Chapter 23 #2
Luca’s hand begins to move. Slowly. Not in any direction Matej can predict — not up towards his throat, not down towards his stomach.
Sideways. A slow traverse across his chest, following the line of a rib, the dip between muscles, the geography of a body that Luca is learning by touch alone.
The calluses drag. Matej feels each one as a separate thing — the one at the base of the thumb, the one along the edge of the palm where a saw handle has worn its groove.
They map him. They leave impressions on his skin through the cotton, and Matej’s body arches towards the touch without his permission, a small involuntary lift of his spine off the mattress.
Luca’s hand stops. Holds. Presses him back down.
Not pushing. Settling. Steady, firm. An instruction the body understands before the mind catches up. Matej goes down. The mattress receives him.
The hand resumes. Lower now. The heel of Luca’s palm finds the soft give of Matej’s stomach, just below the sternum, and rests there.
The weight of it lands differently from anything before — not heavy, just present, in a way that makes Matej aware of every layer between them: the shirt, the skin, the muscle, the bone, the organ underneath that is still beating too fast, still giving him away.
Luca’s fingers curl. Just slightly. The tips press into the soft tissue above Matej’s hip, and Matej makes a sound — not a word, a sound he didn’t know he could make, low and broken at the back of his throat, and Luca’s hand goes still again. Holds. Waits.
The silence stretches. Matej can hear his own pulse in his ears, in his wrists where the belt holds them, in the hollow of his throat where the sound had come from.
He is aware, with a clarity that is almost painful, of every place Luca is not touching him.
The inside of his elbow. The back of his knee.
The space between his shoulder blades where the mattress presses warm and flat.
Then Luca’s hand moves again. Slower. He is not mapping anymore — he has mapped. He knows the terrain. What Matej feels now is something different: the hand moving with intention, with the quiet authority of someone who has decided what comes next and is not in a hurry about it.
The hand travels up. Along the centre line of his chest, between the ribs, over the sternum.
It stops at the hollow of his throat. Luca’s palm settles there, the heel of it resting against the hard ridge of his collarbone, the fingers curling gently around the side of his neck. Not gripping. Just there. Present.
Matej’s breath stutters. His chest rises under Luca’s hand and falls and rises again, and each time the hand goes with him, moving with the rhythm of his breathing, and something in Matej cracks open — not violently, not the way things have cracked open before, with noise and damage — but quietly, like ice on a pond at the first real warmth of spring, giving way along a fault line he didn’t know was there.
Luca’s thumb finds the pulse point at the side of his neck.
Rests there. Doesn’t press. Just holds. Matej can feel his own heartbeat transferring into the pad of Luca’s thumb, can feel the rhythm being read, being received, and he has the strange and vertiginous thought that someone is counting the beats of his heart the way you’d count sheep — patiently, attentively, without expectation of anything changing.
The hand doesn’t move from his throat. It stays.
The weight of it is precise — enough to be felt, not enough to restrict.
Matej’s body, which has been arching and pulling and reaching all evening without his permission, goes quiet under it.
The stillness is not passive. It is a choice his body makes, the way a horse chooses to stand when a hand is placed on its withers.
Luca’s other hand arrives. Matej feels it on his ribs, low on the left side, and the symmetry of it — one hand at his throat, one at his ribs — creates a frame around the centre of him, around the place where everything is happening. The two hands hold him like that. Not restraining. Containing.
Matej breathes. The hands breathe with him.
He is aware of his own body in a way that is entirely new — not as something to be controlled or presented or hidden, but as something that is simply here, being held, being received. The belt at his wrists. The blindfold. The mattress beneath his back. The old wood of the headboard.
Luca’s voice, when it comes, is low and steady. “I’m going to touch you now.”
Not a question. Not a command. A statement of fact, delivered the way a man might say the weather was changing — with a certainty that required no response.
Matej’s throat tightens. He nods.
The hand at his throat stays. The other one begins to move.
Luca’s fingers travel down his ribs, each one a separate event, a separate point of contact that Matej’s body catalogs with startling precision.
