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Sally doesn’t turn around when she hears the shower door slide open behind her.
“You’d better have brought your own towel,” she says. The leftover shampoo is slimy like crushed pondweed in her hands, water warm on the bare skin of her chest. She misses showers. She misses her ex-husband, too, sometimes.
“Right next to yours,” Wilbur promises.
“Good.” Sally has a stack on the bathroom counter: one a blue towel which is still fluffy even after that time Fundy spit up on it, one a grey-on-grey sealskin. She doesn’t wear it in most houses because stairs hurt her stomach, but when she’s human, she likes having it close.
Wilbur sets his hands on her shoulders before he drops a kiss to the back of her neck.
Then, of course, he makes an exaggerated gagging sound. The hands vanish. Sally turns around so he can see her roll her eyes.
“That didn’t look like shampoo,” Wilbur says when he’s finished spitting into the drain.
“It’s ocean-safe. Not much foam.” It’s also the only shampoo bottle here. Wilbur probably doesn’t see at the back of his own head very often. Sally’s starting to remember how little Wilbur sees about himself. “How’s Fundy?”
Wilbur’s eyebrows raise and his eyes dip down: to himself, to her. “Is that the only question that comes to mind?”
Sally closes her eyes and tips her head back into the spray. “So far.” He had a joke, once upon a time, about the words how do you walk. Sally because she was still new to feet when they met, Wilbur because, well.
“He’s with Niki,” Wilbur says. “She needed an intern for something and I needed to focus on my campaign. I can show you her house if you like. There’s some empty lots you might like to look at, too.”
“I told you, I’m not staying.”
They stand in the shower in silence for a few minutes while Sally soaps up her arms and Wilbur takes the shampoo. Sally tries to think of anything they can talk about that won’t become a big fight. The past is off-limits. The future doesn’t exist. They more or less exhausted the present over supper. Sally knows he’s coming up for re-election with Tommy against somebody named Quackity, which has a lot of implications she doesn’t care about. Wilbur knows her sister married into the Keolanuis of the Hawai’an Monk selkies, which has a lot of implications Wilbur doesn’t care about.
She gives up on talk and puts her hand on his arm. Wilbur gives her a self-conscious smile, lifting his hands to meet her as he steps closer to touch him.
It’s been a long time since Sally touched a human like this. She’s forgotten just how thin they are, how much they hate body fat. Seals are nicer.
When he kisses her, he hardly has to bend down, and he tastes minty like toothpaste. Sally presses into his hands, and he presses into hers until they’re both gasping, breath mingling in pleasure as the water streams down around them.