"No!!!!!!"

Shrug. "Then maybe I'm wrong. You seemed very invested in this idea where your sexuality belongs entirely to someone else, though, it's not that weird of a guess." 

"Yes but that's-- the way relationships are supposed to work-- I'm not a sex addict!!!"

Where to even begin.

"You... don't have to be a sex addict to be kinky. Some people just are, and lots of other people watched Star Wars or the Jungle Book or whatever at a formative age and imprinted.

People talk about it more in sex-positive places because there's less stigma and they're more likely to have figured themselves out but we exist everywhere actually and not all of us are hypersexual sluts." 

Also, there is nothing wrong with being a hypersexual slut, but maybe don't pick that fight with the evangelical. 

"There is more than one kind of sex addict and I am not any of them! I'm not a sadomasochist! I just... want my future wife to be happy. --I mean I guess I did just kiss you and cuddle you and think about having sex with you so I am not doing, like, perfectly on making my future wife happy but. Humans were designed so the only context for sex is marriage, men were designed to take care of women as servant leaders, this is the normal way for things to be."

".................kay." 

This is the most openly skeptical Lev has ever heard Raine — or Sasha, for that matter — be. She very cautiously puts her hand back on Lev's hair. 

He rests his head on her chest and makes a soft happy noise and tries to figure out whether this counts as Too Close To Second Base if Raine, despite being a woman, does not technically have breasts, and if it does whether he cares.

In that case she'll go right back to petting his hair. 

"You're still very soft." 

"Thank you. --Is Marlo like six feet tall, Asian, very handsome, very quiet, maybe works as a police officer or a soldier or something--"

"Six feet tall, Asian, very handsome, very quiet, works as a welder but was planning on joining the military when I met him, surname Lane." 

"...Huh. I know a him. Didn't know he was same-sex-attrac-- uh, gay."

"Chances are, neither does he." 

"...Mine is a member of the secret police."

"...christ." 

"He works in enhanced interrogation. --I used to, I quit, that's how I know him."

"And ten to one says he's miserable and hates himself and refuses to admit it to himself -- I'm going to put off the raging about how much I hate Christianity until you're not in the room --" 

"Yeah. It's a terrible job, I had to quit because I kept having nightmares and I couldn't eat and I couldn't stop thinking about what I was doing to people and I was just in, you know, research and development, I wasn't doing anything to people. I thought Marlo was just better than me though."

Hug. Hug hug hug. "No. Just -- better at hiding things from himself. Also, not being able to hurt people doesn't make you a bad person! This is why I hate Christianity." 

"Well. If they're bad people, and it's for the safety of Gilead as a whole... I mean, it's okay to torture a terrorist to get them to tell you where a bomb is, right? But I was just. Tired of spending the entire drive home from work thinking about what it would be like if the person were me."

Hug hug hug hug. 

"I also don't think it makes you a bad person to not be able to torture a potential terrorist to get you to tell them where a bomb is. I don't think people should torture potential terrorists. I don't think anyone should torture anyone." 

"Well, that would be nice, but it's hard to do when your country has Mexico posed to invade, and Deseret and Canada taking in illegal emigrants, and Cascadia with enough nukes to turn the entirety of Gilead into radioactive slag..."

".........I'm glad there are countries that accept refugees, anyway." 

"You wouldn't like Mexico or Deseret either, they're Catholic and Mormon respectively."

"Sounds like Canada's fine, though. And -- options is better than not options even if I hate all the options." 

"Canada's fine for you except that they average less than one child per woman and in sixty years they're going to be an outpost of Gilead. Cascadia-- uh, I actually don't know what you'd object to about Cascadia, but what I object to is the sex trafficking and drug addiction and institutionalized rape of teenagers, and the fact that murdering babies and disabled people and old people is legal. Also they eat their pets which I guess is not wrong but is kind of gross."