Chapter 13 Nico
THIRTEEN
Nico
“Sister Annie seems like a religious fuckin’ zealot,” I tell Annie “Bad Idea Yet Excellent Kisser” Li in the car.
“That’s the point,” she says quietly.
Annie’s right—me and her? It’s a bad fuckin’ idea. Annie is Complicated with a capital C and the opposite direction I need to be moving in if I need to start simplifying my life.
And on her end, Sister Annie maybe should not be having sex with a glorified porn star. That would be the definition of A Bad Fuckin’ Idea.
She’s right about all that.
But I’m thinkin’ she’s wrong about somethin’ else.
“I get the renouncing sex and drugs and alcohol shit,” I tell her, “but renouncing ‘fun’ is fuckin’ ridiculous. Renouncing ‘new’ and ‘different’ seems like life is living you and not the other way around.”
Annie won’t look at me anymore, been looking out the window the last thirty minutes. “It’s what I need to do until I’m absolutely certain I won’t screw something up. I just haven’t been able to find a balance yet.”
“How are you gonna find a balance all holed up in a cave? Seems pretty unhealthy, too.”
“You saw what happened back at the restaurant. That shit just finds me. It can’t if I stay home,” she grits out.
“So Sister Annie is actually a monk.”
She shrugs, body tense.
“That’s no way to live, Annie. And I think you’re setting yourself up for failure.”
“You just want to get your dick wet again,” she mutters. Her walls are back up. She’s back in her shell. But not the Nico shell, because my hoodie has been tossed in the backseat.
“I’m not gonna deny that I think you’re hot as fuck. Been thinkin’ of getting my mouth on that tattoo on your stomach ever since you first sat down in that slutty little excuse for a shirt.”
A switch has been flipped, apparently. Like we got it all out of the way, and now I can talk freely about wanting to plow her. Maybe because I finally got to taste her but am secure in the knowledge that we won’t be taking it any further.
Annie presses her fingers into her eyelids. “That isn’t helping.”
“Sorry.” I’m not. “I just don’t think disappearing is the answer.”
“What’s the answer then, big brain Dr. Nico?” she snaps.
I drum my fingers on the steering wheel, thinking.
My big brain always brings me to chemistry.
“You can control chemical reactions by changing the surrounding environment. Like cooking. You can adjust heat, ingredients, or time to change how food turns out. You can change different factors to speed up, slow down, or even stop a reaction.”
“So I can stop the unwanted reactions from happening by controlling my environment. In other words, staying home.”
“Home and parties aren’t the only two freakin’ environments out there, Annie.” I shake my head. “Pick a different safe environment and adjust the heat.”
She doesn’t answer.
“What about your writing? Your own personal writing? Or your books?”
“What about it?”
“Seems safe to me. You’re surrounded by the things that you love. And it’s safe to lose yourself in book worlds or whatever you do when you don’t answer after I call your name a hundred times.”
Annie looks at me then. “I do volunteer at an actual book world. The library.”
“There you go. What do you do there?”
“I read books to kids and their families, mostly.”
I pause, attempting to picture Annie Li in the company of young children. “What, like the Necronomicon?”
“That,” she says, “or Dante’s Inferno. Sometimes The Tibetan Book of the Dead if the mood’s right.”
I bark a laugh, now willing to pay money to watch Annie interact with young children. “Did you make friends there?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, well, that’s a safe environment. You needed a real community that wasn’t built around fake relationships, so you built it with your library. That’s amazing. What kind of things do you do with your new friends?”
She looks back out the window. “We… watch shows.”
“What kind of shows?”
She pauses before answering, like she’s weighing her words. “Cooking shows,” she finally says, with a hint of embarrassment.
I glance over but refrain from telling her that there are some cooking shows that are not lame. NakedReactions, for one. But Sister Annie wouldn’t let her subscribe, because porn definitely seems like something you’d renounce. “There are some cool cooking shows out there,” I offer lamely instead.
Annie pins me with a long look. I can almost feel the weight against my side. I look over again. She’s frowning at me. Again.
“What?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer.
“Okay, well. The library sounds like a safe environment where you can have some fun. And watching TV with your new friends. I dunno, you could take up bachata lessons or something. Crochet. There’s a cool pottery studio in Clinton Hill.
Go for a flat little forest walk. Go outside and touch grass, Annie.
Go to Prospect Park. Go to Green-Wood Cemetery.
