Rachel Vincent - If I Die

“Kaylee…” Nash scrubbed his face with both hands, then looked at me with the most conflicted regret I’d ever seen. “You know I want to, but…”

I sat up, and I could feel my cheeks flaming. Was he turning me down? After all the times he’d hinted, and asked, and outright pushed? “But what?” I demanded, and I could hear the bite in my own voice.

“Not like this. You don’t really want this. You’re just trying to avoid thinking about next Thursday. Or maybe you’re trying to cross things off some kind of morbid checklist. Either way, this isn’t really what you want, and—”

“Don’t tell me what I want!” I snapped, but he only put his hand over mine and leaned closer, so that I had to see the depth of the regret swirling in his eyes.

“— and I swore to you once that I knew you well enough to know when you want to stop, even if you can’t tell me. Don’t make a liar out of me, Kaylee. Not again.”

He was right. Damn it.

“Okay, I get it. But things have changed.” I sucked in a deep breath and looked right into his eyes, begging him silently to understand. “Everything’s changed, Nash. I do want you. And you want me. You’ve wanted this for months, and now we’ve only got six days to make it happen before we both lose our chance.”

He closed his eyes, and I realized that was to prevent me from seeing whatever he couldn’t stop them from showing. When he finally opened his eyes, they shined with good humor, and only the lines in his forehead told me it was forced. “How did this turn into you begging me for sex?” He grinned, and I laughed out loud.

“You’re not gonna let me live it down, are you?”

Nash’s smile faltered. “No more life and death jokes, Kaylee. This is hard enough as it is.”

“They say humor is the best defense.”

“No, they say the best defense is a good offense. But you can’t take the offensive with death. Though he’s awfully easy to piss off sometimes…” Meaning Tod, of course. Though, honestly, Nash usually meant to piss him off.

“Whatever. Where do we stand on the subject of my dying wish?” I leaned back against the pillows again, hoping to tempt him.

“I’m your dying wish?” He lay down next to me, and I lifted my head so he could put his arm behind it.

“Well…not quite. My dying wish is not to die. But you’re a close second. So where do we stand?”

He ran one hand down my arm and my pulse spiked when his fingers splayed across my stomach. “We stand…”

My desk chair creaked, and I looked up to find Tod sitting in it backward, facing away from us—the most courteous entrance he’d ever given us as a couple. And while most of me was frustrated by the disruption, some tiny part of me was also a little relieved—and confused by the discrepancy in my own emotions.

“Hope I’m interrupting something.” The reaper swiveled to face us and Nash sat up, cheeks already flaming.

“Get. Out,” Nash growled.

Tod rolled his eyes. “I made Kaylee a promise. As usual, I’m just the messenger.”

“What’s up, Tod?” I laid one hand on Nash’s arm before he could say anything else.

“Mom’s in the kitchen with your dad, trying to talk him out of doing something stupid. It sounds like she could use your help.”

“There’s always an exception, Harmony,” my father said, and the raw pain in his voice stole my breath with an almost physical force. I was scared, and pissed off, and riding an unforeseen wave of sexual resolve in the face of certain death. But my father was in serious pain over a loss he refused to accept as inevitable.

The fact that I was that loss was almost too much for me to wrap my mind around.

I inched down the hall silently, aching to see my father’s face, but if they knew I was there, they’d stop talking, and I’d lose this glimpse into his true emotional state.

“Aiden.” Harmony’s whisper was so soft I almost didn’t recognize it. “I am so, so sorry. I wish I could say I know how you feel, but I didn’t have any warning with Tod.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” my dad answered, his voice hard now, like he could hold off the unavoidable with nothing but sheer will. “There’s a way out of this, and I’m going to find it.”

I peeked through the living room and into the kitchen just as Harmony scooted her chair closer to my father’s. They sat at the table with their backs to me, and I could only see them from the shoulders up, over the half wall separating the two rooms.

“Aiden, there’s nothing you can do.” She slid one arm around his waist and leaned her head on his shoulder, and I held my breath to make sure I could hear the rest. “Do you really want to miss your daughter’s last few days of life to chase answers that just aren’t there?”

“I don’t want to miss anything. And I don’t want her to miss anything, either—that’s the whole point. I’ve been such a fool, Harmony. I wasted thirteen years of her life letting my brother raise her because it hurt to look at her. Every time I saw her, I saw her mother. I only got Kaylee back six months ago, and now she’s being taken away. Six months isn’t long enough!”

“No one’s taking her away,” Harmony insisted gently. “Her time’s up. It happens to everyone.”

“What would you do?” my dad demanded, pulling away from her. “If you knew Nash was about to die, would you ever quit looking for a way to stop it? Would you give up on him?”

“I…”

“It doesn’t matter what she would do.” I stepped around the wall, and Tod appeared at my side. Nash’s footsteps squeaked on the hall tile behind me, even though I’d asked them both to stay in my room.

Harmony and my dad stood facing us, but they were both too good at hiding their feelings for me to read anything more than general angst. They were better at that than I would ever be, considering how little time I had left to perfect the art.

“Dad, don’t do this,” I begged, frozen where I stood. “You can’t change this, and if you try, you’ll only be putting yourself at risk. Do you really want me to spend my last six days worrying that we’re both going to die on Thursday?”

“I don’t want you to worry about anything.” He ran one hand through hair that showed no sign of graying, less than a month before his one hundred thirty-fourth birthday. “I want you to finish high school, and break curfew, and keep giving me excuses to toss the Hudson boys out of the house, not necessarily in that order. I want you to have a normal life. A long one.”

I bit my lip, trying to hold back tears as he crossed the room toward me. “Well, that’s not going to happen. And I’m not going to be able to enjoy what life I have left if I’m worried about you getting yourself killed trying to do the impossible.”

“Kaylee…” He reached for me, but I stepped back and crossed my arms over my chest.

“Promise me, Dad. Promise you’ll leave this alone.”

“You know I can’t—”

“Promise,” I insisted, and his stoic expression crumpled beneath a burden of pain and responsibility I couldn’t imagine.

“Fine. I promise,” he said at last, and I let him fold me into a hug.

And as he squeezed me, his heart beating against my ear, I knew only two things for sure: I was going to die, and my father was lying.

I stood on the front porch and knocked again—there was no doorbell—then stared down the rough gravel road at a series of run-down houses and old cars, their age and ruthless depreciation exposed by harsh March sunlight. My own neighborhood was dated—the houses were small with one-car garages and tiny yards. But compared to living in this part of town, I had nothing to complain about.