A thing happened where he simultaneously channeled both Forthrasts, Richard and Zula. “No,” he said, hearing his own voice strangely through blood-engorged ears. “The day I rode in the back of a truck with you.”

She actually took a step back, and raised her eyebrows. “You can have one. Make sure it fits.”

“Okay. No peeking.” He pulled his tunic up over his head and tossed it aside.

“Fair’s fair,” she returned. He heard a clank and a thud followed by a hissing, slithering sound. He turned just in time to see her peeling her sun shirt off. This had necessitated shrugging off her red suspenders, so her cargo shorts had impacted the pavement a moment earlier. Now she was down to a garment that he identified, vaguely, as a sports bra, and a pair of granny panties.

“Oh, excuse me,” he blurted.

“You looked?” she returned, mock outraged. “It’s all right. Nothing you wouldn’t see at the beach, right?”

He had turned his back on her and was pretending to sort through T-shirts. “Still . . . I didn’t mean to.”

He could hear bionic footsteps. “Would you like me to help you with that?”

“I’m good, thanks.”

She came up very close behind him, reached around his body, and plucked out a T-shirt. “You’d look smashing in this. Turn around and we’ll check the size.”

He turned to face her. She held the shirt up in front of him, pinning it against his shoulders with her thumbs, and looked him up and down. “It’s not long enough to hide your doodle,” she observed.

He made a reasonable guess as to the meaning of the term. “Doodle containment’s an issue,” he admitted, “with boxers.”

“One of these containers has some Sthetix men’s briefs,” she said. “Nice and tight.” She pulled the shirt away and tossed it into the box.

They stood there for a few moments looking at each other from rather close. When she’d pulled the hood off, her hair had come loose and tumbled messily down her back. A bit of gentle tugging and head-shaking would have worked wonders, but she didn’t give a shit.

Corvallis reached out slowly and put his hands on her hips.

“After my friend died,” he said, “and I got over the shock, you know what happened? Like, around the time of the funeral?”

“You got inappropriately horny and felt like fucking everything that moved?”

“Yeah, has that ever happened to you?”

“Yeah. When my dad died. When my company died. And now,” she said. “Even though no one died in this case.” She took a step forward, leaving maybe a quarter of an inch of clearance between her belly and the tip of his boxer-tented doodle. “It comes from thinking about mortality, right? Leads to a ‘life is short—let’s go’ mentality.”