After a while, Chris says, "I apologize. My behavior was unacceptable."

"Hm?" 

He's still cradling Chris. 

"It has been about two decades since I last took MDMA but I still should have remembered that I respond to it by becoming enormously physically affectionate and arranged to be elsewhere. I apologize."

The idea of Chris arranging to be elsewhere for that is distressing in a way that Marlo is going to examine later, when Chris isn't right there. 

"You don't need to be," he says, "you were sweet." 

"I kissed you and told you I love you and gave you a very ineffective handjob, all of which are generally considered to be inappropriate ways to interact with heterosexual men who have made it quite clear they don't want you in that fashion."

"If I had wanted you to stop I could have said as much, or stopped you.

I didn't say anything I didn't mean." 

"...are you really sure you're straight?"

"Much less so than I was an hour ago," he says before he can think about it too much. 

Chris kisses him. 

Marlo kisses him back. 

"More uncertain now?"

("You're her soulmate, I'm sure you know best.") 

"I love you. I'm not uncertain of that at all." 

"I have only known you for a few weeks and I don't love you but maybe I could someday."

How to word this so it makes sense outside of his head. 

"I — kept noticing myself thinking that you needed me, and everything else could wait. I have done that for several people and in retrospect they have all been people who I very much loved. I suppose it's technically possible that you'll be the one exception but it doesn't seem likely." 

Chris moves back a bit and studies Marlo's face intently for a moment. 

"What would you say," he says, "if I told you to get up and go get dressed in some outfit you think I'd like, and then we're going to go out for dinner and dancing, and you should refill my drinks and fetch me things I want, and that the purpose of your presence at these activities is solely to make me happy?"

A flash of a feeling he can't name. 

"I would think that was a very sudden change and be curious where it was coming from." 

Chris is watching his face and catches the flash of a feeling. 

"I think you would have a deep sense of satisfaction and inner peace that you long for and very rarely have had. I think you got a similar sense out of being in the army. I suspect if you had not died you would have been recruited into the Marketplace by the time you were thirty. And I rather suspect three weeks from now, if you don't flee in terror about me saying this, I am going to be hopelessly in love with you."

He notes, almost absently, that he's clinging to Chris again. 

"Out of curiosity, how many of the people about whom you felt that everything else could wait when they needed you were men?"

"— all of them." 

"...There are honestly worse soulmates for me than a gay slave."

Marlo curls around him. "I love you so much." 

"Kiss me."

Marlo kisses him, soft and shallow and sweet.