The Bear’s Mail Order Menage

Chapter 8

How could things have come to this? Things couldn’t possibly have come to this.

Joshua felt like his body had fractured into more pieces than he could count. Never, not once, had he believed that things could have deteriorated the way they had between him and Andrew. Even when they were at each other’s throats in the diner, in the back of his mind all he could see was Andrew as a six year old little boy with sad, lost eyes and a face full of defiance. Walking down the gravel road up to their warm house where he and his parents had been waiting by a crackling fire.

His mother liked to say that they had known he was coming before he had even arrived and that was why the fire had been going. They had been waiting for the last piece of their little puzzle and as prickly as he was, they had loved him completely from that day on. Seeing his eyes, even now, when he first walked through the door of their family home, it felt like the man he was standing down in the street was a different person entirely.

“You don’t love a damned thing.”

He had actually said those words to the man who was his brother. He had used the darkest things about his past to hurt him. He had wanted to hurt him. He had wanted to rip him apart so that he would never feel whole again. It was the same as kicking him out of the family and he had done it anyway.

It seemed unbelievable and yet it had happened. He knew, looking at him through the pouring rain, that had the two of them actually thought nothing in the world would have been able to stop them. It wasn’t often that there were fights in the town of Charlotte and that was largely due to the fact that everyone knew what the consequences could be.

The fights that had taken place were legends. They were cautionary tales that all of the young ones in the town were told in order to urge them to to find peaceful strategies for resolution. It worked, almost always, but sometimes things got tense and this was one of those times. It was only the waitress who had been there for practically forever coming out and reading them the riot act that had stopped the two men. Joshua looked at him, looked at his friend whose eyes were still the same, and wanted to go to him and make amends but knew it wasn’t possible.

There was a rift that couldn’t be overlooked and that both of them now held a responsibility for. What he and Alina had done was wrong, at least the way they had gone about it, but the things that Andrew had said were borderline unforgivable. And so instead of going to his friend and fixing things he turned his back on him and walked down the road away from his past and towards what he very much hoped would be his future.

That was his one consolation in this crumbling of his world. He knew that Alina was still waiting for him and that he had given her his heart. He knew that he loved her as much as he had ever loved anything and that she was worth fighting for, that she was worth dying for, even. He couldn’t imagine how she must be feeling at the moment waiting for some kind of word while sitting all alone in that apartment. He knew she must be so afraid and when he heard Andrew’s awful words to her ringing in his head over and over again he broke out into a sprint.

He wanted to get to her as quickly as he possibly could, to comfort her as much as he possibly could, given the circumstances. He ran faster and faster, feeling a sick panic rising in his gut thinking about her building sorrow. Nothing would calm his insides until he saw that beautiful face.

When he reached the stairs that had started to signal home for him he began to relax ever so slightly, knowing that she was only a few more feet away. Bursting through the door was like bursting through the gates of heaven, the only way he could sooth the aching rooted in his organs. It was as though his lungs would burst with the joy of saying her name and hearing her call his out in return.

“Alina! Alina, I’m here. I’m so sorry!”

But there was nothing in return. He looked around, feeling childish in his complete and overwhelming sense of letdown. He looked around wildly, half expecting her to jump out from behind the couch or something. Maybe she was playing some strange kind of prank, trying to lighten the mood after the day the two of them had just had. He could still see the place where the two of them had given into the passion they could no longer deny and for just a split moment, he imagined that he could see her there waiting for him. But no, that wasn’t right. She was nowhere that he could see. In the kitchen? In one of the back rooms, perhaps?

“Alina? Baby, it’s ok now. He’s not here. We didn’t hurt each other. Everything is going to be ok, I promise. It’s safe for you to come out.”

Still nothing. He couldn’t hear a thing except for the low hum of the fridge and the patter of raindrops hitting the window screens angrily. But she had to be here. What else could have happened to her? He would have notice if someone had followed her or attempted to do her some kind of harm. Right? I mean, wouldn’t he? So there had to be some explanation. She had to be in here some place, he just hadn’t yet figured out where.

But then he saw it. It was such a small thing that it could easily have been overlooked, except that one of the windows was open and there was a fairly substantial breeze flowing into the place. It was that breeze that caused the stiff paper pinned to the roll-top desk to ruffle in the wind, which was the only reason it caught Joshua’s attention at all. When he saw it, his stomach sank and acid moved up into his throat.

He hadn’t read it yet, but somehow he knew that what that note would contain wouldn’t be anything good. It sat there, an ill omen, and he knew that it was going to change things before he took another step. He knew it so completely that he was almost overwhelmed by the urge to just turn and run right back out and down those stairs. He would keep running until something in him gave out and forced him to stop. If he could do that, if he could only keep running, maybe everything would somehow come out ok.