Thank you so much for the bi Elena aesthetic I love it! If you aren’t too overwhelmed by pride prompts could I also ask for a fic of Mackelena + Mack finds out Elena is bi? Thank you again!!! You’re wonderful
AN ~ here we are at last! I hope you like it. It’s only short for a lot of reasons but I hope you enjoy it and I apologise in advance for my attempts to avoid any kind of spanish grammar other than that required for the premise of the fic lol
During a Spanish conversation over pool, Mack wonders if he misheard Elena. He didn’t.
(& here’s the aesthetic for those who missed it)
Fluff. Rated light T for some mild innuendo/sexual themes.
The word rolled right off her tongue, and if Elena had not paused in that moment to concentrate effort on her shot, Mack might never have caught it. The wheels of Spanish grammar turned in his mind and he wondered if he, at this level, could correct her - or if she was about to correct him, for some assumptions he had been making. He bounced the rubber butt of his pool cue against the ground, pretending to observe and strategise with the new arrangement of the balls. But it was a foregone conclusion: his careful lack of a response was a response in and of itself and the likelihood of him not being called out on that dropped to zero in a split second, when he caught Elena eying him across the table. She leaned against her cue pointedly, teasing him as she drew out the silence she’d caught him in. Oh, man.
Well, there was nothing else for it now. What’s done was done. So - a little timidly, not that he would admit that (and not that she didn’t already know) - Mack cleared his throat and queried -
“¿Cómo? Shouldn’t it be novino?”
“No,” Elena corrected. “I’m still talking about Mariana.”
There was a slight smile on her face, just like the one she got when she was about to sneak past him and win at pool. Mack groaned silently: she was enjoying this way too much. He was never going to live this down.
“I thought she was just- just a friend?”
Elena shook her head, laughing at the sheer number of times she had heard variations on a theme.
“Maria was my friend,” she explained. “Mariana was my girlfriend. Mi novina. I’m bisexual, Mack. That word is similar here, no? It means I have had girlfriends and boyfriends too. And you.” Elena paused to give Mack an earnest smile, because as much as she loved to rib him, she loved to remind him how dear he was to her heart - and part of that fondness was real for Mariana too. “We met back in Colombia, when I worked at the museum. She did a lot of the art restoration. Her handiwork was beautiful.”
There was a thoughtful little purr at the end there, in a tone Mack very much recognised. Biting his tongue, he bent over to take the shot. She wasn’t about to let him goad him into putting his foot in his mouth, and that was something he predicted he could do quite easily on this subject.
“Hm, what?” Elena teased, cocking her hip against the table and turning her head to a ridiculous angle as if the power of her gaze would distract Mack, as she tried to catch his eye and he tried surprisingly hard to stay focused. “Nothing to say about my beautiful girlfriend, Turtle Man?”
“Nope,” Mack insisted, lining up the shot. Staring straight down the end. Plotting the balls in his mind. “Nothing except that I know it’s mi novia hermosa and not mi hermosa novia.”
He could sense Elena making her way around the table toward him, and yet- and yet- he couldn’t bring himself to hurry up already and make the damn shot.
“Nothing about her… handiwork?” Elena mused. The attempt to distract him was obvious, and yet, he was distracted. She was infuriating. And God help him, he loved it.
“I don’t know the word for handiwork,” Mack offered, “but it’s no contest. I reckon I could make a decent frame, but I’m sure her art is way more beautiful than mine.”
He lifted his eye from the line of the cue, straightened a little, and turned to stare her in the face - just inches away - because there was no way he was about to take his shot when her next line had to be:
“That’s not the handiwork I was talking about.”
They stared each other down for a few seconds until one of them - both of them, not that they’d admit it, or how much they loved it - dropped the ball and let their eyes fall to the lips.
“So…” Mack proposed, “shall we call this halftime or…?”
