The Bear’s Mail Order Menage

Chapter 7

“This isn’t right. I can’t let this happen, can I? No, no, no, it isn’t right at all. Nothing about this is right. Not even a little tiny part of it.”

Alina hadn’t had the faintest clue what to do with herself when Joshua had sent her on her way. Everything that had happened that day was a blur, from practically the moment she had woken up. It seemed to her that every decision she had made had led her down the wrong path and despite her best intentions, things were only going to get worse.

It had all started with her dreams. She had lived through such strange dreams since coming to Charlotte, some sort of lovely and some things she was forced to suffer through. The dreams from the night before, a night that at the moment felt like a lifetime ago, they had been a slideshow of her past.

Those were scenes that fell squarely into the category of nightmare. There were so few good things to reminisce about, so few things that made her feel like she had lived anything worth having before coming to the United States. In her dreams it was just a series of old rickety houses and screaming faces that quickly stretched from human to grotesque.

One awful place bled into another and she was too afraid to move. She cowered in the corner of rooms that changed from one thing to another while she crouched in fear without being able to do anything at all. She was entirely powerless and at the mercy of a life that had never treated her well.

She woke with a gasp, tangled up in sweat-soaked sheets and tears streaming down her eyes. Thank god it had been morning by the time she wrenched herself away from those dreams. If it had still been dark outside she feared she might have actually gone insane. But the sun was out with only the smallest sign of clouds in the sky.

She lay back, her head hitting the pillow again gratefully as she shut her eyes again and pulled the blanket up over her head. She could feel her heart racing in her chest, thumping so violently that she believed it would have sprouted wings and taken off had it been able to. She knew that she was on the verge of a panic attack.

They were something she had dealt with since she was a little girl. She suspected that it might have something to do with the fact that she had never felt safe. That wasn’t just her being dramatic, either. She had never felt safe because she had never been safe and that was something children figured out rather quickly. The result had been these panic attacks.

When she was younger she had been sure that she was having a heart attack every time the panic came on, but over time she had learned to manage. At this point she knew that all she had to do was wait, wait and breathe. If she did those two things she would gradually be overtaken by a blessed sense of calm and everything would be ok.

Slowly, very slowly, she came back to herself and remembered that the place she was in now was not the place she had been in for so much of her troubled life. She was in the oddest town, Charlotte, with people who actually cared for her. At least one person, anyway. Joshua. Joshua with his dark features and sweet heart. His eyes were the eyes she saw when she thought about what it meant to be taken care of. She knew that she could put her heart in his hands and not once have to worry that he wouldn’t tend to it as well as he would tend to his own.

She had thought about it, she really had, about whether or not she should play with fire and take the leap. She knew it might get messy if she contacted Joshua without any pretense of having Andrew involved as well, but she found that it didn’t matter.

Just thinking about him took her from feeling totally despondent to over the moon happy. Because what she realized lying there in her big brass bed was that she loved him. It hadn’t been all that long and she had never loved any person at all, not a single one, but she knew with complete certainty that this man was different. This man she loved.

And so she had sent him a tentative flirtatious text and hidden under the covers again until she got a response to her message. Feeling giddy and vaguely sick all at the same time she had put on her clothes and ordered food, met him at the diner and brought him back home where the two of them were finally together on their own.

It had all felt so perfect to her until she heard the weight of another coming up her back stairs, seen Andrew standing there with a look of utter contempt. That was all it took for everything to go to sh*t. She and Joshua had met Andrew and he had pulled her apart piece by piece. It hadn’t been all that hard. He had found the little loose thread in who she was and begun to pull until she was entirely unraveled.

Now, back in the room she stayed in that no longer felt like her only safe home, she felt like an animal trapped in a cage. Everything that had felt beautiful before now felt like just another bar keeping her in.

“God, what do I do?” she called out with a frank desperation she hardly recognized. There was no answer. There was nobody in this room with her. She was all alone. She began to sob, overwhelmed with making a decision that felt impossible to her. She had never wanted to be a girl like this. She didn’t want to be this woman. She was the woman who had come between two best friends, what she considered to be the worst kind of homewrecker.

“What can I do? What do I do?”

Speaking to an empty room, a beautiful room in an apartment a man she loved had just handed over to her without a second thought. What was she doing here? She had let him lead her out of that diner and into the gravel road where the previously benign clouds had turned threatening. She had looked up into his beautiful, expressive face and see clouds there, too. He had kissed her so sweetly, wiped the tears and the rain off of her face.

“I’m so sorry, Alina. God, I’m so, so sorry that I put you in a position where anything like that could even happen to you. I should never have let that happen.”