Prompt: Elena does the laundry, and Nate doesn't know how to follow instructions.
She had her headphones on at near full-blast while she sorted their laundry, half-heartedly dancing as she tossed Nate's dusty jeans into the dark pile. Even if he's home all day, translating old books for the local university, he always managed to cover himself in cobwebs and dust and dirt by the end of the day. And no matter how many time she washed his clothes, she could never really get the smell of old stone and grit and pencil lead completely out of the fabric.
When she finished sorting, she tossed a load into the washer and cranked on the water. She figures she has about an hour before the cycle completed itself—good. Enough time to get some more research done on the unrest happening in Lebanon.
She was almost out of the basement when she heard an awful mechanical screeching, and ran back down the steps, pulling her earbuds from her ears and wincing at the sound. Goddamnit, he better not have ruined another washing machine. I told him to take everything out of his pockets—
She immediately turned off the washer, the source of the horrible noise, and yanked open the lid, peering in.
A few centimetres of water had settled in the basin, along with some foamy blue detergent, but it had been clearly jammed by something—again. She grabbed a basket and tossed the sopping clothes out of the washer, and inspected the inside tub of the machine.
"I knew it." A blue HB pencil was wedged into one of the small holes in the basin, stopping it from agitating—and judging by all the noise it had been making, God knew what else had fallen from his pockets and down into the guts of the washer. Old coins, crumpled paper, eraser stubs, stones he picked up from the beach... "Nate!"
She heard a thud of feet from above as he sat up from the living room couch, and she heard him stop at the top of the basement stairs. "Yeah?"
"How many goddamn times have I told you not to leave shit in your pockets?" she called back.
There was a long pause of silence, then a guilty clearing of his throat. "Maybe I can fix the washer this time," he finally said, voice sheepish.
She sighed, heading to the bottom of the stairs to look up at him. "Or maybe I'll take the day and we can go shopping for another washing machine." I'm gonna have to start a forensic pat-down of all his laundry before getting it anywhere close to a washer.
He scratched at his hair, which was mussed from him laying on the couch, probably watching TV—she'd heard him yelling at a history program earlier, telling the overly-tanned faux-historians on the screen about just how wrong they were in describing mid-fourteenth-century Iranian architecture.
"I got enough money from my last job," he said, squinting, as if trying to visualise the raw cash he stashed under the floorboards of his small office. "We should be fine."
Her music was still blaring from the buds dangling from her shirt, and she shut it off with a sigh. "Well put on your shoes, then, because I don't have any clean underwear for tomorrow."
"Is that really an emergen—"
"Nate."
"Putting my shoes on!" he called, heading for the front hall.
Elena huffed, grinned at his dumb comment, and jogged up the stairs. Shopping with Nate was always an experience—he had to touch everything, like smearing fingerprints on something allowed him to gain a deeper understand of whatever it was he was touching. She'd seen many an incredulous salesmen go red with irritation when they saw him marking up their shiny product, all the while Nate oblivious to anything except what he was inspecting. At least they weren't shopping for mattresses—they'd been kicked out of more than one department store for the things he did to the display bedding.
More entertaining than research, at least.