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There were a lot of dishes to be done. The past month had been hectic to say the least, with extra responsibilities and chores placed on Agustín and Julieta. It was to be expected of course, with Pepa and Félix recovering after the tragedy that had covered the entire Encanto in snow created by grief, almost never leaving their room.
They were feeling getting better, the snow had finally melted, and Agustín was delighted to see the couple leaving their room to roam around Casita, happy to see his sister in law slowly recovering. Whenever he saw a tiny smile on her face, he was happy because she was healing. It was still too early for them to leave the house though, and therefore everyone had made it clear that they didn’t need to bother with their chores.
Agustín and Julieta would have them covered until they felt ready. The extra wood chopping, making every meal, the laundry, cleaning, mopping, dusting, to name a few. But with Julieta’s duties to the Encanto and Agustín’s own chores, they had been constantly busy and in need to prioritize. And with a large number of plates and an almost infinite number of cutlery, doing the dishes had been the least prioritized on their list of chores. Which is why the couple suddenly found themselves tackles with a mountain of dishes to clean, with Julieta washing them for Agustín to rinse them off, dry them and put them away.
It was easier working together, after all. At least it went quicker, as long as Agustín didn’t accidentally smash anything on accident. Thankfully he didn’t, at least not this time around. And not to brag or anything, but Agustín thought that he and Julieta were a really good team when it came to doing the dishes.
They worked together in a nice harmony, with Julieta’s beautiful voice filling the air as she hummed one of the many songs Agustín sometimes sang for her between laughter and tickling sessions that usually ended with him bruised because he never seemed to learn his lesson about not tickling his extremely ticklish wife. Once she finished humming, he leaned forward and pressed a kiss onto her forehead, and let his fingers gently grace against her stomach. Julieta immediately bursts out into laughter and almost hits him in the face with the plate she’s holding out of pure instinct.
“Agustín! If you tickle me now there’s going to be an accident.”
“Well, I just adore your laugh too much to refrain.”
“So I guess you still haven’t learned your lesson then? You know I always end up accidentally injuring you when you tickle me.”
“Well, it’s a small price to pay for your laughter,” he says as he takes the plate from Julieta’s hands, rinses it off, and then puts it on the growing pile of clean plates to his right. He sees how his wife simply rolls her eyes as she grabs another dirty plate and begins washing.
“Sometimes you’re impossible.”
He chuckles at her words and presses another kiss onto her forehead, her sweet voice and humming still ringing beautifully in Agustín’s ears. Right now, hearing more of her laughter would be like a dream come true, so of course Agustín took matters into his own hands as he began to sing the song his wife had previously been humming.
“Mirame, mirame,” he began as he finished drying the next plate, never looking away from Julieta. He had a huge smile plastered across his face as he was singing, and then gently patted her on the shoulder. To his delight, she laughed, beautiful music to his ears. “Quiereme, quiereme.”
He saw how her cheeks flushed pink, and he took it as a sign to take her hands in his own the moment she let go of the plate she was holding. He leaned closer and made sure to exaggerate his expressions for the next line.
“¡Bésame morenita!”
He holds her tighter, and Julieta’s laughter echoes through the walls and makes Agustín's heart skip a beat. He takes a step backwards and spins her around, ready to continue with a flirty, slightly goofy dance, but Julieta gently pushes him away with a gentle expression. Her eyes are so dark and beautiful, and her hair is framing her face in the most delicate ways possible as it is hanging down her shoulders loosely. Dark, magnificent curls.
“Amor, we need to do the dishes first.”
Agustín sighs, having really looked forward to a dance with his wife, but knows she’s right. They couldn’t keep off doing the dishes any longer.
“Fine, you’re right.”
Julieta presses a kiss onto his cheeks.
“I didn’t say
no
to a dance, let’s just save it for when we’re done. Let it be our little reward. And do keep singing, you know how much I love your voice.”
He gives her a nod, and the two of them continue washing the dishes as Agustín finishes the rest of the song. He adores the light blush that is present on Julieta’s face the entire time. It fills him with an unexplainable joy. Even after more than two and a half years of marriage, and almost seven years since their relationship first started, he still feels the same magical spark he felt for her then, with the same intensity, burning bright.
Once the song is done, he begins serenading her with a second one, and everything turns into a wonderful peaceful moment as they get the work done. Soon, the stack of clean plates on Agustín’s side is overwhelmingly tall, and Julieta has moved on to cleaning the cutlery. Agustín takes that as his sign to put the plates away and does so in several trips, not even daring to think of the idea of carrying more than four plates at a time in case he slipped.
Today wouldn’t be a day where he was the accident prone one, though.
Once Agustín had finished putting all the plates away, Julieta was in the process of putting the last of the clean cutlery on the counter for Agustín to dry off. He saw how she let out a sigh of relief over the fact that they only had the glasses left, and wiped her hands off in order to scratch the back of her neck with the backside of her hand.
Something was wrong though, because he saw how his wife immediately tensed up when she was in the middle of scratching. A second pass as she stares into nothingness, and the next, her hand is in front of her face, Julieta staring at it.
