New short thing. Half hour, a lot of cussing herein. Pass if you mind, but I don't think that would be the most of your concerns if you're reading my diary.

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As far as he was concerned, she could just leave. That was it, he figured--sure, they'd been together for about three years (not that he was like her, remembering the exact minute of the exact hour of the exact day they started dating) but, really, enough was enough.

Beatrice was, honestly, the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. However, as we all know--and as he'd just found out, because, being a bit slow, he didn't figure these things out for a bit--beauty really doesn't factor into much in a good relationship. Sure, he conceded that looks did matter a bit--like it would be hard, he figured, to have sex with a woman who looked just like your grandma. But let's be honest here. Her having shiny golden hair and green eyes and being just a little shorter than he (a rarity, him being 6'4" and all) was just not helping their emotional situation here.

It had all started--the breakup, that is--the previous week. He'd moved in about three months back, and she'd not said anything about his entire huge myriad of stuff. She'd never complained about all the boxes that hadn't been opened, she'd never asked for an explination about why he couldn't organize his books a bit neater. But a week ago, she'd been "cleaning up."

He was at work. Raul Gonzalez, graphic designer. A nice job, actually, with a lot of (now that he thought of it) perfectly nice girls who weren't tall and blond and jerks, who actually read books of a higher sophistication level than Mercedes Lackey. At any rate, when he got home at 10 PM (an early hour for him to be home, actually, considering how long those stupid design sessions went) he realized something.

They were all gone. His entire goddamned pop bottle collection. Gone. The psycho had "recycled them, thinking they were garbage." She knew he collected pop bottles, and he knew it, and she should have known that he knew it, to boot. Why would a man have 87 pop bottles, all washed, all with different designs? Really.

So, that was the first tally mark. This morning was really the cincher, though.

Usually she let him wake up on his own around noon or so, and she usually left some extra breakfast in a pot on the stove so he could have something to eat besides coffee and a cigarette. Not that he minded the latter, but women seemed to. But this morning, she decided to wake him up and make him cook breakfast.

"What the hell? You know I can't cook." It was true. He'd tried, a few times, to do so.

He'd burnt eggs far too many times to do that again.

She kept on nagging, though. Finally, he got out of bed (and, for some godforsaken reason, he looked at the clock. It was 7 AM. Seven-fucking-in-the-morning) and put some pants on.

"So, why do you want me to cook, anyway? What the hell reason to you have for me to go burn your breakfast?"

Perfectly reasonable response. Any good man, woman, or child would agree. It was five hours before he would normally get up (and, for the record, three since he'd crawled, weary and with a writer's cramp, into bed next to her warm side) and he was now being forced to do something completely beyond his comprehension. Really, it's not like you're any better of a human being, are you?

But, for some reason, the woman goddamned snapped.

"That, Raul, is so fucking like you. You go to work and me, the little woman, I get to stay home and cook and clean."

"What? You have a job." She did. Barely. The dumb broad refused to try harder than being a secretary.

"Oh, and that makes it so much better. I have to work and cook and clean. So I'm a liberated woman because I'm a secretary, right? Oh, that is so like you."

Well, at this point he decided that sometimes the best thing to do was to not point out the truth. Like it would not be a good idea to tell her the following: she could get a different job if she tried, she didn't always clean (he did a lot of housework, too), he was not sexist and hadn't ever acted as such, and most of all that she wouldn't have so much work if she didn't throw out his pop bottles. So he just said "Really, Beatrice, what do you mean?"

And here is where she said the absolute reason for her to fucking leave his life. Here is where he decided to shove on his sneakers and leave the apartment, only in a pair of pants, and walk, angry, to Thomas and Henry's apartment two blocks north, where he flopped angry on their sofa, accepting their coffee and really not at all minding the fact that they'd obviously been in bed having sex. This was it. This was fucking it.

"You are so like every damn Mexican. I'm the woman, I'm in the kitchen."

Fucking racist.

And he wasn't even Mexican. He was Brazilian.