How do I love him? Let me count two ways.
I.
“… so, don’t encourage me to eat good food anymore, okay? Let me just eat salad. I mean, you want me to lose weight, right? Don’t you? Don’t you want me to lose weight, baby? So you don’t have to walk around with a girlfriend who’s all… massively… so fat… and swelled up… like a…”
“Baby, when did I ever say I wanted you to lose weight?”
“Well… never. But when I said I was gonna get lipo, you were all agreeing with me.”
“Yeah… If you got rich, sure.”
“Oh. Well, still…”
[Casually, affectionately, totally off the cuff:]
“You’re my big, round bunny.”
[And then he changes the subject.]
II.
So, then, later, we’re lying around and I’m thinking about what it would be like to have a tail. I know this has been done. Phillip Jose Farmer did it as Kilgore Trout in Venus on the Half Shell – the whole “people with long tails having long-tail sex on another planet” thing. But, what if I had a bunny tail?
“You’re touching where my tail used to be.”
“Right here?”
“Yeah. When I was little, my grandmother used to tell my dad that he should have had our tails cut off when we were babies. I didn’t know that she meant he should have gotten us baptized. I thought we must have had our tails removed later in life, like when we were toddlers. So, one night, I was lying there touching my bumpy tail bone, and I knew it was true, and I cried. But now I don’t care anymore.”
“Right? Screw it.”
“Wouldn’t it be awesome if I had a bunny tail?”
What he didn’t say:
1. “You’re so funny.”
2. “What a weird thought. See, that’s why you’re a writer.”
3. “What? Go to sleep.”
What he did say:
“Hell, yeah. We could bleach it white.”
I thought about that. It hadn’t occurred to me that my bunny tail wouldn’t be white. But, of course it wouldn’t. It’d be brown, like the rest of my fur. I mean, hair. And he knew that. And he knew that I would want it white. And he would be there to help me bleach it.
I put my arms around him and held him tight.
For Easter, we can dye it pink and blue.
