You must have fallen asleep, because when you wake up you're in bed, out of your jeans and tucked under the covers. You don't know where Dirk is. Usually he just flops down next to you, unless you were out for a while – you know that you were lying there, trying to get him to make out with your or something, for a while, and you just must have… dozed off.

You've been sleeping a lot lately. It's kind of funny.

Then again, with having almost absolutely nothing to do over the course of dozens upon dozens of sweeps, you have gotten a little lethargic. It's because you just got used to doing nothing, lazing around on your husktop all day or watching movies or trying to get people to sleep with you… you're just not used to actually doing stuff.

Meenah, now. There's a girl – or, should you say, gill, which is what you would say if you were trying to get her to sleep with you – who knows what she's doing. Or, at least, does stuff. She was always like that, even when the two of you were little. You'd always want to get her to just listen to you and look pretty and she always threatened to stab you and then you said that you'd just deflect it with a magic shield and usually it ended with Seahorsedad herding you away.

But, Meenah's not the point now. The fact that Dirk is not in bed with you is. It's a very big problem, really, and you are going to get to the bottom of it.

It's actually pretty easy. He's sprawled out on the couch, eating a bag of chips, reading one of your books. You don't know where he got it from, certainly not the box shoved in a remote corner of your hive, but there it is.

He glances up when you sit down on the floor near his head. "Hey," he says. "Nice Troll Septimus Heap."

"What?" you say, flushing a little. You don't know who Septimus Heap is, but from the book he's reading, you can guess that it's some wizard thing. You really don't know how he found that. Thank the gods it wasn't one of those shitty wizard self-help books. You don't think you'd be able to live it down if he'd found one of those.

"Chip?" he offers, completely bypassing your question, which you're grateful for, and offering a chip. You take it, even though you're not really a fan of these chips, and look at him. He has his shades on, even though he's reading and it has to be bad, so you reach up and take them off of his face, brushing your thumb along the side of his face as you do so.

He puts down the book and looks at you. "Sex?" you offer.

He smirks a little, leaning over and giving you a kiss. You lean into it, wrapping your arms around his neck and pulling him closer. He lets you, encourages it, in fact, adjusting himself so that he can kiss you in the best way possible. His hands go down to your waist, pulling you up onto the couch with him, but instead of making out and then sex, which is what you wanted, he just pulls you onto his lap and wraps his arms around your waist, burying his head in your neck.

"Are you okay?" you ask, because he's still acting sort of weird. Even though he had plenty of time to get some sleep. He nods. "Okay, just checking, because you're still acting sort of weird. Not that you're not great, because you're always great, we're both great, but it's just a lot… different."

"I'm good, bro," he says. He kisses you on the mouth again, with almost no promise of it turning into something more, and it's sort of making you a bit disappointed.

"Can we at least make out?" you ask, and he laughs a little. You adjust yourself so that you're straddling his hips, hands on his shoulders, and lean in close. "I mean, we didn't even get to do anything in that clearing."

He bites his lip, which you find incredibly attractive, by the way, and nods. You grin and close the small distance between the two of you to kiss him, sliding your hands down and over his shirt. You're still just in your underwear and t-shirt, no pants or anything, and his hands go almost instinctively into your underwear. You whine a little when his hand brushes against your bulge, grinding against him and deepening the kiss to distract yourself. You slip your hands under his shirt, feeling the hard muscle and pressing yourself as close to him as you can manage

He kisses you back, not as vigorously as he usually does, but his hand is still working in your underwear, stroking and teasing your bulge, so you'll put it to being distracted. You move your mouth from his and kiss his neck like he always does for you, sucking and gently biting, because you know he likes it when you do that.

He makes a noise back in his throat and he falters in his rhythm. Encouraged, you move away enough to pull his shirt up over his head and throw it to the side, moving down to kiss his collarbone and chest, pausing at his nipple and, taking care so that you don't accidentally bite it off or something, sucking at it, flicking out your tongue. He makes that noise again, and it's so fucking cute and so fucking hot you don't know if you're melt or get genetic material all over him first. He's shaking as he tries to get back his rhythm in your underwear, but you definitely have the upper hand here. He's just wearing a pair of your sweatpants, and you can feel how hard his dick is. If you weren't preoccupied, you would definitely be focusing your attentions down there.

As it is, you're just hoping he'll fuck you right here, right now.

He suddenly pushes you away, breathing hard. "V-" you catch yourself before you can fuck up your 'w.' "What's wrong?"

"I can't do this right now," he says, but from the way that his hand is inching toward his pants you can tell that he really wants to and possibly needs to. "I- fuck, I'm sorry man, I just-"

"What if I just take care of that for you and then we can…" you trail off. You don't know what to do. He's never turned you down like this before. "Why not? At least let me…"

He swallows, pressing his lips together in a thin line. He nods. "Fine," he says, and it's almost businesslike. He worms his way out of his sweatpants and you kneel on the floor in front of him, taking his dick in your mouth and using all of your usual tricks.

It's over faster than you would have liked, between pawing at your own bulge, which is basically screaming at you for some attention, and using your tongue on his dick, but eventually you stand up.

"I'm gonna go take a shower," you say. He nods, staring out at nothing.

Maybe there really is something wrong with him.


Septimus Heap is a book about a young wizard fairly similar to Harry Potter, by the way.

But, yeah! I almost did not get this done tonight, which is weird, because these chapters usually don't take me that long at all. But, yeah, here we go! Cronus is fun to write, as always.