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imagining-in-the-margins · 1 year

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The Birds & The Bees (S.R. | Pt. 27)

Summary: Spencer’s half-truths are catching up to him, and Ms. Fletcher is causing problems.

A/N: Welcome back, my bunnies. Three chapters to go. Couple: Spencer Reid/Fem!Reader Category: Slow Burn (NSFW, 18+) Content Warning: Alcohol, kissing, verbal arguments, allusions to death and blood, ambulances, (metaphorical) hallucinations, paranoia, distracted/emotional driving Word Count: 10.5k

MASTERLIST | Series Masterlist

Since the dawn of man, so has existed the fear of the darkness. I had been no exception to this universal truth.

I’d always written off my fear of the nothingness as a product of my upbringing; my idea of home. Las Vegas was the only place I knew of where the neon signs outnumbered the people. The evenings were often more illuminated than the midday mark when the sun showed no mercy.

But on the nights where I wandered, I would travel far enough until I could find a unique kind of night. I could still feel the crisp air in my blood. With flimsy pedals beneath my feet and the endless desert ahead, I would ride until my legs ached the same as my lungs.

My mother would’ve hated my tendency to wander if she’d ever been able to notice. My father hated it for different reasons.

But if only the world had understood that it was not my love for solitude, but my yearning to be part of something greater that led me to the shrub-laden sand.

When I stood among the cacti and fellow nocturnal creatures, I would find that the night was so much brighter than in my bedroom. I would stand soaked in the starlight that fought against the darkness. Eventually, I would learn the names of every star that had one. They would become something like a friend to me, those stars. The guardians that offered silent, reverent guidance whenever I was lost. All the while flickering to remind me that they were still alive.

It was no wonder to me that I had trouble sleeping when I moved away from the desert and towards the East Coast. My heart knew what beauty hid under the blanket of the bare night.

The nightmares that plagued my psyche were nothing but a contrast to the nights I knew.

It was rare to have nightmares on the nights there had been a Bunny in my bed. Luckily, on those rare occasions, I would still wake from the horror to find her sleeping soundly against my chest. I wondered how the sound of my heart hadn’t been enough to wake her. I thanked whatever Gods were torturing me for allowing her unbroken dreams.

I hadn’t had a nightmare in the five days since Lila’s wedding. Of course, I hadn’t let her leave my side, either. The unique horror that was watching her get hurt, however imaginary, was too painful to bear alone.

But it had come time for her to return to her life without me, even if it was just for a couple hours. I knew I would miss her terribly, but I also knew I had to let her go. I had to allow her the freedom to grow so that when she returned to my arms, there was never a doubt that it was where she’d wanted to be.

Still, I felt an overwhelming relief when I woke to find her already so. She ran gentle fingertips over the rough scruff on my cheeks.

The first thing I noticed was the way her eyes and smile widened when she saw me wake. The second thing I noticed was the same as it always was. Except somehow, in a matter of hours, she had become even more beautiful than when I’d gone to sleep.

“Good morning, Bunny,” I mumbled.

“Good morning,” she whispered back. Her placid voice still shaken by the touch of sleep, she continued, “I missed you.”

My heart wrenched in my chest. It rioted against the starless sound of her sadness, and I was powerless to stop it from using every possible muscle to bring her closer.

Her lips found mine like a sunflower to the sun. Her limbs climbed me like honeysuckle vines searching for home. She found it there, buried in our embrace.

Even in the morning, she tasted like sweetness. She was the morning dew following a cloudless night, my oasis in the middle of a cruel stretch of desert.

When she broke apart to breathe, I found myself still tempted by her honeyed lips. I came closer, pressing our foreheads together like she might be able to read my thoughts. Like always, she giggled like she had heard them.

But when she pulled away again, I let her set the distance. I watched the way her bosom moved with her breath. I cradled her face so that I could count the steady beating of her heart as it resonated through her neck.

I felt how it shifted ever so slightly as he pressed her body against mine like she had something to hide.

“I have a favor to ask,” she said with little confidence.

Quickly, I moved my hands to hide the way I flinched at the thought of what she would want to ask.

I buried my face against the crook of her neck. I breathed in the scent of her hair. I laid hasty kisses against the column of her throat so that the pain in my chest might be mistaken for lust, instead.

“Anything,” I whispered, “I’d give you anything.”

It had been the truth. I would never regret giving her everything she’d asked for, even when I knew what she was about to ask. Even when I knew with the utmost certainty that it would leave me destitute in the daytime desert once more.

My Bunny knew it, too, which was why she was timid when she asked, “I wanted to know if you’d be alright with me going to that party that I was telling you about.”

My heart leapt in my chest with the worst kind of warning, but I tried to remain playful so as to not alert my Bunny of my impending doom.

“It’s tonight? Already?” I whined.

It had worked. She didn’t notice how my lips were more broken as they worshipped her. She only laughed while she squirmed against me and set my body on fire. I continued to kiss her wherever it tickled, dropping lower until I heard her breath catch in her throat.

My Bunny gasped for air while she laced each of her fingers through unruly curls atop my head. She pulled me away, and I obeyed. Yet she gave me enough freedom to grant her one more kiss against her breastbone.

My lips lingered, feeling the heavy beating of her heart. It was too tempting for me not to try.

“Stay with me, instead,” I grumbled against her skin, “I need more time to worship you.”

Her legs rubbed together with obstinate determination.

“Spencer!” she whined back, “You promised you wouldn’t do this.”

She had been right. It had still been worth a try. Just because I hadn’t gotten the answer that I’d wanted hadn’t meant that I would stop attempting to fill each second with adoration. I sighed against her chest and saw how her skin rippled from the humid heat of my breath.

“Of course you can go,” I conceded before I returned to my usual lackadaisical exploration of her.

I had loved her so many times. I knew her body better than my own, yet that morning, I stumbled as I held her. My Bunny was too smart not to notice.

