If nothing else, Jin Guangyao's expression is not bleak and despairing as it might have been if he'd been broaching this subject with Lan Xichen even four months ago. Instead he looks--awkward, certainly, the way he does when he knows he's about to raise a delicate topic of conversation, and can't quite decide how his words are going to be received. But beneath that he looks a bit guilty, too, as though he knows his words will hurt, eventually, for all the reasons that have already gone unspoken between them for years.

He breaths out and steadies himself. "You must sate these demands--zadza, is what the Rubeans call it--every month through violence, or..." His words taper off, and he raises his eyebrows deliberately. "Through intimacy."