end table next to my father’s recliner and pulled the front door open.
Nash sat on the top step, leaning against the porch railing, a squarish glass bottle loosely held in one hand. His clothes were wet, his hair plastered to his head.
“Nash, what the hell are you doing here?”
He looked up, like he was surprised to see me. At my own house. “I’m drinking on your porch. Care to join me?” He held the bottle of whiskey up and I shook my head, then stepped out of the house and closed the door behind me, so my dad wouldn’t hear him. “
“The lawn’s too wet to sit on.”
“That’s because it’s raining. Give me that.” I pulled the bottle from his grip. “Did you walk here? You’re soaked.”
He laughed, but the sound was harsh. Half choked. “My mom frowns on driving drunk.”
“Your mother frowns on
“I don’t want to go home.”
“You need to go home. Come on.” I tried to pull him up but he was too heavy, so he pulled himself up, using the porch railing for balance. Standing, he stared down at me, his eyes half focused in the porch light. He blinked, too drunk to hide the swirls of confusion and longing in his irises. Then he leaned down like he’d kiss me.
I stepped back and put my empty hand on his chest, my heart aching for him. For me. For all four of us, and the ties twisting us together. “No. Don’t do this, Nash,” I said, and his next exhalation seemed to deflate him.
I stepped over the threshold and held the door open for him, and he trudged inside, dripping on the floor. “Where’s your boyfriend?”
“Working.” I pushed the door closed and set his whiskey on the half wall between the kitchen and living room, then dug a clean hand towel from a drawer in the kitchen. “Where’s your girlfriend?”
“In bed.”
“Yours?”
“Yeah,” he said, and I caught my breath, surprised by the hollow feeling in my chest—an unexpected residual ache. “That’s what you wanted, right? You want me with her, so I can forget about you?”
I handed him the towel and he blotted his face with it, but his gaze never left mine. “I just want you to be happy, Nash.” And clean. And stable.
“Yeah, well, that ship’s sailed.” He stood dripping on the tiled entry, still watching me. “Tell me it hurts, Kaylee. Tell me it hurts, just a little bit.”
I exhaled slowly and took the towel when he handed it back. “It hurts. More than a little.” It hurt to see him, knowing that I’d played no small part in making him into what he’d become. It hurt a lot. “Go dry off in the bathroom. I’ll get you something to wear.” My dad’s clothes would be big on him, but at least he’d be dry and dressed.
“I don’t want to wear your dad’s clothes. He hates me.”
“You’d rather wear mine?”
Nash scowled, but took off his shoes, stumbled over his own feet, and headed for the bathroom.
I pawed through the dryer for a pair of my dad’s drawstring jogging shorts and the smallest T-shirt I could find. When I knocked softly on the bathroom door, Nash opened it wearing only a towel wrapped around his waist.
“Here.” I handed him the clothes and he took them, then just stood there, watching me.
“Why did you do it, Kaylee?” he asked, and I put one finger over my lips, warning him to be quiet. I couldn’t mute his voice like I could mute mine.
But I didn’t know how to answer his question. I wasn’t even sure what he was asking—I’d done so many things I wasn’t proud of, most of them to him. “Get dressed, and we’ll talk. But then you have to go home.”
He closed the bathroom door, and I waited in my bedroom doorway, leaning against the frame. A minute later he emerged in my father’s shorts, the drawstring cinched around his narrow hips. The T-shirt lay on the closed toilet lid behind him. I stood, blocking the door to my room, and he stepped so close I could smell the rain on his skin. “Aren’t you gonna let me in?” he whispered, staring straight into my eyes.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” For many reasons. Two of which were Tod and Sabine.
“I just want to understand, Kaylee. Don’t you think you at least owe me an explanation, considering you framed me for your murder?”
How the hell was I supposed to say no to that?
I stepped back and let him in, and Nash glanced around my room like he hadn’t been there in years. And that’s kind of what it felt like. The past month felt like an eternity—so much had changed in such a short period of time that I couldn’t even hold all the facts in my head without getting a little dizzy.
“You moved everything,” he said, making an obvious effort not to slur the words.
“Yeah. I couldn’t… This is where I died. It was…” I swallowed thickly and glanced at the floor. “I needed a change.”
He sat on my bed and Styx glanced at him in disinterest, then went back to sleep. Nash stared at his hands while I hovered near the doorway, uncomfortable in my own room. “I’ve been thinking about everything, trying to make sense out of what happened, but I can’t do it. Everything was fine, and then…” He looked up at me, frowning, like something horrible had just occurred to him. “He gets to touch you now?”
“Everything wasn’t fine, Nash.”
He kept talking, like he hadn’t even heard me. “He gets to kiss you, but I don’t? I don’t understand how we got here, Kaylee.”
“Nash—”
“I know the facts. I can sit here and list everything that happened, every mistake either of us made, but when I do the math—I add it all up over and over—it never works out like this in my head.”
“I know. The longer I think about any of it, the less sense it makes, and I’m sorry about that.” I’d lost count of how many times I’d apologized. “I don’t like how we got here, but this is where we’re supposed to be.” I sat in my desk chair and rolled it closer to the bed. “We’re supposed to be friends, Nash. Can’t you feel that? We were too close for too long to be anything less, but we can’t be anything more. Not anymore.”
“Because of Tod.”
“No.” I shook my head, desperately hoping he’d understand what I was trying to say. “Because of me. Because of you. Because we tried to make it work, but we couldn’t. We tried so hard we nearly destroyed each other, and that’s not what love is supposed to do, Nash. It’s supposed to lift you up and make you feel whole, even if it hurts sometimes.”
Nash exhaled slowly, still staring at his hands, then he looked up and met my gaze, and the vulnerability swirling within his nearly killed me. Again. “Tod makes you feel like that? Whole?”
I nodded. “More whole than I’ve felt since…ever.” At least since my mother died and my father left.
Nash’s forehead furrowed and his jaw clenched, like he was holding back words he knew better than to say. Then he met my gaze, and I could see the raw pain in his, unshielded, thanks to the whiskey. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be that for you, Kaylee. I really wanted to. I wanted to be good enough for you. I wanted to deserve you, and in a way, it was easier after you and he…” His jaw clenched again, then the words tumbled out in an emotionally charged, drunk free fall, and his gaze begged me to understand. “After I saw you with him in the hall. Because you’d messed up, and I thought that if you weren’t perfect, you could understand why I wasn’t, either, and we could fix things. But that was when I thought it was just one kiss, and—”
Nash stopped and glanced at the floor, and when he looked up at me, there were tears standing in his eyes. “If I hadn’t been high that day in the parking lot—if I hadn’t started using again—would this have turned out differently? Would you have given us another chance?”
My own tears answered his, and I rolled my chair closer to the bed. “No, Nash. Please don’t ever think that. As bad as that afternoon was, you and I had already broken up, and Tod and I were already together.” I sucked in a deep breath, then said the only thing I could think of that might help him understand. “He died for me, Nash. He refused to reap my soul, so Levi had to take his.” An unemployed reaper was a dead reaper. “That’s the way it goes.”
Nash’s eyes widened, and he frowned. “Then how is he—”
“I had to bargain for his afterlife.”
“And for my release…?”
