Page 45 of Satisfied By the Slime
She lifts her face from my chest and wipes her eyes with the back of one slick hand, leaving a smear of coconut oil and teal shimmer across her cheekbone.
“The batch,” she says. Her voice is wrecked. “The rosemary-oat. We left the second batch at trace. It’ll be—”
She looks over my shoulder at the pot on the counter.
The soap mixture has set into a solid block in the mold, and where drops of my substance fell during—during everything—the surface has a faint iridescent sheen. Tiny veins of teal and gold marbling through the creamy white.
“Ruined,” she says.
We both look at the mold.
The soap is beautiful. Wrong, completely unsellable, nothing close to what the Verdance order requires, but beautiful.
The shimmer catches the studio light and throws tiny prismatic sparks across the ceiling. The studio smells like rosemary and coconut and the mineral scent of my body after such a powerful release.
Outside, the desert heat presses against the windows, and somewhere in the distance a quail calls its two-note song.
Her breathing deepens. Her hands relax inside me, fingers uncurling, and her weight settles more fully against my chest.
I thin myself where her skin is overheated and warm myself where goosebumps rise on her arms, and she makes a small sound, barely voiced, that means comfort.
Her eyelids droop.
Fight to stay open.
Lose.
She sleeps against me on the labeling counter, one leg hanging off the edge, parchment paper crumpled beneath her, coconut oil cooling on her skin.
Her breathing finds the slow, even cadence of deep rest, and the tension shecarries in her jaw finally, fully releases.
She looks younger when she sleeps. Softer around the edges.
The line between her brows smooths into nothing.
I hold still.
I think about the word I’ve been circling for days now.
The one that describes what we’re building in this small studio in the desert, with soap curing on the counter and dust motes turning in the light and a woman asleep in my arms who brought me rocks from a store because she thought about what I might enjoy touching.
I don’t have the word yet.
It might be something I have to make from scratch, the way she makes soap, combining things that shouldn’t work together and waiting to see what they become.
I can wait.
Decades of practice, and for the first time, the waiting feels like something I’m choosing rather than something I’m enduring.
The quail calls again outside.
The shimmer bars cure in the light.
Maisie breathes, and I hold her, and the day stretches ahead of us like a road through open desert, unhurried and warm and going somewhere neither of us has been.
Chapter 11
Domestic Creature
