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The ball stopped bouncing, so Merroth stopped tapping. His forehead knotted and eyes squinted in a way that suggested he had not heard the question, or heard it but the words made no sense, his jaw slack with unresponsiveness. He was thinking too obviously. Some blithe response was turning somersaults in his head. What to do, what to do, it was hard to decide what the perfect response was. Daydreams of one-upmanship flooded his cortex.

Merroth sniffed disdainfully as if Jace were the one making a fool of herself. Attitude and public perception were everything according to Boston. If Merroth acted like he was two steps ahead of the rest of the world people would believe it. You could get away with a lot of bullshit if you just presented it with confidence. (Jace was not "people" as so specifically defined.) "You're doing it wrong," he said, ignoring her question and her implications, challenging her to prove otherwise. Always force the other person to play by your rulebook when possible. Boston's sports metaphors were rubbing off on Merroth, along with the ideas those metaphors were intended to convey.

Hearing her mimicry, Merroth had to do a double-take. Holy god, did he sound like that? What, no! That was a girl voice and Merroth was not a girl. He decided right then and there he hated girls, Jace in particular, and stomped forward angrily, brand-new dress shoes tapping on the floor, too sharp and polished to sound properly masculine.

"You stop it," he demanded angrily of Jace. It wasn't clear if he meant the ball-throwing or the vocal imitation. Probably both. He attempted to grab for the ball.

"I've been whipped before! I'm not 'fraid," boasted Merroth, attempting to prove his strength and bravery with that statement and not realizing quite the implications of it, or the fact that Jace's use of the word "whipped" was less than literal. Due to the height difference, he momentarily gave up on grabbing the ball, but the intense scowl on his face said he had not abandoned the idea completely.

Warehouse was one of those new words Boston used which Merroth had not yet bothered to look up the definition to, but he had gotten the basic gist of the concept because it was a word Boston used a lot in work conversations. BDSM was a mystery, though, and Merroth filed it away for later investigation. "At least I have more than one," said Merroth, who counted his total number of parents at this point to be four and figured the more, the better. (He did not count Edward John for painfully obvious reasons.)

"I have a mansion!" declared Merroth, who was quite ready and earger to play the bigger p***s game now that he felt he had some suitably impressive material wealth to back it up with. If this kept going, he was going to make it very clear to Jace exactly how much more of a p***s he had, too. Being a girl, there way no way Jace could win that comparison. (Then again, anyone who knew Jace knew that she didn't need a literal p***s. Her metaphorical one could be measured only with a yardstick or measuring tape.)

The demonstration never came, though, because they were interrupted. "There you are, champ!" Down came Boston's hand on Merroth's head, ruffling Merroth's hair in an embarrassing display of affection.