Harry looked at the words. The sentence was a question so the first word had to be W H Y but those letters didn't fill in any more of the gaps. He tried N and R

W H Y / I S / _ I S S I N _/ A / _O _ E R / S O / _ AN _ E R O U S?

He looked again and thought back to what she had written earlier. It was an odd thing to say even for him: that kissing a lover was dangerous. But he must have said it. He trusted Nikki implicitly and she would have no reason to make that up. In her account of the events it was she who had started the kissing and he that had stopped it.

He managed to fill in the last letters just before Nikki had had the opportunity to hang him. She pointed at the sentence and shrugged her shoulders. Challenging him; daring him to answer just has he had earlier when he had asked her why she had been naked?

"Maybe it's kissing you that I find dangerous."

He scribbled it down quickly and held up the pad, but he could tell immediately that Nikki had not understood how he had meant it. He had been thinking about how much they had to lose if they acted on that thing that there was between them. The thing that had been there so long he was surprised it hadn't festered. The way he'd written it, he'd made it sound like kissing her was the infection point and now a million viruses were multiplying and ravaging through them both, ready to destroy their hosts or be destroyed themselves. From the look on Nikki's face, she had understood it as an utter rejection. He scribbled furiously.

"No, Nikki I didn't mean it like that, I didn't. I was thinking about how much we had to lose if we became an 'us' and it all went wrong. Nikki it is dangerous kissing you. Because I'm frightened that once I start I might never be able to stop. I told you I loved you that night Nikki. You remembered me saying it. I do love you Nikki and I meant it then and I mean it now. Please Nikki you have to believe me."

Nikki held up another hangman puzzle.

_ _ _ _ / _ _ _ !

Harry was still breathing hard, he had written that he loved her and she still looked angry. Weren't women supposed to go all gooey after declarations of love like that? Gooey would certainly not describe the look in his colleague's eyes at the moment; livid was closer. 'What a difference a vowel makes' he thought cynically. Eight years or so, it had taken him to work up to this and he was already regretting it.

He looked back at her puzzle in an effort to control his thoughts. Harry automatically went through the vowels and had a pretty good guess as to what the last word was.

_ _ _ _ / _ O U!

But she didn't fill in anything for the first one. He went through the whole alphabet until her little stick drawing of him had him hung and then she drew a little hand gun and started shooting bullets at the stick figure. Harry wasn't giving up though and added some punctuation. He got it eventually, but only after a few missiles and a large bomb had been drawn exploding all over her drawing of him, in a thick circle smudge of angry pencil.

$*%" / YOU!

Was the correct answer.

"Nikki I'm sorry." He wrote.

"I'm really not talking to you." She wrote back and pulled down the blind.