Chapter 14
Matej
He’d said Come before he’d decided to.
That was the thing he turned over afterward — the gap between intention and action, the way the word had already been in the air before anything in him had chosen it.
A few days after the kitchen, he’d been standing in the yard in the last of the evening light, Luca next to him, and something had shifted without announcement: he’d heard himself speak, heard the invitation in his own voice, and then stood a second with the fact of it before he started walking.
Luca had followed. No questions.
That, too, had mattered.
He was nervous. He realized it only when they were standing at the entry of the cave.
The old door, the rust, the familiar weight of the lock in his hand.
He hesitated half a second longer than necessary.
He knew every sound it made, every change in the floor, the exact way the cold moved when you first pushed through. He did not stumble here.
He had never brought anyone here.
He turned the key.
The smell came first. Washed rind and age, sharp and animal, ammonia under limestone, the deep cold of rock that never sees the sun. Matej knew what it was — had lived with it so long it had become weather, unremarkable — but he watched Luca hit it and waited.
Luca didn’t move. Just stood.
Then: slow breath in. Taking it in properly. Letting it be what it was.
Some of the tension went out of him.
Luca moved forward. His eyes adjusted to the weak light, the orange and grey of the cave walls, the long rows of wheels on the wooden shelves: natural rind, washed rind, the accumulated months of patient work catching the light in dull gold and white.
He moved towards the nearest shelf slowly — the kind of slowness that was attention, that was care.
He reached out and touched one of the wheels with his fingertips, lightly, as if it were not his to damage.
He didn’t say anything.
Matej waited.
He was aware, standing there watching him, of the Jura.
November. Théo’s family place, a Saturday, the same kind of heavy door and the same assault of smell and his own twenty-six-year-old self standing frozen at the entrance while Théo waited just inside and didn’t explain, didn’t rush — just waited for him to find his own way in.
He’d never forgotten that. The patience of it.
The way it had said: you don’t have to perform anything here.
He watched Luca touch the wheel. He watched him understand it, or begin to.
Then Luca laughed.
Not the other one — not the social one, the fluid one he deployed like a tool, the one Matej had spent weeks learning to read around. This was the one underneath that, the real thing — unguarded, a little helpless, surprised out of him.
He turned and looked at Matej.
“Some little cheesemaking, huh?”
Matej laughed. Short, real, completely unmanaged — the laugh he almost never let out, the one that showed too much of something. Luca heard it. Looked at him with a new kind of attention.
Matej had been seen.
And then an image, gone as soon as it came: that Luca was standing in the light of the cave walls and that he, Matej, had been watching him for days with the frustration of someone who knew better, and that right now, in this cave, with the smell of his own work all around them, he was thinking things he had not given himself permission to think.
He stumbled.
The stone he’d stepped over a thousand times. His own floor.
Luca caught him — hands at his arms, quick, no drama, balance restored. And then he didn’t let go. He looked at Matej. The smile was still there but it had changed — softer now, or more direct. He brought his hands up slowly to Matej’s face.
Matej was aware, in that half-second, of all the nights they had stopped short of this. Not as lack. As weight.
The first kiss was a question.
Matej answered.
In the half-second after, Luca pulled back just enough to look at him — registering something, recalibrating — and then his hands moved to Matej’s shoulders and he walked him back, unhurried, one step and then another, until Matej felt the edge of the work table against the back of his thighs.
The second kiss was not a question anymore.
Longer. More deliberate. Luca kissed him with a focus Matej hadn’t expected — exact, like he meant to remember it. When he finally pulled back he didn’t go far. He stood there, hands still on Matej’s shoulders, and looked at him.
Then he looked at the room.
The cave. The wheels on their shelves. The cold orange light. The massive table, the grain dark with age, and one very surprised cheesemaker standing with his back against it.
He exhaled once, soft. How completely insane this was. How completely, unexpectedly right.
He took one step back and looked at Matej steadily — just looked, until Matej understood that the table was still there behind him and that he was not required to move from it.
He reached for Matej’s hands. Guided them back, one then the other, and set them flat on the table behind Matej’s hips. No question asked. The pressure of it said: here. Stay.
Matej stayed.
