Probably Asher has a free period. Not Chen's business. 

Concentrating in class on things that aren't Ben is even harder than usual. (He's still avoiding Audrey. It just seems like good sense.) 

Audrey has been crying! Her makeup is smeared down her face very dramatically.

If she would like to advertise to the world that she's been dumped she is free to do so but Chen isn't getting involved, or at least, he's not getting involved publicly. 

It's easier, Ben finds himself thinking over the next few days, to be a king without having to worry about Audrey. He feels disloyal, but it's true.

Sometimes it feels like being held by Chen is the only thing keeping him together right now; if he didn't have Chen's steady face watching him when they strategized, Chen's hand on his when he's upset, Chen's arms around his at night, he would collapse.

He cringes whenever he passes Audrey in the hallway.

They can find different routes so he won't pass by her, or Chen can walk with him, or both. 

He holds Ben at night, takes his hand, touches him more. It's — it might be the most at peace Chen has ever felt. 

Something is strange about Kaleva's relationship with Chen.

Something has always been strange about Kaleva's relationship with Chen. Kaleva is bad about not thinking about things, but he's okay at not actively investigating things, and that's fine. It was a good weird, before Ben. 

But Kaleva feels sick to his stomach about Ben. Ben likes him, Ben thinks he's smart, Ben is listening to his opinion about things even though he is going to be the literal ruler of the whole world and Kaleva is just a fifteen-year-old who spends too much time reading books, and all of this really seems like it ought to make Kaleva happy and it-- doesn't. In fact it makes him fantasize extensively about Ben falling off a building so Kaleva can have Chen all to himself again the way it used to be. 

So.

It is probably a Sex Thing.

Kaleva has never been particularly interested in Sex Things. He had one extremely awkward conversation with his father about it and the entire concept was so disgusting and repulsive that he never wanted to think about it again. Before he was declared an utter failure as a son and sent off to Auradon Prep, his father took him to a troll to make sure he couldn't have kids with all the sowing of his wild oats he would probably be doing as a remittance man in Auradon City. Kaleva had considered explaining to his father that he could not think of anything more unpleasant than sowing his wild oats, but concluded that (a) his father was as likely to believe him about this as he was about any other Kaleva Fact, which is to say not at all, and (b) if there was one thing that could convince Kaleva to sow a wild oat it was the prospect of a baby appearing afterward, so his father was probably making good choices regardless. 

But one of the most concrete weird things about Kaleva's relationship with Chen is that sometimes he dreams about Chen holding him and touching him and saying he loves him and then Kaleva wakes up with sticky underwear. It does not take a lot to put together that this might be a Sex Thing. 

You're not technically supposed to be able to get in the restricted section in the Auradon Prep library without parental permission and a legitimate research interest. But the librarians all love Kaleva, and he doesn't have to do too many pained smiles and reassurances that he obviously understands that the rules can't be bent for his personal gain in order to get the rules bent for his personal gain. 

(He could probably namedrop soon-to-be-King Ben to get it. He doesn't.)

Many of the details of the books don't seem to be particularly accurate. He is pretty doubtful that anyone, no matter how evil, has ever punched a person in the back of the head during sex in order to make the vaginal canal tighter; he is also very skeptical that you can fit a fist inside an anus. Certain of the other described sex acts seem in principle possible but in practice even more unappealing than intercourse itself. He can't imagine why you would want to put your mouth on a vulva, with all the secretions and mucus and its general resemblance to a science fiction alien. Since people observably have intercourse, anal sex doesn't seem that much stranger; it's not like occasionally producing feces is that much grosser than occasionally producing blood, although Kaleva is not really sure why you'd want to put your body parts inside either of those body parts. 

None of this enlightens him about what his relationship with Chen is.  

And then he turns a page and there's a diagram of a man kissing another man and holding both of their penises together in his hand and Kaleva thinks "oh."

And he realizes he wants to kiss Chen, he wants to touch Chen, he wants to grind on Chen, if he turns around some of those sex acts he was just reading about so he's in the female position he suddenly understands the appeal, he wants he wants he wants--

Meanwhile--

Helping someone cheat on their spouse is much more boring than Asher had been lead to believe. He should probably complain about inaccurate representations of adultery in popular culture. 

His dick was inside his lover's mouth when her husband opened the front door and Asher was shoved, naked, into a closet, where he has been for the past two hours, stuck between a fur coat and a velvet blazer. He's shivering from cold. His foot has fallen asleep. He can't make a sound. Fortunately she'd also shoved in his phone, so he could text Ben about the internal politics of Morgendammerung, read some more of a history book Kaleva recommended, and congratulate his younger sister on her first flambé.

