Chapter 21 - Matteo
2370 Words
He hangs up and looks at Raisa. She’s on her phone, hands shaking as she texts someone.
“Hey.” He says and she looks up at him, smiling as he leans closer to kiss her. Raisa kisses too aggressively for Matteo’s taste, but she’s crazy in bed because there’s nothing she wouldn’t do. Plus, her n*****s are pierced, which is something Matteo has never experienced before. He also knows that she’s beginning to fall for the idea of him, and it won’t end well for her if she makes it into something more.
Raisa straddles him without any regard for the driver and starts kissing down the left side of his neck. He slips his hand under her black dress to find that she’s not even wearing underwear. He knows she’s got daddy issues, especially since her father died and is maybe
trying to live out her fantasies through him. Matteo just lets her, by f*****g her real good until she can’t breathe, then actually listening to her problems when she talks.
He never asks her out on purpose, which is one of the things he’s started doing so the girls he hooks up won't make it into something more, but somehow it still happens. He could go the continuous one-night-stand mode (which worked for a few months until he realized he wasn’t even satisfied), and he could try to get it up for random prostitutes or girls he picked up without even knowing their names.
She moans into his ear in the elevator and he unzips her dress before they even enter his apartment. One minute later she’s naked, straddling him on the couch in the living room, looking over his shoulder at the view of the city. He sucks on her pierced n****e, focusing on getting it up with all the cocaine and alcohol in his system. Without him even asking her, she gets on her knees in front of him and smiles.
The reason he prefers having a few “f**k-buddies” as he likes to call them, is because they already know each other’s body so it’s more pleasurable than having a new person every single time. And if he wakes up next to them, he at least wants to know who they are. Trust is also an important part, ever since one of his one-night stands stole two of his watches and posted about it on Twitter in 2018.
He had to come to terms with the fact that anyone who would google his name would see how much money his family has. The statistics on the internet didn’t even showcase a quarter of the wealth he knew his father had acquired over the years.
He goes to sleep an hour later, after having had s*x for forty minutes and taking a shower afterwards. A part of him wishes she’d be gone by the time he wakes up.
***
Two weeks later on the last weekend of February, Aurora finally agrees to come out and celebrate that she was eighteen with her ‘family’, as Matteo had put it.
“Shut up, you sound like dad.” She told him, which was kind of a slap in the face. But she came, wearing a white sundress and sunglasses.
They have their corner in the VIP area and there are more people at the table than usual, two of them which he doesn’t really recognize, probably friends of friends. He spots Valentina talking to Isabella and Raisa so he walks over there.
“Hi.”
“Hello.”
“Anything interesting happened in class yesterday?” he asks after knocking their glasses together.
Valentina takes a sip before answering. “Depends on what you mean by interesting. But if you’re asking whether I took notes, then, as usual, yes I did. But I forgot to send them to you, I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“That’s alright, I don’t really understand them anyway. They’re not even entire sentences. And some abbreviations don’t even make sense.”
Valentina takes another sip from her straw. “I mean, I take my notes so I can understand them. If I know I can make a longer word shorter, I’ll just write the abbreviation.”
“Yes, but I can’t understand it.” Matteo says, mimicking her gesture and placing a hand on his chest.
She smiles. “Which one?”
“All of them.”
Valentina rolls her eyes. “Do you want me to solve your problem?”
Matteo is taken aback. “Uh, no.”
Valentina looks at him questioningly, and the fact that he’s speechless takes Matteo by surprise. He usually doesn’t have to fill the silence himself.
Raisa starts talking to him then and he loses his train of thought, leaving the conversation be for the moment so he can focus on Raisa. He wouldn’t try to talk to Valentina again if it hadn’t been for his father calling him earlier that day, asking why he hasn’t gone to classes for the past two weeks. He doesn’t care enough, but his father does, so he asks Valentina if she wants to do a line in the staff room.
Valentina downs her drink and grabs a bottle of water, then motions towards the door in the back. “Lead the way then.” She smirks.
Her heels echo in the empty hallway as Matteo tries to get the door open with shaky fingers. It’s the fourth time he’s doing this tonight, twice with the boys and then once with Isabella and Raisa when Valentina hadn’t arrived.
She sits down on one of the chairs facing Matteo, who’s already separating two lines on the plate.
“So what is this course about? You can at least tell me that.”
“I never said I wouldn’t help you.” Valentina retorts and leans back into her chair. She’s wearing a white dress that makes her look sort of innocent, despite her no bullshit personality.
“Alright. Do this line and then tell me what the course is about so I can get an idea.” She smiles at him and takes the plate, only sitting back down after they’re both done.
“If it were just Psychology, would you know what it’s about?” she asks.
“Probably, yeah.”
“The course is basically psychology applied in the workplace, or in an organization overall, and it’s used for enhancing productivity for example. Or how to negotiate to get your way.”
Matteo nods. “Okay, so it’s not that hard.”
“Of course, it isn’t, it’s kind of what you already knew because it just makes sense. There’s just a lot of theory but if you look at the basic principles then it’s easy.”
“Do you have good grades?” Matteo asks.
Valentina frowns. “I don’t know my GPA, but I can definitely tell you that I have mostly C’s.”
“You seem to understand it pretty well.”
