For a long moment, he didn’t move at all.

Then I felt the tendril around my ankle tremble. And the whole bath let out a long, slow, shuddering sigh.

I’d never heard a sound like it. It went on and on, like air leaving a balloon, like a wave drawing back down a beach. The surface of him rippled from one end of the tub to the other. His blurred face slipped beneath it and was gone. The great gleaming mass of him slumped and spread and relaxed, settling against the sides of the bath like a cat stretching out in the sun.

Then he overflowed.

Not violently. Lazily. He spilled over the rim of the tub in a slow, glistening tide and poured out across the tiles, around the broken glass, through the puddle of wine. Tendrils unfurled from him in every direction, long and supple and curling, reaching across the floor and up the walls and along the edge of the vanity. One wound itself around the towel rail. Another draped itself over the toilet cistern. The bathroom filled with soft, rippling blue-green light.

And a long, slow wave of him rolled up against my legs, cool and heavy, and stayed there.

“Oh,” said Milo’s voice, from everywhere at once. It was thick with relief. “Oh, gods. Tess. I didn’t know how— I forgot it could feel like this.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It came out wobbly. “Good?”

“It’s like taking off shoes that are two sizes too small.” A ripple ran through him. “After wearing them for five years. Straight.”

I reached out and laid my palm flat on the swell of him against my knee.

He was cool. Not cold — cool, like the shallows on a summer morning. Smooth and soft and impossibly yielding. My hand sank into him a little, and he held it, gently, the way you’d hold something precious. Beneath my palm, I felt a faint, slow pulse. Like a heartbeat. Like the tide.

Then, slowly, he warmed.

I felt it happen. The coolness under my hand eased, and softened, until he was the same temperature as my skin. As if he were matching me.

“You’re doing that on purpose,” I said.

“I always have.” His voice was soft. “Every time you touched me. I’d try to warm up for you. I never quite managed it in the other shape.”

Something caught in my throat.

I looked at him. All of him. Spread across my bathroom floor in a great translucent shimmer, his tendrils curling and uncurling in lazy contentment, the afternoon light turning him to sea glass and sapphire. He was the strangest thing I’d ever seen.

He was also, without any doubt, Milo. I could feel it. In the slow, hopeful way he pressed against my legs. In the tendril still wrapped around my ankle, holding on as if I might bolt.

My best friend. Who’d been in love with me for five years and held his breath the whole time.

I stood up.

He went very still around me. “Tess?”

I didn’t answer. I pulled my work polo over my head and dropped it on the floor. Then my bra. Then I unbuttoned my jeans and shoved them down, and my underwear with them, and kicked them into the corner, and stood there naked in my bathroom, ankle-deep in my best friend, with my heart going like a drum.

Every tendril in the room froze.

“Tess,” Milo said. His voice had gone strange. Thin and wobbly. “What are you—”

“I’m getting in the bath,” I said.

The silence after that was so complete I could hear the tap dripping.

“You don’t have to,” he said at last. Very quietly. “If this is— if you’re doing this because you feel sorry for me—”

“Milo.” I looked down at the shimmering mass of him around my feet. “Five years. You think I never thought about it? You, I mean. Before any of this.”

A ripple went through him from end to end.

“You did?”

“You held my hair back while I threw up tequila on my thirtieth birthday. You sat up with me for three nights when Pickle died. You make me tea exactly right every single morning.” I swallowed. “Of course I thought about it. I just thought you didn’t want me. You always pulled away first.”

“Because I was cold,” he said, anguished. “Because every time I held you, I could feel myself slipping. I thought if you held on too long, you’d feel something wrong and—”

He stopped.

I stepped over the rim of the tub.

He moved for me at once. The mass of him parted around my legs, swirled up around my calves, my knees, drawing me in. I sank down into the bath, and he rose to meet me, and it was like nothing I’d ever felt.

It was like sinking into warm water that wanted to hold you.

He flowed around my hips, my waist, my ribs. He cradled the back of my neck so I could lie back without slipping. He was everywhere at once — soft and smooth and silken, gently, constantly moving, matching the heat of my skin so exactly that I couldn’t tell where I ended and he began. I let my head fall back against him and closed my eyes and let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding for five years too.

“Oh,” I whispered.

“Is it all right?” His voice came from right beside my ear. “Is this—”

“It’s perfect.”

Something shifted above me. I opened my eyes.

His face had risen out of the surface beside mine. Blue-green and translucent, gleaming in the light. It wasn’t quite the face I knew. Softer, smoother, the features less fixed. But they were his eyes. Dark and wide and frightened and hopeful, looking at me like I was something he’d been waiting his whole life to see.

I reached up and touched his cheek. It gave under my fingers like the surface of a pond. Then I pulled him down, and kissed him.

His mouth was cool, then warm. Soft and slick and yielding, and he made a sound against my lips I felt all the way down my spine. For a moment he was clumsy, startled. Then he kissed me back, slow and deep and wondering, and the whole bath moved around me, a great slow surge of him wrapping tighter around my body.

And then the tendrils began.

They rose out of the bath around me, one after another, slow and curious. One drifted up over my shoulder and down across my collarbone, so lightly I shivered. Another curled around my wrist and drew my arm gently up, out of the way. Another traced the curve of my breast, slow and exploratory, circling, until it brushed my nipple and I gasped into his mouth.

