“You know how I said I, uh. Spend a lot of time in the lake? Back home?” “Yes,” Zhenya said cautiously. Yes, Sid had told Zhenya that he was an inhuman fish creature. Zhenya had mostly recovered.

Sid came over for dinner a few nights later with an unanticipated bouquet of pink roses and hovered by the kitchen island while Zhenya put the flowers in water. Zhenya’s heart pounded in his chest. Flowers were a clutching gift; pink flowers— “Geno, uh,” Sid said, and Zhenya’s hands trembled slightly as he fussed with the blossoms. “I know it’s way too soon, but. Do you want to?”

Sid is smitten. He was smitten from the start, he thinks. The first time he saw Zhenya's dark eyes and hair and smooth skin. The way his cheeks flush the same color as his mouth with exertion, or passion. Sid knows that people make comments about his own mouth, the way it would be more suited on a childbearing male, but he thinks that they can’t possibly have seen Zhenya's. The perfect, sweet cupid's bow of his upper lip and the plush, fat pout of the bottom one.