Unconditional

by Tyler, Q. B.

  “Yes, hi, what’s up?” She blinks her eyes several times.

  He narrows his eyes at her and taps her olive button nose. “I’ve got my eye on you.”

  “You’ve got your eyes on my ass, calm down.” She waves him off and turns to me and I chuckle at their back and forth. “You have to come, please!” She puts her hands together and her bottom lip juts out in a pout. “It’ll be so fun. Just tell Cal you’re coming to my house.”

  “That’s not exactly helping. Cal doesn’t trust you, Sash.” I giggle as I think about the few times I did get into mischief. Sasha Parker was always a step behind me.

  Her hand finds her chest and she scoffs. “Well, I never! I am offended.”

  I raise an eyebrow at her. “Are you?”

  The bell rings, forcing all of us to get up and head back to our classes. Sasha falls into step with me as we head to our fifth period calculus class. “Maddie, you’re really not coming?”

  “I mean Cal said I couldn’t go out.”

  “Ugh, fine.” She scoffs and pulls out her phone. “This is so lame. I’ll see if we can move the party to tomorrow. Can you come then?”

  “I’ll see. Why is it so imperative that I’m there, Sash?”

  “Because! You’re my best friend and it won’t be as fun without you.” She hops from one foot to the other and does a little shimmy. “Listen, if you don’t come, the party will die.” She puts a hand over her forehead and pretends to faint.

  “Anyone ever tell you, you’re dramatic?”

  “Anyone ever tell you, bite me?”

  I chuckle and wrap an arm around her neck. “Come on, crazy, let’s get to class.”

  “Or we can ditch?” She shoots me a mischievous look and I just shake my head at her as we make our way down the hall.

  I spend most of my calculus class the same way I do when I get bored: trying to keep my mind from drifting to Cal. It doesn’t help that I could probably teach this calculus class, and according to my teacher, I’m not quite being “challenged” enough. You know what’s challenging? Trying to focus on derivatives when all you can think about is the man you live with working out in the basement without a shirt. I’m fairly certain I saw God the first time I watched him do chin ups.

  I clear my throat as the moan threatens to escape my lips and the girl next to me gives me a questioning look. I give her a thumbs up letting her know that I’m fine but mostly to mind her business.

  Is this what all women in love, or in lust or whatever this is, deal with?

  I am in motherfucking hell.

  I pull to a stop in front of my house and let out a sigh. It had started to rain while I was on the way home, and by the time I pulled into my neighborhood the sky had turned the darkest shade of gray and now I was in the middle of a torrential downpour. I check my front and back seats, searching for my bright yellow umbrella. I don’t see it anywhere. Fuck, I cringe as I remember leaving it by the door yesterday. I slap a palm over my forehead and groan as I accept having to walk the forty feet to the house, all the while getting drenched. I’m just about to reach for the handle to make a run for it when my door opens. I yelp and send my foot flying towards the person on instinct when he grabs my leg.

  “Hey, easy there! Geeze, who did you think it was?” I look up into warm brown eyes and my heart jumps. God, he’s gorgeous. How is it possible for a man to be that good looking?

  Tall and built like he’d spent the majority of his twenties in the gym, Cal Grayson is every woman’s fantasy. I know this because I see it in their eyes at every grocery store, school function, or hell, even the gas station. It’s gotten to the point that I hate bringing him around all the catty and very horny, single and not so single dance moms when he comes to my ballet recitals. It felt almost pornographic looking at him in a swimsuit, and watching him workout sends a shiver down my spine and a dull roar between my legs that I can’t ignore, but pretend I do.

  He has a smile that has the power to control my mood and is so lethal it makes my knees weak. It’s one of those genuine smiles that reaches his eyes, and if you aren’t careful, your heart. It’s often masked by a dusting of stubble that sometimes grows into a beard that makes him look like this sexual mountain man or lumberjack or whatever the fuck would make a woman’s ovaries beg for his child. I can’t be the only woman in love with him.

