THE ONLY THING I KNOW
ROUTINE IS SUPPOSED to be a rebel's first enemy. Predictability, repetition… Not words to look forward to. It's the uncertainty, the thrill of the unknown that should keep one's flame burning bright.
Nonetheless, it's the routine that's keeping him sane lately. Routine is good.
It's the routine that makes him wake up every morning to feed capitalism and go to work, attend to annoying customers, answer a concerned call from Mrs. Forman in the middle of the day complaining about why Forman and Donna still haven't set the wedding date, pay the bills, fill the Camino's gas tank, do groceries and come back to a quiet apartment by the time the sun has long set.
He always goes straight to the bathroom, sets the shower to hot. Scalding. The steam fills the room, warm droplets washing over his body, the sandy locks clinging to his forehead.
That's when she comes, not faltering a single day. Lips meet lips, hands circle a petite body under the hot spray. Soft and slippery. Without a word, she takes him in her hand, then in her mouth, her doe eyes watching him gasp in pleasure from below. Her eyes. Even with pupils wide with want, he can notice the mismatch in them, one green, the other brown. She drives him insane with that look and that tongue and when it's too much, he closes his eyes, letting the water and her kisses wash his sins away.
He cooks them dinner. Sometimes it's pasta, sometimes a fancy sandwich, that buttery souflé she pretends she doesn't like because she's "watching her weight" or that meatloaf Mrs. Forman taught him how to cook to perfection.
They talk a lot in between forkfuls, because she can never shut her piehole, but he's grown used to detail his entire boring day too. She says she doesn't mind. She tells him about the exclusive interview she's doing with the governor about that sex scandal. He tells her about the new Pat Benatar album that arrived at the store that week. She laughs of some joke he makes about Kelso and he wipes an errant sauce droplet off her chin.
They spend the rest of the evening lying on the couch, her occasional giggles at the current soap opera vibrating against his chest. She wiggles her ass against his crotch every now and then while he fondles her breasts under the band t-shirt she wears, one that is so ratty that not even he gets to go out with it anymore. "A businessman must show confidence in his looks", she always says, but he's passed that stubbornness of his youth. It's okay to be the man she's always wanted him to be, he's found out. More so if that means she'll stay forever.
But then it comes that moment when the midnight news starts, and the anchorman eventually gets connected to LA, to their brilliant correspondent in the city of angels, and she starts to inform about a classic NFL game or a Hollywood gala or the latest approval in the Senate or anything else for that matter because, yes, she's that good and captivates the entire US of fucking A with her eloquence and simpathy and beauty and he fucking hates that her voice is not so much like the one that had just whispered sweet nothings in his ear, but one of a professional, mature woman who's living her dream job in her dream city, speaking only the necessary to inform her audience instead of talking his ears off the way he's always claimed he hated but secretly loved more than anything in the world.
He loved her more than anything in the world.
He still does.
Maybe he's not so sane after all.
In the shower, the bottle of lavender shampoo remains untouched, its only function to bring the remembrance of her scent in his bed and in his clothes and in his life. In the kitchen sink, only one set of dirty dishes to be scrubbed in the morning, the pot of pasta too much for only one person. In his arms, an old throw pillow with a flower pattern pillowcase, one of the few things he managed to keep after she left – or when he did, he's not sure.
The band tees are neatly folded and tucked inside a drawer of his dresser though, waiting for the day their rightful owner will come back to claim them. A day that will never come.
On the TV, he can't catch the mismatch of her eyes, and he wonders if he has made that up. Maybe he has. Maybe this is all a lunatic's dream because why would she want him any longer when all he ever did was to rebel against her needs? What good is there in being the perfect man to an empty woman now?
Routine. Routine is good. Routine keeps him sane.
So, day by day, relentlessly, he keeps his routine of living with a memory, because it's all that's left of her. Of them.
A/N: This story is deeply based on Gotye's "The only thing I know". It's impossible to listen to it and not think about Hyde :) sorry for the angst, but thanks for reading!