Unforgettable: Always 2

by Cherie M Hudson

  About Unforgettable: Always 2

  My name is Brendon Osmond. I’m a 25-year-old post-graduate student who knows three things with absolute conviction. I know damn near everything there is to know about keeping in peak physical shape. I have a plan to make a lot of money from that knowledge. I’m an optimist who’s not easily rattled. But then the girl I fell in love with almost two years ago texts me out of the blue and everything I know is thrown out the window.

  Am I rattled?

  No.

  Not until I fly to the other side of the world and discover the girl I fell for has kept a very big secret from me.

  A secret that mocks all my knowledge of the human body and how to keep it healthy.

  A secret that shatters my plans for my own personal training business.

  A secret with my eyes.

  A secret who needs me more than I can comprehend.

  Ask me again if I’m rattled.

  Now ask me if I’m still in love.

  Perfect for fans of The Fault in Our Stars, Nicholas Sparks and Jodi Picoult, Unforgettable is the second book in the Always series that began with Unconditional.

  Contents

  About Unforgettable: Always 2

  Dedication

  Borderline Insane

  Buff R We

  The Austerity of the Aussie Shower

  A Simple Realization of a Simple, Undeniable Fact

  A Lifetime of Dad Jokes

  Beeping and Whirring Constantly

  Oppimus Tuck

  Brendon Osmond Didn’t Hug Himself

  Being Vulnerable Sucked

  Go, Robby. Yay

  Life Isn’t A Fantasy

  Cookie!

  I Remembered Her Answer

  And Aunty Chase Was Awesome

  Dark Swirls of Nothingness

  Considering All Possible Outcomes

  Gravy AKA the Epilogue

  About Cherie M Hudson

  Also by Cherie M Hudson

  Copyright

  For the real Brendon the Biceps, who taught me how to deal with being rattled, how to not be rattled. And how to do burpees. A lot of damn burpees.

  And for Julie Gonano, the best nurse in Australia, who held my hand through all the medical research and is the best friend a girl can have.

  Borderline Insane

  If you’re looking for a tragic, traumatic backstory, I’m going to disappoint you, I’m afraid. I’m not that guy. I laugh easy, joke often, and pretty much see the joy in almost everything around me. I know, unbearable, right? Sorry.

  I’ve been this way forever. Honest, I can’t think of a time when I wasn’t the “glass is half full” person in the room. When I was a kid most of my friends thought I was weird. Or fake. A lot of them tried their best to drag out the emo in me. To mess with me enough to see me snap or crumble. I found out when I was seventeen that my best mate had bet a hundred bucks he’d be able to make me lose my temper enough that I would get suspended from school for a week before we graduated.

  He lost.

  Can you see what I’m saying? I’m a nice guy. I’m not a prick. I’m not a jerk. I enjoy hanging out with the guys, have a few “friends with benefits” on a semi-regular rotation, take a lot of pride in being healthy and enjoy my job as Sydney University’s gym manager and personal trainer. I’ve got a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Science (Exercise and Sport Science) – those parentheses are important, as is the word Honors that goes with it – and six months left before I finish my Master’s in Exercise Physiology. I recently bought a betta fish that I call No Direction. I’ve got plans to open my own personal trainer business one day soon – Push It P/T – and spent a total of nine hours last week with a very helpful bank manager discussing loans, long-term business structures, future staff and, eventually, how I could help her lose the excess weight she’d been carrying since the birth of her twins eight months previously.

  I can say with all truthfulness that I’ve only fallen in love twice. The last time I ended up on television and almost in jail after an American student, Maci Rowling, became the target of the paparazzi due to the fact she was also involved with one of our local celebrities. (Just to fill you in, she didn’t choose me. She went with Raphael Jones. I still give her shit about that.)

  The first time I fell in love …

  Man, I don’t really want to talk about the first time. Of course, what we want and what we get isn’t always the same thing, right? Hell, I wanted the world to shake when I kissed Maci that time in my living room. I wanted her to say “Raph who?” when questioned by the media. That didn’t happen.

  What did happen was I accepted we weren’t meant to be, put my “just friends” hat firmly in place and let it go. Got on with living.

  That’s what it’s all about. Living. Enjoying every minute of every day we have. Not wasting it with second-guessing, regret, hoping in vain, wishful thinking or moping. Yeah, those things aren’t really in my vocabulary.

  As I’ve said before, this attitude seems to irritate a lot of people, which I always find puzzling. Why would a happy person with no baggage piss someone off? Is it because I make them feel … less in some way? Less successful? Less complete? I don’t mean it to. Honest.

  Life is about being in the moment. The present. And the present is pretty damn perfect. Except …

  Okay, I can’t skirt around it any more. My brain keeps coming back to something I’d rather it didn’t. Actually, not something, but someone.

  That “first” I mentioned earlier. The one that “got away”.

