The cacophony of his televisions was a daily ritual in their house, one Joan hardly enjoyed but conceded to him with relative grace. At the very least it made her life more interesting; she never knew whether she'd be feeding Clyde to the sound of a screaming Al Pacino or the stilted dialogue of a daytime soap. By now they had mostly managed to synch up their schedules so that he listened while she ran, which thankfully kept her out of the house for the worst of his racket.

Still, she almost always caught the tail end of it coming in from her jog, and she'd learned to judge his mood by whatever was on the loudest television. She'd noticed a theme lately, or at least she thought she had; she most often came home to the sound of love. Some days it was true love, some days lost love, others unrequited love or the wordlessness of making love.

When she peeked in on him she found him more and more frequently with his eyes closed, mouthing the words with an upturned face as if he were praying. It was a little strange, but she thought it oddly endearing. He never seemed to notice her return, so she stopped to watch him more often than not.

She had to admit there was something mesmerizing about the way his tongue flicked out between his parted lips, the way his hands drifted to his thighs as he watched the screens, the way his muscles rippled as he stretched. He was always undressed to some degree, and she found that the less clothing he wore the more trouble she had catching her breath.

The worst days were those when he wore nothing but briefs and he might as well have been naked because she could see everything, could follow all his lines to their ends, and she wanted nothing more than to make him watch her pull them off slowly, make him beg to have her touch him, reduce that brilliant mind to quivering need. Those days she stayed in the shower until the heat numbed her skin and the distant rumble of the TVs went silent.

Not once did he turn to see her.