The digital clock blinking on Bette’s desk flashed “4:00 am” and a rainbow of colors began to rotate slowly in succession like a visual alarm.  Blue, red, orange, yellow, green, violet colors glowed around Bette’s glass work desk, bouncing off of the glass, lending the dark room bursts of color.

Tina gently held Bette’s head in place while she extricated her shoulder from under the brunette, who was lying peacefully on her right cheek, faced towards her.  “I love you,” Tina whispered.  She so wanted to hold this increasingly rare moment between them a while longer.  But she knew that an alarm mimicking a tropical rain would begin to sound in a minute or so, and Tina wanted to stop the alarm before it started.

The blonde rolled off of the edge of the sofa, bracing her fall with her hands and a knee easily on the soft, cushiony Aubusson rug, decorated in the signature “aubusson blue” that Bette had used as the primary color for her home office.  She saw with relief that Bette had re-settled her head onto the cushion that Tina put in place under the brunette’s cheek, to replace the warm “nook” provided by the area between Tina’s shoulder and neck Bette had settled into when she’d fallen asleep.

“I’ll just give her 5 or 10 minutes to snooze, while I fix her a cup of coffee and put out some clothes she can wear out of here,” the blonde thought to herself as she rearranged a throw over her wife’s body, seeing it shiver momentarily, having lost Tina’s warm body to cuddle against.

That was the plan at least, but the brunette was up and about by the time Tina returned to Bette’s office, a warm-up suit slung over one arm.  Tina was also carrying a backpack she’d stuffed with new sets of “basics” including tank tops in the luxe, soft cotton Bette liked and matching underwear that she’d bought for the brunette during the quick trip to London.

She saw Bette peering into two of the screens Bette had hooked up to the new desktops, sipping the Nespresso latte Tina had fixed for her, eyes shifting from one screen to the next, apparently reading through files that Bette had opened simultaneously.