[for Bobby] Break up, and break down.

[prodigalflame]

These days, the evening meal was quiet in the Allerdrake household. There were the usual, half-hearted attempts at conversation, a cursory 'how was your day?', while John poked at his food and pretended to not notice what Bobby was eating. Or pretended not to hear about what a great workout he'd had at gym.

The evenings were like that too, more than most, and the days stretched, filled in by uncomfortable silences that even John didn't want to interrupt. When they had sex, or cuddled, or brought a sudden, impulsive smile to each other's lips, it felt good, so shockingly good and rare and true that for John at least it threw the other, dreary-dull-polite times into stark contrast.

While John had never, could never, would never do the crazy vegan thing, he wasn't doing a lot of frying or roasting. Instead, he was making a lot of salads: mostly with grilled haloumi, or chicken tossed through, or couscous and roasted vegetables, stuff like that. It was the closest he could come to a compromise. And salads seemed to suit the summer.

Besides, Bobby was judging him well enough, for not being ridiculous in his culinary habits, so John sat at the table in muted silence and speared a cube of cooked haloumi with his fork.

Some nights he could across at the living room and almost pretend he was alone at the table, alone in the house.

Comments

[cold_blueeyes]

Bobby, for his part, did his best to convince himself and John both of how happy he was with the new lifestyle he was living. It hurt that John didn't seem to understand, or even want to, it felt like a rejection of sorts. And when Bobby was hurt, he did what he did best: plastered on a smile and buried the hurt down deep. And kept trying to make John understand why this was so important to him, why he hated that John didn't want to follow him into this better, healthier lifestyle. Which only seemed to widen the chasm between them these days.

His salad contained no haloumi, of course. Just greens, lots of dark, leafy greens, some raw nuts for protein, a light vinaigrette that was more vinegar than oil, and some freshly cracked black pepper. He'd been starving, so he'd made a huge bowl of it, but even halfway through it he started to feel like a pig with so much food in front of him. Maybe he would put the rest away for lunch tomorrow, although salad was never as good the next day, wilted and lacking that wonderful, green crispness.

He set his fork down and looked at John for a long moment, trying to figure out what was happening between them, why doing something so good for him seemed to be an affront to John, fracturing their relationship that had been fairly good up until the start of this year. Then he sighed softly and gave up, at a loss for how to fix things (other than going back to his old eating habits, a thought that made him physically ill enough that he had to swallow a few times to keep what he had managed to eat down.

With a scrape of chair legs, he rose, picking up his remaining food to dump it into a storage container. "I think I'm going to do a cleanse," he announced, hoping that even though his heart hurt, if he could get feeling physically better at least, maybe he could keep going on like this. A juice cleanse for a few days usually left him feeling energized and in mastery of his own body, although the last one or two hadn't been quite as effective as before. Maybe this time he'd do it for longer: a week, maybe.