Chapter 30
Matej
It’s the middle of the afternoon and there is no reason for this except that Luca is sitting at his desk by the window — the desk Matej moved there three months ago without being asked — and the winter light is doing exactly what Matej thought it would do.
He had thought, moving it: the afternoon light is better there. The low angle this time of year, good for working. He had not thought it would do this — catch the side of Luca’s face, the angle of his jaw, the unconscious way he chews his pen when he’s stuck.
Matej stands in the doorway.
Then: “Come here.”
Luca looks up. Reads his face. Sets the pen down.
“I was working,” he says.
“I know.”
“The chapter —”
“Will be there.”
Luca pushes back from the desk.
Another package from Berlin has been sitting on the kitchen table since Tuesday. Luca ordered it, said nothing about it, left it there with the studied indifference of a man who has decided that unpacking it is a joint activity.
Matej has thought about this. He has also thought — in the cave, in how his mind catalogues things when his hands are busy — about everything they have already tried.
The belt on the floor that first night. The ropes.
The straps. The unhurried, slightly scientific way they have worked their way through what Luca once called the interesting range of options, with the same calm methodology Matej applies to cave temperatures and milk cultures, which Luca had found either very reassuring or very funny, and which Matej suspects was both.
The nipple chain is a new addition.
Matej looks at the package. He looks at Luca, still at his desk, glasses on, pen in hand, in the deeply absorbed state that means at least three more minutes before he surfaces.
This, Matej thinks, is going to be fun.
“Someone,” Matej says, from the kitchen doorway, “is about to be thoroughly ravished.”
Luca does not look up. “Mm.”
“Hot and bothered.” Matej leans against the frame. “Undone. Swept away. The full — what do you call it. Bodice. Situation.”
“Bodice ripper,” Luca says, still reading.
“That.”
“Mm-hm.”
Matej picks up the package. Sets it down again, closer to Luca’s line of sight. “I think we should close the shutters.”
This lands. Luca’s pen slows. He looks up, looks at the package, looks at Matej.
“Ah,” he says. “That arrived.”
“Tuesday.”
“I know when it arrived.” He takes his glasses off, folds them with a precision that means he has already shifted registers. “The shutters,” he says. “Because—”
“Because that,” Matej says, nodding at the package, “deserves a certain — privacy. So nobody walks past and gets an unexpected afternoon.”
Luca considers this. “And in this scenario, which one of us is being thoroughly ravished?”
“I assumed you.”
“Did you.” Luca sets the glasses on the desk. “And on what basis.”
“On the basis,” Matej says, “that I am the one who closes the shutters.”
“That’s not how that works.”
“I also,” Matej continues, “made the coffee this morning.”
“Still not—”
“And I moved your desk.”
Luca opens his mouth. Closes it. “You moved my desk three months ago.”
“Accumulated goodwill.”
Luca is trying very hard not to smile. Matej can see exactly when he loses the fight. “Fine,” Luca says. “You make a compelling case. However.”
“However.”
“I believe I am the one who ordered the package.”
“True.”
“And selected the contents.”
“Also true.”
“Which means,” Luca says, standing, “I am the one who knows what it does. Which means I am” — he picks up the package — “arguably the one in a position of power here. Which means—”
“Play time?” Matej says.
Luca stops. Grins. “Yes, darling. Play time.”
“Bathroom first.”
“Obviously.” He is already moving. “Don’t just stand there.”
Matej doesn’t just stand there.
beide
The shower is not fast. It is never fast — this is an established fact about both of them, separately and together. But it has a quality of attention that the rest of the day doesn’t, which is the point.
And they talk. This is also established. The hot water and the steam and the looseness of bodies that are warm and clean and already halfway somewhere else — it unlocks the planning that would be absurd at the kitchen table but makes complete sense here.
“So,” Luca says. “The chain goes—”
“I know where it goes.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“No.”
“Then how—”
“Luca.” Matej looks at him. “I know where it goes.”
Luca laughs — short, genuine, the one that happens before he can stop it. “Fair enough.”
“One of us thinks ahead.”
They discuss it, in the easy, slightly absurd way they discuss everything — positions, sequence, the role play idea Luca floated two weeks ago and which Matej has been thinking about since, which he will not admit to yet. The new toy. What they want from the afternoon.
And then Matej says: “The chain. I want to— I think I need to work my way up to it.”
Luca looks at him. “Okay.”
