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“You getting out, Darling?” Dev asked her. She distantly realized the car had stopped, and struggled to respond to reality like a diver struggling for the surface.
“Yes, coming.”

She finished her work day as she did every day, clocking out in her Excel sheet, logging off AIM, and locking her computer before shutting off both of her monitors. She wrapped her scarf around her neck, shouldering her purse, and meeting her beau in the hallway. She’d often thought how strange it must look to an outsider of the relationship that both partners simultaneously appeared in the hall to walk down it together twice a day without a word spoken between them. Of course, most occupants of this office building were well aware of the invention of instant messaging, and probably didn’t notice anyway. 
He smiled through his yellowish-tinted glasses at her with cool-water-blue eyes, and she smiled back. They took one another’s hand once they’d breached the final door and greeted the cold parking lot bathed in warm, westering sunlight.

“Mind if I stay over tonight?” Devlan asked.
Soly grinned, eyes squinting in catlike contentment.
“Not at all.”

They made love in the wee hours, even though they both knew the morning would come too soon to stinging, heavy eyes; and Soly mused to herself in the warm, dewy afterglow that it was always her fault they stayed up too late most nights. If she had it her way, she’d be mostly nocturnal. To the devil with work, to the dumps with adulthood’s responsibility, and to Dell with rent.
To Dell? That’s funny. My Dell’s my money maker. Shouldn’t poke fun at that.
She breathed an airy moan/sigh of satisfaction into the thin, soft hair of her lover’s damp chest. The sex had been exceedingly good. She couldn’t recall ever having shivered like that at a climax before, her whole body seemed to spasm involuntarily.

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The rippling giggles had died down several minutes ago, but she felt them tickling giddily at the back of her throat. Endorphins were a funny thing, so it seemed. Hilarious.
Thank God for sex, the physical chocolate of life. The sweet treat at the end of the week. The silky, milky goodness of it. The scent of her man.
sex is our religion, let us pray!

“shit! It’s bleeding!”

“fuck,” She hissed quietly, turning away from the now-sleeping form next to her, grasping at the sides of her tingling skull. She saw the toe vividly in her mind, the exclamatory shout, and the alarming dash of red that ran down the length of it.
well, you dumb angry fuck, you shouldn’t have kicked it. 
She remembered thinking this absently at the time it had happened. She hadn’t been surprised. She knew it was going to happen, she just didn’t know it was going to be his toe. Fingers were the phalanges of choice in her head. It was her fingers’ flesh that crawled when she looked at the paper slicer in the corner, its scythe-like blade seemingly safe tucked and latched in its locked position.
The blade, however, was still uncovered. 
She had smiled on the inside, she remembered. And the creeping, tingling sensation had left her fingers after that. She had no problem using the slicer after that incident.

She stared despairingly at the ceiling, then turned her frowning gaze to the bedside clock. Three-a-fucking-clock AM. 3:19, to be exact.
She crawled over her sleeping counterpart, straddling him as she fished a bottle of sleeping pills out of the nightstand drawer and took two with the icy-cool glass of water nearby. Collapsing back into her side of the bed, she thought about kittens instead. Focused on kittens. Unassuming, innocent, and… cute… little… kittens…