Sweet Romance16 min read
My Rabbit Ears, His Fox Teeth
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I knew I was different the moment my ears woke me.
"Name?" the man across the desk asked, tapping his pen like it was a gavel.
I flopped my ears and tried to sound normal. "I don't have one. They call me... Rabbit."
He blinked once, and I felt the way his gaze studied me, hungry for details like a cataloger. When he frowned, my ears drooped. When he relaxed, they lifted again on their own.
I had woken up human. I had no memory of a childhood outside the forest. One night I slept in a hollow under the pines; the next morning I walked into a city that smelled like frying oil and bright lights. I stole a bread roll from a boy to survive, of course I did. Who wouldn't? I am a rabbit, and rabbits get hungry.
"Please don't eat me. Rabbits are not tasty," I told the world, though I was mostly telling myself.
The boy wailed until the world hummed, and then someone grabbed my ear.
"Hey! Let go!" I squealed.
"Such ears," he muttered to the boy, then to me. "Give the bread back."
He wasn't gentle. He grabbed at me in a way that made my whole skull hurt. I pulled away, but when he spoke to the boy his voice changed. The boy bolted. The man returned my pilfered bread.
I ran like a rabbit until I hid among the old women doing what humans call square dancing. They gossip like hungry sparrows—perfect camouflage.
"What's with that weird girl and her ears?" one said.
"Probably some kind of runaway," another clucked.
Then the man found me again. His eyes swept the crowd; his stare pinned me like a bug. He reached and—ouch—yanked one ear.
"Want to run?" he asked, low.
"Yes," I said. "Please."
He tried to drag me away, but a gaggle of grandmothers closed around us like a shield.
"What is going on?" a fierce lady demanded. "You, young man—why are you grabbing this poor girl?"
"I'm police," the man said flatly. "I'm investigating—"
"Then show the ID," another aunt snapped.
He took out his phone and called. Moments later a uniformed person arrived and the grandmothers backed off, quarrelously proud of themselves. I wanted to hide my ears. I wanted to crawl under a bench. But the uniformed person—my captor—opened a car and said, "Come with me."
They took me to a small windowless room. He sat across from me and asked the same question: "Name?"
"I don't have one." I let my ears droop. I had been called Rabbit since I could hop. "They call me Rabbit."
He sneered. "Why did you run?"
"Because I thought you were a bad man."
"You thought a policeman looked like a bad man?" He smirked. "Eyes sharp, mouth quick—funny."
My stomach growled. He laughed. "Eat?"
"Yes," I whispered.
He barked a laugh then shouted, "Faye! Bring some food here."
A tall woman entered, gorgeous and theatrical, like someone who practiced being noticed. She crossed one long leg over the other and said, "Please call me Miss Faye."
"Heh," I mumbled around carrot sticks. "So... Miss Faye, are you mean?"
She stroked my ear delicately. "You're so soft. What's your name?"
"Rabbit. Or—Rabbit White? I heard someone say White."
"White? Cute," Miss Faye cooed.
Another name floated into my head a few hours later when the man—the stern one—looked at my photo and said, "We'll need a name for the ID."
"How about 'White'? Little White?" I asked, still sticky with horror and carrot juice.
The man scratched his chin. "Fine. White it is." He signed the paper and placed it on the table like a verdict.
When his colleagues left, I tried the most ridiculous thing I knew: I tried to charm him. "Can I live with you?" I asked.
"The boss is a mess, a jerk, but he won't eat you." Miss Faye winked.
"Boss?" I echoed.
He watched us with a hard face, and when Miss Faye whispered to him, he didn't look pleased. "Call me Vincent," he said, not as a threat but as a claim.
"Okay," I said. "Vincent, I can be helpful. I'll be tidy. I'll eat quietly."
"Don't be ridiculous," he said then, the words cutting the air. "You keep your form hidden. You are an anomaly. That brings trouble."
