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The thing is, Rey hates being ignored.
It’s totally irrational, she knows.
Knows that Ben can’t pay attention to her all the time.
And she also knows, in fact, that he isn’t even ignoring her.
But again: the thing about Rey is she hates being ignored. And she hates disappointment.
Without much thought at all, she finds herself illogically angry at Ben. Even though she knows his hobby is important to him. It's easy for her to get overly emotional like this—Ben won’t fault her for that.
He’s sitting at their kitchen table, hunched over his eight-year-old, massive laptop, typing notes, researching—things necessary for the task he’s currently working on, whatever it may be.
Rey never quite knows what he’s talking about when he updates her on his niche little hobby (“Yes, he does make the crosswords for the paper. No, he’snot being paid to do it. No, I cannot explain it to you,” she often has to say to those who ask). On his notepad next to him, she knows there’s a grid with all the squares carefully traced in pen, with tentative answers he pencils in as he goes.
Rey doesn’t like puzzles or word games, but she loves watching him construct them. Loves the way he sounds when he says things like: “Conversational response answers dilute the integrity of the puzzle.” and “Are University abreviations too hard for a Monday puzzle?”
But Rey woke up feeling not quite right today, in their bed—empty because she overslept. Her odd time of the month wasn’t in the cards for her for the weekend. Work has been busy, life has been busy, so she simply forgot. Uncharacteristically, Ben did too, because the deadline for his Arbor Day tree-themed crossword is five in the evening.
And so he can’t throw a ball around for her or begrudgingly monologue about the details and intricacies of his week.
Instead, he must focus, and Rey must entertain herself. At least, until he’s finished, and then maybe he’ll read a book to her in the way that she likes.
Annoyed, Rey sits in the corner of the room and watches.
Ben works the way he always does. Single-minded, focused, straight-faced but probably, somewhere on the inside, slightly pissed off. He stops, occasionally, to straighten his back, to absentmindedly massage the back of his neck, but she knows that he’ll still be stretching for the rest of the day.
Rey stares over at the green neon light of the digital stove clock and huffs.
How can she count down the minutes if she can’t even read?
Suddenly, the keyboard clacking stops, the wooden kitchen chair creaks as Ben turns around. One arm resting along the top of the chair’s back, he raises his eyebrow at her, which is enough to make her feel very, very bad.
“Rey,” he says, in that tone of his that’s meant to be serious—that Rey can only find amusing, “is there something you’d like to communicate to me?”
Yes, she thinks. With a little hop, she thumps her back legs against the floor.
“You’ve been doing that for a few minutes now.”
Despite the pretense, she knows he finds it cute (a description Rey does not agree with).
His glasses have slipped down to the lower part of the bridge of his nose. He pushes them up with the back of his hand in a way that gives her high school English teacher flashbacks.
Hopping over to his leg, she stands on her back paws to tap him on the calf. She’s probably normal-sized for her breed, but he towers over her, even sitting. It’d intimidated her for a good few months of their relationship, but now she finds it kind of nice. When she lets him hold her or stays still under the cover of his massive height, it’s like she’s giving the power to something that could destroy her, but trusting them enough not to.
“Need some attention?”
Rey thumps her feet against the floor again in emphasis.
Ben picks her up, gentle as ever, and places her on the table, next to his laptop.
Excellent.
“Be good now.”
Of course.
Rey is always good.
Ben goes back to his work (“Tolkien tree creature,” he mumbles under his breath with a small smile and a shake of his head) while Rey begins grooming her face with little licks of her paws and quick swipes from ear to whiskers to nose.
It’s times like these, when she’s in a weird mood and she’s feeling a little lonely, that Rey wonders if Ben would be better off with someone else. A normal woman with a normal life. The burden of that weighs heavy on her. Not for what it means for her own life, but for what it means to whoever she chooses to spend it with.
Never can she forget that a few days of every month for the rest of her life will be spent with a fluffy tail and whiskers. Even in day-to-day life, she still eats the tops off of strawberries, and she craves those little yogurt drop treats. Nearing the day of the full moon, she thinks about grooming way too much (catches herself brushing her hair well past the point of tidy). Is always weighing the idea of having Ben section off a little garden just so she can dig around with her hands.
When she’s human again, when the sun goes down, she’ll disinfect the whole table, mop the floor, retrace her steps, and clean up after herself. She’ll shower under the hottest water possible, scrub the dirt from under her nails. Maybe (if she’s lucky) Ben will kiss her until their lips feel bruised and she’s so wet that it soaks through her panties and onto his thigh. She’ll sit on his lap, and maybe he’ll even feed her the strawberries he’d already cut the tops off of.
