I'm Leaving My Life In Your Hands

HB wakes me when he tries to slide out of bed. I listen to him dressing quietly, then tiptoeing down the stairs. He's gone a little while, and I'm just starting to drowse again when he gets back... But he doesn't try to wake me. He sits down quietly in the big wing chair with his cup of coffee - I can smell it steaming - and the little snaps and rustles tell me that he's reading the paper. From the intensity of the sunlight against my eyelids, I know that it's already morning and that he'll have to go to work soon, but still he hasn't tried to wake me up.
I crack one eyelid. "Hey," I croak.
"Hey," he says softly. "Morning."
I wait, but that's it. "What, no 'get up,' no slavedriving this morning?" I sit up and wince a little, then smile. "What's gotten into - or out of - you?"
"Didn't think you'd want to exercise this morning." He sips his coffee, watching me over the rim.
"Why, because of that crap with the doctor yesterday?" I flop back against the pillows and groan a little, working the muscles and vertebrae around a little. "It's gonna turn out to be nothing. You wait and see."
"I sure hope so." He sips and grimaces. It must still be pretty hot. "So what are you gonna do today?"
I extend my arms grandly to take in the cluttered bedroom and the house beyond it. "Majestically survey my kingdom, of course." I lower my legs over the side of the bed, stand, and totter over to steal a sip of his coffee. Damn, it is too hot, and he never puts enough sugar in it. "You really don't wanna exercise this morning?"
He cocks one disbelieving eyebrow at me. "You really do?"
I shrug, maybe a little sheepishly. "It's possible that I don't really mind as much as I let on," I admit. "Maybe it's nice to have somebody prodding me because at least it means they still care."
"Stupid," he mutters reprovingly, and grabs my wrist. With one yank he's hauled me down into his lap and then he kisses me the way we almost never do anymore: not as a prelude to coitus or a ritual acknowledgement of our relationship, but rather his very warm and stubble-rimmed lips against mine, his arm around me, the two of us flowing together and merging. One flesh, as the old ceremony used to say. I could stay like that forever.
But instead he finally pushes me off, and upright. "So what's first," he says, "pushups or crunches?"
"On second thought, how about a blowjob?" I am trying to be funny.
"As if," he growls. "Crunches it is. Come on, get down here."
I lower myself with a groan to the floor, my poor skinny ass the thinnest of padding between bone and carpet.
"Okay," he chants, "that's thirty... that's twenty nine... twenty eight..."

Title lyric from "As Long As You Love Me" by the Backstreet Boys.