"What's trouble?" I asked.
He looked at me like a scientist studying an error. "People who see you will want to use you."
I didn't understand then, not fully. I was a rabbit with human thoughts and an oddly steady hope. Then the world taught me. The universe taught me in the meanest language: threat, chase, sale, cuffs.
"Stay," he ordered finally, after a long silence.
"Why would you help me?" I asked, suspicious and hopeful at the same time.
He rubbed his temple. "Because I don't like others taking things that belong to me," he said, and the sentence landed warm and strange in my chest.
Vincent Gordon—the fox in a coat who struck like lightning—claimed me like an owner claims a stray. He had an office at the city’s Bureau for Allied Beings: the place that legally registered spirits, oddities, and things human eyes did not understand.
"You're living with me," he told me one night as we walked through his quiet apartment. "Eat, sleep, obey. But don't show your ears in public."
His voice was a command; it became a promise twelve hours later when he returned me to a small bed and told me to bathe. I slipped on a towel and then, like a startled rabbit, slipped and fell. Something about his expression changed. He stopped laughing. He reached for me.
"Careful," he said. He wrapped a towel around me and carried me, then stood with the blow dryer like a guardian.
"Thank you," I said.
He sighed. "Don't be seen," he said again. "There are people who would hurt you for profit."
I learned quickly that old ladies were more merciful than many men. I learned the meaning of "sell" and the whispers that ran like rats in the gutter—some humans wanted rare things, and not for good reasons.
So I learned to hide and to ask for small favors: a bowl of stew, a place to sleep, a name.
"You can live here," Vincent said more than once. "But you owe me."
"What about payment?" I asked. I knew how rent worked; I had watched faces overledges and in markets.
"You're eating my food," he said simply. "That is payment."
Days slipped and I learned the rhythms of the Bureau. Miss Faye—whose real name was Fernanda Andersson—was loud, warm, and shameless. She taught me how to move without drawing attention. "Act like you belong," she would say, patting my head.
Then the bureau arranged a job for me—something called a "life teacher" at the Bureau’s kindergarten for little beings. "It will be honest work," said Alonso Davidson, the round, official man who handed me papers. "You will be under supervision. Keep the kids safe."
There, I met Isaiah Stein.
"Hi," he said with a smile soft as wool. "I'm Isaiah."
"Hi," I said, my ears nearly peeking out. "Anna. Anna Beasley."
He proposed we call each other by nicknames and immediately suggested, "Call me Isa. Call me Isa, Anna." His warmth was a balm. He introduced himself as a shepherd spirit—gentle and small in his way. He seemed to have some secret and a tendency to worry like the old mothers do. He never raised his voice.
"You're a rabbit?" he asked later, when the children were away.
"Yes," I admitted shyly.
"That's rare," he said, and his eyes widened. "We've never had a rabbit teacher."
"Do you like rabbits?" I twisted my fingers.
"I like people who are kind to small things," he answered.
He taught me how to feed, how to soothe, how to say, "It's okay," like a song. His hands were gentle when he helped a child shrink his ears, and parents liked him for that. I liked him too, but not like I liked Vincent. I liked Isaiah like a friend. Vincent lived in my bones; Isaiah lived in my afternoons.
The children loved me. I learned that small ones had big curiosities and that their hands could be terrifying in their eagerness. One day I let my ears show and the classroom descended on me—a tide of tiny palms and pulsing energy.
"Show us! Show us!" they cried.
"Easy," Isaiah said, hushing them. "We handle teachers with care."
He squeezed in between me and the chaotic children. When he wiped my fur gently with a tissue, his fingers stroked the tenderness out of me. "All right," he murmured. "You can be curious. But remember to listen."
When I brought home stories of glue, glitter, and little victories, Vincent would listen with his unreadable face and small smile. Sometimes he would press two fingers over my ear and say, "Done," like he could seal a small wound.
