The Lion’s Mail Order Menage

“So how come you’re out here?  I thought your parents pretty much knew you smoked by now.  I thought you were done hiding it.  If you aren’t, you should be.  My mom knows and there ain’t a thing she can do to stop it.  She knows it, too.  Wouldn’t dare do a thing to me.”

Caleb knew full well that while that was true, if his father ever found out, he would pop him good.  Not that there was any reason to point that out.  It was an unspoken thing between the two boys that they were both utterly terrified of their fathers, and both for good reasons.  Their fathers were hard, angry men, men who had been cast out of their respective prides, dragging their poor brides along with them for the ride.

Both were lion shifters who had grown up in the same pride somewhere far, far away from the city both Caleb and Tyler had been born in.  The things the boys knew about what had taken place were muddied and confused.  It wasn’t something either man spoke of unless they were so intoxicated that their words slurred together and made little to no sense.

It was something their mothers spoke of, however, practically every time they got together without their husbands being there.  They wouldn’t have dared with the men in the room, or even anywhere in the near vicinity.  They were at least as afraid of their husbands as their boys were of their fathers.  But when the men were away the two women became brave, speaking harsh, bitter words about the men who had dragged them down into the gutter. 

When they knew their husbands would be away for a while, off on business nobody was allowed to speak of, they would break out their own alcohol, relishing the freedom represented by each glass.  Those were the times when they spoke the way they wanted to about their men, and it was never, never kind.  That was why Caleb was on the landing smoking one cigarette after the other.  He couldn’t stand being in there for those gab fests, listening to all of the nasty things they had to say.

It made him feel like an abomination because inevitably the women would get around to discussing the misery of having their two sons.  The boys were constant reminders of the men they hated and when they got drunk enough they loved to remind them that they were nothing more than chains around their necks.  It wasn’t something a kid was supposed to hear, was it?  No child deserved to be told that he was a mistake, that his own mother wished he had never been born.  Especially not a child as sweet and sensitive as Caleb was.  Even thinking about it made him feel a sick, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach, something he never seemed to be able to outsmart or outrun.  Tyler put his hand gently on his shoulder, some of the gruffness he usually sported gone.

“For real, Caleb, how come you’re out here?  My mom over here?  They at it again?”

“Yup.  Been at it for a while now.  Feels like hours and hours.”

“So then they’re good and drunk.  Totally smashed and acting like idiots, I guess.”

“Something like that,” Caleb said glumly, tossing his cigarette over the edge of the landing and watching it sail down to the ground.  It was only half smoked but he didn’t want it anymore.  He just wasn’t interested.  Nothing seemed all that appealing when he got to feeling this way. 

Nothing was going to make any of it any better.

“Well then, you know what I say?”

“Nope.”

“I say the hell with ‘em.”

“What?”

“You heard me,” he said as he tossed his cigarette the same way he had just watched Caleb do, “they don’t deserve you feeling bad.  If they don’t want to be good moms, then fine.  We just have to stop expecting them to be, right?  They may even be sorry someday too, maybe.  Who cares if they are?  We don’t need ‘em.  We don’t need anybody when we’ve got each other.  That’s enough, ain’t it?  At least it’s enough for me.”

Caleb could hear in his voice that it was a difficult thing for him to say.  He wasn’t typically a boy who spoke about anything even close to emotional and he tended to get a little mean directly afterwards, especially if he didn’t feel like the thing he had expressed was reciprocated. 

Caleb practically fell off the landing in his haste to give an answer back.  He would have hated it if Tyler felt like he was being made fun of at all.  Tyler truly hated to be laughed at, or even to have the passing notion that he was being laughed at.

“It’s definitely enough.  You’re right.  Who needs ‘em?  It’s not like they really take care of us anyway, aside from giving us a roof over our heads and half the time we’re all on the verge of being evicted anyway.  The only thing we need that we don’t have is jobs.  If it weren’t for that we could do whatever we wanted to.  I guess nobody would be able to stop us, would they?  Isn’t that right, Tyler?”

“Damn straight it’s right!  And if that’s the thing in our way, why don’t we just go and fix it?”

“What do you mean?  How?”

“By getting jobs, of course.”

“We can’t do that.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Well, because we’re only twelve.  We’re just boys.  Nobody is going to give us a job.”

“That, my friend,” Tyler said with a mischievous gleam in his eyes and a devilish grin on his lips, “is where you’re wrong.”

“But how?  Isn’t it illegal or something?  I’m pretty sure it’s illegal.  You’re not supposed to work before you’re like, fifteen or something.  I only know because my dad says all the time that when I’m fifteen I’ll finally be useful because he’ll be able to send me to work and I can start earning my keep.”

“Well, first things first, your dad’s an asshole, same as mine.  Secondly, who said this job was going to involve the law?”

“What do you mean?” Caleb asked in a wavering voice, his brow furrowing in worry. “You saying the job you’re talking about is illegal?”

“I’m saying what the law don’t know, won’t hurt ‘em.  Come on, brother, I’ve got someone I want you to meet.”

Caleb’s feet were starting to get tired.  He hadn’t wanted his mom to know that he was leaving the apartment and the only thing close to shoes he had out on the “porch” were his father’s slippers, which were still several sizes too big for him.  But there was no way for him to make it through the window and all the way to his bedroom without his mom and Tyler’s mom noticing him, and then he would really have been in for it.