The two of them lay panting and nuzzling until the obvious had to be faced. "Yuck," Jason commented.

Matt snorted and made an abortive attempt to clean up with his t-shirt. "Hey."

"Hey yourself." Jason zipped himself up and grinned.

For a few moments, the two of them were lost in the pleasurable afters; the moments when sex no longer drove their twenty-three-year-old bodies, when instead they could focus on how deeply and irrevocably in love they were, devoted to one another. It knocked Matt off his feet in a way physical things couldn't touch. Always.

He growled against Jason's jaw.

"I know, babe, but Mama Yung's gonna come looking for us any--"

The door to the basement creaked open.

"How does she do that?" Jason hissed.

Matt shrugged his shoulder in mute resignation.

"Robinson! Hicks! Lunch time's over! Now get your sweet patoots back to work asap! This ain't no party! This ain't no disco! Stop your fooling around!"

Matt rolled his eyes at Jason in the dim light, and Jason bit back a giggle. After a few seconds of silence, the basement door squeaked again, then closed with a dull thud. The two of them sagged against each other in relief. "Imagine if she'd come down here," Jason said.

"No," Matt countered, "let's imagine pretty much anything that's not that." He tugged Jason up off the couch and retrieved his courier bag from alongside it.

"Point taken."

Matt fetched Jason's crutches from where they leaned against a rusted file cabinet. "Ah, time to go back to work, I guess."

Jason sighed heavily, fitting the crutches back under his arms. "Guess so." He followed Matt up the stairs. Neither of them mentioned the apartment thing. They'd agreed not to after a second foray into the topic wound up with Matt flinging a perfectly good sandwich across the kitchen and accidentally pegging Emira in the tits. The discussion pretty much went downhill from there.

"I better not find no mess down there." Mama Yung didn't look up from her call-sheets. A supernaturally long cherry hung at the end of her lit cigarette. "At least this time you were quiet. Jeez! Last time it was like some kind of--" The phone rang, mercifully sparing Matt from finding out what last time had kind of sounded like to their boss.

"Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, ten minutes. Tops." Mama Yung slammed down the phone without saying goodbye and flicked ash onto the stomach of an ashtray shaped like a fat, smiling baby.

Jason grinned shyly at Matt and used one crutch to open the swinging doors leading behind the counter. The phone rang again as he was getting settled. Mama Yung answered it while lighting a second cigarette off the first. "Okay?" she asked.

Matt swung his bag up over one shoulder and clipped it into place before scooping a new yellow slip out of his mailbox. Pick-up, Powell Street Printers. Matt automatically mapped out the quickest route in his head: California to Hyde, all the way up to the Art Institute, then east up Chestnut. Maybe Polk, if the traffic wasn't too bad. Anything but Union. Eight minutes out, tops.

"--and you two should talk to Nemo and Allie about their room, okay? You should all live together. It'd be like a slumber party!"

Matt looked up sharply.

Off the phone, Mama Yung was marking yellow slips, sliding them across the counter to Jason, who was entering them into the computer on the counter and refusing to meet Matt's eyes.

Matt stepped forward and Mama Yung marked another slip and slid it across the counter toward him. "Cheese School. Pick up. You haven't asked them?"

Matt grabbed up the slip and stored it in his strap pocket with barely a glance. "Asked who what? Jase?" He looked up at Jason, still entering trip sheets ferociously.

"Your room! You guys gonna move, right? You need some place to stay! So go stay with them! They need a new roommate! Oh, and library." Mama Yung shoved another slip across the counter to Matt.

"The Bremer Library's nowhere near Powell." Matt willed Jason to look up.

"Fine, whiner. Give it back. I give it Nguyen, he get all the tips."

"Librarians don't tip." Matt didn't give her back the slip. "You. You blabbed."

Jason kept his head down, typing furiously.

"Anyway, it's not for sure we're moving," Matt told Mama Yung. "It'd be easier to stay."

"Huh." She took a long drag off her cigarette. "That's not what he says."

"I'll bet. What exactly did he say, anyway?"

"What do you care? You need to get your ass on a bike and get going. But while you do, think about it. They need to rent a room, you guys need a room." Mama Yung shook her head. "A curtain. That's terrible. You should be ashamed."

Matt folded his arms across his chest and fixed Jason with a megawatt glare. "Oh. He told you about the curtain, did he?" ENDEXCERPT