I think we just proved you can get a nice little adrenaline rush in the woods.
I won’t be fucking you against a tree, but you can walk across a log or something.
” I grin. I can’t resist now. “You seemed to like that log just as much as you liked mine—”
“I get it, Nico,” she mutters, rubbing her temples now.
“Honey.” I take my right hand off the wheel and go for her.
Fuck her knee, I go right for the soft skin on her inner thigh.
Squeeze that tattoo of the skull and crossbones with a dagger jammed in the skull, right at the top of her thigh, the one I’ve been looking at for four fuckin’ days.
“Just sayin’, you've got options. You keep yourself all locked up, don’t get control of all the factors, you’re gonna end up with a disastrous and unwanted reaction. ”
She grunts, but she doesn’t tell me she’s not my honey, and she doesn’t move my hand. “Jesus,” she says. “You’re too much.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re just so,” she gestures towards my body. “Much. A lot. Big. You take up so much space in this car.”
I glance over and wink. “I’d take up a lot of space in something else, too, sweetheart.”
Annie bangs her head against the window.
“Fill her right up,” I add, because now I can’t help it. “And yes, it’s a she now.”
I take her on a tour of Duke campus. I try to make it fun and pretty.
We start at the Duke Chapel, its towering Gothic spires cutting into the sky like something out of a book.
A fairy tale. Inside, the stained-glass windows cast colorful patterns onto the stone floors, and the hush of the space feels almost sacred.
She tilts her head back, taking it all in, and I can’t help but smile ‘cause this place has that effect on everyone.
We walk through the bustling West Campus, past students hanging out on the quad and racing between classes.
I lead her toward the Perkins and Bostock Libraries, pointing out the glass bridge that connects them.
But it’s the Rubenstein Library that I really want to show her.
It has a certain smell—the smell of history itself—with its rare manuscripts and archives and shit.
Centuries-old books. I watch her trace a tattooed finger over the spines of leather-bound volumes, her expression shifting from curiosity to something more reverent.
I think of the way I traced those tattooed fingers with the exact same sort of reverence.
We wander towards the gardens for some more tragically beautiful nature shit, where the scent of fresh flowers lingers in the air.
The winding paths lead us past koi ponds and cherry blossoms, and for a short moment when no one else is around, the world closes in, just like it did in that clearing in the forest, like it did at the overlook in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Annie drops her walls again. “I think the quiet beauty of places like these makes everything feel softer and easier,” she says into the air. “There’s not so much noise. I feel like I can breathe.”
God fuckin’ damnit, where the heck does she come up with this shit? It makes me wanna kiss the hell outta her.
We eventually end up at the Science Center, home to Duke’s chemistry department. The sleek, modern building stands in contrast to the older Gothic architecture on campus, its glass windows reflecting the late afternoon light.
“Wanna go in and see where the real magic happens?” I ask her with a grin.
She laughs. “Sure, Dr. Nico.”
“This is actually where Dr. Nico’s origin story began.”
I lead her inside, past rows of bustling labs and whiteboard-covered walls filled with complex equations. She pauses at a display showcasing breakthrough research. She hovers two fingers, the ones with the spade and the heart, over a diagram of molecular structures.
I take those two fingers and rub my thumb over those tattoos again. “I like these two,” I admit.
She stares at my hand holding hers. “Why? They’re so small.”
“I dunno. I can’t stop looking at them. They stand out. A heart and a spade? Love and a little bit of chaos.”
That gets another small smile.
“What does PLUM mean?” I ask, referring to the tattoos she has on the knuckles of her other hand.
“It’s May’s nickname.”
“Why Plum?”
“It’s an inside joke we had as kids. May thought she hated plums. Thought they tasted like garlic.”
I frown. “Why?”
“Turns out someone always used the same knife used for cutting garlic for cutting the fruit for dessert afterwards,” she says with a laugh. “What’s the science behind that?”
I grin, because finally—something in my wheelhouse.
“Garlic’s loaded with sulfur compounds, things like allicin, that bind like Velcro to surfaces.
Metal, plastic, knives, cutting boards, whatever.
They’re oil-soluble, so once they stick, they spread into whatever fatty or porous food comes next.
Plums, peaches, chocolate cake. You name it, they all end up tasting like the ghost of garlic. ”
She wrinkles her nose. “A lot of things about my childhood are starting to make sense.”