She used her quick grip on my hair to guide me back up to her. Although I knew she wouldn’t fall for my tricks, I still used my leverage to climb atop her while I moved to meet her eyes.

As expected, that clever girl barely paid attention to the erection pressed between her thighs. She recognized my desire as nothing more but a sword and shield to defend against unwanted examinations into my emotional state.

“Is something wrong?” she asked before I could lower my face to capture her lips again.

“No, no. Nothing’s wrong,” I said too quickly to be the truth.

I tried to kiss her again, but that time her hand pressed hard against the top of my chest to keep me from lulling her straight into the bliss of ignorance.

“You’re lying to me… Why are you lying to me?”

She really was a clever thing. Almost gratingly so. Of course, if I’d had nothing to hide, it would have continued to be endearing.

It was my own fault. I was the stubborn one. I was, once again, sabotaging things in an effort to avoid the very result I was leading us to. I looked into her eyes and felt like a damn fool, despite how much she begged me not to.

“I’m sorry. You’re right,” I admitted more freely than the last time I’d kept something from her. Still, I couldn’t fight the urge to write off my concerns as nothing more than meaningless. “But it really isn’t anything important. I just…”

“Spencer,” she scolded.

She’d made me promise to be more honest with her. I had tried my hardest not to break it, but it felt inevitable. There was nothing greater than my desire to protect her purity. It was the very core of my love for her.

I had seen so many terrible things that I would never forget, but my Bunny didn’t need to know what horrors lurked behind prison bars. She didn’t need to confront the demons, the blood-soaked talons that would make home in any ounce of goodness they found.

You’re doing it again.

“Please tell me,” she pleaded.

I couldn’t tell her no.

“I had a bad dream and it’s making me feel uneasy,” I admitted.

“What was the dream about?”

You.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted to tell her. It was more so that my mouth refused to make the words. The oxygen fled from my lungs, turning quickly to carbon dioxide to silence me. My heart was pounding, too far from hers for her to hear it. Yet she could see it in my eyes and feel it against her palm. She saw the terror she had no knowledge of.

That time when I kissed her, she didn’t stop me. I took it as a white flag; a shared realization that there would be some things that still scared me too much to mention.

Emboldened by the ambrosia of her lips, I explained it away the only way I knew how. The same thing said to me by my mother about the monsters in the closet. And like this danger, those, too, had been real.

“All that matters is that it was a dream and there is no reason to worry about it.”

Like the stubborn thing she was, my darling daisy fought against the reduction of my suffering. Her hands became softer while her resolve became more rigid. She wound my hair around her fingers like she might find errant nightmares among the strands.

“You know you don’t have to hide things from me, right? I love you,” she said like it was the simplest truth in the world.

I smiled, still waiting for the day I would believe it fully.

“I know, I try to understand why every second that I’m awake.”

Her nose crinkled with her laughter. What I wouldn’t give to hear that sound every morning.

The truth, I heard from within my heart. That is the thing I am refusing to give.

The realization was so overwhelming that it felt unwieldy. So suddenly, reality collapsed in on itself and fell onto my shoulders in its entirety. Like Atlas, I stumbled. In a moment of weakness — no, strength — I admitted to myself and to my Bunny that it had become too heavy.

“I know you deserve freedom, and you can make your own decisions, and that you are strong and capable and…”

I paused. I looked down at the young woman with eyes wide with hope and I tried my hardest not to crush it beneath my heel.

“I don’t need to worry about you, but I do,” I admitted with a broken heart. “I just hate when I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing, and it eats me alive that you could get hurt and I wouldn’t be there to prevent it and…”

She ended the thought with the cruelest kindness. Her lips felt like water on a fire, and I became lost in the haze left behind. I held her closer. I pushed her onto her back and climbed atop her without any protest from the wriggling rabbit beneath me. I held her head instead of the sheets, propping myself on my elbows so that I could kiss her harder. I spoke to her honestly, then, with fumbling tongues and hurried breath. I tried to explain how deeply these roots ran, how often they had been scorched or severed and tried to find another way.

They all led me back to her.

Before I could open my mouth to speak, to finish that terrifying thought that fought its way to the forefront in every single moment of silence, she stopped me.

“Why are you thinking like that, Spencer?”

For the first time, my instinct was to tell her the truth. For a fleeting second, I considered telling her about Maeve. My mind mapped out each nuance and explanation, but when it came time for my heart to decide, I said nothing.

I let out the breath in my lungs and like dried dandelion pappus, the memory of Maeve fluttered away.

This time would be different. It had to be different.

“Nothing. It was just a bad dream,” I professed. Then, trying to avoid any further expanding on those feelings, I focused my attention on more beautiful things.

My Bunny, beautiful above all else.

“But you’re here now, and I would be an idiot if I didn’t take full advantage of that.”

Any hesitation left her the moment I kissed her cheeks. Her giggling returned; this time accompanied by excited attempts to catch my lips with hers. Once I made my way there, I fell back into the comfortable lull of her love.

“You are so beautiful,” I sighed. “I love you more than life itself.”

The rabbit stilled. The musculature of her face twitched in the most subtle way, but I saw it. I saw how hard my Bunny tried to bite her tongue, but she couldn’t let it go.

“I love you, too…but…”

She looked at me, but not in my eyes. She tried, with naive eyes, to read the unreadable in my tense muscles. I held on, as stubbornly as she had. My resolve gripped the facade as hard as I could, not because I’d wanted to lie to her, but because I’d wanted to lie to myself.

She hadn’t let me, though.

“It worries me when you talk like that, Spencer.”

“Why?” I asked, hoping for the answer I’d been searching for since the day I met her.

“Because it just sounds like… you don’t value your own life.”

Oh.

“Like you’re just waiting for the chance to jump in front of a bullet for me,” she said as she crumpled into herself. Her shoulders pulled up and forward, and her hand that had been resting on my shoulder fell away.

As it hit the bed, I wasted no time readjusting so that I could hold it there against the sheets. I prayed she couldn’t feel the way they shook.

