Vegeta turned over on his other side, trying to get comfortable in the king-size bed. There was plenty of room, yes, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was the tense back of his sleeping wife facing him.  The lyrics of a haunting love song that the little girl Trunks had taken to hanging around with had been singing earlier in the day came to mind. ***You don't touch me anymore, you never say the words I love you. You just sit behind your papers. Your silence cuts me like a razor.*** As much as he hated to admit it, Vegeta knew he was just as much to blame for the coldness in their relationship of late as Bulma. Both of them much too stubborn to admit being wrong, or even to admit that the cooling of their love was killing both of them.  ***Then you just hold me, in your arms so deep. I wanna feel you breathing on my skin. We fell out of love (how did we fall out of love?) Maybe we can fall back in.***  Was there hope that he might could lend a hand to mending whatever had gone wrong? The Saijin prince did not know. Even after all these years, the view humans held of love often baffled and mystified him. For Saiyajins, it was simple. You chose a mate, took her, protected her until she bore your offspring. Once she'd bred your heir, it didn't much matter. But this tenderness he felt for Bulma, the way he felt as if his heart was being torn from his body at the thought of losing her, this defied all he'd ever expected to feel.  ***Just as I'm leaving you, you walk in the room, I see the flicker in your eyes. And I say, "Maybe, not tonight."***  That had been what had stopped him from just leaving,the flicker of hurt he'd seen in Bulma's eyes. visible even through the red haze of justifiable rage. That had also been what had kept him from killing Yamcha, the sneaky little runt. Even after catching him sitting on the edge of the bed he and Bulma had shared since not long after Trunks had been born. It had been innocent, so Bulma had told him, but he'd allowed a strangely possessive fury to take hold of him. It was wrong, he knew that now, but to react to someone encroaching on territory he considered his with anger was natural for a Saiyajin, a throwback to the days when there were more Saiyajins than their world could support. Only the strong survived to produce the next generation. Even a prince's life was forfeit if he didn't have the strength necessary for survival.  BUT YOU'RE ON EARTH NOW, he reminded himself, THOSE DEFENSESIVE MECHANISMS ARE NO LONGER NEEDED. NO LONGER PRACTICAL, AS WELL. ASIDE FROM WHICH, BAKA, BULMA IS FAR MORE TO YOU THAN A PIECE OF PROPERTY. ADMIT AT LEAST THAT MUCH.  "Temme," He swore under his breath, leaving the bed quietly so as not to disturb the sleeping woman.  "Vegeta?" Bulma's voice, quiet for once,echoed still in the room's sudden frozenness. "My Ouji, please, don't turn your back on me."   "How can I not?" The statement held much bitter irony, but it was easy to hear the pain in that sardonic tone. "You certainly seem to want no part of me." "You're still angry about Yamcha? I told you it was totally innocent, and it was."  "It certaintly didn't look that way to me." Bulma's blue eyes lowered. "Our anniversery is coming up, and I wanted something special for you." She withdrew from a box under the bed a beautiully-carved crystal sculpture of the Eternal Dragon, Shen-Lon. "I had it made for you, because were it not for Shen-lon, I would never have gotten a chance to know the love I've found here with you. For a reminder of how we met, That's why Yamcha was here that night. The sculptor who made this is his cousin."  Vegeta groaned, mentally kicking himself for his own idiocy. "Can you forgive me for being such an utter baka? How could I have ever have thought that you and he were. . ."   Bulma set a hand on his arm. "Of course I forgive you. If I had walked in and seen Mom sitting on the edge of our bed like that, I'd probably have jumped to the same conclusion."  He wrapped his arms around her waist, content to simply feel her warmth against him, and drifted off to sleep.