Keith knew that one from watchingFinding Nemowith his old teammate Theo’s daughter, but he wasn’t sure bringing that up would make him look all that cool.
Either way, it was the only fish there he recognized. The others were all new to him.
The brilliant neon purple and yellow fish was a royal gramma. Keith kept hearing this as “royal grandma” and imagining a tiny, fishy crown on its head.
The royal grandma—gramma—had a narrower counterpart called a dottyback, which mysteriously had no dots on it on its back or anywhere else. The shimmery green fish was a green chromis, and there were several of those.
“They’re very social,” Iris said. “See how they like to school together?”
He did. They were like their own little companionable team.
The last fish was called a firefish goby. It was ghostly white at the head, with its color gradually deepening around the middle to a kind of rosy orange; it ended with a strikingly crimson tail.
“Can I see the freshwater tank too?”
A split second after he asked, he remembered that the freshwater tank was in her bedroom, and he felt his face heat upyet again. He was going to spend this whole week blushing.
He couldn’t believe how badly he was handling this. Anyone from his team would have done so much better. Even Vin, who wasn’t exactly a smooth-talker himself.
If Iris thought it was rude for him to already be asking for an invitation to her bedroom, though, she didn’t show it. She just happily led the way—wrapped up, Keith realized, in how much she was enjoying the chance to talk about her fish.
And she was taking him at face value. After a reminder of what it was like to deal with the Council and its layers of implications and double meanings, it was nice to get back to having conversations that didn’t feel like trying to speed-solve a Rubik’s cube.
Even though his question about the freshwater tank had been completely innocent, though, he had to admit that as she led him to it, he was hyper-aware that they were only a few feet away from Iris’s bed.
Not to mention hyper-aware of how Iris’s shimmery gold dress clung to her hips ....
Focus! Fish!
Luckily, there were a lot of them for him to focus on. The freshwater fish were as pretty as their saltwater counterparts, and Iris clearly knew and liked them just as much. She introduced him to her bala shark, a relentlessly mobile gray fish trimmed in black, and her crowd of silver-and-red neon tetras. There were plenty more, but Keith’s favorite was the half-gold, half-blue-green rainbow fish.
So many of the fish Iris kept were brightly colored. Like the salvaged metal bookends, they were another sign of who she really was and what she really cared about.
He watched, fascinated, as the fish swam closer to Iris’s side of the tank, following her in a glimmering cloud as she moved around.
“They like you.”
She let out a light and tremendously cute snort of laughter. “They know I feed them.”
That was probably part of it, but Keith really felt like there was something adoring in how they flocked after her.
He could understand it, too. She was magnetic. He couldn’t imagine being in a room with her and wanting to look at anyone else, and clearly the fish couldn’t imagine it either.
“My sister used to have a goldfish,” Iris said, tapping lightly at the side of the tank and letting the fish cluster around her fingertip. “She’s the one who helped me find the closest aquarium shop—there’s one in Polis, downtown.”
Polis was the nearest town. It wasn’t a big city by human standards, but Keith remembered how overwhelming it had felt when he’d first visited it.
The Council kept a communal post office box there for deliveries, since it was helpful to have an address the post office could actuallyfind, and it ferried people there twice a week to pick up deliveries. But that was a one-stop visit, in and out. Keith had never known anyone to actually go shopping there, even though it wasn’t technically against any of the Council’s prohibitions. Still, Iris and her sister had risked some serious disapproval for their fish. It was brave of them.
He saw her looking at him from the corner of her eye, and he realized—with a wrenching feeling—that she was half-waiting forhimto disapprove.
“Maybe you could show it to me,” Keith said. “Although I can already see myself impulse-buying about a hundred fish.”
Her expression lightened. “Itistempting to walk away with at least one of each.”
“And those little castles. I feel like I’d have a real weakness for little castles.”
“I always wanted one of those,” Iris said. “I just have a hard time choosing, so I wind up with the plants and fake caves.” A shadow passed over her face again. “Seraphina had a castle, though.”
