Chapter 3
Luca
Matej had said twenty minutes. It had been closer to forty, and by the time he came in, Luca had found the kitchen, found the wine, set two glasses on the table with the confidence of a man who’d already decided he was welcome.
Matej looked at the glasses. Said nothing. Washed his hands at the sink, opened a drawer, produced a corkscrew.
Luca counted that as a yes.
They’d eaten late, something Matej had put together himself: bread, pr?ut, a board of things, and a cheese that didn’t look like it had come from a supermarket. A dark rind, the interior almost amber. Luca picked up a piece and stopped.
“Where did you get this?”
Matej looked at the wheel. “I make it. Own recipe.” He said it plainly, without elaborating, and poured the wine and moved on.
Luca ate the cheese and did not move on, exactly. He held onto the fact of it: that the man across the table had made this and said so like it was nothing.
They’d stayed at the table longer than the food required.
Luca had talked, he always talked, when the room was quiet and the wine was good and the person across from him was actually listening.
He’d told him about the book. The angle: the Karst as a living wine culture, the old varieties, the Teran, the limestone, the producers doing something serious and mostly unknown outside the region.
He’d told him about Milan, the magazine, how long he’d been writing about wine.
He gave him the clean version, complete, fluent, the version that came out smooth from use.
He had not mentioned the name Ferrante. To Matej he was Luca Casini. It was the name on his byline, on every email between them, his mother’s name. Ferrante was the one on his passport, and that one he kept. He had not mentioned the key either.
He wasn’t sure why. Or rather: he was sure, and chose not to name it yet.
The dishes were cleared. The fire had settled. The second bottle was half gone. Matej had moved to the couch at some point and Luca had followed without deciding to, and now they were here, both angled slightly towards each other like people who have run out of words but not of attention.
Matej was still with him. Not the careful listening of a man who wanted something, not the flattering focus of someone trying to impress. Present. Watching him with a steadiness that had nowhere obvious to land.
Matej’s hands. Around the bowl of the glass, the forearms where the sleeves were pushed back, the muscle and tendon shifting when he poured.
His mouth, too. His throat when he drank, the work of it as he swallowed.
The set of his lips between sentences, which was most of the time. Luca had been watching for a while.
He said it before he decided to. The words were out before he’d chosen them, half under his breath, aimed at no one, already looking away so that if it landed wrong he could pretend it hadn’t happened:
“Madonna, che spreco.”
Long enough that he exhaled, slow, and reached for his glass, and began building the version of the evening where it hadn’t registered, where Matej didn’t speak Italian, where he was safe.
Matej turned his head.
Matej looked at him. Unhurried, without announcement. Not a smile, not a question. Something already past both of those, quieter and more serious and a good deal more dangerous.
Luca opened his mouth. He had something to say. He always had something to say.
He set his glass down and stood, he wasn’t sure why, some instinct, some need to move, and then Matej stood too.
Luca hadn’t seen it coming.
Matej crossed the distance in two steps, not rushing, not hesitating, the same unhurried certainty he brought to everything, and then his hand was at the side of Luca’s neck.
Just placed there, warm and broad and deliberate, his thumb at the hinge of Luca’s jaw, and the touch was so certain, so free of question, that something in Luca’s chest went sideways.
He looked up. Matej was taller than he’d registered, or just closer, close enough that Luca could see the whole of his attention and the surprise behind it, genuine, like he hadn’t entirely planned this, like something had moved in him faster than he’d meant it to.
And behind the surprise, coming in fast: want. Clear and direct and fixed on him.
Luca had been wanted before. This was different. Want with no agenda, no audience, none of the faint exhaustion of someone who needed him to witness how much they wanted him. It just, felt real. Blunt. Like a fact.
Oh, he thought. Oh, this is a different kind of man.
“Good?” Matej said. Low. Right there.
“Yes,” Luca said. Steadier than he felt. “Very.”
The kiss was not gentle and it was not an assault. It was certain. Matej kissed like a man who had already decided and was simply collecting it, and Luca, who always had a next move, who always knew the shape of an evening before it arrived, felt his mind go quiet.
