Their nudity was more utility than seduction, towels around hips like a day at the sauna. White was perched on the Maytag washer while the dryer hummed beside, probing a loose tooth with his fingers.

Orange was pacing just outside the open door, glancing up at a clatter from somewhere in the front of the big house. Voices and laughter, decidedly female. "Joe musta sent his car out," he mused, shuffling into the cozier press of the laundry room. An old woman with a teal apron and a ponytail passes the doorway and Orange waves with his mouth pursed up in apology. "Gloria."

Gloria peeks her head in, frowns at White and leaves.

White's laugh is a silent hitch of his chest. "She thinks I beat you up."

"You did beat me up."

"Pneumonia ain't a VD."

"I know. I was trying to get a laugh out of you."

There was an easy silence between them, White sucking back at a molar with a grimace. "If I lose this tooth, you're footing the bill."

Orange shrugs, pats down his hips for a cigarette before he realizes towels don't have pockets. "Sorry."

White relents his attention, hands braced on bare knees. "What the fuck were you thinking, flying at me like that?"

"Hawaiin shirts don't suit you."

A blank, hard stare.

Orange's grin is less ugly this time around. "Whaaaat? That's what I was thinkin', honest injun." He's got both hands held up, waving tiredly. A chain-link tattoo winds itself around his left bicep, a small star on the inside of his wrist. A snake coils over his ribs, the ink matted and marred by what White can recognize as a knife scar.

"Says the punk in the cowhide, like he's in a fukken rock band," White accusation is soft, though. Kind.

"Who you callin' a punk, punk?" Orange feints a jab, there's a dull noise of bare skin meeting bare skin and suddenly their nudity isn't just utility and Orange isn't a nice guy and never will be and he never had scruples and he was never really all that patient or smart or attractive but dammit he knew what he liked and he was in the business of getting what he wanted so, so.

White's half-caught in the playful grapple and he already knows where this is going but doesn't care. Serve them both right if they got caught. He's sore and he's still scared that Orange had somehow found him out and he's raw and angry and his head is buzzing with the rain. His knee is snug against Orange's bony ribs and all he can think about when he's kissing the guy is how much he wants to get him a proper fucking steak dinner.

Orange reaches a hand blindly out to slam the slatted door of the laundry room shut. He's got a hand under White's towel next minute, long fingers wrapping around White's half-agitated prick to jerk him slow beneath the terrycloth.