At the word friend my chest constricted and my balls tightened. It was an odd sensation. Part nerves, part anticipation. All unfamiliar to me.
“A friend?” Curiosity had replaced Heather’s confusion. I could almost see her squirming about on the neon-pink shag-fabric swivel chair that held pride of place in her dorm room. “More details, please. If I’m going to be looking after your cherished pet, I need more than just a friend. Is this the friend you followed to the US a few years ago?”
“I’ll leave the spare key to my apartment in my letterbox,” I plowed on as I shoved aside a pile of sweatpants from the bottom of my closet, searching for my suitcase. Nope. Not there. “Just three pieces of food once a day. Don’t believe him if he makes out he’s still hungry after that.”
“Are you really going to the States, Brendon?”
I stopped my hunt for the elusive suitcase. In my chest, my heart was thumping faster than normal. Heather rarely called me Brendon. It meant she was serious. Heather rarely did serious. I owed her an explanation.
“Yes, I’m really going,” I said, closing my eyes for a moment. An image of Amanda filled my head straight away. Amanda smiling at me, a promise in her eyes I’d stopped believing in a long time ago. “And yes, it is the friend I followed to the States a few years ago. Amanda Sinclair.”
“Amanda,” Heather repeated, something akin to aggression in her voice. I don’t know why. Sometimes I have no clue the whys of the female mind. “That’s it. So, she wants to have another go at you, does she?”
The censure in her voice threw me. And the venom.
“I take it you don’t approve?”
A soft noise sounded through the connection. “I don’t. You may not remember what you were like when you came back from chasing after her the last time, but I do. And since then, you’ve become my friend. And I don’t like it when my friends are hurt.”
I swallowed. My throat felt thick. Like someone had stuffed it full of sand.
“I’m not going to get hurt, Heather. I’ve moved on from Amanda. Tried to get Maci in the sack, remember?”
Heather grunted. “Fine. I’ll feed your fish. But if you come back all gray and limp and broken and mopey like you did the last time, I’m going to beat the crap out of you and take No Direction away. Do you understand?”
“Deal,” I answered.
There was no way I was coming back from the US in that state. I had moved on. The only reason I was rushing to see Amanda was because we’d once shared something amazing and she clearly needed my help now. I was happy to give her that help. It didn’t mean I was expecting her to give me my heart back while I was there. I wasn’t even after her heart. She was the past. She wasn’t a part of my plan for the future.
Sure, I hear you say, that’s why you just maxed out your credit card with a plane fare your bank manager wouldn’t approve of.
“Okay.” Heather didn’t sound convinced. “When’s your flight? Do you need a lift to the airport?”
I glanced at the radio alarm clock on my bedside table. “Flight’s in three hours.”
Peals of laughter followed the statement. “Oh man,” Heather cackled. “Yeah, sure, you’ve moved on.”
“For that, you can drive me to the airport,” I said, returning to the search for my suitcase. “I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”
Twenty minutes later, after sending Amanda a text informing her of my flight details and staring at my phone for a reply that never came, I climbed into Heather’s beat-up, dubiously reliable hatchback. My passport pressed to my butt as I settled into the front passenger seat. In the boot was my gym bag, crammed full of whatever clean clothes I had at hand. My suitcase, it seemed, was AWOL.
Heather took one look at me and rolled her eyes. “You are so going to get your heart handed to you again, you know that, right?”
“Shut up, Heather.” I buckled in, wriggling into the seat – I wasn’t built for such a small car – and pointed at the dawn-tainted road ahead of us. “Drive.”
She drilled me the whole way. It wasn’t until I said, “I don’t know” for the umpteenth time that I realized just how out of character I was behaving, how many of my own questions were unanswered. Questions I hadn’t been able to ask because I hadn’t been able to talk to Amanda.
Holy crap, I was flying to American without actually talking to the person I was heading over to see. What the—
“We’re here.”
I blinked myself back into the interior of Heather’s car. Or rather, the exterior. Huh. Between all the I don’t knows to Heather’s interrogation, we’d arrived at Sydney International.
