Chapter 18 Annie
EIGHTEEN
Annie
He didn’t do it on purpose.
“Annie.”
He didn’t ruin your life.
“Annie!”
You ruined your own.
I turn around and walk towards him, towards his warmth and security and care, eyes full of concern. But I change my mind, because, fuck. I… fuck. I turn back and blindly find a trail marker and start walking towards it.
“Annie!” His voice cuts through the trees, his footfalls crunching through the dead leaves and the underbrush of the trail.
He grabs my hand and swings me around. “Sweetheart.”
I wrench my hand away and realize I’m crying.
“Talk to me,” he orders.
“No.”
“Fuckin’ talk to me, Annie.”
“No.”
He takes a deep breath, his giant chest expanding, contracting.
When he speaks, it’s evident he’s really trying to keep his shit together.
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take this new information you’ve gathered about my dad dyin’ and turn it into something about you without telling me what’s wrong. ”
With that, something caves. “I’m sorry, Nico.” I swipe at my face. “Shit, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
He opens his arms.
I don’t hesitate.
He wraps me up, but this time I squeeze back. We stand like that, tangled in each other, surrounded by bad, tainted, incorrect memories. But also there’s his scent—clean soap, warm skin—and the quiet hush of the forest morning, and the rhythmic thud of his heart under my cheek.
Eventually, I pull back. “I’m so sorry about your dad, Nico.”
Nico cradles my face in his big hands, wipes tears from under my eyes for the second time.
Soulful brown eyes searching my face with concern, as if he can find the source of my hurt there and make it all better, when I should be doing it for him.
“Come,” he tells me, dropping his hands only to twine his fingers with mine, tugging me further down the trail.
He doesn’t let go. “What just happened?” he asks me eventually, probably knowing I needed a minute. Again.
I exhale slowly. Step over a tree root. “I had no idea.”
“What, that Dad died?” He peers down at me. “Why would you know that? I didn’t share it with anyone. Well, except for my teachers and the principal. Just left school for the rest of the year. It was actually during that Chem project we—” He stops short.
Nico’s face shifts. Realization dawns.
I look around. We’ve stopped at the edge of what feels like the end of the world.
Below us yawns a vast, glittering basin—an old quarry, its waters deep and still.
It’s carved out of solid stone and cradled by a halo of green, trees crowding the rim like they’re guarding a sacred secret. The silence hums, thick and alive.
“During the AP Chem project and the AP Physics project we were partners on,” I finish flatly.
“The classes I needed the college credits for. The projects I ended up doing alone. The ones I bombed, tanking my entire junior year GPA. And when I asked our teachers what happened to you—they said you wouldn’t be working with me anymore.
That you’d already finished them. On your own. And had gotten A’s.”
I let out a dry laugh, no bite to it—just regret and resentment. Not at him. Not at the kid who ruined my life. At me. At the girl who ruined her own.
“Fuck,” he breathes, low and hoarse.
“You didn’t answer my texts or calls,” I continue.
“I even stopped by your house once.” I shake my head, remembering.
“Your sister answered the door. I asked her if you were going to come back to school, or if you were around to help me finish the projects. She looked at me like I was out of my mind.”
I pause. My throat tightens.
“She said you weren’t available. She said—” I swallow. “She said, ‘What fuckin’ projects? Nico doesn’t need that shit. Nico’s—’
I look at him. He already knows.
“‘Nico’s gonna be valedictorian. Nothing’s gonna stop him.
No thing. No one.’” Especially you, she had said, along with some other harsh expletives and vague threats that led seventeen-year-old me to believe he was sabotaging me, but I don’t tell him this, because I realize now that the face his sister had on?
The twist in her face, the curl of her lip?
She wasn’t taking her brother’s side in some new competition.
The face wasn’t one of malice. It was one of grief.
“You know the rest,” I mutter.
Senior year, after I was sabotaged, used, disposed of, bested? I took it all out on the person who had done it to me. The perfect valedictorian with the perfect family and loving parents. And after high school? It was all downhill from there.
“I don’t know the rest,” he says gently. “Tell me the rest, Annie. Let me in.”
Open up. I drag my fingers through my hair, fist it at the crown, tug like I can root the shame right out. I pace to the edge of the cliff, where sunlight crashes off the water—blinding, brutal, and bright enough to carve me open.
