It took us about a week to get the kissing thing down. The only experience I'd had with that had been that one time with Annabeth under Mount St. Helens, and Nico had never done it before so we were both on pretty shaky ground. Besides, we knew we were mutually interested so we didn't need to do stuff like that to prove anything to one another.

The first few times it was mostly just the two of us awkwardly pressing our mouths together in the morning or before Nico disappeared in the afternoons. Just because he was hanging out with me a lot didn't mean he wasn't still interested in all those things he'd told me before. He was still trying to look up who'd paid for his and Bianca's schooling and, more importantly, who their mother had been. That took up most of his time. He didn't even know her name, or if she was still alive.

I had stuff of my own to do, anyway. Since Paul was a teacher at Goode High School, he brought me the reading lists for the year so I could get started early. Plus Mom had suddenly decided that the entire apartment needed cleaning out, and of course she enlisted me to help. I spent probably half a week sweeping and scrubbing and packing things into boxes and then moving furniture around until she'd decided what looked best. The furniture in our living room changed configuration three times in as many days. I think Nico thought that was kind of funny.

It wasn't until almost six days after my birthday that we figured out what kissing was really about. Nico stayed over at night, and Mom didn't seem to care as long as we weren't loud after she declared lights out. I don't know if she knew something was up or if she just thought it was nice that I had a regular friend that I was spending so much time with. I kind of hoped it was the latter. Or maybe she was just looking out for Nico. I mean, she knew how hard it was for a half-blood, and I knew how lucky I was to have such a good relationship with my mom.

The day before that, Nico had abandoned the sleeping bag on the floor and tried sleeping on the bed with me. It was nice, because I got my pillow back, but kind of awkward at first. It was too hot for blankets even with the A/C on, so he'd laid down beside me on top of the sheets between my right side and the wall. Pretty much only our elbows were touching. I think I laid awake for almost an hour that night, even though Nico had fallen asleep pretty quickly. It was weird, to feel someone else beside me like that. Especially on my own bed, which had always only had me in it. If we'd been sleeping someplace like a chamber in the Labyrinth or camping outside somewhere in the woods, it would've been different. But I guessed I was going to have to learn to share my bed from now on, and eventually I managed to fall asleep.

When I woke up early the next morning, Nico had rolled over during the night so that his chest was pressed against my side and one arm was flung over my stomach. It was weird, but that felt more comfortable than the way we'd gone to sleep had. As soon as I moved a little he woke up and jerked back, blushing, but I just snuck an arm around him to calm him down. "It's okay," I'd told him, trying to grin even though I was pretty sure I was blushing too. "You can sleep like that if you want to."

He'd nodded after a minute and we'd fallen asleep again until my mom had knocked on the door a few hours later. Then both of us sprang out of bed so fast that Mom laughed at our expressions when she opened the door a few seconds later and said that she was glad we were so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed that morning. I didn't feel bright-eyed or bushy-tailed, just mostly glad that she hadn't opened the door while we were both still on the bed.

That night when we'd settled down to sleep again, Nico propped himself up on my chest a bit so he could use me as a pillow. I had one arm around his shoulders and it was pretty comfortable, just the two of us like that in the dark. But just as I was starting to get drowsy Nico had moved, pushing himself up until we were face-to-face. He leaned down and kissed me, but this time it was different. It was softer, somehow, and wetter. He didn't move away again like he usually did, but he did do something that almost made me jump. Just as I thought he was going to move, something soft and wet traced the edge of my lip. Nico's tongue.

I was so surprised that I opened my mouth. I don't know why, maybe I had been planning to say something. But then I realized that Nico's mouth was open too, and pretty soon we'd discovered just why everybody seemed to like kissing so much. We weren't exactly good at it, at first, and it was pretty messy and wet. But we must've practiced for almost half an hour before Nico had yawned and settled back down against my chest and we fell asleep.

The next night we practiced some more, and after a few practice sessions I figured we were getting pretty good at it. It's not like we spent hours at it or anything, but we did spend long enough that I always got a warm, excited feeling in my stomach and my hands and feet would get tingly. It was always hard to just go to sleep after that. I usually had to wait until everything cooled down before I could close my eyes and try to sleep.

The last days of summer wore on, until one afternoon Nico asked me to come to the library with him. He'd been going through the city's archives, looking for something that might identify his mother or his benefactor. He hadn't been having much luck, and I wasn't sure how another set of dyslexic eyes was supposed to help him, but I went anyway.

We'd gotten most of the way to the library when Nico's father had shown up.

That's right, Hades himself. I'd met him before on his own turf in the Underworld. But even here in the sunny, sweltering streets of New York City, he was intimidating. He wasn't ten feet tall anymore, but he was probably still pushing six and a quarter, and his jet black hair laid perfectly even in the shimmering heat rising from nearly every concrete surface in the city. He didn't look hot at all, even though Nico and I were sticky just from having walked from Grand Central Station to Fortieth Street.

