Unforgettable (Always Book 2)

by Lexxie Couper

  Stupid body. Hadn’t it learned its lesson with Professor Douchebag? Apparently, I was as defective in the head as I was in the ears.

  I didn’t need an annoying Australian making my life complicated with his sexy accent and smiling eyes and relaxed laugh that vibrated through me regardless of how little I could actually hear it. I didn’t. I didn’t need anyone. Not in that way.

  I had my family, who I love beyond words. My mom (she of the witty sarcasm and addiction to running marathons) and dad (he of the over-protective coddle-swaddling and zero tact), my big sister Amanda (The best sister ever, even if she does like Coldplay) and her husband Brendon (The Wonder from Down Under, with a heart as big as his biceps, which is saying something), and my nephew Tanner.

  Tanner is my world. A fighter to the nth degree, at the age of three Tanner has already fought and beaten leukemia, learned to say g’day like the half-Aussie he is, and spent more time in hospital and tolerating doctors and needles than any adult should, let alone a child.

  But apart from those people, and a friend or two here and there, I don’t do human interaction. It’s easier. Less frustrating. Less exasperating.

  Less . . . painful.

  Caden, however, has refused to read my fuck-off-and-leave-me-alone vibes.

  Didn’t matter how many times I ignored him, or rolled my eyes at him or swore at him (signing, of course – I figured if I sign at him enough he’ll do what everyone who’s not my immediate family do when I’m signing and get all uncomfortable and weird and just go away), he seemed hell-bent on not taking the hint.

  Didn’t matter that the one time we almost kissed, I damn near sprinted from the room and pretended I was asleep in Tanner’s bed. Seriously, the guy can’t take a hint.

  If it wasn’t for the fact he’s so freaking smart, I’d think he was stupid. He’s definitely not stupid. Stubborn, yes. Obstinate, yes. But stupid? No. You can’t be top of your class at college and be stupid.

  Caden O’Dae is far from stupid. Caden is . . .

  Jesus, why am I talking about him so much? I don’t want to talk about him. I’ve said my piece. I was not – repeat not – falling for him, no matter what he did.

  I’m not talking about him any more.

  For now, let’s concentrate on me. (Hey, what twenty-two year old doesn’t want to do that, right?)

  I’m a college dropout, something my university-professor father is horrified about. By the way, Professor Douchebag is not my dad, I should make that clear. Professor Douchebag is the reason I’m a college dropout, but no one apart from he and I know that.

  Of course, Dad thought I’d dropped out to irritate him and I happily let him go with that.

  Don’t get me wrong, I love my father. I really do. He’s just . . . a perfect example of academic pretentiousness wrapped up in over-protective righteousness with a safety-harness of elitism attached for good measure.

  So I’m a college dropout who’s deaf in one ear, partially deaf in the other, who drives a metallic purple Volvo station wagon with a neon green Chinese luck dragon painted along each side. My hair changes color regularly (it’s currently an awesome aqua-blue) and until last week I wore it in dreadlocks. Now it’s short. Short and aqua-blue.

  I’ve got a tattoo of Buddha eating pizza just above my right butt cheek, but don’t tell Dad. I’m pretty certain I’d get kicked out of the house if he knew.

  Currently, I’m working in a pet store that specializes in exotic animals, which isn’t anywhere near as exciting as it sounds. No matter what part of the world the animals come from, their poop still smells the same. Cleaning out the terrarium of an Australian bearded dragon is no different from cleaning out a terrarium of your common, garden variety Green Anole lizard, and no matter what the movies tell you, macaws from Rio are not anal-retentive germophobes, but rather big-ass birds who drop their shit wherever they happen to be perched. Oh, and they don’t sound like Jesse Eisenberg.

  Despite all that, I genuinely enjoy working there. My boss is more anti-social than I am (who knew that was even possible?), leaves me alone most of the time (win!) and the customers on the whole know what they want.

  I’ve only ever had to put my bitch hat on twice since working there, once to stop a stupid parent buying her child a snake, a gift that would have inevitably resulted in the child, or the mother, in the morgue.

