"Ah. Yeah." That'd be pretty dangerous.

"Is it just the horniness, for you?" Lee Tae-gun's surprise suggests not.

Oh okay they're talking about it now. He supposes it's obvious for Jaeha to be as confused as he was.

"It's... do you speak English?"

"Fluently."

"I'm still learning but they have an expression that's—kind of a pun, I guess? I 'lose my cool', it means—"

"To be very angry?"

"Right, but it's more general than that for me. I lose control and I feel—hot emotions, I guess. Um. There's the, what, the, the way I was like before, but there's also... I get angry, or, or impulsive, or I talk a lot and have no filter. I usually also get a bit physically hot but it's mostly the, um, the emotional thing."

"Ah. Yeah, that'd explain why we get on like a house on fire. ...compatibility-wise, I mean."

"At least some of it, yeah."

"'Some'?"

"There's the, you know, personality bit? —I know the evidential base for that particular effect is a lot shakier but looking at the data it seems plausibly true? That there's something there, you know?" He probably wouldn't have let himself get swept off his feet this easily if it weren't for that, for the expectation that probably he and Kang Jaeha are at least a little bit the kind of people who would get along even without powers involved.

"You looked at the data?"

"Some? Um." People are usually judgmental when he gets too into this kind of stuff.

"What's the data even like?" he wonders. "How would you measure something like this?" He's never been curious about it before, it sounded like balderdash given his own experience, but it's clearly something that interests Lee Tae-gun so he's interested, too.

"It's hard, yeah, but you get stuff like—divorce rates of partners who get married, for example, and compare them to the background population, and you'd need a pretty strong external effect of pressure on partners to stay together from a professional perspective to also explain it? And things that are a bit more subjective like sentiment analysis or searching for keywords on Instagram—that one's easier in the West where espers don't have their whole image managed by guilds like they do here—I don't know. Someone should do a meta-analysis at some point but it seems to me like there is something there."

"Were you pretty compatible, like that, personality-wise, with your previous partners?"

"...I think so? We still hang out, sometimes. We're not as close as we were—and we weren't as compatible to begin with—but I think so. ...weren't you?"

"I think less than it seems like you were," he hedges. "And—I kind of have to confess, I'm a little difficult."

"...difficult how?"

"It's kind of hard to deal with a partner who gets the way I do when I'm backlashed? Especially if the guiding compatibility isn't this amazing to begin with, the amount of it we'd need to get to a point where I'm, ah, fun to hang out with gets out of hand. So even if we were personality-compatible in theory, I don't have that much of a personality when I'm very backlashed."

"Oh." He seemed plenty fun to hang out with even before they broke the bedframes having sex—it's always mortifying when that happens, especially in a shared guild silo like this—but maybe he hasn't been that backlashed to begin with.

"I hope this works out between us? But no hard feelings if it doesn't, I'm kind of used to it."

...wow that's. A bit sad, actually?

Tae-gun will stand up and walk over to Kang Jaeha and hug him from behind.

He jumps a bit. "Careful, there, I'm gonna burn the food if you startle me like that."

"Thank you for, um. Telling me that, I guess? I, I mean, uh. I'll. We'll do our best?"