Chapter 10

CHAPTER

10

The dawn air off the ocean was like the breath of a generous cool beast, brushing Luca’s cheeks as he approached the sea’s edge. It was welcome. Summer seemed to be holding the land in jealous claws as they headed into its last few weeks.

The preceding night had been warm enough that sleep had eluded Luca even with the window cracked. He’d ended up fetching water from the kitchen and dipping his fingers into it, then creating hopeful cool trails down his own face and neck. Even then he’d lain there for some time, shifting his aching shoulders against the pillow. He and Ilse had been hired for a high formal show match at the Woodworker Guildband dinner, and Ilse had clearly been practicing how to get the best advantage out of her height and reach.

It hadn’t helped that every time Luca closed his eyes in bed he was back in the intimate darkness of Adrean Vane’s wardrobe, balanced between Matti’s hands like a sword on two fingers. That every time Luca trailed his own wet fingertips over his skin he imagined Matti doing the same thing, and felt hotter and more breathless than ever.

Now, as though Luca’s imagination needed any more fodder, Matti was sitting bare-chested on a stone bench with his feet only just touching the choppy green-grey water.

The sea bath had clearly been a natural basin in the rock, once, and it had been encouraged and shaped by human hands. Now it was a roughly rectangular pool, long enough to swim respectable laps in, and ringed with a low hump of stone in which wooden posts were set at intervals. Sluggish white-capped waves swilled over the ocean-side border and into the pool, but the backwash was weak, and a net was strung between the posts. Even in the half-light of morning it would be safe to swim without fear of being swept out to sea.

The crags of rock lifted, beyond the bath, to form a rough headland dividing these rock pools from the calmer and broader curve of coast which was Glassport Harbour proper. On the other side, the wave-washed ledge stretched out for a good hundred yards before lowering to a short stretch of unattractive pebbled beach. Only a half-hour walk from the busiest part of the harbour, this was a strange, tucked-away piece of the city, barely feeling like city at all. The closest people to Matti and Luca were the fishermen, their boats already dots heading towards the horizon, and the dockworkers and sailors whose cries were faint as birdsong as they drifted from the unseen harbour.

“This wasn’t the kind of swimming pool I was expecting,” Luca said.

Matti had been looking down at his feet. When Luca spoke, he lifted his head, and the smile that broke over his face was like the moment when a lock surrendered to Luca’s picks. Something gave way before it. Some small piece of machinery fell in Luca’s chest with an audible click, some unseen hinges opened, and a soft unfamiliar happiness flowed through the crack.

Before now, Luca’s experience of Matti’s smiles had been that they were sidelong things, unconscious or grudging or hard-won. And now Matti was bestowing this one upon Luca, allowing it to light his features to something extraordinary, as though Luca deserved it. As though Luca need do nothing more than exist for Matti to be glad to see him.

Luca paused in his steps and smiled back. The ocean breeze stroked his cheeks again and he thought: Oh .

Then he thought, making the words deliberate and large in his mind: It’s not real. The person he thinks you are isn’t fucking real.

Which was the fun of it, the point of it. Luca had to remember that.

Matti stood and made his way to the edge of the pool. The bathing trunks began beneath his waist and reached to just above his knees. Luca’s interested gaze had enough time to stray across Matti’s broad shoulders, down the solid line of his torso, and follow the trail of black hair south from his navel. Then Matti rolled his shoulders and loosened his neck, an unselfconscious motion, and dove smoothly into the water.

“All right,” said Luca resignedly, to the breeze, and to the dark moving shape of Matti beneath the surface. “That’s… fine.”

Matti resurfaced with his hair flattened to the sides of his face. He let out a gasping, satisfied exhale. “It’s cold,” he called, “but you get used to it quickly. Come on.”

“At least it’s summer,” Luca said, and began to undress. He found the small pile of Matti’s own clothes, along with a cloth bag containing towels, and set his own things down next to it.

Matti swam closer. “Yes, in winter it’s quite bracing.”

Luca paused in the act of removing his clothes. When Matti had told him where they’d be meeting, he’d gone out and bought a cheap pair of trunks. They were itching his legs beneath his trousers.

Luca said, aghast, “You swim here in winter ?”

