"–wait, you're in love with Spidey, too? Fuck. That's rough."

"And Lev just spent fifteen minutes yelling at me about a minor point of development economics so I am concerned this problem is going to get worse."

"...you fall in love with people if they spend enough time yelling at you?"

"Not that that's not kinda relatable."

"Only if they're normally very shy and terrified of everything and then it turns out I was wrong about development economics and they were so outraged by this that they overcame all their social anxiety in order to call the person giving them a bunch of free stuff an idiot. --It's endearing."

“Fuck, you’re so right. I think I love him too.”

"Can we get back to the part where I kinda sorta said I loved you even though we've been dating for like four hours?"

"Three hours and twenty minutes, sir."

"Shut up, Jarvis."

He thinks this over for a minute.

“...I don’t really get why you do, but I believe you.”

He throws his arms up helplessly.

"I kinda thought I didn't fall in love with people? Like, in retrospect I've had feelings for you for... a while.. but I thought you were monogamous so I didn't think about it much. And then I fell head-over-heels for Spidey and I was like 'oh, shit, I actually do fall in love with people' and then I was like 'wow, maybe the amount of time I spend writing porn about Deadpool... means... something.'"

He laughs.

“I mean, yeah, maybe. How many of those have you written?”

"He has published nineteen works about you," Jarvis says. "There are 97 works unpublished because they are works in progress, were too embarrassing to make publicly known, were abandoned after he ejaculated, et cetera, although of course many of those are only a few paragraphs long."

Asher is staring unhappily at the floor.

“...I think that’s the greatest possible thing. Like...the best. You actually...like me enough that you wrote stuff about me — stuff nobody’d even see, just for you.”

"...So you're not going to decide I'm weird and clingy and way too into you and maybe dating me was a bad idea?"

“...man, I wish I could show you some of my alts. No. We’re cool.”

"Awesome! --what's an alt."

"A Z from another dimension. Don't worry about it."

He'll forget they were even talking about it, of course – he's kind of surprised he noticed it at all.

"There are alternate dimensions? --I guess that isn't that weird, there are aliens and mutants and stuff."

"Yeah, I kind of have this spooky connection to – hold on, you're following this?"

"It doesn't seem like a very complicated topic."

"Literally every time I tell someone about this they forget about it by the next sentence."

"That's weird. Have I forgotten about it?"

"...I dunno. Can you tell me what we were just talking about?"

"Yous from alternate universes! I want a Z pile now. --But I meant, like, have I forgotten about it before."

"Holy fuck. Uh. Do you remember me saying anything weird at the movie night thing?"

"...no."

"Okay, so it just started – happening, I guess – why is it that all my plots are getting a swift kick within like three hours of starting to date you?"