"Oh, you reminded me of someone who was of the belief that if I was up for one orgasm I must actually want three, and if I said I didn't want three then probably I was lying to spare his feelings, and either didn't realize or didn't care that that was actively painful. I dumped him after the second time this happened." 

"What the fuck."

"People! — to be clear the thing that happened the second time was him apologizing profusely for whatever was causing me to lie and spare his feelings, not me having sex I didn't want. 

And um, when I say you reminded me I just mean I was reminded, you are not particularly reminiscent. Your thing is cute." 

"Yes. I know I wouldn't do that. If I were gay and fucking you you'd have exactly the number of orgasms you want."

He's really very cute. "We should really head back to camp." 

"We should."

He's going to have to be responsible, isn't he. 

Sasha starts walking campward. 

Asher follows.

A few days pass similarly. In the morning, they do some kind of athletic activity: football, boxing, paintball, basketball. In the afternoon, they learn to fix cars, split wood, do yardwork, and do financial planning. In the evening, there's free time, some of which Lev and Asher have to spend filling out extremely invasive workbook pages; the rest of the time they can swap tutoring.

He hadn't expected this camp to be so full of things he was good at.

He teaches Sasha how to throw footballs and punches, tries to teach Lev to do the same, does yardwork and splits wood and asks Sasha for help with fixing cars; he does his best to tune out Sasha feeding Asher worksheet answers and debates endlessly whether he'd keep their secret if he was asked; he learns math and how to weave things out of stripped pine branches. 

It's — good. 

He hadn't expected it to be good. 

Ex-gay camp is surprisingly not terrible. 

He's easily the best at boxing and paintball; Marlo can keep up with him at football and basketball, mostly due to Asher's unfamiliarity with the strategies or rules of either game; whether or not he's the best at them, he loves telling his body to do something and his body does it flawlessly. If people don't pull their punches on Sasha and Lev they will get the full force of a very real punch.

Asher is a fast learner, but car repair and yardwork bore him. In the evening he gets worksheet answers from Sasha and wants to know what Sasha's real answers to the questions would be; he dances and eavesdrops on math tutoring and punching lessons and tries to wrap up his practice in time to learn how to weave things out of branches.   

He is very, very confused how any of this is supposed to make people straight. 

Asher smiles at Sasha a lot and Lev a lot; it's particularly nice when Sasha is helping Lev with something because he can smile at them both at the same time. He cuddles Sasha every chance he gets; Sasha doesn't have the right instincts to be at all helpful in practicing lifts, but Asher does fish dives and presage lifts and tosses him up in the air; they talk about poetry and he listens when Sasha tells him about crafts and it's interesting, the way that Robin made poetry interesting.

For obvious reasons he doesn't touch Lev. Lev is an amazing teacher but Asher doesn't feel the same drive to listen to him that he does to Sasha. Asher finds himself thinking Lev doesn't know what he finds interesting, and wonders why he thinks that.

At night he ponders why he is so happy. He hasn't been this happy since Robin broke up with him. He concludes, after some thought, that he isn't lonely.

Ex-gay camp is pretty terrible. 

They're correct that Lev is not comfortable with his masculinity or with essentially anything that is considered to be a "masculine activity." He attempts, cautiously, to participate in sports, buoyed by Marlo's teaching and Asher's willingness to punch people who hurt him. But he can't catch a ball or shoot things and hit what he's aiming at, and he's acutely embarrassed about his inadequacy. Exercise makes him feel exhausted and like he's going to vomit; his skin is sticky with sweat and he has a weird metallic taste like blood in the back of his mouth. Whatever a runner's high is, he's never felt one. 

The afternoon is...  better, in that he sometimes gets to sit down, and in that Sasha and Asher sometimes touch him on accident when they're helping him. Yardwork and woodsplitting suck as much as any other form of exercise. Financial planning is boring because he already knows how to do that, but at least he feels competent about something. Car repair is not that different from robotics, actually; this is unfortunate, because Lev doesn't particularly like robotics, but also fortunate, because he's very very good at them. 

He thinks, every so often, I hate being a man. It's not that he wants to be a woman. He wants to be a man, but to be some other kind of man, where you're allowed to kiss guys and read books and play games with babies and do math, and where you don't ever have to do a sport or know how cars work. This is probably, he reflects, why he is going to end up gay after the end of ex-gay camp. He is not rediscovering his gender identity. He is rediscovering how much he hates his gender identity. 

Lev feels guilty about how much he lives for the evenings. He wonders if it's self-deception to think this, but it's actually not a gay thing. Lev doesn't think about how cute Sasha is when Sasha's smiling about getting the right answer on a math problem. He doesn't think about people at all. He thinks about mathematical beauty and the slow steady buildup of knowledge, about sharing the grand human endeavor of knowing what the truth is with someone else. 

