Math is still mathing. 

Possibly Sasha should wave a hand in front of his face.

He does that. 

Kaleva blinks. "Hi. Uh. What time is it. --What day is it."

"Wednesday, 5 PM." 

"Thanks. --Have I eaten. I am pretty sure I haven't eaten in uh. Two days."

"That's a problem. Let's go downstairs and get you food?" 

"I'm not sure I really need to eat," he objects, but he lets Sasha lead him downstairs.

"Everyone needs to eat." 

"If I ate less I would be thin like you. --Although I guess you wouldn't like that."

"— Auradonians are so fucking weird. Even if being thinner were prettier, you still need to eat." 

"--Sorry you started talking to me for the first time in a day and I was immediately depressed at you, let's start over. What were you up to while I was doing math?"

(He braces himself for "getting fucked.")

"I went to the bookstore and tried to figure out whether I like sci fi or not, with very limited success." 

Bounce bounce. "What happened? Do you want recommendations?"

Why is he mildly disappointed that Sasha didn't have sex.

"About half of the stuff I looked at was very obsessed with calculations of things I've never heard of and everyone sounded like they come from a physics textbook, another one third for some reason was able to conceptualize aliens but not able to conceptualize them living any different than Auradonians, and the remainder have really weird ideas about what a society run by evil people would look like but were pretty fun." 

"--oh, yeah, that's a thing, do you want recommendations of books with really alien societies?"

"That would be awesome, yeah." 

"Well, there's this one really good one where instead of having kids people can magically create adults with whatever personality they want, and this other one where babies appear spontaneously on the ground, and this other dystopian fiction where the villains took over and they banned love so in order to get people not to love each other they forced everyone to marry someone of the same gender and I have suddenly figured out why I liked that one so much."

"You're so cute. I'll give them a try, anyway." 

"It's a whole series-- there's one where this guy has to marry his family enemy and then they become friends, and another where they're strangers and the protagonist is afraid that his new husband will be cruel and actually his new husband is very kind and gentle, and another where they both really like each other but they both think the other one hates them-- that one's my favorite-- and there's no sex or anything but there's a lot of kissing--"

"So cute. So cute." 

Bounce bounce bounce. 

"--Do you think the series was meant for people like us?"

"— so I have on my shelf a handful of books. One of them is about a man who for three hundred pages gives lots of very handsome men blowjobs, and then on page three hundred meets his true love and gets married and the book ends five pages later. One of them is about the dangers facing your teenagers, which is ostensibly a warning but the dangers are very lovingly described and include strange men slipping them aphrodisiacs and at least one sex act that I happen to know is not actually possible. One of them is allegedly a case study of what queer people do but in practice is, again, long loving descriptions of people getting fucked twenty times in one night. And they don't say what they are but — it's pretty clear what they are, you know? And this is — that, I think, but not for sex." 

"That's a kind of book?!"

"Yeah. It is. — my favorite is the one about the dangers facing your teenagers, do you want to read it?" 

"Are there any that are about-- people who really like each other."