Kazuhiro were being driven to the airport to go visit her parents. She noticed that the money in their joint accounts was being spent on frivolous things in negligee shops and expensive dinners all around Japan, cars, clothes, makeup and jewelry, the overpriced penthouse in downtown Domino – all the pretty things that men bought women when they were in love and wanted the world to know.
She noticed, but she put a smile on her face and went to bed next to him every night and woke up next to him every morning. She put up the front for Kazuhiro. The little boy idolized his father. He adored his mother. She didn't want him to lose that beautiful image all because she was distraught and unhappy.
In all truth, deep down inside, Reiko wasn't angry at Seto for finding true love. She was jealous. The jealousy spilled over from her heart and her mind. It invaded her organs. It permeated every part of her life. She was jealous that after this failed marriage – if it could even be called that – he would still be able to have his happy ending. Her own happy ending had run away so long ago.
Reiko wiped away her tears. She didn't want Seto thinking that she was crying about him or about the fortune that she would lose when she no longer lived in his mansion and shared his bank account and name. She was crying because she was going to lose Kazuhiro. Without Kaiba paying the bills, she had nothing to offer him. She had no doubt that she could find a great job – especially with her expansive resume – but she would never come close to the amount of wealth that Seto had inherited and built up.
She called her driver and informed him that she needed to be picked up from the satellite office she worked at inside of KaibaLand and driven to Seto's office at the main KC building.
Her black Christian Louboutin pumps clicked on the polished floors of the KC lobby. Her gait was quick and determined and the stupid girl behind the main desk of the lobby was frantically whispering into the phone at the front desk, "Mrs. Kaiba is here."
And then she swiped her badge and the elevator doors closed. It was just her and the crappy music that some idiot had chosen and the thick manila envelope that contained her divorce papers and a copy of her pre-nuptial agreement.
She made it out of the elevator doors and past the executive boardrooms and Kazuhiro's improvised playroom and into the lobby-type waiting room that preceded Seto's office. The secretary that guarded his double doors was fumbling with her words – she must have noticed Reiko's uncharacteristically serious expression.
"I'll just let Mr. Kaiba know that you're here …"
Reiko pulled off her black Prada sunglasses and looked her in the eye, "It's alright, I'll let myself in."
The woman balked, her eyes going from the door to the office and Reiko. She stepped forward and around the desk, her footfalls muffled by the plush carpet and scanned her badge at the doors and heard the satisfactory sound of the door automatically unlocking.
Reiko had prepared herself for a variety of scenarios. She expected to find him with his lover, no doubt. What she couldn't decide was what exactly would be going on between them. Would they be going at it? Would they be expecting her? Or would they be doing something completely normal and boring and couple-like, like watching TV or just talking?
One swing of the door and she realized that all of her assumptions were wrong. Her soon-to-be-ex husband was sitting behind his desk. He wasn't furiously typing into his laptop or messing with new technology or sorting through proposals or financial reports. He was sitting with his hands folded, staring directly at the double doors.
He was waiting for her.
"Mokuba called me."
She smiled at his statement, at the loyalty between brothers. Of course Mokuba had called.
"Well then, you know what I'm here about then." She had finally made it to his desk and had taken the seat directly in front of him. She noticed that her hands were trembling, but she tried to cover it up by folding them neatly in front of her.
"Yes, and I want you to know that I'm willing to completely honor the prenup –" he stopped when Reiko lifted her gaze to meet his and he saw the look in her eyes. They might not have been in love, but they had spent a significant amount of time together and he could see that she was distraught. It caught him off guard and his neatly prepared little speech crumbled.
His instinct was to get up and put a hand on her shoulder, lean over the desk and brush the hair back behind her small ears. Instead, he narrowed his eyes. This was his place of business and, unfortunately, this was a matter of business now. He tried to continue his speech, his resolve slowly coming back and then dissolving anew when he heard Reiko sob.
Reiko had her face in her hands; her shoulders were trembling with the force of the sorrow inside of her. Seto cleared his throat and she wiped her eyes with a tissue from his desk, meeting his azure gaze with her glassy brown one.
"Look, Seto, I know that there was never any real love between us." She paused to regain some more of her composure. "But I love Kazuhiro with all my heart."
He squared his shoulders at her comment; he wasn't going to let her take his son.
"I'm not going to ask for full custody of him," she whispered. "All I want is to be able to see him whenever I want. I want to be the only person you consult when making decisions that will affect how he is being raised and how he will grow up."
Seto's neck tightened. It was a small detail, something that most people never picked up on, but Reiko had. It meant that he was not happy, but that he was holding it back – he was willing to hear her out.
She leaned forward in her seat, momentarily encouraged, "I want him to live with you because I can never offer him what you can, I can never give him the opportunities that you can. But I am still his mother and I want to be in his life." She locked eyes with him. "I don't want another woman raising my son."
For the second time during the meeting Seto was taken aback, but this time he was unable to mask it before she noticed. "How …?"
She smiled wryly. "Oh Seto, you're my husband. I've spent so much time with you, I know."
He frowned for a moment. "Fine. So you know that there is someone else. That's not to say that you've been fully committed to our relationship. From the start your heart has belonged to someone else."
It was Reiko's turn to gape at him. He had noticed that she was unhappy. It was a strange concept to have her unhappiness, her immortal loneliness thrust out into verbal conversation. She'd been holding it in for so long.
"That doesn't mean I didn't try my best, Seto."
He nodded at her before pulling a document from his desk drawer.
"Alright, here is the prenuptial agreement. You said you don't care about it, but I am still legally bound to honor this unless you sign here to state otherwise." He paused to observe the emotions flying across her face. "Even if you do sign this, there are some things that I want you to have regardless of the contract that we signed."
Reiko looked up at him, stunned that Seto Kaiba was offering her any of his limited generosity.
"I have a list here, separate from the original document. I want you to keep the car that I bought you when Kazuhiro was born; you'll need a safe way to transport him when you do have him. I want you to keep the apartment that you've been paying rent on for all these years, and if it is necessary, I am willing to pay the rent for the apartment until you find a well-paying job. You will be keeping keys to the mansion and the closed-circuit cell phone that I got you so that you can stay in contact with Kazuhiro. Obviously, you'll need to notify me before coming into the mansion, unless it is an emergency."
He looked up at her, the piercing blue eyes that belonged only to him looking deep into her. She nodded and opened her mouth to speak. "I am willing to agree to this, as long as you are willing to agree to some of my own requests."
He repressed a scowl and nodded. "Name them."
"I want to meet her. I want to be there when Kazuhiro meets her. And, most importantly, I want you to explain to him about the divorce before this all gets out of hand."
Seto frowned at her last request and gritted his teeth. "Done."
I just want to apologize for taking so long to get this out - I'm completely swamped with end-of-the-year papers. As soon the next couple of weeks go by I'll be able to get back to more regular updates :) Promise!
I dedicate this to CraftyLion for being so sweet and reviewing :)
Enjoy and review please - I will love you. Forever. :)