After parking his motorcycle, Terry let himself into his home. "Morning." he called out to his mother, who was fixing a meal in the kitchen. "I'll be in the shower." Mary McGinnis had long since gotten used to Terry stumbling in on a Sunday morning after a late Saturday night with no notice whatsoever and heading straight into either the bathroom or his bedroom, so she was unsurprised by his singleminded behavior and lack of conversational skills.

"Bacon and eggs on the stove if you're hungry." she called out after him. "And hang your towel up when you're done with it!" At the sound of the word "bacon", Terry was passed in the hallway by a short blur that could only have been Matt. Assuming any breakfast was left by the time Terry was finished washing himself off after previous night's events, he'd need to avail himself of it. He was sorely in need of a replenishment of spent protein and fats. Not to mention some electrolytes.

Once he was under the hot stream of water in the shower, Terry could tell just how strongly he smelled like sex. Between the steamy humid air making the scent more detectable and the water rehydrating fluids that had already dried up previously, it was overpoweringly obvious just what sort of carnal deeds he'd been up to before hopping into the shower. Enveloped in it like he was, it was really hard to continue to consider the night a mistake. Truth be told, smelling it again and picturing everything, he was more than a little tempted to lean into it and masturbate while replaying the events in his head. As far as it was outside of his usual comfort zone of sex and affection, the night before had been really very enjoyable. He'd never had much call to try talking dirty, since Dana had been content with very vanilla things in bed, and the dalliances with Melanie had been based so much in unthinking passion that there was no need for any dialogue at all. All the things he'd said to Deidre had been well outside his usual proficiency, but she seemed pleased nonetheless. The orgasms were proof enough of that.

Resisting the urge to prolong his shower any more than was absolutely essential, Terry toweled off and headed toward his bedroom to dress, eventually joining his family in the breakfast nook and getting himself a plate of eggs and a single strip of bacon, the sole piece his brother hadn't managed to claim for himself.

"Are you okay? You're moving a little stiffly." Mary commented as he devoured the breakfast, eyes fixed on his torso.

"Yeah, I'm fine, Mom. Just a little sore from helping Mr. Wayne move some heavy rich-old-man furniture around that big mansion of his." he lied quickly. Though the bruising on his chest had mostly faded, Terry was still moving a little slower than usual, and the prior night's exertion had certainly exacerbated it.

"He's probably getting out of shape from being some guy's butler." Matt commented through a mouthful of bacon and orange juice.

"You must be this tall to enter the conversation, twip." Terry shot back, raising his hand in the air a foot above Matt's height. Matt's response was a stuck-out tongue that still had bits of food on it.

"Well, don't overdo it. If you push yourself too much, you'll end up just like Mr. Wayne when you're his age, and you don't have the inheritance to hire on a teenager to look after you like he does." Mary chided.

"Mm-hmm." was Terry's only absentminded reply. If only Mary had any idea of just how much Terry really pushed himself, and especially how hard he was struggling not to end up like his mentor, the tenor of the conversation would be radically different than this lighthearted Sunday morning family breakfast.

"Well, if all it is is sore muscles, then you can help wash the dishes before you go back to Mr. Wayne's." she said with the air of a mom pleased at having connived her child into doing chores.

"Yeah, sure." Terry replied with a shrug. Criminals in Gotham rarely pulled elaborate schemes at noon on a Sunday, nor he wasn't particularly eager to have another awkward conversation about his love life with Bruce. 20ish minutes of dishwashing wasn't going to affect his plans for the day.

WIth the dishes washed and left to dry, Terry was now alone in his room, sitting on his bed and fiddling with his phone. He'd said he'd call Deidre back, but he was at a complete loss for what to say. Part of him was screaming at him not to trust a supervillain about anything at all ever. Another part of him was begging him to, just once, take the uncomplicated path and spend time with someone he didn't have to lie to, even if it was a purely physical thing. He didn't have anyone he could rely on to give accurate and unbiased advice, but he was too torn to figure it out on his own. Terry's phone suddenly vibrated to life in his hands as he stared at it, causing him to jump slightly. "Hello?"

