Unconditional: A Coming of Age Romance Novel (Always)

by Cherie M Hudson

  “I won’t be here tomorrow, Raph,” I said, my voice steady. Level.

  He frowned, mirth mixed with puzzled confusion. “And where will you be, American girl? You and Heather got plans? I’m thinking you need to change those plans. Unless they involve buying me a present. And if that’s the case you can—”

  “I’m leaving for Gunnedah tomorrow morning,” I cut him off. “For the field-study part of my scholarship.”

  He stared at me. Didn’t move. Just stared at me. “What?”

  Had I thought I was dying inside only a few moments ago? That was nothing compared to the cold grief and pain I felt now. “I’m catching the train at Central Station at six forty-five,” I said, forcing my voice to stay composed. It was hard, what with the shocked way Raph looked at me. “Heather’s taking me there. I’m spending the next six weeks on a ranch…I mean a farm, or a property, or whatever you guys call it, and when that’s finished, I’m returning straight to Plenty.”

  He continued to stare at me, the confusion in his face morphing into something else. Disbelief. Followed by anger. “You didn’t think you should have told me this, oh, I don’t know, at the beginning of the week?”

  My stomach rolled.

  With greater effort than I thought it would take, I planted my palms to his chest and shoved him off me. I couldn’t have this conversation while we were both naked and he was still nestled between my thighs.

  He grunted but rolled away. I’m under no delusions it was my brute strength that shifted him. Scrambling from the bed, I snatched up my shirt from the floor, where it had ended up last night after Raph yanked it off me. I tugged it over my head and, without looking at him, searched for my panties, bra and shorts. They had to be here somewhere.

  “Maci?”

  I tried not to flinch at the anger in his voice.

  “Care to explain?”

  Finding my shorts near his desk, I crossed to where they hung from his chair and pulled them on. “I thought you knew,” I said, pretending to still search for my underwear. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about my underwear, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at Raph either. “I thought Heather had told everyone. What did you think was going on here between us anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. I could tell he was staring at me by the prickling heat razing my back. “Something fucking amazing and incredible comes to mind.”

  I shook my head, still continuing my underwear-seeking charade. Amazing and incredible was exactly the words I would have used as well, but if I agreed with him, he’d only want to continue what I knew couldn’t. “It was just some fun. Some good sex and laughs before I move on.”

  Hard fingers wrapped around my arm and, before I could let out a gasp, he was spinning me to face him. “Before you move on?”

  The anger, the stunned hurt in his eyes, ripped my heart apart. I wanted to tell him I was sorry. I wanted to say I was stupid. Instead, I shrugged.

  Shrugged.

  He released my arm. Shook his head. Dragged his hands through his hair. “I don’t believe you.”

  I didn’t answer. Turning my face away from his intense scrutiny, I pretended to study the world beyond the window.

  “No.”

  The single, flat response made me turn back. It was so full of adamant conviction.

  He shook his head again, stare locked on my face. At some point I was going to have to tell him to put on some clothes. At least a pair of boxers.

  “This is bullshit,” he growled. Yes, it was a growl. He was angry. Really angry. “Bullshit. What we have…you can’t just shrug that off. I won’t let you.”

  I arched an eyebrow at him. Do you remember me telling you how much I loved that I could do that? How effective it was in conveying an attitude? Yeah, I was conveying an attitude right now that screamed bitch and God, did I wish I wasn’t. But I had to. There was no future for us. There was no future for me. I didn’t have a normal life sprawling ahead of me, I had a crappy one. One he didn’t deserve to be burdened with.

  “Won’t let me?” I echoed.

  Raph narrowed his eyes. “I won’t let you. I can’t believe after what we’ve shared…how much…” He shook his head a third time, scoring his fingers over his scalp. “Christ, woman, I trust you. Don’t you get the significance of that? I don’t trust anyone and yet I trust you.”

  I stared at him, forcing myself to not respond. And then he said the words I didn’t want to hear.

  “Fuck, Maci, I fell in love with you.”

