Chapter 23
Matej
The fire is lit. That’s enough for tonight.
The keys are on the table, the decision made — and somewhere between Matej setting another log on and Luca turning to look at the photograph again, the day arrives all at once.
The drive across the border and back. The cold kitchen he returned to.
The hours he sat here not knowing whether the door would open.
The hour Matej walked through the snow not knowing whether the house would be empty when he reached it.
It has been a long day to hold.
They don’t talk first.
That’s not a decision — it’s just what happens. Luca crosses the room and Matej reaches for him and whatever they’ve been carrying since the morning finds its way out through their hands, their mouths, the desperation of two people who have been careful for too long.
It’s not gentle. Not at first.
Matej has his hands in Luca’s hair and Luca is pulling at his shirt like he’s angry, like he has been angry all day and has nowhere else to put it, and Matej understands this because he has been the same — the snow, Fanika’s kitchen, the walk home with nothing rehearsed.
You’re still here. That’s what his hands say. I’m still here. That’s what Luca’s say back.
The urgency shifts. Not suddenly — gradually, like temperature dropping towards evening. The grip loosens. The breathing slows. Matej becomes aware of Luca’s weight against him, the realness of it, and something in his chest opens, and he lets it.
He pulls back just enough to see his face.
Luca looks at him. His expression is open in a way Matej has only seen a few times — unguarded, no performance, nothing being managed.
“I don’t want to play,” Luca says. “Not now. Just us.”
Matej looks at him. Reads this. Understands what he is being offered — not a game, not a frame to stand behind. This. What is actually here.
He puts his hand against the side of Luca’s face. Holds it there.
Luca closes his eyes. Just for a second.
“Yes,” Matej says.
Luca kisses him again. Slower this time, the urgency spent, a slowness underneath it that wasn’t there before. His hand comes up to Matej’s throat. Not gripping. The thumb settles at the jaw, the fingers loose along the side of his neck. Just there.
Matej stills.
He doesn’t decide to. His body does it for him, goes quiet under the hand, some held tension letting go all at once.
The kiss deepens. Luca takes more of it, and Matej lets him, and his hands — which have been gripping, pulling, holding on all evening — loosen.
Drop. Find the small of his own back. The wrists cross.
The position his body knows now. After the afternoon in the little room. It went there on its own, without being told, and that is the thing that stops him: not that he wants it, but that his body has already decided, has been deciding for longer than he has let himself look.
He pulls his hands forward, away from his own back. Steps back, half a step. Not away from Luca. Away from how easily his body went.
Luca doesn’t follow. His hand falls away from Matej’s throat. He stays where he is and waits, and his face is still open, still unguarded.
“I know what I’m offering,” he says. “And I want to.”
Matej reads his face the way he reads weather coming over the ridge. Finds nothing in it to brace against.
The words are hard to get to. But Luca has said his part and is waiting now, not reaching, and the not-reaching is what makes it possible.
“I want to not be able to move,” Matej says.
He hears it land in the room. Feels the heat climb his face, the strange nakedness of having said it plainly, with no frame around it.
Luca doesn’t make him say more.
He takes Matej’s hand and leads him to the bed — the one Matej knows in the dark, the carved post at the headboard worn smooth under a hundred years of hands. He settles him back against it. Looks at the post a moment, then down at his own waist.
“Toolbox is in the cheese room,” he says, and works his belt free of the loops. “This’ll do.”
Something releases in Matej’s chest. Not laughter. Close to it.
Luca loops the belt over the smooth post, draws Matej’s wrists up, binds them. Tests it with two fingers. Steps back to look.
“Tighter.”
The word comes out smaller than he means it.
He has to push it past something to get it out at all — the asking is the hard part, harder than what he’s asking for.
Luca tightens the belt. The leather closes on the bones of his wrists, the give goes out of it, and the fact of it settles into him: that he is held, that he asked to be.
He breathes out, long, like setting something down.
“Is there more?” Luca says.
He almost doesn’t answer. Then, before he can take it back:
“My eyes,” he says. And then, lower, the harder half: “I want them covered.”
