Nico Giannuzzi, with hair mussed and pretty mouth swollen from my nibbles, stares at me. His eyes clear up. He takes my hands and presses them against his heart but takes a tiny step back. I mourn the loss of his warmth.
“Because of all that, because of everything I just told you… I’m Sister Annie until the wedding.” I can barely catch my breath. I feel like I’ve just done a dead sprint. “I’m not going to cause problems for anyone. I’m not letting myself do anything. Nothing fun, new, or different. No bad choices. No impulsive ones either. No drugs, no alcohol.” I have to swallow before this next statement. “No sex,” I grind out, even while peeking down at the tent currently occupying the front of his shorts. “I’ve messed up a few times, and…” And what, though?
Nico still grips my hands, enveloping them in his own. He clears his throat. “That what you want?” he asks, voice hoarse.
“It’s what I need,” I say weakly, with so little conviction it’s a wonder he’s even listening to me in the first place. “Especially with someone… well, someone like you,” I admit.
He braces himself. I feel his hands tighten. “And who am I?”
My high school nemesis, source of all my teenage anxiety… my worst enemy?The labels cycle in my head, but they’re starting to hold less and less merit. “Someone… who’s a bad idea,” I go with, but as soon as it leaves my mouth I regret it.
Something flashes across his eyes—understanding, resignation, hurt possibly—then disappears. He seems to come to a decision. He looks down at my hands, drags his thumbs across the tattoos on my fingers with something that looks like reverence and regret.
He finally drops them and steps back, and my ears pop with the immediate snap of the magical forest bubble.
“Yeah,” he says, but he’s searching my face for something else. “It’s a bad fuckin’ idea.” He gives me a small, unbothered smile, then strides out of the clearing without looking back.
Fuck Sister Annie.
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.”
