The Lions Den

Chapter Two: When the Lion Stalks Downwind

Matteo Leone

It had been three days since I watched Kashera ride away in the back seat of the taxi cab, and still she was the constant occupant of my mind. When I walked into Hooks' office and saw her standing there something seemed different. She was beautiful unlike any woman I'd ever thought about entertaining before, and I could guarantee that wasn't a bad thing. She wasn't the average-typical lack-luster fake that I was sadly used to. Nor, did she try to carry herself as such. Instead, she carried herself like a queen who knew exactly what she wanted and was worth. The moment in which she took my hand and shifted those enticing brown doe eyes into my own without hesitation everything clicked.

When I was of age and I began being interested in girls, my mother waited until my father had the man-to-man birds and bees talk with me before she had one her own. I was about fifteen then, and she knew that I was beginning to take an excessive liking to girls as they were to me. She warned me about playing the hearts and emotions of girls that I knew I cared nothing for because having a scorned woman as an enemy was something I should avoid having at all cost. She told me to have fun, experience life, and be carefree but not reckless. I couldn't afford to do so. 

But the thing that stuck to me was when she told me about love. I laughed it off at first because at fifteen I damn sure didn't believe in love. I thought that if by some rare chance I ever found it, I wouldn't accept it if it wasn't going to be real like the relationship she had with my father. Unfortunately for me, she hauled off and hit me in the head, and I actually listened to the words that would resound loudly in my head the moment I looked into her eyes.

"The gravest mistake that some people make with love is trying to put a time stamp on it. Put conditions, terms, and limitations on it. But you see, when you find that one person who was meant for you and you them you'll know. You may not be able to explain it but something in you will just know. Hell it may not even be love at first, but the inking of it will be enough to shock you. It may come the first time you lay eyes on them, it may come years after, but when you know it you'll feel it and when you do you go for it. Without question, without hesitance, without fear of failure because what is meant to be will be one way or another. It's only about the time you spend trying to fight it that'll prolong the inevitable."

I brushed my mother off at the seams, but on the inside I'd made a vow to myself to love like hell whenever I got that feeling. I was immensely proud to be a cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch, but somewhere in the part of my heart that was kept warm by the hope placed there by my mother, I silently prayed that I wouldn't be condemned to wailing around isolated in this lonely hell. And when I found her, when I saw Kashera standing there in that office I knew she was the woman my mother told me about all those years ago and I wasn't going to run away. I, however, had to wait on her, and considering I'm not the most patient man in the world, this was turning into quite the predicament.

"Hey jackass, you wanna come back to Earth for a minute" I heard Clementine's accented tenor smartly called out as he hit me upside the head. I shot a glare at the bastard that I was forced to call my brother. Why my mother didn't swallow him I'd forever wonder.