Before I Wake

9

I GASPED AND Tod pulled me out of reach. Nash grabbed for Sabine, but Thane stood and pushed her backward with him. “Who the hell are you?”

“What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” Sabine croaked, clutching the hand that held her by the throat at arm’s length. “Did your dad beat you? Your mom leave you? Did your girlfriend kick your balls clear up into the back of your throat?”

Thane’s eyes widened, and I realized he was surprised into silence for the first time since I’d met him.

“Whatever it is,” the mara continued, her voice hoarse but audible, “I’m going to top it, if you don’t let me go right now.”

Thane studied her for another second, like he was debating—or maybe waiting for verbal brilliance to strike. Then his eyes narrowed and he frowned at her, and I could see his grip on her loosen a little. “I remember you. You’re the feisty little firecracker I saw at Kaylee’s house.” When he’d been stalking me, in anticipation of reaping my soul.

Sabine frowned—she’d never seen him before—and her eyes darkened. Every lightbulb in the room seemed to dim, and chill bumps rose on my arms. “Know what happens when you hold a lit firecracker?” she said, glaring up at Thane, who didn’t answer. “It’ll take your hand clean off.”

Thane burst into laughter, and Nash edged around the coffee table, closing in on them both.

“Nash…” Tod warned, but he couldn’t make himself inaudible to another reaper. Not that it mattered. Thane had already seen Nash.

“Try it, and I’ll kill her,” he said. “Before you can even blink.” The reaper didn’t have to hurt her to kill her. All he had to do was remove Sabine’s soul, and he could do that in an instant. Much faster than I could retrieve a stolen one.

Nash shuffled backward a few steps, his jaw clenched in fury, hands curled into fists at his sides.

“And how long do you think that would last, in a room full of bean sidhes?” Sabine demanded, her voice dark and low, but as fierce as I’d ever heard it. “How far do you think you’d get with my soul?”

“Hmm… Good point,” Thane said, and I exhaled slowly. But he kept talking. “Maybe I’ll take you whole, and let Avari pick and choose the parts he wants.”

“I’ll kill you,” Nash growled, and Tod edged closer, ready to back his brother up.

Thane laughed. “I’m already dead.”

“You could be deader.” Nash was so furious he couldn’t control the twist of fear in his eyes. I could see disaster coming like an out-of-control train, but I couldn’t stop it.

Sabine glanced at him, then at Tod, and something silent passed between them. Tod nodded, then lunged forward and grabbed Nash by one arm. Nash shouted and tried to jerk free, and I stepped in front of him, trying to warn him. Trying to shut him up. He was too scared for Sabine to see the danger he was putting himself in. Thane could kill him just as easily as he could kill Sabine. In fact, that may have been his plan, to draw Nash close enough to take them both at once.

If that happened, Tod and I could only save one of them.

When I finally got Nash to stop shouting and throwing punches that went right through Tod, I realized Sabine was talking. To Thane.

“…more fears than any reaper I’ve ever met, and I know what they are,” she whispered, and Thane stared at her, mesmerized. “You’re not afraid of your final rest—you welcome it. You crave it. You’re afraid of an eternity spent serving Avari. That’s the thought that leaves you shaking in your tighty-whities, cowering in the corner late at night. You’d do anything to get free from him, wouldn’t you? But taking me won’t help. He wants her.” She let go of his arm to point at me with one hand, and a spark of fear shot up my spine.

Was she selling me out? Again? Or was this a distraction?

“You’re right. So let’s trade.” Thane pivoted with her still in his grip and looked right at Nash. “I’m taking one of them. You decide which.”

My breath froze in my lungs for the half second it took Tod to pull me to his chest. “No way in hell.” I tried to push him off—I couldn’t help Sabine if I couldn’t move—but he wouldn’t let go, and I didn’t know whether to feel loved or underestimated.

“You want her back?” Thane demanded, still focused on Nash—he knew better than to bargain with Tod. “Then give me Kaylee. Just scuttle over there and wrest her from the arms of your brother.”

Nash glanced at me and Tod, and the confusion churning slowly in his eyes scared me.

“That’s your brother, right? Cain to your Abel?” Thane asked. “I’ve pieced a few things together. They betrayed you, didn’t they—your brother and your girlfriend? They broke your heart and stomped all over your pride, but you can make all that end, right now. Give her to me, and I’ll let this one go. What’s it going to be? Which one will you save?”

