Chapter 20
TWENTY
Nico
Candid, intricate, fractured, adrift Annie Li.
Hot, tight, wet, pierced Annie Li.
Languid, post-coital, content Annie Li.
My Annie Li.
“Ouch,” she says, and I realize that I squeezed her hand a little too hard with that last one.
We’re “lizarding,” as Annie had called it moments ago, sunning ourselves on a large, flat rock wide enough for the two of us to lay side by side, a few meters away from the jump-off point of the quarry.
I want to cuddle my soft, lost Annie Li, but she is not, to anyone’s surprise, Annie “Big Cuddler” Li, but she seems happy with the way we’re playing with each other’s fingers, dancing and twirling them together above our faces.
“Sorry, honey,” I tell My Annie Li, Annie “Who is Now Mine” Li, and what the hell is wrong with me? What the hell happened to simple? But at this point it’s kinda hard to not to think about it considering I just marked her like a motherfucking animal at the first opportunity I was given.
“How did you know?” she asks.
“Know what?”
“Or rather, when did you figure out that I watched NakedReactions?”
I turn on my side to face her. “I saw and heard you watching an episode in the pool house. You were watching it with what sounded like a perverted Golden Girls crew.”
She laughs, her entire face transforming into sunlight.
The silk of her long hair a stark contrast to the rough rock.
Unfettered, joyful Annie Li. “Those are my friends from the library. Fernanda and Betty like to objectify the aggressively male chefs on cooking shows, so I shared your channel with them. They’re obsessed.
We try to have a watch party for every episode. ”
I trace the purpling hickey I left on her chest with puffed up satisfaction. “Do they know you’re ghostwriting my book?”
Her face shutters a little at this. “No. No one does. I’m contractually not allowed to tell anyone.”
“Why the long face?”
She chooses her words carefully, but gone is that wariness that came before telling me anything at all.
I internally roar and beat my chest with pride.
“Remember how I said I didn’t exist? That I didn’t have a voice?
I’m someone else’s voice? I meant that literally.
The term ghostwriter couldn’t be more true.
I am a ghost. I don’t exist. My name is on nothing.
Not the work that’s famous, the shit that people quote. Nothing.”
I pinch a nipple through her bikini. “This is something.” Now that I’m looking closely, I can see both barbells poking through the fabric. How the fuck did I miss that?
She sighs—a deep, satisfied sound. “That is something.”
“If you could do anything, what would it be?”
“You mean what did I want to be when I grew up?”
“Sure.”
“A writer. But not this fucked up, Sad Invisible Peter Pan version.”
I want to growl when she talks about herself like this. I twist her nipple as punishment.
“Ouch! Nico!” she says, shoving my hand away.
“Stop talking about yourself like that,” I warn.
“It’s true!”
I pinch the other one.
She sits up and tries to run away, but I grab her arm and tug her back down. I notice her shoulders are getting pink, so I dig into my pocket.
“Here,” I say, handing her the sunscreen bottle. “You’re pinking, and not in the good way. That’s comin’ later, though.”
Annie stares at the bottle as if it has suddenly sprouted wings and a tail. She looks at me. “Did you bring that for me?”
I shrug. “Yeah. On the beach you said the best form of tattoo aftercare is sunscreen.”
Her face becomes unreadable.
But now I’m the lucky motherfucker who’s learned how to read her.
“Come here,” I order, sitting up.
She doesn’t move.
“Sit in my lap and let me fuckin’ take care of you, Annie.”
Annie grumbles (So adorably! Like a disgruntled kitten!) and shuffles into my lap.
“Good,” I whisper in her ear and wait for… yep. The goosebumps down her neck, the stiff of her nipples poking through the fabric of her bikini. My Annie Li likes a bit of praise. And how lucky was I that I figured it out with my dick in her mouth?
Makes sense though. After spending the entirety of her youth trying to impress people, convince them that she was the best or whatever?
I squeeze some sunscreen onto my hands and start rubbing it into her shoulders and arms. On my way down her left arm, though, my thumb brushes against something under her skin. Something maybe two inches long and the width of a glow stick.
I am suddenly lightheaded with the way the blood leaves my head and flows directly into my dick. “Uh oh,” I rasp out. “You’re in big trouble, Annie.”
Annie realizes what I’m rubbing and shivers. “If you want, later,” she starts. I hear her swallow. “You can—” but she cannot finish because I’ve got my fist in her hair and my tongue down her throat.
She pulls away once she feels my hand sneaking down the front of her bathing suit. “Nico,” she sighs.
“What?”
“Think of the children,” she laughs.
