Unconditional by Q. B. Tyler

Author:Q. B. Tyler [Tyler, Q. B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: novel
Publisher: Q.B. Tyler
Published: 2019-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

The sniffles coming from her bedroom gut me as I make my way up the stairs. I open her door, and I watch as she cries into her pillow, her shoulders shaking under the force of her sobs. “Baby,” I murmur and then I’m behind her, curling my body around her petite one in an attempt to shield her from all the outside pain. “I’m here. He’s gone.”

She turns in my arms, allowing me a look at her face that’s red and splotchy. Her eyes are glistening from her tears, turning them the brightest shade of blue, and her puffy lips look so soft and sweet. I lean forward and run my tongue across her bottom lip, tasting the salt from her tears. “The things he said…”

“Don’t mean shit to me.”

“He’s your brother.”

“And you’re everything.” I don’t want to say the words. That although we are fighting the previous conventional terms of our relationship, that I do feel something parental over her. And that trumps everything. “There’s no one in this world I’d take over you.”

She bites her bottom lip and squeezes her eyes shut. “It’s so unfair. Your relationship will never be the same. I know you love him. You look up to him. He’s your big brother.”

“He’ll come around. Or maybe he won’t. I don’t care.”

“It’s been years, and he still hasn’t come around to Grant.”

“And that should tell you something. It’s him…not us.” I cup her cheeks and rub my thumbs over the space beneath her eyes, wiping the tears.

She blinks her eyes a few times and I see the tears clear from her blue orbs. “It’s about your dad?”

I shrug because, to be honest, I’m not sure. I was six when my dad left, during a period when I knew something was wrong but couldn’t understand the ramifications it would have on me later in life. Henry was ten and he asked our mother when he’d be back for months and when my mother finally looked at him with tears in her eyes and a glass of Chardonnay filled to the brim and told him he wouldn’t, I watched my big brother break down and sob.

He didn’t stop for six long months.

He remembered things I didn’t. He remembered our father better than I did. I remembered the nice neighbor that taught me to fish and made my mother feel special. The one that took us to dinner and came to my baseball games. The one that fixed things in the house and taught Henry to drive because mom can’t drive for shit. I remembered Grant. I saw the way he looked at my mother. The way that he loved her. It showed me how a man was supposed to love a woman. Henry was drowning in feelings of anger and resentment, too caught up in the pain to realize that Mom was happy. That Grant made Mom happy. He didn’t see the signs and thus is now in a loveless marriage because he’d been angrier for longer than he’d been happy.

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