"Oh, no, a sauna is a room where you throw some water on hot stones and then the room fills up with steam. It's nice, especially when it's cold out."

"Oh! Okay, that sounds fun."

Kaleva starts to take him to the castle's sauna. 

"I guess you don't have saunas in America? Because it's not so cold?"

"Not as cold as it gets here, yeah. It does get pretty cold in the winter, but we have furnaces in our houses that blow steam or hot air through pipes in the walls into all the rooms and that keeps them warm."

"We have that too! But it's pretty recent so we haven't gotten out of the habit of saunas. --It's weird to think other people don't have them."

"I don't know if we didn't invent them or if I just never happened to run into one."

Kaleva leads Bruce to a small room with shelves; there's a glass door separating it from a wood-paneled room with a bench, which is presumably the actual sauna.

Kaleva takes off his shoes and socks and puts them on a low shelf; then he takes his shirt off, neatly folds it, and puts it on the shelf.

Bruce takes off his shoes and socks and hesitates. It's not like Kaleva is likely to be surprised by anything under his shirt, they share a bed, if Bruce was going to be embarrassed about his appearance he should have started a long time ago. He takes off his shirt and stores it next to Kaleva's.

And then Kaleva takes off his pants and underwear and folds them neatly and puts them on the shelf next to his shirt.

Bruce is not sure what to do about this! On the one hand it's not like Kaleva is going to be surprised by what's under Bruce's underwear either. On the other hand what if they have sinful thoughts about each other. On the third hand he can't actually say "I'm worried we're going to have sinful thoughts about each other because that would be an awful thing to accuse Kaleva of and he doesn't want to admit to it himself either. Really he should just take his pants off and make the choice not to have sinful thoughts but making the right choices about what thoughts to have is the thing he is the very worst at out of a whole world of things he is bad at. And now Kaleva is going to notice that he's standing frozen staring at the wall, shit.

"...are you okay?"

"Fine. Sorry. Just, uh, woolgathering." He is still not taking his pants off, why is he still not taking his pants off.

Kaleva shrugs and goes into the sauna. 

As he pours some water onto the rocks, he notices himself staring at Bruce's chest. It's a very interesting chest. Kaleva is... jealous, probably? It's weird to be jealous. Bruce isn't muscular like the boys who go swimming naked down at the river. (Kaleva has spent up to several hours in a tree looking at them with jealousy and pretending to read a book.) Maybe it's because Bruce is his friend and he wants to know which of them is more handsome. The answer is obviously Bruce.

Once Kaleva's back is turned Bruce can pretend this is a gym locker room and he's about to put on gym clothes and that gets him to the point of getting his pants and underwear off. He follows Kaleva into the sauna and catches himself staring at his shoulders. He hasn't really noticed that shoulders could look good before, but they do. They're a very nice shape. Is that a sinful thought? Maybe. Maybe he's just noticing that the human form is fearfully and wonderfully made, which is supposed to be fine. He stops staring at Kaleva's shoulders and goes to stand next to him and stares at the steam instead, just in case.

Kaleva is not staring at the steam. He sits on the bench and looks at Bruce, who has shoulders (!!!) and a stomach (!!!) and thighs (!!!) and arms (!!!) and the fact that people don't wear clothes in the sauna has never been this interesting before. He physically cannot tear his eyes away. His heart is racing and it's not all from the steam.

Jealousy...? Bruce is very well-put-together so it makes sense that Kaleva would be jealous.

Bruce keeps accidentally looking at Kaleva and thinking about how nice he is to look at. He never really saw the appeal of looking at pictures of celebrities but celebrities all look boring and Kaleva looks interesting. Fascinating, even. And every time he looks over Kaleva is also looking at him, and Kaleva wouldn't be doing that if it was wrong, because he's good, so maybe he can just look and think about how good it is that a person as smart and kind and generally excellent as Kaleva is also very aesthetic.

Next time Bruce looks at Kaleva he can see that Kaleva is hard.

WHOOPS should not have looked there, should not have looked there. It's probably just the heat, it's very hot in here after all, but now Bruce is getting hard too and it's definitely not just the heat and is a whole bunch of sinful thoughts, some of which are incoherent images and some of which are impulses to reach out and touch. He should do something; he should get up and leave; if he did he would have to explain why. Kaleva knows he's not a good person but he didn't mean to be a bad person at him.

Kaleva, who has no idea that anything of note at all is happening, puts his head on Bruce's shoulder and makes a happy noise.

It seems unfair to Kaleva not to tell him the truth. He's going to notice sooner or later and he can at least not compound his awfulness by lying and letting Kaleva think everything is fine.

"Um."

"Yeah?" Kaleva says vaguely but happily.

"I'm sorry and you probably don't want to be doing this because I'm. Uh. IjustrealizedI'masodomite." He finishes in a very quiet mumble Kaleva only stands a chance of hearing because his ear is right by Bruce's face.

"...I don't know what that is," Kaleva says. 

Does that mean they aren't allowed to cuddle anymore. Naked cuddling was very interesting and good and Kaleva is now distracted from whatever Bruce was saying by the fact that he can press his whole entire side and leg into Bruce's side and leg and their skin can touch and this is very interesting. 

That is really interesting and that in turn is awful. Bruce pulls all his limbs in and hides his face in his knees. 

"Means I'm an awful person and I want to do awful things with you. I'm sorry. You'll probably want to avoid me and that's fine." He doesn't know what he's going to do if Kaleva very reasonably decides he can't have a man uncontrollably lusting after him in his house but he'll think of something.

"...um? I don't think you've done any awful things to me so far? And I like you and don't want to avoid you."

Oh no he did something wrong and now Bruce hates him.