He stepped into our path and both of us came up short. Around us the sunlight seemed to turn pale, and all the noise of the city suddenly quieted until it sounded like what you could hear from my window above the street. Nico paled. His hand reached to his side for his sword, but he'd left it in my room like he usually did. Unlike Riptide, his sword didn't disguise itself as anything, and you couldn't really walk into the Mid-Manhattan Library with a sword strapped to your hip. I took a step forward, reaching into my pocket for my pen, but Hades held up a hand and spoke before my fingers could close around it.

"You won't need that here," he said. I could feel him exerting his power over me, my hands trying to fall to my sides of their own volition. I clenched my teeth and forced my fingers to pull the pen from my pocket. I'd overcome Hades' coercion before. I wasn't going to let it get to me now.

"What do you want?" Nico asked, staring up at his father with dark eyes. "Why are you here?"

Hades turned his gaze on his son now, and I got the feeling that I might as well have been on the moon for all they cared. "The question is," Hades said in that cold, dark voice, "why are you here? You abandon me just like your sister did. You associate yourself with him." He made a dismissive gesture at me, like I couldn't hear what they were saying.

"He's my – friend," Nico faltered. His fist curled at his side. "And my ally."

Hades snorted. "Your friend? Your ally?" He looked at me and it reminded me of the way Clarisse looked at someone she was about to beat into the ground at sword practice. "He is neither of those things. You forget yourself, and you forget what he is. It's in his blood to shun you." His eyes narrowed. "It's in all their blood. You will end up alone, just as I am alone."

Silence fell, and I could see Nico's face get even paler. It just made me angry. How could Hades know that? Just because he'd been shunned by the gods didn't mean that was going to happen to Nico. All the same, I couldn't help but remember what Nico had said to me just before I'd left camp just a few weeks ago. "There's a reason they didn't put a cabin to Hades here, Percy."

But he was wrong. They were all wrong. Nico wasn't his father any more than I was my father. "He's not like you!" I burst out. Talking back to Hades probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, but I couldn't really help it. I felt like I had to defend my honor, if not Nico's. "He has friends. He has people who care about him. He's not like you."

Hades drew himself up to his full height now, looking down his long, pale nose at me with eyes that were much darker and deeper than human eyes. "Not like me? We'll see. And just what do you think your father is going to have to say about this?" My stomach dropped like I was on a roller coaster, and suddenly I wasn't sure I really wanted Hades' attention anymore. "What do you think Zeus is going to say about this? None of the gods are going to be on your side, Percy Jackson." He looked from me to Nico and back again. "We'll see who's like who, in the end."

And then he was gone. The sunlight brightened, and the sounds of people and cars suddenly resumed around us like the volume had been turned back up to normal. Nico and I were almost run over by a group of giggling girls as they plowed over the sidewalk where we were standing. I managed to yank Nico off to the side, where we pressed our backs against the glass window of an electronics store and both of us stood there panting like we'd just run the mile test in gym class.

I looked to the side. Nico still looked pale, and he was staring at the street as people kept walking by us, oblivious. "Nico?"

He turned and looked at me like he was surprised to see me there. Then he took a breath and his features slipped back into a mask of indifference. "I'm okay."

I knew he wasn't. But what was I supposed to say? "Hey, don't worry about it, your dad's just being a jerk," didn't exactly seem like it would fix the situation. I nodded, and put my pen back into my pocket. "Do you still want to go to the library?"

"… Not really," he said, after thinking about it for a minute. "Can we just go back?"

That was the first night we made love.

I'd never really understood why people called it that except as a euphemism. I was a fifteen year-old guy and sex was sex. I'd always thought that even if it had something to do with love, the actual act sounded too sweaty and dirty to be called something like that. I'd figured it was something girls probably perpetuated to make it sound more important that it actually was.

It turns out I was as wrong about that as I was about kissing.

Nico and I had started out by kissing, in fact – kissing a lot, which I certainly didn't mind, because by then I'd really started liking kissing Nico. It was still a little awkward, since we usually sat side by side on my bed to do it, but that night Nico crawled onto my lap with one knee on either side of my waist and kissed me like that. I could feel the heat from his chest through the fabric of our t-shirts, and it made my stomach twist and get hot, and other parts of me as well.

I was secretly really embarrassed – I mean, I knew what a hard-on was. I'd woken up in the middle of the night after some pretty intense dreams with them, so I knew why I was reacting that way and I wasn't exactly surprised. But what scared me was the fact that if Nico were to put any of his weight on me at all, he'd know I had one too. I put my hands on his waist to keep him up so he wouldn't lean down, but luck was not on my side. That only seemed to make Nico do exactly what I'd been worried about – he sank down the rest of the way onto my lap right in the middle of a kiss. And then he made the strangest little half-squeaking sound in the back of his throat and pulled back, looking at me.

