Sweet Romance12 min read
My Boss Is a Hedgehog (and He Calls Himself "Husband")
ButterPicks15 views
I was only supposed to babysit a pet.
"You sure you can handle him?" Grey asked before he left, looking at me like I was about to babysit a thousand-dollar watch.
"I can," I lied.
"He reads. He drinks coffee. He has a daily feeding schedule with six meals and a face mask every other day." Grey handed me a thick notebook that looked like a thesis. "And his IQ is like a nine-year-old. So whatever you see is normal."
"Okay," I said, but my mouth went dry when I saw the title: HEDGEHOG CARE GUIDE—TWO HUNDRED SEVENTY-THREE PAGES.
When I arrived at Grey's place two hours late, the little house smelled like coffee and old books. On the side table sat a hedgehog wearing tiny round glasses, a book twice as big as him propped open, and a cup that suspiciously looked like it had coffee in it.
"You're joking," I told him.
The hedgehog blinked, then turned his nose toward me like a small judge. "Are you joking?" he replied, and his voice was my boss's: cool, tight, and edged with amusement.
I dropped my bag and fumbled a message to Grey. "Sorry, traffic. I'm here."
"About time," came a single-line reply, followed by, "Don't break him."
"He breaks things," the hedgehog grumbled. "I break people."
I laughed too loud. "You can talk," I said.
"I never said I couldn't." He sniffed. "You better be better than average, Aubree."
"Aubree?" I blinked.
"Yes. Say your name again," he ordered like a tiny general.
"Aubree Richards," I said, because I was actually doing what a hedgehog with a boss's voice told me to do.
"Good," he said. "Now arrange my evening tea. And don't—" He looked me up and down with two black beads of an eye. "—touch my butt."
I stared. "Your—?"
"Do not touch the butt," he repeated.
Of course that is exactly what I thought about for the rest of the day.
I brought in his luggage—six suitcases and a briefcase. There were tiny clothes, a tiny smartphone on a chain, face masks in plastic pouches, a miniature planner labeled WEEKLY: HEDGEHOG CEO, and a tiny flannel shirt with a patch on the left paw that looked like a heart.
"Who packs all this for a pet?" I muttered.
"He packs himself," the hedgehog said, with the same tired disdain my former classmate had used in high school when he judged my notes.
"You're his boss," I told myself, because that made more sense. "You're not supposed to be this judgmental."
That night, after hiding his tiny coffee cup and putting his plush bed in the bedroom like Grey insisted, I fell asleep on the couch. At two in the morning the hedgehog climbed onto my lap and stared at me.
"He's lonely," Grey's message had said before. "Put him in your room. Don't let him hover in the living room. He's not brave at night."
"Okay, fine," I mumbled, and carried the hedgehog to my bedroom.
He curled into a small prickly doughnut and slept with the tiny phone pressed to his chest. His butt was round and pink under the thinnest fur. It looked like a little peach.
I touched it once. It was soft and springy and ridiculous. The hedgehog jerked, turned, and looked at me with a level of fury that would make any grown man blush.
"Do not touch the butt," Grey said in a drawer-of-anger voice that made me jump. The phone buzzed in the living room; Grey's message came: "I told you not to touch his butt."
I typed a panic apology. "It was an accident."
"If you touch him again, I'll fire you one hundred times."
"One hundred times?" I typed and then stopped. The hedgehog narrowed his eyes.
He was not a normal hedgehog. He was, I discovered over the next twenty-four hours, a creature who drank tea from a cup, watched documentaries, used a tiny smartphone to scroll, and who HATED beards. He also had opinions about my taste in music.
At dinner my mother called. "Aubree, Aunt Marcella arranged something for you. Tomorrow night, dinner with a match."
"Oh no," I said. "I have... plans."
"You will go," she said. "This is not a discussion."
The hedgehog watched me with glossy eyes and at some point crawled onto my stomach and planted his tiny paws there. He sniffed my phone and then turned his face toward the ceiling like he was offended by everything.
"Are you jealous?" I asked before I could stop myself.
The hedgehog froze, then stomped his little paw on my belly. "Do not set me up."
"You can stamp if you want," I laughed.
He put his miniature phone on the blanket and nodded solemnly. "Call me 'husband'," he said.
I choked on a laugh. "Your owner told me to call you what?"
Grey had texted earlier: "Call him husband. It helps when he sulks."