Nash glanced from me to Sabine, then back, his irises churning with intense green twists of anger and brown swirls of fear, and I could practically read confliction in the frown lines etched into his forehead.

He didn’t know what to do.

Sabine could see it, too. She was waiting for his decision. And I saw the exact moment she lost patience. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

The mara wrapped both hands around Thane’s wrist, then tucked her knees to her stomach and let herself hang from his arm—for the fraction of a second it took for him to lose his balance.

Thane grunted and tried to let go of her, but she clung to him. He tipped over. She hit the floor and Thane fell on top of her, his arm still in her grip. Sabine gave his arm a quick twist and Thane howled as something tore.

He rolled away from her, and Sabine was on her feet in an instant, feet spread for balance, hands curled into fists. “Get the hell out of here before you really get hurt.”

Thane stood, holding his wounded arm, staring at all four of us in shock rapidly bleeding into fury. And just before he blinked out of existence, I saw fear closing the gap. He had to go back to Avari empty-handed, with an injured arm.

I almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

As soon as Thane was gone, Nash wrapped his arms around Sabine. “What the hell were you thinking?” he said into her hair. “He could have killed you in a heartbeat.”

Sabine shoved him away. “And you could have saved me just as fast.” Her expression said anger, but her eyes said pain, and I knew that the truth was somewhere in between.

“I tried!” Nash insisted.

“Yeah, when you thought I was the only one in danger. But when he told you to choose, you just stood there.”

“You wanted me to give him Kaylee?”

Sabine rolled her eyes and glanced at me and Tod. “Neither of them would have let that happen, and I wouldn’t, either. I didn’t need you to rescue me, Nash. I needed you to choose me. Just once.” With that, Sabine snatched her keys off the end table by the couch, then stormed out the front door, barefoot and pissed off. And more hurt than I could even comprehend.

“Nash…” I said when she was gone. I wanted to help.

I should have known better.

“Get out. Both of you, just go away.” Then Nash stomped down the hall and slammed his door, leaving me and Tod alone in the living room.

Tod had to go back to work, so when I left Nash’s, I returned Emma’s costume, grateful that she was sleeping when I got there, so I wouldn’t have to recount the story that started with me dressing up like an idiot and ended with Nash acting like one. For now. But she’d probably want the details in the morning.

Alone in my room, I knew I should be grateful that the action was over, at least for the moment, but with nothing to do but think and pet Styx while she slept, the night passed slowly. Excruciatingly slowly.

I couldn’t sleep and I wasn’t hungry, and it turns out there’s nothing good on television in the middle of the night when you don’t subscribe to the movie channels. I considered ordering something On Demand, but my dad had already threatened to kill me—an ironic word choice, for sure—if he got one more bill from the satellite company.

Also, I’d already watched everything that was available.

Around four in the morning, I realized I didn’t want to move. The end of my nose itched, but scratching it seemed like too much trouble, so I let the itch continue, because feeling an itch was better than feeling nothing, right?

So I lay there, listening to my own thoughts race through my head so fast I could hardly focus on them. I wondered how long Sabine could stay mad at Nash before she took him back, because we all knew she’d take him back. I wondered why Nash couldn’t see what he was doing to her, and how long it would take him to realize that loving her wasn’t enough. He had to love her more than anything else in the world. More than he loved me. More than he loved frost. More than he loved his own life. He had to love her like nothing else existed for him, ever, and I wished there was some way for me to tell him that without making him hate me more.

Then I wondered why Avari wanted Tod. Was one reaper not enough for him?

Of course it wasn’t. One of anything was never enough for Avari, and asking why a hellion of greed wanted something was pointless. Avari existed to want things. He’d probably obsessed over the souls of thousands of people in the eons of his existence. Surely I was just the latest in a long line of obsessions, and I wondered if he’d gotten any of the others.

I wondered if he’d get me.

But by the time the sun came up, even my thoughts had started to slow, and I wasn’t sure I even cared if Avari got me. What did it matter? I was already dead. He would make my afterlife hell if he got my soul, but he was clearly prepared to do that, anyway, so maybe it would be easier for everyone if I just…let him.

I couldn’t beat him. I couldn’t outlive him. I couldn’t outrun him. So why fight the inevitable?

My dad came into my room at seven-fifteen—I know, because I’d been staring at my alarm clock for the past fifty-three minutes. “Kaylee, where are you?”

That’s when I realized he couldn’t see me. Because I had no desire to be seen.

