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They could go home to Gainesville for Christmas - Nick’s explained to both Carly and their parents about the whole stolen car thing - but Carly’s liking the shitty New York weather and loving her shitty Tribeca rathole, so Nick lays low on her sofa and scours the want ads. He’s had a few random offers on the streets - they always say it’s modelling, but it sounds more like gay porn to him, and in any case he’s never liked having a camera in his face any more than Carly does - but all he wants is some normal job that’ll make money and kill time while Carly slaves away at the InStyle office. He’s got his own cell phone now and uses it to call Carly just a little too frequently when she’s not around, and he has a feeling that if he doesn’t quit it soon then she’ll be around even less.
After Ambrose, man. Carly copes by working and he copes by fretting, because she’s the good twin and he’s the stupid one. He’s not really scared for her - he knows she can look out for herself, hell, he’s seen her with a baseball bat - but he just can’t seem to shake the freakshow feeling. A doctor at the hospital back in Baton Rouge gave them both the whole post-traumatic blah blah talk, so the nightmares and the anxiety aren’t exactly a big surprise, but it doesn’t make them any easier to deal with.
Mostly he’s just so fucking lonely; losing Dalton’s like taking a knife in the thigh, and then doing it again, over and over. He misses Blake too, but Blake had had him up on some badass pedestal, like he couldn’t really see Nick at all, while Dalton had just been a good buddy, plain and simple. They’d never had much in common - Dalton had been as dumb as a plank and a closet soccer fan of all the crazy things - but Dalton had known him practically forever and was probably the only one who’d even guessed about his fucked up feelings for his sister, and he’d never said a word. Dalton had been the best.
Nick feels the walls closing in (melting), so he shrugs into a coat and wraps a scarf around his neck before heading out into the chill winter air. His footing’s awkward on the slushy pavements - his leg still aches like a son of a bitch - but sometimes when he can’t switch his brain off, the only thing left to do is move. A few optimistic tourists have penetrated even this gray neck of the neighborhood, and he shies from their gawking faces and waving cameras even though he knows full well they’re here in search of the White Christmas of lore rather than survivors of one of the nation’s more grisly massacres. He dodges shoppers and beggars and frozen dog shit and carolers, and finally ducks into a nearby convenience store where he picks up a six-pack and some cigarettes for himself and Ben & Jerry’s for Carly. The clerk flirts with him, but Nick’s more uncomfortable with all that shit than ever and just scowls. Scowling’s what he’s good at. He notices a few mangy looking Christmas trees stacked up in one corner of the store and buys one on impulse, lugging it with his provisions back to the apartment. He doesn’t think Carly packed any Christmas decorations, but if worst comes to worst he’s got an impressive collection of bottle caps.
The tree’s decked out nicely by the time Carly stumbles through the door that evening; her room is always littered with random swatches of fabric and lengths of shiny ribbon, and he presses every one of them into decorative service. He’s lying on the floor at the foot of the tree, staring up into its straggly boughs, and she drops her bags, toes off her wet boots and joins him there.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey,” he says.
“Cool tree,” she says.
“Liar,” he says. He studies her profile; it’s more familiar than his own. They’re both a little snub-nosed, and he touches hers with a gentle flick of his finger. She feels cold and he starts humming ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ to make her smile, but then he remembers the roadkill pit and he can tell she’s thinking about it too. A festering pile like that’s not something easily scoured from the memory banks, but it’s the way she screamed for Wade and not him that Nick remembers most of all.
“Stop it,” she says, making some half-assed attempt to return his touch but undershooting the target. Her finger’s healing, but the stump’s still a bit sore and swollen and she keeps the dressing on in the cold weather. More than anything else in this sorry saga, it’s the fact that he just stood there while that crazy fuck did this to her that really does his head in. And it’s not like it’s some nightmare that he can shake off, because her fingertip will be lost in Bo’s pocket forever and there’s not one thing Nick can do to make it better. If Dalton were still alive he’d probably be making lame Frodo jokes to cheer her up, and he’d be smacking Dalton upside the head, and Wade’d be wearing his stupid grown-up face under his stupid He-Man haircut, and Carly’d be laughing her ass off. But tonight it’s just the two of them under a Christmas tree, minus fingertip and friends, and Nick feels so far away from her that they might as well be back in junior high.
“Fuck it,” he says, taking her hand in his and drawing her cold, chapped knuckles to his lips like the most desperate hail mary of his entire life. She watches him with a solemn expression, then leans into him, fitting their mouths together and shivering in his arms, and he licks at her scarred lips like ambrosia.