My heart slammed into my throat, a place it never ventured. The only real time my heart made itself known to me was when I was doing fifty-calorie-burn sprints on the assault bike. Going to see Amanda was nowhere near as grueling as that.
Drawing in a slow breath, I waited for Heather to pull to a halt outside the Departure terminal. “Thanks.” Before I could open the door, she grabbed my wrist. Hard. Man, I really needed to reassess her upper-body workouts.
“Listen, Osmond,” she said, fixing me with a steady stare. Heather and steady weren’t usually a thing. It was both jarring and oddly sweet. “I know you’re this big strong guy who prides himself on rolling with life and not letting anything bring you down, and to be honest, you’re pretty much the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a person living in perfect peace with himself, which is incredible.”
I grinned at her compliment.
She didn’t grin back. In fact, her grip on my wrist tightened. “But I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d beat the crap out of you if you come back broken. I will. If you let Amanda screw you up like she did the last time, I’ll kick your arse. Then I’ll fly to the States and kick her arse, and you don’t want to be responsible for America declaring war on Australia, do you? I mean, you’re already on Delvania’s watchlist after beating the hell out of their princess’s bodyguard, you don’t want to be added to the American list for inciting a hyperactive Aussie going thermo on one of their citizens, do you?”
A warm fuzziness bloomed in my chest. The realization you have friends who care about your emotional state and kind of take it personally can blow you away. That kind of friendship is a powerful thing, and for the first time since knowing her I recognized how significant Heather was to me, and me to her. We’d been through some slightly weird stuff together – the whole Maci/Raph/Delvania Royal bodyguard/paparazzi riot just to name one – and come out the other side closer. That she was ready to start an international situation over the state of my heart proved it. I leaned across the center console and kissed her on the cheek.
Two things happened. One, she let out a gasp I could only called surprised. And two, she followed that gasp with a melodramatic Ewww, gross, and shoved me away.
I laughed. She did the same, rolling her eyes. “Time for you to get out of my car, Biceps,” she ordered with mock command. “Let me know how it’s going while you’re over there, okay?”
“Will do.”
It wasn’t until her car turned out of the drop-off bay and disappeared from sight that I realized I had a lump in my throat. When the hell had I become so schmaltzy?
Hitching my gym bag up on my shoulder and patting my butt to make sure my passport was still there, I pivoted on my heel and fixed the automatic doors of the Departure terminal with a steady stare.
You may have gathered by now I don’t live life the way it’s expected of me. When I decided to apply for a Bachelor of Applied Science my school careers advisor advised me I was making a mistake. She told me I should concentrate on a job less cerebral in nature. Laborer was her suggestion. When I was offered a position playing professional football for the Balmain Tigers at the age of eighteen – complete with a six-figure deal sweeter than any junior football player had ever seen – I turned it down. When I was being threatened by a dick bodyguard bigger than me with a Glock permanently under his arm, I punched him in the face and broke his
jaw.
Life is to be lived to the fullest, and I lived it that way. But even I had to admit, standing there on the footpath outside the Sydney International Departure Terminal, that dropping everything to fly to the States to see a girl who’d rejected me almost three years ago, without even speaking to her was . . . well, borderline insane.
So why was I doing it? Because I was still hung up on Amanda? Because she still made me horny? Because I wanted to prove to her – and myself – that she didn’t have the power to render me defenseless against her any more, and the moment I saw her in the States I’d know a hundred percent it was over?
No. I was doing it because a person once very important to me had asked me to. There was no other reason than that. And life was to be lived. And experienced. And if I didn’t do this, I wasn’t experiencing it, was I?
How’s that for a reason? And a life philosophy?
I refused to think about it any longer. Actually, refused is the wrong term. I chose not to think about it any more. This was one of those situations that didn’t require thinking.
I strode into the terminal, checked in, watched my overstuffed gym bag disappear on the luggage conveyor belt, and then made my way to the appropriate gate.