It was simple then. There were ordinary joys: a new dress Vincent thought looked too short but insisted I wear ("It will look neat with longer leggings"), little meals where I learned how to chew food properly, an argument when I complained about rent, a warm bed. He had moods like weather; sometimes thunder, sometimes summer sun. Once he announced, deadpan, "I like rabbit. I like you."
I laughed. "Because I save you, maybe. You said once a little white rabbit saved you, so maybe you're returning the favor."
Then came the restaurant. Vincent took me—because foxes love displays—to a place that smelled of garlic and bright napkins. He sat across from an elegant woman, and beside her sat a boy who looked like his brother. The boy looked like Vincent had been sketched small and careless. For a breath I thought I was seeing a family photograph.
"That's my sister," Vincent told me later, not unkind. "Antonia. She... she is loud."
And there was another woman who called herself Veronica—Veronica Vitale—who smiled with too many teeth and asked about me like a judge.
"Is she the rabbit who saved you as a child?" Veronica tried in a voice as silky as a trap.
I wanted to say it was a mistake. I wanted to say I didn't remember. I wished the story would be a small, warm, true thing. Instead the air shifted. Veronica's smile hardened.
"Funny," she said low. "What if she took the fruit that belonged to my family?"
I blinked. "What fruit?"
"Just a thing," Antonia said carelessly. "You were cute then. Now you are... potential."
I chewed my rabbit leg with a blind focus and thought: foxes have families, and families keep treasures. Someone had left a fruit, a powerful thing, in the street years ago and a child—perhaps me—had eaten. Maybe it had made me able to change shape. Maybe I was marked.
The idea that I had stolen family heirlooms made me small and ashamed, even when I couldn't recall the moment. Vincent's face shadowed, not with anger but with something else. He seemed to protect a private wound.
That night he kissed me in the doorway, very quietly.
"I like you," he whispered; it wasn't brusque or cruel. It was an admission.
"I like you too," I said, not fully understanding how my heart would tether itself to a fox.
Days were a tangle of small happiness and bigger questions. Vincent was protective—too protective, some would say. He didn't much like Isaiah's steady presence in my life. Issa was kindness personified; Vincent folded himself into danger and threat. When I felt Van's hand on the nape of my neck, I sometimes flinched at the strength. He would say, "Don't talk so close to him. Remember: you belong to me. You belong to no one else."
Those words made my whiskers tremble with embarrassment and warmth.
One evening at a bright cafe, my stomach did the thing it always did—growl loud as a church bell. I left the kindergarten and waited by the gate, sure that Vincent would pick me up. He was late. People came and went. I began to worry.
"Let me walk you home," said Isaiah, appearing as if from the air. He wore a sweater that made him look like a book. When he smiled at me I felt cozy and safe and suspicious—they might call that feeling something else, but it was a gentle, kind comfort.
"I'm fine," I said, though my ears trembled.
Isaiah offered, "Stay until I go. It's safer."
"Thank you," I said. I did not know then how that tiny action would be loaded. Vincent arrived with the thunder of a man who had been waiting at roof's edge. He watched Isaiah like a hawk watches a mouse.
Later, at home, Vincent's voice was a low drum. "She's too close," he said.
"I was just being polite," I said. "Isaiah's a good friend."
"Be careful whom you call friend," Vincent breathed. "Sometimes friends become dangerous when they get too close."
It was diplomatic with teeth.
Then the first real danger happened. The sky turned wrong inside a small room when a woman with kind face and crooked eyes—I later pieced it together—lured me into a van and into an old place with barred windows. There were other girls there, pale and scared. Men came and circled like wolves. They wanted to sell us. I tasted dust and fear.
"Remember," I told a small girl with a piglet ear who had been crying, "be brave."
I hatched a plan the way rabbits do: instinct, speed, a tiny leap.
"Run," I whispered. "When I say, run."
