"We can afford the sitter's overtime, can't we?" Edward asked, morose. His free hand flitted up to his cheek, thumb firmly scrubbing at the tell-tale trace of Vivi left on his (warm) skin -- it drew him short. Pleasure aborted, like a child being gently dragged back from the park: Really? So soon? The man was abruptly sullen and crestfallen, experiencing a small spike of that irritation which become habit, which was Edward's resentment piled high over the years. (Across the room, a pale, dark-haired man with a melancholy twist to his mouth stared at him. Edward did not recognise the man.)
Getting back.
Home. To their shared home. Vivi would be there -- she was always there, of course, her body willing and pliant and violent at turns, whatever he wanted, whatever he needed -- but the man's yearning was for more, for variety and breadth; for something other than the hiccoughing tears in the other room of a girl with the flu; than cabinets stacked with painkillers; than shucking his trousers to the floor only to find them neatly and lovingly folded by morning; than waking up mid-sleep to a creature burrowing its way under the sheets and taking up post between mother and father, all elbows and knees and stifling hair. Every time it happened, Edward would wake and then would slip out of bed. He'd been slipping away more often. Making more phonecalls to the Gem.
(Yet somehow, he didn't possess the guts, the nerve, the spine to fully commit to infidelity and roaming elsewhere. Edward was a withered, pale shade of himself, shackled and bound.)