The Lion’s Mail Order Menage

She was perfect, better than Tyler had any right to expect, and he felt suddenly very shy.  He wanted to greet her, to move forward and shake her hand, but part of him was convinced that he would trip over his own feet and go sprawling before he ever got close enough to try.  It was only the condescending look on Caleb’s face that moved him to action and even then he had to concentrate the way a toddler would on putting one foot squarely in front of the other.  When he made it, he extended a hand, one she just looked at instead of taking, and he cleared his throat, feeling like a total idiot.

“Hey there, how are you?  Sorry about all of the noise.  I guess I’m kind of an impatient guy.  My name’s Tyler, by the way.  And I’m sorry to say, I don’t have a clue what name you go by. I guess they never included that in the information.”

“Meena,” she said in a soft, silky voice that sent shivers up his spine, “my name is Meena.  Thank you for bringing me here, to this city.  It’s impressive.”

Tyler felt his jaw drop open and he knew it probably made him look like a total moron, but he couldn’t help it.  Her voice was like a cat’s purr and her English was absolutely perfect.  She was a knockout and he couldn’t for the life of him understand why anyone would ever put her up on a website instead of trying to keep her for himself.

It didn’t bother him any, however.  That asshole’s loss was his gain.  And at this point he was getting pretty damned excited.  If this girl Meena was this much of a home run, he couldn’t wait to see what her friend was like.  He looked around for her, figuring that if he had missed this chick upon first entering it wasn’t out of the question that he would also miss seeing her friend, but he didn’t see anything else out of the ordinary aside from the massive suitcase beside the couch with the smaller one tied on top.

How a girl as small as this Meena managed to navigate that bag through the city was beyond him.  She couldn’t have done it alone, could she?  No, the other girl must have helped.  But where the fu*k was she?

“Hey guys, just let me know if I’m being a total jackass, but where’s your friend?  I’m pretty sure I ordered two of you guys.”

As if following a cue she had been told was hers, Meena began to cry the moment he spoke the words.  She buried her face in her little hands while her body shook with silent sobs.  Caleb shot him a dirty, exasperated look before sitting next to her and gingerly placing an arm around her shoulders in comfort.  The entire scene had changed dramatically in only a few seconds and Tyler just stood there, utterly bewildered and more than a little bit frustrated.

“What the fu*k?  Am I missing something here?  Because you two both seem to know something I don’t.  If it’s all the same to you, I think I’d like to be let in on the secret.”

“I-I’m so sorry.  I don’t know what to say.  I don’t know what happened, or how it happened, only please.  Please, don’t send me back.  I can’t even imagine what he’ll do to me if you send me back.”

“Wait.  What?  Slow down, sweetheart.  I still don’t have a clue what’s going on here.”

“Her friend,” Caleb answered softly, stroking Meena’s hair lightly as he spoke, “she left her.”

“What do you mean she left her?  Who left who?”

“The girl Meena was supposed to come here with.  They weren’t strangers or anything.  They were roommates back in Moscow.  They were best friends and they flew here together, sitting side by side.  Only when they got to LaGuardia she went to take care of some things and then never came back.  Meena finally had to make her way here on her own.”

“Well, did you wait around for a while?  LaGuardia is a big place, sweetheart.  Maybe she just got lost.  Hell, you don’t know.  Maybe she’s still just wandering around looking for you, still just looking for you in the crowd.”

Tyler had honestly been trying to help but he quickly saw that he hadn’t done anything close to that.  Meena’s face grew hard as stone, her eyes cold and guarded and her mouth pursed tightly.  Caleb rolled his eyes and smacked himself on the forehead, clearly finding it hard to believe that Tyler had been dumb enough to say a thing like that.

Thinking about it, Tyler was a little surprised as well.  He wasn’t exactly known for his tact, but even for him that last comment was unforgivable.  What exactly was he trying to do, convince her that her friend was in trouble somewhere because she had given up on her too soon?  Nice.  Real nice, Tyler.  No wonder Geno called you a fool.  And you certainly did seem to be doing your part to live up to the observation, didn’t you?

“Sh*t.  Sh*t, I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean it like that.  I wasn’t trying to say you just walked off and fu*ked over your friend.  I just meant that maybe she wasn’t in any kind of trouble or anything.”

“I don’t think she is in trouble.”

“You don’t?  Then why were you crying?  What is it that you do think?”

“I think she’s gone because she wants to be gone.  I should have seen it.  She said such strange things before we came here, things about how she wouldn’t always be there to take care of me and see that I didn’t put myself in terrible situations any longer.  I should have known what she was planning but I didn’t see it because my head was so turned by the prospect of coming here.”

“But why would she go?”

There was that look of condescension again, such a withering look that it made him wish he could just melt into the floor and make this introduction over again.  This was definitely not going the way he had planned.  It had never even occurred to him that out of the two of them Caleb might be the one to play this thing smoothly.

“Why would she go?  I think you are asking yourself the wrong question.  I think you should be asking yourself why she wouldn’t go.  She went so that she wouldn’t have to belong to another person any longer.  She went to have the chance to be her own person again.  She did not tell me because I am weak.  I would not have been able to do what she has done.”

“Is that why you’re crying?  Because you’re sad that she left you?”

“No, that’s not why.  At least not all of it.”

“Well then, what was it?”

“I cry because I’m afraid of what you will do to me when you see that instead of two girls you got only me.  I’m crying because I do not want you to hurt me, or to send me back to Victor so that he can hurt me even worse.”

Tyler had zero idea what he was supposed to say to that.  He was a young man but a man who had seen far more violence than most men saw in their entire lifetime.  That being said, it hadn’t even crossed his mind that this woman would be worried that she could be abused for something her friend had done.  Whoever this man was she had come from, this Victor, he was a bad fu*king guy.  Even if he never saw Meena again after this night, he was glad that his rash actions had taken her away from him and whatever kind of sadism he had in mind.