Luca moved towards him again, slowly, with intention. He brought one hand up to Matej’s face, touched his jaw, his cheekbone, the corner of his mouth. Light. Learning the surface. His thumb traced Matej’s lower lip and he watched his own hand do it.
Then his hand moved to Matej’s throat.
Not hard — a held pressure, fingers at the side of his neck, tipping his head to an angle and holding it there. Matej felt his breath change. Luca kissed him — deep, deliberate, in complete ownership of the moment — and then kissed his jaw, the hinge of it, moved down to his throat.
The room was quiet except for their breathing, which was becoming less quiet.
Luca straightened. Opened Matej’s jacket — methodical, no drama, moving through something already decided. Pushed it off his shoulders. His hands went to the buttons of Matej’s shirt, worked from the collar down, then pulled the hem of the t-shirt beneath free and slid both hands underneath.
Matej’s breath caught.
Luca’s hands moved over his chest, up over the ribs where the ram was inked along the bone, not pausing there, not making a thing of it.
The cold of the cave sat on Matej’s skin; Luca’s hands were the only heat in the room.
His thumb and index finger found his nipple and pinched, slow and deliberate — Luca’s eyes on his the whole time — and Matej’s head went back slightly, almost against his will.
Still no words. Just the breathing, and the cold of the cave, and the heat of two people standing very close together.
Luca’s hands moved to Matej’s waistband. Button. Zip. He pushed the jeans down to the mid-thigh and left them there, and stepped back.
Matej stood — jacket gone, shirt open, jeans at his thighs, doing nothing to conceal what was already obvious.
Luca looked at him. Without apology. Then he shrugged his own jacket open, worked through his own buttons, same pace, and opened his jeans. Mirrored. So that they were standing three feet apart, both of them open, both of them visible, and the cave around them was utterly indifferent.
He moved.
Not towards Matej — down. One knee, then the other, on the stone floor. He looked up.
Matej made a sound. “Luca —”
“Relax,” Luca said. His hands came up to Matej’s thighs: warm, steady, a held pressure. “Relax, secret cheese lord. We will not defile the kingdom.” Then, something lighting in his eyes: “Too much.”
Matej almost laughed. Almost.
Luca’s hands moved — slowly, with a care that had nothing performative in it. Matej’s hand came down towards his hair.
Luca caught it. Both hands, lifted, placed them firmly back against the table behind Matej. Held them there. Looked up until Matej met his eyes — held the look, steady, until something in Matej settled into understanding.
This. Yes.
Luca’s mouth came forward.
Not all at once. Breath first, warm, then warmer, the heat of his mouth arriving ahead of any touch.
Then his lips. Then the wet heat closing around his cock, slow, taking him in a degree at a time.
Then the tongue, flat, the full width of it, moving from the base to the tip, slow and unhurried.
Matej felt all of it: the soft drag, the suck, the close wet heat.
His hands pressed harder into the wood. He could feel the grain under his palms, and he pressed harder still because his hands wanted to move and he was not letting them move.
Luca looked up. Held his gaze.
Matej held it back.
The tongue again. Slower this time. Then the teeth, just the edge of them, grazing up the length of him, careful, a threat that was not one. Then the lips after, soft, closing over the path the teeth had taken. Matej’s breath left him in a short unguarded sound.
“Yes,” he said. The word came out quiet. He had not decided to say it.
Luca heard it. His eyes stayed on Matej’s, and the next pass was deeper, longer, the wet heat taking him further in, and Matej felt himself harden against the pull of it, the ache climbing, his knees adjusting without permission.
“That,” he said. “More of that.”
He heard the hesitancy in his own voice — the carefulness of someone who did not usually ask — and then the next one came easier.
“More.”
Luca gave him more.
The teeth again. The flat of the tongue again. A rhythm building that was not rushed, that had already decided it was going to last. Matej’s hands ached against the wood. His fingers wanted to close, wanted a fistful of hair, wanted to set the pace himself. He kept them flat.
His body stopped bracing. He felt it go.
Luca had read it before Matej did. The shift. The body that finally stopped thinking about what it was doing and simply did it.
He eased back. Sat on his heels.
Matej looked down at him, slightly dazed, breathing changed.