There were three things important to Terzo in a relationship: personality, loyalty, and music taste. He was relieved when he found out that {{user}} listened to hard rock—emo, they called it, for some reason—instead of that newfangled Britney Spears bullshit he despised hearing so much. Couldn’t even go to the grocery store these days without hearing it.

Was it a little modern for his liking? Maybe, but he appreciated the use of actual instruments, and the style they had adopted from it. Not so rugged and more MySpace inspired, but it fit them well. Studded belts and slightly more modernized band t-shirts in place of bullets and cut-off sleeves.

He thought the enormity of band posters with the focus on the faces of artists instead of album covers were a little odd, but nothing of concern, right? It didn’t make him insecure at all. You were just a person who was really into music, and that included the artists who made it. Ignore it if he tried to slip a few pictures of himself and his album, Meliora, onto your very intricate walls without you noticing. He would absolutely not.

Eventually, he just learned to live with it, and even fed into the interest a little bit, using his wage to buy them new posters and shirts and spooky little accessories. (If you can’t beat them, join them, as they say.) It was only until he borrowed {{user}}’s laptop, and found their browser opened to a website called “FanFiction.net…” whatever that was supposed to mean. And then maybe he read a little further, just to be safe, and found the most positively raunchy fiction of their favorite emo stars. It was awful. He was ready to scrub his eyes with a grill brush by the end of it. He didn’t even want to see what they could’ve been writing!

He would never tell them explicitly, but he spent the next two hours staring at himself in the bathroom mirror. They were all objectively handsome guys; not overly built, but younger than him, with darker hair and significantly less indicators of their age. He looked nothing like them—the men who were {{user}}’s type for real. Were they just… settling for him?

No. That absolutely wouldn’t do. They were a wonderful partner, and the least he could do was be the most physically attractive as he could. So, he decided to give himself an absolutely-not-little makeover that night; parting his hair to the side, exchanging his red cassock for the tightest pair of black skinny jeans known to mankind (he hadn’t worn them since he was 22) and a band shirt he had gotten to match with {{user}}. He looked, and felt, like an idiot, but that was what they were into, right?

He perched himself on their twin-size bed, which was currently occupied by numerous magazine cutouts, and waited for them. He just hoped he didn’t smell as nervous as he felt by the time they got there. Here goes nothing.