  The second time I had to convince a father that the Sydney Funnel Web he’d illegally smuggled in from Australia did not make a “cool” present for his son’s graduation from elementary school.

  Safety tip for future reference: Sydney Funnel Web spiders are the most deadly, venomous, dangerous spider on the planet. They are not like tarantulas. They are not suitable for young children as pets. Yes, they look cool, all shiny and black and hairy, but they can kill you. In fifteen minutes. Like most things from Down Under, America is not physically, medically, psychologically or emotionally prepared for them.

  The same warning goes for that country’s Taipan snake, Eastern Brown snake, Red-bellied Black snake, and Caden O’Dae.

  Shit. I didn’t mean to say that.

  Back on track.

  More about me (that’s what you’re here for, right?) . . .

  So, college dropout with unconventional hair, awesomely talented artist doing little but doodling nowadays, second daughter to parents with parenting issues, totally dedicated and fabulous aunt, proud Volvo owner (FYI, I call my car the Speeding Dragon) and exotic pet shop worker. I’m a card-carrying geek who would run away with Loki at the drop of a hat. (Google him if you don’t know who I’m talking about. Tom Hiddleston . . . sigh) I still live at home (yeah, that one needs some attention), love movies but really don’t like going to the movies, generally want very little to do with most people, and have zero plans of ever being in a relationship that requires any kisses except the Hershey kind.

  You still with me? You haven’t decided to dump me yet?

  Okay, that’s good.

  So Caden O’Dae, Brendon’s cousin, comes back and forth to San Diego as often as his studies will allow. Usually those visits are only short trips. I can deal with that. But this next trip he’s staying for three weeks.

  Three weeks. How am I meant to deal with him being around for three weeks?

  He was planning to spend those three weeks with Amanda and Brendon, true, but I doubt I could avoid him for the entire time. I also knew he was going to be bringing all manner of gifts for everyone, and try as hard as I might, standing in the Arrivals section of LAX waiting for him, I couldn’t help but wonder what he was bringing me.

  The first time he came back, after Tanner’s successful bone marrow transplant, he’d presented me with a bright purple and green sock puppet dragon. He’d made it himself. He does this weird thing where he makes sock puppets. I will never tell him this because then he might get the stupid opinion I actually like him, but they are adorable. If his intended career as a veterinarian fails he could make a living selling sock puppets on Etsy. Not a good living, I’m sure. Not compared to what he could make as Dr. Caden O’Dae, Animal Doctor, but a living all the same.

  The last time he visited, he gave me a Thor sock puppet. Except Thor wasn’t wielding his mighty hammer, but a can of Foster’s beer. And he was wearing board shorts covered in flowers.

  “Cause he’s actually Australian,” he’d said as I stared at the puppet in my hand. “Not Asgardin.”

  That was one of those moments where, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t help but laugh. Our eyes had met for a moment. My tummy did one of those unsettling tightening things. Thank God he said something low enough that I couldn’t quite make it out, something that was probably lovely and sweet, because it gave me a reason to get grumpy and stomp off.

  (By the way, I’m sure most people think I’m a brat. Given how anti-social I am, I’m fine with that. I am guilty, however, of sometimes behaving less than exemplary to cover the fact I’m feeling awkward. I’m not a fan of feeling awkward. Who is?)
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  I didn’t see him for the rest of the time he was here.

  I didn’t take him back to LAX, which was my normal routine. Instead I sat at home, glaring at the clock in my room when his plane was due for takeoff.

  My phone pinged at me once five minutes after, but when I grabbed it out of my bag, my heart beating faster than it should, I discovered it was a text from Professor Douchebag.

  The text –

  No, let me start that again.

  The professor.

  Professor Douchebag was my Art History professor when I was still a college student. Insanely sexy and hugely popular, he had this amazing ability to make students feel like they were the most important thing in his world with just a look.

  When I joined his class, he’d commented about my hair (purple at the time) and suggested my father – who he knew quite well – was probably not a fan. Straight away I’d felt like he understood me.

