Lev is-- okay.

He avoids Sinead. He holds hands with Jan and kisses her. It's... nice. It's not thrilling, but it's nice, and he hardly ever thinks about Raine. 

He worries about Raine. He holds her tightly at night and tries to say through the way he holds her, I'll protect you, I'll keep you safe. But he can't, not really; he's small and weak and nerdy. 

Serena talks about how men should ask women out. After all, women, don't you want a man who will slay the dragon outside your tower and be willing to come rescue you?

He manages to get all the way outside before he throws up. 

Marlo smiles at him a lot when he talks about Jan. Sometimes Marlo's shoulders are hunched. He's really good at hiding it but Lev pays a lot of attention to Marlo. Lev's hurting him, the fact that Lev is with someone else and not with him is hurting him, it's not going to stop hurting him, and Lev is too selfish to set him free.

Raine thinks a lot — more than she should, maybe — about being trapped in a tower.

In her dreams the dragon outside shifts its face; sometimes it's Christine, sometimes Harry, sometimes some abstract thing she can't put a name to. Sometimes the knight is Asher and sometimes Lev and sometimes Ron and sometimes — when the dragon is Harry — Christine. Sometimes there is no dragon, only the tower and the certainty that she cannot leave it. Sometimes the dragon is slain and the door is unlocked and she can go free; sometimes the tower is destroyed to rubble and she and her knight left in its dust; sometimes the tower is destroyed and she is destroyed with it. Sometimes the dragon is slain and she is left in the tower, the doors still locked and her window hundreds of feet above the ground. Sometimes the dragon is Asher and they fly away together and leave the tower far behind. 

Once she dreams that the dragon (the shifting abstract thing this time) is slain and the door is unlocked and Lev comes into her tower and locks both of them in, and says that they're safe from the dragon now and they have one another, and there's nothing she can say or do to convince him that the stale air and too-small spaces aren't worth it, and Raine wakes in Lev's arms and tries not to cry. 

She's taken dozens of showers since — since — but she still doesn't really feel clean. If there's anything you need, Christine said, and rules can be bent, but Raine can't think of what she would ask for. She tries sewing again, and scratches herself with a needle by accident and freezes up and then she stops. She tries not to pick at her scabs. SLUT fades and the scab falls off after a few weeks; FAG and CUNT remain. 

The only way out is through. It's just until February. It's just until the end of camp. She'll be let down from the tower eventually, and the cuts will heal and she'll — and she'll. 

Jan gets condoms from some place Lev doesn't ask about and they sneak off and have sex. Kissing is nice. Eating her out is fine. It's sort of slimy and disgusting but she makes soft happy noises and it's easy to focus on making her feel good and on being wanted. The specific details of the act are unpleasant but he doesn't mind doing something unpleasant to make Jan happy. 

She tries to blow him but he pulls her off after a minute; it's too similar and not similar enough, if she'd kept going he would have gotten soft.

He lasts a long time when they have sex. He closes his eyes and thinks a lot about the sensations, about making Jan happy, about how nice it is for someone to want to have sex with him at all. And when she seems to be finished he--

(-- a dark room, men lined up for him to suck off, his jaw aching, and every time one of them finishes there's another one-- drugged so that he doesn't even know how many people have fucked him or when they switch, all he knows is that he's full and used and wanted--)

comes.

He keeps dating — "dating" — Graham. She's nice enough. She doesn't want to have sex with him; he doesn't want to have sex with her; they do all right. 

He keeps an eye on Lev, keeps track of how he's doing; he worries. When Lev comes back from doing — things Marlo doesn't especially want to think about — with Jan, he's visibly sadder than usual; Marlo stays close to him, offers hugs and cuddling and praise, tries to hide just how worried he is. 

That night, he curls up next to Raine and says, "Is it always like that?"

"Is it always like what?" she whispers. 

"Sex with girls."

"I don't know. I've never done it, except kind of with Harry, and, well." 

"It wasn't that bad. It was nice to make her happy. I liked holding her."

"...imagine if I had sex with someone and I described it to you as 'it wasn't that bad'." 

"I know. Kiss me?"

She does. 

She's gentle about it, soft and sweet and affectionate. 

"I'm hurting Marlo," he says into her mouth. "By being with Jan, and not with him."

"I think he's okay with being hurt," which is notably not a contradiction. 

"He wouldn't be okay with hurting me. Even if I were fine with it."

"No," she agrees, "he wouldn't." 

"I want kids. Someday. So does he but--"

She pets his hair. "But?" 

"I think he just plans to do whatever he thinks will make me happiest forever. Because he loves me."

She considers that. 

"...he talked about wanting a family before he fell in love with you, though," she says after a moment. 

"No, I mean. --I think he plans not to have any kids because he can't have them with me."

"...I don't think he's planning that far out? I think his current plan is 'trade school and we'll see where I can get from there,' which I guess does mean he's stopped planning on having a family but I don't think it means he's planning on not having one." 

"How do I get him to stop loving me."

"I'm pretty sure you can't." 

"So I'm just going to. Keep hurting him. Unless he decides to stop loving me on his own."