Every once in a while, without looking away from his emails, Ben reaches over and scratches under her chin. Rey sighs wistfully and rests her head on her paws for a little while, the sound of a pencil scratching on paper lulling her to sleep.
*****
Though she’s in her early twenties, Ben older than her by a rough ten years; together, they seem to work. And it’s not that Ben makes her whole necessarily, because Rey doesn’t really like the optics of being made whole by a partner. That she’s not a real and whole person without one.
For Rey, it’s like there’s these places inside her that are dark, where the light doesn’t reach. Ben is that extra light. He keeps her warm and happy—he doesn’t let her fall into that dark.
She’d known it the first times they’d met. First when Rey was a bunny (loosened tie, and a croissant from a local coffee place in hand, long strands of grass offered to her through crowded lower shrub branches), then when she was a human (the baffled way he looked around the coffee shop with his eyes wide and ears reddening in the most “Who, me?” moment Rey had ever seen—as if her full smile greeting apropos of nothing was beyond comprehension).
Rey’s not a pet, and he doesn’t keep her like one.
(“Did you pay the electricity bill?” Ben asks. Rey flops over onto her side, like a dead weight. Ben laughs because he knows her, he knows she forgot, he knows that later she’ll feel guilty, but for now she thinks being funny will solve her problems.)
She’s his girlfriend. Even when she runs around in circles on the carpet, or tests how high she can jump on their bed.
It’s a hard balance to strike.
Yes, I need you, but no, not too much.
Rey tries to make the trade even. By making his lunches for work (lots of chicken and rice) and changing the oil in his car. When his back aches and the sound of his neck popping can be heard from across the room, she rolls a menthol magnesium stick along the tendons there. Kisses the back of his head and takes his gratitude with a smile.
Ben is an attentive partner, and she knows she’s lucky. He keeps a bowl of water out for her, fills a little container of celery for her by the couch. He doesn’t laugh when she tries to jump onto furniture but doesn’t quite make it. Their days off are usually spent together with Ben feeding her presliced carrots and apples from a cupped hand while they lay around together.
Ben doesn’t view things as transactional, and Rey knows she shouldn’t either. When she lets him watch reruns of 90s Jeopardy (“Do you think I could pull off a mustache?” he asks, to which Rey, mouth full of popcorn, replies: “That would be too up to current aesthetic trends for you.”) all night or when she scrubs his back in the shower—she does all these things because she loves him.
If the way his eyes light and get a little moist or the conviction of his hugs are to be believed, Ben knows that.
But she thinks of the way Plutt made her earn dinner by scrubbing rust off of hubcaps. The ease with which her parents left her in their abandoned burrow, alone in the moist, cool, dark underground cavern.
It comes up for her intrusively. And so even knowing what is true about her and, more importantly, about Ben, she has trouble believing sometimes with her full heart.
That gifts and favors and love come from want and not obligation.
*****
They install one of those cat flaps on the backdoor because there’s a lot of things she’ll concede to doing in this form, but begging for him to open the door so she can piss in a corner is not one of them.
There’s only so long she can stare wistfully at the hollow of his neck, hoping for a little bit of a cuddle before it gets boring, so she maneuvers her way through and out, feeling a little too much like the family dog for her taste.
As a kid, Rey hated shifting.
She hated the way it made her feel. Going from a small and vulnerable kid to a thing more small and more vulnerable.
The loss of control.
The animal instinct.
Now she embraces it.
Grass sticks out of her mouth while she chews lazily, and its crunch masks some of the quieter sounds around her. But she still hears a cricket off somewhere to the west. A fuzzy, round bumblebee lounging in a cluster of dandelions about twenty-five feet in front of her.
Her brain is barely big enough to carry a single complex thought, but her body knows it feels relief in the sound of the wind and the scent of the earth. Feels it in the warmth of the sun against the cartilage of her ears.
Quickly, she finds a place to sit and wait for Ben, scared of letting the sun burn her, even though her skin is covered in fur.
There, off through the green and yellowing grass, is a dark patch of ground around the base of the tree that shades their yard. Where other living things no longer grow, and the earth pits—not very big, but the hollow of it calls to her. A place to cool down her overheated body for a little while.
Somewhere along the back fence, under the yard, Rey has a burrow. It’s only natural, really, for a bunny to want to dig. She’s grateful that her fur is solid and brown, like the dull color of her hair, because wouldn’t white fur be a bitch to clean. But Rey loves to get dirty—lives for it. Ever since she dug her first burrow hidden in the junk of Plutt’s garage.
