Total pages in book: 53
Estimated words: 49645 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 248(@200wpm)___ 199(@250wpm)___ 165(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49645 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 248(@200wpm)___ 199(@250wpm)___ 165(@300wpm)
While his numbers hadn’t miraculously dropped to the point that his viral count was undetectable, the fact was that they had dropped. Enough so that Dr. Kleinman kept Christopher on the same regimen. A month later, the numbers had gone down again, then again. While Christopher wouldn’t allow himself to get his hopes up in the beginning, as each month had gone by and the number had continued to decrease, there was no denying that he’d begun to feel safe enough to hope.
Within six months, Christopher had taken the RN exam and enrolled in the nurse practitioner program at Duke. I’d moved in long before that, and life had become relatively normal and even somewhat anticlimactic. Christopher quit his insurance job and began working part-time for Dr. Kleinman with the intent of staying on staff after he became a nurse practitioner. He spent the rest of the time evenly split between studying and spending time with his family, all of whom knew about his diagnosis by then.
Whenever possible, Christopher and I spent our evenings together, usually exploring some aspect of making love that Christopher was certain wouldn’t put me in any kind of danger. Despite having been on PrEP, a drug that prevented HIV, from nearly the beginning of my relationship with Christopher, we hadn’t had actual sex until the day he’d gotten the all clear from Dr. Kleinman that his viral load had become undetectable.
When we weren’t exploring each other’s bodies, we were working our way through his most favorite romance novels, reading sections to each other. Not surprisingly, the hotter parts of the stories were always a considerable distraction, though not an unwelcome one. Once our bodies were sated, it wasn’t unusual for one rabbit after another along with a slowly but steadily growing Pip to end up in bed with us, thanks to the little set of steps I’d built the critters that allowed them to get up on and down from the bed with ease.
In between the normal stuff, we focused on remodeling the house, hosting and joining in on neighborhood parties that usually included one of Theresa’s famous cakes, or just sitting on our bench overlooking the backyard.
I was doing exactly that as I tried not to think about how many hours I still had before I’d get to video chat with Christopher.
While I’d built the bunnies a sizeable bunny mansion in the backyard and even given in to Christopher’s insistence that we put up some birdproof netting to cover the entire yard so none of our “kids” would be grabbed by a hawk, more often than not, the bunnies were in the house with us when they weren’t gorging themselves on grass.
When Christopher had first decided he’d bring in the rabbits each night for dinner, I’d watched on in humor as he’d tried to wrangle them all. Within two days, he’d only had to call out to them, and they were all racing up the steps to wait by the back door.
I sighed because it was yet another moment that made me keenly aware of how much I missed my man.
“Okay, guys,” I called as I swallowed down the last of my beer and resigned myself to spending the evening channel surfing surrounded by at least one bunny butt pressed up against some part of my face. “Thumper, Bugs, Hazel, Snowball, Bunnicula, come on, dinnertime.”
I couldn’t help but smile at the three names Christopher had come up with to replace my ill-advised numbering system. He’d absolutely refused to use Google to find some famous bunny names, but after he’d only managed to come up with Hazel, the only female rabbit name he could remember from Watership Down, he’d sought out expert help from a younger generation.
His sister, Rory, had come up with Snowball from the Pets movies while Luca’s daughter, Violet, had insisted that the last rabbit be named Bunnicula. When questioned, the little girl had insisted not only was Bunnicula a female name but that it fit perfectly because Bunnicula the movie rabbit and our Bunnicula both loved to suck the juice out of vegetables.
Since there was no arguing with that kind of logic, rabbit number five had been christened as such.
As predicted, all the rabbits came hopping up the steps followed by an excited but still pretty wobbly Pip. I was in the process of following everyone inside when something white caught my eye. I looked over my shoulder and saw a white rabbit in the grass. “Snowball, what the hell—” I began only to notice that while the rabbit in the grass was white, it wasn’t solid white like Snowball.
I put my beer bottle down and slowly made my way down the porch steps. “Hey, sweetie, where did you come from?” I said softly. Since I’d checked the fence for holes just that morning, there was no way the rabbit had gotten into the yard that way.