"Well, that was fun", he said, smirking a little at the understatement. It had been a good night. A well-deserved release after a somewhat existential week. However, only silence greeted his overture. Running his fingers through his hair, a frayed thought struck him. She was just the sort of person he would have fallen in..there was that word again. Love. He'd actively spent the last six months trying to expunge that word from his head. The silence stretched, and he grew uncomfortable. As was his wont in such scenarios, he began to babble. "Have you ever given much thought to love?” he asked, slipping one hand and then the other into his shirt sleeves. That could have been a sound of affirmation. He chose to take it as such. "I sometimes feel like it would take a dark but enlightened man to decipher this quandary that we carelessly assign a monosyllable to. Perhaps two of these opposing spectrums could sit down and hash it out between themselves. Maybe they could figure out the insanely infectious emotion that ensnares, entangles and elates those little four-chambered organs we hold so dear. It defies logic and deifies idiocy, expects adulation but accepts adultery, condemns ignominy but condones ignobility." Here, he paused to take a quick breath, fiddling with a particularly resistant button on his shirt and looking for some human response from his poker- faced audience. Seeing none, he continued. "And still, we crave it. We seek out this fantastical dream and we fall right into it with all the willingness of an opiated pig nibbling a cleaver. And we love every minute, every second of it, until it's suddenly gone." Here, he stopped again; nervously cleared his throat, and began working on his tie. “That's when the cribbing begins, you know. We deserved more, we deserved better. The usual rhetoric. Frankly, I feel like it's masochism of a more virulent strain than all the poxes and plagues we shut down our schools for. We have only ourselves to blame, really. Well, that and a certain herd mentality, if pigs herd, which has us rushing to fulfil love's ideals." Finally, a half-decent Ascot. And yet, the silence was getting to be a bit unnerving. Time to be a bit more aggressive, show off that big surgeon's brain. "Now love the bond, love the unspoken emotion, is it not the pinnacle of sapient evolution? No, of course not. That's brains, which hardly seem to come to play in this discussion. So is love just an abstract idea, an excuse for us succumbing to our base instincts, a simple release of oxytocin when we're excited?" This was getting to him a bit now. Granted, she was still in bed, but that wasn't any sort of an excuse for this kind of behaviour. Putting on his briefs and trousers, he began wrapping up his little episode. "I don't know. How could some chemicals affect anyone enough to allow for them to excuse all kinds of torture, humiliation and abuse with the reiteration of those tired old words - because I love her." A padding of soft feet, followed by a pair of arms slipping around him from behind as Kara kissed his neck. "You know I love it when you're broody, but come back and join me in the real world, babe." she said, winking, as she walked back into the bedroom. Blinking quickly, he refocused on himself in the mirror, now fogged up from his breath, smiled sadly, and said, "And yet, more often than not, I find myself in love.”