  “Shit. What are you doing home?” Great, this puts a delay on my plans to finish the rest of this fantasy and at least two orgasms.

  “Preventing you from getting soaked, evidently. You left your umbrella at the door.” I blink up at the man standing next to my car door, holding his huge umbrella and I can’t even try to ignore the throb in my sex from the chivalry. “Come on.” I grab my backpack and he immediately takes it from me while I grab my purse.

  “Thank you,” I tell him as we walk towards the house. With every step, my panties dampen and I feel my cheeks heating up at the growing need to relieve myself. As soon as we’re through the door, I ask him again. “Why are you home, though? You’re not usually here at three.” I look at my watch and then back at him.

  “I wanted to be here when you got home.” He shrugs and sends a hand through his light brown hair.

  “Why? Did you really think I was going to go out without telling you?” I scoff; the lust I was feeling is suddenly gone, replaced with irritation that he doesn’t trust me.

  “No, but…” he scratches the back of his neck, “they’re calling for a really bad storm.”

  “So?” I knew what he was alluding to, but I wanted him to say it. I wanted him to say that he is here for me.

  “I know how you get during storms. I just didn’t want you to freak out, and Aria is working the night shift tonight.”

  Aria is one of the few people that Cal allows in the house with me alone. He trusts her wholeheartedly, and while he trusts some of his guys in the same regard, he didn’t want to leave me alone with men at a young age, so Aria became a second parent.

  She’d taught me all of the woman things that Cal couldn’t teach me and she was the only person I felt comfortable talking to about boys. The very few boys I forced myself to try and date to keep my mind off of someone I had no business wanting. Cal may have been both my mother and father at times, but Aria was Mom. The warm side, the compassionate side, the side that gave me the best hugs and taught me how to shave my legs and how to bake the best chocolate chip cookies.

  Once I’d gotten older, and it wasn’t a requirement for me to have a babysitter physically in the house with me, Cal would get someone from the station to park outside the house to monitor it. But that didn’t help when I got freaked out during the storm. A clap of thunder takes me back to my first storm in this house.

  I shoot up in bed as the crack of thunder is so loud it shakes my bed. My eyes immediately go towards my nightlight, a source of comfort that illuminates the room and makes it not so dark. But I don’t see anything. The whole room is pitch black. I look down at my hands and I don’t see them. I don’t see anything.

  Am I dead? Am I like Mommy?

  Mommy!

  I reach around the bed, searching for my bunny. The tears start to fall from my eyes…I think they’re tears. If you can’t see them, how can you be sure? I touch my face, and I feel the wetness. I blink my eyes trying so hard to see, but it’s so dark. Another crack of thunder followed by a flash of lightning illuminates my room for a second and I could have sworn that I saw every monster come to life.

  “Not real. Not real. Cal says they’re not real. Your mind just plays tricks on you.” I open my mouth to scream for Aria. She’s babysitting while Cal is at work, but a voice whispers in my ear.

  “If you scream the monsters will get you.”

  No. No. They’re not real!

  “You sure?” it whispers again.

  I put my bunny in my mouth and scream just as another crack of thunder moves through the house and I jump off the bed, not realizing that I was tangled in the sheets. I hit the ground wit
h a thud. “Owwwwww!” I cry, and I tuck myself into a ball.

  The thunder claps again and I squeeze my eyes tighter. I grip my bunny and slide away from my bed, hoping that nothing comes out from under it to grab me. I manage to crawl despite my hurting leg before I curl into a ball in the middle of the floor.

  “Mommy, can you hear me?” I sniffle just as the door opens. I scream and cover my ears because I’ve decided that hearing the monsters is worse than seeing them.

  I feel arms around me and I begin to kick and suddenly my hands are away from my ears. “Hey, it’s me. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I think he’s sitting down now because I’m sitting too as he rocks me back and forth. I let out a breath.

  Cal’s here. No monsters can get me.

  “I’m sorry.” He kisses the side of my head. “I sleep through storms usually…I should have figured you’d be scared. And then the power went out…did you fall? I heard something.”