Halfway there, I stopped at an Australian souvenir shop that charged ridiculous prices for stuff I could have bought at a discount shop for less than five bucks. For reasons I didn’t question, or think about – remember, I’d put my brain into neutral – I bought a soft toy koala infused with eucalyptus oil, a soft toy kookaburra that laughed when you squeezed it, and a jar of Vegemite. I don’t know why. Amanda’s younger sister didn’t really like me, and a soft toy wasn’t going to change that. I bought them anyway.
It was then I realized I hadn’t brought along an on-flight bag. I had a thirteen-hour flight ahead of me, and I hadn’t brought anything with me apart from my wallet, iPhone and passport. Not even a book. Or a toothbrush and deodorant.
I wasn’t new to traveling (Hello? Previous trip to the US), so the fact I was an hour away from climbing onto a plane bound for the other side of the world, without any of the things that would make that trip bearable, hit me hard.
It took me forty minutes – and further credit card abuse – to procure everything I needed: small backpack, travel toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, new charger for my phone (superfluous and expensive given I already have three at home), new noise-canceling earphones (went the cheap route with those, but still, ouch), and travel pillow (Master’s of Exercise Physiology, remember? I know the importance of muscular comfort and posture and there was no way those airline–supplied pillows do anything but give you a stiff neck). I even splashed out and bought a pair of loose, long-legged PJ pants to change into come sleep time. Comfort is your friend on long-haul flights.
I also exchanged every Australian note I had in my wallet for US dollars which gave me a grand total of a hundred and thirteen dollars US.
After logging into my iTunes account on my phone and downloading my music library, along with a biography on Arnold Schwarzenegger in case the inflight movies sucked, I stuffed everything into my new backpack, the soft-toy kookaburra laughing constantly as I did. A part of me wondered if it was trying to tell me something. The rest of me ignored it. What the hell does a soft-toy kookaburra know?
As it turned out, I probably should have listened to it. Sometimes living life in the present takes you by the short-and-curlies and you’re left wondering what the hell happened.
Two
Buff R We
I didn’t sleep for the entire flight. I watched every Dwayne Johnson movie on offer (Yes, even Tooth Fairy). I walked the aisles every thirty minutes. I did deep lunges up and down said aisles every hour.
I drank more coffee than I ever have in a thirteen-hour period. I put sugar in my coffee three times, not even realizing I’d done it until I took the first sip.
The passenger beside me, a rather large man with a dubious understanding of personal hygiene, had a habit of facing me whenever he yawned, so I kept getting drops of the saliva squirting from his mouth on my arm.
I thought of Amanda only once during those long hours. I remembered the last time we were together. Really together. Our bodies joined, our sweat mingling, our breaths doing the same as we moved to a rhythm so perfectly in sync it was a thing of beauty.
I’ll admit to finding myself in the memory halfway through Tooth Fairy. On reflection, that was a bad movie choice. It didn’t help that my new pal on my right decided to pick that exact moment to need to go to the loo. Do you have any idea how hard it is to hide an erection when you’re standing in a plane aisle while wearing loose flannel drawstring pants?
All in all, it was an interesting flight.
Twelve hours and forty-two minutes after takeoff, the captain announced we were going to be landing soon. I hurried to the loo, my jeans, toothbrush, toothpaste and deodorant in hand. Thirty seconds later – PJs off, jeans not yet on, foamy toothbrush in mouth – the seatbelt warning sign chimed. A second after that, the captain announced we were heading into turbulence and everyone needed to return to their seat and buckle up, ASAP.
“We’re in for a bumpy landing, everyone,” he informed us all. “Sorry about that.”
I made my way back to my seat, bouncing side to side as the plane did its best to mimic some kind of insane ride at a theme park. From the overhead compartment, the raucous laughter of the kookaburra in my backpack provided a jarring soundtrack to the violent movement.
Thirty-five minutes later, with a screeching of tires and a teeth-clattering thud, we touched down. I refused to see the landing as an omen of what was waiting for me outside the plane. I was, however, going to pull that damn kookaburra from my backpack and rip the bloody thing to shreds.
