“I know,” he said, before I could decide how to continue. “Everything must feel so weird for you now, knowing it’s all going to end. I don’t even want to think about you being gone. I just want to spend this last day with you, and we can forget about what happened yesterday. That’s not important now. What’s important is salvaging what time we have left together.”

Crap. I’d never felt more guilty in my life, and it was worse knowing that he wasn’t mad at me when he had every right to be, and if I weren’t about to die, we both knew he would be.

“Nash, I really appreciate that—” Lame. “—and I know you’re just trying to make sure that my last day on earth doesn’t suck.” True. “But we can’t get back together just because I’m going to die tomorrow. That’s not a real reason.”

“We shouldn’t have broken up in the first place,” he insisted, and I realized he was only hearing what he wanted to hear. Competing vines of unease and guilt wound slowly up my spine, tightening as he continued. “When I messed up, you forgave me. Now I’m forgiving you. You were scared and confused—who wouldn’t be in your position—and he was there, like he’s always there.” Nash shrugged. “I’m still gonna kick his ass the next time he has the balls to face me, but today’s about us. You and me. So let’s get out of here and have some fun. This may be our last chance.”

He reached for my hand, but I pulled away before he could touch me, and an irritated twist of green shot through his irises, piercing stubborn composure to reveal something stronger and darker than mere determination.

Uh-oh.

“Nash, I need you to understand something,” I said. “Tod was the catalyst for our breakup, but he wasn’t the reason. He’s not the source of our problems. Nothing’s been the same between us since the winter carnival.” Since the thing we didn’t talk about. It was always there between us, making him too cautious and putting me on edge. “You know that.”

“That’s not true.” He shook his head firmly, stubbornly. “We moved on. We were fine. It was working.”

“No it wasn’t. Not like it used to.” I was always afraid he’d slip up, and it would happen again—even Sabine had told him that. Hell, he had trouble trusting himself half the time. “I’ve tried to put it behind me. I tried so hard, and I didn’t realize it wasn’t really working until I felt something that did work.”

“What are you saying?” He looked like I’d just smacked him in the head with a two-by-four—like he didn’t know whether to cry or strike back.

Why was there no greeting card for letting a guy down easy the day before you’re scheduled to tumble into the dark hereafter? “I’m sorry for what I did. I’m sorry for howthis happened. And I’m so, so sorry that I didn’t see the problem sooner. I didn’t want to see it, because I wanted us to work.” My vision blurred with tears and I had to swallow the lump forming in my throat. I didn’t want to say what needed to be said, but it wasn’t fair to either of us to leave this hanging. “But we don’t work. Not as a couple. Not anymore.”

Nash shook his head, frowning, more frustrated than surprised now. “Yes we do.”

“Nash, you need someone with more than I have to give you. More than I’d have, even if I were going to live.” Someone who didn’t have to talk herself into trusting him. “You need someone who understands the way you think and sees into your soul.”

“That’s you.”

“No, it’s not. I don’t understand what’s going on in there most of the time.” I glanced at his chest, where his heart beat beneath his shirt, then back up to his face. “I don’t know what you want from life. I don’t know where you want to go to college. I don’t know where your father’s buried. I don’t even know how you feel about losing Scott and Doug. You don’t tell me any of that.”

“Because I don’t want to scare you!”

“That’s my point. You need someone you aren’t worried about scaring.”

“He’s not getting it,” Sabine said, and I whirled around to find her walking toward us, from the direction of the quad, her sneakers silent on the spring grass. How long had she been there? “Maybe because you’re leaving out one important detail.” She stepped onto the sidewalk and aimed an angry, challenging look my way. “Why don’t you tell him what this is really about?”

“Go away, Sabine.” My pulse spiked, and I realized with one glance at her that she knew what he didn’t want to hear and I didn’t want to tell him—that Tod and I weren’t a once-kiss mistake. That we’d gotten together for real after Nash and I broke up—either because she’d read my fears, or she was just plain perceptive. Or both. “This is none of your business.”

“What is this really about?” Nash glanced from her to me with dread twisting tight coils of brown and green around his pupils.

“She’s talking about Tod, but this isn’t about him. He’s not what went wrong between us.”

“What about Tod?” Nash demanded through clenched teeth.

I exhaled slowly. “He and I…kind of…got together last night.”

Nash’s irises went still, and the only interpretation I had for that was that he didn’t know what to feel. Then the colors in his eyes burst into furious motion—a true storm of color. “What the hell does that mean? You slept with my brother?”