Page 39 of Feline Good

“When you guys went through the boxes, did you find a stuffed cat, maybe a handwritten card?” Eyes darting around the room, Maya stood and tried to decide which box to start with. She didn’t know what had come over her so suddenly, but she wanted to hold that cat in her arms, she wanted to see their handwriting. It didn’t matter that she had their names tattooed in their own scrawl on her arm, she wanted to see the real thing.

Instead, August pulled her to him, hugging her tight and palming the back of her head. “Maya, just breathe, it’s okay.”

It wasn’t until that moment that she realized tears streamed down her face, her sorrow tugging at her chest in gasping breaths. It had been a long time since she had cried for them, for their loss, for her loss. Her mistakes— the last of her family and how she’d betrayed him. A sob ripped from her throat, and she tried to rein in the emotions spinning wildly out of her control, but it was no use.

“Where did you go, Maya?” August asked, hesitancy in his voice, the question pouring from him in a gentle plea, as if it had been weighing on his mind for a while. In that moment, August very well could have been inquiring about her mental state, but with her mind so shocked by that image, Alex was the one that came to mind; how she’d moved out to live with him on a whim. Something she regretted even in that instant.

“I left with him.” She squeezed her arms tighter around August, and Asher came up behind her to tuck his head into her shoulder, their warmth cocooning her. “Uncle Malak dropped everything to take care of me. For all intents and purposes, he became my dad, too. And I just left, as if everything he’d done for me didn’t matter. I even left you guys behind. I’m so sorry.”

She might have spoken the words into August’s chest, but she prayed they carried to Uncle Malak, wherever he was. Unintelligible words fell from her lips, but she at least knew what needed to be said.

“He taught me everything. Once my parents died, he picked up the bar, adjusted his life to make the changes to mine as seamless as possible, almost as if nothing had happened. He trained me to fight, to take care of myself, because at the time it had just been a simple robbery, and he never wanted me to feel helpless again.” She laughed at the irony. If only she had known.

Arms tightening around her, they both let her cry and apologize, offering sweet notions and comforting words as she let her regret manifest into an emotional outburst.

Many tears later, she opened her eyes and sniffed the last of the episode back, finding herself on the floor surrounded by not only two, but all three of her men. At some point, they’d laid out a blanket, and now she lay prone on August’s chest as Amir and Asher caressed her arms and back from each side.

Breathing a heavy sigh, she basked in the silence for a moment, before opening her mouth—

“Don’t you say it.”

Her mouth snapped shut, and she turned her head to Amir with a questioning glance in his direction.

“Don’t apologize for that. You not only needed it, but you need to forgive yourself.”

A simple nod was all she could offer them, her strength fading quickly as if it was sucked from her bones. The silence pressed in on her, becoming too much, and so she shared the vision she’d had the night before, changing the subject and taking her mind off the painful memories. They soaked up the fresh information, tucking it away for future use.

But they didn’t let the distraction last long, as she should have known. Maya had been the one to open that particular can of worms, so she wasn’t all too surprised when they asked her about her past.

“What exactly happened to you during those years you were gone?” Asher questioned cautiously.

Innocent question or not, Maya still flinched when she remembered those years. The Alex years. “I don’t know if we should go into that.” Avoiding their gazes, she looked around the room.

“It’s in the past, I know, but I feel like wherever you went— whatever you did, it made you who you are now, and that’s significant to me. To us.” August spoke the sweet words quietly beneath her, his chest rumbling with the words. Asher and Amir were on either side, stroking her skin and playing with her hair.

A heavy sigh left her. “It’s not pretty.”

Amir’s eyebrows drew low. “It never is.”

Maya gave in, spilling the whole, ugly, terrible truth.

“When I was eighteen, I met this guy.” She grimaced. “That’s how it always goes, right? Anyways... I was obsessed with him. Alex. I thought he was the best thing to ever happen to me. We had so much in common that we clicked right away, and the connection was so... intense, I thought that surely it was love. That he was the one, and I was so lucky to have found him.” Maya waved her hand in the air as if clearing a chalkboard to make room for more history, and she noticed the guys were intent on her story. Thankfully, and hints of judgment appeared to be far from their mind. “He was exciting. I feel stupid now, after everything we did together, everything I did to impress him. Hindsight, you know?” Maya laughed at the irony. “Before you ask, no, I never saw him coming, or going. He was a surprise, which is maybe why I thought it was so real. Because I couldn’t see a damned thing about him when I wove.” More hand waving, and she took a deep breath before continuing. “To please him, I did pretty much anything he wanted, because I wanted to be with him constantly. Couldn’t get enough. If it was midnight and he wanted to see me? Done. I would sneak out, he’d come get me, and we’d abscond to some lame local haunt. I thought I was so cool, I had the coolest guy on my arm, at least in my eyes. The rose-colored glasses I adopted hid everything else from me. So much so, that after I graduated and turned nineteen, I moved out. Against Malak’s wishes and despite his desperate pleas, I still left him.” Barely able to meet their gazes, Maya eyes trailed elsewhere, bouncing between boxes and shadows in the attic. She only caught glimpses of the pain on their faces, and she remembered that they’d been the ones to see him through the end.

That was the part that killed Maya the most, and barbed wire seemed to constrict her throat as she continued her tale, drawing circles on August’s chest for comfort. “What I didn’t know was that Malak had cancer. He’d been diagnosed, and he knew I was making a mistake. But I just moved out and left him there alone. For a guy. A fucking guy. Malak begged me not to leave, but at the time, I thought it was just because he didn’t agree with my choice. Instead, he just didn’t want to—” Maya cleared her throat as a wave of sorrow welled up. “He just didn’t want to die alone.”

A tear escaped, and soon, her entire story flowed out alongside the sobs. How almost immediately, she regretted the decision, but was too stubborn to go crawling back. When Alex went too hard on the drinking, she was there for him to knock around if she mouthed off. Maya skipped over the parts where he’d withheld money until she worked for it, in order to buy them groceries because he hadn’t allowed her to have a job.

His ‘rock star’ career had ended fast, because he wasn’t nearly as suave as she first thought.

When Malak passed, out of the blue, after she turned twenty-one, Alex had even tried to keep her from attending the funeral. That was the day she’d said enough was enough. She’d made use of his newest addiction, sleeping pills, and crushed up a few in his morning beer. He’d been out like a light, and she had packed amid his sloppy snores, and disappeared.

Of course, he knew where to find her and had done just that. Weeks later, he’d hunted her down in her newly owned bar and made a scene. Maya had stood up for herself, bringing that bastard’s head down on her knee, ruining his once flawless face. By that point, she’d seen everything she hadn’t before. His nose was huge, his hair was kept long to hide the receding hairline, and his saggy skinny jeans were worn to hide the fact that he had no ass.

Maya had kicked him out of the bar with a parting curse and filed for a restraining order against him. Since she lived above the bar, he was ordered not to come within a thousand feet of her residence or place of work. With all the images of bruises, hospital bills, and paperwork, the courts had easily agreed that she needed some form of protection.

Oh, Maya could protect herself, but now she didn’t have to, because as much as Alex valued his control over her body, her emotions and even her state of mind, he valued his freedom to piss off, more.

“Thank fuck for that. Now, here I am. Still living above the bar.” Still shut off from anything even hinting at intimacy, at least until these guys.