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Matteo pulled his laptop closer to himself and opened the next set of exercises. He let the air fizzle out through his lips before he read the problem aloud to David who sat opposite him on the other end of the bed, his notepad on his lap, his left leg stretched out towards Matteo.
“There are six red balls and four green balls in a container. Two balls are randomly selected. Calculate the probability of the following scenarios: 1) Both balls are green, and 2) No more than one ball is red.”
He sighed and looked over at David, who raised one eyebrow at him.
“What's the problem?”
“Urgh, stochastics,” Matteo grumbled, thinking that would be sufficient. But David's second eyebrow followed his other.
“Stochastics are literally the easiest field of mathematics, Matteo,” he replied half-mockingly.
“Yeah sure,” Matteo retorted with a scoff. “Geometry, that's the shit.”
David's eyebrows traveled yet a bit farther up his forehead, part of them disappearing behind the side-swept fringe that fell into his eyes.
“Hey, not everyone can be a genius at math like you!” Matteo spit back playfully, smirking. He saw how the corners of David's mouth stretched into a grin for a split second before he collected himself again.
“You won't get out of solving this problem by complimenting me, you know that, right?” David asked in return, which wiped the grin off of Matteo's face. Fuck. He had complimented him. He was toeing a line he had promised himself not to cross, but with every smile from David, that promise became harder and harder to keep, and the voice deep inside him that told him that David did reciprocate him feelings louder. He inhaled and exhaled noisily.
“Worth a shot.”
At this, David grinned back at Matteo, which caused his heart to flutter in his chest. He would never forget the first time he had seen this grin, back when they had ditched the Abistreich committee together to smoke weed. Maybe...
“Come on, let's solve this,” David then said and leaned over to turn the laptop around so that he could read the problem again himself. When he had done so, he asked, “So, how do you calculate this?”
Matteo licked his lips, trying to remember everything they had learned about stochastics and realized a lot of it had slipped his mind. He hated that his memory was like a sieve sometimes. But he was grateful he had something else to concentrate on than the thought of how beautiful David was when he looked over at him like this.
“Uh... tree diagram?” he tried, semi-confident that it was the right answer.
“Uh-hu. How many branches?” David continued, twirling his pen between his fingers.
Matteo grimaced, knowing he was making a fool of himself right about now. “Two?”
“Is that a question?” David answered, one eyebrow raised yet again. Matteo had been intrigued by this side of David since the first time they had met, this deadpan, matter-of-fact behavior. At times it still caused him to be thrown off, but he got better every day at telling if it was actually extremely deep sarcasm (which almost nobody ever got) or not. This time, he knew it wasn't.
“No,” he simply replied thus. “Two.”
“Okay,” David said and drew two branches on his notepad and Matteo followed suit on his own notepad. “Next?”
Matteo thought for a moment before the answer came to him. “Label the branches. Should beeee... six tenths for the red ones and four tenths for the green ones.”
“You're not as stupid as you look,” David mocked him, which earned him a playful kick into the side of his thigh from Matteo. He was aware that he was dangerously close to crossing the line, but he couldn't help himself. Everything between them was so easy. Natural. In a voice that almost convinced Matteo that he was being serious, David snapped, “Ow! What was that for?!”
“For being a smartass,” Matteo replied mischievously and, with a grin, gave David another kick. What he hadn't anticipated was that David would grab his leg, keeping it in place with a firm grip. Matteo looked at him with wide eyes and saw that David couldn't hide the grin that was spreading across his face.
Matteo was sure that he'd never get over this, that glint of mischief in David's eyes whenever the mood changed, the air suddenly full of chemistry. At times it felt to him like the space between them was charged with electricity, threatening to give him an electric shock as soon as their skin touched. He held David's stare for a second, two, three, before Matteo, without thinking twice about what he was about to do, lurched towards him.
“Hey!” David called, half of the word swallowed by the laugh that found its way from his throat to his lips, as Matteo curled his hands around his shoulders and pushed him onto his back, straddling him. The notepad fell to the floor with a rustling thud. “This is not was I came here to do!”
Now that they lay like this, Matteo realize what a stupid idea this had been. He was pretty sure they had never had this much physical contact before. “Well, it's what we're doing now,” he tried to reply in a smug sort of way to cover how much being this close actually affected him, but it came out softer than he had planned. He was thrown by how loud his heartbeat thumped in his own ears. David seemed to notice, or at least registered the change in his voice, and stopped struggling against Matteo's grip on his shoulders. Instead, he raised his left hand, causing Matteo's right hand to slip off his shoulder onto the mattress underneath. This brought Matteo's face a good ten centimeters closer to David's and both of them stilled, David's hand hanging in the air in front of Matteo's face. For a moment, neither of them moved, trying to figure out how to go on from here, before David continued to raise his hand and brushed the strand of hair that fell into Matteo's eyes aside. His fingertips brushed lightly across the skin on Matteo's temple and he held his breath. They stared at each other.
The tiny voice inside Matteo whispered to him and just now, with the sunshine painting golden streaks across his room and David moving his hand so that his thumb ran along his jaw, Matteo threw all caution overboard.
He leaned down and closed his eyes and kissed David.
This was so very, very, very different from kissing Sara. Or being kissed by her. With her, he had never been sure what to do and had done everything in his power to avoid getting kissed but this? Oh. Ohhh...
David's thumb rested lightly on Matteo's cheek, the rest of his fingers brushing across his buzzed hair in the nape of his neck, holding him close. God, he never knew kissing could do that. Their lips were so soft against each another, no heat, no rush, no urgency. Just the two of them caught up in the moment. This right here should've been his first kiss.
A moment later, Matteo pulled back, feeling like he had to catch his breath. Not that he was out of it, he just had a feeling that he'd be overwhelmed by emotions (something he didn't think was possible up until now) if he kept kissing David. He opened his eyes and found David already looking up at him, his eyelids heavy.
“I'm not dreaming, right? You just kissed me?” he whispered thunderstruck and Matteo could see his chest rising and falling heavily.
“No,” Matteo replied with a small smile. “You're not dreaming.”
“Good,” David said, a similar smile appearing on his face, and he brought his other hand up to Matteo's face as well, and pulled him close again.
God, he never wanted to stop kissing him.