"Hey, whoa now, kitty," Staas said as he jumped in surprise and lifted Lady, claws and all, off his lap. "Valuable assets under there." He resituated her to seat her properly in his lap, with less violence, but she was having none of it. She offered him a benign swipe with her paw, and jumped off his lap to sit straight and proud along the back of the couch, showing her his back, tail curled around herself, its tip twitching. "Well, la-di-da," Staas huffed with a smile, but then he looked back to Ira, still waiting for some kind of answer.
Which he got, dropped into the middle of the sentence so casually that Staas almost missed it. Not that Ira's sexual orientation mattered to him. But it was something he hadn't known, and now he did, and it made him smile.
"That's you, dude," he said just as casually. "Ira Bosko, proving reputations wrong since, uh . . . When did you realize you were bi?"