  After just one month I lived for his lectures. Hurried to them, eager to see his face. To have him see me.

  Those classes . . . oh wow. He’d hang on every word I said. He’d call on me to answer questions, ask my opinion on the topic at hand. That may not seem like a big deal, but when you’ve gone through the education system with teachers who handled your hearing impairment by either pretending you didn’t exist in their class, or shouting the most basic of questions at you just so you can feel like you’re included, to be treated like a normal student is huge. And I so desperately wanted to be treated like a normal student back then.

  When I look back, that desperation really messed me up. But I was only eighteen. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. Eighteen and angry with my father for making it obvious he was disappointed with me.

  On some weird, subconscious level, I suspect the fact Professor Douchebag taught at the same collage as Dad was an added bonus.

  Whatever the reasons, I fell hard. Took out my heart – that moronic organ I’d spent eighteen years guarding like it was the One Ring – and gave it to him.

  He took it. And for ever so long I was happy. Why wouldn’t I be? He worshipped me. Adored me. Spent long hours exploring my body with his hands and lips and tongue. Made me feel normal. Like a real girl, not the defective one I’d grown up believing I was.

  I should have wised up to the fact he didn’t consider my heart as precious as I did when it became clear we were never to be seen in public together in any capacity other than that of student/teacher.

  But I was in awe of this intellectual, sexy, popular god with more than one New York Times Bestselling art book to his name. I was in love with him.

  Love is stupid.

  And it makes you blind, which is not ideal when you’re already damn near completely deaf. Functioning on three senses is tricky at best.

  Ending it hurt more than it should have, for a variety of reasons. But the thing with Professor Douchebag? He figured out very quickly he’d got under my skin. And for every No, I’m over you text I sent in reply to his I need to see you now texts, there were shamefully just as many Okay, I’m coming ones.

  Under my skin. Didn’t matter what I did to try and exorcise him, he was under there. And when we were alone together at his place, or in his car, or his office . . . when he was touching me, looking at me, listening to me . . . I forgot how the us that existed behind closed doors wasn’t the us I wanted beyond them.

  So when I got the professor’s text asking me to come to his place, as I was sitting on my bed with the knowledge Caden O’Dae was once again gone from my life, I went.

  Was it self-punishment for refusing to acknowledge that Caden O’Dae was the first guy to ever make me feel like my life was actually fine the way I was living it? I don’t know.

  I still don’t.

  Thankfully, I stopped myself from doing something completely stupid and drove away from Professor Douchebag’s place before I could get out of the car.

  I went to a friend’s house and we got drunk on tequila, and watched Daredevil on Netflix, and while Charlie Cox beat up bad guys with brooding, angst-ridden intensity I was wondering if maybe this time, this time, Professor Douchebag was going to take me out for dinner in public, hold my hand in public, say he was wrong for breaking my heart. Apologize for hurting me . . .

  And then it wasn’t the professor I was thinking about but Caden. Caden and sock puppets, and his laugh, his grin, his eyes. Caden and his ability to make me forget I was defective. His ability to make me realize when I did remember, that it was okay . . .

  His ability to make me smile . . .

  I passed out before the last episode of Season One began. My friend let me crash on the couch, which was a good thing. I couldn’t have faced whatever disappointment I’d find in Dad’s eyes if I went home, and if I’d gone to Amanda and Brendon’s I would have told my sister about everything and I wasn’t ready to deal with that either.

  Being messed up about who you are and what you want is really messed up.

  Caden and I hadn’t spoken or been in contact since the Thor sock-puppet incident. I’d seen what he was up to on Facebook, of course. And Instagram, where he posts pics of him and the animals he cares for at the RSPCA on the weekends (the RSPCA – the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals – is the Australian equivalent of the ASPCA). Facebook is mainly dedicated to his social life.