With a sigh, I concentrated just enough to slip into the physical plane, and that took a great deal more effort than rolling over, which I’d been putting off for the past few minutes.

“Why are you still in bed? You have to be at school in half an hour!”

“I’m not going.”

“The hell you aren’t. Get up. Get in the shower and wash your hair. You look like…”

“Death warmed over?” I blinked when I realized my eyes were dry. “’Cause that’s how I feel. Minus the warming over.”

“Kaylee, please.” My father shoved Styx over and sank onto the side of my bed. “This is normal, but you have to fight it. You’re not going to feel alive until you start acting like you’re alive. Tod says—”

I rolled onto my back and glared up at him. “You’ve been talking to Tod behind my back?” A spark of irritation flared deep in my gut and swelled for a moment before sputtering out.

“No, I’ve been talking to Tod in your absence. I’m worried about you, and he’s the resident expert on afterlives. He says you have to want to live—so to speak. That you have to find a reason to be here. I understand that I can’t be that reason, but you have to find one. Find something that makes you want to get out of this bed.”

“I have plenty of reasons to get out of bed. School just isn’t one of them.”

“Bullshit,” my dad said, and I blinked at him in surprise. “Your life isn’t over.”

“Um, yeah. Actually, it is. My death kind of coincided with the end of my life. Funny how that works.”

“You know what I mean. I know you, Kaylee. I know that a simple change in your state of being isn’t enough to make you lose interest in the rest of the world. So get up. There are friends at school waiting to see you smile and hear you talk. There are stolen souls out there waiting for you to liberate them. There’s even a grim reaper who loves you more than his afterlife itself, and if that’s not enough to get you moving, you better close your eyes, because I’m coming back with a bucket of cold water.”

I didn’t realize my eyes had watered until tears trailed down my face to soak into my pillow. “It’s enough,” I whispered, pushing myself upright. “You’re enough, even without all the rest of that.” I wrapped my arms around my dad and laid my head on his shoulder, and more tears soaked into his shirt. “I’m sorry. I just get lost in it, in the middle of the night. It’s so quiet, and there’s nothing here but my thoughts, and even those start to repeat after a few hours of nothing else, and then they stop making sense.”

“But it’s better now?” he asked, his arms so tight around me that my ribs ached. I could hear it in his voice, how badly he needed me to say yes. Even if it wasn’t true.

“Yes,” I lied, and more tears fell. “It’s better now.”

I still didn’t want to go to school. I didn’t want to shower, or brush my teeth, or dry my hair, but I did all of that because every time I looked up, I saw my father watching me, and he looked scared. He looked like he wanted to help me, but didn’t know how. Like he wanted to save me, but couldn’t see the threat.

He looked like he’d already lost me.

I blinked into the bathroom at school to save time, and slid into my desk in Advanced Math just as Mr. Cumberland started calling roll. “Are you okay?” Emma whispered, and I wondered if that “death warmed over” descriptor was more accurate than I’d thought.

“Yeah. I just don’t want to be here today.”

She gave me a sympathetic smile. “That makes all of us.” Her smile faded and her eyes narrowed. “You guys didn’t do it, did you?”

“No. Turns out privacy’s kind of hard to come by when there’s a hellion and his psychotic reaper minion out to steal your soul.”

Emma frowned, but before she could demand details, Mr. Cumberland cleared his throat and started class.

Fifteen minutes into the lesson, I would have sworn the clock on the wall was stuck. The hands hadn’t moved in ages. I swear, time was deader than I was.

Sure, my previous math teacher was an evil, soul-stealing pedophile, but he’d never once bored anyone to sleep, which was more than I could say for Cumberland and his Bueller-esque monotone.

Halfway through the fifty-minute period, Emma kicked my desk, and I sat upright, startled. “I can see through your arm!” she mouthed, exaggerating each mimed word.

Crap! I’d forgotten to concentrate on being solid—I’d forgotten to concentrate on anything—and had nearly disappeared in the middle of class. I narrowed my focus and solidified my form, but it took every bit of willpower I had to make my physical form stick. Seriously, if Mr. Cumberland couldn’t summon any enthusiasm for the lesson, how were we supposed to summon the will to be there? Some of us literally…

Sabine was waiting in the hall after class. Alone.

“Hey, have you seen Nash today?” she asked, falling into step beside us.

Em shook her head, and I glanced at Sabine in surprise. “You didn’t pick him up this morning?”

“I decided to let him stew a little longer, but how am I supposed to know when he’s had enough, if he’s not here where I can see him stew?”