It makes everything inside me rise to the surface.
But I don’t think that’s what’s giving me the urge to tell him. It’s not because the pain is unbearable or the silence is too loud or whatever trite bullshit.
It’s because he’s still here.
Because he’s seen the worst of me, nasty, problematic Annie, and was okay with it. Liked it, maybe. And didn’t flinch. Gave me a hug instead. Told me I was something. I was Annie Li.
And he maybe wanted some of it for himself.
Somewhere between Brooklyn, New York and Durham, North Carolina, in a Mustang convertible and a Honda Civic, my worst enemy carved out an Annie-shaped space inside of himself.
So I can’t hold the rest back from him—not now.
Because Nicholas “Nico” Giannuzzi, my oldest nemesis, is somehow the only one I want to give it to.
“In high school, I pushed myself so hard I forgot what breathing felt like,” I start.
I feel Nico come up next to me, a steady, silent sentry. We stand next to each other, staring out at the water.
“Straight A’s weren’t enough. Honors weren’t enough. I had to be valedictorian, as you know. Student council, volunteer of the year, write award-winning essays for shit I didn’t even care about—because if I didn’t, my parents would eviscerate me.”
He turns to look at me. “Define eviscerate.”
I shake my head.
“Like, physically?”
“Among other things,” I admit. “Mostly verbal. And I wouldn’t get my ass totally beat, but… Little things. Maybe it’s a cultural thing,” I add weakly, not sure why I’m feeling the need to defend them, but the truth is a lot of us grew up this way.
He blows out a breath. “Annie. Baby. I’m so sorry.” He squeezes my hand. “Just in high school?”
“Since childhood, it had been like that.”
“What the fuck, Annie? And how about May? Why?”
I inhale some of that beautifully sad nature shit for strength.
“Only me. Not towards May. Not if I could help it, at least. Because since childhood, I took it all, so she didn’t have to.
I shielded her from it. By being louder, smarter.
By being the best. I didn’t want to be the best. I had to be the best. I took it all on—all of their attention and their wrath, just so they would leave May alone.
I got straight A’s so that I would be the one berated for a B+.
I was loud and talked back so that they wouldn’t look twice at May—she was the good one.
The silent, deferential, perfect one. I played piano and violin really, really well, so that May could sit happily as a second chair clarinet player. ”
“So I was never allowed to be average. I wasn’t allowed to rest. So that May could be happily average—so that she could rest. So I hustled.
” A bitter laugh escapes me. “And for what? So I could get into Harvard and be their shiny little trophy?” I shake my head.
“Didn’t get in. I blamed it on my GPA. I blamed it on you.
Got into NYU instead, and the second I got out from under them, moved into the dorms, I fell apart.
No rules, no parents, no pressure? I went feral. ”
My voice drops.
“I exploded. No curfews, no parents breathing down my neck, no one watching. I partied in the best city in the world for partying. Slept too little, drank too much, hooked up with people I didn’t even like because they could get me something.
” I shake my head. “Even if that something was just a funny story in the morning.”
Shame washes over me, hot and tight, but Nico’s hand brushes against mine. Gentle. Intentional.
“Every relationship I had was a transaction. Attention for validation. Sex for connection. Proximity for status. We used each other as social currency. And I told myself I deserved it—after everything, I was owed some pandemonium. I was allowed to be selfish.”
“After we graduated high school, I was a huge fucking embarrassment to my parents, obviously. But then it was May’s time to shine.
She thrived. And I was so proud of her—I am so fucking proud of her—but…
But then I kept swinging, swinging, swinging, and my poor decisions started impacting her.
Like… we used to live together in Chinatown.
She’d come home from her MBA program to find me in her bed with some rando.
Or she’d come home and I wouldn’t be there at all.
For days. Without answering my phone. Or she wouldn’t be able to work because I’d have people over. That sort of shit.”
“She made me move back home, even if it was hell, because that was the kind of overbearing structure I needed again. She made me go to therapy. She made me get my shit together. It was her turn to watch over me. And then…” I blow out a breath.
“The engagement party,” Nico finishes for me.
“The engagement party,” I confirm. “And then…”
“This.”
“And then this.”
Nico wraps me up in his arms. In this.
“Thanks for telling me the rest,” he murmurs.
I shake my head.
“That’s not—I don’t think I’m done.”
