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a sort of walking miracle
(my skin)
Because it is hard to navigate the line between what they are and what they want to be – they do not navigate it at all. Because he is (rough, mellow, angry, alone) and because she is not –
Precisely what they are becomes hard to name.
(together? apart? predator and prey—)
“Will you touch me?” she asks, reaches out to cup his jaw, fingers trailing up to trace the soft, darker fur of his ears.
“Of course. Always.” He moves, the bed (their bed) shifts, and his paws hold her face and he kisses her, rolls her on top of him and they sort themselves out. It should be like puzzle pieces meeting, like two paws coming together to make a fist, but it isn’t.
It is so much more than that.
It is, Judy thinks, like standing on the high dive, years ago, above the lake, and being too afraid to jump and too proud to climb back down.
It is finding the middle ground, between admitting you are wrong and admitting you know what to do.
He is, in these solitary moments, hers.
(And so.)
She leaps.
Nick will not pretend to be a good fox.
(good, adj.: to be desired or approved of – having the qualities required for a particular role)
Nick will not pretend he was ever a good fox. But she calls him that. Not, good fox. Just, good. She tells him that he is good, that he is wonderful, that she loves him, she loves him, she loves him, she loves—
A soft gasp in the night, a quick turn and a pull, a tug here or there and a flood of warmth through his veins, his heart, his stomach and brain – far apart, anatomy tells him, but connected by the fibrous endings of nerves and capillaries and tendons and bone.
And on Sundays, she makes tea in the morning, and he’s getting used to it.
(he knows the skin of her neck is porcelain, but the cut of her gaze is steel.)
She had poured herself into being all or nothing, had deviated so far from what constituted normal, had no friends she could call close or consistent. She had been kissed once, and unpleasantly so, had refused to dance or be danced with, had made herself small and also larger than life, all at the same time, all within the same breath –
(it’s called a hustle, sweetheart.)
He knows the trajectory – know it well enough to understand that they have smashed it to pieces.
He sees it in her mother’s eyes, the first time they meet. They sit, paws clasped together in the Hopps family home, and Nick counts four hundred and eleven framed photos in the sitting room before someone finally says –
“As long as you’re happy.”
(read: we’ll get used to it.)
And he does his best to win them over. He is not good (a lie, she says, because she desires and approves of him) –
But he loves her.
(over and over again, staying quiet on the pullout couch where they are camped out for the weekend, he loves her, he loves her, he loves her, her neck is porcelain but her voice is –
home.)
“Did you kids sleep okay?”
Judy’s paw creeping over his thigh, reminding him that she is lightening and she is fire and smoke and spark and occasionally that one extra shot you should not have had the night before –
“It was good, mom, thanks.”
Nick shoves eggs into his mouth to avoid having to speak.
(and he wants to know if he should be worried that Judy never asks why he can’t sleep some nights. and he wants to know if he should be worried about the three pink lines that run down her cheek. and he wants to know if he should worry that the answer isn’t good or pleasant or sickly sweet –
and he wants to know if she would have used the little pink canister on her hip, jutting out under her plastic vest, pulling him in without permission.
he wants to know.)
Judy’s come to hate certain words.
skulk, fester, shirk, moist –
(“It’s just a word, I don’t know why you let a word—”
“I don’t know why you don’t!”)
The jostling on the street, the odd predator or prey that pushes and shoves, that spits and bites and says the most horrible things when he brings them into the precinct, when he sits across from them in the interrogation room, when he tries to question them on the street –
“Tell me it doesn’t hurt,” she says. I need to know I didn’t force this on you.
“It’s going to take a lot more than words to hurt me.”
I hurt you. My words. They came out of my mouth and they fell into your paws and they cut you and they hurt you and they –
“You didn’t hurt me,” he says, holding her close. “Don’t ever think that. This is what I want. This is where I want to be.”
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love—
She is a molecule of herself. Isolated, except for him. They orbit around one another, touching and looping and fixing and starting again.
Sometimes they fight.
Nick has been alone so long, being so close to and needing someone like this is new to him. Alien and unprecedented.
Finn is a friend of convenience.
But he needs Judy.
(codependency, his staff therapist says, even though she doesn’t say it like it’s a bad thing.)
“Isolation leaves you feeling branded. Needing someone and feeling needed, so long as it’s healthy, can be a good thing.”
Nick feels healthy.
And Judy feels…soft, pliant, malleable, warm under his paws.
(needing and being needed is new. he's learning how to feel it.)
They are learning how to feel a hundred different things at once. It is overwhelming. It is too much and not enough.
(there are moments when it’s too hard and he wants to quit, same as there are moments he’d live in forever if he could.
like in the mornings, when she steps out of the shower and dries herself, but the tips of her ears stay a little cold, and she shivers at the table and he comes behind her and holds them in his paws and she leans against him and reads the paper and shows him pictures her mother sent and reaches behind her chair to make sure his shirt is tucked in.
moments like that.)
They blur the line if only to prove it doesn’t really exist. (you can’t see the line and the line can’t see you)
“I wonder if I’d met you in some other life, some other way,” she murmurs, tired and sated and dozing off.
“Like if I’d been the sweet little bunny and you were the dummy fox?”
“Sure.” Her eyes are closed, she’s not really with him anymore.
“You’d love me anyway,” he teases, and she does smile, so she’s still there.
One eye opens. “You think so?”
“I know so.”
(his good, sweet, clever bunny)
She kisses his shoulder.
(her fox, it says. mine, unspoken.)
“I know so, too.”