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Mariana and Charlie are alone tonight, hands working in practiced rhythm as they made Juanaflippa’s bed. Mariana straightened the sheets as Slime fluffed up the pillows in the special way Juana liked, standing across from Mariana, their hands brushing every once and a while when their paths would overlap, and Mariana tries not to spend too much time focusing on her husband instead of the bed, but…
He has a look of overwhelming domestic calm, his eyes half-lidded as he works. Mariana sees a sliver of silver light from the open balcony outlining his eyelid and turning his eyes their palest shade of sage, but Mariana thinks she’s never seen them so beautiful before.
Slime’s hair outlines his face in soft brown tufts that just barely fade into a singed green, which Mariana hadn’t noticed about him before. The strands ripple or sometimes drip from his head, leaving Slime to ever so slightly flutter his lashes as a reaction when small droplets of his slime land on his nose or cheeks. Freckles drift to the surface where the droplets fell, as if repurposed. Mariana wonders why she never questioned the shifting and disappearing marks on her husband’s face before.
Besides his moonlit face, the contours of his body are especially visible in the contrast of Juana’s dark bedroom and the encroaching starlight, worn even more so with his sleeping tank-top that leaves nothing loose. Not even the hem of his shirt is untucked from his sweatpants, which seemed to be a habitual fashion choice Slime was particularly insistent about.
Not that Mariana minds, really.
Slime has forgone his glasses, instead neatly clasping them on the fold of his tank-top’s low collar, which means he likely can’t see very well, proving true by the amount of times Slime would accidentally touch Mari’s hand with a hushed “Oops, sorry” each time, and how he tended to squint in a way that brought up his nose when the sparce light didn’t hit his work just right. Glasses still perched on her own nose, Mariana is equipped to see all of these things about her husband in just about a minute, when Slime finally looks up as well and catches her eye.
He gives her a shy sideways smile as he reaches over to smooth another winkle in Juana’s pillow. He silently rolls his eyes at her and grins as he tosses his hair to make fun of Mariana, as if he hadn’t already been flaunting his silhouetted beauty by simply standing in front of her.
Mariana laughs and assumes the brunt of it is over, but once he finishes with the pillow, Slime leans over the bed and briefly touches his lips to hers through a smile. He absentmindedly chuckles to himself as he pulls away, brushing lint off his hands before walking out to get Juana. Mariana stares after him—the ghost of the kiss on her lips—before realizing she should follow him too, and speedily leaves the bed behind.
Slime wraps a hand around the edge of Flippa’s door and peeks into the room. Soft, melodic humming draws him in, hovering on the threshold of Flippa’s room because… This is Mariana’s and Flippa’s moment, and it feels sacrilegious to interrupt.
Slime can only make out the sloping figure of Mariana’s head from where he stands, and truthfully, Slime almost wants to believe there is nothing more. That Flippa had gone to Tilín’s house for a sleepover, and Slime could smoothly glide across the room and have Mariana to himself.
But this is nice, too. Slime slumps against the doorpost just to listen to the shifting reverberations of his wife’s voice in the wood, closing his eyes to savor the sound of half-murmured Spanish lullabies that felt warmly familiar though he seldom understood a word.
Mariana’s humming peters off, and Slime smiles quietly to himself as he watches her gently run her hand through their daughter’s bangs, perhaps not to fix them, but to admire her sleeping face.
“Slime, come here,” comes a clipped whisper. Slime blinks, startled out of his stupor at realizing Mari knew he’d been standing there. He leaves the door to sit with Mariana at their daughter’s bedside, leaning heavily against the back of the plush cushion as he felt his eyes being to droop.
Slime didn’t turn to look at her when he felt the side of Mariana’s head drop against the top of his—he is too busy sleepily admiring how much the crest of Flippa’s cheekbones matches Mariana’s perfectly, and how the oddly-shaped slope of her nose mirrors his own. She’s a perfect patchwork of all the few good aspects of her undeserving parents.
Slime links his fingers with Mariana’s over their bumping knees. He’s trying to commit the feeling of her soft pad to memory, trying to find each callous with a wandering fingertip. Mariana doesn’t react much beyond a slight tip of her head and a thoughtful hum, and Slime feels all the tension and anxiety drizzle out of his shoulders as he connects each of Mariana’s dot-shaped callouses like a sailor counting his stars into families of constellations. No one moves to turn off Flippa’s night light as they admire her presence, and that was alright. They’d be here again without her someday, when the stars aligned, and for now it was alright to be secretly happy.
Mariana moves her head to bury a kiss in Slime’s hair. “Let’s go to bed, cariño.” Slime closes his eyes to breathe the moment into his nose, to hold it there, in case he forgets. Then, he nods.
“Sleep well, Juanaflippa,” he whispers, half to himself. He flicks off her night light, and the room drowns in darkness. Mariana guides a glasses-less Slime across his house and into bed in the light of the moon, hand in hand.