Page 45 of Ho Ho Homicidal Mania
I think about that any time I get all gooey about Nico and consider if we would work as a couple in real life instead of our la-la land in this cabin. The answer? I don’t fucking know. I’ve never been with anyone else.
But I’m happy when I’m around him. He listens to me and answers requests before I can even voice them, and today is no different. I complained about not being able to publish the next episode of my podcast, so knowing how much that means to me, Nico set me up with a phone and computer for recording. They’re not the professional tools I’m used to, but more than enough for my purposes.
“Will it be about me?” he asks excitedly as he adds wood to our fireplace.
I snort. “You can’t be jealous of the Zodiac. I bet he attacked couples because no woman wanted someone with his horrible personality.”
“But it’s December,” Nico whines like an impatient puppy. “It makes sense to have another episode about the Christmas Killer.”
“There’s only so many times I can recycle the same information. There has been no new victim, at least not to the knowledge of the authorities.”
“Oh! I know!” Nico paces the room, rubbing his hands. “What if I sent you ananonymousletter, and you could have an Interview with the serial killer segment.”
Excitement rushes through me like a shock of electricity, but as I imagine the hit that would have been,the amount of things that can go wrong, especially in my current situation, is simply too great.
“That’s… so sweet of you. It would do amazing things for my show,” I say, watching him grin in self-satisfaction. “But it’s too much of a risk. What if they track us down, and then check your place and somehow find out who you actually are?”
His face falls, and he nods, turning his face to the fire with a thoughtful expression. I’m struck by how eager his offer was. I’ve never worked on the podcast with anyone, and here he is, so excited to be a part of what I love to do. It’s touching, even if misguided.
It makes me imagine him as part of my future, which is something I’ve been trying to avoid in our little bubble of bliss.
Nico finally speaks again. “What if you talked about a theory that the Christmas Killer is a vigilante? Maybe we could reverse engineer some evidence in a way that is plausible that you unearthed it?”
I grin and lean against him, happy to have a collaborator of sorts. We spend the next hour coming up with ways to bring his idea to life, and by the time we untangle the Gordian knot of problems his suggestion brings, it feels like I might just have a future hit on my hands.
Conversation moves from one topic to the other as we drink hot chocolate. I don’t remember ever feeling so at ease with anyone and mention that my most treasured memory of my dad is when a snowman I built fell off the sleds I was using to transport him closer to my bedroom window. The figure fell apart and I was inconsolable. My dad took a break from work to help me build another snowman, which I insisted needed to beidenticalto the first one, like the brat I was at the time. And he even put his own tie on the finished thing.
I feel loved whenever I remember that day, and the moment I share that, Nico decided we should build a snowman of our own.
So here we are, getting our boots soaked, rolling snow into balls, which will soon become a head and a torso. The sun sets quite early in December, so it’s already getting dusky, but that doesn’t dampen Nico’s excitement. Nor mine.
He’s attractive when he gets intense in bed, but he’s just as handsome now, smiling and red from the cold.
“I don’t have a carrot for the nose. Any ideas what else to use? Oh! Oh! Just imagine if we still had the assassin’s body. We could have used the nose I cut off him.” He sighs as if that idea isn’t absurdly awful.
“We wouldn’t be able to see it from the cabin. Let’s just use a piece of wood,” I propose and twist on my heel to look at the fallen branches within sight. I come back with a twisted piece of bark and shove it into the snowman’s face.
Nico rests his gloved hands on the back of his head, and I notice they’re the same red leather he had on when I first met him. Is it wrong to think they’re kind of hot?
“It’s okay. I guess,” he says, but it’s obvious he’s not impressed.
Stifling a laugh, I approach the snowman and lean against him, with one of his stick arms touching my back. “Well, hello, handsome. Bold of you to just come over and prod me like this,” I say but slide my cheek over the snow as I catch Nico’s eyes.
Blood drains from his face, and he pins me with a deadly gaze, as if he’s really getting jealous over asnowman. “Don’t do that.”
I bite my lip, trying not to grin. “Are you talking to me orthis guy?”
“This fucker!” Nico says and punches the snowman so hard his head falls off.
I get such a hysterical fit of giggles I have to grab one of the branch-arms to stay on my feet. “You gotta get used to this. They all seem to want me.”
Nico reaches into the pocket of his jacket and I stop laughing when he pulls out the black balaclava. He puts it on and stares at the snowman’s headless body.
“That’s no surprise, but you will have to learn to deal with their flirting if you don’t want them dead.” His voice is a little muffled through the fabric, and I’m embarrassed what hearing him say such things does to me. Nico leans down to grab the fallen head and I sneak a glance at his ass. He’s such a fine piece of man. Lean and strong as a lion, and just as deadly. I’m breathless when he picks up the head and shows me that the bark nose is cracked, twisted out of its original place, and located right next to an imprint of Nico’s fist.
Blood floods down my body, and I find myself hot with excitement. “You can’t kill people just because they look my way. I’m good-looking. It’s gonna happen,” I tell him, trying to steady myself on my feet.
Nico places the head back on top of the other balls of snow, but he watches me intently from behind the fabric mask. It’s both unnerving and exciting to not see the rest of his face. “I can’t? You sure about that?” When he cocks his head, a shiver runs down my back, because I know he’s joking (or at least I think so). I also know he’s capable of murder, so is it even a joke in this situation?
