Bunny (Bunny, #1)

by Mona Awad

We’re practicing tango, like we did all summer, taking turns being Diego for each other. Diego is an imaginary panther-footed man we dream will one day come into our lives and whisk us off our very large feet.

never not had another world of my own making to escape to, never known how to be in this world without most of my soul dreaming up and living in another. Until I came here.

And then I felt insane. Like I’d imagined his warmth, our closeness. Bullshit, Ava said. I bet he cooled off because of the bonobos. I bet they saw you guys getting friendly and got their sugar whiskers in a twist. Started a rumor and he freaked out like a little pussy-man. He’s not a lion, he’s a lemming.

“Yes,” I say, swaying a little from the Bunny punch. “Very much. I can’t believe it.” “Believe, Samantha,” he says. “Please. It makes sex faster.” Sex faster? “I—”

Did he carve those words into her peaches-and-cream flesh or did she, while he merely leaned back on her couch and observed, encouraged, supervised with eyes like smoking tar, asking softly what good is it to be left with no trace, to be wounded without the pleasure of a scar?

In the stories I tried to write about that night later, something happens in that silence. Rather than us getting up, walking down his dark hallway, him turning to go up the stairs, me stumbling out his front door. I fill it with something. Something like sex. An insinuation of violence. A pass made. A line crossed. Something, not nothing. Definitely not nothing.

Wanting so badly to pick them back up. Take it all back. Wipe away the night, my dumb tears, my endless tumbling out of words. I never meant to give this to you. How alone now. Truly alone I was, making my shuffling way through the dark, the ground seeming to give beneath my feet, the dark of the street and the dark of the sky, one big dark. So lost I somehow wound up at the pond instead of home. Where you met me, Ava reminds me. See, Smackie? Sometimes being lost is a fucking wonderful thing.