The Bear’s Mail Order Menage

“You?” she said with a voice that was completely dumbfounded, “You think you were responsible for this? How could you, in any way at all? You’ve been nothing but wonderful from the moment I met you. You must know that. It will break my heart if you don’t.”

“Well I don’t want to break your heart, but I should have known how angry he would get if he found out we were spending time together. I shouldn’t have let that happen.”

She reached up one shaky hand and smoothed the hair out of his face. His eyes shut briefly at the touch of her skin and, just for a moment, Alina was hit with a flash of what their life would look like if they could do this every day without fear of judgement or retribution. What a lovely life that would be, so tender and sweet. But then Joshua’s eyes opened again and the storm was still there, and she knew the crisis was far from averted.

She felt this sudden sense of blind fear that they needed to get out of there as quickly as possible before things got so out of control that they could never be recovered. She knew that could happen faster than most people could imagine.

“Let’s just go, ok? Let’s just go, Joshua. We don’t have to stay here. You don’t have to go back in there and talk to him anymore. We could each just pack a bag and make an adventure out of it. We’ll live like we’re characters in a nineteen sixties beatnik novel. It will be wonderful, yes? I can’t think of anything more wonderful than that.”

“I can’t do that, Alina,” he said so quietly for a moment she convinced herself she hadn’t heard him say anything at all, “I wish I could, but I can’t. There’s no way.”

“Why not?” she knew the answer and she knew she must sound pitiful and desperate in asking the question, but she couldn’t help herself. She wanted so badly for the two of them to pick up and run away together.

“Because, honey, I’ve got roots here. They may not all be roots I like, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. If I just took off without any kind of explanation it would break my mother’s heart.”

“I know.”

“And after Cali, well, I don’t think she can handle another heartbreak. My mom, it almost killed her. If I took off and all that was left was Andrew acting the way he is now it would be too much.”

“I know. Of course you can’t do that. Just be careful, ok?”

“Always.”

“And Joshua? Don’t let me be the thing that breaks you and your brother apart. Mend things with him. Do it however you need to.”

“I’ll do my best. Now go home, will you? Go back to the apartment and I’ll be there just as soon as I can.”

She nodded, not entirely sure that she would be able to answer him if she tried to speak. She had done exactly as he said, feeling drunk and sick in more ways than one. Nobody had bothered her on her trek back to her place. Nobody seemed to be around. Everyone had some place else to be, or they were at the diner watching the showdown between the two men who had been as close as possible for all of the days before this one.

She stumbled up the steps that had led Andrew to his awful discovery and burst through her front door, half expecting the two of them to both be in there waiting for her with smiles on their faces and a devious delivery of the exact details of their elaborate hoax.

But there was no one, not a living soul, and everything that had once looked so bright and hopeful now looked anything but. She couldn’t even sit on the furniture anymore. Every single piece held a memory and every memory was piercingly painful. Instead she sat cross legged in the middle of the floor with her arms wrapped around herself, rocking back and forth and humming a sad little tune from her childhood. She needed to make a choice. She needed to do something, even if it was difficult.

Besides, she knew that it wasn’t the doing that was hard so much as it was the deciding to do the thing. And although she was working very hard not to admit it to herself, she had already made her choice. She knew what she had to do and with a choked sob she pulled herself up off the floor. She went to the old roll top desk Joshua told her had belonged to his grandmother and sat at the little iron stool she had grown so fond of. She pulled out a piece of crisp, thick paper and a sharp black pen and then froze. What was she supposed to say? What could she say that would possibly soften the blow of what she was about to do?

Joshua,

There isn’t anything I can say to make you understand the way that you have changed me. You’ve given me hope that people can be other than what they appear. You’ve given me hope that there is good in the world. You’ve taken care of me when nobody else in the world thought to. I owe you the only lovely things that have happened in my strange life. I wish I could stay with you, that I could maybe even grow old beside you in this town or any other, but it is clear to me that it is not to be. Love your brother. I will not be the thing to spoil that. Just know that I will think of you, wherever I go and for the rest of my life. I wish I had gotten up the courage to say it when we were face to face, but I love you. Carry that with you in your pocket and pull it out on a rainy day.

Your Love,

Alina

As Alina finished her letter a solitary tear hit the page beside her signature. It was laughable, how cliché it looked. It almost drove her to crumple the letter up and throw it out of the window, but she couldn’t stand the idea of Joshua coming home and finding himself completely alone. It would be too awful and she couldn’t let it happen. So she left the letter just as it was, placing a little trinket on top of one corner to keep it from being blown off of the desk and lost somewhere in the commotion of life.