Chapter 23 #3
Luca’s fingers find him. Not grabbing — cupping, the way you’d hold something fragile and warm.
The contact is so careful, so deliberate, that Matej feels each individual finger as a separate event: the rough pad of the index, the smooth crease of the middle knuckle, the callus at the base of the thumb where it rests against his hip bone.
The touch is exploratory but not uncertain — Luca is learning the weight of him, the shape, the heat.
Matej’s wrists pull against the belt. The leather bites, and the pain is sharp and clean and clarifying, and he leans into it, pressing his arms back, using the resistance to ground himself because otherwise he would float away, he would dissolve into the dark and the warmth and the impossible gentleness of what is happening to him.
Luca’s hand begins to move, and the motion is devastating in its simplicity — a slow, unhurried stroke that starts at the base and travels upward, and Matej’s entire body jerks, a full-body flinch that he cannot control, that he doesn’t try to control, because the belt holds him and the dark holds him and Luca’s hand at his throat holds him, and he is held, he is held, he is held.
The sound that comes out of him is not a word. It is closer to the sound a tree makes when the wind catches it — a low, structural groan, the noise of something that has been standing still for a very long time beginning to move.
Luca’s hand repeats the motion. The same path, the same pressure, the same devastating patience.
Matej’s whole body strains towards it without permission — shoulders lifting off the mattress, the belt biting his wrists where he pulls against it — and the hand at his throat presses — stay — and he sinks back, and the obedience of it, the absolute surrender of it, makes something hot and liquid spill down the side of his face, and he doesn’t know if it’s tears or sweat and he doesn’t care, the distinction has ceased to matter.
The rhythm establishes itself. Not fast — Luca doesn’t allow it to go fast. Every stroke is measured, complete, the full length of the motion, and between each one there is a pause — not empty, not nothing, but a space filled with the weight of Luca’s hand resting against him, the heat of it, the sheer presence of a man who is not going anywhere.
The space between strokes becomes its own kind of torture, a sweet, unbearable tension that builds in the hollows of Matej’s body, in the spaces between his ribs, in the place where his wrists strain against leather.
The hand at his throat adjusts. Fingers curl more deliberately around the side of his neck, not squeezing but holding, and Matej feels the subtle shift in pressure as Luca’s thumb presses more firmly against his pulse point.
Reading him. Counting. Keeping time with the rhythm of what is happening below.
Matej’s breathing has become something he can no longer recognise. Shallow, rapid, broken by sounds that aren’t words.
Luca’s hand on him changes. The grip tightens fractionally — not more pressure, just more contact, more surface area, the palm flattening against him, and the difference in sensation makes Matej’s back arch off the mattress in a long, slow curve that he cannot control.
The belt holds. The headboard holds. Luca’s hand at his throat holds.
The rhythm doesn’t change. That’s what undoes him — that Luca doesn’t speed up, doesn’t respond to the escalation of Matej’s body with escalation of his own.
The strokes remain measured, unhurried, each one as complete as the last, and the steadiness of it forces Matej to feel everything — every second of contact, every fraction of a pause, every shift in pressure — because there is nowhere to go, no way to rush towards the end, no way to escape the accumulating weight of what is building inside him.
He is crying. He knows he is crying because he can feel the wetness gathering at the temples where the blindfold sits, the salt of it seeping into the fabric, and the tears are not sad — they are something else, something that doesn’t have a name in any language he speaks, something that lives in the space between held and holding, between bound and free.
Luca’s thumb at his throat strokes once.
A single pass, side to side, over the tendon.
The gesture is so small, so incidental, that it shouldn’t matter.
It matters. It matters more than anything that has happened in the last hour.
Matej’s body recognizes it the way water recognizes a stone — by the way it changes the current.
The rhythm continues. Unchanged. Unhurried.
Luca’s hand moves with the patience of a man who has all night, who has made the decision that this will take as long as it takes, and Matej’s body, which has been climbing towards something that keeps receding, begins to understand that the climb is the thing.
