The Lion’s Mail Order Menage

Chapter 11

He couldn’t understand it.  He had gone over and over it in his head and he couldn’t understand what could have gone wrong.  Was that what it was always like when something that seemed perfect suddenly came to an end?  He took every detail and turned it over and over again in his head, every moment from when Bella had gotten herself run out of Geno’s joint.  Had he done something?  Had Tyler?  Every single second they spent together played on repeat, every taste and touch, until he was almost positive that he was going insane.  And not the fake, dramatic kind of insane, either.  He was talking “lock you up and throw away the key insane.”

All he had wanted to do was make her breakfast.  Well, that wasn’t true.  He wanted to make her breakfast in bed, which seemed absolutely ridiculous to him now that everything had gone to sh*t.  He had gone down to the corner store with this crazy idea that he was going to cook like a food network king and make her so in love with him that she would never want to be near another man again.

He even got flowers, daisies because he remembered her saying once that they were her favorite and that she never got them when she lived in Moscow.  He had it all planned out down to the way he would arrange the tray he put in her lap but when he unlocked the front door he knew that something was wrong.

He didn’t have to take more than a few steps inside to know it, either.  He could smell Meena’s panic and fear falling all over everything in the apartment.  It was contagious.  He could feel that same panic starting to settle deep inside of his bones.

“Meena?  Meena?  If you’re in here let me know, because I’m starting to freak out a little bit.”

Nothing.  All that was left of her was her scent and after doing a quick assessment of the bedroom, most (but not all) of her clothes.  There was something else there too, some other smell, but he couldn’t make it out.  That alone was beyond frustrating. 

Under normal circumstances, Caleb knew he had the best nose of all of the shifters in his family or Tyler’s. It wasn’t that he was bragging, it was just a fact.  It was his strongest asset, just like Tyler’s bullheadedness was his.  But now, now when he wanted to be able to use it more than anything, all of his senses were taken over by that one, overpowering scent of Meena.  Meena, the only thing he had ever wanted, and now she was gone. 

For a while, he felt like he was completely paralyzed.  He wasn’t usually a man of immediate action, but this was fu*king ridiculous.  He needed to get up!  He needed to do something, not just sit here.  And the first thing he thought of to do once he could think clearly at all was to call Tyler.  Tyler was a lot of things that drove Caleb crazy, but he was also a man of decisive action and that seemed like it would come in handy at a time like this.

“Hey, brother!  What’s the matter, you two bored without me?  I guess if you ask really nice, I’ll come back and find something for us to do.”

“Tyler.”

Times like this, Caleb was glad to have a friend who knew him so completely.  He didn’t have to say anything, nothing but his friend’s name for him to know that this was not going to be a light hearted conversation.  Like flipping a light switch, Tyler was all business.  It was the first little bit of hope Caleb had felt since realizing Meena was gone.  Thank Christ.  He needed all of the help he could get.

“What’s going on, brother?  What happened?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t know if anything happened.  Can you just come over?  I can’t get my sh*t together enough to make sense of this.”

“Make sense of what, Caleb?  I need you to calm down, slow down, and give me some kind of a clue as to what I’m dealing with here.  If you want my help, that’s where you’re gonna have to start.”

“Meena,” he said desperately, feeling a weight on his chest that made it difficult to breathe, “she’s gone.”

“What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

“I mean gone, OK?  She isn’t here and some of her stuff is gone.  And there’s a smell.”

“Smell?”

“She was afraid, Tyler.  Wherever she was going, she was so fu*king afraid when she went.”

“Just hang tight.  I’ll be there soon.”

Caleb hung up the phone and concentrated on sitting as still as possible.  His hands were balled up into fists, clenching and unclenching rhythmically.  If there had been anyone else in the room with him, they would likely have been able to hear his teeth grinding together painfully.  It was taking everything Caleb had not to shift into his lion and rip this place apart before tearing into the streets of New York and wreaking havoc until he felt something other than what he was feeling right now. 

It was the not knowing that was driving him crazy.  Not knowing where she was, not knowing why she was afraid.  And then there was the hardest question.  Caleb didn’t know if she had left because there was something wrong that for some reason she didn’t believe she could tell him, or if she was gone because she didn’t want to be around him anymore.  What if it was him she was so afraid of that she couldn’t even gather her things before she fled? 

He kept going over every little thing he had done with her since she had first shown up at his door.  Like a record on repeat.  That was what it felt like inside of his head.  There was literally no explanation for Meena not being there that was good. The longer he waited here without knowing which sh*tty reason there was for her not being there, the more he needed for Tyler to get there fast.  He needed to get there before Caleb did something he couldn’t take back.