He tried to never lie but if he were to say that he and his dad had a true father-son relationship, Alek would be doing just that. Don't get him wrong. Grzegorz loved him and Alec loved him back but he'd been born during the latter part of Grzegorz life and the two had never had a close connection. But that's another story. The relevant part of this is that one fateful day that would change. Though they didn't share much, they both did so love to fish.
They never talked much on these trip. Alek thought casting his reel out and over Hale Lake. The Hales, a couple from Ireland not too many years older than Alec, had bought the land but allowed the town to still use the lake. His dad sat on the other end of their small boat singing a quiet polish song to himself as he waited for his hook to catch.
Alek sighed, before settling into a comfortable position. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a few fish scales floating by him in the water. He reached out to snag one and jumped as something slid across his skin.
"Aleksander?" his dad asked, concerned and turning to look him over.
"Sorry, Papa. Something touched my hand." He said reassuringly as he pulled his hand back out, clutching the scale.
"Probably fish think hand was food." Grzegorz replied in slightly-broken English. There was a twinkle in his eyes now that Alek had never seen. "We bring more next time."
"Yeah." He agreed while thinking if it was a fish, then why the hell did it feel like it was another hand?
And so the pattern began. Every time they would go fishing, he would see the scales and reached for them, only to have something touch him gently. Sometimes he felt scales and other times, he'd swear he'd felt skin. As said before, Grzegorz was in the prime of his life so after about a year of their fishing trips, with each trip spent talking more and more about fishing and simply life in general, Grzegorz died of a heart attack at the Ripe old age of 63. On the day of his memorial service, Alek found himself taking the boat out on the water by himself. Across from him, on the seat his dad had always sat on, sat a small hand-carved wooden fishing lure with a weight attached to it. Nearing the end of that year, Grzegorz has made him promise to take it to the lake and make sure it stayed there.
He rowed himself out to the middle of the lake and set the oars inside the boat. He took the lure in his hands and ran his fingers over the designs, feeling water splash against his cheeks. He stood up carefully making sure not to rock the boat and then with bleary eyes, he threw it with all of the might he could. He still didn't know how he slipped but before he could even shout, he was swallowing water and was slowly sinking. Right before everything went Dark, Alek saw honey-chocolate eyes, felt hands cradle his face and a pair of soft lips touch his, then he was in darkness.
In the three months following his near death encounter, Alek learned that the Hales had pulled him from the water and kept him alive until help could come. Funny enough, he didn't remember any of that. The only thing he could remember about that part of it was a fuzzy feeling that left him warm and like he was painless. His family coddled him but finally they backed off after a while. He didn't tell anybody about the eyes and the kiss but they seemed to always be there in his dreams and popped up at random times. He was grocery shopping when he heard a woman's laugh that compelled him to look up from the health food he was contemplating about getting.
Naw, he thought before glancing up and seeing the Hale couple with their eldest daughter and new son accompanied by a dark-blonde haired woman with a beautiful smile. She looked up and their eyes met. Hazel met honey-Chocolate and Alek's dipped down to her neck where a necklace was resting. At the end of it, there was a beautiful fish scale the same color as her eyes. He looked back at her eyes and smiled. She smiled back and that's how Deputy Aleksander Stilinski met his wife. Nereida.