I pushed and pulled; the men laughed. Then I made a break for the window and the city air slammed into my face like cold water. My heart pumped like mad. Then, like a bolt of light, Vincent was there. He hit like a storm and the scuffle broke into a fight of bodies and curses. He shoved men aside, so hard that the floor trembled.
"Go!" he grunted. "Get to the street!"
We ran through alleys like thieves and then like survivors. He did not hurt me; he carried me into his arms and tucked me into places that felt like a home.
After the rescue, there were consequences. They traced the ring that trafficked spirits and small folk. It led into dark pockets of the city, into offices with velvet chairs and men with good shoes. One name, one office, kept popping up. It had furniture and a man with a name badge that said Alonso Davidson.
"Who hired them?" Vincent asked, reading the threads.
"The people who think lives are things to be traded," Alonso said, with a polite smile that did not reach his eyes. "We will do a sweep. We have to stop this."
The Bureau moved like a machine with teeth. Vincent worked night after night, his jaw set like a clamp. He was tired and yet he kept his eyes on me often enough that my cheeks warmed.
Then the day of exposure came. It was not private. It was not quick. They brought the traffickers into the square outside the old market, where people gathered to buy bread and gossip. Someone put a makeshift stage. A police van arrived. Cameras whirred. The crowd pressed in, chins high, hungry for spectacle in the noon sun.
"Bring them forward," Vincent told no one and everyone at once.
They marched out a parade of thugs: Emilian Barr, Sterling Callahan, Ricardo Jensen—names I had only heard on the paper as if they were characters, and now there they were in the flesh. One by one the men who had touched, sold, and planned were lined up facing the crowd. The sheriff read their crimes.
Emilian stepped forward first.
"You took the children," Vincent said, standing in the center like a judge perched on a cliff. "You hid children in old houses and sold them to men who'd break them. What have you to say?"
Emilian sneered. "We were doing business. You had no right—"
"You were taking lives," I cut in, my voice small but pointed. "You turned people into goods."
A hum rolled through the crowd. Someone spat. A mother in the front clapped, slow as thunder. A teenager filmed everything with a phone and laughed like the world was a stage.
Emilian's smile faltered as witnesses stepped forward: girls with hair stuck in their mouths, old women pointing fingers, a young man who carried a wooden splint on his arm and told how they had sold him for weeks.
"Is it true?" someone shouted.
"Yes!" three voices shouted back. The crowd tightened, smelling blood and truth. Then a surge of anger rose like a wave.
They brought forward a woman who had been part of the ring—she had been hired as keeper. "You told us the jobs were safe," she said, throat raw. "You promised protection and you sold them instead."
Emilian laughed, then his expression split. "You think you can stand here and pretend you are better?" he spat. "You who let your kind be foolish—"
A man in the crowd, hands trembling with rage, pushed forward and slapped Emilian. The slap echoed. Cameras caught the moment. The crowd whooped and hissed like a storm.
Sterling tried to shout the old excuses: "It was business. We needed money—" But when a mother shoved him in the chest and said, "My daughter never came back. She was fifteen," the words clung to him like ice.
I watched the men shrink. They wanted to stay comfortable in their arrogance, but people's faces turned. A teacher who had lost a niece came forward and dragged Sterling's collar down, so the man could see the eyes of his victims. The man's face drained like a spilled drink.
Then came the worst for one of them—Ricardo Jensen. He had stood above me in a doorway, eyes cruel, and the memory of him crouched like a dog came alive. People began to read the names of the missing. Mothers recognized jewelry, a child's doll. The crowd leaned in to hear each detail and their anger grew.
The humiliation was not just a speech. It became a slow unpeeling.
One brave woman climbed the stage and held up a torn shawl. "You sold my sister," she cried. "You promised she would be fed, and you fed her to men like trash." She pointed straight at Ricardo.
He tried to step back. "No—no—"
"You thought you could hide," the mother said. "You thought we'd forget. But we remember, and we will make others remember."