“Trouble in paradise?” Em asked, and Sabine glowered at her.

“He failed to save her from the clutches of evil,” I explained, and Em’s brows rose.

Sabine stopped walking and grabbed my arm, pulling us all to a halt in the middle of the hall. “He would have stepped up. Thane just caught him by surprise.”

“I hate it when evil doesn’t send fair warning in advance,” Em said, and the hall dimmed as Sabine’s eyes grew darker.

“How’s this for warning?” the mara growled at Emma. “Get lost, or I’m having your pretty little human boyfriend for lunch.”

“She doesn’t mean that,” I said as Em’s expression cycled through anger and horror before settling somewhere in between.

“The hell I don’t. I haven’t had a decent meal in ages, since someone insisted I stop feeding at school.” She glanced pointedly at me.

“Well, if you’d feed at night, like any normal Nightmare…” But I realized the problem as soon as I’d said it, even if she wouldn’t admit it. She couldn’t feed most nights because she was watching Nash. Almost twenty-four hours a day, since his relapse the day before I died.

With a heavy sigh, I turned to Em. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure she doesn’t snack on Jayson. See you both at lunch.”

Em headed for class reluctantly, and I turned back to Sabine, but she started talking before I could. “This is your fault, Kaylee. He needs me and he loves me. I can see that in him when we’re alone, and he’d see it, too, if you weren’t always there, giving him something else to look at. If you’d stayed buried like any decent dead girl, none of this would have happened.”

I didn’t even know where to start. “I’m not going to apologize for my own existence, Sabine. Besides if I weren’t here, Nash wouldn’t be, either. He’d be sitting in jail awaiting trial for murder.”

“Because you framed him!” she whispered fiercely, dark eyes flashing. “No matter how you look at it, this is all your fault. So take me to him, now, so I can smack some sense into him. Assuming Thane didn’t go back for him last night.”

Thane. Shit. I hadn’t thought of that. And Harmony wouldn’t think to tell anyone he was missing, if she thought he was at school.

“I’ll go check on him, but I can’t take you with me.” Blinking all the way to Nash’s house was pushing the limit of how far I could go on my own without a layover, and I couldn’t get half that far with someone else in tow. “But I’ll text you if there’s anything wrong. Okay?”

Sabine scowled and grabbed my arm again, and this time she wouldn’t let me jerk free. “In case you haven’t noticed, Nash is in withdrawal again, but this time the drug is you. Don’t you think we ought to limit his exposure?”

Seriously? She was classifying me as a controlled substance now?

“I’m just trying to help.” And I’d go even without her approval. She didn’t own Nash, and he and I were still friends. We’d probably always exist in that weird twilight between friendship and more. We’d been through too much together to ever be any less to each other.

“Fine. But if anything happens to him because of you, I’ll…”

“You need some time to work on that one?” I said, pulling my arm free when I realized that for perhaps the first time in her life, she didn’t know how to finish a threat. “Threatening to scare me to death has kind of lost its punch, huh?”

“Just go get him. Please.”

The rare courtesy told me just how worried she was about him. So I nodded, then ducked into the nearest bathroom and waited until it was empty. Then I blinked into Nash’s living room, backpack and all. I set my bag on the floor and started toward the hall, until I heard the clink of glass in the kitchen.

I pushed the swinging door open slowly, expecting to see Nash, but I found his mother instead, and for a moment, I didn’t know what to do. Harmony and I hadn’t spoken one-on-one since I’d cheated on one of her sons with the other, then framed one for my murder. Since I’d eavesdropped the day before, I knew she thought Tod and I were good for each other, but I wasn’t sure if she’d actually forgiven me for what I’d done to Nash. Or if she ever would. And I had no idea how she’d feel about me popping into her house, unannounced.

But then she turned and noticed me in the doorway, and my chance to sneak out expired.

“Kaylee!” She stood and motioned for me to come in, and the minute the door swung shut behind me, she pulled me close in a tight hug. “I’ve been hoping you’d come see me, but I didn’t want to push you, if you weren’t ready.”

“So… You don’t hate me?” And in that moment, I realized that of everything I’d lost when I died, other than my heartbeat, Harmony was what I’d missed the most. She was the closest thing I had to a mother, but with everything that had happened between me and her sons, I’d thought… Well, I hadn’t expected open arms.

“Kaylee, I could never hate you.” She let go of me and pulled out a second chair at the table, then pushed a plate of cookies toward me when I sat.

