Chapter 3 #5
Luca’s hand left his jaw. He pressed in, closing the last of the water between them, and then he was against Matej, the two of them lined up hot and slick, his hand coming around both of them at once.
Matej’s hand was already there. Luca’s folded over it, their fingers overlapping, and the two of them moved through that one grip together, water spilling over their knuckles.
“Like this,” Luca said. Not a question.
His head went back, the tile against his skull. Luca’s mouth was on his throat again, the same spot, the same knowing press of teeth, and Matej’s freed hand came down and found the back of Luca’s neck and held on. Luca’s other hand had found his hip, holding him into it.
The rhythm was theirs together. Of course it was.
The plug shifted with every move and his hips chased it, forward into their grip and back onto the fullness, and Luca’s hand tightened around them both.
Faster. Just enough that Matej felt the change before his mind caught it, the gathering, everything narrowing to the one point where they were joined.
He came first, over their hands, between them, the sound out of him low and broken and entirely unmanaged. Luca’s grip held through all of it, didn’t stop, didn’t rush it.
Luca followed a breath later, his hand tightening around them both, his forehead dropping to Matej’s shoulder, a sound private and swallowed and real.
The water ran. Both of them breathing.
Luca’s mouth found his. Warm. Not the start of something — the end. Matej’s hand came up to the side of his face and held him there, and the kiss was short and quiet and tasted like water and the long strange evening and something that didn’t have a name yet.
Luca
They came out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam, Luca with a towel around his waist and Matej with nothing, which Luca noted.
The bedroom was at the end of the hall. Matej stopped in the doorway and looked at the bed — a real bed, wide, with the solidity of old furniture that had never been asked to be anything other than what it was — and then looked at Luca with an expression that was mostly exhaustion and a little something else.
“There’s a room,” Luca said. “Upstairs. It has a—”
“Don’t,” Matej said.
Luca laughed.
“I have no energy,” Matej said, “to make up another bed.”
“That’s a terrible reason to share.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll take it,” Luca said.
They got in. The sheets were cold for about thirty seconds and then weren’t. Outside the rain had finally stopped, or maybe Luca had just stopped hearing it — the silence was different now, softer — the hush that comes after weather.
Matej was asleep almost immediately. He was present and then he wasn’t, his breathing changing, his weight settling. A man who knew how to sleep.
Luca lay on his back and looked at the ceiling.
He was not tired. He was the opposite of tired — he was lit up, still running, his body humming quietly with the frequency of a person who had learned something about himself that couldn’t be unlearned.
He felt light. Absurdly, almost embarrassingly light, like something had been removed that he’d been carrying so long he’d forgotten it had weight.
He turned his head and looked at Matej. The line of his shoulder in the dark. The stillness of him.
Ostani, Matej had said, half into the pillow, already mostly gone. Not a request. Just a word, soft at the edges, spoken to the room or to himself or to Luca, no clear boundary between those things.
Luca had stayed.
He was still staying.
He looked back at the ceiling. The old beams. The dark. Somewhere outside a nightbird called once and stopped.
He said it very quietly, to no one, to the room, to whatever version of himself had shown up tonight without warning:
“Ma cui soio, cumò?”
An acknowledgment. That the man who had walked into this house six hours ago, certain of his own edges, certain of what he wanted and what he didn’t, had left somewhere around the second hour, and this person — lighter, stranger, less defended — had taken his place.
He wasn’t sure yet if that was frightening.
He thought, on balance, that it wasn’t.
He did not sleep immediately. That would have been too easy — too clean an ending for an evening that had been neither. He lay there in the dark, in a bed that was wide and warm and not his, and his mind did what his mind always did: turned the thing over, looked for the seams.
He found no seams. That was what he had no category for yet.
At some point Matej shifted in his sleep and pulled him closer — not deliberately, just the unconscious logic of a warm body finding another — and Luca let himself be pulled, which was also not something he did as a rule.
He settled with his back against Matej’s chest and thought: this is a thing that is happening.
And then, because there was nothing useful to do with that thought at three in the morning: alright.
He lay in it: Matej’s warmth beside him, solid and uncomplicated, and the old house settling around them both, and the Karst outside doing whatever the Karst did at night — breathing, probably, in that slow geological way it had, limestone and dark and the silence of a place that had been here long before anyone was keeping track.
Luca slept.