“I swim here every day,” said Matti, as though he weren’t confessing to the deepest form of bodily insanity. “Before you, anyway,” he added. “There are usually a few days when it’s too dangerous, but it’s not that bad.” He rested his arms on one of the rocky edges. Wet Matti was no better for Luca’s composure than dry Matti. “It doesn’t get as cold here on the coast as it does inland.”

Luca imagined stripping off and diving into the freezing lakewater in the coldest mornings of Cienne’s winter. All the skin tried to crawl off his body in horror. He slowly finished undressing and tested the water with his toes. It was no cooler than the sensation of trailing one’s hand through a fountain.

Matti laughed. “Just dive in, Luca.”

Luca shook water from his foot and took a moment to choke down the ironic role reversal of Matti being the one to advocate flinging oneself headlong into an experience. He felt as though he’d been dared, and he’d never been very wise in the face of dares.

The water was like a light slap, and Luca held his breath hard against the urge to gasp it out at the shock of coolness. He surfaced for long enough to take a breath and then submerged himself fully again, eyes shut, willing his body to acclimatise. The bottom of the pool was smooth rock with a thin layer of sand. Luca had barely nudged it with a toe before he found himself bobbing towards the surface, where he trod water awkwardly. It had been a long time since he’d swum, and he’d never learned much more than the minimum required to stay afloat. Muscles in his legs and arms, which he considered fit and strong, were already beginning to protest that they were not used to moving in this particular way.

“That end is shallower,” said Matti.

“I see,” Luca said. “You wanted to see me flail around for a change. Hilarious. Please imagine I can spare a hand to make the gesture I want to make.”

Matti grinned at him and took off for the indicated shallow end with a loping stroke of his arms. Luca followed in his wake with less speed and less dignity. He felt better with his feet solidly beneath him, though his body had already embraced the water’s temperature and the air now seemed the cooler of the two environments, prickling at Luca’s neck as the seawater trickled down it.

He joined Matti at the edge of the pool, looking out at the horizon. The lightening sky was grey-blue, streaked with pale gold clouds like smoke rising from the jewelled fire of the sun. Luca looked sidelong at Matti, whose face was still, but it didn’t strike Luca as the stillness of hidden things. He looked almost at peace.

Luca drew his fingers back and forth in a shallow puddle formed in the rocky barrier, crossing and recrossing his own ripples. The intimacy of this, the generous sharing of something private, was settling over him.

“You did this every morning?” Luca asked. “Before we started having sword lessons instead?”

“My physician told me to.”

“Really?”

Matti began to run his fingers through his hair, made a face when they caught in the wet strands, and settled for pushing it slickly back instead. “I used to get nausea so bad that I couldn’t eat in the mornings. Then I started having dizzy spells. The physician told me to exercise every day. He said it would improve the flow of blood to and from my head, and it would feel more solid. And this was easiest.” Matti looked out to sea again. “It doesn’t cost anything. I can do it without anyone else around, before the day properly starts.”

Luca began to ask a question, stopped, then decided to ask it anyway. “Do you enjoy it?”

Matti looked back at him, eyebrows raised. “I like the quiet. And it did make the nausea and dizziness better. I didn’t do it to enjoy it.”

“No.” Luca’s heart wrung like a lemon being squeezed for juice. “No, you wouldn’t.” He thought about the way Matti’s shoulders had shaken yesterday: the quiet, violent breakdown of the wall behind which Matti had been storing years and years of tamped-down guilt and worry. Luca added, forcing himself to sound playful, “And instead of following your physician’s orders you’ve been listening to me go on and on about feet positions and reading your opponent’s signals. It probably hasn’t been helping, has it?”

“No! I mean, yes, it’s been… fine. Just different. I don’t focus on anything when I’m swimming, and I have to focus all the time when I’m with you. But that’s just as good, I think. In its own way.”

“Good,” said Luca. “I’d hate to think I was shoving more things into the tangle that goes on up there.” He meant to poke at Matti’s forehead, but somehow the gesture gentled itself. Luca found himself with his fingertips soft at Matti’s temple, his hand barely hovering above the side of Matti’s face.

Matti leaned into it. After a moment his eyes fell closed: not a flutter, a definitive fall, just as he’d fallen to sit down on that bench when they’d left the Vane house. It had the same exhausted air to it. Matti’s cheek was wet. Luca’s throat felt tight.