  “I fell off the bed.”

  “Shit, are you okay?”

  “You said shit,” I whisper.

  “Yes, but you know you’re not supposed to say that.” He taps my nose. How does he know where my nose is? It’s so dark in here.

  “You shouldn’t either.”

  “Fine, but are you okay?”

  “My leg hurts.”

  “Which one?”

  I shake the one that hurts and I feel his hand on it as he shines his flashlight. “It’s okay I don’t think it’s broken. We won’t have to cut it off.”

  “Cut it off!” I shriek with a giggle. We’re silent for a minute when I turn to look at him as best I can. “It’s too dark here. Can I sleep in your room with you? Please, I’m scared. Or will you stay here with me?”

  “Your princess bed is probably a little too small for me.” He stands up with me still in his arms and grabs his flashlight. “You can stay in my room.” He starts walking out of the room when I stop him.

  “Wait, my bunny!”

  Not that I needed it. When I had Cal, I felt safer than that bunny has ever made me feel.

  “You good, Mads?” Cal looks at me, his hand on my shoulder and I nod. “Yeah, I just… thinking about that first storm. Do you think the power will go out?” I wince as I think about how dark this house gets with it almost completely surrounded by woods.

  “It might, but you know I’m better prepared than I was ten years ago.” He’d changed out of his suit and was now in basketball shorts and one of the few Academy t-shirts I hadn’t stolen that showed his sharp biceps.

  I need an orgasm, stat.

  “I know, still freaks me out.” I grab my backpack from his hand and make my way up the stairs.

  I don’t know when exactly my feelings for Cal changed from superhero to star of all my sexual fantasies. When I was younger, I would tell him that I loved him, that I was going to marry him, and attack his face with kisses on a daily basis. It was innocent, in that schoolgirl crush way.

  And then one day, he touched my shoulder in the same innocent way he always had and I blushed. Hard. I couldn’t have been any more than thirteen. For a year, I tried to make sense of my feelings, wondering how it was that I was starting to feel these things for a man that had practically raised me.

  I’m sick, I thought.

  I tried to ignore the thoughts.

  And then I discovered what I could make my body do after a little too thorough exploration one day in the shower. Sasha and I had stolen her mom’s Cosmopolitan one day and decided we were going to figure out what all the fuss was about. Not together, but separately and report our findings.

  Long story short, I was home alone, thank God, because Cal’s name slipped from between my lips the moment I fell over the edge of my first orgasm.

  That was three years ago.

  I’ve been fucked ever since.

  “I’M NOT DOING IT.” I cross my hands in front of my chest as a scowl finds my face. I stare at the beautiful pink bike that Cal had bought me for my birthday and turn my face back to his as he kneels next to me. “I refuse.”

  He pulls his sunglasses off his face and his chocolate brown eyes meet my icy blue ones. “Maddie, come on. You have to learn to ride a bike without training wheels.”

  “I tried. I failed.” I huff.

  “You fell one time.” He puts his index finger up in front of my face.

  “Because you let go.”

  “You were doing so good, sweetheart. You didn’t need me!”

  “No.” I turn away from the bike and begin walking back towards the house when I feel his hand wrapping around my arm.

  “Mads.”

  “NO!” I scream. “You can’t make me.”

  “I promise it’ll be—”

  “No.” I glare at him. “I fell. Look at my elbow AND my knee!” I show him the scratch on my arm that is so big it has to be covered with two SpongeBob band-aids and the one on my knee that hurts every time I bend my leg. “It hurts, Cal.” My lip trembles and my eyes well up with tears. “You swore you wouldn’t let me fall.”

  His eyes are warm and I wonder if he’s going to cry too when he wraps me in a hug. I smile and rest my head on his shoulder because even though I’m mad at him, he gives the best hugs. He rubs my back and kisses my nose, the hair of his beard tickling my skin and making me giggle.

  “You can’t stay mad at me forever.”

  “Yes, I can.” I go back to glaring so that he thinks I’m still mad. He smiles and touches my cheeks with his index fingers like he always does when he wants my dimples to pop out.