  I went cold. My lips prickled, my heart smashed into my throat. My chest constricted. The pit of my belly, slow to catch up with the situation, it seemed, fluttered with nervous joy and excitement before reality smothered the deluded reaction. I looked at him, hating myself.

  “I didn’t ask you to,” I said. Damn, I should have been a drama major with how well I was pulling off cold-hearted skanky bitch. “I don’t want you to.”

  Before he could respond, I turned to his desk and plucked the top book from the pile. “Just like I didn’t ask you to read these,” I continued, showing him the cover. Living With Parkinson’s Disease. “Holy crap, Raph, you’re reading books about Parkinson’s disease. About how to cope with a loved one who has Parkinson’s disease, about living with it. Don’t you get how wrong that is?”

  His jaw bunched. “It’s wrong to care about someone?”

  The lump in my throat making it difficult to breath grew thicker. Cared about me. Loved me. Everything I’d wanted since meeting him. And my worst nightmare. “Please put on some pants,” I beseeched, turning away from him again. I dumped the book back on his desk.

  The sudden jolt woke his laptop, the screen filling with a Google page on Parkinson’s disease.

  I wanted to sob. I wanted to hit him. Just as much as I wanted to hug him.

  Life was so unfair. So fucking unfair.

  “Is it wrong to want to understand what the person you’ve fallen in love with has got?” he demanded. The jerking sound of his voice told me he was doing as I’d asked, as did the rustle and snap of denim followed by the distinct sound of a zipper being yanked up. “Wrong to want to know how to help them?”

  Knowing it was safe for my sanity to turn around, I faced him again. He was indeed wearing jeans now. Just jeans. Somehow, that made it worse. His naked chest rose and fell with each ragged breath he pulled. His stomach—with its exquisite six-pack and sexy-as-sin trail of hair leading down from his navel—hitched.

  The dizzy memory of the night before lashed at me. The memory of me licking a path from his navel over that thin line of hair down to his arousal.

  Shutting that memory off, I rammed my fists to my hips. It was hard-truth time. I’d been a bitch, now it was time for a reality check. “What I’ve got? This thing? Parkinson’s? It’s never going away, Raph. I’m not going to grow out of it. I can’t take a magic pill and be cured. It is going to slowly devour everything that makes me me, take away every ounce of pride I have, every shred of dignity, and there’s nothing you can do to stop that. No matter how many books you read, no matter how many bottles of water you open for me or door handles you turn.”

  He looked away. Out the window first and then at his bare feet. “I didn’t think you’d noticed.”

  “I did. You buttoned my shirt yesterday, Raph. Sure, my hands were trembling a little, but I could have done it up myself.” I couldn’t stop the disappointment in my voice. It cut me like a blade, but it was there. “If you’re doing that now, what are you going to feel you have to do in two weeks? Wipe my ass?”

  His dark gaze snapped to mine. “That’s not fair.”

  “None of this is fair, Raph.” I drew in a slow breath and released it. “And none of your research and Googling for alternative treatments and support groups will cure me.”

  The muscle in his jaw ticked. “What if I know that? What if it doesn’t matter to me?”

  I raised my chin. “It should matter to you. You’re not even twenty-five. You have a
life ahead of you. I don’t. And if you can’t see that, then you’re a moron.”

  Cold fury flickered in his eyes again. Chips of dark rage and deep grief. “So you’re saying you don’t love me? You don’t have feelings for me at all?”

  Mouth dry, bile in the back of my throat, my pulse pounding in my ears, I shook my head. “I don’t love you.”

  His Adam’s apple jerked up and down. “And what we’ve been doing was just some no-strings sex?”

  I forced out a sarcastic snort. “I’m a college girl in another country, Raph. Of course it’s no-strings sex.”

  Man, I was being a bitch. I know that. But when you know what’s ahead of you, when you’ve witnessed it firsthand—a lifetime of the tremors, of choking on your own spit, of falling over and drooling, of burdening the people who love you no matter how much you try not to—you realize no one is going to want to have to deal with that.

  Even if Raph thought he did. Even if I desperately wanted him to.

