Switch: On
Life in the South is slow.
Especially in the South of Italy.
Even if you are il bello del paese.
And Matteo, at twenty-one, was more than the town’s heartthrob. He was the kind of beautiful that made widows cross themselves and fathers uneasy when he stood too close to their daughters at church. Still, he didn’t seem to register the effect he had on people. He nodded along when other people talked, he always smiled when expected, he said permesso and grazie too often.
You might have taken him for simple if it weren’t for how deliberate his body was. His boyish face, his impressive height, his dark curls—those were genetics. But the thick, almost bodybuilder-ish frame that carried him through the village was his own doing.
Whatever restlessness other people talked through, drank away, or turned into prayers, Matteo pushed into his muscles. The effort quieted him. And the results bordered on indecent when he came out of the sea, wet and sunlit, water tracing lines down his chest and back. And sex obeyed the same logic, more or less. He didn’t chase it for release, or tenderness, or even pleasure in the usual sense. He chased the quiet after. His stamina could undo even the most insatiable, but it wasn’t pride or performance. It was simply that he kept going until there was nothing left in him. And that meant that whoever was beneath him would end up stretched and used beyond their limits long before he came anywhere near his peak.
That was Matteo. He lived in the same peeling white house by St. Antonio’s church where he’d grown up with his nonna, a black-dressed woman who had long stopped asking where he went at night. She knew. Everyone knew. The village had been talking ever since he failed the final at seventeen, and Mrs. Romano—his old high school literature teacher—had to give him extra lessons. For hours. Every day.
On workdays he worked the fields. On weekends he worked at the local café. When there was nothing else to do, he worked himself to exhaustion. When even that wasn’t enough, he fucked whoever was there to extinction. It just happened. Like summer heat in the South.
And Maria burned in that heat. She had sworn, more than once, that she was done with him, done with the way her legs shook for hours after he left, done with the way his sweat tasted when her tongue caught it on his neck. She meant it every time. And every time she’d find her face buried between his legs, worshiping his unyielding pole with her mouth before taking it in her cunt, or trying to keep herself impaled on his cock even when her eyes rolled back in her head.
She knew too. Everyone knew. About that married woman from Naples who had first come to the village on holiday with her husband and now returned every other weekend, alone. About Mr. Navarro—fourty-two and still unmarried—timing his coffees to Matteo’s shifts, lingering too long, always tipping just a bit too generously for it to be innocent. She could feel the girls’ eyes on him, and the boys’ envy settling in their throats.
Yet, she was determined to keep him. To outlast them all. Six months now, and she was the closest thing to a real girlfriend he’d ever had. Or so she told herself. His gaze might drift sometimes, but it never lied. And she knew his face when he finally fell asleep by her side, leaving her filled with cum yet hollowed inside out. A face like that wouldn’t know how to lie. It meant everything it said, even when it said nothing at all. It couldn't possibly belong to someone capable of cruelty.
The way he fucks isn't cruel, she told herself. It was what he’d learned sex to be. Given time, she could soften it. Him. She’d teach him differently. She’d show him that it was okay to let his feelings out. She’d fix him, she thought, and that delusion was enough to make her wet again.
Her hands would start moving all over his body then, like they had a mind of their own. His shoulder in the dark, the vein on his bicep, the heat radiating from his core, his skin streched tight across his muscles, his chest expanding and contracting steadily as he breathed, everything on him, of him, hers, asleep and receiving. Wet. Again. Not desire. Need. His taste, like scortched earth on her lips. She tries to think of a better way of describing it to herself at 3 a.m. in the morning but nothing comes. Only the half-forgotten memory of how the air smelled for days after that fire that almost burned through their town when she was little.
Down his chest then, instictively, his nipples, his abs, lower. Hard. Hard! Already. Still asleep yet hard in her mouth. Switch/On. Like there is no intermediate semi-phase in his circuits. Down her throat. His palm slapping her ass. Swallow him. His palm slapping her ass. Swallow! Jerk him off with your hands if you can't keep him into your mouth. Slap! Ignore his fingers inside you. Two. Then three. Resist. Go lower. Eat him down there. Grab his legs and stick your tongue in. Break him like he breaks you. He's about to come. He's coming. All over your face. No. It's you who's coming. It's your pussy that comes when he wants it to. Let him have it. It's his. Not your fault. It was made to be his. Let him fuck you. Please. Say it. Please! Let him fuck you till there's nothing left. Kiss him as he fucks you into his scortched earth. Let him know how he tastes when he's in your mouth. And try not to scream like that. Your brother is in the next room, trying to get some sleep...
