Hold Me Close - Talia Hibbert Page 0,245

the back of his hand seemed to fly with the movement. Finally, he asked, “How are you?”

It was a question they’d repeated regularly, purposefully, ever since Nate’s return to Ravenswood. Getting to grips with Ma’s illness had been a shitstorm. Of course, having Nate back home for the first time in years was one hell of a silver lining.

“I’m good,” Zach said, and it was the truth. He felt more like himself than he had in… forever. Ma was doing better on her new medication, Nate was on cloud nine with Hannah, and Evan was across the table right now murmuring to Ruth like a lovesick sap. Everyone was happy, except, possibly, for Rae—but he was determined to fix that.

There was just one niggling worry at the back of Zach’s mind: his own quiet, growing anger. It was heavy and secret and pointless, and no-one wanted to deal with it, least of all him—he didn’t even know where it came from, because he refused to explore it. Zach Davis wasn’t an angry person. He was cool. He was chill. He was easy. He made other people feel good. So this burning, teeth-gritting frustration would fade if he ignored it long enough. It had to.

But Nate didn’t look convinced. With a weirdly shifty look around the patio, he leaned in close and lowered his voice. "Hannah says everyone’s talking about you.”

Zach arched his brows. “Well, if Hannah says so…” He wasn’t being sarcastic. Hannah knew everything. She was the town crystal ball—or a very nosy woman with Machiavellian tendencies. One of those.

Nate nodded. “You remember the night we got Ma’s new diagnosis?”

As if Zach could ever forget. If discovering his mother had a dangerous chronic illness wasn’t memorable enough, there was also the part where he and Nate had gotten wasted and finally talked about all the heavy shit they liked to avoid. Like the past. And death. And depression. And…

“You said you weren’t interested in sex anymore,” Nate went on. “But you’re better now, right? Except, according to Hannah the All-Knowing, you still… aren’t. What’s up with that?”

Jesus Christ, this fucking town. “You know,” Zach said mildly, “I’m not in love with how much you two know about my sex life.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m serious here. Are you okay or not?”

Zach took in the harsh line of his brother’s brow, the worry in his pale eyes, and felt a flash of guilt. A few months back, on that messy, drunken night of confessions, Zach had wanted to tell his brother what he was learning about himself. He’d wanted to say, I’m not what everyone thinks I am. I don’t experience attraction the way you do. I’ve been pretending this whole time.

But he’d still been unsure, back then, still been confused, so he’d lied. Just a little. Just to test the waters. He’d acted like his sexuality was a strange new phenomenon instead of something he’d been avoiding his whole life, and Nate’s supportive response had been reassuring.

Now it was months later, and Zach was confident in his identity—but for some reason, he still hadn’t come out to his brother.

For a moment, he felt a flare of temper at the fact that he even had to. After all, Nate had never come out to him. Nate had never sat him down and said, “Hey, sometimes when I see a nice arse or a pretty smile, I get this lurch of sexual attraction, so I wanted to let you know that I’m straight and allosexual.” So why the fuck did Zach have to sit Nate down and say, “Hey, attraction doesn’t work like that for me because I’m demisexual”? Why?

The anger was irrational, so Zach crushed it and focused on what mattered. His brother thought he was hiding something, and technically, he was: Zach Davis, Ravenswood’s notorious man-slut, was actually a bullied, ostracised little nerd who’d grown up so self-conscious about his demisexuality that he’d slept around for years to overcompensate.

Just the memory of it made him sweat. Thank God he was himself now.

He should probably let his brother in on that fact. Evan, too. But the beer garden of the Unicorn didn’t seem like the best place to discuss it, so Zach settled for clapping his brother on the shoulder and looking him in the eye. “Listen. I swear to you, I’m okay. We can talk about this later. We will talk about this later. But you don’t need to worry about me.”

Nate stared at him in silence for a moment, clearly