She doesn’t spend much time down there anymore. Would rather zoom around until she gets tired, snack on the clover patch next to their back porch—the one that Ben refuses to mow.
(“It’s enrichment, Rey. You need it,” he says, wiping the sweat from his forehead, his foot braced on the bottom step of their porch.
“I’m not a shelter cat, Ben!” she responds with a hot face and a quick temper. Later, when she shifts back into her human skin, she concedes. Smiling and happy, she wraps her arms around him from behind as he washes dishes.)
Rey hops with a leisure unbecoming of a bunny such as herself; careless and slow because she knows the mindful ways that Ben has cut off their yard from their neighbor and the horrendous barking creature that lives there.
It’s easy to lose track of time like this, and so she does.
Rey rolls and sniffs, and listens to the world around her. Scratches at a revealed tree root to sharpen her claws.
She’s chewing on a stick, probably something a squirrel shook off from the tree above, when something approaches from behind. She freezes in that way that's instinctual, though she knows it’s just Ben from the sound of his breathing.
Rey is facing away when he reaches down to grab her by the scruff.
“Hello, little rabbit.”
She wiggles, and her feet kick wildly in the air beneath her. This seems to amuse Ben. Which pisses Rey off because, dammit, she's a fierce fucking creature!
“Stop that, now,” Ben reprimands and if Rey had a mouth capable of speech she’d tell him to piss off. Instead, she seethes quietly at the way he manhandles her. He presses her small body up against his chest, her head pillowed in his elbow. Then he leans down and kisses between her ears.
She never feels so small and helpless than when he holds her in his arms. Even though she knows, with every fast-tempo beat of her heart, that he’d never hurt her.
“How about we sit?”
Ben brings them over under the shade of the tree—its branches long and spindly but covered in green leaves. An ugly chair sits with layers of white and green paint stripped away in places, bare grain in others, but it’s solid. A relic from Ben’s childhood home; something his dad made maybe (a sore subject, often avoided).
“You were so good to wait today.”
Yes, she was.
“I’m sure you’re not happy with me. You can’t help what your body does, but I could schedule my time better.”
That’s just not true. She hates to hear Ben speak as if he’s not doing enough already, as if he needs to change to accommodate her more. She’ll be sure to tell him that later, when she can speak.
He opens to the bookmarked page, not that far in, because Rey’d gotten bored last time and tried to eat the pages from his hands.
“I’m not doing the voices. Just so you know.”
One time after a glass of afternoon wine, she convinced him. Shook with laughter all night long and then for the next week, every time she saw the book in the wicker basket on the counter.
Ben sits, and she’s glad the sun beats down around them because it’d rained yesterday, and she’d hate for him to suffer through wet pants for her (taking the pants off, maybe, enticed her, but it’s hard to enjoy pantsless Ben in this state).
And as he reads, he focuses on his favorite spots: the soft flattened planes of her ears and the space between them. Her paws—left, then right. Along the ring of her neck. She’s incredibly still under his touch. Like this, she’s at her most vulnerable. His hands are so strong and big, he could likely break her if he wanted to. Instead, he soothes her beating little heart and the tremble of her legs, still activated from the adrenaline.
In these moments, the casual and intimate touches, Rey backtracks.
All her doubts wither on the vine because, of course, Ben doesn’t want another woman.
Rey is not too much—too loud, or small, or furry, or annoying.
Would he be with her otherwise?
Ben’s not perfect himself. He’s needy in his own ways; the strain of work and life sometimes so much, his day sometimes so brutal, that he’ll get all terse and stiff. He’ll give himself the space he won't ask for by shutting himself in their room. Quiet and still, but not sleeping or reading. Just staring at the wall.
She’ll come in with something sweet. A cupcake they split or grocery store chocolates from a dented box.
They’ll sit like that for a while until Ben is ready. Rey will kiss both his eyelids and the end of his chin and the places where each dark eyebrow ends. Then he’ll dust the crumbs off of Rey (he’ll have more in-depth complaints about this later) and pull her tight to his chest. His hand will slip under the back of her shirt, and he’ll stroke along the knobs of her spine—the skin that’s dew soft and sensitive. It’ll remind her of nights on the couch, in his lap with her twitching little nose and slicked back ears. Except here in the dark of their room, she’s got all her fingers and toes; arms to hold and lips to kiss.
With him now, she lays her little bunny head down and shuts her eyes again.
Somewhere between the chapter they started at and the beginning of a long stretch of character banter, she feels him put down the book on the arm of the chair.
He whispers he loves her, and she believes that it’s true.