down now.” Nash stared at his full tray. He’d lost weight. His face looked … sharper. The flesh under his eyes was dark and puffy, and he hadn’t bothered to artfully muss his hair that morning. The bright, charismatic Nash I’d first met had been replaced with this dimmer, somber version I barely recognized. A version I was afraid I didn’t know on the inside, either. Not like I’d known my Nash, anyway.
“Maybe you should have stayed home a little longer,” I suggested, slowly twirling noodles around my plastic fork.
“I wanted to see you.”
The fissure in my heart cracked open a little wider, and I looked up to find regret and longing slowly twisting the greens and browns in his irises. Humans wouldn’t see that, even if we’d had company. But because Nash and I were both bean sidhes—banshees, to the uninformed—we could see the colors swirling in each other’s eyes, and with a little practice, I’d learned to interpret what I saw in his. To read his emotions through the windows of his soul—when he let me see them.
“Nash …”
“No pressure,” he interrupted, before I could spit out the protest I’d practiced, but hoped not to have to use. “I just wanted to see your face. Hear your voice.”
Translation: You didn’t visit me. Or even call.
I closed my eyes, trying to work through an awkwardness I’d never felt with Nash before. “I wanted to.” More than I could possibly express. “But it’s just too hard to …”
“To see, but not touch?” he finished for me, and I met his rueful gaze. “Trust me, I know.” He sighed and stirred a glob of mass-produced peach cobbler. “So, what now? We’re friends?”
Yeah. If friends could be in love, but not together. In sync, but out of touch. Willing to die for each other, but unable to trust.
“I don’t think there are words for what we are, Nash.” Yet I could think of at least one: broken.
Nash and I were like the wreckage of two cars that had hit head-on. We were tangled up in each other so thoroughly that I could no longer tell which parts of us were him and which were me. We could probably never be truly untangled—not after what we’d been through together—but I had serious doubts we could ever really recapture what we’d had. “I just … I need some time.”
He nodded, and his eyes shone with the first flash of hope I’d seen from him in ages. “Yeah. We have time.”
In fact, we had lots and lots of time. Bean sidhes age very slowly from puberty on, so while I’d likely be carded until I was forty, if Nash and I actually managed to work things out, we’d have nearly four hundred years together, barring catastrophe.
Although actually barring catastrophe seemed highly unlikely, considering that since the school year began, my life had been defined by a series of disasters, barely held together by the beautifully strong thread of Nash’s presence in my life. At least, until recently. But now I was clinging to the wreckage of my existence, holding the pieces together on my own, trying to decide if I would be helping us both or hurting us by letting him back in.
“So, how’s Em?” Nash asked, his voice lowered as he glanced at something over my shoulder.
I twisted to see Emma Marshall, my best friend, heading toward us across the nearly deserted quad. Everyone with half a brain—or nothing to hide—was eating inside, where it was warm. Em carried a tray holding a slice of pizza and a Diet Coke, content to eat with us outside, not because she couldn’t face the crowd ready to judge her, but because she didn’t care what they thought.
“Em’s strong. She’s dealing.” And though she didn’t know it, in many ways, Emma was my hero, based on her resilience alone.
Doug Fuller, Em’s boyfriend of almost a month, had died from an overdose of frost two weeks earlier, and though they’d been connected at the crotch, rather than at the heart, she’d been understandably upset by his death. Especially considering that she couldn’t comprehend the Netherworld origin of the drug that had killed him.
Nash lowered his voice even further as she walked toward us. “Did you go to the funeral?”
“Yeah.” Doug had been one of Eastlake High’s starting linebackers. Practically the whole school had shown up at his funeral—except for Nash. He’d been too sick from withdrawal to get out of bed. And Scott, their third musketeer. Scott had survived addiction to frost—but at a devastating price. He’d suffered brain damage and now had a permanent, hardwired mental connection to the hellion whose breath had killed Doug and mortally wounded my relationship with Nash.
“Hey.” Emma came to a stop on my right and glanced from me to Nash, then back before taking a seat next to me. “Someone bring me up to speed. Are we making up or breaking up? ‘Cause this limbo is kind of driving me nuts.” She grinned, and I could have thanked the universe in that moment for the ray of sunshine that was Emma.
“How low can you go?” I asked, then crunched into a French fry.
“Lower than you know …” Nash replied, with a hint of an awkward grin.
Em rolled her eyes. “So … more limbo?”
Nash looked just as ready for my answer as she did. I exhaled heavily. “For now.”
He sighed and Emma frowned. Like I was being unreasonable. But she didn’t know the details of our breakup. I couldn’t tell her that he’d let a hellion take over my body and play doctor with him—to Nash’s credit, he hadn’t known it wasn’t me that first time—without even telling me I was being worn like a human costume.
I couldn’t tell her because the same thing had happened to her, and for her own safety and sense of security, I didn’t want her to know that her body had been hijacked by the hellion responsible for her boyfriend’s death. Her friendship with me had already put her in more than enough danger.
“Oh, fine. Drag out the melodrama for as long as you want. At least it’ll give everyone around here something else to talk about.” Something other than Doug and Scott.
If they hadn’t already had two weeks to deal with grief and let off steam, the whole school probably would have been reeling from the double loss. The looks and whispers when we passed in the hall were hard enough to deal with as it was.
“So, did you see the new girl?” Emma asked, making a valiant attempt to change the subject as she tore the crust from her triangle of pizza.
“What new girl?” I didn’t really care, but the switch in topic gave me a chance to think—or at least talk—about something other than me and Nash, and the fact that there was currently no me and Nash.
“Don’t remember her name.” Emma dipped her crust into a paper condiment cup full of French dressing. “But she’s a senior. Can you imagine? Switching schools the last semester of your senior year?”
“Yeah, that would suck,” I agreed, staring at my tray, pretending I didn’t notice Nash staring at me. Was it going to be like this from now on? Us sitting across from each other, watching—or pointedly not watching—each other? Sitting in silence or talking about nothing anyone really cared about? Maybe I should have stayed in the cafeteria. This isn’t gonna work….
“She’s