Tears burned behind my eyes and I blinked, trying to keep them at bay. “But I got Tod killed and Nash framed for murder.” I certainly didn’t deserve her sympathy, much less her cookies.

“Honey, I know that was a hell of a crazy week, but you didn’t do any of that on purpose. And let’s not forget what else you did. You also saved Tod’s life and got Nash’s name cleared.”

“Doesn’t matter.” I sniffled, in spite of my best effort to hold back tears. “Nash hates me.”

“No. Nash wants to hate you, but he can’t. That’s the problem. He just needs time.”

“To learn to hate me?”

“No.” Harmony arched her brows at me, and I sobbed even as I laughed. “To forgive. To move on.”

“Tod and I… We messed up.”

She nodded. “Yes, you did.”

“But we didn’t mean to hurt him.”

“I know. Deep down, I think Nash knows. But on the surface, that’s harder to understand, and even harder to forgive.” She sighed and broke a chunk from her cookie. “I wish I could say I didn’t see this coming, but I did.” She’d warned me from the very start to be careful with bean sidhe brothers. I’d thought I was.

I’d thought wrong.

“Tod told you how he felt?”

She gave me a sad smile. “No. I’m the mother. Neither of them ever willingly tells me anything, but I know how to listen, even to the things they don’t say.” She sighed again, and this one was heavier. “Still, when Nash comes around, maybe you and Tod could hang out here sometimes. I wouldn’t mind seeing the two of you every now and then.”

“Sure.” Tod checked on his mother regularly, but he rarely let her see him. “For now, can I talk to Nash?”

“I wish you would. He says he’s sick, but he’s clean, and sober, and has no sign of a fever.” She looked worried, but I couldn’t help being relieved by the fact that he was still here, instead of suffering in the Netherworld with Avari and Thane.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

When I knocked on Nash’s door, the answer was almost immediate. “Go away, Kaylee.” He must have heard me talking to his mother. That’s what I get for going completely corporeal, instead of letting only Harmony see and hear me.

“Nope.” I pushed his door open and walked in, hoping he was dressed. I got half my wish—jeans only.

“You don’t get to just walk in here anymore,” he said, stretched out on his bed, hands folded behind his neck. “You gave that up when you started making out with my brother.”

“But you get to come to my house in the middle of the night, drunk, and try to kiss me?”

Nash frowned. “I said I was sorry about that.”

“No, actually, I don’t think you did.” Not for that specific offense, anyway. I pulled out his desk chair and sat. “So, are you sorry?”

He sighed, then sat up and met my gaze boldly. “No. You kissed him when you were with me. How was I supposed to know that road doesn’t run both ways?”

“Nash…” I hardly knew where to begin. “If you don’t love Sabine, you have to tell her. You’re all she wants. You’re all she thinks about. You’re all she has.”

“I do love her. How could I not?” he said, and I had no idea how to answer that one. “What did you think this was going to be like, Kaylee? Did you think you could dump me, and I’d bounce back to her and miraculously be happy? I’m not a Ping-Pong ball. You can’t just swat me back and forth and expect me to be content wherever I land. If Tod dumped you tomorrow, would you come back to me?”

I shook my head slowly, pushing myself back and forth a couple of inches in his wheeled desk chair. What had I thought things would be like between us after the breakup? The truth was that I hadn’t given it much thought. I hadn’t expected to live past my own death.

“Look. I love Sabine—I probably always will—but that doesn’t mean I don’t still love you, too. It’s not a switch I can just flip off. I wish it was, because I’d flip it in a minute. I don’t think I even like you anymore, but I can’t get you out of my head, and it hurts to see you, Kaylee.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But you still have to come to school, if for no other reason than that our strength is in numbers.”

“I’m fine. Baskerville starts barking if anything inhuman or undead gets within twenty feet of the house, in this plane or in the Netherworld. How do you think I knew you were here?”

So he hadn’t heard me talking to his mom, after all.

“I’m not worried about you, Nash. But Sabine and Emma are both at school with no Netherworld guard dogs looking after them. Or did you forget that a rogue reaper tried to kill your girlfriend last night?”

“She’s not my—”

“Save it.” I rolled my eyes and walked the chair closer. “You love her and you’re sleeping with her. Do you really think it’s worth arguing over how you define your relationship?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

Okay, he had a point there. But that didn’t change anything. “Get dressed. You’re going to school.”

