Page 20 of Dearly Unbeloved (Spicy in Seattle #3)

ROSE

Maybe try glaring a little less if you want to make friends at work. - S

Sierra

Did you throw my flowers out?

Yes.

What the fuck?

Care to elaborate?

You had four vases. No one needs four vases of flowers. I only threw out the roses because they looked like they were dying, anyway.

They’re antique roses. They’re supposed to look like that

Well, they’re ugly. Why are you even home? Shouldn’t you be at work?

I have a ton of data entry to do and it’s quieter here. Is that okay with you, Mom???

Don’t call me that.

Sorry, honey

Have you socialized with your colleagues today?

I said good morning.

Oh, wow. I’m surprised they didn’t promote you on the spot. You’ll be CEO before you know it.

I’m going to stop replying now.

Not an airport, Cannon. No need to announce your departure.

Rose.

Seriously, go hang out with your colleagues at lunch. You can thank me later.

Thank you how?

I’m not fucking sexting you.

I roll my eyes as I lock my phone and drop it on my workspace. Why would anyone want roses that looked half-rotted?

“I’m starving,” Minah, the lab tech who’s working beside me today, says, peeling off her gloves. It’s the same every day: one person says it, and everyone else falls in line, like they were just waiting for an excuse to go for lunch.

I don’t get it. If you’re hungry, eat. Why wait for a dozen other people? This isn’t kindergarten. We’re allowed to eat unsupervised.

“Do you want to come for lunch, Rose?”

I open my mouth to decline, like I do every day, in favor of eating at my workstation, or in my car, but Sierra’s text niggles at me. Since the team picnic at Lisa’s place, I haven’t made any effort to integrate myself into the team. It was easier with Sierra around, socializing on my behalf.

Forcing my face into a somewhat eager expression, I take my gloves off and grab my phone. “Lunch sounds good.”

I pretend not to notice the surprised expressions exchanged between my colleagues as I follow them to the elevators. I can’t blame them, I suppose.

The idea of squeezing myself into a metal box with other people is painful enough that I almost always take the stairs, but two elevators arrive at the same time, and I don’t get the chance to volunteer to save space before I’m ushered in.

I press myself against the back wall of the elevator, holding my breath and trying to tune into the conversation so I’m not totally out of the loop.

“So she shows up at my cousin’s wedding with a date, and you’ll never guess who it was,” Minah says, and everyone leans in, as if we might be overheard in here.

“Who did she bring?” Imogen asks, bouncing on her toes .

“Her sister’s high school ex-boyfriend!”

“No way.”

I raise my eyebrows in a way I hope looks suitably scandalized, though I can’t really see the big deal unless they’re not long out of high school or the ex did something shitty.

The conversation continues as we stand in line waiting for food, with everyone debating whether they would date a sibling’s ex after so many years.

“What about you, Rose? You have a sister, right? Would you date any of her exes?” Imogen asks, through a mouthful of romaine.

“A brother and a sister, yeah,” I confirm. “But my brother is perpetually single because he’s been in love with his best friend since they were kids, and my sister’s dating history is… questionable, so definitely not.”

“How questionable are we talking?”

I tear my pita bread into strips and shrug.

“I’m pretty sure her dating criteria was whoever would piss our parents off most. But she’s married now, and her husband is great.

Though they started out pretty questionable, I guess.

..” I trail off, talking mostly to myself, but every eye is trained on me, and no one is eating anymore.

“You can’t leave us hanging, Rose! Tell us everything.”

My skin crawls under their attention, but I’m socializing, at least. “Um, okay. Well, I guess it all started when my sister’s best friend started hooking up with her boss…”

When we head back to the lab, fifteen minutes and a hundred questions later, my colleagues seem much more endeared to me. Gossip works wonders .

Lisa is standing near my workspace, chatting with one of her bosses, and she lifts a hand, waving as we all filter back in. I sit in my spinny chair and tuck my stuff under the desk.

“Hey, Rose.”

I jump as Imogen’s head appears over the divider between our spaces. She laughs. “Whoops, sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you. Listen, Minah and I are going on a hike this Saturday with our partners. I remember Sierra mentioning she liked hiking at Lisa’s. You guys should come.”

Fuck. I was so looking forward to a weekend at home. I make myself smile. “That sounds amazing. Sierra loves hiking.” I’ve literally never heard her mention hiking. “I don’t think we have anything happening this Saturday, but I’ll check with her tonight and let you know.”

“Amazing. Hey, what’s your number, and I’ll call you so you have mine?”

I recite my number and a second later, my phone buzzes with Imogen’s number. I’m adding her to my contacts when Minah pipes up.

“You should add Rose to the group chat.”

My thumbs still. “The group chat?”

“Yeah, a lot of the team’s in it. It’s mostly just Mike sending memes and everyone sharing pet pictures, but it’s good to keep in touch with everyone.”

“Added!”

I watch as a new chat pops up on my phone:

Imogen Weisz added you to The Lab Rats.

This promotion better be worth it.

The apartment is suspiciously empty when I get home. Empty and tidy, considering Sierra has been home for most of the day. Tidy by Sierra’s standards, anyway. The kitchen cabinets are all open, there’s a coffee cup on the island, and a sweatshirt on the floor by the couch. I’ve seen much worse.

“Sierra?” I shout, straightening the shoes by the door and hanging my bag on the dedicated hook.

“Through here!” Her voice is muffled and entirely too cheery. Suspicion fades into outright panic. What the hell has she done?

