He opens his mouth to say 'yes' but then stops and turns his feelings over in his mind. "I think so. I'm not in any pain, I'm reasonably well-rested, and the mental part is... harder to gauge, but... I think so."

"Would you be able to tell that you got to this level of guided?"

"Not automatically. If I stopped to think about it, yes."

"But even with no backlash you still..."

"I still have the habits, yes. And... the impulses."

"But you haven't slipped?"

"Only this morning when I had just woken up."

"That seems manageable, then, right? If you come home right after your dungeons, we guide each other..."

Tae-gun! Just! Called! His! House! "Home"!!!!!! He might actually pass away.

"You're not going to find me complaining about you guiding me more."

"Speaking of which..." He reaches for Tae-gun and slides his fingernails lightly against the skin of Tae-gun's forearm. "You did go on dungeons yesterday, didn't you? And didn't get guided at all?"

"I think I should fix that."

He doesn't need to be feeling Tae-gun's emotions directly. Tae-gun is so, so very expressive, and he knows exactly what he needs to do to make that beautiful, amazing man beg.

It always boggles the mind, how good sex with Tae-gun is. You'd think he'd get bored of it, and honestly if you'd asked him at the start of this all what he thought would happen if he got rid of all of his backlash, he would have expected his interest to wane a lot. It hasn't, though, but to be fair it is for a reason he hadn't considered at all plausible at the time. Having sex with someone you love just feels different. And while he's sure the novelty will wear off eventually and the honeymoon phase is going to end eventually he's still not even close to that.

"What do you want to do with the rest of your day off?"

He scratches the back of his neck without looking up from his phone. "Um..."

"Is the answer that you kind of wanted to see if maybe you could do one of the dungeons you rescheduled this evening since our chat ended up being quicker than you thought it'd be?"

"You don't need to feel embarrassed. I was thinking the same. I'm... not sure they won't feel jerked around by us, but maybe we could see if we can do it at the same time? I can't pick up a dungeon to solo like you can but..."

Wait, really?

"I do feel kind of guilty taking two days off in a row like that, with no prior warning, especially with how, like you said, the work I do is valuable. Whatever affordance we may have due to how diligently we've otherwise worked over the years, the need is still there.

"Besides, this means that when we next have some scheduled time off we'll be able to rest more easily and maybe go on a date together. We haven't in a hot minute."

Well now he kind of wants to kiss Jaeha.

Unfortunately Jaeha has turned his powers off so he doesn't know that!

...that's a hiccup, actually. It takes Tae-gun a couple of seconds to understand why, and to notice that he'd gotten accustomed to Jaeha kissing him whenever he thought about it. Tae-gun had figured it was just because of how good Jaeha is at reading people, but...

That drives the extent of Jaeha's power usage home in a different way that he hadn't really thought about before.

"—did I say something wrong?"

Damnit, he did, and he doesn't even know which part of what he said was wrong, he wasn't looking at Tae-gun so he didn't even catch his body language—

"No. Um. You said something right. And I wanted to kiss you over it."