"Holy fuck," breathed Foggy. "May I never complain about your Daredevil workouts again. You've got some kind of abdominal muscle thing that's…holy fuck." Foggy swallowed. "I mean, uh, is that blasphemy or something? I can try to watch out for-"

"No, I'm not concerned about the language." Matt was smiling broadly, obviously pleased with himself. "I take it you enjoyed the festivities?"

Foggy walked to the bathroom and returned with a damp washcloth. He threw it at Matt. "You're such a smug little asshole."

"Funny, I was just thinking about your little asshole."

They cleaned each other off. Foggy didn't mind waiting, but Matt hated being sticky. He had admitted to Foggy one drunk evening how he had spent his adolescence taking midnight showers so he could jerk off in privacy and peace. "It's a technically a sin," he had mentioned, "but that's not the problem. It's mostly just really hard to set the mood when there's nuns down the hall."

Foggy lay back on the bed and rested his head on Matt's chest, listened to his heartbeat. That was what Matt heard all the time. Foggy couldn't really make any meaning out of it – excitement, fear, dishonesty – but he supposed he couldn't expect himself to understand a 60-second snippet of sensory data that Matt experienced all the time.

"Was it good for you too?" asked Foggy. "I mean, I'm talented, of course, but I don't have as much practice with men."

"The loud moaning and gasping didn't give you a clue?"

"Murdock, you're always moaning and gasping for one reason or another, and you don't usually look like you're having a good time."

Matt chuckled and ran his fingers through Foggy's hair. "Maybe I am." They were far enough away from the discovery, from the secret, that there could be little jokes. Not a lot of them, but there was an enormous distance between some and none.

"That's something," said Foggy, "because you like that whips-and-chains, BDSM stuff, don't you? So does getting beaten up by bad guys turn you on? I mean, that would be pretty fucked up, but it would also be a really great way to end a fight." Foggy made his voice lower and gruffer, a deadly serious parody of the Daredevil persona, and said, "Go on, hit me again. And can you pull my hair a little? Maybe call me a slut?"

Matt put on his cold, dead stare and in his deepest, dullest voice, he intoned, "Keep kicking me, you bastards. I'm getting an erection."

Foggy howled with laughter. Matt laughed too, glad that Foggy could joke about Daredevil. Besides, the image was really funny: A criminal and a vigilante bludgeoning each other in an alleyway, bones cracking, bleeding, grunting, and then the Daredevil suit starts to get a little tight? What would a guy like Vladamir even have done in a situation like that?

"Do you," asks Foggy, back in his own voice, "need stuff like that? I mean, to really be satisfied?" He tightened the muscles in his legs, but he didn't actually pull them away from Matt. "I know you really liked it, the stuff you did with Elektra. And I don't know if I can do that. I dated a girl – remember Charlotte? – she wanted me to slap her and I tried, man, I tried, but nothing made me lose my hard-on faster."

"I liked it with Elektra. It's not something I want in every relationship."

"Good, good. I mean, I can try if you really want it, but it's just not my thing."

"Foggy, are you nervous about…satisfying me?"

"Are you reading my heartbeat right now?"

"Not your heart, but your skin. It's a difference in electrical conductance, I think. It feels energetic."

"You're like a one-man polygraph."

"You haven't answered my question."

Foggy exhaled slowly and steadily until his lungs were fully empty. "Matt, I've always known that you have something in you. At first, I thought you just had a temper – remember when you smashed that telephone in the student lounge? Then, I thought you just wanted to save the world, but like, in the normal way, by working and voting and stuff. And yeah, there was Elektra and you seemed happy you had somebody who liked to go to crazy stuff with. And then you had Daredevil and you had a way to be angry and save the world and do crazy stuff, all by yourself." Foggy shifted, unsticking his skin from Matt's. "I think maybe ever since your accident, you've had too many people treat you like you can't do stuff, so when you figured out how you could get everything you wanted all by yourself, you had to keep it secret. And people keep disappearing from your life, and your dad was murdered and I can't even imagine what that was like and you had that creepy blind ninja guy making you keep even more secrets. So, I mean, you wanted to protect your friends from retribution and you wanted to punish yourself because of some weird Catholic thing. But I think you also feel like you want to be alone and you can't stand be alone at the same time." Foggy's breath caught. "So am I worried about satisfying you sexually? Yeah, I guess. But it's kind of low on the list of things I worry about."

Matt ran his fingers down Foggy's free arm until he reached his boyfriend's hand. He shifted in bed, raising his right knee and placing Foggy's fingers on the patella. "Do you feel that? The scar?"

"Yeah?"

"I got that when we were at Columbia, after the first Christmas break. You hadn't yet realized that I had nowhere to go for the holidays. When you came back and found me moping, you wanted to cheer me up, so you borrowed Dave McHale's car and took me to that abandoned lot in Harlem. Remember that? You took me out there to drive, to do donuts in the snow. It was one of the stupidest, most reckless things I've ever done, and it's one of my most treasured memories."

Foggy smiled at the memory. Yelling to give Matt directions from the passenger's seat. Leaving the windows open and letting the snow in, ostensibly so that Matt could hear echoes, but really because the wind and precipitation made it more exciting. Trying to convince Matt to drive over five miles per hour. Trying to convince Matt to slow down.

"How did you get the scar?" asked Foggy. "It was a freaking miracle, but we didn't crash."

"Getting out of the car. We'd driven down the snow so much that it was practically ice. I just slipped and scraped my knee."

"Stupid irony," groused Foggy. He touched the scar on Matt's knee again. It was thin and light, less than an inch long, not like Matt's newer scars. "I never knew you got a scar from that day."

"I'm glad I did. Because I don't do photographs. This scar, it's how I remember that night, and I want to remember it." Matt ghosted his fingers over Foggy's. "I want it in my memory forever. Because I didn't feel alone that night. And I don't feel alone right now."