Luca pulls his shirt over his head. Folds it in the dark. Lays it over Matej’s eyes and ties it behind, checks it at the temple with one finger so it won’t slip.
Then he sits back. Matej can’t see it, but he feels the looking — the weight of Luca’s attention settling over him, bound and blind and waiting. The room goes still and certain.
Matej listens. The bed frame doesn’t creak — it’s good wood, old — and that’s how he knows Luca has moved. A shift in weight. The sound of breath being let out slowly through the nose. Not a sigh. Something more deliberate, a man settling into a chair.
Matej’s wrists are bound above his head, the leather of Luca’s belt warm where it’s been against skin and now going cool in the air between them.
Snug now, no give left in it after he asked.
He couldn’t slip free if he tried. He doesn’t try.
That’s the point — that he can’t, that he asked for exactly this.
The dark behind the t-shirt is absolute.
Not a shred of light. Luca must have folded it three times.
Matej can smell him on the fabric — the particular salt-and-warmth of a body that’s been working all day, layered under something cleaner, the soap from the bathroom, the green one in the ceramic dish.
His own breathing sounds loud to him. The room is quiet otherwise. The farmhouse holds its silence the way old houses do, in the walls, in the joists, in the spaces between floorboards that have been settling for a hundred years.
He waits.
He doesn’t know what Luca is doing. That’s the thing.
He can’t see him, can’t read the angle of his shoulders or the set of his mouth, can’t calibrate his own responses against the other man’s expressions.
There’s nothing to play to. Nothing to manage.
His body is here, offered up, and the rest of him has no choice but to follow.
A floorboard gives somewhere in the house — a long, soft complaint.
Matej tracks the sound the way he tracks a bird landing on a branch, without trying to, his body mapping the house by its small noises.
The kitchen. The second step from the bottom.
The weight of it suggests that nothing’s moving — just the wood adjusting to the cold pressing against the outside walls.
Luca hasn’t touched him yet.
That’s the thing that sits in Matej’s chest, heavy and strange.
He is waiting. He has been waiting, he realizes, for longer than this moment.
For longer than today. For something he has not allowed himself to name because naming it would mean admitting he wanted it, and wanting it would mean having it, and having it would mean —
The mattress dips. Not much. A hand, maybe, pressed flat beside his hip.
Matej feels the warmth of it before he feels the pressure — a heat that radiates through the sheets, through the thin cotton of his shirt, which Luca had not taken off him, which is a gentleness in itself.
The hand doesn’t move. It just rests there, heavy and present.
A weight that asks nothing and goes nowhere.
Matej’s breath catches. Not because he’s surprised. Because his body recognizes something before his mind does — a hand that is not reaching, not taking, not performing any gesture at all. A hand that is simply staying.
Luca’s thumb moves. Just once. A slow drag across the fabric, following the ridge of Matej’s hip bone. Then stillness again.
Matej’s throat works. He swallows. The sound is too loud in the dark, in the quiet of the room, and he is aware of Luca hearing it, aware of every small noise his body makes being received by someone who is listening.
The hand lifts. He feels the absence of it like a change in temperature — the cool air rushing in where warmth had been.
Then it returns. Higher. The flat of Luca’s palm against his sternum, resting there with a weight that is deliberate, unhurried.
Matej can feel the calluses — the roughness of a thumb that has been working with wire, with wood, with the stubborn machinery of an old farm.
The calluses catch against the cotton of his shirt.
He feels each one as a point of friction, a small event.
Luca’s hand stays. Doesn’t move. Just presses, steady, against the centre of Matej’s chest, and Matej realizes his heart is beating hard enough that Luca must feel it — the rapid percussion of it, the animal urgency that his body cannot hide, that the dark cannot conceal.
He wants to say something. His mouth opens.
Nothing comes. The words he might have used — please or more or like this — they don’t arrive.
His voice is somewhere else, somewhere deeper than language, somewhere in the place where his hands are bound and his eyes are covered and he has no choice but to feel what is happening to him.