“I don’t feel like it.” He lay back on the pillow again, and suddenly I understood how my father had felt when I’d refused to get up that morning.

“No one feels like going to school. Least of all me. But if I have to go, so do you.”

Nash shrugged and put one hand behind his head again. “Who says you have to go?”

“My dad. The state of Texas.” When that made no difference, my temper flared. “You want to stop loving me? I think I can help you out with that.” I snatched the T-shirt slung over his footboard, then sat on the bed and grabbed his free hand. Then I closed my eyes and pictured the alley behind the doughnut shop, where I’d seen Thane the day before. That was as close as I could get to the halfway point between Nash’s house and the school—which was as far as I could go with him in tow—and it was the place least likely to be populated.

“What are you—?” Nash tried to jerk free from my grip, but I held on tight, and a second later, I fell onto my butt on rough concrete. “What the hell?”

I opened my eyes to find Nash lying on his back on the ground, propped up on one elbow, one hand still gripped in mine.

“Where are we?”

“Almost there.” I closed my eyes again, and pictured the first-floor supply closet, across the hall from the teachers’ lounge. An instant later we were there, in the dark, Nash sprawled out on the floor with me sitting beside him.

“What the hell, Kaylee?” He jerked his hand from my grip, and when he tried to sit up, something crashed to the ground with an ominous-sounding slosh.

“Hang on.” I stood carefully and felt around on the wall next to the door. When I flipped the switch, dim light flooded the small space from a bare lightbulb overhead, highlighting Nash’s angry face with dramatic shadows. “Here’s your shirt. I think second period’s almost over.”

“Damn it, Kaylee!” He jerked the shirt over his head, then shoved his arms through the sleeves. “I don’t even have any shoes!”

“Don’t you keep cleats in your locker?” I asked as he stood, glaring down at me.

“I can’t walk around all day in baseball cleats!”

I shrugged. “Then go barefoot.”

“Take me home, Kaylee. Now.”

“No.” I crossed both arms over my chest. “You can’t just stay at home and pout when everyone you care about is at risk. All we have is one another, Nash. You, me, Sabine, Emma, and Tod. You owe it to us—all of us—to look out for us like we look out for you.”

“Like you were looking out for me when you kissed my brother?” he demanded. “Or when you framed me for murder?”

“More like when Tod and Sabine kept you from overdosing or hurting yourself when you fell off the wagon. Or when I made a deal with Levi and Madeline to clear your name. Or when Tod got rid of the dealer who supplied you with frost in the first place. Do you even know what he did?” I demanded, and Nash shook his head, brushing dust from the ground off his pants.

“He dropped him in the Netherworld. That’s a death sentence for a human. Your brother killed to protect you from yourself. And that’s not even…” I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying what else Tod had done for him. That wasn’t my secret to tell. “The point is that you’re not alone, Nash, and you have to stop acting like you are. We’re in this together. All of us. And we need you as badly as you need us. So stop pushing us away, because we’re not going anywhere.”

Nash blinked at me, surprise shining in his eyes. But that wasn’t all. In the low light, I thought I saw something else swirling in his irises. Something serious, and…relieved. “I’m so sorry for what I did to you, Kaylee. In the parking lot. I should have said it before. When I’m thinking straight, I can’t blame you for turning to him.” Tod, of course. Nash still wouldn’t say his name.

“You know it had nothing to do with that.”

“But it did,” he insisted. “If I’d been the answer to your problems instead of the source of them, you would never have even looked at him. So, I blame myself as much as I blame him.”

“Don’t.” My eyes were watering for the second time in an hour. Three hours earlier, I’d felt so empty I didn’t even want to get out of bed, and now I was so full of pain and regret I could hardly make myself breathe. “Don’t blame either of you. I did this. I kissed him.” I glanced at my feet, then made myself meet his gaze again. “I love him, Nash. I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

He exhaled slowly. “I know.”

The bell for third period rang then, and we both glanced up, startled, even though we’d known it was coming. “I have to go back for my backpack.” Which I’d just realized I’d left in his living room. “I can grab some shoes for you, if you want.”

“Thanks.”

We parted ways in the hall, and I wondered if anyone had seen us coming out of the closet together, him with no shoes. Then I realized I didn’t care what anyone else saw, or thought, or said about us. Nash and I had been through more together than any of them could ever imagine, and if they couldn’t understand the wounds we’d inflicted, they couldn’t understand how long and bumpy the road to forgiveness really was.