Chapter 30 #2
He opens the first clamp on the inhale, the second the same way, careful, and Luca’s breath stutters at the blood coming back.
Matej rubs his thumbs over the marks, small slow circles.
Reaches for the tin he set down before any of this began, opens it, works the aloe in — exact, unhurried, a man who thought about this on Tuesday and bought what he would need. Luca watches him do it.
“Good?”
“Good.” Luca’s voice is wrecked and entirely steady. “That was — God. Good. It hurt, in the right way. Right up until it didn’t.” A breath. “First time. I’d do it again.”
“Good,” Matej says. “We will. Not now. But we will.”
Luca
He kisses him. That is the answer he wants to give, so he gives it — takes Matej’s face in both hands and kisses him, and the want comes back, not the sharp thing it was but something he can stand inside.
He takes Matej’s wrist and puts the hand back where it was, around his cock, and holds it there until Matej’s fingers close.
And then he cannot not talk. It comes out in a flood, the relief and the wanting both, all of it at once. “I was promised something. A ravishing. A pounding — your word, you said it — I want you to take me, properly, hard, I want you to —”
Matej’s hand comes up to his jaw and his mouth comes down and the rest of the sentence goes into the kiss.
Luca makes a sound into it that is half complaint.
Then Matej’s other hand goes low, finds the base of the plug, works it — slow, in and out — and whatever he was going to say next is simply gone.
Matej holds his jaw. Looks at him.
“Anything else, Mister Plaything?”
There is, in fact, nothing else. Luca opens his mouth and closes it. For once in his life he has run out of words, and Matej watches it happen and does not smile, quite.
Then he is being moved — towards the bed, fast, precise, no ceremony in it at all, Matej’s hands sure on him — and it lands somewhere behind his sternum, the being handled like this, as though Matej has decided and Luca gets to find out what.
“Hands and knees.”
He goes.
Matej
Shoulders down to the mattress, hands reaching back, the plug still in him and visible — Luca arranges himself without being told, knowing the shape of this, wanting it. Matej works fast now. Eases the plug free, sets it aside, lube, lines himself up.
Then he leans down and spits, directly into the cleft of him.
It lands like a slap. Luca comes apart — a sound pulled out of him before he can shape it, his hands fisting in the duvet, his cock leaving a wet smear across it. Matej says nothing about it. He does not have to. The sound Luca made is all the confirmation there is.
He takes Luca’s hips in both hands and pushes in.
The first stroke deep, full, slow, no hurry in any of it.
Out, and in again. Long, deliberate, his own breath gone heavy and audible.
Then he folds down over Luca’s back, chest to spine, as much of himself against as much of Luca as he can reach, and keeps moving.
Not frantic. The opposite. Controlled — and he can feel the control doing its work, in the sound Luca makes every time he bottoms out, small and breathy and helpless.
Luca’s hands have gone slack on the mattress. Open. Palms up.
He pulls out. Abrupt. Rolls Luca onto his back, and in the second it takes he is already moving, already between his legs, already pushing back in.
Face to face now. The mirror was the first half. This is the other thing.
“Yes — here — harder, please, harder —”
“I’ve got you.”
It builds. His weight over Luca, kissing him while he fucks him, Luca’s legs coming up around his waist and locking there, and it stops being something either of them is steering.
He takes both of Luca’s hands and presses them to the mattress above his head, laces his fingers through, palm to palm, and feels Luca’s pulse going against his own wrist — the two of them out of time and then closer to it.
“Touch yourself.”
He lets one hand go. Luca’s comes down and wraps around himself. The other Matej keeps, fingers laced, pinned to the mattress, and they hold each other’s eyes and keep holding them, both of them, as long as it can be held.
The pace tightens, and it is not his decision anymore. Somewhere under thinking he stops choosing any of it, stops setting it, and it has him as much as he has it — his hips working a rhythm that has stopped being a plan and become a thing his body does because it cannot do otherwise.
Luca’s hand is moving on himself between them, fast, and Matej feels it in the laced grip of the other, in how Luca has pulled taut as a held line.
Luca goes first. Matej feels it before he sees it: the clench of him hard around Matej’s cock, the grip of his laced hand crushing down.
Then he sees it, this close, the whole of it.
Luca’s mouth open, his throat working, his cock pulsing in his own fist, the spill of him hot across both their stomachs, the sound torn out of him with no shape to it and no care for who might hear.
Face to face. Matej watching every second of it because for once he can — and the sight of Luca coming apart a hand’s breadth from his own face is what the whole afternoon has been walking towards.
And loud, not careful, with nothing built around it at all, Luca says:
“Ti ami. Ti vuei ben.”
It goes into Matej the way the chain went, straight through, no slack in it.
The clench of Luca around him, the words against his mouth, the wreck of his face — all of it arrives at once, and the last of his control ends.
He drives in deep and stays there, buried to the root, and comes inside him in long hard pulls that empty him out, his forehead down against Luca’s, their breath one breath, his hips still working it through to the end of it.
Matej holds his gaze. One beat.
“Zlato.”
And bites his neck. Not hard. Just present. Just there.
Matej
At some point it tips into laughter — not nervousness, not deflection, just the genuine absurdity of two people who know each other well enough to find the whole thing a little funny without it being less.
An elbow, a repositioning, Luca saying something under his breath in Friulian that Matej doesn’t catch but responds to anyway with a sound that is definitely amusement.
“What,” Matej says. His hand is moving on Luca’s back, slow, without thinking about it — up the spine, down again.
“Nothing,” Luca says. “Keep doing that.”
He does.
Luca is sprawled across the bed, boneless, looked after. He is looking at the ceiling with an expression Matej has catalogued — satisfied, slightly dazed, trying to remember what he was doing before.
“The chapter,” Luca says eventually.
“It’ll be there.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It keeps being true.”
Luca turns his head. His hair is a disaster. He doesn’t seem to know or care. Matej finds this — as he finds most things about Luca at this point — entirely, inconveniently compelling.
“Matej.”
“Mm.”
“What does zlato mean.”
Matej is quiet.
He has said it twice now — once in the dark on the first night, watching his face do something Matej had never seen it do, the word out before he could stop it and left there, unfollowed. Once just now, without planning to.
Luca has never asked. Until now.
“You know what it means,” Matej says.
Outside: winter. Inside: the lamp, the low ceiling, the warmth of a room that belongs to both of them now.
“Gold,” Luca says quietly.
“Gold,” Matej confirms.
He doesn’t look over. He doesn’t need to. He can feel Luca smiling the way he felt it on the very first night — that private thing, not performed for anyone.
He leaves his hand where it is.
beide
Later, when the lamp has shifted and neither of them has moved much, Luca says: “Next time.”
“Mm.”
“I think you should be the one who is hot and bothered.”
“I was hot and bothered.”
“You were in control the entire time.”
“That,” Matej says, “is how I am hot and bothered.”
Luca considers this. Accepts it. Then: “But next time. I want to be the one who closes the shutters.”
“Fine.”
“And makes the coffee.”
“I make the coffee.”
“You make terrible coffee.”
“My coffee is fine.”
“Your coffee,” Luca says, “is an act of aggression against the Bialetti.”
“Fine.”
“And,” Luca says, with the tone of a man delivering a verdict, “I want you to be the cabin boy. Thoroughly taken apart. Swept away. The whole situation.”
Matej is quiet. Outside the wind moves.
“Next time,” he says.
Luca smiles. Matej can feel it. He leaves his hand where it is.