Splintered Memory by Natascha Holloway Page A

face, and when she smiled at him he lost himself in her. He closed his eyes as he felt the familiar sensation mount within him, and when he heard Charlie let out a familiar scream he couldn’t hold back any longer and he groaned into her.
    Charlie kissed his neck , and he lifted his weight off her and rested his head by hers as he caught his breath. She kissed his neck again, and he kissed her cheek before rolling off her entirely.
    That night as Charlie slept with her head resting on his chest, and her left hand on his stomach, he lay awake listening to her breathe and thinking once more how incredibly lucky he was.
    ***
    “Matt,” Oak said in his gruff voice making Matt look up and feel suddenly sick to his stomach.
    He saw that Oak was looking at him as though unsure of how to say what he’d come to tell him, and he’d never seen Oak like this before. He was afraid. He was in fact terrified, and he was sure that Oak was about to tell him the news that he was certain that he couldn’t handle hearing. 
    “ Charlie’s been taken into surgery. She’s bleeding internally, obviously from a result of being pinned in the car. She’s fighting, but your baby it…”
    “ It won’t survive the operation,” Matt finished for Oak in a deadened tone.
    “ No,” Oak said. “She also has some bleeding in her brain, but they won’t know the full extent of that until they get her into surgery.”
    “ Okay,” Matt said dropping his head. “So we wait.”
    “ We wait,” Oak said.
    Matt felt Oak put his hand on his shoulder, and he nodded in recognition of the gesture. He knew what needed to be done next. He knew that there were people that had to be told.
    He looked up at Oak and said; “I need to call her parents, and mine.”

Claire
    She was sat on her sofa holding her phone between her hands and against her chest. She hoped that Matt would call her with an update even if he was furious with her, and she hoped that Charlie was okay. She couldn’t be too badly hurt she told herself. Matt hadn’t sounded upset when they’d spoken she thought. No she said to herself reassuringly, he’d just sounded angry.
    She looked at the screen on her phone and willed it to show Matt calling. She knew that Charlie would be okay, she had to be. There were too many people that depended on her for her not to be okay, and Claire knew that she was just one of them.
    Charlie and Claire had been best friends since they were babies. Charlie’s mum and Claire’s mum had been best friends at school, and they had had the girls within two months of each other. From the moment that they were old enough to talk and know each other, they had been the best of friends and had shared everything.
    Whilst Charlie had been the girl next door growing up ; pretty, sporty, and popular. Claire had been the trouble maker; loud and abrasive, and very aware of her own sex appeal to all the boys at their school from a young age. Yet whenever Claire had done something wrong, which had been often, Charlie had always been the first person that she’d confided in. She’d just always known how to solve Claire’s dilemmas, although it had often entailed her taking a share of the blame for Claire’s actions.
    Many people had tried to come between the two of them over the years; other girls that had wanted to be as popular as they were, or boys who’d tried to play them off against one another, but nothing had worked. The two of them had been and to this day remained above such things.
    Charlie knew Claire better than anyone in the world, and in return Claire felt sure that she knew Charlie better than anyone else as well. Although she knew that Matt would likely disagree with this, but then she and Matt rarely saw eye to eye on anything.
    Claire had tried to get along with Matt for Charlie’s sake, but he was uncompromising towards her and she’d long since given up trying with him. She was civil, but he knew as well as she did that this was for