  Yeah, that’s a lot of quotation marks there, isn’t it?

  I just … I don’t …

  Damn it, let’s start this again.

  G’day. I’m Brendon Osmond. I’m a twenty-five-year-old post-graduate student at Sydney University. Most of my friends call me The Biceps, I suspect because I give Chris Hemsworth in Thor-mode a run for his money. I have big plans, big goals and a ridiculously positive outlook on life. Nothing fazes me. Nothing unsettles me.

  Until the morning I woke to a text message from someone I didn’t expect to hear from again.

  Someone. Okay, not just someone … that one. She of the quotation marks.

  It was a simple text but one that shook me a little.

  Thinking of you.

  That’s it. Who sends a text like that after over two and a half years of no contact whatsoever? I mean, I followed this girl to the States, I opened my damn chest, took out my heart and gave it to her, and she gave it back. Told me we had no hope. And now she sends me this text? Without any follow-up? No text to let me know she’d sent that message to the wrong person. No apologies for the utterly random contact. No LOL Psyche! complete with a winking smiley face emoticon just to highlight the joke of it all.

  Who does that?

  Apparently Amanda Sinclair.

  Amanda Sinclair, the American girl who made it clear we didn’t have a “relationship” because she “wasn’t for me”. Because she couldn’t “be what I wanted”. See? More of those damn quotation marks. I don’t think I’d ever had the need to use quotation marks until Amanda Sinclair entered my life. Amanda Sinclair, the American college student I met almost three years ago during an amateur snowboarding competition down in Thredbo (that’s the main ski slopes in Australia, if you don’t know) and who I then proceeded to spend the rest of the comp in bed with.

  We both lost our respective rounds, but we didn’t mind. Not at all. Holy fuck, did we … well, fuck. It was the most mind-blowing sex, the most intense, perfect, sublime sex I’ve ever had.

  After the snowboarding competition finished, she followed me back to Sydney and crashed in my one-room apartment. We spent most of the days in bed. Most of the ni
ghts as well. We laughed a lot. She had the same approach to life I did: live it, don’t dwell on it, regret is just wasted energy, exist for the now. We occasionally went out, caught a movie or two. I once smuggled her into my Biomechanical Analysis of Movement lecture. We sat in the back of the lecture hall, where my professor – who wore glasses with the thickest lenses ever – couldn’t see us, and made out. And by make out, I mean Amanda went down on me while I was trying to take notes.

  Six weeks after we first met, she realized she’d overstayed her visitor’s visa by a week. By that stage I was in love with her. That simple. I have no problems admitting that. If I’m going to spill it all, the whole sordid, woeful story, I may as well go the whole hog and leave nothing out. I was in love with her. And she was in love with me.

  Of course, being in love doesn’t suddenly change geography. She was from the US and I was Australian. We both had studies to complete, families to think about. So she went back to the States the next day, back to San Diego where she was studying to be a high school English teacher at San Diego State University, and I stayed in Sydney. For three days.

  Three days.

  Long enough for me to finish my mid-semester thesis (Carb Depletion and its Impact on Muscle Regeneration), submit it to my professor, bring the assistant manager up to speed at the university gym, and buy a one-way plane ticket to San Diego.

  One week later, I flew back to Australia. Alone.

  The crib notes version of that week goes like this:

  I arrive in San Diego.

  Amanda collects me at the airport.

  We spend five incredible days rarely leaving her dorm room.

  I meet her family in the flesh three times.

  I eat with them twice.

  I tell her I love her on the fifth night.

  Amanda tells me on the sixth day she’s bored with us, that there is no us.

  I fly back to Sydney on the seventh day.

  Not a word from her since.

  That’s twenty-seven months and three days of silence (yes, I’ve kept track, which is pathetic I know) and now this text.

  Suffice to say, the guy who's never rattled was feeling … shaken. But not rattled. I refuse to be rattled.

  I won’t lie though. When I finally replied to her text I had to type Hi eight times before I got it right.

  An hour later, I sent her another one. I tried not to, but I did.

  Thinking of you as well.

  For the next sixty minutes I checked my phone every minute. Not a single response.

  I calculated the time difference between San Diego and Sydney. Seventeen hours. It was almost seven am on Wednesday over there. I downloaded a World Clock app just in case my math skills were as dubious as my math teacher suggested they were back when I was only fifteen.

  As it turns out, my math skills were holding steady.

  If Amanda was in San Diego – and as I pointed out, it had been over two years since we last spoke, so really I was only guessing that’s where she was – she should at least be awake. Maybe eating breakfast somewhere.

  Sixty minutes of obsessive-compulsive phone stalking later, I sent off my third text.

  What’s up?

  I’d like to say she replied a short time after that. Instead, twenty-four hours passed. Have you ever spent a day, a whole day, waiting on a text? The text tone on my phone is the main chorus from “Eye of the Tiger”. I know it’s corny but that song from the seventies pumps me up when I’m working out.

