Bette woke up and felt beside her for Tina. She was not surprised when the other side of the bed was empty. They’ve stopped waking up to each other for several months now. It started when Tina stopped waking her when the latter went out on her morning runs. At first Bette was hurt, but when Tina said that she just wanted Bette to sleep longer, Bette rationalized that Tina was simply being thoughtful. Now, on the wake of their recent troubles, Bette wished that Tina had woken her up with the kiss and hug that she had in the beginning of their relationship.

Well that’s to be expected, right? We’ve been together almost two years. I guess we’re slipping into a routine. Or just slipping back into our habits that were there before we got together. Bette made a face and turned to look at the alarm clock. An hour to go before she had to get ready for work. What would she do for an hour without Tina?

I figured that out a long time ago, Bette scoffed. She got up and freshened up in the bathroom. When she walked back out into bedroom, she noticed her cellphone blinking on the night stand. She remembered that she had told Candace to call her at work today. At the time, she had responded to the text message by instinct. A long-buried instinct that still responded to her long-ago lover.

Bette sat down on the bed and contemplated the display on her cellphone. It was a snapshot of Bette that Tina had taken and insisted that she set as her theme. It showed Bette laughing uproariously at something Tina had said, looking happy and carefree. Bette remembered Tina’s instruction: "Now, put that as your wallpaper, Honey. So you’ll always remember how I see you."

How Tina saw her? She looked back at the display, noticing that in the snapshot, she looked like none of her other photos. Her mouth was wide open and her eyes scrunched shut. Her hair was awry all over her face. Bette blushed. If Bette hadn’t known that she was laughing in the photo, she would think that she was at the peak of an orgasm.

Bette smiled softly. Over the year and eleven months that she and Tina had been together, the past six months were spent together under one roof. In all that time, she and Tina never lacked for sexual intimacy. Of course, in the beginning, they couldn’t get enough of each other. Several months of being sleep-deprived finally caught up with them and they decided to limit their intimacies to at most 2 hours per night. However, Bette immediately started her habit of putting off sleep until dawn was nearly peeking in the sky. She never did recover all her lost sleep, and felt that at this point, it was a futile wish.