Hold Me Close - Talia Hibbert Page 0,134

he could go back in time and tell his teenage self about this. That he could reassure the Samir who’d once been so full of rage he hadn’t trusted himself to speak. That he could say, One day you’ll be surrounded by people who love you. One day you’ll have children with Laura Albright, and marry her, and watch your babies become adults, and know that you’re capable of contentment, of family.

But he couldn’t time travel. He couldn’t tell himself that. And in the end, it didn’t matter.

Happiness had been one hell of a surprise.

The End.

Next Up: back to Ravenswood and the Kabbah sisters. What’s a girl to do when her high school crush returns as a widowed, single dad? Apparently, she takes a job as his live-in nanny.

Untouchable

Ravenswood Book 2

For everyone who’s ever been left.

Content Note

Please be aware: this book contains material that may trigger certain audiences, including:

themes of depression and anxiety

parental illness, chronic illness, terminal illness

parental abandonment

discussion of spousal death

reference to suicidal thoughts (Chapter 10)

a sex act that is stopped abruptly due to one participants’ discomfort (Chapter 14; there is no dubious consent or non-consent in this book).

Prologue

Most people didn’t like walking in the rain.

Especially not this kind of rain, the sort of icy spray that barely seemed to fall, yet soaked everything in its path within seconds. Sly rain, Nate’s mum called it. You might look out the window and think, Oh, that’s alright to go out in—but as soon as you stepped outside, you’d realise it absolutely wasn’t.

At least, it wasn’t unless you were Nate. Unless you needed something damp and dour to soothe your scorched bones. Only on days like this, when the sly rain fell and the sky was a sad, blue-grey and the earth smelled fresh and clean, did he stop feeling so fucking furious. Only on days like this did his strange, empty rage—the rage he had no reason to feel—go away.

He’d turned fourteen last week, and his mum had bought him a birthday cake. His ever-cheerful little brother had stuck fourteen candles in the round, white sponge. Nate had blown out the candles and tried to seem excited. Later that night, he’d snuck out of the house to watch the stars and wondered why he was such an ungrateful, miserable, angry motherfucker when he had no right to be. They loved him, but all he had room for was rage.

He’d decided it was this fucking town. This tiny, suffocating town and everyone in it. Ravenswood. It wasn’t his fault; it was Ravenswood’s fault. He wouldn’t always be like this; he just had to leave. And the minute he’d made that decision, something in his chest had eased. That was all. He just had to leave.

So, Nate was biding his time until adulthood came along, and he could fuck off out of here. He’d run away to somewhere huge and awful like Manchester or London, and… and become an artist. Or a photographer. Something that didn’t involve words or reading, since he couldn’t even do that right. His jaw still ached from the effort of clenching his teeth in Geography class that morning. That fucker Mr. Meyers had called him stupid again—and since Nate had been too angry to speak, and since he’d promised Ma he wouldn’t throw chairs at school anymore, he’d just had to sit there and take it.

Which was why he’d decided to spend his lunch break wandering the school grounds in the rain. It calmed him. He passed by the music block to circle the mammoth obelisk of the science tower, dragging in gulps of cool, wet air. Later, he’d turn up for maths with rain dripping from his nose and the tips of his too-black hair, and some clever twat like Dan Burne would probably call him a demonic drowned rat or whatever.

Didn’t matter. Nate felt water leak into his battered old school shoes as he stepped purposefully into puddles and relished the shock of cold. He turned his face up as he walked and let the raindrops bathe his wide eyes like someone else’s tears. Which is why it took him so bloody long to notice Hannah Kabbah walking in front of him.

But once he saw her, he couldn’t focus on anything else. He didn’t really want to. He liked watching Hannah—he liked Hannah full stop, not that he’d ever tell her so. If he did, she’d probably just roll her eyes and turn away, which was kind of why he liked her. She was so…