“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.