Excerpt from "My Best Friend is a Mermaid". Series uploads Sundays on my AO3
If Lance doesn’t know any better, he swears that the charmingly off-tune hum gets more muted. He can hear the unsettling clicking and clacking of jars. As only a stealth master can, he tiptoes across his bedroom carpet all the way to the bathroom area.
…It calls meeee, no one knoooows how far it goooooes…
Lance works hard to temper his blood pressure the moment he witnesses Ava’s tiny digits polka-dotting her cheeks with bright green. And she continuously chatters away with a mysterious person, one who’s name Lance has heard before.
“You have to put it on like this, Trixie!”
“What are you doing, missy?”
The girl meets Lance’s eyes in the mirror with “Putting stuff on my face?”
“The same stuff I told you is important for me to use every day? And the same stuff I’m pretty sure I told you not to touch?”
“You said not to come in here by myself. So I bought Trixie in here with me. She’s older, so is it okay?”
“Sounds like I’m gonna have to have a talk with little Miss Trixie…”
Ava looks up at her invisible friend and gives her a quick nod. Lance supposes that’s her cue to take the floor, so to speak. And he swallows before speaking to this non-entity because it’s just easier that way.
He looks down, “Hi, Trixie? I’m Ava’s father-“
“Papí, she’s tall like you!” He held out his hand pretending to shake “Trixie’s”. Trixie did have hands, right?
“She’s a person, just like you and me, Papí. But sometimes she likes to swim with her mermaid tail at the beach.”
“Oh…she’s a mermaid. Well Trixie, there’s nothing in here for you, and Ava is not allowed in here without me, understand?”
And to keep up with this little charade, Lance gave it to her friend straight by rehashing the same speech about “off limits areas.” Which he shouldn’t have had to do in the first flippin’ place, but whatever.
Ava cowers into a stifled laugh that begins to fizzle to snickers.
If it weren’t for her total disregarding tone and the way she continues to smear the stuff on her face, he would’ve been much more dismissive. Instead, his composure blooms into a few hand waves, possibly even a puppet jerk of his cranium-he didn’t remember in the heat of the moment. He’s not quite yelling at her, just raising his voice above his normal talking volume.
“Ava Luci McClain, this is not funny! I can’t be going to the store and spending another two hours and another twenty dollars hunting this stuff down, so paws off!” He finishes with flamboyant yet unwitting waves of spirit fingers.
Her body hiccups some more until her cheeks swell from laughter.
Lance’s shoulders drop at that moment because it was almost pointless to interrupt what she’s doing right now. As the “papí authoritarian” juice floods from his veins and leaves sheepish fumes, he gets to work putting away the container and wetting a washcloth to wipe his daughter’s cheeks.
“Why are you laughing at me? Did the giggle monster attack you?”