Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
Nico
In the morning light, My Annie Li sleeps like a rock, as if she’d spent her night slaying her enemies and drinking their blood.
Or at the very least, fucking one three or four times.
It’s wild, the way that she or I pulled towards one another throughout the night, drawn together like magnets, mouths and hands searching and learning, slow, languorous, dreamlike fucking with whispered laughs and gasps under the covers, under the blanket of night.
Falling asleep right after, only to wake up a few hours later to do it again.
When I wake up, she’s in my arms, her head buried in my chest, arm and thigh thrown around my waist like an adorable little koala.
Everything below our waist is sticky. Normally I’d be horrified, but I feel nothing but proud and really fuckin’ pleased.
I should probably digest this myself before we digest it all together. Because now we’re running out of time.
It’s Wednesday, and there’s one more stretch ’til we arrive in Miami tonight. Tomorrow is the welcome party. When real life will burst through this little bubble of daggers that Annie’s only just let me into.
Which side of the bubble will I be on tomorrow? Which side do I want to be on? Is My Annie Li only Road Trip Annie Li? Will she be different when she’s around her sister, parents, family, friends? Will I?
As if she can hear me thinking, she snuggles deeper into my torso with a contented sigh. From here I can see the freshest mark I’ve left on her body, on the side of her neck from just a few hours ago.
I’m so fucked.
I clear my throat. “Babe.”
Nothing.
I peel myself away the slightest bit. “Sweetheart.”
“No.”
“Honey.”
“I’m not your honey.”
Lie, but I’ll take it easy on her this morning. I chuckle and lift some hair out of her face. “We’ve gotta hit the road soon.”
One eye opens. “How soon?”
I lean back and check my phone. “Two hours.”
Silence, then, “Are you fucking kidding me, Nico?” She wrenches herself around, buries her head under a pillow, and throws the covers over for good measure. “Wake me up ten minutes before we have to leave,” a muffled grumble says.
I am so very tickled. I leap out of bed and round it to her side. I bunch everything in my hands—covers, sheets, pillow—wrench it all off onto the floor, and smack her ass.
Annie screams.
I admire the pink of my handprint in the morning light, relishing, yet again, in the shock of power that explodes through my body, before scooping up her thrashing body and hauling her over my shoulder.
“We gotta get in the shower. I need to wash myself off of you,” regrettably, “and I need to get some food in you.
And I gotta do this laundry ‘cause no one should have to touch it.”
I deposit her in the en-suite walk-in shower and turn it on.
It happens to be one of those dual showerhead systems, so she’s blasted on both sides.
As Annie glares at me through the wet hair in her face, like she wants to gut me from stomach to neck, she resembles a bedraggled, angry kitten who’s just slipped into the bathtub.
I’m gonna marry this girl one day.
I step into the shower and get down on one knee in a twisted foreshadowing, dazed by the promise I’ve just made myself. “Let me make it up to you,” I tell her, and I have my breakfast.
“Get naked and do the voice,” a much more chipper Annie tells me over the sound of bacon sizzling.
I’m unable to respond because I’m currently speechless at the image of Annie kicking her bare feet while perched on the counter next to the stove, wearing nothing else but my hoodie, reinforcing all these ridiculous notions I’m having of “forever” and “permanence” and “mine.”
How did this happen? In six days? Or maybe it’s been months in the making, considering the Ali/Chef correspondence.
Regardless, this can’t be real, can it? But it certainly seems real, especially when I suddenly feel Annie’s arms wrap around me from behind, when her face snuggles into my back between my shoulder blades.
“Nico.” I realize I’ve been wordlessly staring at the bacon as if it held all the answers. It usually does, but not right now.
“Yes, honey.”
“Take your pants off and do the sexy professor voice and talk to me about the science of eggs.”
“Hmm…” Something about this makes me feel wary.
“What?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Are you embarrassed?”
I think about it and try to answer that in a way that won’t put that panicked look back in her face, and we’ll never be embarrassed in front of one another because I’m going to watch you shit on a table while birthing our children and you will be picking me up from my colonoscopies won’t cut it.
“No, I don’t think that I would be embarrassed to do anything in front of you. ”
“Wait,” she says suddenly, taking the spatula from my hand and placing it on the counter. She turns me around, and the ease and the familiarity of it is almost painful. “Let’s make a video!”
“Right now?” I consider my whole rig. “We don’t have time. We gotta be out of here in an hour, and I can’t get all my camera stuff unpacked and repacked by then.”
“Can I use my phone?” Annie is adamant and earnest and enthusiastic about this in a way that I haven’t seen before.
“Maybe?”
“What’s wrong?” She squints at me before her gorgeous eyes light up like a damn pinball machine. I think this is Impulsive Annie Li. “Can I do it with you?” she asks excitedly.
There is a sudden roaring in my ears. “No.”
She frowns. “What do you mean, no?”
No—from this moment forward, I am the only one who is ever allowed to see your naked body. “I don’t want you to,” I tell her instead.
It’s in this moment that I learn that saying no to My Annie Li is the equivalent of telling her to do it, and do it more and harder.
“Well,” she announces to the kitchen, “now I’m doing it. More, and harder.”
“I just said ‘no.’”
“You promised me ‘yes’ to everything for the rest of our lives!” she fires back.
There is a new roaring in my ears, and it’s the sound of shocked silence as we stare at one another, digesting this thing that has permeated the air around us since I released it last night.
The smile that spreads across my face is slow and measured. “You ready to talk about it?”
She throws the hood of my hoodie on. “Never mind. We don’t have to make a video.” She tries to move around me to leave the kitchen, but I don’t let her.
“We don’t have to talk about it right now.
But what should the video be about?” I ask her gently, reaching down to the hem of my hoodie and peeling the whole thing off her body, grateful when she lets me.
“I just did one on breakfast foods, and this stuff is done already.” I rub the various love bites I’ve left on her body, and the nonsensical animal in me is soothed knowing that anyone who sees her naked body will know she is mine.
Annie melts in my arms. “It has to be fast, right? Easy?” She scans the kitchen. “Coffee? Tea?” Her eyes light up again. “Caffeine Chemistry.”
I ponder this, running through factoids in my brain.
“There are a bunch of specifics with brewing coffee and tea that I don’t remember off the top of my head.
Things like water temperature and steep times for different grinds or types of tea.
I’d have to look those things up, so I don’t think I can just do those things off the cuff.
” I keep scanning the kitchen. “How about add-ins?”
Annie’s already moving through the kitchen, gathering things like a sous-chef hurricane. “Milk,” she says, opening the fridge. “Wow. They have whole, skim, half-and-half, oat, and almond.”
“That’s perfect. Those all do different things that I can talk about.”
She moves to various cabinets. “Sugar. Spices?”
“Cinnamon,” I say, after a moment. “And cardamom is used in Turkish coffee.”
“Oh,” she exclaims. She takes one last thing out of the cabinet and slams it on the counter.
“A supersaturated solution.” I grin. “Good girl.”