Cain sighs softly. He looks down at their linked hands as well, the contrast of their complexions as he strokes his thumbs across Abel's pale skin, and as much as his heart is racing he feels strangely calm as well.

He's not sure if that calm is a good thing when it seems like a fragile, shaking kind of calm that might shatter if it's looked at too closely.

"... I couldn't give you that, at the start. Not even if I thought I should have. I was..." His eyes fall closed for a moment. "What Bering said about me. He was right."

Cain was too rough, too brutish, the kind of feral animal that navigators were always told to expect fighters to be. That he'd been able to get Abel under his thumb was a miracle that surely wouldn't have happened had the other man not been so desperate to begin with.

"But you— god." He pauses to gasp out a soft laugh, moving one of his hands to rub at his eye again. "You were so fucking nice to me no matter what I did. Do you have any idea how long it had been since someone had—..."

A pause. A deep breath.

"Since—... someone had put a hand on me like that, and it wasn't..."

He puts both hands back on Abel's. Squeezes them.

"You were the first person to treat me like that in years, Ethan. ... I should have seen falling in love with you coming from a mile away."