"A couple of these are pre-partnership hypothetical ones but the rest..." He starts scrolling through the descriptions and stops at one of them.

"Well well well, what have we here?" Kang Jaeha wonders aloud, a peculiar smirk spreading on his lips. "My, my, Lee Tae-gun-shi, I didn't know this side of you."

Lee Tae-gun can't show his face. Can't, can't let Kang Jaeha see him like this. "Please go away, I need—I need some time—"

"What you need is guiding," Kang Jaeha argues, turning the light on and loosening his tie.

"Don't turn the light on—!" Tae-gun pants, but it's too late, and he's now exposed in all of his glory, the layers of clothes he wears in public gone to reveal a body sculpted by years of effort and training.

"But then how will I see you?" Kang Jaeha counters in something that could almost be a purr if it didn't sound so hungry. You're mine, now, he thinks to himself.

or

Kang Jaeha is about to discover that his new partner Lee Tae-gun's backlash makes him submissive and breedable.

If Kang Jaeha were looking at this on his phone, Tae-gun would be trying to steal it away from him. As is, the best he can do is try to cover the screen with his hands. "Don't read that!!!!"

It's easy enough for him to move the screen away from Tae-gun's reach. "Why not? It could give us inspiration for things to try in the future." He clicks through to the author's page. "...wow, they're really prolific about their esper pairing stories, huh?"

"Kang Jaeha—!"

"Yes, Tae-gun?"

"...stoooooooop," he whines, covering his face.

Jaeha grins and waves the screen away, turning his body to more properly face Tae-gun. "You're so very lovely like this," he says, reaching under the bed covers to run the tips of his fingernails against Tae-gun's inner thigh, feather-light and slow. "We could read these together, play them out... Would you hate to see me in a suit while you're naked and pleading? I wouldn't hate that."

He lowers his hands from his face.

Then he twists around and pushes Jaeha onto his back, straddling his hips with his legs and pinning his wrists with his hands. "No."

"You're going to need to stop me."

"I will."

"I'm not totally sure why you're B-rank," Tae-gun says, humming thoughtfully after discussing Min Woo-young's power with him and seeing it in action.

It's really nice, the way Lee Tae-gun says this kind of thing. The sentence sounds like it's almost meant to be a compliment but Lee Tae-gun says it matter-of-factly, like he's analysing facts and reaching a logical conclusion and it's not a matter of opinion. It is, if anything, more flattering than a compliment.

"It's my backlash. I get really, really impaired by it, and the accrual rate is pretty bad."

"Loss of motor control?" he recalls. He didn't ask, but Min Woo-young shared it, so.

"Loss of motor ability. I just can't move, and it starts with my legs, so in a dungeon setting I can't even walk out if necessary."

"Ah, yeah, I can see how that'd be a pretty big issue. But you do have a partner right now?"

"Yeahhhh but we're not that compatible." Still more than Woo-young is with Lee Tae-gun, though, which is a shame. Not that he can compete with Kang Jaeha, of course, but, sue him, he's a bit start struck and has got a little puppy crush. It's fine if he can recognise the feelings inside him, right? He's not indulging in anything other than some longing looks.

(How did he ever think he was 100% heterosexual? Maybe it's because he hadn't ever been this close to Lee Tae-gun, not that he's ever going to tell the man himself that when he said it was "being around handsome men" that made him question it what he meant was specifically "having been in the same room as Lee Tae-gun a couple of times". It's not kosher to tell someone you barely know that they personally made you realise things about your sexuality.)

"It's really lucky that the guild managed to find a battery for your powers so quickly, anyway, so you don't need to go into dungeons that much."

"Oh they actually already had one!"

"Huh. Really? That's lucky."

"Yeah. I mean, they do keep these weird dungeon materials around, right, and the researchers said... Okay I confess I don't understand what they said, exactly, but they knew roughly what kinds of affinities that material had and when I manifested and went through the initial battery of government tests the researcher that was working with me suspected that I might be a match and followed up on it and it turned out that I was. That's actually how I got into Quasar—I could've just sold my powers to them but you guys seemed pretty cool, in comparison to other guilds, so I decided to just join up."

"...yeah. Quasar is really cool."

How can anyone not have a crush on this man when he's capable of smiling like that? It's quite frankly unfair.

"How'd you join? If you don't mind me asking."