My mind becomes static as I try to parse all the information now zooming in loop-de-loops through my brain.
No children; that’s the point of the implant.
I’m going to come in Annie Who is Now Mine Li.
I can mark you from the inside. Fill you up, drive it in, let it drip.
Do you want kids? Will you bear my children?
Should I rip the implant out with my teeth?
What the hell is happening to me? And then, Do I have a breeding kink?
! And last and most alarming, No, just a “pumping Annie Li full of my come” kink. So… yes?
She clears her throat.
My eyes refocus.
Annie is looking at me with concern. “There are kids swimming over there,” she says slowly.
“Yes,” I solemnly nod. I shake my head to get rid of the insanity and resume my task.
“You brought me sunscreen because I mentioned it several weeks ago,” Annie mumbles after a while.
“Yep.” I move onto her chest. “You might not be used to people taking care of you, honey, but that’s just ‘cause you hadn’t met me yet.”
“Nico, we grew up together.”
“I amend. You hadn’t decided that you liked me yet.”
“I hate you.”
I land a sharp slap to her clit again, loving the whimper that leaves her throat. “Lie.”
I don’t see it but I know she’s smiling, especially when she relaxes in my arms and lets me fuckin’ take care of her.
I suddenly cannot breathe. The oxygen up all the way up here on Mount Olympus is pretty thin.
“Do you write anything else?” I ask after getting all her visible skin covered.
“Hmm?”
I plant a kiss on the side of her neck. “Do you write for fun?”
“Yeah,” she rumbles. “Poetry.”
“Any of that published?”
“No.”
“Can I read some of it?”
“No.”
“No matter,” I reply, unbothered. “I’ll make you read it to me while I go down on you later.”
We watch the sun glittering on the lake, still playing with each other’s hands.
“So… ghostwriting.” I ask. “Why’d you start?”
Annie doesn’t answer immediately. She shifts her weight on my lap.
“It wasn’t some noble calling,” she says finally. “I didn’t sit up one night and think, ‘I want to devote my life to writing memoirs for wellness influencers who think drinking chlorophyll cured their depression.’”
I smirk. “You sure? Sounds poetic.”
She laughs, dry and soft. “It just fell into my lap. A friend of mine from a writing group got offered a ghostwriting contract she didn’t want. She passed it to me. Said, ‘You’re good at sounding like other people.’ I needed money, and it wasn’t self-publishing poetry that no one read.”
She says the last part like it’s a joke, but her voice goes a little hollow at the end.
I angle my neck to better look at her face. “But you kept doing it.”
She shrugs, eyes still fixed on the horizon.
“It pays the bills. And it got easier to sell other people’s truths than keep digging around for my own.
There’s a weird kind of relief in that. Like…
if the words flop, it’s not really your failure.
And if they fly, you just pretend you weren’t even there. ”
I let the silence sit.
After a while, she says, “It was easier to hide behind other people’s voices than admit mine wasn’t loud enough to matter.”
I shift closer. “Well, too bad. I’ve heard it now, it’s fuckin’ beautiful, honey.”
Annie giggles, and I want to bottle the sound up to pour over pancakes at a later time.
She turns sideways and snuggles deeper into my lap.
I’m not sure she realizes she’s doing it, but she’s rubbing her cheek against the hair on my chest with her eyes closed.
Maybe she ain’t used to cuddling because she hadn’t met me yet, either. “Nico,” she says suddenly.
“What, baby?”
“I’m dying to know about the surprised duck,” she says, poking it with her finger.
I smile. “Mallard.”
Annie’s body grows tense in frustration. “There’s a connection that’s been on the tip of my tongue for days now but I can’t fucking get it.”
“It’s a mallard, Annie. A mallard having a reaction.”
She looks up at me with gorgeous eyes. “Maillard reaction.”
“Yup.”
A pause, then, “That’s the corniest fucking thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
I bust out laughing. “It’s amazing. It’s hilarious. You love it.”
“I hate it.”
I spank the side of her ass. “Lie.”
“It’s okay,” she grumbles, eventually.
We ended up hitting the road way later than I’d planned ‘cause Annie fell asleep on my arm while lizarding, and despite the jagged bits of rock digging into my ass and skull I was not gonna move her. We’ve gotta haul ass now, ‘cause we’ve got a big six hour push to Savannah.
Annie’s got her laptop on her lap and has been barraging me with questions for the last few hours.
"Okay," she says, fingers still clacking, “explain the difference again between caramelization and the Maillard reaction. But this time, say it in the Nico voice.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I mutter. “My voice is my voice.”
She huffs out a laugh. “I want your actual voice in this thing. I want it to sound funny and sexy.”