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“Hey Steven” you greet as your lover takes his shoes off at the front door. Steven blinked as he looked up to you across the apartment standing at the stove.
“How do you always know that it’s me dove?” He asks with a confused smile “You always get it right before I can even say hello.”
He leans in to smooch your cheek. You smile, leaning into his embrace before returning your attention to the bubbling pot of risotto in front of you.
“I just do. All of you share a body, sure, but the similarity ends there. Hungry?”
“Of course love. Smells amazing by the way.”
“Well tuck in because this is just about ready”
+++
Jake walked out of the bathroom towelling off his hair on his way to the bedroom.
“Hello Jake. Nice to know you three didn’t drown in there.” You say with a snicker from your position on the couch. You were nose deep in a book before you heard the door open and were quite looking forward to getting back to it.
“You know it was Steven who went into the shower, right?” He asked as pulled on a pair of slacks, his buckle clanking as he notched it in place.
“I know” you replied, not really paying attention.
“Querida,” He walked towards you, a suspicious look in his eyes. “How do you do it? You always know which one of us is there. How?”
“I just do” you huff as you adjust your position, trying to make the book you were so vitally interested in more obvious “You’re all different”.
“One day you’ll tell us” he says with a resigned sigh.
+++
The sun shone through the lacy curtains you had hung in the bedroom. Mark always thought they made the room look like his abuela’s house, but he secretly loved that they made sure the sun didn’t blind you both in the early morning hours yet still let the gold shine through to land on your soft hair.
He would also never admit that he loved seeing you like this, all soft from sleep and so trusting. His heart would soar every time you reached for him in your sleep, even in the dead of summer when he woke drenched in sweat from your shared body heat. Or the way your usually smooth voice was scratchy from disuse. Or the little smile you gave him when you woke up on lazy mornings, like you were just too happy that he was the first thing you saw.
And if he was right, it would be coming up about now as you rolled over and rubbed the sleep from your eyes.
“Mornin’ Marc”
“Morning babe” he breathed and again you graced him with that little smile that made him feel like he was the most important person in the world.
“Hey, how do you always know it’s me, huh? Or Steven. Or Jake. You always seem to know who’s out. How you you do it?” His tone was a lot softer than he’d realised, the wonder at her being there with him - and more than a little pleased about it to boot - bleeding through his question like a heartbeat.
“I just know. You’re all so different it’s honestly surprising that I seem to be the only one.”
“You never really answer that question, y’know that?”
“I know”
“One of these days I’m gonna get it outta ya. I know it.”
You hum in response, more concerned with burrowing yourself into his chest to care about what he was saying and who was he to argue with that?
+++
It came out on a Friday night six months later. It was too cold to go out anywhere, so Jake had grabbed a bottle on the way home. He made dinner too, his new cabbie job’s flexible hours were paying off and with the week you’d been having up to now, he decided to take the night off and spoil you a little.
“Corazón” you greeted as you put your purse down on the entryway table and tossed your keys into the bowl.
“Mi sol” he answered as the familiar warmth of your presence settled into his chest.
“Smells amazing in here. What is it?”
“Lengua con tomate. Your favourite.” His face seems to crack with the smile, his face unused to such pleasantries. It made you so happy to see he was getting better at it. The movement seemed more comfortable to him now.
“Urgh you’re the best. I love you.” You toed off your shoes and made your way to the kitchen to kiss him but before you could, he held a hand up.
“Wait, you haven’t even seen the best part” he passes you towards the small table deemed both the kitchen and dining room table, and the only one at semi-standing height. Riffling through the bag atop it, he pulled out a bottle and patiently waited for the smile that would soon come.
And boy did it ever. Mi sol was an understatement, your trillion watt smile burning though him like a solar flare. In his hands was a your favourite bottle of whiskey. It wasn’t easy to find either, and Jake thanked his lucky stars that Marc had had the foresight to order it in advance.
“You guys are the best!” You exclaimed as you threw your arms around his neck. Jake put the bottle down on the table and wrapped his arms around your waist, shrouding himself in your hair. He took a deep breath in, relishing the way your smell seemed to put him at such ease.
“One sec, I gotta get out of these clothes, then we can put a documentary with dinner? Maybe eat on the couch?” And though Jake was a stickler for eating at the table and talking, he couldn’t resist the idea of not having to wait through dinner to be close to you again.
By the time he’d set out your plates on the even smaller ‘living room’ table and poured each of you a glass, you were out of the bedroom swaddled in various articles of clothing, mixing both theirs and yours. The most notable to Jake being the undershirt he had chucked into the basket the night before. She smiled at him again, and again he was struck by the brilliance of it. She settled on the plush couch and invited him to join her.
“I saw this really nice baking documentary on Netflix I thought we could watch. I know you’re not really into that but Steven is and for you and Marc… well I thought maybe you could both decide on something from the show and we could bake it together?”