  Most of his Facebook posts involve him and his university friends being twentysomething-year-old students doing the kind of things twentysomething-year-old students do. There are lots of images of him and his friends in crazy costumes no doubt for crazy college parties. Lately, there have been a few posts involving the celebrity veterinarian he’s interning for in Australia.

  I’m not jealous. Honest. It means nothing to me that she’s tall, blonde and stunning, with teeth so white my brain hurts. It really doesn’t. But seriously, people were going to talk soon if he wasn’t careful. I mean she’s older than him for starters. And she tags him all the time. And you should see the way she leans into him in all the photos she has posted on—

  “. . . incoming flight . . . delayed.”

  I blinked, frowning at the crowded airport around me. What was that announcement?

  The noise of the place – an incomprehensible, muffled cacophony that grated on my senses and made my head buzz – seemed to swell around me. Because I was grumpy, I hadn’t bothered to charge the battery of my hearing aid, which meant it was just another thing I was carrying around that I didn’t need. I rarely wore it, because it irritated the hell out of me. Noises were either too loud when I wore it or too confusing, and the second people saw it they treated me differently.

  So no hearing aid, just a lot of noise in my head.

  And now an announcement I’m almost certain was about an incoming flight from Melbourne, but because I couldn’t hear it clearly I could have been completely wrong.

  That happens. More than I like, unfortunately. There are ways around it, of course. Services provided for the “hearing impaired” (I don’t know why, but that term grates on me just as much as the noise of a crowd). All I needed to do was seek out one of those services and problem fixed. Or do something as simple as go check the arrivals board again.

  I didn’t do either. Common sense and I weren’t on speaking terms at that point in time.

  Instead, I held my ground, glared at the flow of tired-looking people ambling into the arrivals section, and waited until Caden came into my line of sight.

  He didn’t.

  Instead, someone else did. Someone I did not want to see.

  “Shit,” I muttered, turning away.

  But not before Professor Douchebag saw me. Not before he smiled at me.

  Shit.

  And as much as I hated the fact, my throat grew tight and my belly fluttered.

  Shit. Again. Times three. God, where was Caden O’Dae when I needed him?

  Caden

  What was a good Aussie boy like me doing falling in love with a prickly, feisty,
snarky American girl, you ask?

  Good question.

  The answer? Hmmm . . . not sure if there is a good answer. Just a brutally honest one. And in love – and war – brutal honesty is paramount.

  The second I saw Chase Sinclair I fell in love with her.

  I’m not embarrassed to admit it. Okay, I didn’t admit it to anyone but myself, and begrudgingly to start with. I wasn’t in the market for the love of my life, and if I had been, I’m one hundred percent certain I wouldn’t have been looking for an American girl who seemed convinced I was trying to kill her sick nephew with the sock puppet I’d made for him. But the heart wants what the heart wants, as the saying goes, and the moment I laid eyes on Chase my heart wanted her. It was only later the logical problems of that love sank in. Things like her being in the Northern Hemisphere, and me being in the Southern Hemisphere. Things like me being twelve months away from finishing my doctorate at the top of my class in Veterinary Medicine at Melbourne University. Things like the fact I was an intern for Australia’s most distinguished and respected vet, with the offer of joining her practice when I finished my studies.

  None of those logistic complications mattered when I first saw Chase. I fell in love with her instantly.

  She, however, didn’t want a bar of me.

  I was jet lagged when I first saw her. Jet lagged, sleep deprived and over-caffeinated. At the best of times I’m . . . how should I put this? Exuberant. I’ve been called a prat, a dickhead, accused of never taking anything serious, dumped more than once for that very reason, labeled a joker and – in that weird way Australians appropriate American slang – a jackass. Jackarse just doesn’t have the right sound to it, I guess.

  I’m probably all of these things, truth be told, but the one I’ll gladly own is the not-taking-things-seriously label. I don’t. Not really.

  Unless it’s important, and when my cousin Brendon called and told me he had an eighteen-month-old son he’d only just found out about in America, and that son had leukemia and was likely to die if a suitable bone marrow match wasn’t found . . . yeah, that falls into things-that-need-to-be-taken-seriously.