“I spent a restless night plagued with excruciating dreams of Adam sucking me off in front of Matt, Jay and my mother. Matt and Jay weren’t paying much attention, being too busy excavating each other’s tonsils with their tongues, but Mum was staring with folded arms and narrowed eyes, occasionally muttering, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Timothy—show a little enthusiasm!”

“There was a singlegolden hair on the pillow, curled in on itself as if asleep. Simonpicked it up carefully, then lay down still holding it, his head in itsplace. The bed was cold, but it still smelled warm, like Matt.”

“We did sixty-nine that night. Larry went on top so he didn’t get squished. He’s really good at sucking dick. I wondered if he’d got exams in that too.”

“I didn’t know what to spend it on, ’cause my mum said she didn’t want me to buy her nothing. So I was going to buy Larry something, but he said I should spend it on something I always wanted. So I bought a cat.”

“Well, that went well,” I muttered to my cock, which had optimistically jumped up when I did. All pumped up with nowhere to go. I took it for a shower and gave it a few strokes to make it feel better, but it wasn’t fooled. It knew it was just my hand tugging on it.”

“Larry said that Michelangelo was a poof, so I wondered why he’d sculpted a guy with a really tiny cock. But I know when you go to old houses, the doorways are much smaller, ’cause people were shorter then, so maybe cocks were smaller too. It makes me glad I wasn’t born a few centuries ago.”

“Feeling inspired, I grabbed one of Jay’s cookbooks from the kitchen shelf and flicked through until I found a recipe for something I recognised. Lasagna. That was just pasta, and pasta was easy, right? Trying not to be put off by the list of ingredients longer than my small intestine, I scanned the instructions. Chop onions… I could do that. Brown mince…trickier but manageable. Probably. Make a roux in the usual way… I sighed, shut the book with a snap and went off to make dinner in my usual way: pierce film; bung in microwave; wait for bell.”