“You are. You do,” Matti said, very soft. “You tangle me up.”

Luca pulled his hand away. Or at least he planned to. The plan had barely communicated itself to his body when Matti’s own hand rose, trapping Luca’s beneath it just as Luca had trapped Matti’s yesterday. Matti’s eyes opened. His lashes were spiked with water.

That was enough for Luca. He had been wanting for weeks, and now the desire was large enough and unbearable enough that he couldn’t find it within himself to do anything but take, as he took most things that he wanted, in the end.

He stepped even closer, used his hand to angle Matti’s face slightly downwards, and kissed his way through the film of salt water to the heat of Matti’s mouth beneath.

If Luca had tried to count the number of people he’d kissed in his life, he would have run out of space on his hands and feet, with a fair few digits representing those whose names he couldn’t remember. He certainly hadn’t gone to bed with all of them. But he’d seldom held himself back from the impulse of the moment, if the slightest spark of attraction was there, and some of his fondest memories were of the nights when he’d flirted himself into a man’s company and then into his lap, taken all the kisses he wanted, and then melted away, buzzing and satisfied, before midnight.

There had been, in short, a lot of kisses. Some of them disappointing, but most of them enjoyable, else Luca would have abandoned the activity; he didn’t stick with things when he wasn’t getting anything from them.

He wondered, now, whom Matti Jay had been kissing in the years before Luca elbowed his way into his life. For all Luca’s thinking about it—and he had been thinking about it—he’d assumed that Matti might have been too busy, too self-sacrificing, to be particularly proficient in this area.

Matti kissed in a way that was unhesitatingly hungry and exploratory, a way that Luca had never known he wanted. Luca wondered if he was now doomed to spend the rest of his life trying to chase this kiss down and replicate it.

Luca still had one hand at Matti’s jaw and another at the back of Matti’s neck. They were standing waist-deep in water and Luca felt as though he was fully submerged once more: buoyant and breathless and aware of his skin’s boundaries. The heat of Luca’s desire and the heat of Matti’s body, his arms wrapped around Luca’s back, were battling the coolness of drying skin, and their attack was two-pronged and deadly. Matti didn’t taste of salt anymore.

“Wait,” Matti said, during a pause for breath.

Luca had waited long enough, thank you. He tried to communicate that with a murmur of complaint against Matti’s jaw, which was unshaven and rough, shadowing Matti’s face in a way that frankly had no right to render him more attractive than ever and yet was managing to do so.

Gently, Matti pushed Luca backwards, his hands on Luca’s shoulders. He wasn’t making eye contact.

“Stop,” Matti said softly. “Just stop.”

“We have stopped,” said Luca, with more of an edge than he’d intended.

Matti gave something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I—it’s not you.”

“Remember yesterday, when I threatened to break your nose?” Luca said. “I’m not saying it’s not going to be more of a challenge, now that you’re standing instead of sitting, and I am possibly even more useless with my fists than you are with a sword, but if the words it’s me are the next things to emerge from your mouth, I’m going to do my level best to punch them back in again.”

Matti gave a sudden sunburst of a smile and touched Luca’s mouth. He did it absently, as though his hand was acting freely from the rest of him: a touch like an exploration of new cloth’s texture, like a finger between pages, marking the place in a book. Luca’s whole body tried to sway into the smallness of it. He would have paid every bronze he’d ever earned, every gold in the coffers of his House, to hear Matti say be quiet, or be still, and to keep on looking at Luca like this while he waited for Luca to comply.

“I meant, I was talking to myself,” said Matti. His smile slipped as Luca, figuring he had nothing to lose at this point, opened his lips enough to be an unmistakable invitation.

“I don’t want you to stop.” Luca’s tongue slid against Matti’s finger with the words. Come on, he begged silently. Let yourself have this. “If that isn’t absurdly obvious.”

“Luca.” Matti’s hand dropped to his side. “We’re not—I’m not—”

Luca didn’t know where that sentence was heading, but he liked his chances of throwing a log in its path. “Matti. I’ll steal a lot of things, but I wouldn’t actually steal someone’s husband. But you’re not married yet, are you? And it doesn’t have to be serious. I don’t think either of us is looking for serious. We don’t even have to do anything more than… this.”

