Page 54 of Dearly Unbeloved
“Drink.” Ice clinks against the plastic cup as Sierra presses the iced jasmine tea into my hand.
I sigh and take a sip, wincing when all I taste is the paper straw. I hand it back to Sierra and she takes a long sip, sighing happily.
“God, that’s good. Here, try this. It’s a little spicier than the chili garlic sauce.”
I open my mouth to decline, but Sierra just uses it as an opportunity to pop a cube of her Szechuan tofu in my mouth. The force-feeding is a little much, but I dutifully chew and swallow. It’s fine. I can tell it’s spicier, but it still doesn’t taste of much.
“I’ve had enough for now,” I say, setting down my chopsticks and wiping my mouth with a napkin. Sierra flicks her gaze over my face before nodding.
“Okay.”
She piles the containers back into the bag and sets it on the floor beside the bed before standing up and leaving the room. Disappointment settles over me. She said she wanted to take care of me, and feeding and hydrating me is that, I guess, but part of me wanted her to stay. Bright and shiny things might overwhelm me, but I’ve become somewhat desensitized to Sierra. It’s not like she’s under any obligation to stay, I suppose. And I’m used to?—
She walks back in, a bunny in each arm, and drops them gently on the bed. They had their dinner in their enclosure when our takeout arrived. Rabbits, we quickly learned, are surprisingly speedy and good at stealing human food, so they’re no longer allowed to eat with us.
Sierra climbs back under the covers beside me and tosses a shiny red package my way. “You have to open your fortune cookie. I don’t make the rules.”
She tears into her own cookie and snaps it open. Her eyes widen as she reads the fortune, a laugh that sounds somewhere between amused and pained falling from her lips.
“What does it say?”
“Sometimes the rose is true love’s prize,” she reads out, shaking her head.
I frown. “What does that even mean?”
“No idea.” Sierra folds the paper and sets it on the nightstand. “Open yours.”
I crack open the cookie, flinching at the crumbs that fall over my blankets. I’m not an eating-in-bed kind of person. The waxy paper is rolled up, so I smooth it out and read aloud. “Pain loses its potency when we share it with others.” Well, shit.
Sierra snorts. “Thank you for that segue, little fortune cookie.” She sits back against the headboard and pats my pillows.
I sigh, tearing off tiny pieces of the cookie and giving them to the bunnies before placing the rest on the nightstand out of their reach and sitting back. Sierra slings an arm around my shoulders, twirling her fingers through theknotted ends of my hair. I can feel how tense I am, every muscle on edge like I’m about to be attacked.
“Hey,” Sierra says, tugging me in closer to her so I’m basically lying on her chest. From this angle, she can’t see my face, and it’s easier. “We don’t have to talk about what has you feeling like this. Don’t get me wrong, I think we should, because I agree with your fortune cookie. But if you’re not ready, I’m not going to push you.”
“I don’t know if I want to talk about it. I don’t even know where I’d start,” I admit, and Sierra runs a soothing hand down my back.
“Those are two different things, honey.”
Honey. It no longer sounds sarcastic when she says it. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting used to it, but I don’t mind it so much anymore.
“If you don’t want to talk about it because you don’t want to talk about it, that’s a fair reason. But not knowing how to do something isn’t a reason not to try.”
In theory, she makes sense. In practice, I’ve never been good at doing anything less than perfect.
“But what if I do a bad job?” My voice cracks, and Sierra tightens her hold on me.
“A bad job of talking? That seems unlikely. And even if you do, you have nothing to lose. Because you don’t care what I think, right?”
“Right,” I confirm, though the word tastes bitter as I force it out. “Um. Okay, well… Where should I start?”
“Start with this morning,” Sierra prompts.
I tell her about struggling to wake up, struggling to turn off my alarm, or put my feet on the ground. I tell her aboutforcing myself out of bed to feed the bunnies and practically running back to my room, because every second out of the covers felt like my body was in attack mode. I stumble over the words at first, but once I start talking, it’s hard to stop. Everything just spills out.
Sierra listens, silently, as I tell her about almost failing my eleventh-grade English class because my brain was too foggy to understand the book I was supposed to be writing my final report on. I cried and begged my English teacher not to fail me, to give me more time, and she just gave me an A, promising me I’d shown her enough great work to pass the class. At the time, I wondered what I’d done to deserve her kindness, but I later remembered she’d had both Xan and Jazz in her class, and she probably knew how my parents were.
I tell her about how my girlfriend in my freshman year of college broke up with me because I went radio silent for a whole week, and refused to tell her why—my parents were out of town and there was nothing to incentivize me to get out of bed when I woke up feeling like death.
