Chapter Four #2
Sasha's shirt was open. His nipples were going hard. His eyes were enormous in the dark, and he reached up and got his fingers under the blocker patch at his own nape and Matteo caught his wrist.
"No."
"Matteo—"
"Not that." His voice came out wrecked. "Anything. Not that. If you take that off I can't promise you what happens next and I am going to be able to promise you what happens next. That's the deal. That's the only deal I've got."
Sasha looked up at him for a long moment.
Then he let go of the patch, and put both arms around Matteo's neck, and pulled him down.
Matteo went down.
There was a moment -- brief, and he would come back to it later the way he came back to everything -- when he understood that he had no procedure for this.
He had been touched by doctors. He had been touched by his sister, twice, at funerals.
He had been touched by men who wanted something and were letting him know the shape of it.
This was a fourth category and he had nothing filed under it at all.
So he did what he did in rooms he didn't understand. He went slowly, and he watched.
The shirt went. Sasha's hands were doing the buttons at Matteo's cuff with the same fine attention they had brought to the closures ten minutes earlier, and when the left cuff wouldn't come he made a small impatient noise and simply pulled, and a button went somewhere under the bed, and he laughed against Matteo's jaw -- once, surprised at himself -- and that was the sound that took the last of it out of Matteo.
"The arm," Sasha said.
"The arm's fine."
"The arm is closures I put on myself and I'm telling you now that if you split it I'm not doing it twice."
"Then don't do it twice."
He got a hand into the boy's hair and pulled his head back, carefully, watching the whole time for the flinch, and the flinch did not come.
What came instead was Sasha going loose all at once from the throat down, his mouth opening on nothing, and Matteo held him like that for a second longer than he needed to, just to see.
"Oh," Sasha said, to the ceiling. "That's -- all right. Noted."
"Noted."
"I'm keeping a file."
"I know you are."
Then he put his mouth on the boy's throat and the filing stopped for a while.
***
Here is what Matteo did not do.
He did not touch the back of Sasha's neck.
Not once, not in passing, not with the flat of his hand where a man's hand naturally goes.
He went around it the way you go around a wet paint sign: shoulders, the knob of spine below it, the line of the jaw, the soft place under the ear -- everywhere but the beige square sitting there under the fine dark hair.
And Sasha noticed. Of course he noticed; he noticed men in windows.
He got up on one elbow at some point, flushed, mouth ruined, and looked down at Matteo with an expression that belonged in the office rather than the bed.
"You're avoiding it."
"Yes."
"You could just take it off. You know that. I'd let you. I've told you I'd let you and you'd have me in about four seconds and you know that too, and you're not going to, and I'd like to hear you say why."
Matteo lay there under him with his heart going and his arm aching and eleven years coming apart at the seams, and he said, because it was true:
"Because then it would be the chemistry that wanted you. And I want it on the record that it isn't."
Something happened in Sasha's face. It was very small. It was the place a great deal would have gone in a less careful man.
"On the record," he repeated.
"You're an accountant."
"I'm a very good one." His voice had gone unsteady. "Say it in the ugly way. Like the hall."
"I don't know what I am with you," Matteo said, "and I'd rather find out sober."
Sasha put his forehead down on Matteo's shoulder and breathed there for three or four seconds without saying anything at all, which Matteo was to learn, over the following weeks, was the only thing that ever actually silenced him.
Then he reached back himself -- and Matteo's whole body locked -- and pressed the patch down. Smoothing the edge with his thumb. Checking the seal. Adjusting it because he didn't like it.
"Fine," he said. "Then it stays on. Both of us. Sober."
"Both of us."
"You're on suppressants."
"Eleven years."
"Then we're doing it blind," Sasha said, "and we'll see what's left," and it was said lightly, and it was not light at all, and they both let it go past without naming it because naming it would have made it a test, and neither of them was prepared to admit he was administering one.
Matteo put his thumb over the beige square himself, once, and pressed it flat -- the way you press a stamp onto an envelope you have decided to send -- and then took his hand away and put it somewhere else.
***
After that it stopped being negotiable.
The boy weighed nothing and made a great deal of noise about it.
That was the discovery, and Matteo would think about it for a long time afterwards with something that was almost embarrassment: that Sasha Vetrov, who had stood on cracked concrete at four in the morning and made a room full of armed men hear a number, was in a bed absolutely without dignity.
He said Matteo's name wrong. He said it constantly.
He apologised, once, for his hands being cold, and then swore in Russian at length when Matteo laughed at him, and then bit him on the shoulder for laughing, which turned out to have been a tactical error on both their parts.
At one point Matteo caught both his wrists and put them above his head, testing, and Sasha said, "Yes -- that -- do that," with such open and undefended greed that Matteo had to stop for a moment and put his face in the boy's shoulder and simply be still.
"What," Sasha said. "Why have you stopped. Don't stop."
"Give me a second."
"Why?"
"Because I'm thirty-six years old," Matteo said, into his collarbone, "and I have not wanted anything in eleven years, and I would like to be sure that when this is finished I can put you down and let you leave the room."
The wrists went slack in his hand.
"Matteo."
"Don't."
"Can you?"
He thought about it. He gave it the same silence he gave a number he didn't like.
"Yes," he said. "Tonight, yes."
"Then it's tonight," Sasha said, "and we'll do the rest of it with a calculator in the morning," and got a knee up, and that was the end of the conversation.
***
Somewhere in it, a closure gave.
Neither of them noticed for a while. When Matteo did notice it was because the sheet under his forearm had gone warm and Sasha was staring at it in the half dark with an expression of purely professional outrage.
"The third one."
"Leave it."
"It's the third one, I knew it, I said it was the wrong tension--"
"Sasha."
"--I said--"
He put a hand over the boy's mouth. Sasha, after a moment, and with tremendous dignity, licked it.
***
Later -- much later, when the house had gone entirely quiet and the garden had started up its small noises -- Matteo lay on his back with a dead arm under a sleeping accountant and did the only thing he was ever really able to do, which was take stock.
The patch was still on. He could see it in the dark against the pale nape, two inches from his mouth, and he had not touched it.
He had promised what happens next and he had delivered it. That was the ledger, and the ledger balanced.
And underneath the ledger, down where he did not keep records, some old amputated thing had turned over in its sleep and gone quiet again -- not gone.
Not gone at all. Asleep, and turned over once, and Matteo Ferrante lay in the ruins of an architecture he had spent eleven years building and understood with perfect clarity that he had a month.
Perhaps six weeks. Nothing like ninety days.
He should have been afraid.
He put his hand very lightly on the back of the boy's neck, over the beige square, the way you'd hold down a page in a wind, and did not feel afraid, and noted that too.
***
Even later, in the dark, with the window open and the garden making its small noises, Sasha said into his shoulder:
"There's sixty thousand dollars a year going out of your fuel accounts."
Matteo did not open his eyes. "I know."
"You don't know who."
"No."
"Neither do I. Yet." A pause. "I'm telling you now because if I tell you tomorrow you'll think I only told you because of this."
"I'd have thought that."
"I know you would," Sasha said. "You're that kind of person. It's very tiring."