The Birds & The Bees | S.R.

Ch. 20 | The Bloom

Summary: It's almost Christmas, and Bunny stays true to her promise that he won't be alone. The couple comes to a decision.

A/N: I'll put a note about the hiatus at the end of the chapter because I know y'all will forget about it by then. Bon appetit.

Content Warning: Do I really need to write this? You all know. Fingering, penetrative sex, loss of virginity, discussions of virginity, mild pain after sex, discussions of death/dying.

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There is a finite amount of information on earth. It is a strange thing to consider, but it is inexplicably true, that one day humanity will know everything about this rock hurtling through space at an average rate of 492,126 miles per hour.

There was a point in my life where I realized that I'd learned more than I was perhaps ever meant to. Between the consumption of every textbook and scientific journal I could get my hands on, I started to feel empty when a table of numbers stared back at me.

I could memorize them all I'd wanted, but they no longer satiated that deep longing to learn something new. To experience something that I'd yet to understand; to navigate uncharted waters and conquer them like the indigenous peoples once did. I thought that the feeling had been lost to me, soaked up too eagerly by a youthful mass of spongy neuronal, glial, and endothelial cells.

Then I met her. I met my Bunny, and the whole world changed. And I mean the whole world — not just my perception of it. Every single particle on the earth shone differently in her presence, and it was not a trick of my mind. There was a life that followed in her footsteps, and I was determined to figure out how to capture it.

I was Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin reborn, seeking the answers that everyone chalked up to luck and divine intervention. It just so happened that at the current moment, I was contemplating how far I was willing to go to denounce the existence of a god in search of my answer.

The supposed angel atop her tree was as close to a biblical rendition as the woman with long hair and beautiful wings. It was just a star, ornate and catching the refracted light from tiny metal filaments burning inside of plastic crystals. But it felt warm in a way religious symbolism rarely did, and I wondered if it was just the dry heat from the furnace or the residual warmth from a pre-heating oven finally getting to me. I wondered if it was just because I knew that it belonged to her, and so it was different from the rest.

That magical girl was in the other room, struggling with too many things to do and still refusing to accept any help from me. 'Too many cooks in the kitchen', she'd said, although it was obvious to me that the true number of them was zero. I wouldn't care if the food was mediocre, or even downright inedible. I would choke on every bite and enjoy the fact that she'd made something for me for the mere purpose of having done it on my behalf.

We could always just order take-out.

I just wanted to spend time with her. So, while I appreciated the way I was surrounded by the smell of her perfume and entertained by manufactured memories of stories she'd told, I missed her. I could hear her, just a couple rooms away, humming and muttering curses at cast iron and wood, but I wanted nothing more than to be closer to her than ever before.

"So what's holding you back?"

Tara's voice rang through my mind, pulling me back to another room that was warm and smelled like cinnamon and comfort.

I'd been talking to her almost daily since the incident in the park. Although she'd made jokes about never wanting to be my therapist, I couldn't chalk our conversations up to mere friendly commiseration anymore. The poor woman seemed dedicated to unraveling the years' worth of knots in grey and white matter.