"Well, I don't know if it's Lexi, or maybe something about how I met Brilliance, or what, but Lexi's the obvious difference," says Aurora. "And - Lexi is my favorite person - and now I'm dating Brilliance which is like inviting him to take that spot, eventually, and meanwhile -" She trails off, gesturing hopefully at Rose.
"I'm unsure that we're the best pair to interview," says Rose. "For months we were each other's only company at all. I was his rescue from an eternity of loneliness. I am his wife. I do not think mon cœur is likely to abandon me for any newer interest unless the first abandonment is mine. It would certainly have been a terrible surprise, had it been a surprise, had I been assigning more significance to where he takes his exercise than to the rest - but it was not a surprise."
"I can also read his mind," Rose says, lifting her hand to touch Beast's cheek. "Most of us do - I don't believe Cam or Amariah do, though. And Aegis's version is considerably more under Sue's control than Angela's or Stella's is under Micaiah's or Alice's. But it helps. There is - really no understanding of how they love until you have seen it, I think."
"People from Amariah's world have their own sort of particular intimacy, which may suffice for her. I don't know about Cam. Possibly it's relevant that the two of them are by far the most likely to follow suit with the behavior that has you so concerned," Rose suggests.
"Yeah, um." Cam scratches his neck awkwardly. "I might be a little less serious with Jellybean than the others with theirs? Like, he's my boyfriend, he tells me he loves me all the time, I'm not really there yet, he doesn't really seem to mind, so it's not like I'm entitled to have a problem with it if he tells Tilly he loves her too or if he gets up to bizarre things with tentacled aliens. Let alone screws his way through the deck of Jokers, because I did that too, it's worth a go if you're into it."
"Um... I love people," says Jellybean. "For a while 'people' was pretty much Matilda, and I guess that's kind of like having a favourite person, but only superficially, because now I love you too and it doesn't make sense in my head for that to be a competition. I mean, I'd rather fuck you than Tilly but that's because Tilly's not interested in fucking me. If I had to choose between rescuing the two of you from something I wouldn't be thinking about which one I liked more, I'd be thinking about which one I had a better shot at rescuing, which one could probably take care of themselves without me, which one would be better at helping me rescue the other one after, stuff like that."
"Well, yes, obviously that all factors in, but I - maybe we, I'm still not sure how off-center I am in this department - need to know what we'd do if it was really one or the other. If somebody's going to die and somebody's going to live - and it's for good, not 'oh we can just get them resurrected tomorrow' - and you have to pick - I have to know that. And - and I want to know what anybody who might pick me would pick. Lexi and I worked it out between ourselves, and I'd given up on our parents ever telling, and then - there was Brilliance." Her voice gets mousier as she proceeds through this paragraph.
"It's not just that, it's a whole tangled constellation of things of which that's the easiest to explain. And I did sort of try that anyway. And the answer was good enough - I mean, I'm dating him now, not just sort of awkwardly ogling him and getting needled by Lexi about it - but I'm still sort of bewildered is why I'm interviewing all the Bells with Jokers one at a time. Might talk to Shell Bell and Juliet too, they're not mono either."