“If you think of it like separate concepts that are part of a whole, then it’s easy to piece the main ideas together and understand the subject. I think the problem is the theory which you have to learn in order to pass the exam.”
“What do you do in seminars?”
She shrugs and looks down at the plate. “Do exam preparation, questions, I don’t know. It’s every Wednesday.”
Wednesday could work. If he goes to the seminars on Wednesday and gets notes from Valentina on Thursday, he could keep working at the club and get his father off his back.
“You know, everything is on the schedule and the outline of the course is in the course materials online.”
Matteo pushes the plate with the credit card and the bill towards her. She takes it and starts doing two lines, still talking. “I think if you’d care even one bit about your classes you could make it work. You just have to put some time and energy into it.”
The lines she does are larger than Matteo’s, they look like something he and Vinnie would do. He smirks.
“Too much?” she asks, looking up at him. Matteo looks at her lips for a split second without even realizing it, then takes the plate from her to do the honors.
“Never.”
***
The club closes a little while after 4am and Matteo refuses to stay behind because he’s way too active and half of the people there are already on the way to his apartment. He grabs a taxi with Vinnie and their brothers, and by the time they reach their building there are people waiting in the lobby.
The elevator goes up three times taking ten people each and for twenty minutes the door to his apartment stays open until everyone is finally inside.
He sits down on the couch, suddenly feeling like his legs are exhausted from all the dancing. What he’d like to do most is get into bed and search for something on YouTube to fall asleep to, but there are about forty people in his apartment, some of whom he still can’t recognize. He watches Valentina entering the living room with Isaac, one of his friends from school, and remembers that he also didn’t even notice her until Isabella made him aware of her.
“Who are those guys?” he asks Vinnie at some point, when he sees the same two guys he saw at his table at the club and couldn’t recognize.
“I don’t know. Maybe they know Aurora?”
“Who left an hour ago?”
Vinnie looks at him in a weird way. “Are you okay? Or are you getting paranoia?” “I’m just going to ask them.”
“Matteo-“
But Matteo is already headed towards them, elbowing people out of his way because the living room can only fit so many people. One of them spots him and they both bolt towards the hallway.
“Hey, turn around!” he yells over the music. By the time he reaches the hallway, the door is wide open. “Fuck.” Vinnie’s probably right. He’s getting paranoid because his brain is coming down from the dopamine.
The dancing goes on for one more hour until people slowly decide to leave in groups. There are only half of them left around 6am, most of them chatting on the balcony waiting for the sunrise view so they can finally sleep.
Isabella is alone on the couch scrolling through her phone, which is unlike her, so Matteo sits down next to her and places an arm around her shoulders.
“I didn’t see you at all tonight.”
“Yeah.” She dully answers, not looking up.
“Are you alright?”
This time, Isabella looks up. “Yeah.” She smiles. “I’m just tired and I want to go back to the hotel, but I’m waiting on Valentina.”
“How does she know Isaac?” Matteo asks, turning to look towards the balcony where Valentina and Isaac were two of the people sharing a joint.
“She told me he was a year above her in middle school in Moscow. Funny how small the world is huh.”
Okay, so Isabella is more drunk than anything else. It’s fine.
“Finally.” Isabella sighs and gets up from the couch.
“Uhh.” Valentina says with a guilty look on her face directed at Isabella. “I think I want to stay a little longer.”
“It’s fine, I’ll just call myself an Uber.” Isabella waves it off and immediately opens the App on her phone. “So you decided you’re interested?”
Matteo looks up at Valentina, who just shrugs. “Maybe? I haven’t figured it out yet.”
Isabella grabs her arm. “Okay, I’m going to be direct. You need new d**k. I know you’re on your self-discovery journey and whatever, but it’s okay to be horny and it’s okay to hook up with that hot guy you’ve had a crush on since middle school. If I were you, I would do it.”
Valentina crosses her arms over her chest. “Oh, would you really?”
Her tone is more accusatory than joking and Isabella flips her off before she announces her departure.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” she yells as she hurries away, happy to be on the way to her bed.
After sunrise everyone comes back inside, including a horny Raisa who places her hand on Matteo’s arm while he’s pouring himself another drink in the kitchen. She tells him to meet her in his bedroom in five minutes before simply leaving him there staring at the drink he just poured.
Valentina and Isaac are talking on one of the couches, away from the rest of the people who are trying to decide on a song. Matteo doesn’t bother to say goodnight to either of them before he turns around and heads towards his bedroom, not knowing what to expect.
He finds Raisa on her stomach, scrolling through her phone. Nothing special then, she probably just didn’t want to seem obvious. His excitement goes down.
“Hey.” She basically purrs at him and turns on her back, spreading her legs to make space for him.
Matteo looks at her for a moment, wishing he were already hard and so he could make the whole process quicker. But he settles for crawling on top of her and kissing down her neck, already knowing all her weak spots.
***
Finding Valentina in his kitchen, wrapped in a blanket, trying to make coffee in a pot when he wakes up that afternoon takes him by surprise.
Before he can ask her what she’s doing here or where she slept, Isaac comes into the kitchen with a towel around his waist like he owns the place.
So that’s what she’s doing here. As Isaac starts talking about some irrelevant football s**t, Matteo finds himself feeling a weird apathy towards the guy standing in front of him.
- Writer
