Excerpt

          I spot Vano at the shore, lounging on his belly, looking off into the distance. He smiles and rises up onto his palms when he sees me, waving me over with a pair of clawed fingers. 
          For some dumb reason, I almost don’t want to go over...don’t want to hear about how happy he is to met her, how cute he thinks her fins are, or whatever his kind find attractive in their opposite gender. But I head over, wiping some residual droplets off my brow and crouching before him in the sand. 
          “Morning,” I say. 
          He winces. “Did you sleep okay?”
          Ah shit, it’s obvious. I shrug a shoulder. “Slept alright. How is she?”
          Vano nods. “Looks like she was out of the water for too long. Poor thing didn’t know she was taken by the Kholorua, either, so she woke up confused as backward currents.” 
          I snicker at his strange idiom. “Glad she’s alright now, then.” 
          “Yeah, she’s alright,” he says. Leaning back onto one palm, and the length of his tail, he uses his free hand to gesture me forward. “Come down.” 
          I hold up a hand, grimacing and glancing away. “That’s alright.” 
          His hand remains airborne. “Wh...why not?” 
          “Ehhh…” I creak out as I slowly stand. Generally I don’t like towering over him, so I tilt my hips and face my body to the side. My feet begin walking on their own, and I mosey back to my shelter as he slithers along the sand, walking with his hands. “I don’t want to intrude.” 
          “...the fuck would you be intruding on?” he asks. 
          A phrasing he learned from me, for sure, and his tone suggests he means it much more gently than it would normally imply. 
          I’ve reached my shelter, leaning over behind it to tuck the stems of my new leaves into the crossing support vines. “I mean...I imagine you two don’t want me around anymore.” 
          He’s quiet for a while. I get another leaf tucked in before he says quietly, “I didn’t realize you knew about Væliāḷu impermanence, but it’s not relevant anyway. We aren’t doing it now, I’m going to give her a few days to get back to sorts, and get to know me first, at least. You should meet her--she’s very nice.”
          Ohhh, well fuck--so they are going to bang. They actually are a ‘unit’, now. 
          Damn, I didn’t realize how secretly hopeful I’d been that he’d assure me there wouldn’t be anything romantic between the two of them. 
          I just tuck the last two leaves in to overlap any openings as best as I can, then step around to the front of the leaning shelter and sit myself down underneath. 
          “I’m not in the best of moods right now, sorry…” 
          He brings himself further up the shoreline, fully out of the water, until he’s a pace away from me. A hand on my knee, he strokes at the dull, red fabric there. “I can kind of tell. What’s wrong? Is it about Mri?”
          So that’s her name. 
          ...It’s pretty. 
          Sighing out, I rub the side of my face and then plant it into my palm. “I guess so.” 
          Vano has the audacity to snicker. “Are you jealous? Jīvitayē ræḷi, Milo--there’s no reason to be.” 
          I furrow my brows together and stare at him for a moment. When he says nothing, I raise a brow instead. “Vano you literally just admitted that you’re going to sleep with her in a few days.” 
          He opens his mouth, and I can already see the dismissive tone on his face. 
          Quickly, I add, “And by ‘sleep with her’, remember that in human words that means ‘mate’.” 
          He pauses, listening, then looks straight at me again. “Yes...because of the impermanence. What else am I supposed to do?” 
          With a soft groan, I rub a fist into my eye. Quietly, “I don’t know what you mean by that. I’m not completely fluent in Kathāvi, yet.”
          “It’s the way Væliāḷu bodies work,” he explains gently. Vano never gets upset about our miscommunications, misunderstandings, or my dense ass not remembering something he’s already told me. I seriously love him for it. “When Væli females reach a certain age, if they haven’t yet birthed offspring, their bodies cease to survive. They just stop working, over the course of a few weeks or a month, if they’re lucky.” 
          I take my head off my palm and stare at him in shock. “The fuck…?”
          “Once she gets eggs in her and produces offspring, she’ll be fine. She’ll have a normal, two hundred year lifespan like the rest of us. But right now she’s approaching sixty, and without eggs, she’ll just...stop living. The spots on her gills, I don’t know if you saw them, but they’re dark. And quite large. She’s got a month before she starts to go under, I think.” 
          “I-I...I didn’t know.” 
          “You’re not Væliāḷu, it’s alright.” 
          I hang my head, looking into my lap and brushing some sand from my pants. “Well, still...If you’re, like...about to start a family with her, I don’t want to get in the middle of that.” 
          Vano takes in a deep, hissing breath, cupping the meat of my calf with both his hands and laying his face against my knee, stroking his cheek back and forth idly. “I just don’t see how you have any sort of negative impact on what she and I do. Why don’t you come down and meet her? Say hello? We’ll be up later today for sunbathing, unless it decides to downpour again.” 
          I sigh, trying to chase my thoughts into some sort of logical order. 
          “At least come in out of the rain.” 
          A laugh falls out of me, and I glance at the lake. “And submerge myself underwater, instead? That’ll keep me dry.” 
          His head tilts upward to look at me. “It’s a different kind of wet.” 
          I raise a brow and say half-mockingly, “The good kind?”
          He nods in all earnest. “Because it means we’re together.”