Chapter 38
“Hey,” Claudio’s voice was quiet in the dark. “Can we— sorry?” He stopped suddenly. “Bad way to start that. It’d make you worry.”
They’d had a pleasant day. A chain of them, even.
This evening, they’d been out to Fairlight for supper, rapidly becoming a tradition for Matty, too.
He and Claudio had come back to the flat— again, by different routes— and had a quiet romp in the bed.
They’d done this often enough now, with enough time, that Matty no longer felt like he had to grab at every minute.
And Claudio had made it clear he could stay overnight, they didn’t have to rush.
They’d both fallen asleep. Claudio needed it, far more than Matty did.
Matty was certain he was burning a candle at both ends, bright and fierce.
It suited Claudio, in a way Matty couldn’t describe.
His friends couldn’t either, though Hypatia had in the end shrugged and said it was how he got as they got close to the moment of things needing doing. Feed him well during and after.
Claudio didn’t have those flinches, for all he wanted to keep his back to the wall and didn’t care for loud noises. But it meant that when Claudio slept, Matty wanted to let him. Or even when he’d dozed. Apparently this had been dozing, since Claudio was being specifically conversational.
“Possibly.” Matty shifted to roll onto his back, rather than on his side, staring up at the ceiling.
There was a hint of light through the curtains, around the edges, just enough to be sure he was looking at the bit of ceiling nearest the street.
It was probably around eleven at night. They dimmed the streetlights at midnight.
“I wanted to talk about before the Challenge. Preparations. What I’m thinking about, and what parts I’d like you to help with.
If you’re willing. Still willing. I mean, this isn’t an entirely new bit?
” Claudio moved, his hand reaching for Matty, then settling on his wrist. Just two fingers on the inside, easy to pull away if Matty wanted.
He didn’t want, but he wasn’t sure he wanted more contact just yet.
Claudio touching him, in any form, anywhere, was terribly distracting.
Still. Possibly forever. It wasn’t as if Matty had enough information to judge properly.
Claudio was quiet for a bit, then he just started talking. “You know I want to surrender. To see what happens. To have you take me as hard, as fierce, as you want. As we both want.” Talking as if this were something it were possible to talk about, not hung about with shame and secrecy.
They were in the dark; they were private.
Matty knew that consciously. The rest of him was sure something horrible was going to happen next.
And right now, the rest of him was winning.
He felt a flicker of panic, the kind that wanted to drag him down, not let him near anything that had goodness or virtue or compassion in it.
“What are you thinking about?” Claudio’s voice shifted.
“Not—” He almost said ‘nothing’. But he didn’t want to lie. And he could still manage to talk. “Why do you ask?”
“Your pulse shifted. I’m not cheating. Much.
Here, come closer? So you can feel what I’m doing?
” Claudio wriggled slightly, making space with his arm and his body, and Matty moved as well, somewhat warily, to set his cheek on that shoulder as a pillow.
“There. You can feel better now. What were you thinking?”
“That doing it is one thing and talking about it is entirely another.” Here, where he was so tight against Claudio’s warmth, he could at least say that much. He knew Claudio had been poring over the books he’d borrowed, about the ritual of it as much as the sex itself.
There was a short silence, just long enough for Claudio to turn his head and kiss Matty’s hair.
“Right. This one, I blame entirely on Gabe. Well, Gabe and the architecture of the Penelopes, singular and eternal. You have a tangle. We’re trained to notice them.
Talking is, annoyingly, one of the best ways to sort tangles.
Trust me, I complain about it too. At length.
But we’re private. You have any doubts about that? ”
“Noooo?” Matty drew it out. “I mean. I’m taking it as a basic principle that you’re competent.
And that if, somehow, for some reason, you slipped up, you’d have noticed.
You check that things are working. Every time.
” It suggested a precision of attention that Matty couldn’t quite imagine.
He certainly had the places he reacted to too often, a gnawing anxiety that wouldn’t quiet, but whatever Claudio lived with was a different species.
“Just so.” That had a comfortable rumble. “So it’s your nerves that aren’t sure, not, um. Logic. Or desire.” He didn’t turn the last into a question. Mind, the way Matty was lying now, Claudio could certainly feel how Matty felt about some of it.
