"I - feel better about having you as my boyfriend than having you as my expensive personal indulgence. It's not culturally legible as coercive even if we still have to figure out how to actually not be coercive."

(This is technically true but he is super turned on by having his redmage as a personal indulgence! There are absolutely no visual cues that this is the case.)

There are maybe visual cues that something is being left out. Cir squints at him.

"You know, this is really frustrating, usually I'm great at lying to people."

"...sorry."

"Really, really not your fault. Anyway. I meant that, even if it's more complicated."

"More complicated how?"

"I think I should talk to Timothy."

"Okay."

And he goes over to Timothy's room.

Cam answers the door.

"Hi. Can I talk with Timothy - or you too, I guess, I mostly need expertise on humans."

"I have technically spent more time human than Timothy has."

"I accidentally acquired a human teenager who will do whatever I want except have preferences."

"...gosh."

"Also I tried to explain to the humans that I found this a fairly horrifying state of affairs and they were all like 'sure, he can have his own guest room, wink wink, some people are shy about it' and I was there to do diplomacy so I couldn't tell them their whole civilization was evil and should die in a fire but that's really a pretty secondary complaint here."

"Redmage, I presume? Yeah, in retrospect the literature was very coy about those and someone should have read between the lines for you."

"He's fifteen. In a couple weeks his appointments would start and there were thirty people scheduled and before he was sixteen he wouldn't remember his sisters' names."

"Yeah, they start them early so they can spend longer collecting fees, it's pretty gross."

"Trying to get a feel for whether the guild'sll just take more kids if I subsidize them to keep everyone's workload tolerable. But anyway, this one grabbed me and begged me for help and so I took him away with me and now I have. A human teenager. - also I can't lie to him. Like, my default mode of handling this would just be to say 'I am completely uninterested in sex with you and I want you to go to university in Tirion and load up on memory blessings and be fine' but I am not completely immune to - the redmage thing - and he can tell if I'm pretending to be - what's the Elf equivalent of fifteen -"

"Fortyish, I think. For whatever it's worth I think the Temple-Guild economies are not set up to expand their capacity if subsidies appear - but that just means they'll raise their prices instead."

"That seems like much less of a problem. And was his guess, too. I will make overtures about doing that, then. Fortyish."

"I think, I'm not sure. Same age as Theodore or Fredrick."

"Thank you." Sigh. "Is Timothy around?"

"In the shower, should be out any minute."

"Okay. 

I asked him if he would turn me down, ever, under any circumstances, and - the answer is no, though he wouldn't actually put it that way."