The Boy on the Floor

The first time the Otter saw the Rabbit, he was asleep.

Not in a bed.
Not anywhere an animal is meant to sleep.
In the middle of a living room floor, at a house party, at eleven at night, with the music still going on around him.

Alcohol never made the Rabbit louder.
It made him tired.
While the room got brighter and faster and more sure of itself, something in the Rabbit slowed down, and lay down, and stopped.

He does not remember the floor.
He only remembers being told about it later.
That is how he entered her story.
Not as someone who arrived.
But as a shape on the carpet that the other animals had to step around.

He has thought about that since.
How the first thing she ever knew about him was that he disappeared in a crowd.
That a room could be full and he could still find a way to be somewhere underneath it.

They did not really meet that night.
You cannot meet someone who is asleep.

The real meeting came months later, in a nightclub.
Loud in the way those places are loud, where you have to lean in close to be heard, so that every conversation becomes a kind of accidental intimacy.
The Rabbit was better in the dark.
Easier to be brave when the lights are doing some of the work for you, when the noise gives you a reason to stand close.

He does not remember the words.
He remembers that it was easy in a way that talking was almost never easy.

By his final year he had moved into her flat.
In the town centre. Small.
The kind of small where two animals learn each other quickly because there is nowhere else to go.

He had been living with his friends before that.
And moving out broke something there.
They did not understand it.
A boy who chooses a girl over the house, so soon, so completely.
They were angry.
And the Rabbit could not bear the anger.

So he did the thing the Rabbit does.

He kept paying the rent.
On the empty room.
Month after month, for a room he no longer slept in, full of nothing, so that no one would have to be replaced and no one would have to be told and no conversation would ever have to happen.

It was cheaper, to the Rabbit, to pay for an empty room than to sit in front of his friends and disappoint them out loud.

He told himself it was kindness.
Looking back, he is not sure it was.
It might just have been the oldest thing he knew how to do.
Pay whatever it costs to avoid being the reason someone is upset.

Two animals, a small flat, a beginning.
And already, in the very first chapter of the love, the Rabbit was quietly paying for a room he was never going to use.