Because this is love.
TWENTY-SIX
Nico
Annie “Whom I Love”Li is gone in the morning.
I check my phone, though, and she’s left me a text.
I’ve gotta be with May all day today. But we’ll talk.
Thank you.
I scrub my face and throw the phone on the pillow next to me, right where her head used to be.
The sheets still smell like her warm and faintly citrusy, sweetened with skin and sweat and the ghost of champagne and sex. The whole room is haunted by her. Her gold dress is draped over the back of a chair. A single heel lies on its side next to the balcony door, like it made a break for it.
God, I love her.
There. I said it! Mentally, at least. Quietly, in the echo chamber of my skull, because it’s something I don’t know what to do with yet. But it’s true.
Annie Li, the girl with impossible compassion and loyalty, who will defend me to the death. Not just to others—but to myself.
I hadn’t realized how small I’d gotten, how much I’d been hiding. From the world, from my family, from the version of myself I didn’t want to explain. But she makes me want to be seen again. Not just tolerated—claimed and fuckin’ proud.
And not a nameless, faceless, fuckin’ porn star, some ghost floating through fuckin’ postdoc purgatory. Just a man. A man with his hands on a woman who is somehow too much and not enough and exactly right, all at the same time.
I sink back into the mattress and stare at the ceiling. It’s white and perfect and impersonal. It cost me a lot of fuckin’ money a night to feel this detached.
And still. There’s this tiny, minuscule part of me that’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Because Annie is… complicated.
Not just emotionally. Though, yes. That too. Her feelings arrive in full technicolor, with their own weather system. But she’s also restless in a way that makes my bones ache because I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep up if I tried to follow her forever. And what if she doesn’t want to be followed? What if she just wants to burn hot and bright and then vanish?
What if I’m just the guy she kissed in a car on a borrowed week?
I sit up and stare at my phone again, like it might cough up some answers.
Seven days.
It’s only been seven days.
That’s not enough time to know the full story. Not really. Right? There are chapters I haven’t read yet. Pages she hasn’t let me see. Maybe whole volumes she’s burned before anyone could get to them.
And don’t I know better than anyone that people are full of secret selves? Hell, I have one. A whole identity I’ve kept hidden for years.
I told her everything, though. Not all at once. Not perfectly. But she knows. And she didn’t flinch. In fact, she called it hot as fuck.
But what if she’s still hiding something from me? What if the next version of Annie is one I don’t know how to hold?
But it hasn’t only been seven days. It’s been nine months, hasn’t it? Nine months of Chef and Ali.
I press my palms against my eyes and blow out a breath.
This is what happens when someone cracks you open. When they sneak in through the cracks in your logic and nest there, quietly rearranging the furniture.
Now I’m sitting here, fuckin’ alone, wondering if I’ve fallen for someone who might bolt the second she thinks she’s become a burden. Who might sabotage us just to prove she doesn’t deserve to be loved.
