Chapter 3 #4
He fixed his eyes on the rail above them, the rings, the water beading and dropping, something to look at that asked nothing of him. It didn’t work. Luca’s hands were on his hips, pulling him in, and Luca’s mouth was on him, taking him deeper, and there was nowhere to go that wasn’t this.
“Luca,” he said, and it came out wrong, like a thing he’d found on the floor.
Luca’s free hand left his hip. Slid around behind him, and a fingertip found the cleft of him, slow, just to the rim and no further, wet from the water but without the slick that would let it go anywhere, the limit of what the room would give them.
Matej’s whole body clenched around the want of it, around how much further it asked to go.
Luca’s hand slid up and pressed flat against his belly, palm warm against the skin.
Matej’s hand loosened in his hair, some muscle giving up, and slid down to hold the side of Luca’s face.
Luca turned into it. Pressed his mouth to Matej’s palm.
The tenderness of it cracked something open behind his ribs.
Luca eased off him and looked up. Water in his lashes, his lips wet and swollen and parted. The curve they made was not the knowing curve from before. Quieter. Like it cost him. He opened his mouth, the man who had a word for everything, and then he didn’t use it. He just looked at Matej.
Matej didn’t know what the look meant. He didn’t ask.
Luca’s hand found the wrist that was holding his neck. He glanced at the tiles, the old rail, the single shelf with soap and nothing else.
“If we had—” He didn’t finish. He wasn’t really asking.
Matej, who was not in full possession of himself, said: “Above the radiator.”
Luca stared at him.
“The shelf.” Matej tipped his head towards it. “Other side of the curtain.”
Luca pulled the curtain aside. Stood there, water still running, and took stock of the shelf.
He turned back, his face still recalibrating.
“There’s lube,” Luca said. “And a plug.”
“And a—” Luca glanced at the shelf again. Looked back.
“I’m a gay man,” Matej said, “who lives alone. I’m not a monk on a mountaintop.”
Luca laughed. The real one, the helpless one he’d been losing all evening. He stood dripping with a hand on the curtain and laughed, and Matej watched him do it, and the last of his own guard went with it.
“Fair,” Luca said. He reached for the lube, picked up the plug, and the look he turned back on Matej had changed — the laugh still in his eyes and under it something more focused.
“Turn around,” he said. “Spread your cheeks.”
Matej went still. Not for long. He turned it over once, what this was, what he was agreeing to, and the answer came back as it had all night, as it had since Luca set two glasses on his table: yes. Obviously yes.
He turned. Pressed his forehead to the tile, cold against his skin, and reached back with both hands and spread himself open. The water hit the small of his back and ran down.
“Like this?” he said.
Luca’s hand spread warm over one cheek. Then the slick press of a finger at his rim, careful, and Matej’s breath fogged the tile in front of his mouth. He stayed in the body, not the head. No commentary. Only what was happening, and that he let it.
“Breathe,” Luca said behind him, quiet.
He breathed. The fog on the tile spread.
The finger pressed deeper and his breath stuttered against the cold tile, and Luca’s free hand settled warm on his hip, and Matej hung between the two of them, the cold and the warm, not thinking.
Then Luca’s finger was gone. He felt the absence before he understood it — his body closing around nothing, the small involuntary sound it pulled from him. His forehead stayed on the tile.
“Wait,” Luca said. A fact, not an order.
He waited. He heard the cap. He didn’t turn. His hands stayed where they were, holding himself open.
Something cool against him, not water-cold, something else. He flinched and Luca’s hand tightened on his hip, just present, and then Luca took his hand, guided it back, pressed the thing into his palm.
The plug. Silicone, already warm from Luca’s hand.
“Your hands,” Luca said, low, against his spine. “You do it.”
His fingers closed on the base. He turned it once in his palm, the water making it slick, and then he stopped thinking and pressed.
