Then he looks at me, those pale eyes steady and unreadable to anyone who does not know him.
I do. I know the softness he hides inside all that precision.
"Jennifer," he says.
He lifts my wrist where my hand rests at his jaw and keeps it there, fingers light over my pulse. His pale eyes are close now, darkened by focus, fixed on me with the kind of attention that makes furniture seem temporary.
I lean in and kiss him.
He goes still for a beat, the held breath before weather breaks. Then his hands come to my face and he kisses me back with that precise concentration that belongs only to him. No rush, no showmanship, only care. As if this, too, deserves to be done properly.
He is not Santos.
Santos kisses like sunlight. Matteo kisses like a conclusion reached after serious thought. Neither better nor worse. Simply him. I feel it in the structure of it, in the way each moment opens cleanly into the next.
He draws back enough to study me.
"The chair reclines," he says. "For your back."
I stare at him.
He returns the look, mouth curving slightly, which on Matteo is practically vaudeville. My strawberry lifts warm between us as he reaches past me for the lever.
The chair reclines.
Of course it does.
He bends over me and kisses me again, slower now. His hands move with the calm thoroughness he gives to anything worth knowing. I shut my eyes and let him take his time. Matteo's time is usually an investment.
He finds the hem of my shirt.
His palms slide over the changed curve of my stomach and do not pause there, not even for a breath. The certainty of that touch, the absence of awkwardness or caution, loosens something in my chest I had not realized was clenched.
"You're thinking," he says against my neck.
"I'm always thinking."
"Stop."
"Make me."
He lifts his head. That catches him. I see it happen. Then he smiles, the real smile, quick and warm and ruinously rare. He lowers his mouth to me again and does exactly as instructed.
After that everything is unhurried, warm, exacting. He notices every response and answers it. Builds carefully. Adjusts. Learns. Somewhere in the bright middle of it I understand that this is how he has always spoken, in gestures, in steadiness, in every measured kindness I nearly mistook for habit.
I say his name.
He answers with his hands, his mouth, the solid warmth of him. When I make the sound I cannot hide, he gathers me close and holds on, face tucked at my throat.
Later the study is quiet and honey-colored with afternoon light.
I lie back in the reclined chair. He sits beside me on the edge, watching my face with the grave concentration he usually reserves for contracts or mechanical failures.
"Say something," I tell him.
"I'm working on it."
"Matteo."