Chapter Seven #4
Three days of being driven -- of a body that had been handed an agenda by the weather and simply run it -- and now there was a Monday afternoon and a north wind and two people who had both had a shower, and no chemistry in the room whatsoever except the ordinary kind, the kind everybody has.
And it turned out that the ordinary kind was quite enough.
It turned out it had been quite enough since the kitchen, on the first morning, over the almond biscuits.
Slow, then. Unhurried. Ludicrously careful with each other, the way you are when you have already been the other thing and know exactly what it costs.
Sasha got his shirt off him and took his time about it and found the arm -- the scar, four inches, the third closure's fault -- and put his mouth on it again, in daylight, where he could see it, and Matteo made a noise like a man being let off something.
And Sasha's body, which had never in twenty-eight years consulted him about anything, had of course already answered the question and filed the paperwork, hours ago, without asking.
He felt his entrance go slick and felt his face go hot, and for the first time in three days he was actually embarrassed, which struck him as so absurd that he laughed into Matteo's shoulder.
"What."
"Nothing. The corruption is very fast."
"You said that in the kitchen."
"I did. I was talking about biscuits." He got his knees either side of the man's hips. "I want it on the record that this is a considered position and my body is merely agreeing with me. It's concurrence. It's not evidence."
"Noted."
"It's a very hostile witness and I'd like it excluded."
"Overruled," Matteo said, and Sasha stopped talking for a while.
***
Later -- not very much later; the light had barely moved -- there was a point at which Matteo went still underneath him. Sasha felt it as the knot began to swell.
He'd known it was coming since about two in the afternoon and had decided to let the man get there himself, because being told things was not going to be the shape of today.
"You'll be stuck," Sasha said.
“I know it’s different when you’re not in heat. The feeling.” Matteo said. “Do you want me to stop?”
"No. How long?"
"Twenty minutes." Matteo's hands were on his hips, not moving. "Half an hour."
"Twenty minutes where you can't get out of a room."
"Yes."
"Where you're in one place, and the place is known, and anybody who wanted you would only have to come up the stairs."
Matteo's throat moved. "Yes."
Sasha put both hands on the man's face.
"Your father was findable on Tuesdays," he said.
"Sasha--"
"I'm not being cruel. I'm being exact, and you're the one who taught me the difference.
" He leaned down until there was nothing much between them.
"You have spent eleven years making sure that there is no twenty minutes.
No rut, no wife, no chair you have to sit in.
And I want you to know that I know precisely what I'm asking for, because I'm not going to take it off you by accident and then find out in six years that you gave me something you hadn't counted. "
"It's Monday," Matteo said.
Sasha stopped.
"Say that again."
"It's Monday," Matteo said. "He was killed on a Tuesday. I've made every decision of my adult life on that Tuesday in March and I am so tired, tesoro. I'd like a Monday."
And then, because he was who he was, and because he had never in his life let a thing stand unfinished when it could be made exact:
"Twenty minutes. In a room with the door locked and the key in your hand. That's the arrangement I'm asking for and I want it said out loud, please, in front of everyone, so that nobody in this house has to invent a different one later."
Sasha made a sound and put his forehead down on the man's shoulder.
"That's my line."
"I know. I've been waiting."
"You absolute--"
"Sasha."
"Yes." He got his head up. His eyes were streaming and he did not bother about it.
He reached back with one hand and found Matteo's, and brought it up, and put it flat over the bare place at the back of his own neck where nothing had been for three days.
"Yes. Now. Do it now, while I'm looking at you. "
And Matteo turned his jaw carefully, the way you turn something you intend to keep --
***
He did not black out. He'd always heard you blacked out.
What happened was quieter and much worse and much better: the world narrowed to one point at the join of his neck and shoulder and then it opened, and there was somebody else in it — not thoughts, nothing so neat, just the enormous and unmistakable pressure of another person's presence sitting behind his own sternum like a second heartbeat, and the first coherent thing Sasha felt through it, arriving from the other side, unfiltered, from a man who had spent eleven years making sure nobody could find him:
Terror. And under the terror, going down further than Sasha could follow:
Relief.
He started crying and couldn't have said why, and Matteo held on, and outside the window the garden was doing its small noises, and it was Monday.