The calluses catch against his skin through the shirt.
The touch is unhurried — not tentative, but deliberate, like a man reading braille, absorbing information through his fingertips.
Luca’s hand reaches the hem of his shirt. Pauses. Then fingers slip beneath the fabric, and the contact of skin on skin makes something in Matej’s chest crack open wider.
The touch is warm. Luca’s palm is dry, rough in places, smooth in others.
It lays flat against Matej’s stomach, and Matej feels the warmth of it seep through layers of muscle and tissue, reaching something deep and unguarded.
The calluses on Luca’s fingers catch against the fine hair below his navel, and the sensation sends a current through him — not electric, not sharp, but slow and rolling, spreading outward from the point of contact.
Luca’s hand spreads. Fingers fan out across the plane of his stomach, covering more ground, and the weight of it is extraordinary — not because it’s heavy, but because it’s complete.
Every square inch of contact is accounted for.
There is no part of Luca’s palm that isn’t committed to the task of touching him.
Like he is worth the care. Like the care is not a gesture.
Matej’s breath shudders out of him. His wrists pull against the belt — not to escape, but because his body wants to reach, wants to reciprocate, and the belt won’t let him, and that’s the point, that’s the thing he asked for, and the understanding of it — that he is getting exactly what he wanted — makes something hot and liquid pool behind his sternum.
Luca’s hand begins to move. Slow circles, clockwise, pressing just enough to compress the muscle beneath, then releasing, then pressing again.
The rhythm is hypnotic. Matej finds himself matching his breathing to it — inhale on the press, exhale on the release — without deciding to.
His body is making decisions without him.
It has been waiting for this, he realizes.
His body has been waiting longer than his mind has been willing to admit.
The hand travels lower. Not in a straight line — along the oblique muscle at the side of his hip, following the ridge of bone there, tracing the place where skin meets the waistband of his trousers. Luca’s fingers hook into the fabric. A question, held in the fingertips.
Matej’s mouth is dry. He licks his lips.
“Yes,” he says. His voice comes out rougher than he expects — scraped raw, like something dragged across stone.
Luca’s fingers work the button open. The sound of it — metal against metal, the small click of the mechanism releasing — is magnified in the dark.
Then the zipper. Luca is careful with it, drawing it down slowly, the teeth separating one by one, and each one makes a sound like a breath being let out, and Matej’s body arches off the mattress again, involuntary, a reflex he can’t control.
The hand at his throat presses. Firm. Settling. Stay.
Matej goes down.
The cool air hits his stomach where the fabric falls open.
He feels exposed in a way that has nothing to do with nudity and everything to do with the vulnerability of being touched through clothing that has been partially removed — the transition between covered and uncovered, the moment when the barrier thins but doesn’t disappear.
Luca’s hand slides beneath the waistband.
Not down — sideways, along the crease of his hip, finding the hard line of the iliac crest, following it to the point where it curves inward.
The touch is exploratory, methodical. Matej feels Luca learning the shape of him the way he’d learned the shape of the land — by feel, by repetition, by patience.
The hand at his throat stays. Steady. The thumb still resting at the pulse point, and Matej is certain now that Luca can feel how fast his heart is going, can track the acceleration, can read the changes in rhythm by the surface, by what moves underneath.
Luca’s other hand continues its journey — along the hip, down the outside of the thigh, to the knee. It presses there, holding the joint in place with a grip that is firm without being forceful. Matej’s leg wants to bend. Luca’s hand says no. Matej’s leg obeys.
Luca’s hand returns to the crease of his hip and pauses.
Not hesitation. Intention gathering. Then the hand moves inward.
Slowly. Across the plane of his lower belly, over the ridge of muscle that runs down from his hip, into the territory where the fabric is still bunched and the skin is bare and the air is cool and everything is waiting.
Matej’s breath stops. Not because he chooses to hold it — because his body forgets how to do the thing it has been doing automatically his entire life.
The hand at his throat presses, just slightly, and the pressure releases something in his diaphragm, and the breath comes out of him in a long, shaking exhale that sounds like it’s been stored somewhere for years.