“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.