“Mierda!”
Her swearing echoes through the Casita, and is followed by a whole sentence only containing the worst profanities Agustín had ever heard, not a single normal word in between. He hears the pure anger and slight fear in her voice, and looks over at his wife in concern, still not knowing what had caused such a reaction from her.
“Mi amor, is everything okay?”
Julieta answers with a loud angry groan as she violently hits the air with her arms all stretched out, she’s all tense.
“No! My wedding ring is gone! I must have dropped it down the sink!”
Her explanation is then filled by another chain of profanities, each one worse than the last, and if Agustín hadn’t known his wife since they were children, he would have been terrified of her sudden outbursts with profanities that would have caused the village priest to ask for forgiveness for simply hearing them. Agustín did know Julieta though, and was one of the few people (not even her mother knew) to know that she always resorted to an ungodly swearing when stressed or angry.
And this was a perfectly reasonable thing to be stressed about.
“Do you want me to get Félix?” he asks. “He is usually the one that fixes the sink when something is up?”
Julieta shakes her head, and Agustín sees how she’s taking a deep breath and she clenches her fists.
“No time, and he’s busy with Pepa. I’ll fix it.”
Agustín is about to give Julieta a nod, understanding that she was probably the one taking care of anything kitchen related for her entire life, sink included. But instead of simply starting to unscrew the bolts and take the parts apart like a normal person would, he watches in fear as Julieta takes up her rolling pin as she looks over at the sink in determination.
Before he has any time to stop her, her scream echoes through the house as she runs towards the sink, hitting the pipes with full force. He hears a painful crack and the loud sound of metal being hit. And it doesn’t stop, because Julieta hits the sink over and over again, with the same ferocity as if she had been in a drunken fistfight by the town bar at three in the morning after someone had insulted her sister (that had been a VERY interesting birthday outing when the triplets had turned twenty four). He’s almost scared of her (and slightly attracted by her power), as he sees her trying to break apart the sink like her life depended on it by brute force, instead of unscrewing it. It reminded him of how much stronger his wife was than him, her muscles were terrifying.
Half a minute passes, and then the sink breaks apart the moment Julieta calls it an insult (poor Casita, Agustín thought). The sound of the metal pipe falling onto the floor tiles hurts Agustín’s ear as it bounces away. Julieta throws the rolling pin to the side, and he can see that the wood is damaged. The metal pipe looks worse though, with deep powerful dents everywhere.
Julieta picks the pipe up with anticipation in her eyes, shaking it. To their relief, the sound of metal hitting metal is heard, and soon Julieta’s wedding ring falls onto the floor, the golden wedding band glimmering in the sunlight from the windows.
Agustín lets out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding as he sees his wife gently pick it up. She has a soothed smile on her face, pleased with herself, and Agustín didn’t even want to imagine what her reaction would have been if the ring had been lost. It wouldn’t surprise him if his wife had decided to uproot the entire Encanto in order to find it, forcing the entire village to partake.
Julieta puts the ring back on her finger, and at once all the anger and stress seems to disappear from her face.
“You’re not getting away from me that easily,” she tells the ring as if it wasn’t an inanimate object, but a person. “You’re the one good thing I have in life and I’m not going to let you slip away.”
“Julieta, are you okay?” Agustín asks her as he thinks over the words he has just heard her say. She gives him a happy nod and presses a kiss onto his cheek.
“I’m all fine now, mi amor. Well, as fine as a woman can be when she almost loses her most precious belonging.”
“Your wedding ring is your most precious belonging?”
She laughs.
“Of course it is! It’s the physical sign of my undying love for you, and your love for me. It’s proof to everyone else that we’re going to be together for the rest of our lives, and that we’re experiencing the most beautiful feeling there is to experience together. I would have been devastated if I lost it.”
Agustín nods at her explanation.
“That makes perfect sense, it’s beautiful.”
“My wedding ring? Of course it is, you have an identical pair.”
“No, well, I mean yes. Our wedding rings are beautiful, but I meant the sentiment behind them. Your explanation was beautiful, and I can understand why you acted the way you did,” he says, gesturing to the broken sink. Julieta’s cheeks flush red as she lets out a soft laugh.
“Sorry, I might have gotten a bit overboard there. I was very emotional.”
“Well, maybe a little , but I’ll help you fix it. Looks like we have a new chore.”
Julieta sighs.
“Agustín, I love you and I trust you with my life, but I don’t think Casita would trust you with repairing the sink.”
“You just assaulted Casita.”
“There’s a difference. I did it for love. You would break them by accident.”
“Fair enough, I’m a tailor, not a plumber. I would probably injure myself and make everything worse somehow, and I don’t want the house to hate me when this is where I’m going to live until the day I die.”
Julieta chuckles as she kisses him once more.
“Good call. Could you please be a dear and get the tools from the shed for me? Looks like I have one more thing to fix before I can take you up on that dance offer.”
“For you, mi amor, I would wait patiently for days for the dance.”