All I could do was stare back at him. I felt my face get hot and I knew I must be blushing. I expected Nico to move away – I figured he'd be pretty freaked out or disgusted or something. But then I realized that… well, there was something hard pushing against my hardness. And he was starting to blush too.

"Percy…" he whispered, biting his lip and he suddenly looked really, really cute like that. His dark hair was falling over one eye and his cheeks were splotchy and red. I think I must have started grinning pretty stupidly, because Nico made a face at me. But then he moved against me and things rubbed against other things and I definitely stopped grinning because it was hard to concentrate on anything other than how good that felt.

"Percy," he said again, and I looked at his splotchy face and wondered if he was going to say we should stop. But he just leaned forward until his face was beside mine and said, "I want to have sex."

I stared at him. Sure, I'd had sex ed in school. Just last year all the boys and girls in my class had been taken into separate rooms, and we'd sat there and snickered while one of the gym teachers had shown us some video that looked like it was from the seventies that was supposed to explain what was happening to our bodies. It didn't really explain anything at all, and the slides that he showed afterward were pretty gross and didn't make much sense either. Despite all that, by the end of the year most of us knew what sex was, but it hadn't been because of anything the teachers had showed us. Most of it came from sniggers and jokes during lunch or drawings of stick figures scribbled in somebody's notebook.

And now Nico was sitting on my lap, and he looked scared. At first I thought he was just scared that I'd get mad or say no or something because I hadn't answered straight away. But then I realized that wasn't it at all. It was something bigger than that. He was scared because of what had happened earlier that day with his father. Scared that I'd been scared away from him, maybe, or that I'd decide that Hades had been right. I'd be lying if I said it hadn't made me think. I mean, I knew it wasn't exactly... usual for two guys to do stuff like this. Especially not two guys like us. We were special among people that were already special. And that meant that everyone paid attention to what we did – even stuff that should have been private. Stuff like this.

I had to admit, I was pretty scared too. I'd tried not to think about it too much before then, but the truth was I'd known that we couldn't get away with something like this for long. The gods pretty much knew everything whether you wanted them to or not. I didn't know what my own dad would think about this, whether he'd be glad or angry or something else entirely. I didn't even know what Mom would think, but I was definitely scared to tell her anything either.

But none of that seemed important right now, with Nico here. I realized I still hadn't said anything. And I also realized that there was no way I could tell him no. Not because I felt I would hurt his feelings if I refused, but because I realized I didn't want to refuse. This was something I'd started wanting, too. This was something that would bring us closer.

The fact that I'm a fifteen year-old boy and I had a pretty good hard-on going probably had something to do with it too. I won't deny that. But a lot of it was the way Nico looked and the way Nico talked and the way I'd come to really like having Nico in my life like this. When I thought about Hades and his threats, it only made me want this more. There was nothing wrong with that, right? Besides, it wasn't like I could accidentally get him pregnant.

I swallowed and nodded. "Yeah," I said, my voice sounding strange and hoarse, even to me. "Yeah, I do too."

Now, just because I had gotten some kind of sex ed talk didn't mean that I knew what I was doing. In fact, I really didn't, because even though I kind of knew how a guy was supposed to do it with a girl, I really didn't see how a guy could do it with a guy. I guess that must have shown on my face, because Nico gave me a little smile and settled back against my pillow, pulling me down with him. "It's not hard. I can tell you what to do."

Part of me wanted to ask how Nico knew what to do when I didn't. But I figured it was better not to ask. Well, either that or the way he was rubbing against me again was making it hard to think. About then was when I stopped caring and let him take the lead.

When I sank into him, it was the most amazing thing I have ever felt. I've felt a lot of amazing things in my life – I can breathe underwater and I've flown on a pegasus's back and I spent two weeks on Calypso's hidden island. But none of that could compare at all to the way that Nico felt around me. I went as slow as I could, because even though I'd snuck out and stolen a bottle of Mom's lotion, I could tell it hurt Nico. He didn't look like he cared much, but that didn't mean I wanted to hurt him any more than I had to.

Time seemed to slow down. Every movement was slow and painfully deliberate. We moved together for a lot longer than I would've thought possible, until Nico's breathing hitched and he grabbed at me from everywhere at once and pulled me over the edge right behind him.

We woke up the next morning tangled together on my sticky bedsheets and smelling like the bottle of Enchanted Orchid body lotion lying on my bedroom floor. Nico still had on his black t-shirt and his hair was sticking up in tufts around his head. I grinned and shoved his shoulder a little and he groaned and rolled over, muttering about how next time I would get to be the one who was sore in the morning. That just made me grin wider and curl up next to him, and we drowsed until Mom knocked and scared us half to death when she called through the door that she was going to make blue pancakes for breakfast.