Rest and recover, mostly.

Lenny groaned “That was an ordeal…” as he plopped himself onto his apartment’s couch.

“… are you okay?” Erica asks, sitting next to her roommate.

“I’m fine. She’s not a… bad partner. Just hard to please. Thanks for the assist by the way, I was running out of stamina.”

She muttered “Don’t worry about it, I got you into that anyways…”

As his tired body sank into the furniture, Lenny glanced at Erica. She was hunched over, hands grasping themselves. “… did you mean what you said at the end there? Or were you just trying to get me off so I’d satisfy Jenny?”

She jolted, then looked back at him as she said “… I think I did mean it.”

“Oh. O-Okay…” He hadn’t expected that. It would’ve been easier if she was just lying, it was how he rationalized most of her dirty talk before.

“I’ve noticed the glances you made downward, before jerking your gaze back up to my face…! I don’t mind it, not from you…!”

It was easy to blame it on the Berserker Class’s unstable mental state, but this made things a lot more awkward. He almost wasn’t sure what to say next. Nonetheless, words spilled out.

“… f-for how long…?” he asked.

“… not since the beginning. Not even when I figured out why Kyle got fired. But it was… before we slept together. Before you even summoned me… I’m not sure when. It’s weird.”

“Wait, didn’t you say you got, uh… ‘excited’ when you found out about Kyle?”

“Well, that’s more like arousal. I’m talking about, you know, mushy emotional stuff. You’re a dependable guy, it’s hard for me to pick a big moment that made me think about you like that…”

Looking back on it, he couldn’t really count the number of times that he got her some snacks from a vending machine after noticing she didn’t have a lunch. Or the nights he drove her home after the pair did overtime and buses weren’t stopping near them that late.

“Okay, um… thank you for telling me. I… think of you like that too.” Lenny muttered.

She giggled. “No offense, but I already worked that out.”

Leonard blushed. “Of course you did… Hey, did you also mean it when you said you’d be cool with me, uh… sleeping with other women…?”

“Y-Yeah, if it’s like with Jenny. Just, uh… talk to me about it first.”

“Okay, cool. Open relationship, gotcha. Message received, yep.” he chuckled calmly, a subtle smile on his face. On the inside, it was more like a large office space populated by copies of himself panicking as documents were flying around the room. “She’s cool with us sleeping with other women!? How’d that happen!?” “I don’t know, we did it somehow!” “Oh god, she must’ve misspoke! O-Or we misheard her, how is this real!?” “Oh god, it’s been five minutes, we have to say something!”

“You know, it’s kinda weird to say it out loud, but it’s kinda nice that we can just sit silently like this without it being awkward.”

“I wet the bed till I was 12.”

“… I-I’m gonna go ahead and get the sheets washed.” Erica said, blinking.

Lenny put on some episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh while the washing machine spun around in the background. It was fun, though he didn’t really learn anything about the game. Erica said it only got accurate around the fifth series.