“What’s the answer then, big brain Dr. Nico?” she snaps.
I drum my fingers on the steering wheel, thinking. My big brain always brings me to chemistry. “You can control chemical reactions by changing the surrounding environment. Like cooking. You can adjust heat, ingredients, or time to change how food turns out. You can change different factors to speed up, slow down, or even stop a reaction.”
“So I can stop the unwanted reactions from happening by controlling my environment. In other words, staying home.”
“Homeandpartiesaren’t the only two freakin’ environments out there, Annie.” I shake my head. “Pick a different safe environment and adjust the heat.”
She doesn’t answer.
“What about your writing? Your own personal writing? Or your books?”
“What about it?”
“Seems safe to me. You’re surrounded by the things that you love. And it’s safe to lose yourself in book worlds or whatever you do when you don’t answer after I call your name a hundred times.”
Annie looks at me then. “I do volunteer at an actual book world. The library.”
“There you go. What do you do there?”
“I read books to kids and their families, mostly.”
I pause, attempting to picture Annie Li in the company of young children. “What, like theNecronomicon?”
“That,” she says, “orDante’s Inferno. SometimesThe Tibetan Book of the Deadif the mood’s right.”
I bark a laugh, now willing to pay money to watch Annie interact with young children. “Did you make friends there?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, well, that’s a safe environment. You needed a real community that wasn’t built around fake relationships, so you built it with your library. That’s amazing. What kind of things do you do with your new friends?”
She looks back out the window. “We… watch shows.”
“What kind of shows?”
She pauses before answering, like she’s weighing her words. “Cooking shows,” she finally says, with a hint of embarrassment.
I glance over but refrain from telling her that there are some cooking shows that are not lame.NakedReactions, for one. But Sister Annie wouldn’t let her subscribe, because porn definitelyseems like something you’d renounce. “There are some cool cooking shows out there,” I offer lamely instead.
Annie pins me with a long look. I can almost feel the weight against my side. I look over again. She’s frowning at me. Again.
“What?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer.
“Okay, well. The library sounds like a safe environment where you can have some fun. And watching TV with your new friends. I dunno, you could take up bachata lessons or something. Crochet. There’s a cool pottery studio in Clinton Hill. Go for a flat little forest walk. Go outside and touch grass, Annie. Go to Prospect Park. Go to Green-Wood Cemetery. I think we just proved you can get a nice little adrenaline rush in the woods. I won’t be fucking you against a tree, but you can walk across a log or something.” I grin. I can’t resist now. “You seemed to like that log just as much as you liked mine?—”
“I get it, Nico,” she mutters, rubbing her temples now.
“Honey.” I take my right hand off the wheel and go for her. Fuck her knee, I go right for the soft skin on her inner thigh. Squeeze that tattoo of the skull and crossbones with a dagger jammed in the skull, right at the top of her thigh, the one I’ve been looking at for four fuckin’ days. “Just sayin’, you've got options. You keep yourself all locked up, don’t get control of all the factors, you’re gonna end up with a disastrous and unwanted reaction.”
She grunts, but she doesn’t tell me she’s not my honey, and she doesn’t move my hand. “Jesus,” she says. “You’re too much.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re just so,” she gestures towards my body. “Much. A lot. Big. You take up so much space in this car.”
I glance over and wink. “I’d take up a lot of space in something else, too, sweetheart.”
