If I Die by Rachel Vincent Read Free Book Online

The three of them would do anything to protect Nash, and they’d be there for him when I couldn’t be. I was much more worried about my father….
    “Don’t think about that right now,” I said, talking to myself as much as to Nash. I stepped back so that he had to look up at me. “Think about all the privacy I just bought us. Too bad I waited until the week I’m gonna die to join the teenage resistance, huh?”
    “That’s not funny.” Nash frowned as I sat on the edge of the bed.
    “I wasn’t joking.”
    “Your dad thinks he can stop it.”
    “Yeah, well, Tod says he can’t.” I leaned back on the bed and let my legs dangle over the side while I studied my ceiling. How had I never noticed that crack, directly over my pillow? How often had I stared at that very spot and never noticed it?
    Nash swiveled toward me and the chair creaked. “And you believe him over your dad?”
    “Do I believe the reaper with insider’s knowledge on how death works over the desperate bean sidhe? Yeah. I do.”
    “Why are you acting like this?” he demanded, walking the rolling chair forward until his knees hit the mattress.
    I rolled onto my side to watch him. “My expiration date didn’t come with instructions. What am I supposed to be acting like?”
    Nash sighed and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “I just don’t understand how you can take this so lightly.”
    “What do you want me to do, slap on some black eye shadow and host my own wake? I’m gonna die, Nash. There’s nothing anyone can do to stop that. But I’ve got six days left, and I don’t want to spend them thinking about how it’s all gonna end.”
    I sat up on the bed and studied him, trying to see him like I had six months earlier, when we’d first started going out. Before he’d betrayed me to feed an addiction to Demon’s Breaththat was my fault in the first place. I’d spent the past month and a half learning to trust him again—letting him convince me that was possible—but now I was out of time. As with everything really good in life, I’d have to either jump in headfirst, or not at all.
    “What?” Nash said when I just stared at him, thinking. Wondering if I could really go through with the idea taking root in my brain. Or maybe someplace a little lower. “You better not be thinking something stupid, like breaking up with me now will make next Thursday easier for me.”
    “Nash, if I thought there was any way to make my death easier for you, we wouldn’t be together in the first place. I just… I don’t want to dwell on all the things I’m not gonna get to do.” I took a deep breath and ignored my racing pulse. I couldn’t choose when or how my life ended, but I could choose how I spent what time I had left.
    I can do this .
    I took his hand and pulled him out of the chair. I didn’t have to pull very hard—it was more an issue of guiding him where I wanted him. Onto the bed. With me. “I wanna do some of them, before it’s too late.”
    I scooted backward and he crawled over my legs and up my torso as I lay back on the pillows, and my heart beat so hard I could hear it echo in my ears.
    “This is why you closed the door?” he whispered, dropping a series of tiny kisses at the back of my jaw.
    “It wasn’t premeditated….” I breathed, running my hands over the front of his shirt, feeling the planes beneath. Was his heart beating as hard as mine? Was that even possible?
    “Coulda fooled me.”
    “Shut up.” I slid one hand behind his neck and pulled him down until his mouth met mine. His lips were warm and soft, and the taste of him brought back nothing but goodmemories—the only advantage to having been possessed by a hellion is that you don’t actually remember what happened while you were away from your body. Which made it just a little easier for me to push aside the knowledge that he’d been less than trustworthy in the past and just decide to trust Nash now.
    I’d been unable to do that