Page 42 of Dearly Unbeloved
“Our bathroom, honey,” she chides in a sarcastic, singsong voice.
“Why is it inourbathroom?”
“Hisname is Thorne. And that’s Dibbles.” She points to a second, bigger ball of fluff, sitting perfectly still in our towel basket. She blends in so well with the gray towels that I didn’t notice her.
I must be losing it. There’s no way even Sierra is such an awful roommate that she brought home two rabbits without asking me. “Okay.” I press my lips together, trying not to shout. Fuck Sierra, quite frankly, but I don’t want to scare the rabbits. I’m notthatmuch of an asshole. “Why are theretworabbits inourbathroom?”
Sierra runs her fingers lightly over the rabbit’s back, and his eyes half-close, like he’s relaxing into her touch. “It’s actually really interesting, but rabbits need to live in pairs or they get lonely. Apparently, they form super close bonds, like mating bonds, and when their mate dies, they can actually die from a broken heart.”
How morbid. And completely beside the point.
“Right. I just feel like I’ve missed a vital part of the story here. Like, perhaps, the part where there are rabbits in our apartment, and what the reason for that might be?”
Sierra’s shoulders droop, as if she’s realized she can’t dodge the question forever. She looks up at me and shrugs. “I mean… look at them.”
“I don’t want to look at them! I want to know why they’re here and when you’re getting rid of them.” I can’t stop my voice from climbing.
Sierra rears back, narrowing her eyes. “Don’t shout at them.”
“I’m shouting at you, not them!”
“I’d prefer if you didn’t do that either. The shelter was desperate. They needed parents.”
I ball my fists, taking out my frustration on my palms as my barely there nails bite into skin. The pros really outweigh the cons of having short nails, but sometimes I wish I kept them longer. “Two things. One, you didn’t think that asking your roommate before bringing living things into the apartment you share was the polite thing to do? And two, you thinkyou’rethe right person to parent them?”
“I knew you’d say no. And I don’t see why I can’t be a good mom for them,” she replies, indignant.
I flick my eyes toward the rabbit in the basket. “That one’s eating a towel.”
“Shit. Dibbles, no! Gimme.” She sets the smaller rabbit down and speed-crawls toward the basket.
The little one hops over to me, and I crouch down, kneeling on the tile. When I’m settled, he sits up and rests one paw on my knee, looking up at me. He has shaggy brown and gray hair, like a lion’s mane. One of his ears points straight up, but the other flops a little, twitching, like it’s supposed to be straight up too, but it’s being lazy.
I offer my hand and he sniffs it, his tiny nose moving a mile a minute. After he’s sniffed my hand, he moves to sniff my pants before rubbing his chin on my knee.
“He’s marking you with his scent,” Sierra explains, and I look over to find her sitting against the wall with the gray rabbit in her arms.
“I know nothing about taking care of rabbits. Do you?”
“Technically, no, but we’re intelligent people. You went to med school, and I went to law school. We can figure it out.”
“I quit med school, and you flunked out of law school,” I remind her, but she just scoffs.
“We got in, though.”
The little rabbit rests his other paw on my leg and uses his back feet to push up until he’s more or less on my lap. I lift him the rest of the way and sit back against the side of the tub while he nuzzles into me, sniffing everywhere he can. “Are they going to live in the bathroom?”
“Just until we bunny-proof the living room.” Ah, they’ve been upgraded from rabbits to bunnies. Somehow cuter. “They’ll be free to roam the living room and kitchen for the most part, but I’ve ordered stuff to make them a big open plan enclosure if we need to shut them away at all. Well, actually, I’m probably going to rope Maggie into making it for us.”
She continues on, chattering away about her plans for their setup, but I tune her out, looking down into the sweet, brown eyes of the little rabbit on my lap.
“You know, if you really don’t want them here, we can take them back to the shelter…” Sierra says, the words cutting through me.
Over my dead body is anyone taking this rabbit away from me. But I can’t let her know how much I love him already. “Ifwe keep them,” I begin, “you’re going to have to stop leaving shit all over the place. Otherwise, one of them might eat something that makes them sick. Speaking of, youneed to research the plants you have and any flowers you want before bringing them into the house. And we’re going to learn how to take care of them properly.”
Sierra sits forward, her eyes lighting up. “Of course. Yeah. All of the above. So… we can keep them?”
I nod jerkily, and she grins.
