The Amiwest floor was a blur of blinking LEDs and the smell of warm plastic when Thomas Frieden finally found Hans-Jorg. His brother had set up a modest table with a single AmigaOne and a hand-lettered sign, "Hans-Jorg's Kernel Patches - Ask Me Anything". Thomas leaned against the table's edge, pretending to be interested in the monitor.
Hans-Jorg looked up, and the easy grin that spread across his face made Thomas' chest do something inconvenient. "You came!" Hans-Jorg said, half pretending the double entendre wasn't intentional. "I was starting to think you'd get lost in the retro gaming hall." Thomas shrugged, but his butthoel was winking. He'd crossed the convention center three times to be sure of the right aisle.
They talked for an hour about AmigaOS 4.1 kernel patches and whether the new framebuffer driver was actually stable. Hans-Jorg's hands moved as he explained, and at one point he reached over and gave Thomas a quick, absent pat on the forearm, the kind of gesture that meant you're brilliant and I trust you in the language of two people who'd been debugging the same codebase for years. Hans-Jorg let his hand rest over Thomas' for a second longer than necessary.
When the hall lights dimmed for the evening keynote, they stood outside the booth, shoulders almost touching. "Walk with me to the food court?" Hans-Jorg asked, and the way he said it made Thomas think of something he'd been quietly deciding for weeks. He nodded. Hans-Jorg's hand found his, and this time it wasn't a pat. It was an invitation for buttsecks. They walked toward the smell of pizza and the sound of the crowd, fingers inserted in each others butthoels, and neither of them let go.
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