Chapter 3 #3
He had not expected any of it. Not the wall, not his hands above his head, not his own voice saying again, please without a flinch.
Not that he had wanted to hand the control over and hadn’t known it.
That there was a version of him who could say yes to being held in place, yes to the hand at his throat, yes to the heat blooming across his skin, and could lean back into someone and give all his weight and manage none of it.
Who are you, he thought, not at Matej. At himself. When did you get here.
Matej
Matej reached past him and picked up his own t-shirt from the floor.
Handed it to Luca without ceremony. Luca looked at it, then at him, and something in his face broke open into a laugh — quiet, helpless, the laugh of a man who had completely lost the thread of his evening and found he didn’t mind.
He cleaned up. Handed it back. Matej looked at the shirt, then dropped it somewhere behind the couch.
“Sorry,” Luca said, not sounding sorry.
“Don’t be,” Matej said.
Matej stepped on the belt. Luca’s belt, on the floor where it had landed. He looked down at it. Luca followed his eyes.
“We missed an opportunity,” Luca said, looking at it. “Considering.”
Matej looked at the belt. Looked at him.
“It’s a belt.”
“It is,” Luca agreed. “Versatile object.”
“Holds trousers up.”
“Among other things.”
Matej considered this with what appeared to be genuine gravity.
“I have a box,” he said finally, “in the workshop.”
Luca stared at him. “You have a—”
“Tools,” Matej said. “For the tractor. Straps. Chains. Rope.”
“Rope.”
“For towing.”
“Right.”
“Also a second belt,” Matej said. “If you’re keeping inventory.”
Luca laughed first — helpless, the laugh surprised out of him. Matej a second later, the real one, the one he didn’t manage. Both of them on the same side and both of them knowing it.
The couch was old and deep, twenty winters absorbed into it.
Luca folded into it like his bones had been replaced with something softer.
Matej sat beside him and Luca, without discussion, without asking, leaned into him — shoulder, then more, until he was mostly against his side, and Matej’s arm came around him because where else would it go.
They didn’t speak.
The fire had settled into coals, orange and slow.
The evening had compressed itself — long, and also over too quickly, as evenings do when they turn out to matter.
The walk through the Bora. The wall. Twenty minutes.
Forty. A man coming in from outside carrying cold air and the smell of limestone, washing his hands at the sink.
All of it felt like it had happened to someone else.
All of it felt like it had happened last week.
Luca laughed, quietly, at nothing.
Matej looked down at him.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Luca shook his head. “I just —” He stopped. Started again. “I didn’t expect this evening.”
“No,” Matej said. “Neither did I.”
Then Luca looked up at him, and whatever was in his face — the openness of it, the uncomplicated pleasure, the slight delirium of a man running on adrenaline and late wine and genuine surprise at himself — Matej felt it land somewhere in his chest.
He had not seen that face before. On anyone. That lightness. Like something had been set down.
You did that. He said it under his breath without meaning to. Zlato. He didn’t follow it.
Luca kissed him.
Not an escalation — just turned his face up and kissed him, warm and unhurried, and Matej kissed him back, and then Luca kissed him again with more intention and his hand was on Matej’s jaw and his chest and Matej felt the shift, felt the energy in it, Luca’s earlier delirium converting into something more directed.
He pulled back a centimeter. “You’re sure.”
“I’m very sure,” Luca said. His eyes were bright. “I’m extremely sure. I would like to —” He stopped, reconsidered, kissed the corner of his mouth instead. “Can I.”
“Yes,” Matej said.
Matej had always been the one who waited.
Who observed. Who moved carefully and deliberately and kept his own counsel — and now he found that he had stopped thinking.
That the long internal negotiation had simply — stopped.
That he was here, in this room, with this man’s hands on him, and he had no position on it, no management of it, no sense of watching himself from the outside.
Present. Completely present.
Matej looked at him and thought, without meaning to, of the weeks ahead. Both of them in this house. The work. The proximity. The thought didn’t alarm him.
You made the cheese, you put it in the cave, you trusted the conditions. Some things worked best when you stopped checking on them.
Then it changed. The same hands, but they had decided something. Less answer in them now, more intent.
