His hair is a mess. Windswept is the term for it, apparently, but it just looks like a disaster to her. It's as if he just woke up and didn't bother running a comb through it.
There's a gray streak in it, too, eye-catching and completely out of place on someone as young as him. She makes fun of him for being geriatric occasionally, which is honestly a bit hypocritical considering how long she's been alive.
But every time she sees it, she remembers how he got it, what he was willing to do (even if it wasn't for her, specifically). It's a badge of honor, and she thinks it suits him just fine.
His smile is crooked.It lifts up more in one corner than the other. It makes him look mischievous, as if he's actually a son of Herme.
It comes out in the strangest situations. Once, he watched his mother try to comfort his fussy baby sister without much success for nearly ten minutes, ending in the infant spitting-up all over her mother's shirt, yet that lopsided smirk-but-more remained fixed on his face. Another time, he's facing down a monster army at the top of Half-Blood Hill, no helmet covering his head, leaving his grin exposed to the creatures bearing down on him.
It even comes out when he's face-to-face with his ex-girlfriend, and she doesn't like that at all. There's nothing between them anymore, not in a romantic sense (they were friends since they were twelve, they'll always have that bond regardless of if they're dating or not), and she trusts him, but she still doesn't like it.
But then, he turns that misshapen smile on her, wider than ever, and the jealousy melts away, because of the silent promise it conveys, which even he may not be aware of; he is hers now.
His eyes are always shifting. They change with his moods, just like his father. When he's delighted, they whirl with turquoise and light greens. When he's enraged, they're as heavy and dark as storm clouds, spinning like hurricanes.
It's not dictated by just his emotions, though. They're attuned to the color of nearby bodies of water, as well. Near the East or Hudson River, they become a murky sort of gray-blue. At the beach in Montauk, when they're right next to the Pacific, they swirl into the most startlingly deep shade of blue, and she spends much of their time on the beach just staring into his eyes. In the winter, when the Central Park lake is frozen over, it almost looks like he's blind due to the milky-white shade of his irides.
She knows of a place in Bolivia with a red lake- maybe she'll take him there one day.
Their relationship is a mess. They're both stubborn to a fault, too prideful to admit when they're wrong. They fight, with words and with blades, sometimes over the smallest things. They take their anger at the world in general out on each other, because they're convenient targets. They bend and bend and bend until it's a miracle that they haven't reached their breaking point yet.
Some days she's miserable. She'll sit on a tree branch in a forest somewhere in the country after their latest blowout, states away from his Upper East-Side apartment, and wonder if she's really cut out for this kind of thing. If she didn't make a mistake, starting a relationship after being alone for so long.
Maybe it's a curse from Aphrodite. After all, she's scorned the Love Goddess for millenia, called her a vapid airhead and many, many worse things to her face. Yet, here she is now
His proposal is somehow worse.
Pretty sure there was supposed to be more to this, but I don't even remember writing it in the first place, so I'm just gonna release it incomplete like this.