Marlo hugs him back, presses his cheek into Lev's hair. 

He's very familiar with what Lev likes in hugs, by now. 

It's so nice.

"I trust you."

"I trust you." Squeeze. 

"If I say I don't want to kiss you you're not going to try to-- seduce me or convince me or kiss me anyway."

"Of course not — did someone try that —" 

"Uh. Sort of. That's not the point. The point is that you wouldn't so I don't have to try to avoid situations where you might."

"Of course I wouldn't." He's holding Lev more protectively now. 

You'd probably trust him even if he were going to abuse you, that's what abusers do, Lev's brain points out unhelpfully.

It would be nice if Lev were not continually struggling with self-doubt and uncertainty. 

"Let's go to breakfast."

"Yeah." He lets go, smiles at Lev for half of a second before he turns to put shoes on. 

Marlo looks so happy. 

Lev had gay sex and then immediately afterward he was a better person. This is a moderately inconvenient observation. 

Self-awareness, he reflects, is a curse.

He keeps smiling all through breakfast — he's aware that he's not being subtle, but it hardly seems to matter when Lev is right there. 

Marlo is so happy and it makes it hard to believe that he is doing something wrong.

He walks very slowly to the paintball field and says, "Christine says that our relationship might wind up being-- abusive."

"She said that to me too. But — a lot of the red flags she listed seemed like they'd only fit if you twisted them, it's true that I spent a lot of time with you but it's not true that I tried to stop you from participating in other things. 

If you want me to back off you can tell me so and I'll do it." 

"It made you miserable. I don't want you to be miserable."

"You not being abused is more important." 

"I think I'd rather have a chance of being abused than a certainty of you being miserable all the time."

"...I promised I was going to keep you safe. And even if I hadn't, you being abused would make me miserable." 

"Maybe you're doing some kind of eleven-dimensional chess manipulation thing but this really does not seem like the sort of conversation abusers have with their victims."

"I mean, I'm not saying I'm definitely going to stop talking to you for your own protection. Just, if you want me to stop doing something, tell me, I'll stop." 

"And I'm saying I'm going with the plan that has a chance of not making you miserable. Even if I might be abused."

He nods and doesn't say any of the things he's thinking. 

Is handholding straight? It's probably straight enough. 

He grabs Marlo's hand and squeezes it tight and says, "I love you."

He squeezes Lev's hand back. "I love you too." 

He's... happy. 

Christine was right about the importance of intimacy with other men. It's hard to get away from the electricity that passes through his body when he touches Marlo; he can't stop thinking about how nice it would be to feel Marlo's lips on his lips and Marlo's body on his. But that's just... a small part of it. Spending time with Marlo and Raine makes him better. He's happier. He opens up in group, even when he's afraid that everyone else will reject him, because Marlo and Raine won't. He can throw a football and sometimes manage to get it to the person he intended to throw it at, because Marlo taught him; he can make things out of metal, because Raine showed him how. He thinks about the fact that Marlo and Raine love him and considers the possibility that there might be something in him that is worthy of love.

When he jerks off at night he thinks about Raine-- her face, her lips, her hands, her body-- and even if it's not all the way straight it's straighter than he's ever been. He tries, experimentally, to think about her with breasts and a vagina and he still wants her desperately. 

(Maybe he can come home from camp with a girlfriend-- maybe if Raine wears enough makeup she'll look in her pictures like she was born a girl-- maybe he is going to be fixed.)

He thinks sometimes about the fact that he was miserable and making Marlo miserable, and then he sucked a dick, and then he was happy and made Marlo happy. It does not seem like this is what Christine would have predicted. He thinks about the fact that everything Raine is being denied other than sucking dick is hurting her for no reason. He thinks about the fact that Marlo loving him felt good and wholesome and pure.

He doesn't come to conclusions. 

He's — happy. 

He spends time with Lev, makes sure to spend time with Dolph and Clayton too; he offers to teach Andre how to throw a football but is mostly unsurprised when Andre turns him down. He learns metalworking from Sasha and math from Lev and makes little notes about trade school, about what he'd want to do afterwards, about things he should research — what kind of jobs can you get with metalworking, with welding, what skills from car repair are transferable to other things, what kind of salary should he be planning for — he isn't sure whether he'll have his parents' help or not. He opens up in group, does his best to show Christine that he isn't trying to fight her. 

He keeps thinking about how nice it would be to kiss Lev — he does his best not to have those thoughts, Lev doesn't want to kiss him, or at least doesn't want to want to kiss him which is close enough to the same thing for Marlo's purposes, but he does in fact have them. 

He quietly retires the dream of a house and a family. He has plenty of other dreams to replace it with.