“I would,” I confessed, despite the fact it was unwelcome. “I would die for you in a second.”

My Bunny gave a solemn smile; sad but honest. It held multitudes of universes that I chased after in her eyes just before she lowered her gaze.

“Please, don’t,” she pleaded somewhat playfully.

Although it had been uttered like a joke, there had been an honest vulnerability in her request. Behind soft lashes I saw the layer of dew gathering in her eyes that she blinked away in a quiet moment.

She had never asked me for much. Still, I couldn’t promise her that I would change as quickly and wholly as she’d hoped. As she had deserved. So, I offered her all that I could.

“I’ll try my hardest, Bunny.”

She accepted it. She soaked in the small change like succulent roots following a downpour. Just like the cacti I’d called companions, her hope brought blossoms to the bright morning light.

“So… what I’m taking out of this is… I can go to the party?” she snickered.

“Of course, Bunny,” I chuckled.

That dastardly desert flower sneaked her hand back just so she could throw her arms around my neck. She pulled me closer, and, in a frenzy of laughter and kisses, she eased the pain that had always accompanied letting her go.

When she’d stopped, though, the fear resurfaced from the cracks in my armor.

“Just… promise me you’ll be safe,” I whispered against her skin. “You can call me any time, and I will be there.”

“I promise, Spencer,” she sighed.

I felt the release in my own lungs. I closed my eyes and lowered myself until our chests met in the middle. I laid my body weight on her like a security blanket, listening for the gentle beating of her heart so mine might remember how to do it right.

“I’ll be curled up with you in bed tonight, just like it should be,” she assured me.

I thought of all the ways that might not happen before I could convince myself to consider the far more likely reality that it would. The tension began mounting until I was worried that I might crush the flower in my grip.

I forced myself to sigh to relieve the pressure once more.

“I can’t wait,” I whispered.

At least it had been the truth.

The air was thick and smelled like a mixture of liquor and smoke. The smoke itself had varying levels of pungency, and I didn’t dare try to differentiate the source of each. I would be lying if I’d pretended the thought of finding something to calm my nerves hadn’t crossed my mind, though.

It wasn’t so much the nature of the party that had me panicked; it was something inside me that seemed to have changed. Perhaps that was why I’d been so insistent to Spencer that I need time to do the things college girls do.

As I stood in a room full of belligerent fools, though, I wanted more than anything to just go home. Even that realization felt frightening. It had only been a few months that I’d known Spencer, and really, it had only been a few weeks since we traded vulnerabilities.

How could it be that I’d forgotten how to blend into a crowd so quickly?

I was supposed to be having fun. But the moment I found a mostly empty room, I took advantage of the reprieve from heavy bass and invasive eyes. I didn’t just stop there, either. I continued to slip into the empty bathroom and let out a deep sigh when I found it was not occupied by a couple who would only feel encouraged by an audience.

No, it was just me. Just me and the muffled sound of a party that I’d gotten dressed up for, even though I knew Spencer wouldn’t be able to see me.

I looked at myself in the reflection the same way I had in Vegas. I touched my own exposed skin and remembered the way it had felt that first night he touched me. Silently, I wondered if it would still feel the same.

A smile appeared before a conclusion had been reached by an inebriated mind. An eerie sense of calm started to cover my skin with goosebumps like lilies sprouting over a grave.

I realized then, as I chuckled to myself in an empty room, why it was so hard to be there. I knew with the utmost certainty that I felt out of place there because I was. I always had been.

This was not to say there was anything wrong with the girls on the other side of the old home’s hollow wooden doors. There was nothing wrong with enjoying a more hedonistic lifestyle and, for many years, I envied them for being able to find the courage to indulge.

But the version of myself that I had presented to them felt as distant from myself as the reflection in front of me.

I took in a deep breath and closed my eyes. I pictured a quiet night alone with the man I loved, and I reminded myself that this was not a decision I had to make. I could grow into a new version of myself that existed without him the same way that I’d grown along with him.

At the end of the night, I knew, he would be waiting for me. I couldn’t wait. I wanted to hear his voice, soft and comforting as he lulled me into another wonderful dream.

Just as my heart began to mend itself, and I felt the life returning to me, it drained from me in a matter of seconds.

“Hey Bunny,” a young girl sneered.

My eyes shot open to find that I was no longer alone in the bathroom. I had been joined by a face I knew too well.

Her friends would call her Montana. Spencer would call her ‘Ms. Fletcher.’ But to me she would always be the grating voice of insecurity. The supposed self-appointed President of my boyfriend’s fan club, and the most irritating girl I’d ever had the displeasure of knowing.

I would say that the hostility she instilled in me was a result of the alcohol, but I would be lying. Even Spencer had warned me about her. Never with much detail, but always with an overwhelming amount of disdain. She was the only student in his entire career that he would forcibly remove from his class. When I’d asked him why, he’d simply said that he pitied the girl.

I didn’t ask any questions. The look in his eyes told me she’d done enough to deserve his apathy.

Still, she was young and foolish and hopelessly in love with a man who hardly remembered her name, and so I felt obligated to show her a modicum of respect. Even if the only motivation was my own desire to be kind.

“Oh, hey,” I offered as politely as I could.

The girl stalked forward with enough confidence that it almost made me stumble. Despite her negative qualities, she possessed enough sureness in her own sexuality to make most things seem possible.

For a second, I wondered how different life must be for girls like her, but then I remembered that I didn’t particularly care about how anyone else looked at me. Spencer already looked at me with enough adoration to fill a black hole to oblivion.

Yet when she looked me up and down, I felt myself shrinking, if only for a second. I nonetheless forced myself to stand tall and refuse to cower.

“You look cute,” she snickered, “Where’s your boyfriend? Does he know you’re here?”

“Yeah, of course he does,” I shot back a little too quickly. She latched onto the tremble in my voice and dug her nails into the vulnerability.

“Sorry, I should have specified which boyfriend,” she continued.