His arms tighten.
I cling to him, now taking a hit of that Beautifully Sad Worst Enemy Shit directly into my lungs, my bloodstream.
“I’m either nothing, Nico,” I say, “or I’m just a bad fucking person.”
I’m surprised at how saying it out loud makes it feel smaller, as if it’s not pressing quite so hard on my ribs anymore.
Nico holds me tighter, and I can feel it in the way his whole body wraps around mine like armor that he wants to fight that thought for me. But he doesn’t say anything yet.
“I was jealous of you—I recognize that now. And none if it was your fucking fault. What a shitty fucking thing.” I tear at my hair while Nico tries to swat my hands down.
“Also? Even when I got out of my mess? After the engagement party? I didn’t fix anything.
I didn’t become a better person. Or at least…
I just started hiding better. I keep Old Annie on a leash and hope she doesn’t maul anyone.
I don’t… do anything, see anyone.” I’m rambling now.
“I don’t have my name on anything and—shit, Nico. I don’t exist.”
Something about the way he has me, though, makes me doubt that, a little. One hand smoothing over my hair. The other tracing circles on my back. Slow, steady.
“You’re not a bad person,” he says once he feels me settle, quiet but resolute.
“You were just a kid under too much pressure—too many unstable variables, not enough control. So you did what you had to do. You protected the person you loved. And when she was finally safe, you tried to rebalance the equation. You just over-corrected. You’re not empty, Annie.
You’re still trying to find equilibrium. ”
Jesus. I let out a laugh-sob hybrid. “Big-brain Dr. Nico.”
But something, I realize, has shifted in those few words.
Not an explosion, or a full epiphany, or some miraculous transformation. Just… something. A softening and a slight easing in my chest.
So I breathe. A real, full breath. And when I exhale, it’s like I’m letting go of something I’ve been clutching too tight for too long. I let it drain out of me, slow and quiet.
And what’s left isn’t nothing.
What’s left is warmth. Faint, but something. A flicker of light where the weight used to be.
“I’m sorry,” I exhale, with this renewed invigoration. I peer up at him, at the kindness in his eyes, and become even stronger. “I’m so sorry, Nico, for the way I treated you. You didn’t deserve that. I didn’t deserve that. I’m so, so fucking sorry.”
He holds me at arm’s length now, staring at me like he’s seeing me anew. He nods once, accepting my apology without words, but his eyes say it all. He forgives me. I may not deserve it, because I’m still a raging, fucking bit—
He pulls me close again, softer this time.
“You are good,” he says, voice barely above a murmur. “You are fun. You are strong. Appreciate that, at the very least. And you exist. You do.”
I snort. “To who?”
“To May.”
“Well, obviously—she’s my twin—”
“—to me,” he interrupts, low and slow.
I look up at him. He’s so intensely serious about this that his jaw is clenched.
His brows are pulled tight. But his eyes—those warm, brown, soul-deep eyes—don’t waver.
They hold me steady, safe, secure. Maybe that’s what I should name those three moles dotting the smooth expanse of his disgustingly handsome face.
“You don’t know me,” I say, trying to deflect that thought, shoo it away.
“I think I do,” he replies. “Because if we’re talkin’ ghosts—Annie, I’ve been one, too. Just a different kind.”
I breathe and wait.
“You gave me the rest,” he says with a faint smile. “Now you can have mine.”
Before I can speak, Nico kicks off his shoes, the sound of them hitting the dirt absurdly loud in the stillness. He peels off his socks with exaggerated care, like he’s putting on a show. He starts walking backwards, slow, theatrical steps, retreating toward the edge of the cliff.
“What are you—?”
He just winks.
And, with ridiculous, arrogant confidence, he reaches over his shoulder, grabs the back of his T-shirt, and pulls it off in one smooth motion.
My breath catches so hard I actually stagger.
It’s that chest.
With that fucking tattoo.
But the grin on his face—wild, unrepentant, teasing—says it all. It’s the grin of a man who’s just shattered a wall.
My face cracks open, like I can’t hold emotion in anymore. Like joy is pouring out of me from every seam. There’s a sound—a real, sharp, dizzying thing that comes from somewhere low in my gut. A noise of pure, undiluted delight rips free from my throat, half-scream, half-laughter.
With that, he backflips off the edge of the cliff.