They made him stand behind a line painted on the stage. They chose that line to make him small. People took photos and the phones became mirrors that reflected the faces of the men who had chosen profit over people. They held up signs. They wrapped his head in a mock scarf and paraded him as if he were less a man than a cautionary tale.
"You thought you were invisible," Vincent's voice cut through the murmurs. "But you are not. You made a business of suffering and now your business is exposed."
Ricardo's expression changed: from smirk to confusion to anger to denial. "I didn't—" he began, then stopped. Denial cracked into panic.
"Not guilty," he said, then his voice shortened, "Not—"
The crowd answered with cold precision: "You are guilty."
People recorded. People spat. A young woman in the front of the crowd pulled off her scarf and tied it around Ricardo's wrist—an emblem of shame. He noticed too late the effect his face had on the cameras. The second wave of humiliation was the transformation from powerful to ridiculous. Someone sprayed glitter on his jacket. Someone else tied a cheap plastic crown on his head. It was grotesque and petty and perfect.
"You sold a child for money, Ricardo," a woman said quietly from the edge. "Look at this child." She held up a drawing—child's crayon lines of a house and two hands, one small and one large. "You made sure this child had no hands to hold."
Tears came to my eyes. The crowd shifted, like a thousand blown metronomes synchronized to the same rhythm: anger, then the relief of being heard, then the appetite for justice.
Ricardo started to beg. It was small and scouring. "Please," he said, "I didn't know—"
"You knew," a voice snapped. "You knew more than you said."
He dropped into full collapse: denial, then blame, then bargaining as the crowd closed in. He tried to twist, to turn the blame, to pick people off as scapegoats. The crowd would not let him. People shouted his sins, and each one landed like a pebble on a pane of glass: "You sold my daughter... You sold my friend... You lied to the mothers."
The humiliation worked its way into him like cold. He blanched. People turned away from him with disgust. Some clapped. Some simply wept.
Sterling fared similarly. His attempts at charm dissolved when a woman who testified that he had once laughed at the idea of compassion produced a ledger with names, dates, and sums. The numbers were cold; the faces were not. He had helped build their commerce and now he was a math problem solved in public.
Emilian, who had been vocal and cruel, stood last. Once he had been towering, but as testimony mounted he shrank. The boy he had assaulted—now a woman—spoke with the voice of a hurricane, showing the bruise and the mark and the wallet he had ripped from her. Emilian's jaw worked like a stuck machine. His protests disintegrated into excuses. And then the crowd did what crowds sometimes do when they've been patient with horror: they laughed at him. It was the cruelest sound.
"You're not a man," the woman with the shawl said, slowly savoring each word. "You're a sale."
Emilian's eyes moved. For the first time I saw him truly small. He tried to bargain. He tried to call whoever he thought would pull his thread. He cut deals. He begged in the way of those who realize the people against them will not blink.
The punishment was not purely physical. It was a social excoriation: names that had been hidden were now listed, transactions unveiled, phone numbers printed, bank accounts frozen. Their partners fled. Their contacts distanced themselves out of fear, disgust, self-preservation. People posted the names like talismans to ward bad men from their neighborhoods.
The crowd swelled and surged. Some shoved, some sobbed, some screamed. The brigands' faces turned colors they couldn't control. Their smugness evaporated. People who had been on the fence now became prosecutors of a public court.
When the police took them away, it was without glory. The ropes were replaced with handcuffs; the mocking crowns were flung into the dirt. The men had been made ridiculous and exposed; the worst punishment was the knowledge that every neighbor would remember and tell.
Vincent stood beside me when it was over. He had not joined the mocking; he had been collecting statements, quiet and meticulous. But when it was time, he had stepped to the stage and read the list of charges like a priest reading funeral rites.
"They will not be forgotten," he said after the men were led away. "They will be accounted for. We will make sure they cannot do this again."