This time when my hair stood on end, it was nothing like lilies. It was the needles of a cactus and the thorns wrapped around the roses.

“I meant Spencer,” she purred.

Don’t fucking call him that, was what I’d wanted to say. But the shock of the indecency had rendered me speechless. I just stared at her, exactly like the deer caught in the headlights. I had promised myself not to be prey anymore, but it had been so long since I’d been faced with a predator as ruthless as the unfortunate girl in front of me.

“I know you were seeing a couple guys there for a minute,” she continued without giving me a chance to answer. “I never thought you would have it in you. I guess you proved me wrong.”

A whore by any other name, I suppose.

I tried not to let it bother me.

“Uh… sure,” I said.

It didn’t work.

“Yeah, Spencer knows I’m here,” I repeated.

Her body brushed against mine as she forced her way in front of me. I stood firm in my space, refusing to give her even an inch more of my resolve.

As she perched herself on the counter, she made a point not to fix the risen hem of her skirt. I wondered whether she had meant for me to be jealous of her or attracted to her, but ultimately, I felt neither. If anything, I was confused by her attempted displays of dominance.

“Don’t you find it weird?” she asked as she leaned forward like it had been a scandalous thought, “Calling him his first name?”

“Not really… he’s my boyfriend,” I answered.

“Yeah. I guess it’s different when he’s like, actually your professor,” she laughed.

A familiar nausea began rocking in my stomach. It was unrelated to the alcohol. It was more like a warning of an impending storm that ushered me to find shelter.

But my shelter wasn’t there. He was at home, where I’d begged him to be. He wasn’t there when she said something that made me recoil.

“I almost slipped up so many times in class. Wouldn’t that have been embarrassing?”

I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. It drowned out the distant sounds of the party and alerted me only of my desire to release the rage that had been brewing for several months now.

I took a deep breath in and released some of it with a quick exhale. I stepped to her right and pretended like I had something to fix about my make up so I could stop looking at her shit-eating grin. I ignored the obvious mockery of when he’d actually used the wrong name for me.

Shouldn’t that very incident have shown her how silly this charade was?

“Yeah, you probably shouldn’t call him by his first name,” I said more confidently after the oxygen returned to my brain, “He really doesn’t like it when his students do that. It’s disrespectful.”

She was unbothered by my words. In fact, it seemed like she’d hardly even heard me. She just continued on, each word hitting me like talons and teeth.

“He seemed to like it when I was in his office,” she said. If that had been all, I would have easily written it off. But it hadn’t been.

“Right before Thanksgiving?” she giggled before adding, “Although, I guess you weren’t there for a couple weeks…”

I swallowed the anxiety that shot up my throat in the form of liquor and bile.

“A man like him gets lonely.”

My fingers twitched as they struggled to find something to do. I forced them to move, to fix any errant hair or pigment on my face to not give her the satisfaction she was after.

She was lying. She had to be lying.

It didn’t make any sense that Spencer would cave to something so unabashedly lustful. My mind recounted each time he spoke about purity as the only thing worth protecting, but then the few times he spoke about men broke through.

‘He’s the same as any other man,’ was what he’d said about Kyle.

He had been right. At the time, I knew he was also speaking of himself. But how far did those indiscretions reach? Surely, it couldn’t be what this girl was implying.

Could it? It couldn’t be.

The confidence wavered as I realized that, even if it hadn’t been Spencer’s intention to trick me, he had narrowly escaped any discussion on exactly why he had cheated on Max.

I was taking too long to respond. The silence in the room was heavier than the air. The tension was even worse than both combined. It had only been a few seconds, but it was long enough that she had felt the need to deal what I’m sure she thought would be a fatal blow to a soft heart.

“Not to mention all the late night messages. Those never really stopped.”

Immediately, a burden was lifted from my chest.

“Right,” I laughed. The airy sound of my voice must have tipped her off to something, because I saw her tense in my peripherals. Without even turning to her, I hummed through the continued laughter, “Because that’s what my boyfriend known for. Texting.”

She didn’t concede even when I looked at her with a pout full of pity.

“Yeah, I guess those dating sites are more similar to e-mailing, so the old man is more comfortable with it,” she persisted, nonetheless.

My lips flattened but the sarcastic smile remained. Because I understood then, what Spencer had meant.

I felt bad for her, too.

I felt bad that she felt it was necessary to lie about any of it. I pitied her because I couldn’t imagine a world where she thought I wouldn’t know about my own boyfriend.

How many men had convinced her that paranoia was normal? Who had taught her pain to the extent that she was so confident I would believe any of the lies she’d told?

“Besides, it’s harder to hide phone calls from certain nosy people,” she spat. For the first time, I saw her initial confidence for what it really was. It was just fear; an almost debilitating amount of self-hatred disguised as something else.

I might not have known what happened with Spencer and Max, but I sure as shit knew that this girl was lying through her teeth.

“Right. I don’t know what you’re doing, but… it’s not going to work,” I told her. I tried to infuse the words with kindness that she was probably not used to. But when I said, “I trust my boyfriend,” she continued to fight.

“That’s so cute,” she snickered with so much disappointment it was almost palpable. “Stupid. But cute.”

I summoned all the willpower I had left after the alcohol had drained away most of my inhibitions. I was going to let her go on believing she had won, albeit with a bruised pride and nothing to show for it.

I was so ready to walk out the door without uttering a single mean word to her.

But Spencer had been right about her. She couldn’t take no for an answer. She just had to keep going.

“Guess Kyle was right about you, too,” she said.

And I snapped.

“What, you expect me to believe that Spencer Reid slept with a student just because she offered? Do you have any idea how fucking stupid you sound?”

The sound of my own voice surprised me. Her eyes grew wide, not with fear, but excitement at having earned the response she was hoping for.

She didn’t even particularly care if I was right, or even if I’d believed her. She just wanted a spectacle, and I’d given it to her.

“Actually, that’s a silly question. Of course you don’t,” I laughed, loud and bitter between the songs. The few people in the room took notice of the two of us, but no one took a step closer.

