Chapter 14 Nico
FOURTEEN
Nico
Fuuuuuck.
Does she know? Is she fucking with me? Has she known this whole time? Did she put two and two together that food chemistry is really freakin’ niche? Is that where the “own your choices” shpiel came from?
There’s no way, though. No fuckin’ way! If I know anything about Annie from the four fuckin’ days we’ve been trapped together, it’s that there is no version of Annie—grouchy, gentle, friendly, crying, or otherwise—that would give up an opportunity to fuckin’ shit all over me for having a paywalled dick.
I gotta know.
How do I find out?
Because I have a death wish, I crawl closer to the window.
I hear myself through the wall, hear my academic fancy-pants voice talking about the coagulation of egg proteins. She doesn’t recognize that voice. She’s never heard it before.
“There’s just something about his dick that makes me want to put it in my mouth,” Annie suddenly declares, and I lie down right there in the dirt under the window, fully fuckin’ horizontal, and I perish.
“Glad to see he’s all healed!” a voice says. Who?
I cover my face with both hands and take deep breaths.
“Someone needs to make a cast of this man’s cock and put it in the Louvre,” someone else says. Someone old. Someone who sounds like a grandma. Yuck. I mean, I’m flattered but… yuck.
“There’s still a little blotch on his weird surprised duck tattoo,” another voice says. I rub it. That splatter messed with the color a little bit ‘cause it healed and scabbed all weird. Poor little mallard.
Someone shrieks dramatically. “I swear my blood pressure goes through the roof every time he turns around,” someone else says. Also someone old.
What in the messed up, Golden Girls pornography watch party is this?
There is a lot fuckin’ goin’ on right now. Too fuckin’ much. I’m currently feeling a hundred different feelings, lying in the dirt under Annie’s window, listening to her and her elderly girl band salivate over my naked body and wax poetic about my dick.
“He’s so hot. Good for him. Honestly, whoever this guy is, he’s my hero,” Annie is saying. “Making a little space for himself in this weird little section of the internet and raking it in.”
“Little?!” one of the old ladies shouts. I wince. “Fuck your ‘little’. He’s gotta have carved out a full eight in—”
This is about as much as I can handle.
I crawl away. All the way back to the car. Slither like a snake in the grass. Grab the Pacojet from the middle of the driveway, where I apparently left it in my panic.
I close the car door as quietly as possible.
My ears buzz in the silence.
Annie Li doesn’t know.
Annie Li thinks I’m hot.
And… I am Annie Li’s hero?
Do I fuckin’ believe that?
Yeah. Yeah, I do.
Not just because she said it when she didn’t know I was listening—although that helps.
That makes it feel really real. No performative teasing, no bravado, no games.
Just Annie and her opinions and her absolutely unfiltered mouth, talking to a room full of old ladies about my dick like it’s a national treasure.
But it’s not just that. It’s what she said to me at the lookout. In the forest, too.
She told me the truth. Her truth. She didn’t have to.
She could’ve shrugged it off or made a joke or steered the whole thing back to My Cousin Vinny or grisly murders or industrial techno, but she didn’t.
She let me in. Told me her mess and her history, the shit she went through after college and how it changed her.
I saw it—the jagged parts under the veil. The realness underneath the mask.
And that’s been her pattern, hasn’t it? Every day, a little more. Not the whole story, not all at once. But enough. Enough to know she’s choosing to trust me.
I… I kinda wanna give her the same thing.
I could keep this to myself. I could let her keep thirsting over the version of me behind the camera, the faceless cock on the internet.
But something about Annie makes me want to show her. Makes me want to own it.
Makes me want to say: yeah, that’s me. All of it.
But I also wanna mess with her a little.
A laugh bubbles up in my throat, low and involuntary. It startles me. Feels like it came from somewhere deeper than humor.
I want to see her gorgeous fuckin’ face when it clicks. When she connects the dots and realizes she’s been talking about my dick like it's a museum artifact. I want to be there when her eyes go wide and she short-circuits. I want to see the carnage. I want to be the carnage.
Because Annie is mayhem—grumpy and stubborn and brilliant and unfiltered—but she’s also honest. Loyal. Not nice, but kind in that bone-deep way that makes you feel like maybe the world isn’t total trash.
And I want her to know me. Not just the guy she used to hate. Not just the one who flirts and bickers and cooks. Me.
The illiterate gorilla of a man she doesn’t realize she’s been drooling over in two different formats.
I lean back in the seat, grinning slow and wide, heat rising in my chest like it’s got nowhere else to go.
She is so fucked.
I call Michelle, the head chef of the restaurant, tell her I’ll swing by tomorrow. Ask her what she’s making for family meal. I go right to the grocery store. I buy a steak.
I drive back to the house. Lock all the doors and pull all the blinds shut. Set up my camera equipment.
I start recording.