Wolfgang pauses to think about the last time he let someone touch him like that -- he must have been fifteen, maybe sixteen. Touching him at all, more recent, but still years ago. There was a gap in there of several years before anyone wanted to; before that, just two, and one of them had already grown too old for it except sometimes, and then he spoiled it with a kind of grudging fine, I guess display of burgeoning machismo. Adolescence is hard on everyone.

Generally speaking when people want to touch him it's because they want a precursor to other kinds of touching -- and that scares him. He doesn't think that's where this is coming from, so it's different. The point is, there's a kind of comfort in being touched that he hasn't let himself experience in years because he's been too afraid of other people's motives.

He is not sure if he's capable of being comforted in that way, but he can try.

"Okay," he says, finally, with the pause there indicative of his actually having thought about it and not just giving an answer either way to be polite. After another pause -- this one much shorter -- he holds out one of his large hands, the brandless one, the right one.

He is reasonably certain this isn't going to hurt or make him explode, it's just. Been a long time.