“You don’t have any idea what Professor Reid thinks about anything, because he doesn’t even know who you are.”

Behind the smile, I saw something inside of her crack. I should’ve known better than to poke the beast, but the rage inside of me demanded it be known. Like the wrath of Persephone, I flung thorned words at the woman and hoped that she would turn to mint and wither beneath my heel.

“The few times I mentioned you, it kind of seemed like he didn’t even remember your name,” I spat, “which is pretty fucking hard to do to someone with an eidetic memory.”

I could hear feet shuffling into the room, I could feel their eyes on my back the same way they stared when Spencer had called me by the wrong name.

I probably should’ve been embarrassed, but I wasn’t. I didn’t feel anything other than anger and hurt that didn’t result from any one specific person. That poor, pitiful girl just happened to be the right person at the wrong time. She had unknowingly batted at the wasp’s nest and would forever bear the scars.

She couldn’t hide her own disdain. She tried to speak, but her teeth told her not to. She bit down on her tongue and avoided looking at me or the crowd I felt forming.

Even though I had turned into the aggressive one, I still felt trapped.

“So you know what, even if he did sleep with you, which I find hard to believe considering — contrary to what you clearly think — he doesn’t really like nasty, vindictive little girls who try to fuck him before they even finish writing their dissertation, you certainly didn’t leave any lasting impact on him,” I shouted. I yelled loud enough for even the people in the hallway had to hear me. Then, much quieter and through what were almost tears, I choked, “And that’s somehow even more pathetic than lying about it in the first place.”

Like a hurt animal backed into a corner, I had lashed out and accidentally shared a glimpse of my insecurity that she wouldn’t let slip away.

“Wow,” she chuckled with a fake pout. “Did I strike a nerve, Bunny? Has ‘your boyfwend’ seen this side of you?”

“God, you’re so fucking stupid!” I spat. I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but once it started, I couldn’t make it stop. “I don’t even know why I wasted my breath on you. Have fun living in your fantasy world where you think my boyfriend would ever want to fuck you.”

I turned on my heel and threw the door open. It took every bit of focus for me to not fall from the dizziness of the rage and anxiety. Even when familiar, friendly faces tried to stop me, I shoved their hands off me and pushed my way through the crowd.

“Bye, Bunny!” she called.

“Hey, you know, since you’re so obsessed with me, please feel free to date Kyle,” I answered. I threw my hands up like white flags as I ran the other direction, “Heaven knows he’d love you!”

As I stumbled through the crowd, I tried to find any reprieve from the feeling in my chest. I almost thought to lock myself in another, less intimidating bathroom, but the thought of looking at myself in the mirror made me sick.

I knew I wouldn’t like what I’d find.

So, instead of giving in to the misery she wanted, and instead of facing my own misgivings, I threw myself into the life I had once tried to live. I grabbed my friends and a drink I didn’t want.

I didn’t call Spencer.

I knew I wouldn’t like what he’d find.

Don’t think of a pink elephant.

It should be a simple instruction. Think of a blue monkey or a purple bird with a broken wing. Think of a brown bumblebee or any other oddly colored thing.

Just don’t think of a pink elephant.

In 1987, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a paper confirming the existence of the Pink Elephant Paradox, although back then, the experiments dealt with the less alliterative polar bear. The idea remained the same: the more you try not to think of something, the more likely it is that you will.

Perhaps the reason why we switched from tundra bears was more than a mere purple prose preference, and in fact had something to do with the inherently intrusive nature of everything else we’ve come to know by its name. From drunken hallucinations per Henry Wallace Phillips’s The Man and the Serpent in 1896 to the more recent tale of Walt Disney’s Dumbo, there has always been the haunting allure of the Pink Elephants on Parade.

I was not drunk, yet I couldn’t rid myself of the thought that I’d wanted more than anything to forget. I knew the psychology; I knew that the harder I tried not to picture every way everything could go horribly wrong, the more I would fixate on it until I was trampled by two-ton feet.

Thinking about my Bunny being mangled by talons and teeth wouldn’t make it any more likely to happen, but it would certainly drive me insane. Yet it somehow felt like a disservice to not even consider it.

If something did happen and I hadn’t been worried, what would that make me in the aftermath? Nothing different than the alternative, I reminded myself. Because if something did happen and I had been sulking without action, I’d be equally paralyzed by my failure.

Perhaps that was the true source of my torture. It was the powerlessness of it all. This pain, this endless suffering was a remnant of each time that my intellect abandoned me when I’d needed it most.

I stared at the door to my apartment and tried to imagine the wood being adorned with flowers. I looked at it until dry eyes burned and my resolve shattered.

The pink elephant appeared, and on his trunk, he wore a crown covered with wilted flowers and brittle thorns.

Bzzt. Bzzt. Bzzt.

The sound erupted as I watched blood dripping from its proboscis. There stood the albino elephant stained with the blood of every innocent life lost to poachers. It cried out a warning that would be heard too late.

As I lifted the phone, I knew what I would find.

Don’t think of the pink elephant. Ignore its cries and hold on to the hope that it will be different this time.

But there it was, with LED burning through the daze and refusing to be forgotten.

“You better come get your little rabbit before someone gets hurt,” the message read.

I faced the unfamiliar number with nothing else to say.

“I’m on my way,” I answered.

And I ran.

No matter how loud the door was when I slammed it behind me, I couldn’t hear it over the incessant pounding of my heart. I was acutely aware that what I was doing was reckless and dangerous, but my body moved without instruction. It functioned purely on a mixture of adrenaline and muscle memory.

Each traffic light that flashed green felt like a mercy and mockery. It was as if some greater being, some bastardization of God was indicating to me that it wouldn’t matter how fast I got there—it was already too late.

My mind was filled with endless images of every vile thing man has ever done. I pressed a shaking palm against one eyelid until I saw nothing but red.

Red like blood-stained lilies. Red like the burning surface of the sun. Red like everything at the end.

