"...okay, you don't have to tell me if you don't wanna. Uhhhh I rescued an American today and she tried to tip me, so that was funny."

He snorts and covers his eyes. "I do wanna, I kinda gotta because it's about you, it's just embarrassing and I'm putting it off."

"Oh no. I don't suppose it helps if I promise not to tease you about it or anything."

"I think we have conclusively determined by now that my feelings about my image are only very tenuously connected to reality."

"I do sometimes tease and I can in fact not do it about whatever this is, if it helps! But yeah I didn't expect it to make a huge difference."

"She gave me a pretty good suggestion which is that I should text you about it rather than say it out loud, but you being right next to me ruins it. Unfortunately you just came back from a dungeon so I'm not about to let you go, at least not without pounding whatever sense you've got missing back into you."

"Oh, okay, I'll just have to live in agonizing suspense then."

Jaeha kisses him. "I hope I can distract you from the suspense. Permission to carry you to the bedroom?"

"Always."

Oh he really hopes Haru means that.

Hyup goes the Haru to go be distracted.

It's not that hard to get his mind off the mystery of the therapy homework.

It's somewhat harder but still not objectively hard to get Jaeha to at least not be constantly thinking about it. Spending time with his ✨boyfriend✨ has the tendency to occupy all of his thoughts.

And once the sense is all duly injected into his poor senseless self Haru will kiss Jaeha and go off to do some work on his blog.

Okay! Cool! So Jaeha can work on his homework!

...he'll take a look at those questionnaires first.

Oh there are kind of a lot of questions huh. They're all multiple choice though and kind of... Well, they sound like therapy questions, which, no, duh.

Is he going to successfully put it off long enough that Haru will be back, oh no, there'll be nothing he can do then—

He buries his face in a pillow and screams quietly into it.

whyyyyyyy is he liiiiiiike thiiiiiiiiiiiissssssssssss

He just needs to ask to go to a restaurant. That's all. Nothing more. Does he even need to text Haru that? Except he should also be paying attention to his feelings. And maybe tell Haru about those feelings, which honestly sounds terrible. 

...he'll start writing this down, shall he.

He just needs to ask Haru to go to a restaurant with him. ...a fancy restaurant. One of the nice restaurants he knows, the kind that needs a reservation. The kind where you usually can't go in in jeans and T-shirt but Jaeha fortunately has more money than sense so he can bribe them to allow Haru in anyway. 

(He could be using that money for charitable donations.)

(He might actually go completely insane if he starts thinking like that.)

(Note to future Jaeha: figure out how to deal with the fact that unless he donates everything he owns but the bare minimum necessary to survive he is not a good person.)

(He's not a good person yet, anyway, so it doesn't matter, he's going to spend money on a restaurant reservation.)

And he needs to pay attention to his feelings, before and during and while waiting and after Haru's reply. "Before" is "right now", so, what is he feeling?

Scared, obviously, and embarrassed. Extra embarrassed by how much of a big deal he's making it. It's just not that big a deal, and yet here he is, making it be one. And it's gonna make it even more embarrassing when he finally does message Haru and Haru'll be like "wow, that's what you were embarrassed about? kinda cringe ngl".

Except the Haru in real life is not as mean as the Haru in his head. If he were, Jaeha would probably not be dating him. In fact, it is very central to why he likes Haru, the fact that Haru's not mean.

But, well, the thing about all of the being embarrassed that he keeps doing is that it's...

...it's ego-dystonic to be cringe. It's ego-dystonic to be broken. It's ego-dystonic to be, to, to not have his shit together. If ego-syntonicity is better than fun, ego-dystonicity is worse than, than—not boredom, that doesn't fit. It's worse than just—something. It's bad, is the point. It's like being dysphoric about his personality, there is a kind of person he wants to be and whenever he fails at being that person it hurts.

And when he used his power, he could just be that person. That's...

Okay that's definitely the kind of thing that'll make it harder to let go of using his power frivolously and it definitely explains a whole lot of the way he feels about all of it, wow, okay, huh.

Right.

There is a kind of person he wants to be, not just come off as. And when he's failing to be that person, that hurts his ego, in a—not in the way that phrase is used, or at least not directly, but in a—there is a body part of him in his mind—a mind part of him—that part of him gets hurt whenever he fails to be the person he wants to be. And the person he wants to be doesn't dither, or overthink, or get nervous and anxious, or misjudge social situations, or be tentative and uncertain and scared, or lack confidence. The person he wants to be is confident, and secure, and knows what he wants, and is good at getting it, and is sexy and suave and cool and composed and put together.

...hm. On the other hand. That does kind of mean that a lot of the using his power he does—used to do—was actually just putting up a front. Some of it wasn't! To the extent he wants to be able to communicate things correctly, there isn't a difference (or much of one) between using his mouth and using his powers for it. But guessing the correct thing to say isn't that. Guessing the thing that the other person wants by asking and then erasing the memory of it isn't being good at social skills, it's cheating. It is, in fact, being bad at social skills. It's a crutch.