ꜱᴏᴍᴇ ʙᴜɴɴʏ ᴛᴏ ʟᴏᴠᴇ| Jikook

2

When I decided to pull over and stretch my legs after eight hours in the car, I anticipated a little run, nothing more. I’d been so stupid, not bothering to scent the area thoroughly first. My sleep-deprived haze resulted in a lapse in judgment that almost cost me my life.

I’d been on my way to start a new job. A crappy job, but a job was a job, and it paid halfway decent. The company I worked for back east had been kind enough to put out feelers for all their employees when their closing became eminent. About half of the employees were lucky and found local jobs. I was in the second category that had to move. But still, I was glad not to be in the group of my former colleagues who were still looking for work.

I was trying to look at this as an adventure and not what it really was, which was a pain in the ass. That’s what I got for having a generic degree instead of something more specialized. What had I thought I would become, an English professor?

The countryside was beautiful where I stopped. I had never been a city guy, but had spent the last couple of years there trying to make ends meet. If I’d had my way, I’d have been living in a place like wherever it was I stopped. All I could see for miles were farm houses and a quaint little downtown.

I shucked my clothes and allowed my bunny to take over. Of all the shifters in the world, I had to be the fluffiest, most useless one out there. Wolves could hunt and defend their property. Bears could fish and intimidate the entire food chain. Heck, even owls had their practical uses, keeping mice away or some shit. But no, I wasn’t anything cool or tough like that.

I was born a bunny.

Had my parents also been bunnies, life would have been much different for me. But I was one of the very lucky few who possessed a recessive gene that made me a bunny shifter and not the fierce wolves they were. And when I had my first shift… Well, let’s just say it was interesting.

Or mortifying.

It sucked so bad that I told my family I wasn’t going to stay with our pack because I needed to pursue my dreams of becoming an—well, an English something since I had no practical dreams. Thankfully, they allowed my pretense, knowing how hard it had been for me growing up with all my friends shifting into my natural predators.

Happy to be out of the car, I hopped around, enjoying the stretch in my legs and the feel of my fur in the wind. Unfortunately, the same wind had come from the wrong direction, shifting only quickly enough for me to run a few feet as the scent of a fox tickled my nose. Had I been a predatory shifter, I could’ve attacked the creature. Shit, had I been a quick shifter, I could’ve become human before he got to me.

I was neither of those.

The rest of it was a blur, a blur that ended up with me being wrapped in a hoodie by some kid. I wanted to shift. Needed to shift. But my injuries prevented me from doing so.

The kid promised he’d take good care of me, get me to some miracle worker old lady. I believed him. I had no choice, falling in and out of consciousness along the way.

I spent my youth besting wolves in the chase, and yet now, when it truly mattered, I lost to a freaking fox. A real one too, not even a shifter with the brain capacity of a human. I was officially the loser of the shifter kingdom.

Yay, recessive genes.

The next thing I knew, I was being looked at by someone who was definitely not an old lady. His scent was all lavender and calming and very much human. A vet, I hoped. Although the location appeared to be an old lady’s bathroom, complete with three-dimensional wall hangings of seahorses.

But I didn’t care about that. I was too focused on the man. He was cleaning my fur with a washcloth, his strokes so soft. “I’m going to do the best I can for you, little fella.” He turned to the side, and while I couldn’t see what he was doing, it sounded as if he were wringing out the washcloth. “I promised Jisung I would do whatever I could for you, and I will. I have a feeling his life is not too good, so how about you pull through this so he can smile again.”

I surmised that Jisung was the boy I half-remembered bringing me in, and inner me smiled at the way the man spoke to me as if I were a human. The sensation in my body was beyond the point of pain by that point, which was both terrifying and oddly comforting.

“I’m almost done cleaning this side of you. Then I’ll need to roll you over and check out the other side, which is going to suck. How about you don’t bite me when I do that, yeah? If I’m bleeding and you’re bleeding, there’s no way I’ll be able to see where the bandages go.”

He kept tending my wound and chattering away. He was right about rolling over. It sucked. But from the words he spoke, I was doing less horribly than I felt. If I could heal just a little bit, I’d be able to shift and speed things along dramatically.

“I did call the vet, just so you know. I don’t want you to think I’m being a cheap-ass loser.”

I had been thinking a lot of things as he spoke to me and tended me so carefully, and him being a cheap loser had not been one of them.

Yay i updated 🙈

Thank you guys for waiting if you were lmao😅

Anyway i started a new jikook book

Its called salty baby
😊