Slow. The stretch wider than Luca’s fingers, fuller, the silicone giving and then holding. His breath went out in a long line and his hand shook on the base, and Luca’s hand stayed over his, not pushing. Just the weight of it.
He pressed deeper. His body held and then opened and the plug slid to its widest and stopped. He kept it there. Breathed. The water ran down his back.
Luca’s hand left his. Found his hip. Squeezed once.
“Good,” Luca said against his spine. Rough, like he’d been holding it. “That’s good.”
His hand dropped from the base. The plug stayed, present with every shift of his weight, every breath. His body full in a way that was new, and entirely his own.
He had never done this with someone watching. He was doing it now.
Luca straightened. Put a hand flat between Matej’s shoulder blades, not pushing, placed there, and turned him. Walked him back until his shoulders met the tile, cold against the heat the water had put in his skin.
He lifted one of Matej’s arms above his head and held it to the wall.
It was what he had done to Luca earlier, his own hand at the wall, Luca’s wrists pinned above his head. He knew it from the other side now. He let his arm stay where Luca put it.
“Touch yourself,” Luca said.
His breath came out unsteady. He had never done this in front of anyone. He understood, in the second before he moved, that he was going to.
His hand moved. The water had washed him slick and his own grip was rough and sure and the pull of it dragged another of those sounds loose.
Luca watched. His own hand was working himself, unhurried, the same focused attention he’d turned on everything tonight, on his own cock now while his eyes stayed on Matej.
And Matej looked at him — water sheeting off his shoulders, the flush high on his chest, his hand moving on himself — and the watching was its own heat.
They were both in it. Both seen. He had spent his life on the outside of rooms like this. He was inside this one.
Luca brought his mouth to Matej’s ear.
“Did you like it,” he said. Low. “Earlier. When I said again.”
Matej made a sound that was not an answer and was entirely an answer.
“Did you like the sound of it.” Almost conversational, which was worse. “When your hand came down. The noise it made.”
“Yes,” Matej said. His voice had left him around touch yourself and this was what had come back in its place, lower, rougher, not managed at all.
“The sounds I made,” Luca said. “That you made me make.”
He let that sit. Then his voice came again, lower, with nothing of himself held back: “I keep thinking about the sounds you made. The ones I made you make. I want all of it. The parts you don’t let anyone see.” His breath was unsteady against Matej’s ear. “Give me those.”
It was the saying it that got him. Not the words.
The fact that Luca, who lived a half-step back from his own life, who described things to keep them at a distance, was putting his own want into the air with no frame around it and nothing to hide behind.
Matej had the sense, listening, that Luca had never once said any of this out loud.
That he was showing himself doing it, for the first time, here.
“Slower,” Luca said, and Matej’s hand slowed before he’d agreed to it. “I want to watch you the whole way.”
Matej said nothing. His hand kept moving.
The water ran down his wrist and his forearm and he felt the plug shift with every stroke, small and insistent, a second pulse under the one his own hand was making.
His hips pressed back into it without his say-so.
His other arm stayed where Luca had put it, above his head, against the wall.
He was seen. All of it — the plug, his own hand, Luca watching. He wanted to be. That was the part he hadn’t expected.
Luca’s hand was still on himself. Matej could see it through the water, the slow deliberate work of it, and his own mouth went dry with the water running into it.
“Look at me,” Luca said.
He looked. Luca’s eyes dark and steady and on him, water running down his face, his hand moving on himself, and his other hand came down from Matej’s raised arm to find his jaw — that same broad warm certain hand — and held him there. Made him keep looking.
“Don’t stop,” Luca said.
He didn’t stop. His hand moved and the plug moved with it and Luca’s eyes were on him and his breath came in pieces, and he was going to come apart in front of this man and let it happen and be seen for all of it.
He was almost there. And then he wasn’t, at the edge of it and his hand not enough. Not alone. Not with Luca watching.
“I can’t—” His voice came out wrong. “Not like this. Not without—”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.