People cheered. People spat. People cried. For the first time since I had been taken, a form of justice was public and immediate and jagged like a beacon. I felt filthy and cleansed at once.
After the parade—after the cameras left and the crowd dissolved—we were in the quiet of the Bureau. Vincent tucked his hand into my hair and said, "You were brave."
"I had to be," I said. "There were so many, so small."
He searched my face until he found my eyes. "You belong with me," he said. "This city can break you or make you. I will not let it take you."
He did not say it like a command this time. He said it like a wish. Like a promise.
We built small days after that. Isaiah came by to bring tiny cakes the children had made. Fernanda barged in with ridiculous gossip and three steaming dumplings that were not hers to keep. Antonia—Vincent's sister—visited, and she fussed like a mother and laughed like a gunfire.
Veronica—Veronica Vitale—kept trying to find small splinters of power. But the men who had trafficked were in jail. The network collapsed like a rotten staircase. Alonso Davidson's name was dragged through hearings. He pleaded ignorance, which made the mothers howl with contempt. In the end, he was removed from power. A man who had smiled over a ledger was asked to sit behind a desk that no one cared to admire.
Isaiah kept teaching. He came sometimes to sit quietly as if he were studying clouds. We would talk about children and then about nothing. He was kind, and he showed me what adulthood could be if it was soft and steady.
Vincent—my fox, my landlord, my guardian—let himself laugh sometimes in private. He confessed to me that he had been the boy the fruit belonged to, that the fruit had been a family heirloom that bound power to lineage. He thought for a time that I'd stolen it. He had been empowered by the idea of me saving him, and then terrified that I might be a false miracle.
"I like you without promises," he said one night, pressing his forehead to mine. "I like what you are—small and fierce. I like how you hold children like you hold bread."
I laughed. "You are a cruel compliment machine."
He grinned. "Maybe."
We learned to live as a strange little family. There were scuffles and jealous storms. There were nights I cried because the world was heavy and terrible and human hands could be cruel, and Vincent would drag a blanket over my shoulders and hold me like I was a garden that needed shelter.
One morning, sitting by the window with a mug, I told Isaiah something I had thought for a while.
"What is it?" he asked.
"If a rabbit and a fox live in the same house, who teaches whom?" I asked.
Isaiah thought. "Whoever opens their heart more often," he said.
Vincent polished his keys on a passing night and said, "Then keep opening. I'm clumsy but I know how to guard."
Our ending is not a line; it is a continuous small thread of moments. I keep my ears hidden in public but out at home they bob and sway, and Vincent—always amused, sometimes fierce—will reach for them just to keep a promise. Isaiah carries stories about the children. Fernanda tells me gossip. Antonia brings pastries. Veronica tries to ingratiate herself and finds the door politely closed.
We don't know what comes next. There were days when the city felt like a cage and days when it felt like a sunlit field. But when Vincent leans down in the dark and says, "Rabbit, come here," I do. I snuggle into the warmth because for all the terrible things we've seen, for all the men who traded human lives for coin, there is a fox who keeps me from harm.
"You're not food," he says once, very softly.
"Not tasty either," I counter, laughing.
He kisses my forehead. "You are mine."
I did not intend this to be tidy. I did not want to be small and kept in a pocket. I wanted to be whole. But Vincent and I found a kind of whole that was strange and stubborn and fierce: one where his teeth and my ears fit together like two pieces, not to devour each other, but to shelter.
In the Bureau office there is a small paper rose in the pen cup—a fox drawn on one petal, a rabbit on another. Fernanda made it and hid it there like a flag. I look at it sometimes when the city feels far too loud.
It tells me what I already knew: I was lost, I was found, and sometimes monsters get punished in public so the rest of us can breathe. Life is not perfect. But my ears twitch when he reaches for me, and in this odd apartment, with that fierce fox who cleaned my wounds and a gentle shepherd who mends other people's hurts, I have room to be alive.
The End
— Thank you for reading —