"Yeah um."

"If you wanted to not have shirts on that sounds nice and I probably am interested in other things as you can tell but don't think I should do um. Too many other things while I am this crazy? It would be a lot at once."

"Yeah, that's super valid." He pulls his shirt off.

"I am trying to figure out if I was just confused or if there was an active conspiracy to prevent me from noticing I was attracted to men." 

Sporfle. "I think you were probably just confused."

"If you're sure." He is still just sort of staring.

He is welcome to stare, and Haru will decline to unbutton Lucien's shirt for him. "Espers are all at, like, peak health backlash aside, and symmetrical, and stuff. Also sometimes we have weird hair or eye colors, my eyes are actually sort of navy blue now in the right light."

"I see..."

"I previously thought that uh, statues of men were attractive because they were designed by very competent artists but I am reevaluating that assumption now."

"Espers are disproportionately queer - uh, that's an umbrella term for all the nonstandard ways people can relate to attraction and gender - but we're not sure why."

"Mm."

"I was going to take off my own shirt."

"That was the plan, yes."

Lucien can shakily undo a few of buttons, slowing down towards the third one.

"Um. Could we be touching more now please, the guiding was really nice."

Haru can pull him into more of a hug.

Lucien relaxes considerably after a second and can go back to undoing buttons even.

It is HARD to maintain a balance between indicating that you are totally up for whatever amount of touching would be welcome and also that there is no pressure for that amount to be any specific level. It is especially hard when the guy is from a hundred years ago and only just realized he was attracted to men. Maybe it will help if Haru starts talking about something completely unrelated like other Bollywood movies Cricket has been summarizing for him. Cricket is a very helpful kitty who watches a lot of television and film and then tells Haru all the good stuff when Haru needs to be having a conversation.

Lucien has questions that aren't even always about how things relate to him! Also he is not wearing a shirt now and sort of leaning into Haru an increasingly large amount.

You can arrange quite a lot of skin contact just by being naked from the waist up. Completely non-escalatory hug, back to chest so they don't have to worry so much about laps.

Lucien can do so much wrapping his arms around Haru and he is enjoying it too much at the moment to panic about it.

Once they have run out of TV plots Haru remembers in enough detail they can play twenty questions or something, though it's going to be both very easy and kind of hilarious if Lucien is incapable of guessing that the answer might be anything other than himself.

"I'm pretty sure I'm not smaller than a bread box?"

Snort. "You are not, but the thing I'm thinking of for the purposes of this game is."

"Is it a body part?"

"No."

"Is it very young?"

"No."

"Is it.... the last two times it wasn't me but I can swear all the clues make sense as me this time."