He reached up, hands finding Matej’s chest, his shoulders.
Matej caught his wrists. Both of them, one hand, and pressed them to the wall above his head. Not hard. Not a contest. Just stay — and he kept kissing him.
Luca pulled once. Not to get free. To feel where the limit was. The grip answered, tightened a fraction, and the answer went through him hot and low, and he made a sound into the kiss he hadn’t planned to make.
Matej drew back an inch. Read his face.
Luca let him. Didn’t hide it.
Matej let go of his wrists.
And Luca left them there. Backs of his hands against the cool plaster, fingers loose. No one holding him there now, just his own choice not to lower them. He didn’t have to do anything with his hands.
Then Matej’s hand moved to the top button of Luca’s shirt. Worked it open, then the one below, knuckles dragging down the skin as it bared, unhurried, like there was no version of the night where he didn’t get to do this. The shirt fell open.
He took Luca’s hands down from the wall. Both of them, gathered easy, and brought them behind Luca’s back, and held them there at the base of his spine. He didn’t press. He just held, and waited, and the hold was a question.
Luca answered it without a word. He stopped bracing. Let his wrists go soft in Matej’s hand, let his head drop forward, and that was the yes.
Matej let go. Luca kept them there. The shirt, pushed off his shoulders, slid down his arms and caught at the forearms, gathered behind him, his hands at the small of his own back as if tied there and nothing tying them.
The air was cool on his bared chest. He shivered before he could decide not to.
Matej’s hand settled on the bare shoulder. Warm, broad, still. Then it moved down, slow, along the collarbone, and Luca’s breath shortened and caught under his ribs.
The pad of Matej’s thumb found his nipple.
A pinch, light at first, thumb and finger, and Luca’s whole chest drew tight around it and the sound that came out of him came from under language.
Matej felt that. Did it again, harder, watching him now, and Luca’s hips lifted towards him without his say-so.
It was out of him before he could shape it, half under his breath, not to Matej, not to anyone, the language that arrived when he stopped choosing which language he was in: “Sì, ancora.”
Matej didn’t answer it. He didn’t have to.
His thumb and finger closed again, harder, a slow pull that bordered on too much and wasn’t, and the noise out of Luca then was one he had never made for anyone, high and breaking and openly wanting, and some far-off part of him registered with something close to alarm how much he liked it.
How much. How fast it took him apart. Each time Matej took it further and read what came back, and each time Luca gave him more to read.
His hands were still behind his back. No one holding them now. He kept them there anyway.
He had always been the one who decided. Who arranged the evening, chose the restaurant, drove the conversation, timed the moment his hand landed on a knee.
Always the one with the map, always the one who knew the next turn.
And now here he was, hands at the small of his back, a man’s hand on him, his breath in pieces he couldn’t reassemble, and what undid him was not the surrender of it but the relief.
He didn’t have to run this. For once he could stop.
The weight he’d carried so long he’d stopped feeling it was gone, and nothing in him reached after it.
“Still good?” Matej said. The same low register, the same absence of show.
Luca tried for a sentence. Nothing useful came. He got out a nod, which should have been humiliating and wasn’t, which was the most honest thing he’d done all week.
Matej’s hand came up to his jaw. Took it, not hard, turned his face up, and kissed him, slow and deep, taking his time, taking what was his.
Luca could have pulled away if he’d wanted.
He didn’t want. The hold on his jaw tightened a fraction and he heard himself make a sound closer to a word in a language he didn’t speak.
His hands stayed where they were. The shirt hung from his forearms, behind him.
Matej’s hand found the waistband of his jeans. Paused there. Fingers at the skin just above the denim, a question made of pressure.
Luca’s hips jerked towards the touch before his brain sent the word.
“Yes,” he said, rough. “God, yes.”
The button gave with a small precise sound, then the zip, and the denim loosened and Luca’s breath stopped, not for effect, just stopped, as if his lungs had lost the instruction.
At his jaw the hold tightened. Not painful. Present. A reminder of where he was and who was holding him there.