That what he is being given is not release but presence — the sustained, unbearable presence of a man who is here, who is not doing anything except exactly this, with the full weight of his attention.
Matej surrenders to it. Not the way he has surrendered before — not with gritted teeth, not with the grim calculus of cost and benefit, not as a strategic retreat. This surrender is something else entirely. It is the moment when a river stops fighting the shape of the valley and simply becomes it.
The tears keep coming. He is making sounds he doesn’t recognise — low, wordless, the give of something taken apart from the inside and not minding.
Luca’s hand at his throat hasn’t moved. The pressure is constant, unwavering, and Matej has come to understand that the hand is not restraining him — it is tethering him.
Keeping him connected to the earth while everything else tries to pull him away.
The thumb at his pulse point is a fixed point, a star to navigate by, and Matej finds himself orienting towards it the way a plant orients towards light — unconsciously, fundamentally.
Then Luca’s hand slows. Stops.
Not done — changing. Matej feels the shift in weight, the mattress adjusting, Luca moving down the bed.
The hand at his throat presses once more — stay — and then it lifts.
Gone. The fixed point he has been navigating by for the last hour, the star, lifted away, and Matej’s body lurches at the loss of it, his hips rising, chasing nothing, before he makes himself go still on his own.
No hand to tell him now. Only the belt at his wrists, and the dark, and whatever Luca is about to do.
He waits. His breath is ragged. The room is very quiet.
Luca’s mouth finds the inside of his thigh first. The warmth of it — lips, then breath, then the faint drag of stubble — makes Matej’s leg twitch, the muscle jumping beneath the skin.
He can feel how close Luca is. Can hear his breathing, steadier than his own, the concentration of someone reading in the dark.
Then Luca’s hands take him. Both of them, palms hooking under his thighs, pushing them up and back and open, and then the thumbs, spreading him, holding him open to the cool air of the room.
Matej feels how exposed he is, how offered — laid bare in the dark with nothing to see it by and no way to close himself, his whole body held open by two hands that do not hurry.
Then Luca stops. His breath warm against him, close. He doesn’t move.
“More?”
The question comes out of the dark, low. Matej understands it for what it is. The door held open at the last moment, the choice handed back to him.
“Yes,” he says.
Then Luca’s mouth, so close that Matej feels the next word shaped against his skin before he hears it.
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
Then his mouth is on him, and Matej goes still in a way that is entirely different from all the stillness before it. This stillness is not willed. It is the stillness of something suddenly, completely present.
A sound comes out of him. Low, unguarded, it surprises him — the sound of a man whose last defense has been removed and who discovers, in the removing, that he didn’t need it.
Then his tongue. The flat of it, slow, dragging up from below — and then more, his lips too, a slow suck at the rim, and Matej feels the give of his own body under that mouth, muscle that has spent a lifetime held shut, yielding.
Luca presses inside. The tip of his tongue first, then deeper, the flat of it working him open, a slow push, a slower twist, and the sound that breaks out of Matej splits in the middle, the way a board gives along the grain.
Luca doesn’t rush. He could — Matej is already coming apart — but he keeps it slow, deliberate.
Each pass the same as the last, the tongue circling, finding the give, pressing in, drawing back, and the blindfold makes a world of every one: the heat, the soft wet drag, the pause, then again.
With nothing to see, he feels each pass twice.
Once on the skin. Once somewhere behind his ribs.
Matej feels himself being read — not by a thumb at his pulse now, but by the hands that hold him open, that feel the tremor start in his thighs, that know how his whole body strains and is held and cannot get away.
He is being learned the way Luca learns everything: the farm, the cave, the names of things. He feels like he is being named.
His wrists pull at the belt. His hands want to reach, to fist in Luca’s hair and keep him there, and they can’t, the leather holds them, and the wanting goes nowhere and stays in him instead, banked and enormous.