His SAT books gather dust. Lev tries to convince himself that, actually, teaching people is the best way to study something. He does not succeed. 

For the first time in his life, Lev has friends, people who actually want to spend time with him instead of just tolerating it. It's strange and uncomfortable and he's not sure if he likes it. He doesn't talk much, because this friendship thing is fragile, and if he talks too much he might ruin it. He usually brings a book to read protectively. But while he flips through the pages at a reasonable rate he doesn't actually read; he listens. 

Lev hates learning to throw a football or a punch but he likes it when Marlo touches him to teach him to throw a football or a punch. He tries not to feel jealous every time Asher does some fucking ridiculous dance thing with Sasha, and sometimes succeeds; he's never really sure which one he's jealous of. He thinks a lot about touching Sasha's hair and resting his head in Asher's lap and having Marlo enfold him into a hug.

Lev does not show anyone his workbook. He feels excruciatingly embarrassed to see it written out in black and white: that he's never kissed a girl, gone on a date, or even had a crush on a girl; that he's pined uselessly after dozens of guys he never actually worked up the nerve to speak to; that he likes reading porn, rather than watching it, and only stories where they've spent tens of thousands of words building up to the sex, so he knows that they really love each other. It feels pathetic. 

He turns every so often to the page in the workbook where he's checked 'no', he's never kissed a man. Lev should tell someone that Sasha kissed him. But Sasha would get kicked out of ex-gay camp, and Lev doesn't know where he'd go, or whether his family would hurt him. And as long as Sasha is here, he might recover from SSA, but if he isn't here, he definitely won't. And if Lev did tell, he wouldn't have friends anymore, except maybe Marlo. Asher would definitely punch him a lot, and he is fragile and easily broken. And-- as bad as it is for his recovery-- he doesn't want Sasha to leave. He wants to see Sasha smile, and to listen to him talk, and though he won't do anything about it he wants to kiss him and touch him and hold him.  

It's not the actual activities. He did plenty of yard work before he got good enough at crafts that people would buy the things he made, he can handle sports, and he turns out to be surprisingly good at car repair. 

It isn't the free time. He loves free time, loves the rare moments when Lev is explaining something and he looks happy, loves the rush of warmth when he wins a smile from Marlo, loves being thrown in the air and caught and seeing Asher's face. He enjoys making up Asher's history for him, enjoys having the time to sew pockets and patches and decorations onto his clothes and make them feel like they're really his. 

He writes to Natalie, on the back of a postcard from Granada, Spain; he tells her about how beautiful the forest is and how wonderful his friends are and how he's learning metalworking; he laments his lack of access to the glue in the craft building and trusts that she'll get the hint. 

It isn't the activities. Every individual hour he could point to is fine. It's — 

— it's how he embroidered parsley and sage and rosemary and thyme onto the front of his jacket, because he knew they'd make him pick it out, stitch by careful stitch, if he embroidered a rose. 

It's how he goes to the bathroom and puts in a pair of earrings that he'd smuggled into the camp and twirls them around and takes them out, just to make sure the holes don't close before he can get home. It's how he barely remembers the familiar swing of a pendant around his neck as he walks. It's how cold the back of his neck feels, without hair or even a ponytail to cover it; it's how when his hair falls into his eyes he can't tuck it back behind his ear, it isn't long enough. It's how he has to consider carefully whether he'll look too counterculture whenever he plans a project; it's how he'd give almost anything for eyeliner, or even for watercolor paint. 

It's how they call him Alexander, here. 

Asher's head is on Sasha's lap one evening and Marlo and Lev are out of earshot when he complains, "you know what's the worst part about ex-gay camp?"

"That I had to change my name because Christine doesn't like that I'm Russian?" 

"Okay, that," Asher agrees. "But other than that the worst part is that I'm super horny."

Sasha's been getting up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, but he can still sympathize. "Is that an offer?" 

"Still straight."

He pets Asher's hair. "Friction's friction. And everyone has a mouth." 

He glances at Marlo, who is failing to teach Lev how to dribble a basketball. "If they won't notice. I think it would be particularly embarrassing to get kicked out of ex-gay camp for having gay sex as a heterosexual."

"I can be quiet if you can," and he adjusts Asher's position so there's some obscuring shrubbery blocking Lev and Marlo's line of view and unzips Asher's pants. 

Asher's dick is soft but it's still pretty big. He's looking at Sasha with a soft face.

Oh, lovely. 

Sasha sets about getting him hard. 

Asher's watching Sasha very closely; he gently touches Sasha's hair and his neck and his shoulders. 

He swallows down the sounds he'd like to make, licks and kisses and sucks on Asher's cock.