"'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?"

"If us doing our best involves me getting occasionally surprise-hugged from behind by you naked I'll absolutely take it."

Jaeha laughs when he notices Tae-gun's cock getting hard again. He also notes that Tae-gun hasn't unhugged. "All of those hours not enough for you, huh?"

He buries his face in Jaeha's back. "It's my backlash," he mumbles.

"I don't think I can top you any more tonight but if you want to pull my clothes off and rail me while I finish this I can't say I'll be complaining."

Aaaaahhhhhh.

That'd be really hot! But also aaaaaaahhhh!!!!

"Maybe I'll make a habit of not wearing clothes around you, either, and if you feel like fucking me you could just do it whenever you want. Free-use Jaeha. In fact, I will start doing this right now," he says, turning the hob off and stripping naked.

...and then he'll put an apron on. And nothing more.

Fuck.

"Make sure to lube me up, though, I don't think I can take you raw yet even after earlier today." He shakes his ass a bit. "But other than that, go to town."