"I won't make you eat more than you want to and you can wear whatever you want and I'll call you Her Highness the Princess of Maldonia if that's what you want to be called."

"Thank you." 

She wants to be less tense. Why isn't she relaxing? 

"And. I guess you can have unprotected sex if you want to, it's your body, I just. --I would really rather you not decide to do things that are going to fuck you up this much."

She isn't going to protest that she didn't know it would fuck her up this much. She isn't going to cry. 

She's going to nod and not say anything at all. 

He's going to hold her.

(He doesn't know what he's doing wrong.)

Being held should be nice — she doesn't want to feel too-hot and constricted — she closes her eyes. 

"Do you want me to leave you for a bit?"

"I think I'm going to go, there's. Stuff I should do." There isn't. 

She gets out of bed and puts her shirt back on and — contemplates eating; food is deeply deeply unappealing — goes and finds Marlo in the library. 

He's still halfway asleep but when he sees the look on Raine's face he wakes up the rest of the way. 

"Hey," he says, very soft, "what's up?" 

"I told Asher. About — the thing. With Harry. 

He'd — thought I hadn't known. And it was okay because I'd just made a mistake, and when he found out I had known —" 

She's whispering. She's not sure her voice would work if she tried to make it. 

"Do you want me to hug you?" 

Pause. Tight, quick nod. 

He stands up and collects Raine and sits again with her in his lap. 

"Tell me what he said?" 

Now she relaxes. (Fuck, what does that say about her, that her boyfriend holding her made her feel trapped but Marlo feels —) 

"He wanted to know why I'd done it and then he said he didn't get how fucking someone like that would make me feel like my body was mine and he said could I maybe not express my ownership of myself through making stupid choices and — when he could tell I was upset he stopped and hugged me but —" 

"Yeah," Marlo says, softly, and adjusts the way he's holding her, cards absentmindedly through her hair. "I get it." 

She's spent a lot of time with her head on Marlo's shoulder and his fingers in her hair, these last few weeks. It's — nice. Familiar. 

"And — he wasn't. Wrong? It was a stupid choice I shouldn't have made, I should have figured out something else to do that wouldn't fuck me up so bad, I just —" 

"...Raine, it is not your fault that you got raped." 

A distressed sound. 

"It wasn't — I didn't say no, ever, and I —" 

He holds her closer.

"Would you have? If you'd been able to breathe, if you had thought he would stop?" 

That same tight too-quick nod. 

"We have a word for sex you don't want to be having but can't end. That word is not bad decision. That word is rape." 

She nods again and then all at once goes limp. 

"...yeah," she says, quiet. "Yeah." 

And he keeps petting her hair, keeps cradling her, keeps being there. 

He did something wrong, he hurt Raine, he doesn't know what he did wrong, he has to fix it but he doesn't know how--

Lev wakes up, shakes his head, and immediately dives back into the Research Pit.