Danger.

I could hear the sirens calling my name.

You’re in danger.

But I wasn’t, she was.

This is going to hurt.

I slammed on my brakes just in time to avoid colliding with the ambulance flying down the road perpendicular to my own lane of travel. The ear shattering screech of rubber and asphalt still seemed louder than the high-pitched screaming. The grim reaper with flashing lights affixed to metal limbs.

All the air in my lungs left me at once, like I’d awoken from a dream to find myself stuck in a liminal space.

The sudden shift in pressure and space did, however, alert me to the fact I had little to no clue where I was. I looked up at the street sign and I begged the universe to alter however much was necessary so that it would change.

I didn’t want to believe that it was correct when it told me that the ambulance had become my guide to where I’d needed to be. The world stopped at the same second the stoplight turned red. I waited, basking in the reckoning like humility might save me now.

Eventually, I received permission to proceed, although it did little to assuage a heart that had already broken itself in preparation for what it would find. Each piece of ceramic once held together by the liquid gold flowing from her lips had lodged itself in my lungs.

Yet when I made it up to the house that I knew she would be at, there was no ambulance in sight.

It hadn’t been enough time to find her. It couldn’t have been. Before I got out of the car, I forced myself to don whatever remained of my civility to be sure not to hurt anyone but those who should be held responsible.

I was not judge. I was not executioner. I was just another fallible fool. I tried to remind myself. I tried to maintain any visage of authority before I confronted what would, undoubtedly, be the least helpful collection of young adults in town that evening.

As I approached the door, the few people who braved the freezing temperatures hardly seemed to notice me.

The door was already open. The scene was, however, far from inviting. The heady stench of liquor and marijuana was somehow the least offensive part of what I’d found inside the four walls.

The music was so loud that I could feel the bass in my blood like a hammer to my heart. Every second that passed that I hadn’t found her yet, I felt a part of me dying. The tragic romantic in me swore that was a sign sent from my Bunny.

But it wasn’t. She promised she would call me. She promised everything would be alright.

“Yo! Professor Reid!” a relatively familiar voice called to me.

I turned to find a boy from my class, who I could only assume lived somewhere in the filth.

“Where is she?” I asked with as much patience as I could muster.

Luckily for the boy, he was sober enough to know who I was looking for.

“Around. Somewhere… I think,” he muttered inarticulately, “I’m almost positive I haven’t seen her leave.”

But he hadn’t been sober enough to help, it seemed. I abandoned any hope from him and opted to scan the sea of faces, instead. I tried to focus on any that felt familiar enough to be able to find her.

My heart pounded harder. My rib cage rattled like a death knell. With each passing second, it got louder until it was impossible to ignore.

If I’d been anywhere else, I think I could have pulled it together. I tried so hard not to project my own experiences onto these… children, all things considered. They were kids who just wanted to find themselves. They were going about it all wrong, but that was simply part of the journey.

But in every girl, I saw Alexa Lisbon. In every boy, I saw the faces of the boys who chose to find themselves by stripping me of my safety.

I recalled the first time I’d tried to tell my Bunny what happened to me, only to get lost in the ghosts crawling out of the graveyard buried in my chest. I never wanted her to know what that was like.

Yet when I looked around, I watched every unwanted advance and lost soul bumbling through a group of people who’d yet to learn how awful they could be under the right circumstances.

That was when the boy spoke again, unaware of what he had been implicitly allowing.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” he laughed “That’s hilarious.”

The mask slipped. It cracked and shattered the same as my heart and I lost any patience that might have remained.

I turned to him but had the wherewithal not to touch him.

He wasn’t Kyle. He was just an idiot.

“Listen, I understand this is all fun and games to you, but if someone doesn’t tell me where she is in the next thirty seconds, I will have every cop in the county at your doorstep before you even have time to climb out of the window. Do you understand?”

His eyes widened before his whole face turned to a nervous grimace.

“Chill, dude.”

A couplet consisting of two of the worst words he could have uttered. But thankfully for him, they had been quickly followed by the only thing capable of extinguishing my rage.

“She’s right there.”

Before I could even turn to see her, I heard her.

“Professor!” she yelled over the music. The title was featherlight and filled with so much joy that I nearly fell to my knees at the mere sound.

It was innocent; still innocent.

“Bunny, oh my god,” I sighed. It felt like the first time I’d breathed since she left me a few hours earlier. I would need the extra air, too, because she tore through the crowd and barreled into me with no inhibition. I couldn’t help but laugh as she nearly took us both down to the ground in her haste.

Despite her fervent, untamable teenage-esque excitement, I managed to hold her with something resembling fragility. My hands knotted in her hair as I held her against my chest. My embrace became stronger the longer she touched me; like she was the roots that kept me tethered to the ground after a lifetime of wandering through drought riddled fields.

It couldn’t have been longer than a few seconds, but the past half hour of trying to find her had caught up to me at once. I savored each second of the peace I found in her.

The same second my arms relented, though, she had straightened herself enough to wriggle her arms free. She grabbed hold of my face with both hands and her full force, and my wistful little lavender girl downright insisted that I kiss her.

I did. Or, at least, I tried. The pungent taste of what I could only imagine was pure liquor almost made me recoil. Once the initial shock had faded, though, I subdued the eager girl into a more tender meeting of our lips.

It took her about five seconds to decide that she’d had enough of that and return to her previous efforts to get me drunk from her tongue alone. That had been a lot, but nothing unmanageable. I just laughed and tried to pry her hands from my cheeks.

When she’d dropped one hand, I thought her sense had returned to her.

But then she grabbed hold of the waistband of my pants and I decided it was probably high-time to take her home.

“God, you are drunk,” I chuckled.

My Bunny was safe in my arms when she hummed. So happily, so freely, she curled within my embrace and nuzzled herself against my chest. My heart had calmed, but still reached out for her all the same.

Gently, I lifted her face back up to look at me. I looked into glassy, bloodshot eyes and still saw universes worth of love. I sought signs of pain and found only the kind that would be rendered inconsequential in time.

