Until You

Sweet, filled with a wide range of different emotions, quite angsty and covering a lot of triggering topics - that's “Until You” in a nutshell. This slow-burn story of two men, heartbroken for different reasons and coping with the shock of losing the lives they've known, and finding their own way to cope and survive, is truly touching and thought-provoking. Paul and Charlie are an unlikely couple brought together by sheer accident of fate and the divide of 27y between them was really quite a lot to take in. But it didn't bother me. Sometimes life delivers curve balls and the way we catch them, can deeply affect us. So when Paul stumbled on the homeless kid in a back alley, saving him from a beating and taking him home, this spur of the moment decision turned into a life changing moment. And I loved seeing how this so lonely, consumed by grief and guilt, man slowly started the climb from the pit of his own mini hell, he was drowning into for years. And while, at the beginning, Charlie looked like a project of self redemption, other stronger, foreign and definitely not fatherly feelings started to grow and develop. The story beautifully presented the initial internal turmoil, the doubts and the wonder that someone so much younger could be the reason for so many intense feelings and longing. And here comes Charlie - the other piece of the love equation. For someone who has lived on the streets alone for a long time and been forced to make tough decisions to survive, he was surprisingly overly tearful. But it was actually so human and understandable. He had accumulated so much trauma in his short 19 years that I wanted to hug him and never let him go. Fortunately they were both able to help each other and built a wonderful relationship. Overall, it was a good read and I enjoyed the fact that Charlie found such a caring, thoughtful and doting partner and for Paul, that in finding Charlie, he actually found a reason to move on, to overcome the crippling pain of his past and fully embrace his second chance at happiness and love.