"Also I specifically asked God to send me a psychologically interesting alien and once again my prayers are not granted."

"Are you calling me boring?" 

"Never. I'm just saying that it would be cool if you came from a species that never Fell, or a species where babies appear spontaneously in the forest instead of being produced through pregnancy, or a species that has chips in their brains so they can't die, and instead it seems like you're a normal human. --Please correct me if you're any of those things, of course."

"To the best of my knowledge I am a normal human, although one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that I am a fairy child switched at birth with my parents' human baby. Seems pretty unlikely, though, I can handle iron and lie." 

"You could be from a weird fairy species. Have you tried crossing running water?"

Oh no she's great.

He tries to figure out whether he should shut down his crush on her. But probably he should be doing what God wants from him because of the whole interdimensional bar situation, which is probably talking to Raine. --Oh, no, she's a girl, maybe he has a crush on her because God wants them to get married, which is definitely nice to think about, but also definitely terrifying, and really not the sort of decision he wants to make in the next five minutes. He wishes there was a bathroom he could go scream in for a couple minutes, or alternately that he could pray and get a sense of inner peace instead of a sense that the Divine found him fundamentally wanting.

"I have and it worked fine. Are you okay?" 

...forget it.

"I noticed I, um, like you."

"...you're very cute about it. 

You can look at me, you know, I won't turn you to stone." 

"Um. If I look at you I'll, um." Intense blushing.

"....you'll?" 

"Lustafteryou."

".....if you stare at my tits I will ask you to stop it, but otherwise that honestly sounds... fine?" 

He blushes even harder at the phrase "stare at my tits."

"Um, well, even if you don't mind it's bad... in general? For women and for my future wife."

"I really don't see how you looking at me would be harmful for women in general but if you think your future wife will have opinions about it then feel free to not." 

"Well, if men look at women with lust, then they'll objectify women and it'll lead to pornography use and sexual violence and sex trafficking and adultery and sexual harassment and other things that are bad for women? And in the case of my wife specifically she might be jealous if she knew I had been attracted to other people, or worried that I was going to compare her to someone else. And it might tempt me to kiss someone else or, um, other things. And if I discipline my mind so I only think of my wife in a, um, sexual way, then she'll be my standard of beauty and I'll always think she's the most beautiful."

Lev is looking at the ground for reasons that have nothing to do with whether Raine is pretty.

What the hell do you do with that set of sentences, Raine is so unqualified for this 

"...sexual violence and sexual harassment and especially sex trafficking are largely systemic problems that really do not seem best solved by individual people refusing to look at other individual people, and the evidence seems to point to pornography use actually just being fine for women, when porn was more widely available rape rates went way down although there's hella confounding factors there and I don't know any good studies off the top of my head, my Lev looked and then started yelling about validity and replication -- admittedly I am probably not the most qualified to talk about adultery -- and that is really not how being attracted to people works in my experience but I guess if it works for you?" 

"I don't... really care about the other things. I just want to be the best husband for my wife that I can be. And I want to treat you with respect."

Honestly Raine knows how to deal with that even less. 

"...okay," she says, because she isn't sure what else to say. 

"...why are you not qualified to talk about adultery? Because you're not married, or...?"

"That, and also I kind of have two and a half boyfriends." 

"Is that... okay... for you?"

"...sorry, I'm not sure what the thing you're trying to imply here is. I love all three of the people I live with and they love me and each other and we like the arrangement we have, yeah." 

"Oh. I guess I'd want to know that you're... happy, and not being taken advantage of or exploited, and that sort of thing. Um. I haven't really talked to Cascadians very much, I don't know... how to be polite around polygamous people."

Raine is taken three times over, he should shut down his nascent crush on her right now. He tries to think about her flaws. She's not chaste (but he could forgive her and maybe she'd be grateful and happy). She's not a Christian (he doesn't really care about that). She's vulgar (he doesn't really care about that either). This is difficult. 

"Polyamorous. But considering everything I know so far about Gilead you're doing great at it. If you have questions I can try and answer them, or alternately you could tell me more things about what Gilead and Cascadia are like?"