Hold Me Close - Talia Hibbert Page 0,178

shut me up.” She grinned, then ran her tongue over the edge of her teeth. Which he had never seen her do before. He had no idea what it even meant, but the sight of that smiling mouth and that curling tongue and the gleam in her dark gaze…

He was standing in front of her, shopping abandoned, before his brain fully grasped that his body was moving.

She looked at him, her smile nowhere to be found. Now her laughing eyes were wide, her lips slightly parted, and he could see the soft, pink inside of her mouth beyond the armour of her lipstick. He wanted to taste that mouth.

But he wouldn’t. He shouldn’t. He couldn’t. It was just kind of unbelievable how much he needed to. How he felt fucking desperate to, as if he’d give anything to kiss her, including his damn principles.

It’s not about you. It’s about her. And even though she smiles for you, and laughs with you, and whispers in the dark with you, that doesn’t mean she feels anything like the shit you feel. So back away. Now.

He stepped back.

“Nate,” she whispered.

Another step.

“Nate, you—”

“Let me know,” he said casually—as if he hadn’t just stood there staring at her mouth—“if I can help you with anything else.”

She stared for a moment, the slow rise of her chest visible as she dragged in a breath. Then she said, “Like what?”

He cleared his throat. “Like dusting places you can’t reach. I feel bad about you risking your neck to clean the house.”

She nodded slowly. And then the tension in her body dissolved, the heat in her gaze fading, until he could almost forget the last thirty seconds had even happened.

Almost.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, refolding a tea towel that looked perfectly fine to his mortal gaze. “I barely do anything. I’m beginning to feel as if I’m swindling you.”

“You do plenty,” he said. “You get the kids from school. You scrub my house to within an inch of its life. You cook, and you got us a…” He grimaced. “A family calendar. Seriously, you have no idea how much peace of mind it gives me to know that you’re here. That if there’s any kind of emergency, I won’t be caught between looking after the kids and looking after Ma.” He rubbed his eyes, suddenly tired. He still wasn’t sleeping well. And he couldn’t stop reading medical articles, even though they made his head throb like a motherfucker.

Something just wasn’t sitting right with him.

Hannah distracted him from that familiar tangent when she said, “I meant to ask you, actually, about the boxes in the dining room. I wanted to unpack, but I don’t want to go through private things—”

“Nothing’s private,” he said. Which was true. He’d had a single box of items that might be labelled private, and that had long since been unpacked in his room—but he had the oddest feeling that he wouldn’t mind Hannah seeing any of it anyway. “It’s just shit we don’t necessarily need, so I didn’t get around to it yet. I’ve been lazy. I’ll do it.”

She gave him a wry look. “Lazy is not the word I would use to describe you.”

“Maybe you don’t really know me,” he winked.

She didn’t smile back. Instead, her eyes sliced him open and examined him from the inside out. She opened her mouth to say something that he knew, instinctively, would ruin him.

So he was relieved when his phone rang, interrupting her.

But he wasn’t relieved for long.

10

“My body is not my enemy. My body is me.”

- Hannah Kabbah, The Kabbah Code

Waiting rooms were the ninth circle of hell. Especially when you were sitting in the Respiratory Department with your mother, trying to wipe your sweaty palms against your jeans while she flicked serenely through a magazine.

They need me to come in, she’d said. They have something to tell me, she’d said. And then, her calm voice wavering just a little: Apparently, it’s urgent.

And that was all they’d said. Urgent. No details, no explanations, no reassurances.

It was a good thing, Nate decided, that they were at a hospital right now. Because he could feel himself creeping closer to a fucking heart attack with every passing second.

Nate had been telling himself for a while now that his mother was going to die. Not because he believed it; he didn’t. But when Ellie had died so suddenly, it had felt like the moment a brawl turns bad, when you’re drowning in kicks and punches from every direction. Like,