The Lion’s Mail Order Menage

But not Caleb.  Caleb seemed a lot closer to a poet than a gangster.  But there was no reason for him to lie to her about a thing like this and so it must be true.  Not that she was judging him.  She was the last person to judge another for the questionable life decisions they made.  She knew all too well how easy it was to wind up in a place you never expected to be and how difficult it was to claw your way up out of it once you landed yourself in a pit.

“I understand if you don’t want to be around this.  Lord knows you’ve had enough of it already, from the sound of it.  If you want to go, to make your own way, I’ll understand.  I won’t try to stop you.  Hell, I’ll help you the best I can and if Tyler has a problem with it, I’ll take care of him, too.  All you have to do is say the word.”

“No,” she said softly, not even feeling the need to think about it if those were her two options, “thank you, but no.  I’ll stay.  I would like to stay, if you’re OK with having me here.  Is that alright?”

“Of course it is!  I mean yes, I would like that.  I would like that a hell of a lot.  I just wanted you to know.  He’s not a bad man, Geno.  He really has taken care of us.  He’s gotten us out of scrapes that would more than likely have destroyed our lives without his intervening.  I don’t know. 

“I guess it sounds like a crock of sh*t to you, but maybe not all gangsters are created equal, you know?  Maybe some of them are decent men who just saw that as their best option. I know that must sound like such a cop-out to you.  I just can’t help thinking that there might be some truth in it.”

“No, I don’t think it’s a cop-out.  I believe that what you say is very probably right.  After all, none of us is wholly good or wholly bad, isn’t that so?  I believe we all live more in the grey than anywhere else.  It’s just which spectrum of the grey we lean more towards.  I don’t know.  Maybe that sounds silly to you.  Maybe I’m not making any sense.”

She looked into his eyes and for a moment she thought she had said something wrong.  His expression was one she couldn’t quite read but it looked like there was a storm raging inside of him, one that she feared she might have helped to create.  Maybe now he would change his mind about her.  Maybe now he wouldn’t want her to stay, and would send her to someone else, or worse, decide to send her back to Victor, after all. 

But then he was leaning in towards her and she realized that the storm she was seeing was of a different nature entirely.  His hands moved into her hair and he pulled her in close, his breath quickening and his heart beating so hard in his chest that she could hear it, the way one would hear the distant beating of a drum.  Then his lips were on top of hers and she felt like she was falling, sinking into his body and the sweet taste of his tongue sliding into her mouth. 

Meena had been kissed many times before, more times than she cared to think about, but none of them had been like this.  She couldn’t quite say why, couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she thought it might have something to do with desire.  She had been desired physically by many, many men, but this was desire of a different nature.

She could tell by the way Caleb was touching her that he actually liked her.  He wanted her and he wanted her for more than just her body.  He wanted to get to know her, to protect her when and how he could.  They were two broken people, she and him, two broken people who may have finally found something to help them do more than just pass the time.  She could see how the two of them could start to heal each other, to make lives that made a little more sense than the ones they had before. 

Things might be perfectly lovely if it weren’t for the fact that there was a whole other person involved.  Tyler was going to make things more complicated.  There were probably many things that would make things more complicated before it was all said and done, but no matter what happened after this, Meena knew she would always have this sweet moment where a boy kissed her because he just couldn’t wait anymore. 

That was enough to keep some of the clouds away, she was almost sure of it.  When he finally pulled back he had a rather sheepish smile on his face and Meena started to laugh.  It was funny for two people coming from their particular backgrounds to feel as shy as they seemed to be now.  But they would get better at it.  They would get more and more comfortable until it felt as natural as breathing.  At least she hoped so.

“OK,” he said with a slightly shaky breath, “now that I got that out of my system, can I ask you a favor?”

“Another one?  Yes, I suppose you can.”

“I wish I could say it was going to be the last one,” he said with a laugh that made her smile right along with him, “but I can’t say that it will.”

“Alright, go ahead.”

“He wants to meet you.  Geno, I mean.  I was supposed to bring you to him tonight.  Well, pretty much now.  We’ll get there later than planned, if you say you’ll come, but that’s just going to have to be enough.  Will you do it, though?  Will you come and meet him?”

And so Meena had agreed to go and meet yet another mobster, just another man on a long list of men she should never have met to begin with.  But Caleb had been right, this was a very different experience than any of the ones she had been through in Moscow.