He lifted his mouth to Matti’s again, and Matti didn’t resist. Luca directed the kiss this time, making sure it was the sort he was good at: teasing little bites, very light, very swift, promising something deeper but never delivering. He was rewarded with a moan, a thrum of breath in Matti’s throat where Luca’s hand rested.

“You want to,” Luca said, letting the words catch his lips against Matti’s. “I want to. It’s not complicated.”

“You’re such a liar, Luca Piere,” said Matti, with such helpless affection that the flare of Luca’s nerves was over almost before it began.

Oh, yes, he felt on one level like he was drawing Matti into another deception, but nothing he was saying was untrue. It could be simple. The warm, lockpicked ache in Luca’s chest was his own business.

“I’m not,” he lied.

“Of course it’s complicated. You’re… complicating. A complicating factor.”

“How flattering.”

The look Matti was giving him shifted from apologetic to sarcastic. “Yes, I know. But—oh, Huna, I wish things were different, but it’s not just the engagement. It’s everything else. It’s that I’m already lying to my family, and now there’s this business with Corus and the Keseys.”

“Are you telling me,” said Luca, “that you would have fucked me if I’d just kept my damn mouth shut?”

Matti’s eyes widened and his lips became a line. Luca lifted his hand from Matti’s neck to Matti’s cheek to see if he could feel the flush. Matti pulled Luca’s hand away, but kept hold of it, which seemed a good sign.

“If you’d kept your mouth shut about Corus that night at your boardinghouse, we’d never have found ourselves shut in a wardrobe the next day,” said Matti, dry.

“There was a bottle of Diamond Blend and you were on my bed, Matti. I’m pretty sure I could have improvised if necessary.”

Matti squeezed his hand. “I mean it. There’s too much going on. I don’t—I don’t do well, when I feel overwhelmed.”

“Complicating and overwhelming,” said Luca. “I love it. I shall adopt it as my motto. I will have it embroidered on my—”

This kiss was sudden, a deluge. Matti’s hand at the back of Luca’s head created enough force that he was nearly crushing Luca’s mouth against his own. Luca felt one of his feet slip, sand on rock, and wondered if Matti would ever believe it had been accidental when the slip brought him right up against Matti’s body. They were pressed together from mouth to groin. A hot splash of longing coaxed Luca to let himself slip farther down, all the way to his knees, depth of the pool be damned. He could feel Matti stirring against him.

And then he felt the firm shove as Matti released him and pushed him away, where the water caught him and kept him from overbalancing.

“Yes,” Matti said, uneven. “Overwhelming.”

Luca didn’t know he was arranging the next attack in his throat until it vaulted out, catching itself on the sharp points of his desperation. “You could have had my trousers down and fucked me in that wardrobe, you know. I got myself off last night, thinking about it.”

“ Luca .” Matti’s tone was halfway between commanding and pleading. He didn’t have a parry. Luca had expected as much. “That’s not fair.”

Luca opened his mouth to point out that he was a cheat and a con and he’d never pretended to play fair; that what wasn’t fair was Matti putting his hands on Luca, Matti kissing him like he wanted to devour Luca whole, and then not following through . But here Matti was, decently telling him the truth, even though neither of them wanted to hear it.

And Luca was going to have to do the decent thing, too, wasn’t he?

“Gods damn you, Mattinesh,” he said. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too,” said Matti. “Really.”

“So. What do we do now?” Luca waved an arm to encompass the pool, the distant flock of birds against the sky, and the two of them, standing there shirtless and aroused and wet. He hoped his gesture managed to communicate what he was thinking, which was: What a fucking waste.

“We could swim laps? That was my original plan for this morning.”

Luca weighed the likely indignity of his poor swimming skills against the urgent need to burn off his desire. He wanted to throw himself back at Matti and start the argument up again. He’d win, that was the awful thing. He knew he’d win. He could talk faster than Matti could muster denial, and he could feel the effort with which Matti was trying not to rake his gaze up and down Luca’s body.

All he’d have to do would be to get his fingers onto Matti’s cock, pick one of many provocative facial expressions, and beg. Shamelessly, explicitly. Beg.

“Laps,” Luca said, mouth dry with salt. “Why not?”