‘Bribing the opposition huh? That’s a dirty trick’ interjected Marc from the reflection of his steak knife. ‘Can’t say it isn’t working though’.
“Only if it has real butter in it. None of that weird milk stuff, okay?’ He said pointedly as he looked back into the reflection, the reflection seemed to smooth down to Steven’s softer expression.
‘Well that’s hardly fair now is it? How am I supposed to enjoy it then?’ He pouted.
“I’ll tell you what: we can make two things. One vegan, and one not. That way everybody eats. Deal?” You had that twinkle in your eyes that meant she knew she’d one. In his defence, he couldn’t be expected to say no to you. Not when you looked at him the way you did.
Both of you were buzzing softly through drink number two and had moved on from the soft documentary to a more exciting competition style cooking show.
‘Come on we all know that you have to temper the eggs, otherwise you’ll have breakfast icing with the scrambled egg in there-‘
“No no no what are you doing?! You can’t put those macarons in the oven yet they haven’t set properly!”
‘No. No. Absolutely you did not just mix that much matcha into the cake batter. You realise they won’t be able to taste a thing for the next month, you twit?’
“What do you mean you’re replacing the flour with cornstarch?”
Between you and Steven, there wasn’t a moment of peace to be had, but the catharsis of yelling at the TV was indisputable. A favourite pastime between you and Steven. Best way to get the jitters out from a hard day according to Steven. Personally, Jake would take a street fight any day, but it wasn’t him who needed the de-stressing right now. Jake ignored the show completely, simply enjoying the closeness of you pressed into his front and his arms wrapped around your waist.
Marc work up fifteen minutes later to the tv turned off and the dishes done.
“Marc, there you are. Thought I was gonna have to carry you to bed.”
By the looks of it, you were the one who would need to be carried. You swayed a little on your feet as you made your way over to him, bumping your nose into his cheek as you placed a chaste kiss there.
“C’mon. Wanna snuggle” You said as you took his hand and pulled him towards the bed.
“You ever gonna tell me how you know who it is every single time sweetheart?” He asked almost as a joke as he took off Jake’s slacks and tossed them into the basket.
“Oh. That’s easy. You all look different. You use different parts of your face.” You frowned as you realised that that didn’t really explain anything “like you have different expressions. You hold yourself differently. Like face posture. And regular posture I guess. That’s the easiest way to tell. Like Steven always has a wider eyes and his lips do that cute thing in the corners. Jake pinches his mouth more, and his eyes are wider, but not soft wide like Steven’s. More like he’s watching everything. Your face is more relaxed, but you frown more. Like you get these cute little creases in between your eyebrows and you have different frowns instead of just regular expressions.” She explains, and Marc is fascinated. He’d never realised you spent so much time just analysing their face.
“So that’s the magic trick then? Aside from the accents, I frown more, Steven looks like a kicked puppy, and Jake looks like a vulture?” He asks as he laughs. He feels Jake try to push to the front and lets him, curious to see what his body-mate wants to do so badly.
“But that’s not all, is it? You can tell us apart in the dark, Querida.”
“Well yeah of course there’s more, Jake. You touch me differently. You touch me like a you’re dying of thirst, or like one of those stupid fancy eggs with the jewels on them. Like I’m made of smoke or something and one wrong move will blow me away. Marc touches me like he’s robbing a bank, like he’s getting away with something. Either that or it’s like Scrooge McDuck in that one scene where he’s swimming in money. Steven touches me like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do, or like it’s the last time he gets to so he makes the most of it. Take all that you can carry kind of thing. That or like he has all the time in the world, and he intends to use all of it up. Depends on how you’re feeling.”
Jake pauses, thinking, and feels Steven getting antsy, wanting to push forward, but not quite having the experience to know how to flip smoothly like he and Mark. Jake recedes, allowing Steven to come to the fore.
“But even without that, the touching or the looking, you can always tell.” He says with a whine. Jake shakes his head in the bathroom mirror.
“Okay yeah. It’s just how you carry yourself. Steven, you’re gentle. You move so softly, but you’re also a bit of a klutz, so as hard as you try to make it soft, there’s always that little trip over your feet, or you’re bumping into the doorframe, or something like that. Jake is meticulous. I swear sometimes he measures his moves with a ruler or something. Delicate in a sort of mechanical way. Like a machine that works really smooth.”
“And Marc?”
“Marc is smooth. He moves like he’s dancing all the time.”
Steven smirks as he tries to imagine Marc dancing at all. “Bet he does a great funky chicken”.
You chuckle as you make your way under the covers and open your arms in invitation.
Steven smiles, and there is nothing that could make him happier than to join you. So he does.
“I love you” he whispers into your neck with a smile.
“I love you too” you answer as you wiggle around in his arms, getting comfortable. Steven’s head was quiet, the other two boys simply enjoying from the sidelines as Steven took his turn falling asleep with you in his arms. He let himself enjoy the peace of it as he drifted off to sleep.