“It’s—”
“Matej. Okay.” Simple, no performance. “So I put it on.”
Matej looks at him. “Yes,” he says.
“And you—”
“Yes.”
Luca is quiet, water running over both of them. Then, mildly: “I want it noted that I have won this argument.”
“Noted. And that I am, in fact—”
“Don’t,” Matej says.
“—about to be thoroughly ravished. By you.” He says it with enormous satisfaction, the way another man might announce a holiday.
“I was getting to that.”
“Were you.”
Matej reaches past him to turn off the shower. “Go and prepare yourself,” he says — not an order, the plain instruction of two people who know the shape of this. “Then the bedroom. Stand in front of the mirror. Wait for me.”
Luca goes very still. Then, quietly — the register entirely changed: “Yes.”
He goes.
Matej
He comes down the hall in the open bathrobe, nothing under it, and the apartment has gone the way it goes when the shutters are closed in the afternoon — sealed, warm, the winter light shut out, everything narrowed to the rooms they are in.
He does not hurry. There is no version of this that is improved by hurrying.
Luca is at the mirror. Naked, still damp at the back of the neck, the towel folded over the chair with the same care he gives his glasses.
Already hard. Standing very still, waiting, and not enjoying how much he is having to wait.
He has done what he was sent to do — Matej can see it in how he holds himself, the small adjustment of his stance, the plug already seated in him.
Matej crosses to the nightstand and sets the small tin of aloe down on it. He says nothing. He does not need to. In the mirror he watches Luca’s eyes go to it, hold, understand, come back up.
Matej steps in behind him. Both of them facing the glass. He puts his arms around Luca’s chest, settles his chin at his shoulder, and looks at him in the mirror the way he looks at things he intends to keep.
His hands move. Shoulders, the line of the arms, the chest, the stomach — unhurried, mapping what he already knows.
He reaches Luca’s cock and wraps his hand around it and gives him two slow strokes, three, enough that Luca’s head tips back against his shoulder, and then leaves it.
Moves down. Cups his balls. Takes his time.
Luca turns his head and they kiss, slow and open, and Matej bites his neck, lightly.
“You’re already leaking,” he says. “And I haven’t started yet.”
Luca presses back into him — feels him, hard and warm through the open robe — and says the word he does not spend often. “Please. Come on. Please.”
The chain is in the pocket of the robe. Matej takes it out. The metal is still cool from the other room and he draws it slowly across Luca’s chest, the links catching the low light, dragging over the skin, and Luca’s breathing drops and roughens.
He finds one nipple between finger and thumb. Light, then less light, until it is hard and standing. Then the other. Luca is making sound the whole time, not for show — he could not stop it if he tried, and he is not trying.
He fits the first clamp. It closes — no sound to it, just the slow bite of the padded jaws taking hold — and Luca’s breath leaves him all at once and he braces back against Matej’s chest. The second.
The same care, the same press, the same sharp inhale.
The chain hangs between his nipples now, the links heavy enough to drag them down, catching the low light where they fall. They both watch it in the glass.
Matej shrugs the robe off his shoulders. It drops. He is naked against Luca’s back now, warm the whole length of him.
His hands move over Luca’s chest below the chain, kneading the muscle, and every press of his palms pulls at the clamps without touching them, and Luca’s cock jumps where nothing is touching it.
He is trying to hold still. He is losing.
His hands come up to the mirror and brace there, fingers spread, and leave their print on the cold glass.
Matej watches his face in the reflection, reaches for the lube one-handed, and takes him in a proper grip — slow, sure, building it stroke by stroke. Luca is loud now. Then Matej draws the chain forward, gently, just enough to stretch, and Luca’s knees go.
He catches him. Arm flat across his chest, his weight taken.
“I’ve got you,” he says, low, against his ear. Luca’s head is back on his shoulder, his eyes shut, barely on his own feet, and the sound he makes is yes with the word burned out of it.
It is in the next pull that he misjudges it. Too hard — he feels it the instant it leaves his hand, and Luca’s sound changes, goes from the low open one to something short and sharp and wrong.
Matej stops. He has let go of the chain before he decides to, both hands flat to Luca’s shoulders, holding him steady on his feet.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ve got you. Look at me.”
He comes around to the front of him. Luca finds his own feet, finds Matej’s eyes, holds them. No shame in it, just the two of them and a question already answered.
“I’m taking it off. Breathe in.”