Still, I had to ask, “Are you okay, sweetheart?”

“Mmmhm m’great,” she slurred with very little enunciation, “wan kiss more.”

“Not right now. Let’s go home first,” I offered.

I hadn’t realized how much it would break her heart. Her eyes grew big and filled to the brim with tears that would almost seem comical under the circumstances. I tried to straighten out her disheveled appearance but found myself growing even fonder of her somehow.

Which would work against me when she pleaded, “Please?”

It would never stop feeling like this, I realized. Her begging would never cease to render me stupid. All the IQ points in the world would never make me strong or smart enough not to give into her swiftly and without remorse.

But at the same time, I knew how many people were watching. I knew how easy it would be for someone to read my actions as a rejection rather than a desire to keep her intimacy entirely to myself. So, I gave into her the only way I knew how.

I pressed a soft kiss against her forehead. I lingered there, feeling the warmth of clammy skin that still tasted as sweet as the honeysuckles from my youth. I held her steady like twining vines upholding a weary flower so that she could feel the sun without having to leave the safety of the shade.

She seemed pleased. Her dopey smile, while altered by the alcohol, still seemed as genuine as it had been the first time that I’d held her in the early morning light.

It would never stop feeling like this, I realized. I would love her with my everything, forever.

What a wonderful, horrifying feeling, to let your heart wander amongst so many that would crush it without hesitation. What a worse fate it would be to have never had it at all.

“Come on, sweetheart. We’re leaving.”

My Bunny followed my direction without another word. There was nothing resembling a protest. Part of me wondered if she would have followed anyone in that state, but I knew it was just my paranoia projecting onto her yet again.

Catherine Adams is dead, I reminded myself. There was no reason to believe that she, or anyone else, might recycle tactics that had managed to hurt me.

Yet the scar on my hand stung the entire ride home. It demanded my attention even more than the heavily intoxicated girl half-asleep in my passenger seat. I couldn’t stop myself from glancing over at her, but every time I did, the pain became even more nauseating until I could hardly focus.

Eventually, though, I’d made my way home without incident. The disgust and adrenaline had exhausted themselves, leaving nothing but the many skeletons in my closet. They crowded my insides until it felt like I would burst with a flurry of acid coated, mineralized shrapnel.

I looked over at my Bunny who fumbled with a still-locked car door. I saw the almost suffocating innocence, the ease with which she could find herself in any number of my work-associated memories.

There pink elephant hadn’t come, no matter how much I’d called it. It couldn’t because Catherine is dead, I reminded myself.

But the man who shot me wasn’t.

“Who were you arguing with?” I asked.

My Bunny gave up trying to leave the car and instead curled into a ball right where she was.

“What’re ya talkin’bout?” she said with a yawn so carefree that a broken heart might mistake it for mockery.

She wasn’t being cruel; just naive. She had been as clueless as I’d always wanted her to be around me. But in that moment, her sheltered mind lacked the imagination to understand why I’d even arrived in the first place.

“You’re… friend, I guess, texted me and told me you were in trouble,” I explained with as much patience as I could.

My Bunny twisted into a perplexed, and slightly defensive posture.

“Whaaat?”

Rather than trust myself to explain it without releasing my internalized hatred and raising my voice, I simply handed her my phone. Again, she grimaced at the contrast of the LED against the darkness. Once she was able to steady herself enough to read it, however, all she did was roll her eyes.

“Oh, well… that sounds way scarier than what happened,” she scoffed.

“Yeah, it does,” I spat back bluntly. The sound hit like a bat to a fragile girl’s heart.

The wounded look in her eyes provoked an all-encompassing regret.

“I feel like… you’re mad at me,” she whispered. She squirmed in her seat and tried to straighten her back only to find herself sliding back down with shame.

I should have apologized to her then. But it had been late, and I’d exhausted all efforts in my attempt to save her from nonexistent enemies, so instead of admitted fault, I clung to the painful memories that had nothing to do with her.

“Who were you arguing with?” I asked again, more aggressively than I’d ever wanted to speak to her.

“A stupid bitch.”

Resting my elbows against the steering wheel, I lowered my face into my hands.

She wasn’t the only one who’d felt ashamed.

“I’m going to need more information than that,” I demanded.

The spunk I’d admired in her came out sounding like venom.

“Why? It‘s none of your business!”

“Don’t give me an attitude right now,” I warned.

She didn’t heed it. Instead, she threw her arms forward to shield her heart and screeched, “Why are you mad at me? I didn’t send it!”

There was nothing left. The well of charitably had been drained and left nothing but starved, scorched roots seeking for something it would never find. I wanted comfort, but she had needed it.

With a raised voice, I shouted, “Because! I just had to walk into a… disgusting house party filled with a bunch of stupid drunk boys because I thought you were in danger, and if it turns out this was all just because you were… bored, or insecure, I have every right to be upset with you, Bunny!”

If I’d stopped for a minute, I would have heard her sobbing. If I had looked at her instead of my own scars displayed against my palm, I would have seen how the sound made her shake.

But I didn’t. I steadfastly ignored the reality that this had not been the time, place, or circumstances to try to sort through my own responses to something that had turned out to be nothing.

“I thought you were hurt! I thought you—!”

My throat closed around the words. I choked on the thoughts that had been filling my head. Even in my panic, my body had known not to speak them into existence. Those thoughts were supposed to be her shield. They were not meant to be wielded as swords.

“I thought…” I croaked.

I thought it had happened again.

But it hadn’t. It hadn’t happened. It had been different this time, exactly as she’d promised.

You’re safe here, she had told me. But that was only because the fear I felt hadn’t been shared or understood by the drunken, withered flower beside me because I hadn’t told her any of it. I had kept it from her—lied to her—only to blame her for it. To punish her for being able to live the way she deserved. The way I had promised to allow her to.

“You scared me,” I said with a trembling, but still rage filled timber.