  He sucked in a slow breath. His nostrils were white with livid rage. Fury radiated from him. “Well, thanks for finally filling me in then, Maci. You’ve saved me making a big mistake. And stopped me wasting any more of my time. Fuck knows, I’ve wasted enough of it on you already.”

  The words sliced through my heart. I wanted to cry. God, I was dying inside. “You’re welcome,” I said instead, sick to the stomach. At my hip, my hand shook like a goddamn vibrator on full speed. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to pack.”

  Christ, I didn’t want to do this. I so didn’t. I wanted to go back to him and say sorry. But I couldn’t face an almost certain day in the future where he would make excuses to end the relationship, knowing my Parkinson’s was the real reason. And I knew I didn’t have the strength to pretend to believe him when that day came.

  It’s easier this way. Horrible, yes. Bitchy, definitely. But easier. For both of us.

  I turned and walked to his door, pausing for a second as I wrapped my hand—the right one, shaking but not as bad as my left—around the door knob. “If you find my bra and panties just throw them in the trash. They’re not important to me.”

  Before he could utter a word, and let’s be honest here, there wasn’t much left to be said, I pulled open the door and hurried through it.

  Straight into Brendon. “Hey, Plenty, Ohio,” he said, catching me with a firm grip around my upper arm as I stumbled backward across the threshold of Raph’s room. “I was just coming to get you for—”

  “Get me out of here, Brendon,” I snarled. Yeah, I snarled it. “Take me back to your apartment. Now.”

  I didn’t look back as I shrugged off Brendon’s hands and stormed away from Raph’s room.

  I didn’t pause as I hurried down the stairs. I kept walking. Until I was outside. Until I was at Brendon’s car.

  Then, only then, did I allow myself the luxury of collapsing to the ground, one hand holding onto the front passenger wheel, the other pressed to my face, scrubbing at my eyes. Holding back the tears, the hot, damning, self-hating tears.

  Holding them back. Holding them back.

  And then failing.

  Brendon found me that way a minute later. Whatever had held him up, whatever had passed between him and Raph, he didn’t say. He wordlessly crouched down beside me, wrapped a strong arm around my back and helped me to my feet.

  “C’mon, Maci,” he murmured against my temple. “Let’s get you cleaned up. You look an absolute mess with all the tears and streaked mascara and snot.”

  My answering laugh was tortured and weak. But it was a laugh.

  It was the only one I had for the rest of the day.

  Heather came and collected me from Brendon’s apartment an hour later. In that time, I’d showered, washed my hair, removed any signs of my tears from my face and removed any remains of Raph from my body.

  I sat on Brendon’s sofa, staring at the exercise bike positioned between me and the television. I heard Brendon and Heather talking in low murmurs in his kitchen but didn’t care about what was being said.

  I had gone into full-on Parkinson’s melt down. My brain had turned the world gray and bleak and miserable and I was drowning in it.

  And it was all my fault. All of it.

  At some point, Heather took me back to Mackellar House. I needed to pack after all. Gather up my things and get ready to move on.

  That’s what I was doing—moving on. There was no point in staying here, even if my heart was telling me I should.

  We walked through the building with its noisy floorboards and noisier occupants that had been my home since I’d arrived in Australia. The smells were familiar to me, the faces the same. As confusing and conflicting as my time here had been, I realized as I climbed the stairs, that I loved it here at Mackellar House.

  I was going to miss it.

  I was going to miss it all.

  My gut flip-flopped at the thought of leaving.

  My mind—fuzzy and tormented—told me it wasn’t just the house I was going to miss. Stupid mind. Of course I was going to miss Heather and Brendon. And Raph…

  Was he going to hate me forever, I wondered? After what I’d done to him? Was he going to…I don’t know, miss me?

  I shut down that thought. It was too raw and messed-up. I didn’t want Raph to miss me. Wanting him to miss me meant I wanted him to think about me and I didn’t want that either. He needed to move on.

  Huh. Moving on. Yeah, I was beginning to think moving-on was a sucky term that didn’t come close to conveying how horrible and miserable and wrenched the actual act was.

  We were two steps away from my room, Heather being her normal chatty self—this time in an effort to help me find my happy again, I suspect—when the door to Raph’s room opened.

