Theme 28 – Love triangle

He wakes up sprawled across the bed as usual, shaken out of sleep by the roar of the lawnmower outside in the yard. Her hollow in the sheets next to him is empty, and he brushes sleepy fingers across the dent in her pillow and finds it long since cold. Closing his eyes with a groan, he rolls over and pulls the unused pillow over his head. The sputtering clamor outside rises and falls as it passes the window, and he struggles to fall asleep again.

It's too distracting, just lying there listening to the smug growling of the competition. This is the third time he's woken up alone in three days.

This infidelity of hers stings. For once it would be nice to awaken to her twined warm around him, the way she did when they were new at this. He would not complain about her morning breath if she stayed, he resolves, nor teasingly run a freezing metal hand down her spine. He would be careful not to kick off the covers, if she was there to keep warm instead of downstairs by five in the morning, running loving fingers over some captivating new invention.

Occasionally he's been tempted to curl an arm around her waist and pull her back to bed, when he's roused out of sleep by her covert attempts to slip away in the wee hours of the morning. He hasn't dared yet. He can survive her affairs, but not the rejection of being physically squirmed away from. Besides, she's probably already got a wrench in her hand. She keeps it on her bedside table, next to her picture of him.

Scowling, he reaches for his own small indiscretion, tucked half under the bed on the floor. His old alchemy books are a long-familiar mistress, but it just isn't the same. There is more blue fire in her eyes than a thousand arrays could produce…

Laughing at his own drowsily bitter train of thought, he tosses the book back to the floor and goes downstairs to take a crack at making breakfast. It really is ridiculous, to be jealous of her career and lifelong obsession. Whatever she does with her mornings, her nights still belong to him. He pauses in the kitchen window to wave out at her, kerchief pulled tight around her sweaty brow as she pushes the lawnmower down another strip of dewy grass.

She doesn't notice, and he sighs and turns back to the stove.

He has begun to understand, a little, how she felt in the old days when he went constantly gallivanting off to consort with the twin femme fatales of military and science. Heartless boy that he was, never sparing a thought for her feelings as he curled up cozily with tomes of alchemy right in front of her, ignoring her attempts to converse. He feels a twinge of remorse, now that he knows the other side of it. These love triangles are vicious things.