The phrasing was so like what Matty had been thinking he had to chuckle. “I had about worked through to that point, yes. I think we just need to keep going and get through to the other side? Not sure anything sensible is going to help.”
“All right.” Claudio took a breath. “So. I know you like the idea on several levels. But I want to talk about the day before, um, the day of and the night before, to be clear. What I think might help. What I don’t want to do.
There are a lot of pieces I’m not sure about, and they’re things you get to have an opinion about at the very least. Some things you get to decide on. That I want you to decide on.”
Matty nodded against Claudio’s shoulder. “Right.” Then he said, “Um, can we talk out what we decide again later? Not for me to make notes, that’s too much of a risk? But to make sure it’s properly in my head?”
“Sure.” Claudio sounded easy about it. “Not your usual mode for paying attention. And there are certain distractions at hand.”
“There are distractions at hand whenever you’re in the same room.
” Matty grumbled, but this was entirely for show.
Claudio, to his credit, did not move his fingers to be even more distracting.
Self-control was one of the things Matty found endlessly fascinating about him, not least because he kept demonstrating it under provocation. “What did you have in mind?”
“The thing I keep coming back to is it being like a ritual. You had Borea straight through for Ritual, I’m pretty sure she did this in your second and third years.
How to set up a ritual, make a container for it.
Alexander made an argument for doing it then rather than later, and she agreed it was a good one.
” It still startled Matty to hear Claudio talk about the Schola professors so casually.
He’d only barely got used to him doing so about Thesan Wain and Isembard Fortier, and that was a special case.
But the actual question there, he could answer that. “How the shape of the ritual has qualities for the container. A bowl is different from an urn, a small container different than a large one. All that. Are you a particular kind of container, then? Or want to be?”
“Want to be.” Claudio’s hand stopped moving, still just resting on Matty’s wrist. “I don’t want to crack. Not that. Maybe that’s what happens in the Challenge, I don’t know. What I want is to be is blown glass, I think. Charmed sturdy, if we can do that. But the way that it expands and transforms.”
“From a globe of fire to something shining and translucent.” Matty bit his lip, trying to figure it out, though the image was potent.
“Something that can be filled. That shows off what it’s filled with.
There’s no argument about a clear bottle, not really.
It’s not hiding things.” He rubbed his cheek— a bit of stubble, probably, but Claudio didn’t complain or move.
“You don’t show things. Generally speaking. ”
“I was taught not to.” Claudio’s voice went soft. Then, just as soft, but now insistent, like Cammie prowling, he said, “What I’m working around to is this, as a statement. I will go as myself or not at all. And part of myself is being a man who loves you. In a variety of ways.”
Matty pushed against the hand suddenly. “You’ve not said it like that. Not before.” He flexed his fingers. “I know you mean it. Doing all— all this.” He flailed blindly in the dark, just the faint shadow of his fingers moving. “But we haven’t, what that means.”
“What do you want it to mean?” Claudio’s voice had that penetrating quality again.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how to know.” Matty’s voice cracked at the end. “Tell me instead about the Challenge. Got to figure that out soonish.”
“Fair,” Claudio took a breath, resetting himself.
“A ritual. A container. I want to know— in my body, the ways that are hardest to lie about— what I can take. What I can surrender to. I don’t know what that involves entirely.
I don’t think I can. Because it’s about being in relationship to you.
Other things too, but you for a start. Before. I hope after.”
“Is there a reasonable worry about after?” Matty asked.
“There is, I gather, an extremely wide variation in after. I don’t actually know about either Mother or Father, oddly.
Mabyn knows about Mother, but I haven’t wanted to ask.
Orion was laughing and the life of the party, though Hypatia had no complaints once they got to bed.
Not that she ever does.” He said that utterly fondly.
“Gabe— well. Gabe took all of that glowing power, glowing being a literal reality here— and deflected a couple of bombs before he came back for the announcements. I gather Rathna also had no complaints once they got home. I do think, given that set of data points, we might reasonably want to plan for time alone that night together.”
“Here?” Matty swallowed. “I mean.”