  I froze.

  My heart didn’t just leap into my throat—it lodged there and damn near suffocated me.

  I stared at the dim interior visible beyond the opening.

  And sucked in a breath as Shelly White, she of the bikini-modeling fame and Twitter infamy, floated across the threshold, hair a wild mess, lipstick smeared.

  “Errr…” Heather said beside me.

  Shelly smiled at us and then, with a toss of her artfully wild hair, turned back to Raph’s open door and wriggled her fingers in a cutesy wave that made me want to throw up.

  Or maybe it was the sight of Raph standing in the doorway that made me want to throw up. Raph, who was still naked except for his jeans. Jeans that were now hanging lower on his hips, thanks to an undone fly.

  Raph’s stare found mine for a split second before, with a silent snarl, he swung the door shut.

  I scrunched up my face, drew another breath—this one less shocked—and then opened my eyes and walked to my door.

  If Shelly said anything to me and Heather, I didn’t hear her. She probably did. It’s probably for the best I was in a semi-fugue state. I might have snapped and done something highly violent.

  Which was stupid really, because I had no claim over Raph. I’d thrown that claim back in his face but a few hours ago. He could fuck whoever he wanted now.

  And apparently was.

  Yay. Awesome. How freaking fantabulous.

  Not.

  God, could I be any more fucked-up?

  No. Probably not.

  Give Me a Home Among the Gum Trees.

  But Please, Leave a Canoe

  Three weeks into my fieldwork study of koalas, their mating habits and their movements in an environmentally threatened area, a flood hit.

  Biblical in size.

  I’d spent the last three weeks living with the nicest family in the world. The Scotts—Reginald, Mary and their eldest son, Robbie—ran the second-largest cattle ranch in Gunnedah. Well, outside of Gunnedah.

  Gunnedah, I discovered very quickly, was a small country town with only one set of traffic lights, six bars, AKA pubs, and a lot of utes. The Scotts lived on a ranch twenty miles northwest of that. Sorry, a property. I’m never going to get us
ed to the jargon. They welcomed me, their American intruder, into their family with open arms. They were warm and friendly and laughed often and didn’t try to force me to eat Vegemite and had a ready supply of Tim Tams in the cupboard.

  Robbie helped me with my research. And by helping me I mean he would drive me every morning in his ute, which looked so much like Raph’s I wanted to cry every time I climbed into it, out to the large koala colony on their land. He’d leave me there with a picnic basket full of food Mary Scott had prepared for me and a walkie-talkie to communicate with them. I’d learnt on my day with them there was no cell phone service this far out whoop whoop—whoop whoop being the Australian term for way out in the country, apparently.

  They warned me to watch out for brown snakes. I wanted to point out the grass where I was camping each day was brown and long and how the hell did I have a hope of spotting a brown snake in it, but I never did. Robbie was too nice—and busy—for me to make him waste time dealing with an American’s worry about snakes.

  I’d settled without any hassles in the three weeks since leaving Sydney. My research was going well. Koalas reacted to daily temperature changes in both speed and distance traveled, it seemed. I spoke daily to Heather via Skype and Brendon every second day—where I assured him I was still doing my exercises, and, no, I wasn’t forgetting to take my meds.

  I was keeping up with my meds, and there’s nothing like the Australian Outback for meditation. I found myself meditating often during the day, especially when the sun was turning the sky pink as it sank toward the western horizon, the wind rustled the gum leaves and the scent of eucalyptus hung heavy in the air.

  I would sit cross-legged on a folding stool—where the brown snakes couldn’t get me—eyes closed, focusing on my calm.

  I was not, in all those twenty-one days, dwelling on Raph. Nope. I wasn’t. Nor was I feeling miserable he hadn’t tried to contact me. No way. I wasn’t lying in the comfy single bed in the Scotts’ spare room every night, imagining a life without Parkinson’s, a life with Raph, torturing myself with the impossible before rolling over and shoving my face to the pillow to muffle my pathetic, self-inflicted sobs. And I sure as hell wasn’t fixated on the memory of Shelly White leaving his room as he stood in the door with his jeans undone.