"Then call me husband," the hedgehog coaxed. "Say it, do it properly."
"Old—" I stopped.
"Husband," I tried.
"Husband," he corrected sharply, puffed out tiny chest hairs, and closed his eyes like a king satisfied.
He was dramatic. He acted like a very small, very prickly monarch.
The next morning he refused to eat. He rolled into a ball and refused to move. He refused his tea, his bread, his tiny meat chunk. I coaxed and tried to bribe with peanut slivers and quiet songs. Nothing.
I panicked. I messaged Grey: "He's withholding food. He won't come out."
"Why did you touch him?" Grey asked.
"I—" I typed, then told the truth, because lying to someone who could fire you one hundred times felt petty. "I poked his butt."
"You're useless," Grey wrote. "Call him by name."
"His name?" I asked aloud.
"Call him 'husband'." The message was three words: "Call him husband."
I knelt, cleared my throat, and said like a ridiculous person in front of a plush animal: "Husband."
The little ball in my hands trembled. He slowly uncurled, spun a little, and then peered at me with long lashes.
"Husband," he said in a voice that had the tiniest of smugness. "Okay."
I started talking to him in a dopey, silly voice. "Husband is good, husband is clever, husband is the most handsome hedgehog in the West."
He stretched both hind feet up and seemed, for a second, proud.
He also burped. Loudly. In a hedgehog way.
After he ate, he sat beside me on the couch. He watched the television like a grumpy old man. When I took a second to glance at his little butt, he tossed me a look.
"If you're thinking about touching it," he said, "you should stop."
"I—" I rubbed my knees and tried to be grown.
The hedgehog yawned and then, despite every rule I had learned about personal space and not poking animal buttocks, I touched the peach again. A reflex. It was soft. It trembled.
"Again?" he asked, not angry this time.
I laughed. "Sorry." I didn't stop.
"Stop," he said.
I didn't stop.
He closed his eyes. "You are incorrigible." Then he muttered something under his breath that sounded like: "Stupid..." and then he said my name like a person: "Aubree."
My chest fluttered. He said my name like he used to when we were much younger and used to share a desk. I hadn't told him I'd be here. He had known.
That night Grey called me.
"Aubree," he asked, voice like thunder over a cup of hot coffee. "Did you take pictures?"
I stumbled. "Yes."
"Don't." A beat. "Don't post them."
"Okay," I said.
"Also," he added slowly, "do not—" He stopped. Then texted: "My hedgehog calls me husband because I'm his husband."
I stared. "Your what?"
He sent three messages: "I can transform sometimes. Kiss rule. If someone kisses my forehead when I am a hedgehog, that person becomes a hedgehog too. It wears off in twenty-four hours."
My phone fell from my hand.
"This is not the time for games," I texted.
"I know," he said. "But it's the reality."
The next day at work he texted: "Come by. We need a chat."
At the office, Grey kept his distance like he usually did. He sat behind his desk and stared out the window. His hands were clean, his suit was impeccable, and for a second, he looked like the boy who sat across from me in high school, who asked to borrow pens and never forgot to thank me with an odd mix of annoyance and gratitude.
"Why are you here?" I blurted. "Why is your hedgehog... you? Why did you leave him with me?"
Grey didn't look at me. "I had to leave town. Business. I left him in your care because..." He stopped, then said, "Because you used to talk to me about small things once."
I remembered him handing me a hedgehog plush in school and saying, "You can have this." He had always been odd—a mix of disdain and tiny, awkward kindnesses.
"Also," he said finally, "you poked his butt."
"I'm fired."
"No," he said. "But the kiss rule exists. So if you kiss his forehead, nothing else. But if you kiss the wrong place..." He didn't finish the sentence.
That night I kissed him.
It was an accident. We were sitting on the couch and I had to test the rule, to see if this was a story Grey made up to frighten me. He leaned forward, silly and small and impatient, and I pecked the top of his head like someone kisses a cat by habit.
For a second nothing happened. Then the room spun.
I tried to stand, but my hands were small and prickly. I smelled like fur and tea. My knees were tiny. My voice was a squeak.
"Aubree!" I squealed—no, squeaked. There was a small hedgehog on the couch with my face.
Grey's expression was a fissure between panic and glee. "Oh my God."
"You told me—" I squeaked, and then felt panic as my lungs felt too small.
He reached out with a hand and then stopped, because he realized that his fingertips were far too large for this sudden, absurd creature.
