Hazed behind the whisps of smoke and oversized sweatshirts from Hollister, Kenji Tanaka is a sassy, sharp-tongued omega, and he meets Meena - the son of a notorious crime boss posing as a legitimate businessman to anyone in law enforcement - who wou...
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Meena gingerly sips at the rasberry-flavored bottle of vodka in his palms. His eyes glazed over with tears, Smirnoff was just blurry smudges of red and white.
He leaned against the dusty-yellow wall — underneath the dim lighting of his bathroom. In pieces, the broken shards of the mirror scattering the polished tile blink back at him.
A layer of blood coated his otherwise bare knuckles — tainting the gold of his rings — but the salt in his throat, suffocating him, prevents him from pressing the button to call anyone.
He couldn't allow himself to collapse in front of prying eyes.
❝What the fuck happened, Meena?❞ Meena's head snapped up to meet the honey eyes of Mustafa scowling down at him. Though his silhouette was hazy, the buttoned shirt tucked into his black jeans, and the fact he and Aafiya solely had a key to his apartment gave him away.
❝I knocked my hand into the wall on accident,❞ he lies to his brother's face.
❝Doing what?!❞ Mustafa practically shouted at him.
❝I was drunk, okay?❞ he chokes out, ignoring the searing pain from the glass scarping his skin.
❝Bullshit,❞ Mustafa accuses. ❝You always hold your liquor better than me.❞
Meena stared at the back of his hands covered in blood. The tears beneath his eyelashes combined with the alcohol in his veins made the colors of crimson and toffee across his bruising knuckles into a kaleidoscope. With every fresh tear that formed in his eyelids, the faces of the kaleidoscope shifted. ❝I'm so tired,❞ Meena whispers. Mustafa raised an eyebrow at his words. ❝I'm goddamn tired of trying so hard to be perfect, to be okay. Honestly, I'm far from it. I'm not even sure what okay is anymore. I can't sleep. I can't stand the silence because my mind is the fucking devil. And above all, I'm scared. I'm scared of shedding the bulletproof vest I slid on years ago, and letting the bullets of everyone's perception of me to pierce me. I've tried so hard to keep myself put together for your sake. You idolize me, but fuck, I'm so tired.❞
❝Meena....❞
Meena falls silent. A soft ping from his phone kills the words in his throat.
shortcake 🍓🤍: please talk to me. I said good morning earlier, and you never replied.
shortcake 🍓🤍: please tell me you're okay. I'm scared, meena.
shortcake 🍓🤍: at least tell me what I did, so I can make it up to you.
shortcake 🍓🤍: you've been ignoring my texts for two days, meena.
🌹🤍🌹🤍🌹🤍🌹🤍🌹🤍🌹🤍🌹🤍🌹🤍🌹🤍🌹🤍🌹🤍🌹🤍🌹🤍🌹🤍🌹🤍
❝How have you been, Meena?❞ his mom muses, her French-tipped fingernails wrapped around the neck of her glass of red wine.
Meena peeks up through his curls — damp from his shower an hour prior — and finishes off his iced coffee before saying, ❝I'm good,❞ he lies. When he was younger, lying to his mother wouldn't have even crossed his mind. After he graduated from high school, though, he and his mom's relationship grew rather distant. Even more when Aafiya and Mustafa enrolled in USM as well. He didn't have much of a reason to visit after that.
Aafiya catches the look of melancholy in his eyes, and her smile fades into the hue of nude on her lips. His stare falls to the egg rolls on his plate instead.
Samir doesn't seem to notice, too focused on stuffing their faces with orange chicken.
And his father definitely didn't pick up the traces of sadness on his face. He was firing off a message on his phone. The sound his fingers made on his keyboard drowned out the silence in the white-walled dining room — that was slowly suffocating him.
But Mustafa's face twists into pain at the lie, now knowing how much hurt Meena was truly in.
❝Well, that's good. Will you three be joining us for Christmas?❞ her voice was quiet. Almost as if she knew the thoughts that kept Meena up at night.
Oh, yes. Christmas. The day they pretended there were no cracks in the fountain of their family.
Meena almost scoffed at the thought of that being a reality.
❝I'm not sure,❞ Meena fills in. ❝I might spend Christmas with a friend or something.❞
❝Are you sure? Meena, it's Christmas. You're supposed to spend it with family.❞
❝Aafiya, Mustafa, and I are planning on spending the 26th together,❞ he speaks.
Palms clammy, he toys with the loose threads in the rips of his jeans; his heart pounded in his chest.
She sighs before facing Aafiya, ❝What about you, Fiya?❞ Aafiya scrunches her nose up at the childish nickname. ❝Are you coming?❞
❝I don't know, ma. Samir can join us the day after if he wants.❞
Breonna downs the rest of the crimson liquid in her glass. Her face fell. But she chooses not to comment.
Instead, she stacks up all the plates before heading into their marble-adorned kitchen to load the dishwasher.
Meena felt guilty, sure, as he gnaws on his bottom lip for a moment, but he just turned twenty. He shouldn't have to force himself to show up for Christmases anymore just to down champagne and listen to his father complain about his major for an hour.
You should major in business like Mustafa, he'd always say, even though both he and Mustafa knew he preferred Meena.
Besides, he's tired of them constantly rousing the topic of him dating — preferably someone that didn't mind being in the public eye.
The Khaled name brought plenty of publicity to anyone they associated with. Anyone dating a Khaled would have their name splashed on pages of the Maine Gazette within a week.
And Meena couldn't stand the thought of putting Kenji in the glass house — with broken windows and paint peeling behind the pristine, beautiful walls — that associating with him would lead to.
He ponders over replying to Kenji, but when Aafiya's name flashes across the top of the screen, he backs out of his messages with Kenji.
Aafiya: are you okay?
Yes, was his only reply. Three letters. Each letter stained with a lie.
Hola loves!
This chapter was surprisingly easy to write, for I already had more than a hundred words of it written, then it came easy from there.
Did you like that Meena finally came clean to Mustafa? Did you like seeing the Khaled family all together for a meal? Can you see Breonna's reasoning for trying to put the broken pieces back together every Christmas? Do you think Meena and Aafiya were fair to decline the invite?
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