When night gave way to morning, the slow gradient from black to blue, there was a certain calm. He in the baby's nursery, she lying naked amongst the sheets, savouring the wee hours before her caffeinated workday began. Oh, how they loved to play house. She watched the smoke from her cigarette rise and dissipate as it met the ceiling fan, unperturbed and spinning about dutifully. The impermanence of it all reassured her.
The sheets were cold in the early dawn. With every movement, their shadows were cast long across the room. This was the morning-after, or so it could only be called on the technicality that it was past twelve am, it would still be hours before breakfast.
If she tried hard enough, she might be able to forget last night, let the memories evaporate along with her tobacco-infused breath. Every one of these little disagreements had exploded into yelling matches, never able to be calmed through some kind of deadpan joke. They were so similar, the same comments and insults, that they'd blur together indiscernibly like an overexposed film. She couldn't remember what had started it this time, but it had happened at dinner. Utensils clanged against their plates, the rhythm of their conversation halted. She'd hiss at him, careful to cover the baby's ears. He'd yell. His energy, good or bad, always seemed to bubble beneath the surface until it exploded without a care for any potential casualties. A few glasses shattered. They were too good, each other's equal, able to pick out their flaws with just the right words. They'd go in circles until one day Rick found a way to cheat the system. He'd leave. It didn't matter what either said or did when he'd get up and decide destroying his liver at some distant bar was more important. The door slammed as he left her to pick up the pieces.
What came next, after a few empty bottles had dulled his senses she was sure, were slow, staggering steps up to the bedroom. He was so uncoordinated when he was hammered that it sometimes took him a few tries, interrupting Beth's sleep, before he ended up in their bedroom. He'd stutter out her name a few times more than he would while sober. He's trip and crawl across their bed, gripping the sheets between his fingers like an epic hike up Mount Everest. She'd groan, half annoyance half sleepy confusion. He'd shift his weight as he settled next to her and whisper apologies. Hints of beer hit her nostrils with every word. His voice would grow with desperation, words slurred into each other. An arm would slide around her back as another went between the fabric of her pyjamas and the bare skin of her stomach. Sometimes she'd kick him out of bed. Last night, she didn't.
As the light of day began to creep beyond the curtains of their windows, two shadows moved together with a deft familiarity. Even with as skin brushed against each other, their breath less than a millimetre away, his frantic pleas never ceased. He told her he was sorry. That he was a fuck-up who ruined everything. He was sorry. He was sorry. He held her tighter, just to reassure himself that she was still there, afraid to let her go even while she was in his grasp.
Later, they'd sink back into the mattress and out of sheer exhaustion. They'd forget what brought them here.
They'd had fights, arguments. It was commonplace, so much so that one could say—as some have—that it was the basis of their entire relationship. What was once witty banter, a verbal spar as they leaned over a pair of classroom desks, had grown into ritual, their blows softened to teasing until it simply became a sharing of ideas, jokes, an intellectual debate for the sole purpose of reminding each other they weren't alone. They were both too precocious, too guarded to admit that they might be stupid, desperate, normal enough to seek the other's company for its own sake. The added layer of interplanetary crime helped obscure it even more.
When did it stop becoming fun? She had her answer when Beth's cries echoed, muffled as it passed through the stretch of hallway between their bedroom and the nursery.
Neither made to get up, lying next to each other still dreaming, procrastinating. There was something special about this hour of night/day. Time slowed. Between sleep and wakefulness, they were at once lucid and carelessly languid. The crinkle of the sheets, the steady presence of his breath. His fingers brushed a hair across her face before tracing the edge of her cheek, delicately, in the way that his words weren't. He watched her eyes flutter, feeling the weight of his gaze, her lips curled into a sleepy smile. She brushed her feet, ice-cold, against his. It was quiet, no jokes, no insults. They could just be.
The hand of the clock ticked in tune with the rotation of the fan as Beth's cries continued from where she lay in her crib. The wails of an empty stomach or a soiled diaper, or both. She mumbled and turned before reaching a hand out to search for her glasses on the side table. He put a hand on her shoulder.
She plopped back onto the pillow, nestling into the blankets while she watched the curve of his back as he sat up to dress. The hard edges of his face softened in the dim blue of the room, the stark lines of his premature wrinkles, his unibrow hidden in the shadows. Belt buckled, his feet padded across the hall to the nursery. Whatever happened the night before, as it inevitably did, was too easily forgotten. And that was exactly what allowed it to happen again. She leaned over to fetch her cigarettes out of the side table's drawer.