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?”

Geno was in pre-heat when he showed up at the rink: Sid could smell it on him. Geno swanned into the locker room with his head held high, kind of glowing with self-satisfaction, and smelling ripe with it, right on the edge of tipping over.

“Sid, I’m so—I’m sorry,” Geno said. “My stupid—I’m ruin everything, I—” “Shut up, Geno,” Sidney said, already intensely weary of listening to Geno’s self-recrimination. “You’ve barely even done anything.” Geno’s voice dropped what sounded like an entire octave. “But I want to.”

The first Zhenya heard about it was an email from Sidney in the middle of August.

Merpeople didn’t kill humans except in stories. Merpeople also didn’t talk to humans, or bob up in the water near where a human was fishing from the dock and tell him to throw back anything that wasn’t a lionfish, or kiss humans or look at them the way Sid was looking at Zhenya now, as Zhenya finally stepped out of his trunks. Merpeople kept to themselves. But not Sid.

It was hot, and Sid felt kind of weird about thinking it was hot. This guy was screwing himself on camera for money. That wasn’t really Sid’s scene. He closed the browser window. Fine for other people, but not his thing.

He was dying to know, obviously he was dying to know; obviously he knew something had happened, with the way Geno and Sid kept looking at each other, and holding hands like that, which Sidney had never seen them do. And kissing on the couch, and Sid looking like he was up in the clouds, just totally gone, like his feet were floating at least a kilometer above the earth.

Sitting at the table was Sid: Sid as Zhenya had first known him, almost a decade before: dorky, long-haired Sid, his cheeks round with baby fat. He couldn’t have been older than twenty, and even that was generous. “Wow,” baby Sid said. “Are you Evgeni Malkin?"

After a while, Sid forgot that it was strange. Early on in Geno's second season, Sykora took Sid aside and said, “Look, what is going on with Malkin,” and it took Sid a moment to even figure out what he was talking about. Sid shrugged. “That's just how Geno is.” “Like a routine,” Sykora said, expression still skeptical. “A superstition?” “Sure,” Sid said. “Something like that.”

The locker room chatter started up almost at once, providing a screen of background noise. Zhenya sat down beside the ghost. “I’m captain. Evgeni Malkin.” “Sidney Crosby,” the ghost said. He didn’t offer his hand, which made Zhenya think he had been dead for a while, long enough to shed the ingrained habits of the living. “I’m, uh. Is it really 2018?”

The naiad moved in shortly after Sid finished his house, that first summer, a week after he filled the pool. He noticed some splashing one morning while he was eating breakfast, and when he went outside to investigate, she popped her head up out of the water, clung to the side of the pool, and hissed at him. “Uh,” Sid said, still holding a slice of toast in one hand. Dew from the grass chilled his bare feet. “Are you—hi?”