Two in the morning, Saturday. Door shut. Lamp on.

Derek sat on the edge of his bed with his own equipment back where it belonged and Jordan's on the desk beside him, on a folded towel, where they'd left it earlier with a note that said sorry about Thursday and a smiley face that had taken them, he suspected, several attempts.

He hadn't touched it yet. He'd been looking at it for ten minutes.

It didn't look like much, detached. That was the first thing. Attached, on Jordan, on him, it had been a whole region — heat, pressure, the soft weight of the outer lips against his thighs, an inward-facing warmth that changed when he shifted his weight. On the towel it was a small pale shape with the seam-line around the edge, neat as a hem, the slit closed and quiet, and it was nothing. It wasn't asleep. It wasn't waiting. It was a part with no owner, reporting to nobody, and nobody in the world could have told you what it felt like right now, because right now it didn't feel like anything to anyone.

He put a finger on it. Cool. Softer than he'd expected. It gave, the way skin gives, and stopped, and that was all. He pressed a little harder, dragging the finger down the closed slit, feeling the shape of it through the skin, the slight ridges, the plumpness of it, and it didn't react, because there was nothing in it to react with. He spread the outer lips with two fingers, just to look, the way you'd open a locked car you didn't own. Pink and folded and utterly vacant. He let it close again.

His own, meanwhile, had opinions.

It had had opinions since Thursday, to be honest — some residue of the whole night, of the couch and the stairs and the pea sitting up to take an interest in a conversation it should have stayed out of. He was hard. He'd been hard on and off for two days, and tonight he'd given up on ignoring it, and now he was hard in the old familiar way, the way he'd been hard ten thousand times: a full, heavy, straightforward hardness, a length of him standing up from his lap, the head dark and tight and shining a little in the lamplight, pulsing with his heartbeat. He'd been stroking himself …