Chapter 13
Matej
It’s the forearms.
Luca is reading something, for once actually sitting on a proper chair, at the kitchen table. Sleeves pushed up, one hand flat on the page and the other holding a pen he isn’t using. Just resting it against his knuckles. Matej passes through the room and stops without meaning to.
The forearms. The tendons. The way his wrist turns when he sets the pen down.
Matej is aware that he has been looking for a while.
He goes back to what he was doing. Then he doesn’t.
He comes up behind Luca quietly — not sneaking, just not announcing himself — and puts his hands on Luca’s shoulders. Luca stills. Matej leans down, not quite to his ear, and stays there a moment. Just that. The weight of it.
Then his hands move. Down the chest, slow, no rush. Luca exhales — controlled, trying to be — and Matej feels it under his palms.
“Keep reading,” Matej says.
Luca laughs, short and disbelieving. “You’re not serious.”
He’s serious.
His hand goes lower. Luca’s breath changes. Keep reading hangs there, unanswered, and the page does not turn.
It doesn’t take long. Luca’s hand finds the edge of the table and holds. Matej watches the back of his neck, the line of his shoulders, the moment he stops pretending to be composed. When it’s done Luca tips his head back and Matej catches it with his shoulder.
They stay like that.
Then Matej straightens and goes to wash his hands.
“The forecast says rain by Thursday,” he says, from the sink.
“Right,” Luca says, when he can manage it. “Rain.”
Matej goes back to whatever he was doing before. The belt tensioner, probably. He has been carrying it through the house for three days.
Luca opens his laptop.
Forty minutes pass. Maybe more.
“Cleopatra,” Matej says, from somewhere behind him.
Luca looks up. Matej is in the doorway, one AirPod still in, the tensioner in his hand, looking at Luca as if continuing a conversation that hasn’t started yet.
“What about her,” Luca says.
“She’s closer to the moon landing than to the pyramids.
In time.” He says it plainly — something that has been sitting in his head for an hour and has finally found somewhere to go.
“Two thousand five hundred years between the pyramids and Cleopatra. Fifty years between Cleopatra and the moon. Roughly.”
Luca says nothing.
“That’s —” Luca starts.
“Dan Carlin.” Matej taps the AirPod. “He mentions it. I keep thinking about it.”
He goes back down the hall. The tensioner, apparently, still needs attending to.
Luca sits with it. Then he opens a new tab and checks the dates.
Roughly is correct. He sits with that. Not the dates — the depth. How far back things go when you actually look.