Matej knew the feeling from the other side. He had done it himself earlier, his hand at Luca’s jaw, Luca’s wrists pinned above his head and then gathered behind his back. He knew what it was to want and reach for it.
This was Luca reaching.
Not smoothly. His hand stalled at Matej’s chest, a question he hadn’t finished asking himself. A man who had spent the evening being moved and held and taken, feeling now for the other side of it. Whether he could. Whether he was allowed to want it.
Matej did the only useful thing. He stopped leading. Let his hands go still, let his weight go back, gave Luca the room.
He watched it land. The small surprise first, then the dare answered. Luca’s mouth curved against his.
“Okay,” Luca said. Low, to himself as much as to Matej. “Okay, yes.”
“Shower,” Luca said.
Matej blinked. “What.”
“Shower.” He stretched. “I’ve been in a car, then walking, then sitting, then —” He gestured vaguely at the general situation. “Basic hygiene.”
Matej looked at him. Then: “Down the hall. Left.”
“I know,” Luca said, standing, extending a hand. “You showed me earlier.”
“I showed you where the towels were.”
“Same hallway.” Luca’s hand was still extended, waiting. “Come on. The water takes a minute to heat up, I assume.”
“Two minutes.”
“So we have something to do for two minutes.”
The water took exactly two minutes.
They used the time.
The shower was not big. Old tiles, a curtain on a rail, a bathroom that had never been asked to be anything other than functional. He knew every inch of it. It was his. He had never stood in it like this — back against the wall, Luca’s hands in his hair, the water finally hot.
He had agreed to a shower. Luca had started elsewhere.
His shirt was gone, his jeans, all of it, shed somewhere between the couch and the water — he couldn’t have said when.
The water ran between them. Luca’s mouth was at his throat, then lower, the tile cold where his shoulders pressed and Luca’s hands warm where they weren’t.
One of them spread flat over the tattoo of a ram on his ribs and stayed there.
Luca didn’t ask about it. Just kept his palm over it, like he’d found something and wanted to keep it under his hand.
Matej didn’t know where to put his own hands. He had spent his life knowing exactly where they went. They found the rail, found the wall, found Luca’s shoulder, and stayed.
Luca’s mouth moved down his chest and his breath went short, shorter than he’d meant anyone to hear. Teeth at his nipple, a slow worry of it, and the sound that left him was nothing he knew. He turned his face into the tile, wet against his cheek.
Luca didn’t let up. Mouth and hands, and Matej’s hand on Luca’s shoulder was the only thing holding him up, his knees gone somewhere else entirely.
He could feel Luca smile against his skin.
The shape of it, the knowing, and he pressed his palm harder into Luca’s shoulder because he had no words for any of it and didn’t want them.
Luca’s hand came up and cupped his jaw and turned his face from the tile.
No question in it. That was the part that undid him — the hand broad and warm and certain, turning him like the choice had been made somewhere he hadn’t been.
His mouth found Luca’s, and his hand slid to the back of Luca’s neck and pulled him in, because a hand that wanted something this badly had to do something with it.
Luca made a sound against his mouth, low and pleased, and it went through Matej before it reached his ears. The hand on his jaw slid down his throat and pressed flat over his sternum.
“Stay,” Luca said. Not a request, not a command. And then he was on his knees on the wet tile, and Matej’s hand found the wall, because there was nothing else to hold.
The water hit the top of Luca’s head and ran down his face.
He looked up through it — mouth wet, eyes dark, water caught in his lashes — and Matej, who watched everything, who had spent his whole life on the outside of the moment looking in, had nothing to do now but be looked at.
He looked back. He let himself be seen wanting it.
Then Luca’s mouth, and the word for it came plain into his head because there was no managing anything now: his cock taken slow into the wet heat of him, and his head went back and the tile met his skull, the cold of it shocking him half-awake before the rest of him went under.
He made a sound. Heard it leave him. Small and broken, nothing he’d have let out in another life. His fingers curled against the tile, the grout rough under his nails, and his free hand found the back of Luca’s head without asking the rest of him.
He was leaking before he understood it — knew it only in Luca’s answer, the low pleased sound Luca made around him, Luca taking the taste of him and wanting more.
The sound went straight through the hand on the back of Luca’s head, through the tile, through the cold grout under his nails.
He was shaking. He didn’t know when that had started. He didn’t care.