  I grew to loathe that song in that twenty-four hour period.

  Every time I heard Survivor sing that damn chorus my heart went into overdrive, my pulse smashed into my throat and my gut clenched. Every time I looked at my phone and saw the sender wasn’t Amanda Sinclair, I wanted to scream.

  Go ahead, you can say it. I was rattled.

  But that was nothing – the pounding heart, the choking pulse, the churning gut – nothing, compared to my body’s response when Amanda’s reply can through at two am, Friday morning.

  I need you.

  She didn’t answer when I called. That may have been a good thing. To be honest, I’m not sure what I was going to say to her. What she did do was call me an hour later – when I was in the shower, of course, trying to get myself sorted out under a punishing stream of cold water.

  I came out to find the 1 New Voicemail message notification on my screen. Throat tight, I played the message.

  “Hi Brendon,” Amanda’s voice messed with my sanity, her subtle American accent as sexy as ever. “I know … I mean …” A shaky sigh came through the phone. I don’t remember Amanda ever making such a noise before. “This is going to make no sense, and I know I’m asking a lot, but can you come to San Diego ASAP? Please? I’ll … I’ll explain everything when you get here.”

  The message ended. I played it again. And again. And again. I rang her three times. She didn’t answer. Rather than try a fourth time, I opened my laptop and bought a one-way ticket on the first flight I found – Premium Economy. Sydney to LAX. Qantas. 6:40am. My credit card balance was not going to like me, and my bank manager was going to have some kind of conniption, but I didn’t care. I’d heard Amanda’s voice. I was essentially screwed, but in a good way. Life had presented me something, and I was taking that something. Live in the present, remember? The second I bought the ticket, all sense of being rattled and flustered vanished.

  Despite the fact it was only 3:45 am on a Friday, I rang Heather Renner.

  Now Heather had swooped into my life like a ADHD tornado a few years ago, starting our relationship as just a student who worked out in the uni gym before becoming an acquaintance I enjoyed talking with. We hung out occasionally before the whole Maci/Raph/Brendon situation (or as media called it The American Love Triangle), and it was during that time she morphed into one of my closest mates. Heather was Maci’s best friend while Maci was in Australia, and she somehow insinuated herself into my daily life after Maci went back to the States. I’m not complaining. Heather – who has only two speeds: on and hyper-on – is funny, infectious and almost impossible to say no to. Once upon a time she had a thing for me. Now she has a thing for her ethics professor, a fact I give her a hard time about constantly. Heather is like the sister I never had, and as such, I had no problem calling her at quarter to four in the morning.

  She answered on the second ring. There wasn’t a hint of sleep-slurred confusion in her voice.

  “I’ve told you before, Biceps,” she chirped, her normal exuberance somehow dialed up to fifty, “I will not go for a jog around Bondi with you.”

  Heather has tried to convince me more than once she wasn’t responsible for the nickname “The Biceps” on campus. One of these days I may believe her.

  Gaze fixed on my laptop screen and its ticket-purchase confirmation, I grinned. “Not even if I buy you breakfast at Triptych after?” I asked, completing the telephone conversation routine that had developed between us over the last few months.

  She laughed. “Not even then. Now tell me what’s wrong. There’s no way you’d ring at this time unless there was a problem. Is it Maci? Is she okay? I was only talking to her yesterday and she sounded great. What’s happened? Is it Raph? It’s not Raph, is it? He was flying back from seeing his mum and dad when I was talking to her. Mid-flight in fact. It’s not his plane, is it? Tell me his plane hasn’t crashed and there’s no sign of the bodies. Jesus, how long will it take us to get to—”

  “Heather,” I cut her off with a chuckle. See what I mean about only two speeds? “Maci and Raph are fine. At least, I assume they are. I haven’t spoken to either of them for a few weeks.”

  A relieved sigh burst through the phone connection. Followed by an angry grunt. “Then why the hell did you let me think they weren’t? That’s not nice, Osmond. Not nice at—”

  “Heather,” I repeated her name, firmer this time. If I’d been in her company I’d have grabbed her by the shoulders to hold her still. At times she was like a wriggling puppy. A wrig
gling puppy with an IQ of 128. “I need you to feed No Direction for a while.”

  Silence came from the other end. I couldn’t help but lick my index finger and make an invisible stroke in the air. Chalk one up for The Biceps.

  “I’m heading to the States,” I continued, “and I need you to feed my fish while I’m gone.”

  Silence. Still.

  I frowned. “Heather?”

  “You’re not going over to try to break up Maci and Raph, are you?”

  I burst out laughing.

  “I take it that’s a no?” Wary confusion filled Heather’s voice.

  “That’s a big no,” I answered, pushing myself up from my desk to make my way to my bedroom. I had a suitcase in the cupboard somewhere, I think. “A friend over there needs my help.”

  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.”