“Through here” isn’t exactly a place, but our apartment isn’t big. Her bedroom door is open, but she’s not inside, and I’m not sure she ever willingly goes into the laundry room, so that leaves the bathroom. The door is cracked, and the light is on. I knock lightly.

“You can come in,” she says, in that same overly happy voice. And as soon as I push the door open, I know why.

My gaze falls to her lap, and I immediately close my eyes. I take a steadying breath and pinch the spot between my brows.

I grit my teeth before looking at her. “What is that?”

Sierra screws up her face, like she doesn’t understand the question. “It’s a rabbit.”

Deep breath. One, two, three… “I know it’s a fucking rabbit, Sierra. ”

“Well, you ask?—”

“Why is there a rabbit in my bathroom?”

“Our bathroom, honey,” she chides in a sarcastic, singsong voice.

“Why is it in our bathroom?”

“ His name is Thorne. And that’s Dibbles.” She points to a second, bigger ball of fluff, sitting perfectly still in our towel basket. She blends in so well with the gray towels that I didn’t notice her.

I must be losing it. There’s no way even Sierra is such an awful roommate that she brought home two rabbits without asking me.

“Okay.” I press my lips together, trying not to shout.

Fuck Sierra, quite frankly, but I don’t want to scare the rabbits.

I’m not that much of an asshole. “Why are there two rabbits in our bathroom?”

Sierra runs her fingers lightly over the rabbit’s back, and his eyes half-close, like he’s relaxing into her touch.

“It’s actually really interesting, but rabbits need to live in pairs or they get lonely.

Apparently, they form super close bonds, like mating bonds, and when their mate dies, they can actually die from a broken heart. ”

How morbid. And completely beside the point.

“Right. I just feel like I’ve missed a vital part of the story here. Like, perhaps, the part where there are rabbits in our apartment, and what the reason for that might be?”

Sierra’s shoulders droop, as if she’s realized she can’t dodge the question forever. She looks up at me and shrugs. “I mean… look at them.”

“I don’t want to look at them! I want to know why they’re here and when you’re getting rid of them.” I can’t stop my voice from climbing .

Sierra rears back, narrowing her eyes. “Don’t shout at them.”

“I’m shouting at you, not them!”

“I’d prefer if you didn’t do that either. The shelter was desperate. They needed parents.”

I ball my fists, taking out my frustration on my palms as my barely there nails bite into skin.

The pros really outweigh the cons of having short nails, but sometimes I wish I kept them longer.

“Two things. One, you didn’t think that asking your roommate before bringing living things into the apartment you share was the polite thing to do?

And two, you think you’re the right person to parent them? ”

“I knew you’d say no. And I don’t see why I can’t be a good mom for them,” she replies, indignant.

I flick my eyes toward the rabbit in the basket. “That one’s eating a towel.”

“Shit. Dibbles, no! Gimme.” She sets the smaller rabbit down and speed-crawls toward the basket.

The little one hops over to me, and I crouch down, kneeling on the tile.

When I’m settled, he sits up and rests one paw on my knee, looking up at me.

He has shaggy brown and gray hair, like a lion’s mane.

One of his ears points straight up, but the other flops a little, twitching, like it’s supposed to be straight up too, but it’s being lazy.

I offer my hand and he sniffs it, his tiny nose moving a mile a minute. After he’s sniffed my hand, he moves to sniff my pants before rubbing his chin on my knee.

“He’s marking you with his scent,” Sierra explains, and I look over to find her sitting against the wall with the gray rabbit in her arms .

“I know nothing about taking care of rabbits. Do you?”

“Technically, no, but we’re intelligent people. You went to med school, and I went to law school. We can figure it out.”

“I quit med school, and you flunked out of law school,” I remind her, but she just scoffs.

“We got in, though.”

The little rabbit rests his other paw on my leg and uses his back feet to push up until he’s more or less on my lap. I lift him the rest of the way and sit back against the side of the tub while he nuzzles into me, sniffing everywhere he can. “Are they going to live in the bathroom?”

“Just until we bunny-proof the living room.” Ah, they’ve been upgraded from rabbits to bunnies.

Somehow cuter. “They’ll be free to roam the living room and kitchen for the most part, but I’ve ordered stuff to make them a big open plan enclosure if we need to shut them away at all.

Well, actually, I’m probably going to rope Maggie into making it for us. ”

She continues on, chattering away about her plans for their setup, but I tune her out, looking down into the sweet, brown eyes of the little rabbit on my lap.

“You know, if you really don’t want them here, we can take them back to the shelter…” Sierra says, the words cutting through me.

Over my dead body is anyone taking this rabbit away from me.

But I can’t let her know how much I love him already.

“ If we keep them,” I begin, “you’re going to have to stop leaving shit all over the place.

Otherwise, one of them might eat something that makes them sick.

Speaking of, you need to research the plants you have and any flowers you want before bringing them into the house.

And we’re going to learn how to take care of them properly. ”

Sierra sits forward, her eyes lighting up. “Of course. Yeah. All of the above. So… we can keep them?”

I nod jerkily, and she grins.

“What are their names again?”

“That’s Thorne,” she says, nodding to the rabbit on my lap. “And this is Dibbles.”

“Dibbles? Jesus. I don’t suppose you’re open to changing that?”

“Nope. They’re both around two and a half, and that would just confuse them.”

“Great.” Thorne and… Dibbles. “I guess we’re moms now.”