"Don't panic," he told me, voice full of something like tenderness that hadn't been in it for years. "It will wear off in twenty-four hours."
"You're enjoying this," I wanted to say with a normal human voice. Instead I made a hedgehog cross-grumble that meant, apparently, "Shut up."
He picked me up gently. His heart hammered in his neck. He pressed his forehead to mine—no, to my tiny hedgehog nose—and murmured, "I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking. I didn't mean for this."
"That is not helpful," I squealed.
"You'd rather I scramble to find a scientist? Or call someone? Or..." He left sentences hanging. Grey was never bad with words, but the right words always hid behind caution and a guarded face.
He tucked me into a little box lined with a warm scarf and put it next to his laptop. "Don't move. I contacted Bruno to help."
"Bruno?" I squeaked.
Bruno Walter was the man who'd come the week before to claim a lost hedgehog. He'd been all soft laugh and expensive suit, lifting the hedgehog like a man who worshipped small things, and telling me in the café, "He runs away a lot. He's stubborn, but very loved."
Bruno arrived within the hour. He moved around Grey's house like he owned the floorboards. He lifted me—no, my hedgehog-self—like a fragile relic. He hummed like a person reading prayer.
"How did this happen?" he asked.
Grey explained in short, choppy sentences, and then sat back, brows knotted. "We need to wait twenty-four hours," he said. "He'll turn back."
Bruno smiled at me like I had the best tail in the room. "You're cozy."
For the next day Grey hovered like a storm. He worked with one hand and pet me with the other. He made lists: do not let me out, do not let me near the stove, do not let me call the elevators. He made a tiny bed for me and heated it with a small patch of warm cloth.
People walked into Grey's office and they didn't bat an eye when a hedgehog sat on the conference table, snoring into a small tie.
At one point our HR manager, Emil Booth, walked in and stared, then said, "Is that a hedgehog? Is this a joke?"
"It's a long story," Grey said, not looking at me. "It's my fault."
"Whose?" Emil asked. He looked at me and then at Grey, and then he laughed, high and incredulous. He didn't laugh at the absurdity. He laughed because the world kept going, hedgehog or not.
At dinner my mother texted again: "Did you go to dinner? This match better be Mr. Decent."
"I am a hedgehog," I tried to text back through Grey, who typed for me with an angsty thumb. "We can't make it."
My mother sent a voice message that sounded like a judge: "Go, anyway."
Grey frowned. "Let her go. I'll be here."
"You're letting me be dressed up and set out?" I squealed, muffled by a wool scarf.
He kissed my nose. "You'll be safe. You'll be back by eleven."
So he put me in a pouch in his jacket and went with me.
The dinner was a disaster by most standards. I sat on a napkin while a talkative man with nice teeth—and the name that Margot suggested—worried about my silence. "Is she shy?" he asked.
"She has a... pet," Grey said, and stared down at his jacket. "He is in my jacket."
"Is it your pet?" the man asked.
Grey nodded, then added, in a voice that made me look up like a tiny hedgehog straining to the edge of the napkin: "He's very particular about his butt."
The man blinked and laughed, then choked on laughter, and the dinner became a memory of awkward smiles. I listened to Grey as he let me out to stretch and he told me about the stars: "101 stars," he said softly as if reciting a private map. "One hundred and one means 'you are my one and only'. My grandmother taught me that."
He traced constellations with his finger over my small head. He had kept a jar of paper stars on his desk, and one night he had found a phrase tucked into one: "For the one who is my only 101."
"Do you believe in stupid sentimental things?" I squeaked.
"Sometimes," he said. "Especially stupid things that make life tolerable."
By the time the twenty-four hours dwindled, I had learned details about Grey only a hedgehog-knows. I had a favorite patch on his sweater that smelled like coffee and rain. I knew he flinched when someone used a particular tone of voice—because it had been used to scold him once. I knew he had a ridiculous number of ties with little embroidered hedgehogs. I knew he thought my butt touches were an affront and a delight at once.
When the clock hit twenty-four hours, I expected some bright flash or a painful pop. Instead there was a small, warm pressure on my tiny snout and I felt each of my fingers stretch, each of my arms lengthen.
I blinked and looked up.
Grey was leaning over me, looking like a man who'd been awake for forty-eight hours and only now decided to be honest. He laughed with a little crack in it and then teared up, and for the first time he was loud and soft at the same time.