Even so, he is bored. He eavesdrops a little on his lover and her husband's boring domestic quarrels, mourning that he has nothing better to do than listen to two people arguing about who did the dishes last. Then realizes that he has a brain and therefore always has something better to do than listen to people arguing about doing the dishes, and instead entertains himself seeing how much of trigonometry he can reinvent from the two days of class he actually bothered to attend. 

The argument noises turn into squeaking bed noises. His lover, it seems, has decided to distract her husband from the teenage boy in their closet by fucking him. 

He is more than familiar enough with the sounds of her arousal to know that she's faking. Still, it's a pretty hot pornography soundtrack, and her husband is pretty good-looking, and reconstructing what must be happening from the gasps and whimpers and creaks of the bed is more entertaining than trigonometry. 

Asher is a teenage boy, and he didn't actually get to get off before he was so rudely shoved into a closet, and there are two reasonably attractive people fucking two feet away from him, and if his impulse control was any good he probably would not have found himself in this situation in the first place. So he finds his hands stroking up and down his chest and his thighs, and then his dick finds its way into his hand. He bites his lip and throws his head back and imagines what must be happening, imagines her legs wrapped around his back and his face contorted in pleasure and the way his dick would look sliding in and out of her pussy. He can't make a sound or he'll get caught and the danger itself makes his heart race, puts him on edge; he feels alive. 

The husband finishes with a grunt and rolls over. Asher bites his hand hard to keep from making a sound, imagines that it's his turn inside her next, imagines them both taking her, imagines the sounds she makes when she comes around his dick, and finishes. 

For lack of any better method, he licks his hands clean. Then he returns to contemplating trigonometry. 

Kaleva has words, now, for the sort of person he is. 

He's a sodomite.

Sodomites, he learns, are not capable of true love. True love is only between a man and a woman; only a man and a woman can perform true love magic, the most powerful of all magics. Kaleva might feel sadder about this, but he'd always figured he was too ugly and awkward to ever be truly loved anyway, so it's not like this is much different.

(He's sad that he can't really love Chen. That hurts.)

He learns that there are places where sodomites meet other sodomites. Bars, bathhouses, certain public toilets, places to meet for sex. You don't date, if you're a sodomite. Two men can't get married and they can't love each other, there wouldn't be a point. It's not useful information, because Kaleva is pretty sure the only person he wants to have sex with is Chen. But maybe someday he'll be desperate enough to try.  

It is possible to do sex things to yourself when you are awake. It causes hairy palms, which he doesn't particularly care about, and weakness of the brain, which he absolutely does. Fortunately, the concept of touching himself, as opposed to Chen, is already kind of gross, so he's not really tempted by it.

The knowledge is mostly theoretical, and it's probably going to stay that way, as long as he only wants Chen. But still. It's good to know.

One night Ben curls up with his head on Chen's shoulder and says, "I'm not sure that my dad was a very good king."

He pulls Ben closer and says "What brings this up?" 

"You know that the dwarves and fairies went on strike?"

"I'd heard about it, yeah." 

"All of my human advisers think I should send troops out to put them in an anti-magic field and arrest them, and my nonhuman advisers don't want to disagree."

"...there are plenty of people who'd react that way to human strikes too," but he knows that isn't the real problem. 

"The problem is that"-- he sighs-- "I feel like maybe they're actually right? They can't leave their jobs and they're not getting paid in money."

"...it's definitely much better than what genies had before your father." 

"The genies are talking about joining the strike. They can't stop granting wishes but they can interpret them as maliciously as possible."

"That sounds likely to become a disaster." 

"Yeah. If the dwarves go on strike it's whatever, diamonds are going to be a little more expensive, but if genies go on strike-- Well. My advisers are talking Isle."

He thinks about that. 

"I'm not sure that wouldn't also be a disaster, just a longer-term one." 

"How so?"

"Right now, genie wishes are the most reliable magic we have, if we put a bunch of genies on the Isle not only are we losing that resource but also even the genies who aren't on the Isle just — aren't going to be interacting in good faith, and even if they aren't interpreting wishes as maliciously as possible that still seems likely to end badly in the long run." 

"They want to be free and not in their lamps anymore. And... on one hand we really don't want a bunch of all-powerful free agents running around, even if we can use anti-magic fields, and genie wishes are useful. On the other hand, I definitely would not want to live in a lamp forever."

"Yeah," he says, very softly. "I don't know either." 

"And I keep thinking-- what do I know, you know? I'm sixteen. Probably my dad is right."