"There's never that much traffic, Terry." came Deidre's slightly annoyed-sounding voice from the other end. "Sorta gives me the impression that you're leaving me hanging. And since we haven't even gotten started with the bondage yet, I'm less than thrilled. What's up?"

"Sorry. I was just thinking things through. Trying to come to a conclusion. I want to be sure I'm doing the right thing."

Deidre scoffed. "And your plan on that was to just pull back from me and do it all by yourself? I talked you through the whole thing the first time; now that you've seen me naked, you're suddenly less chatty? Talk to me, Bats. If you've got a problem, then just say so."

He couldn't deny that she made a valid point. "You've got to admit, last night aside, this whole thing is crazy. A vigilante dating a criminal is practically a cliché in Gotham and it's never worked out well. And you already said you weren't going straight."

"Hey, what I said was that you'd better be good in bed if you want me to give up a glamorous life of clown crime. And, well, lemme just say that you impressed me last night. A couple more sweaty nights like that and I might just end up the poster girl for reform…"

"I'm not joking about this."

"Well, I'm only half-joking, which is basically the same as being serious for me, so cut me some slack! Look, if you're worried that I'm going to try and corrupt you or that villainy is sexually-transmitted, you can relax. I know how exhilarating it must be to dress up as a big bat and go punch clowns and snake-people and drop them off in jail. I'm not going to try and take that away from you. And if you're convinced this is all some big con job, I can promise you that Delia isn't a good enough actress to pretend to be fake-mad at me, and I'm not a good enough actress to have faked those orgasms."

"She did seem pretty mad." Terry elected to skirt around her continued reference to their coitus, trying to focus on the seriousness of the conversation.

"More than anything, she was pissed that I convinced her to do that whole alley thing without telling her it was part of a plan to get you in my bedroom. I told her it was just a chance to screw with you, not screw you. She didn't love the actual screwing you, either, to be honest."

"Wait, you lied to her? Why didn't you just tell her what you wanted?"

"Because she wouldn't have done it otherwise!" Deidre's voice got louder, emphatic, and more defensive. "Because she would've been totally Delia about it; she would've told me that it was a bad idea and that I shouldn't do it and you were gonna shoot me down at best or toss me into lockup at worst." Her voice had a noticeable quaver to it; in anyone else, it would've seemed to herald tears, but Terry didn't especially picture Deidre as the type to start crying over the phone, at least not sincerely. "But I knew what I wanted. So I lied."

Terry was silent. Deidre's words hung in the air for uncountable moments. "I have a brother." he finally said.

"What?" her voice still quavery, but shifting more toward confused.

"I've got a brother. He's a lot younger, not my twin or anything, and we fight all the time, pretty much hourly. So I get it."

"Hey, don't start getting familiar, Bats." her voice was resolute and impassioned, but Terry could tell that it was just a veneer over her true emotions. "I'm just using you for your body, remember? I don't need your life story."

"Sure, yeah." Terry couldn't help but chuckle at her words, crass once again. "That confession didn't at all sound like there was more to this than sex."

"Maybe there is. I dunno yet. Damn, Terry, give a girl a chance to figure out her feelings, why dontcha?"

"So you lied to your sister to get her to attack me in an alley, in the overall hopes that you and I would… What, exactly? Hook up and see if that turned into something more?"

Now it was her turn to let out a tiny laugh. "You're assuming I thought it all the way through. All that stuff I said in the diner was true, but it's not like I'd planned out our entire future together. I just knew I had to give it a shot and hope for the best. I definitely thought that fucking you first would work best, though. After all, even if it didn't get you to come back for more, I still got to fuck the big bad Batman."

"You realize that if this turns out to be a big joke on me, I'm gonna be really pissed."

She laughed again. "As much as I'd love to pull off such an epic brick joke, this isn't that. This is as real as I'm ever going to be able to get." Her voiced turned suddenly serious. "Come over tonight. After you go do your Batman thing, keep the city safe from people like me, stop by. Don't blip me."

He shouldn't. He couldn't. "...Okay. I'll be there."