“Tess,” he breathed. “Tell me if—”

“Don’t you dare stop.”

He didn’t.

He touched me everywhere at once. That was the thing I hadn’t understood until it was happening. Not two hands, or even four. Dozens. Tendrils of every size, from fine as a thread to thick as my wrist, sliding over my skin in a hundred places at the same time. They cupped my breasts and rolled my nipples between soft, slick coils. They stroked the sensitive skin inside my elbows, behind my knees, along the arches of my feet. They wound around my thighs and drew them gently apart. And all the while the rest of him held me, rocked me, matched the heat of my body exactly, so there was no cold edge anywhere, no gap, nothing but him.

I’d never felt so completely touched in my life. Every nerve I had was lit up at once.

When a tendril slid between my thighs, I arched so hard I would have gone under if he hadn’t been holding me up.

It was slow. So slow. A long, smooth, silken stroke along the whole length of me, then another, then another, until I was trembling. Then it shifted. Changed. I felt it grow thinner at the tip and curl, finding my clit, circling it with a pressure so precise and so gentle that I sobbed out loud.

“There?” Milo asked, his voice shaking.

“There,” I gasped. “Milo, there—”

He stayed there. Circling, stroking, flickering, and all the while the rest of him kept moving over me. His mouth on mine, swallowing every sound I made. Coils at my breasts, around my wrists, sliding slow and slick over my belly. I came the first time almost embarrassingly fast, shuddering and clutching at nothing, while he held me and murmured my name against my lips.

He didn’t stop. He just slowed down, and gentled, and let me come back. Then he began again.

“What do you want?” he whispered. “I can be anything. Any shape. Any size. You just have to tell me.”

I opened my eyes and looked at him. At his translucent face hovering above mine, gleaming and soft and uncertain. At the rippling blue-green mass of him filling the bath, holding me, wrapped around every inch of my body.

“I don’t want you to be anything,” I said. “I want you. The way you are. Just like this.”

Something in his face broke open.

Then I felt him press inside me.

Not a shape. Not something made to look like anything. Just him, flowing into me, soft and slick and warm, filling me slowly. I felt him enter me and keep coming. He stretched me gently. Filled me completely. Then he pressed deeper, flowing into every space, shaping himself to the exact contours of my body from the inside, until there was no part of me he didn’t touch.

I cried out. I couldn’t help it. It was like being filled with warm water that pulsed. That moved. That knew me.

And then he started to move.

Not in and out — or not only. He rippled. He swelled and eased, swelled and eased, a slow rolling wave inside me, matching the tide-beat I’d felt beneath my palm. He pressed against every sensitive place at once. The tendril at my clit never stopped. The ones at my breasts never stopped. And the rest of him rocked me, held me, moved with me, until I couldn’t tell anymore where the bath ended and my body began.

The pleasure didn’t build like it ever had before. It rose, like the tide coming in. Slowly, inevitably, from every direction at once. It rose up my thighs and through my belly and into my chest until I was drowning in it, and still he kept going, slow and patient and endless.

When it broke, it broke everywhere.

I came so hard I screamed into his mouth. My whole body seized and shook. I clenched around him inside me, and he felt it — I knew he did, because the whole bath shuddered with me, a great convulsing wave from end to end that slopped over the rim of the tub and across the floor. His light flared. Bright blue-green, so vivid it lit the whole room like sunlight through the sea.

I felt him come apart with me. A deep, rippling pulse from inside me and all around me at once. Hot, then cool, then hot again. His voice saying my name, over and over, from every direction.

Then, slowly, everything went still.

For a long time, I just lay there. Floating. Held. Boneless and shaking in the warm, gently rocking embrace of him. He’d slipped out of me at some point, I didn’t know when. His tendrils had gone soft and loose around me. One of them was idly stroking my hair.

His face rested on the surface beside mine. His eyes were half-closed.

“I think,” he said slowly, “that’s the most relaxed I’ve been in five years.”

I started to laugh. Weak and wet and shaky.

“Me too,” I said.

We stayed in the bath until the light from the frosted window turned gold, then pink, then dusk-blue. I dozed off with my head against him. When I woke, he’d warmed himself a little more against the evening chill, and I could hear him humming. That low, wordless, water-over-stones song.

“Tess,” he said, when he felt me stir.

“Mm?”

He hesitated. A ripple ran through him.

“I have to go away,” he said. “On Friday. For a few days.”

I went still. “What?”

“It’s the spring tides. Every year. My family all go back to the rock pools at Gull Head. To rest. To be properly in the sea.” His face rippled anxiously. “I always go. You thought it was a fishing trip with my cousins.”

I had thought that. Every October for five years.

“How long?”

“Four days.”

Four days. It shouldn’t have felt like a lot. Two hours ago, I’d been planning to spend the evening on the couch with Milo and a bottle of wine, the same as a thousand other evenings. Now four days felt like forever.

He must have felt something change in me, because one of his tendrils came up out of the water and curled gently around my hand.

“I’ll come back,” he said. “I promise. And—” He hesitated again. “I could leave you something. While I’m gone. If you wanted.”

“Leave me something?”

The tendril around my hand squeezed, very gently.

“A piece of me,” Milo said.