"Oh, yeah, before I awakened I was planning to, like, save myself for true love and monogamy and stuff and then I had my hellweek and popped up on the other side like 'well that's inconvenient, no more of that'. And I am basically fine with this though it turned out not to have been quite so essential as I imagined since June's so - hidey - and my secondary's not exactly what I had in mind as an opportunity I couldn't pass up, at the time."

“Honestly I don’t know if casual sex is ever going to be my thing but I can imagine myself juggling a handful of friends-with-benefits arrangements—but I think my point is that—if we try to be something, I am not by default expecting monogamy, and also as an addendum if at any point I am not doing anything non-monogamous this does not bear on my expectations for you.”

"That makes sense and I think it straightforwardly vice-versas."

“—I like you a lot, I know I said that already but I like you a lot a lot. You’re so—thoughtful—is the word I want to use but it’s a massive oversimplification, like using one word for someone’s backlash. You’re careful and you think things through to their logical conclusions and you’re—creative, in a having-good-ideas way, I know the word is mostly used for art—you already knew about smallpox eradication day—you don’t do the stupid thing where people suffering is good if you don’t like them—there are things where—I’m not disappointed in everyone around me all the time because it would never occur to me to expect those things from them, and then you just do them, all the time.”

"- that might be the nicest compliment I have ever gotten in my life, wow."

“Oh. I’m glad.”

"I like you a lot too, you're - a number of people read my blog but not a lot of them internalize it to the point where they'd be taking video while kidnapped, just in case it turned out to be important, you know? And you're - practical and easy to strategize with, about backlash handling and the dungeon approach and stuff, and you're smart and - energized? Animated? I'm not sure I know exactly what word I want but it's something in that vein. And I could see myself going on to like you even more than I currently do."

“Can I kiss you?”

"Yes absolutely."

Kiss! She has not done this a whole lot and her first attempt is kind of shy and chaste, but he can feel her lips curving delightedly against his.

Has she considered that kisses are a way better source of that lovely fizzy guiding feeling even from zero backlash if: you open your mouth a little.

OH WOW. She is sure considering it now!!! She flings her arms around his neck and presses closer.

Mmmmmgood. Mmmmmakeouts. It's not too escalatory to have an arm around her waist without her shirt in the way, right?

It absolutely is not.

Yaaaaaay she's so kissable.

Lucy has tried kissing before. It was fine? It was skin contact, and she is generally in favor of that. But she didn’t have that much chemistry with the people she tried kissing in the past.

This is—an entirely different experience. Usually when you read someone having the experience “oh, so this is what the fuss is about,” they had previously been sort of confused about why people go on about things like sex and kissing. Lucy had a perfectly good working model of that! She reads smutty fanfiction with reasonably high amounts of enjoyment!

There is, nonetheless, a big difference between modeling and experiencing, and Lucy is having an emotion reasonably glossed as “oh, so this is what the fuss is about.”

She’s not sure how much of it is esper compatibility and how much is how much she likes Haru, but they are both definitely contributing.

Haru has never kissed someone he... liked. He has kissed several people who were Better Than Nothing While Backlashed, which is a recommendation threshold of basically nil, and the only one he kept going back to was Sparkler. He likes Lucy, though, and she's almost as compatible as June is and a whole lot more interactive about it, and in short this is the best kissing event of his life and he is very tempted to get carried away but their conversation did not cover the topic of how far away Lucy might like to be carried.

“I um,” she says after a while, “I had an arm implant and I have heard those work less well for espers—so right now probably we shouldn’t—”

"Yeah, you want the copper IUD. Alas that I tossed all the condoms."

“I will totally get the copper IUD but I have not yet. But um.” She’s really emphatically not backlashed enough to not be blushing as she says this, but she says it anyway. “Nobody ever got pregnant from oral.”

"That is truuuue." Kiss. "Upstairs?"

Blush giggle. “Upstairs!”

What if he scoops her up and carries her up the stairs, what then.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeee is what!!!

Then up they will go into his room, where the bed is not really big enough for people to literally sleep together but does have enough elbow room for figurative versions.