"Oh, it's right close by, we can walk there."

Lev's hand is conspicuously close to Sasha's hand, like he kind of wants to hold it. 

He will absolutely hold Lev's hand. 

"I don't know anything about you and I don't know what kind of questions to ask! Uh. I'm 26, I was a grad student in psychology, I worked a lot, I'm gay, my moms and sister are the best people in the world and I'll fight you if you say bad things about them, I like indie comics and shirty fantasy novels and bands no one else has ever heard of, my kinks are kind of hard to explain--" 

Cute. "I'm 24. I'm gay, I am definitely not going to fight you about your moms, I would have studied art history if I could have but my parents were wildly unsympathetic about the trans thing so I dropped out of college for financial reasons. I like poetry and fantasy novels where the author is clearly having fun. I'm tempted to say 'try me' regarding your kinks." 

"I'd say 'weird kinks' but whenever I say that people think I'm into balloons and I like normal BDSM-y stuff, it's just... it's like I'm a switch but I want to switch in the scene? Except not that, it's like"-- he gestures-- "I want to have power over you at the same time that you have power over me? Sort of thing."

"...I want to say 'like rolequeer but without all the stuff about how doms are evil and the point of kink is to deconstruct traditional heteropatriarchal constructs of power,' except that rolequeer is the stuff about how doms are evil and the point of kink is to deconstruct traditional heteropatriarchal constructs of power and I'm like ninety percent sure you don't mean that. If you do in fact mean that, phrases like 'deconstructing traditional heteropatriarchal constructs of power' is a dealbreaker for me with boyfriends, sorry." 

"What's a rolequeer? Why are doms evil? I'm pretty sure the point of kink is to get me hard actually, not anything about... deconstructing... sorry I took like one humanities gender studies class and I basically flunked it, I'm not sure I know what all those words mean in that order, if you want to talk about the biopsychosocial development of gendered behavior in children I'm your guy but I don't know what a construct of power... is." 

"Rolequeer is like lesbian separatism but for subs, with all of the associated ingroup-outgroup baggage. I, uh, did not have the best taste in friends when I was in college and kind of latched onto the first group of people I found who didn't misgender me all the time." 

"What? Why would anyone... this is why I never got involved in queer activism. Also, because I went to a meeting once and I called myself 'queer' and someone said 'no, you can't call yourself queer, because you're a cis gay man' and I was like 'I have definitely had that yelled at me from out of a car while I was holding hands with my boyfriend, what the fork is your problem' and then I decided that probably it was a better idea to improve the world through improving epistemic standards in psychological research instead."

"Smart choice! It's terrible. I can see why I liked you. Am going to like you. The English language is really not built for this, wow." 

"I think we should agree to use the past tense for our future selves, that seems like it would cause the least confusion."

"I can see why I liked you, then!" He squeezes Lev's hand. 

What's Lev's house like?

Lev's house is avant-garde. Each of the rooms looks like a star, with twelve or fourteen walls; each individual wall is smaller side-to-side than Sasha himself.

The walls are all adorned with posters: Science: It's Like Magic But Real; Never Trust An Atom, They Make Up Everything; Bill Nye's face with the caption Science Rules; Keep Talking I'm Diagnosing You; Don't Mistake Your Google Search For My Psychology Degree; The Curious Paradox Is That When We Accept Ourselves Only Then Can We Change. 

There are no bookshelves, but Sasha has to step around a dozen piles of books that have already accumulated. 

There are pullup bars over every doorframe, so that it's impossible to close any of the doors; some of them also have rings that you have to push aside if you want to walk through them. 

"That is possibly the most inefficient floor plan I have ever seen," he comments. The books are a nice touch, though, and he's not halfway-terrified of breaking everything like he is in his own house. (He's aware that it can probably be fixed with whatever magic caused it to be in the first place, but still.) "Your room?" 

"Yeah, I guess it makes sense that I have to live with my soulmate, but we have really different tastes in houses. For example, I want my house to have bookshelves for when I need to summon my entire to-be-read list from the magic robot lady. My room's this way."

More obnoxious posters. Shelves of neatly organized sex toys: floggers, rope, dildoes, lube, buttplugs, a violet wand. (You can tell they came with the house and wasn't from the magic robot lady, because they are organized and not on the floor.) The only furniture is a giant bed.

He ignores the posters and flops on the bed. 

"Oh it's soft," he says, and then looks over at Lev. "C'mere?" 

Lev lies on the bed, wraps his arm around Sasha's shoulder, and conspicuously does not touch any of his other body parts to any of Sasha's body parts.

He cuddles up to Lev, puts his head on Lev's shoulder. 

"I don't know exactly how much the teleportation thing will let us do but I liked hugging you." 

"I like cuddling you but I don't want to do things you're not comfortable with."

He chooses his words carefully. 

"It's not that I'm not comfortable having sex, it's just — it's been a really long time since I got to just cuddle someone. And I've missed it."

And also he has some feelings about having sex with Lev this soon after meeting him, but that's not related to whether he's comfortable with sex in general, that's — a whole other bucket of issues. 

"That's criminal. I'm going to cuddle with you a bunch. --Hey, wait, we're in Heaven, we don't have to do anything, we can cuddle for literally as long as you want!"

"You're so sweet." He nestles into Lev's shoulder and sighs happily. "You should touch my hair." 

Lev can do that!

He can also very cautiously kiss Sasha's cheek.

He kisses Lev's cheek and lets his fingertips run over Lev's back. His hair is very soft; he makes more happy noises when Lev touches it. 

(It's soft and warm and sweet and — he doesn't know Lev hardly at all, Lev knows his favorite lines from his favorite poem and almost nothing else about him, it's — he can't really feel safe yet. But it's soft and warm and sweet.) 

He makes soft little hissy noises at being touched. His other hand moves hesitantly down to Sasha's back. 

"You're beautiful."