It was my fault, though. Not hers. She didn’t scare me. I was just scared.

Before I could craft the words, however, she spoke them for me.

“I’m sorry…” she whispered. Dejected tears began pouring like endless rivers down her cheeks, and I drowned in them exactly like she had.

“Bunny,” I cried with her, “it’s not your fault. I’m sorry. I’m not being fair to you.”

She just kept crying, though. Her sobs got louder the more kindness that I showed her. I couldn’t blame her for the confusion I’d caused.

The clear blood of torn petals soaked the softness of her and made it heavy. I reached over and guided the poor girl back to me. I lifted the weight with careful hands. I wiped her make-up-stained tears aside and tried to find a way to reassure her.

“It’s okay, Bunny. I’m not mad at you,” I swore to her. The gentle words, like the kindness, had the opposite effect of the one I’d intended.

Once she spoke, though, I realized that the tears had hardly been about my actions. In fact, it seemed like a lot of her anger hadn’t been from my unspoken fears, but her own.

“Some stupid bitch told me that you kissed her!” she warbled.

“Well, that’s certainly not true,” I scoffed. Perhaps I would’ve been more articulate about how ridiculous of a notion it had been if I hadn’t been caught off guard by the accusation. But I was truly so confused that I didn’t know how else to express it in the moment.

“S-She told me…” my Bunny whispered between endearing and adorable hiccups despite the tears, “She told me that you slept with her after you kicked me out.”

The rage from earlier returned in full force. One hand gripped the steering wheel enough to void any blood from the space between skin and the bone of once broken knuckles. The monster within me bared its teeth in search of vengeance.

But then it was gone, subdued by the insistent sniffling of the most beloved part of myself. The stubborn leaves that clung to parched branches, beautiful in their resilience while facing the relentless cold.

She had been so beautiful, even then. Even when she had nothing left to give but broken whimpers, there was a light that shone so painfully bright.

I’d tried so hard to prove to her that I would never do anything to hurt her. I had promised her that very morning that, if given the options of losing everything to save her, I would take it without hesitation. I would bury myself under six feet and every regret I’d ever had if it meant that she would never feel pain again.

And there I was, causing it from both my own hand and another’s.

“Please don’t tell me you believe that,” I begged her. “I would never do that. I would never do that to you, Bunny.”

She nodded in agreement, yet she covered her head with her arms as she shouted, “I know, but I still got mad!”

Any relief from her believing in me was outweighed by how pitiful she looked. It wounded me deeply to see her withdraw from me like I would ever find fault in her righteous anger.

I had been angry, too. Angry that someone would dare to use me as a proxy to hurt her. Angry that, through my own desire to protect her, I had probably failed to give her the requisite knowledge to laugh in the face of such a distortion of the truth.

I abandoned the steering wheel in favor of her. I carefully unfurled the dispirited flower until she revealed her brilliance to me. I comforted her the best way I knew how. I pulled her closer until her small hands clutched my shirt. That time when she nuzzled her face into me, I felt the cool dampness of her tears.

Exactly as I had promised her, I tried to bear the weight of her sadness so that she might be able to breathe again. Eventually, she continued to explain her own frustration. Her voice was small, shaky, and pure, just like the creature I knew her by.

“Who lies about that?” she asked, “Why would you ever do that to someone?”

My mind immediately went back to the young girl that had fantasized about my Bunny’s worst nightmares. The obstinate child who couldn’t take no for answer. The same broken girl that relied on her conventional beauty to hide the ugliness that rested just below the surface of perfectly painted skin.

I refused to let my hands turn to fists. I kept my palm splayed across her back so she could feel the steadiness, the safety of my embrace. I wouldn’t let any anger at her make its way to my darling. The same as before, that girl would not her what she wanted.

“She’s just jealous because she knows she’ll never be you.”

You, my bespoken proof of purpose among the mad. You, with a softness bestowed upon but still envied by the Gods. You, with your trembling hands holding up the weight of a world that will never deserve you.

You, I felt loudly enough to drown out the rest, You are to be perfect to be made into mere tragedy.

“I love you so much,” I said, infusing the words with the metaphors I would never have time to perfect. “I would never do anything to jeopardize your happiness.”

Except tell the truth, a dark voice recounted.

I ignored it’s taunting. I still had time to make it right, but in that moment, all I’d wanted to focus on was my Bunny’s barely perceptible smile.

“I love you, too…” she whispered.

It hadn’t been enough. I had been greedy after a difficult night, so I asked my darling girl for one final favor.

“Stop crying, sweetheart. It breaks my heart.”

“I can’t help it,” she admitted with some strange combination of a chuckle and a sob, “I’m very drunk.”

I laughed, too.

“Yeah, you are,” I laughed because it had been true. I wondered if I would ever get used to bearing witness to such unabashed vulnerability. In my heart, though, I knew I wouldn’t.

It would always be like this, I thought just before the shadows mirrored it back to me in their own words.

It won’t be different this time.

I turned to the night, illuminated only by flickering streetlights. Within the shadows, I saw the ghosts from the skeletons still crushing the tired muscle affixed between many layers of bone cages. My fears sneaked through the sinew and lingered just beyond the glass and metal that housed us.

It will be different this time, I swore.

“Come on. Let’s get you some tissues and water,” I said, definitively making up my mind.

The innocent girl, now free from the tears, lit the way for our return to peace with a smile.

“And cuddles and kisses?” she asked.

“Yes, lots of those,” I assured her.

As we made our way to the door, I fought the urge to turn back. I opened the weary wood that tried to keep us safe. I heard it’s wailing as it fought against the intrusion, it’s harsh sound acting like a warning that something was lurking just beyond the light.

After my Bunny made her way into the meager safety I could offer her, I stood for a moment on the other side of the threshold.

The death knell in my chest rattled louder. It begged me between its beating to look back before taking another step.

I ignored every instinct and followed her, instead.

But in the distance, I swore I heard a strangled cry through torn tusks.

Don’t think of a pink elephant.

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