Chapter 14 #3
He had gone into this thinking he would be the one in control. Not the way Matej was doing it now, with his hands, his weight. Luca’s control had always been the other kind. Words. He never said it out loud, but whatever he could describe became his. It was also where he hid.
He could not describe this.
Matej kept it slow. Brutally slow. Luca had all of it now, every part: the slow drag, the heat of him, the fullness that pulled back to almost-nothing and pressed home again.
He could feel the restraint in it, the deliberate refusal to hurry, the same patient attention Matej gave the wheels on their shelf, turned now on him, and it was its own form of cruelty.
His hands worked the old wood. His head dropped.
He made a sound that was not a word, then another.
At some point he said please. It did not come out as a request. It came out because it was true.
Behind him Matej made a sound that was almost a laugh. His hands moved to Luca’s hips and took hold, both of them, the whole grip, fingers pressing in hard enough to leave marks by morning, and Luca knew it and wanted it. The tempo came up. Two beats, then three, then no count left to keep.
It drove him forward onto the table. The oak met him every time, his forearms dragging across the grain, the worn ridges of the wood biting into his skin, a burn he would feel for days.
The table itself shifted under them, a low knock of wood on stone, the old weight in it moving for once.
He braced and was driven forward and braced again.
His cheek came down against the surface and he pressed it there and held on.
The cave was loud with it. The slap and the drag, the wet, the knock of the table, the noise that could be taken for nothing but what it was.
And under all of it Luca had no words. None.
The one thing he had always been able to do — take a thing and name it and make it his — was simply gone, and what was left was his body and the wood and the hands at his hips and the silence where his control used to be. That, in the end, was the point.
He came with his face down against the oak and his hands white on the edge of it, the spill on the dark wood under him, and the sound that left him was not relief and not triumph but stranger than either, closer to laughter held underwater. He did not let go of the table.
Matej came not long after. Luca felt it before he heard it — the stutter, the lock, the hand going hard at his hip and then helpless — and the sound Matej made was torn out of him, a sound Luca was fairly sure he had never let anyone hear.
Then Matej came down over him, heavy across his shoulders, spent, shaking.
He stayed there. His face in the curve of Luca’s neck. A long time.
Luca’s own skin was sweat-slick and going cold.
They stayed like that. Breathing.
After a while Matej reached up and worked the belt loose from Luca’s throat — not pulling, just letting the leather slide free — and Luca felt the small absence where it had been, the cool of the air on the mark of it.
Luca laughed first. A huff, low, against the wood. Then Matej, behind him, a sound coming loose in his chest — the real one, the laugh he almost never let out.
They were still half-dressed. The cave was indifferent.
Out into the night.
The cold hit them both at once — the actual Karst, dark and sharp, the farmhouse lights a dull yellow in the distance.
They came through the door half-laughing, still muffling it, the giddiness of having done something slightly mad and gotten away with it, and the indifferent ancient dark around them didn’t care at all.
“We smell like the cave,” Luca said.
“Yes.”
“I hope the cheese kingdom is okay.” He glanced back at the cave door. “The wheels. In there.”
“My cheese does not question the decisions of its lord.”
“Your cheese has strong opinions about everything.”
They separated at the bathroom. One shower each — let’s keep it fresh, Luca’s logic, no argument from Matej.
He stood under the hot water and let the cave come off him and did not sit with what he was feeling with any care, just let it be there: warm, slightly dislocated, more present in his own body than he’d been in a long time.
The stove was still warm by the time they came back to it. Someone — Luca, probably, moving through the house with the easy instinct of a person who had decided it was his too — had fed it another log. Wine still on the table, two glasses. The room felt like late hours, time that had slowed down.
They sat. No ceremony. No weight on it.
Matej turned his glass on the table. “By the way,” he said. “Do I want to know why you had a condom in your pocket.”
“No,” Luca said. Then, dry: “Optimism.”
At some point Luca’s hand found Matej’s.
Neither of them noted it.
The conversation slowed the way it does late at night when two people are tired in the same direction — longer pauses, both of them letting the silence hold what words didn’t need to carry. Matej noticed that he was comfortable. Warm in a way he hadn’t been in a long time.
He also noticed — and then set down, quietly, to leave alone for now — that Luca was looking at the room like he was already in it.
Somewhere between the wine and the stove, Luca already half-gone:
“Tomorrow,” he said. “You show me everything. How it works. All of it.”
Matej was quiet.
“All of it is a lot.”
“I have time,” Luca said.
Matej didn’t say no.
They went to bed as they’d done everything tonight — without naming it, moving towards sleep with the same natural gravity that had moved them through everything else. Both of them under in minutes. The sleep of a body that has been fully used and fully held.
That first night, Luca had lain awake and looked at the ceiling and asked himself who he was now.
He didn’t ask tonight.
He already knew what he was doing here.
He just didn’t know yet what it meant.