"Joan or Louise."

"I sometimes fuck Mariam, but it's pretty strictly a Nectar thing."

Wow that's not a sentence with horrifying implications or anything!

"I don't know either of them very well?" he says, instead of any of the things he's thinking, which are mostly about Lev. "Not that I wouldn't like to know them better, but --"

"Reasonable," Inaaya says. "I guess I don't know how much you like"-- she gestures-- "sex with random people."

She thinks about it. "I guess you don't either."

"It has not really come up, no," he agrees. "And I think I'd like trying it out to be --" vague gesture -- "low-stakes."

"That makes sense."

Teasing: "and is another thing that'd get fixed by taking Bangkok Nectar."

"See, I feel like adding more violence and trying a new drug for the first time would not make the experience lower-stakes."

"Sure, but once you're on it you wouldn't care."

"Nectar's great like that."

"Sober preferences count more than other preferences. At least according to me."

"I guess."

Different topic different topic can they be on a different topic please-- "I don't actually think I've ever talked to Joan?"

"Huh. Probably you should, at some point. If we're going to be--"

She gestures.

"Yeah. I should. --most of the people I'd want to introduce you to aren't here, but. It's nice meeting people who are important to you."

He's tracing absentminded patterns over her side with his fingertips.

"Who'd you want to introduce me to?"

"My brother and my best friend. And you've met Lev."

"Tell me about them?

Are they part of the cult?"

"No. They're not.

Gale is -- very quiet and very shy and more firmly on the side of human freedom including the freedom to be weird and broken and doing person wrong than almost anyone else I've ever met, I think you'd like him and I know he'd like you. You told me once that there was someone my whole brain was wrapped around loving? That was him."

"Oh.

He sounds-- lovely."

"It sounds... like something good to know someone who isn't." She gestures.

"He's also a devout Catholic, there's a lot of things we don't talk about, but -- yeah. He's really good, and really good for me."

"No offense to your friend but the Catholic church is evil."

"It extremely is," he agrees.

"But -- so he's epileptic and he sees angels, it's the version of the world he can verify, it's what he gets when he trusts his eyes and not just consensus --"

"He does a lot better than the church does. I think that's -- not uncommon, honestly, individual people being better than the things they believe."

"I guess I see the Mouth which is why I think the Mouth exists," Inaaya agrees.

She hesitates.

Mordred is absolutely not going to make the subtext explicit here. He does put his head back on Inaaya's shoulder. 

She says, very very very quickly and nervously, "I don't think we have much room to criticize being part of a religion that's evil."

....blink blink. Mordred moves to get a better look at her face.

She looks terrified.