  “Let’s try one more time, and then…I’ll let you stay up late tonight.”

  My ears perk up and I look around as I think about his offer. “How late?”

  “Past nine o’clock news late.”

  I put my hands on my hips and cock my head in that way that Cal says “he can’t say no to.” “I stay up past then anyway.”

  “You’re supposed to be asleep, Madeline Elizabeth.” He narrows his eyes at me and I giggle with a shrug.

  “Stop buying me books.”

  His eyes roll in a full circle, and I find myself trying to imitate him. How does he do that? “Fine, ten o’clock news, final offer.”

  “You got a deal!” I shake his hand and take off for my pretty pink bike with the tassels and wicker basket attached to the front.

  A clap of thunder rouses me from my sleep and immediately I’m on high alert. The room is almost pitch black and before I can think I’m reaching for my cell phone and turning on my flashlight. Fuck, the power went out.

  It was rare that we lost power, with Cal getting a generator installed after the first few times scared me shitless. For the power to have gone out, it’s probably a big storm and right on schedule, the thunder claps and confirms my suspicion. The tree outside is scratching against my window, and the rain is hitting the roof so aggressively I’m surprised I’ve been asleep this long. A flash of lightning brightens the room and I shut my eyes just like every time for fear of seeing something that would shake me to my core.

  I’m out of bed before I can stop myself and padding down the hallway towards Cal’s room. Even without my light, I’d know how to get there. I’d memorized that it was sixteen big steps and twenty-two smaller steps between mine and Cal’s room. A fact that was necessary when I was bolting for it in the middle of the night. It’s been years since I snuck into Cal’s room, and I don’t know if it’s because my feelings have been getting more intense and I’m being led by my hormones, or if the memories of that first storm are still haunting me, but I find myself in front of his bedroom.

  From a young age, Cal taught me to always knock on closed doors, and while at the time I didn’t realize why, I always listened to his rule. Of course now, at seventeen, I realize why he’d ask me to knock before barging into his bedroom. And because I’m seventeen, with lustful thoughts swirling through my brain about seventy percent of my waking hours, I decide to proceed without caution. I push through his door and pad through
his room, the carpet plush under my feet, careful to keep my phone pointed downwards as I move towards his bed. I sit on the edge and I feel him shift.

  I shine my phone upwards, careful not to blind either of us. “Wha—Mads?”

  “Power’s out.”

  He lets out a sigh and sits up, resting his back against the headboard and grabs his phone to check the time. “What did I tell you about knocking?”

  I roll my eyes. “What, are you naked under there or something?” I hope he can’t see the flash of hope cross my face or my eyes that dart straight to where his dick is hidden beneath the wool blanket.

  “No, Madeline, but you know the rule.”

  “Sorry, but you didn’t come to my room when the lights went out. You always come…” I trail off.

  “It’s been a while since they went out.” My eyes are finally adjusting to the darkness of the room and I can make out his eyes now. “Must be pretty bad out there.”

  “Yeah…” I tell him softly. I bite my bottom lip gently and my eyes flit around the room. “Can I stay?”

  He’s silent and I briefly wonder if he’s going to tell me no. That I need to go back to my room and stop whatever it is I’m doing.

  Stop trying to seduce me, Maddie. I swear I hear his body telling me.

  “Yeah, of course, I mean… yes. Let me just run downstairs for a second, okay?”

  I don’t say anything because a part of me is a little scared about being up here by myself. I know my fear is irrational and a little childish, but call it what everyone refers to it as my “brush with death” when I was a kid. There were things that went bump in the night and it scared me. Except these bumps were heard from within. The brutalities of my childhood whispered in my ear in the dead of night, making me wonder if I’d eventually meet that same end. The nightmares of physical monsters had stopped haunting my dreams years ago. The nightmares manifest in different ways now. I’m no longer afraid of the monsters under the bed, but the ones that lurk in my brain. The ones that whispered, you’re next. Ones that are only completely silenced when I’m around Cal.