Chapter Five
MAKAI ROLLEDover in bed and tried to get his brain to quiet down so he could sleep.
After stumbling upon Emil in the shop, Makai felt much better about the guy. In some ways, he felt too good about him. He hadn’t expected to find someone interesting, someone who might just understand some of the shit he’d gone through, not in this town.
Coming out of prison had been one thing. Leaving Missouri with a bag of self-help books his mom had given him—they were her thing, and she thought they genuinely might help him help himself—had been a priority. He hadn’t really given thought to dating or anything like that.
Sure, he knew that his parents had once been happy together. He’d seen love growing up, and he’d fancied himself being in love with she-who-shall-not-be-named. Maybe he had been. Who even knew? But prison and what happened there, and the betrayal from his girlfriend, had pretty much broken the side of him that believed in love, romance, and any sort of physical intimacy.
He’d gone to prison thinking he was straight. He’d come out knowing he was bisexual. At first, he’d thought when a man caught his eye in prison, it had been because there weren’t any women around. After it happened a few more times, he realized he was having crushes of sorts, because the men were always capable, safe, intelligent, and handsome. He’d never had consensual sex with a guy. That was the gist of it, really. He knew he could, in theory, want a male in his bed. He just hadn’t had one positive experience, and anything men had done to him had been… well, he knew what the terminology was, but he didn’t want to think about it, because he didn’t want to see himself any more a victim than the legal system had made him.
Logically, he knew he should’ve tried to find a therapist. Probably not in town, but in Mercer. Someone who he wouldn’t have to see every time he went to get groceries. He just wasn’t ready for it, at least not yet. There were still too many things he needed to figure out for himself and get used to existing in his past and in his psyche before he could talk about it all with a stranger.
Maybe some of it was also pride. His dad had been a strict but fair man, someone unshakable, who had always bottled up the negative and dealt with it somewhere outside the house. It had been a point of pride in Ikaika Stone’s life not to take his problems to anyone, but instead solving them himself.
Makai knew better. He just needed more time.
He rolled over again, pushing his hair behind his ear and sighed. Sleeping wasn’t going to happen, it seemed. He wondered if he should just find a book, when he heard a funny sound.
He peered around in the dim light that came from the cracked open bathroom door and listened.
“Mouse? Is that you?” he asked finally, hearing the sound again.
The cat had abandoned him during his tossing and turning at some point, but now she wobbled into the beam of light and mewed at him.
“Are the babies coming?” he asked, because by now he knew all the different noises that came out of her, whether it be content purring or different vocalizations when she expressed hunger or that her litterbox needed cleaning.
She turned around and walked out of the bedroom. Frowning, Makai pushed his covers aside and got up, an inexplicable feeling making him walk carefully and quietly through the little cottage.
He found her waiting for him in the middle of the living room. She stood there until he put on the lights. As he watched, a tremor went through her round figure.
“Yeah, I think that was a contraction, girl,” Makai murmured.
She meowed quietly, then wobbled to the corner of the room and peered at him again. She vanished—with some trouble as there wasn’t much of a gap—behind the armchair Makai had brought home from a flea market on his trip to Mercer the other day.
She was nesting. He gently pulled the chair from the corner just a bit and moved it so that she had privacy but also more room.
“I think you’ll need a cardboard box for this, lady. Maybe after the kittens are here, we’ll move you. What are you lying on?” He knelt as close as he could get.
She’d somehow managed to drag a T-shirt of his into the corner, and now rested on it, huge belly moving with her labored breathing.
“Oh, sweetheart.” Makai reached a hand into her corner to pet her.
She purred at him, looking like it was just fine to lie in a corner, on a ratty piece of fabric, because it had his scent on it.
Makai felt like he was about to tear up, so he sat there with her until the next contraction passed, then got up and went to find something else for her to lie on. He grabbed two towels and a blanket, then gently moved her enough to be able to put them underneath her. He placed the T-shirt on top and watched as she made herself comfortable again.
“Now that’s better. Let me go make coffee, okay?” He patted her and quickly made himself some instant coffee and a big sandwich. They would tide him over for a while.
At the last moment, he remembered he might need his cell and got it from where it was charging on the kitchen counter. Nobody really called him, so he wasn’t attached to the thing like most people seemed to be these days.
He looked at the time and decided not to wake up Doc Donovan unless he had to. For now, he sent a text, painstakingly typing with the tiny keys of his old-school Nokia phone, his fingers feeling like sausages, to tell the man that the cat had definitely gone into labor and that he’d call him if needed.
A few minutes later he got a text back wishing them luck and to call if anything seemed off.
Makai sat on the floor on another blanket, with his back against the wall, forming an additional shelter for Mouse in her corner. He kept one hand next to her, stroking her fur when she seemed to want it, and otherwise offering the comfort of closeness to her.
He drank the coffee and ate the sandwich, then closed his eyes and listened to Mouse breathing and purring through the contractions.
