Chapter Thirteen #2
Bianca came through at half past and took a biscuit and told him the Sabbatini reconciliations were a disgrace and she was blaming him personally.
Rocco drove him to Footscray. He signed eleven things.
He argued with a man in Altona about invoice dates for twenty minutes and enjoyed it enormously. Somebody's wife sent a lasagne.
And at eleven o'clock at night he sat down at the desk in the east wing with the lamp on and opened the notebook and wrote nothing at all.
He looked at the blank line under DAY 79 for a while.
Then he put the pencil down and closed the book and put it in the drawer, and went to bed, and nobody in that house mentioned it -- not that night, not that week, not once, ever -- and Sasha understood that this was not an oversight.
It was the single most tactful thing eleven armed men had ever done.
***
He told him about item nine on a Sunday, in bed, with the window open.
"You never asked again."
"You said it would keep."
"It's kept."
Matteo turned his head on the pillow. "And?"
Sasha took his hand -- the right one, the scarred forearm, the third closure's fault -- and turned it over and drew the four characters on the palm with one finger, slowly, twice.
"That's the shorthand for not collateral," he said.
Matteo did not say anything.
"I wrote it on the Friday afternoon. Four o'clock, at your desk, before any of it.
I'd just spent an hour negotiating the terms on which I'd be handled through something I couldn't control, in a house I'd been sold into, with a man who could have done anything he liked to me and was instead asking my permission to sit in a chair in a hallway.
" His voice had gone odd. "And I wrote it because I was terrified I was about to stop being a person and start being a thing that had been paid for, and I couldn't say it out loud, because saying it would have made it true.
"So I wrote it where nobody could read it. Which is, now that I say it to you, the most cowardly thing I have ever done, and I've been a coward in four countries."
Matteo closed his hand.
"You were right, though," he said.
"I was right later. On the day, it was a lie, and I knew it was a lie, and I wrote it anyway because a man in this house had already handed me a folder of fuel accounts and I had started -- God help me -- to hope.
" He wiped his face with the heel of his hand, briskly, annoyed.
"Anyway. That's item nine. It doesn't require anything of you. I told you at the time."
"I'd like to give you something," Matteo said.
***
Here is what Sasha had understood about it, having read everything there was, at nineteen, in a library, out of defensive fury:
An alpha's bite binds. An omega's does not. There is no gland, no chemistry, no scaffolding -- an omega can put his teeth in an alpha's throat as hard as he likes and produce absolutely nothing except a scar, and that asymmetry is the oldest joke in the biology and it is not funny.
"It won't do anything," Sasha said.
"No."
"It's not enforceable. It doesn't bind you. You'd feel nothing, and it would heal badly, and in ten years it would just be a mark on you that people would assume you got in a car park."
"Yes," Matteo said.
"Then why."
And Matteo Ferrante -- thirty-six years old, eleven years of suppressants, a man who had never in his adult life asked anybody for a single thing, because asking is a location and a location is how they killed his father -- said, with enormous difficulty, to the ceiling:
"Because everything I've got, you can prove I was made to want.
The bond's chemical. The house was my grandfather's.
The money's the business. Even the child--" He stopped.
Started again. "You audited me once and found one honest entry in the whole book and it was eleven seconds on a footpath, and you've been living on it ever since, and I've watched you do it and I've been ashamed of how thin it is.
"So I'd like something on me that nothing made me want.
Something with no chemistry in it at all and no use and no outcome, that I asked for, out loud, in a room, sober.
" His throat moved. "You said it yourself, in a bathroom, with your hand on my wrist. It has to be out loud with you or it isn't real. I've worked that out about me."
Sasha lay there for a moment.
"Say it, then," he said. "The whole sentence."
"Sasha. Bite me."
***
He did it slowly, which was the entire point, because nothing was driving either of them and there would never be a version of this that anybody could say was the weather.
He took his time. He got Matteo's shirt off him and put him on his back in the lamplight and went over him first with the flat of his hand -- the wrist, the inside of the forearm, the ridge of the scar, every rib counted, one at a time, with the same absolute quality of attention he had once brought to four inches of a man's forearm in a bathroom at midnight and had brought to every column of figures he had ever loved.
Tending. He had learned the word in a grey room in the rain and had hated it, and he did not hate it now.
"You're doing it back at me," Matteo said, wrecked.
"Yes."
"That's--"
"Be quiet."
And later, with the man's pulse going under his mouth at the join of the throat and the shoulder where anybody would see it, in a shirt, at a table, for the rest of his life, Sasha stopped and said:
"Last chance. It gives you nothing."
"I know exactly what it gives me," Matteo said. "It's the only thing in my life I chose without a reason. Do it."
So he did.
Afterwards, in the dark, Matteo lay with a hand pressed to his own throat like a man checking he was still there, and laughed once -- a small, appalled, private noise Sasha had never heard out of him before and would hear perhaps four more times in forty years.
"That hurt."
"Yes."
"You could have warned me."
"I told you three times it would achieve nothing and you kept talking.
" Sasha put his head on the man's chest, over the noise underneath it.
"There. Now we've both got one that proves nothing.
Mine says I was claimed and yours says you were chosen, and neither of them is admissible anywhere, and we'll both be explaining them to a child in about nine years. "
"Eleven," Matteo said. "We agreed eleven. It's item six. It's written down."
"God," said Sasha, into his chest, "you've become insufferable," and put his hand flat and open low on his own stomach, where by then there was something to feel, and went to sleep.