I look toward the front of the line slowly creeping inside Beach Burritos. This place is always packed. We’re going to be here for a while. And maybe laying everything out there will actually help. Share it with someone completely unattached to me or Dominic so I can get it off my chest and into the universe and move on. I’ve been trying to have this moment with Kavya, but whenever I mention the breakup, she just calls Dominic a bag of dicks and changes the subject. Mom does the same thing, wanting to protect me and my feelings by making Dominic the bad guy. But it’s not that simple for me. I need to vent. And Ross is giving me that opportunity.

I take a deep breath. It’s the same one I take before starting a heat.

Then I dive in.

     Ross     

Holy flick, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I could tell Sean had something up with them, but everything pours out like a tsunami of emotion, nervously fidgeting with a ring on their finger the whole time. Apparently they’d found the love of their life, this boy named Dominic, experienced every last first you could have with him, and then he tossed Sean aside for somebody new. Humans can be such blowholes.

I mean, the way Sean feels about Dominic sounds a lot like how I feel about Drop, or Bob, as they’re now being called up here. We’ve spent every day together, were born on the same Blue Moon with the rest of the mer in our generation, and our relationship has been steadily switching from friendship to something else the last few moon cycles. We haven’t declared ourselves partners or anything, and we definitely haven’t scaled yet; it’s all just been flirty fun. But I have a feeling when this joke of a Journey is over, we’ll be so excited to be back in our mer bodies that we’ll be ready to share every last inch of our tails together, our scales literally lifting to expose a whole magical sea of nerves waiting to be explored. The Elders encourage us to use our human bodies to the fullest so we really know if we like human parts over mer ones, but I cannot imagine doing that. I think I want my first time with anybody to be with Drop, scaling when we’re both back. Who knows, maybe that will take us to the next level.