"You're going to be just fine," Dan tells him, because the thoughts are big enough to bubble over. "Already my favorite."

Is there something to the fact that he feels so much more open and easy affection with Marcus? He'd been okay with it, in the past, most of the time, with the women he'd dated, but it had been easy to feel startled or suffocated. And he's not going to feel that here, he thinks.

He knows.

"In some ways, this doesn't really feel like a first date," he says. "But like we've been doing this for a while."