"I thought I'd have to make a hundred calls," he said. "I thought I'd have to explain to all of this."
Bruno stepped forward. "You looked worried," he confessed. "I should have come earlier."
"Shut up," Grey said.
I flexed my hands like a woman who had been learning the awkwardness of human limbs again. I stretched my spine. I stood.
"There are consequences," Grey said, half smiling, half resentful.
"What consequences?" I asked.
"That you now know my stupid secret," he said. "You saw me at my worst—yelling about butt pokes."
"Hey, I deserved some of that," I said. "You left me a hedgehog and told me not to touch his butt, which is a trick because it's adorable."
Grey sat down on the armchair like thunder had softened. "I didn't leave him for you out of spite," he said. "I thought of you. Because you used to be patient. Because you would read to him."
"I read to him?" I laughed. "You know I once sang the entire chorus of a song to a hamster."
"You were kind once," Grey said, and he looked at me like someone had handed him a coin with both hands.
There were other things. He confessed that he'd used to copy my homework but had always said 'thank you' like a man who owed me more than simple manners. He had jealous spikes that suddenly made sense: when I said the word 'butt' and his pen stabbed the paper too hard; when I accepted a gift and he smiled like the sun was going to set.
"It isn't just embarrassment," he said, unusually honest. "I don't want to be the person who remembers kindness only as a debt."
"So you're saying…?"
He leaned forward. His fingers reached for my hands. "I'm saying I like you, Aubree," he said, and he said it like a man letting go of caution.
I laughed, which was what I always did when I couldn't cry. "You like me because I poke hedgehog butts?"
He smiled. "It was part of it."
We left things messy and true. He promised not to use his strange rules as a weapon. I promised not to treat his hedgehog like a joke.
In the weeks that followed, Grey and I found a rhythm. He would send me a text in the morning: "Do not forget: carrots for the hedgehog today." I would respond: "I'll pet the butt twice." He would bar me from entering his kitchen when he had coffee-making business. I would leave his mailbox with paper stars folded into little notes.
We spent evenings on the couch—sometimes with him transformed and sometimes not. He'd always insist on calling the hedgehog "husband" in a voice that suggested he was trying on a very small crown. Once, when he turned back into hedgehog, he whispered, "You call me husband and mean it."
"I mean a lot of things," I said.
"Name them," he demanded.
I laughed and listed them like a child's shopping list. He listened like someone taking notes.
People at the office didn't comment—only a few raised eyebrows. Bruno visited, often with a trinket for the hedgehog: a tiny scarf, a new set of tiny notebooks. Bruno had a softness to him; he never made fun. Once he said quietly, "You two are lucky to have each other."
Grey barked a laugh. "He's a hedgehog."
"My reality is better than yours," Bruno said, and I realized he meant the kind of reality where small things mattered.
On a small spring evening, when the jar of paper stars on Grey's desk had a fresh new scrap folded into the corner, Grey took a star and unfolded it. He had written on it, in a hand I recognized from high school notes: "101." He cut it into pieces and tucked it into my palm.
"101 means I'm yours," he said, and his voice had the smallness of sincerity. "It was stupid when my grandma taught me, but it's not now."
I looked at the little paper in my hand, then at his face—the face that used to look like smoke and now looked like someone with a map in his pocket.
"I like you," I said, because it was true, and because hedgehogs had enforceable rules about honesty.
He kissed my forehead—this time, it was a normal kiss, not a test—and then he said, with a smirk that had the smallest hint of old mischief, "You still can't touch the butt."
"I will never stop trying," I said.
He laughed, and his laugh was the kind that warmed rooms. I looked down. A tiny hedgehog scampered up and settled between us, and for once his butt was perfectly safe.
When people asked about the story—how a woman ended up dating a man who sometimes turned into a hedgehog—we made a half-joke and a half-truth. "It was complicated," Grey would say.
"I poked the butt," I would answer, and then we would both laugh.
In the end, I kept a folded paper star in my wallet. It had "101" written on it in Grey's careful hand. Some nights when the lamp was low and the little hedgehog snuffled at my feet, I would look at the star and whisper, "Husband." He would twitch his whiskers and answer with a contented little snort.
And sometimes, if you were very quiet and very close, you could hear Grey mutter to the hedgehog, and to me, and to the little jar of stars on his desk: "Don't touch the butt." Then he would add—so quietly you had to lean in—"Not because it's forbidden, but because it's mine."
The End
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