It took me a few moments to realize I was not . . . at my best. Wired, sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated. Not my usual state.
Choosing not to take it out on the soft-toy bird, I disembarked. My B.O. resplendent traveling companion followed closely behind me. It seemed he didn’t just have a poor understanding of personal hygiene, he wasn’t a big fan of personal space either. After we crossed through the doors leading to Customs he moved from directly behind me to directly beside me.
“Hey,” he said, puffing as he matched my stride. “You’re that guy who was in the news last year, right? The guy who beat up some other guy over some American student at Sydney University?”
It wasn’t the first time I’d been recognized since that incident happened. Fame, even fame as surreal and superficial as mine, has a weird impact on people. In the immediate days that followed the infamous “Mackellar House Brawl” as the media christened it, I’d been contacted by more than one news program, followed by more than one Biceps Groupie (who had a Facebook page documenting where I was, what I was eating, what I was wearing) and been confronted more than once by guys who wanted to prove they could take out the guy who took out a royal bodyguard.
The world is full of strange people and I don’t normally worry about that. But I was tired, desperately wanted a shower and the kookaburra was still uttering the odd chuckle from my backpack. I didn’t snap at the guy, but by the way he scurried away from me when I shot him a look, I must have had bloody murder in my eyes. Of course, the second he did, I was flooded by another emotion I’ve never found myself experiencing.
Doubt.
Oh man, why was I doing this again? Why was I here? Sucking in a slow breath, I dragged my hands through my hair, counted to ten, and exhaled just as slowly. I was okay. I was good. I was gravy. I was chillaxed.
That mantra stayed with me all the way through Customs. Even when the kookaburra started laughing halfway through the process, causing the officer behind the counter to study me with a look that said “please explain”, I was okay, good, gravy and chillaxed. Nothing rattled me. Not my gym bag being half-unzipped on the luggage conveyor belt and my Calvin Klein undies deposited a few feet behind, all grimy and scruffy, not the kookaburra w
ho now seemed determined to laugh every ten minutes with insane delight.
Okay. Good. Gravy. Chillaxed.
Right up until the second I exited Customs and entered the arrivals hall of LAX and found Amanda Sinclair standing in the crowd, watching me.
Did my heart slam up into my throat and try to smash its way out of my body?
You fucking better believe it did.
She looked . . . incredible. I stopped walking and just stared at her. My throat seized up. My chest grew tight. My gut seemed to roll in on itself and twist over the other way. I forgot how to breathe, how to blink. My whole body seemed to be suddenly hot and prickly, like I’d put in a massive cardio session in the space of a heartbeat. I can’t really explain the surge of sensations that crashed through me at seeing her any other way than that. I guess there’s a reason I’m a gym-junkie muscle head and not an English Lit major.
I stared at her and she stared back. She tucked a strand of that coppery-russet hair of hers – hair that felt like cool silk streaming through my fingers – behind her right ear, an ear that still had the tiny gold cuff I bought for her one morning at Bondi Beach after a particularly awesome surf.
I ate up her face with my eyes. I apologize for how cheesy and corny that sounds, but I did. I stood there among the tired travelers and sign-carrying drivers, and took in every inch of her face. Her blue eyes, her straight, dark-red eyebrows. Her slightly turned-up nose with its smattering of freckles. Her lips . . . lips I’d felt against mine over and over . . .
Oh fuck, I wanted to kiss her.
Right there. Right then. In the airport, no doubt stinking from over half a day of traveling, I wanted to run to her, swoop her up like some lame-arse movie hero and kiss her. Erase the last twenty-seven months of being denied her with a kiss that would make the airport security kick us out of the terminal.
I wanted to remind her, in that kiss, why she’d overstayed her visa in Australia. I wanted to point out how stupid she’d been to walk away from us. I wanted to prove to her I was the only one who could make her feel alive, that if there was someone else in her life now, it was time to say goodbye to them.
Unforgettable (Always Book 2) Page 2
