Harou was staring at the paper passed to him in homeroom ever since he sat down for lunch.

No, it wasn't a love letter. This was 8th grade, the last year without humans, and they passed out this paper about the sports that would be available in highschool, especially for people to try out for football. Both his brothers were current players, though Zippy (Tyr Pagan) would officially graduate this year.

Football, since it was such a popular sport, got too much attention in schools, so neither sifter population played it in our grades—the wolves because it takes a lot of self-control to not kill human teams and bunnies because the neutral-sexed were often just not big enough to shoulder their way through that much momentum.

Plus all hell would break loose if one of us wound up being a girl, exposed after a few years on the team. Football was known to be deliberately brutal to get girls off teams in the first place.

They didn't pass it out to rabbits unless they were markedly bigger than the rest, at our age. I mean, I wasn't tiny, mostly legs, would make a decent runningback, but Harou was already nearly 6 ft tall at almost 13, and I'm clearly never going to be like that.

The wolves were more focused on packing muscles on me, anyway. I've got the beginning of little bitty pecs that I can flex on command. I spend too much time in a mirror, laughing hysterically.

To which my mate said, "Better not do that to anyone else, Bunny."

Back to staring at the paper. No blushing.

I poked his cheek with a carrot. Yeah, I eat them for nostalgia's sake, but I was really wanting to eat the burger on my plate. Carrot chomping was to keep me from getting on the table and screaming " We have the meats! "

Yes, I did that, some time between Harou's first shift and VD last year...

Why did this guy bring me home?

Ah, yeah, because he worries. I needed to focus on practical things, or I was going to get precocious, too. "You're thinking about football, aren't you?"

"Yeah..."

"Do you like it?"

"Not really, but it's good practice on being gentle with humans. I need to do something like that to please dad. But really, joining football is networking chicks across multiple schools. Helps when you are trying to find your mate. I have you, so that part is a waste of my time."

"That ain't your only worry, is it?"

"No. The idea of appearing to be a gay player is going to put me in more fights."

I finally gave up on the carrot and bit deep into my burger, and then tried to talk.

"I'm going to wipe your face in public if you don't swallow before speaking."

That's when he finally stared at me with those mercurial eyes. I swear, it was a reaction to how gorgeous he is that I put down my burger and swallowed, not because he threatened me. "I'm going to dress in a hoodie and jeans for the rest of my life, tits or not."

"So gay accusations for 4 years unless you develop a rack that comes around the corner before you do. " Harou rubbed his forehead." I guess I need something a little more quiet, where they fight me alone, and not hide it in a greater game..."

"Wrestling!" We both said it at the same time, were pleased with our agreement, and ate. It's such a dude way of looking at the world. So we enjoyed our burgers in peace before we went off to GT English.

While GT stood for Gifted and Talented, all it really did was put us in 9th grade English with more papers, so we could do AP English our Senior year. I didn't even know if we were going to college. More excess Alpha stock was being shipped off into education, to be more than the dominance of the pack, so likely the Alpha would push us to go to college.

Mmm college co-ed showering.

Wait, we already shared a shower. Nothing happened because I'd shriek in rage if he tried.

I'm glad he laughs at me for it. I'm always scared to ruin what we do have because I'm not ready. That's not changed in 5 years.

Anyway, off to the damn class where I had a surprise in store for everyone.

When they do Shakespeare for the first time, it's almost always Romeo and Juliet.

But to explain how the language gets to Shakespeare, eventually they are stuck pulling out a page of that Christian religious text, showing how heavily similar The Bard of Avon was to the most widely spread text in England. Most teachers would just pull from somewhere safe in Psalms, spend a day on it, and you'd never have to see a Bible again for life. A more progressive teacher would take a text from a long list of how many donkeys some dude's territories was taxed and strive to make the argument that the whole of that book was poetry that Shakespeare emulated. While true that the greatest poet wrote peak prose-poetry that's hard to separate into either category, trying to argue what a translated text has to say about the original because you want to get political about religion could backfire spectacularly in a class full of brilliant kids. Someone is bound to realize that English wasn't the original language.

Well, it was going to backfire—and not because I understood my grudge back when I just turned 13. It took me years to piece together why this teacher rubbed me the wrong way.

Mrs. Bodycomb passed out 2 sheets for us to discuss, one of the modern translated Quran (because once you bring in 1 religion, you had to bring in another—forget that the translations were too modern to have anything to do with Shakespeare). The other was an excerpt labeled as Exodus 19 at the top.

The first half of class was boring, reading a text dutifully, talking about meanings, all from some safe passage that was beautiful modern poetry.

Then it was Harou's turn to read:

Exodus 19:

Your two breasts are like two fawns,
twins of a gazelle,
that graze among the lilies.
Until the day breathes
and the shadows flee,
I will go away to the mountain of myrrh
and the hill of frankincense.
You are altogether beautiful, my love;
there is no flaw in you.

By time he said breasts, Harou was already beet red—score 1. Mrs. Bodycomb was starting to wake up to something being wrong because she really wasn't listening to the reading. By the time he said "You are beautiful" my mate had figured everything out and was staring at me, ignoring the teacher's constant whining about him not stopping—score 2.

No, it's where he started over a second time, and the rest of the class took to making it a deadpan chant that had her running shrieking out the room like this shit actually burned her—KO!

Didn't she know that the wolves already had a Goddess and that us dumb bunnies just had the devil incarnate? Whatever point she wanted to make about choosing Exodus against two very often cruel sets of people wouldn't change anything. Just stick to the kids killing each other because they were stupid!

Anyway, that was the first detention of the year.