🔥 House Rules 🔥
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Penalty Clause by Tessa Valehart
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place in Bologna on Boxing Day, between the end of Chapter Sixteen and the epilogue of Penalty Clause. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.
Matteo’s side of the night after the tortellini lesson: his sister’s trattoria after close, three rules taped to the extractor hood, a steel counter he was told not to touch, and the instruction from Jericho, turned round. Explicit content — 18+.
House Rules
There are three rules on the card above Lucia’s pass, and every cook in Bologna who has ever worked for her can recite them in their sleep.
One. Nobody touches the stock.
Two. Clean as you go.
Three. The chef’s word is final.
She wrote it at nineteen in green felt tip on the back of a supplier’s invoice, and it has been taped to the extractor hood ever since, going slowly brown at the corners in the steam. Under rule three somebody has added, in biro, (Lucia is the chef). Under that, in Lucia’s hand, (obviously).
It is Boxing Day, ten to midnight, and the trattoria has been shut for two hours. The shutters are down. Twenty-two members of my family have eaten what was left of Christmas Eve, a second mountain of tripe, and most of the panettone, and gone home to sleep it off. Mamma left at nine, still furious that my girlfriend ate all the tripe without complaining. Lucia left at half past eleven, with Ferrari under one arm like a loaf, and dropped her keys into my palm on the way out.
“Lock up,” she said. “Mop the floor. Don’t touch my counter.”
“I wasn’t going to touch your counter.”
She looked past me, into the kitchen, at the Swiss woman leaning on the long steel bench with her sleeves pushed up and flour to the elbows, and then she looked back at me with my mother’s eyes.
“Matteo. I’ve known you thirty-one years. Wipe it down after.”
Then she went, and the bell over the door rang once, and the lock turned, and it was quiet.
So here we are. One light on over the pass. The dishwasher ticking as it cools. The whole kitchen smelling of brodo and bay leaves and the bleach I’ve just used on the floor. And Sabine Keller, sporting director of Vesper Racing, standing at my sister’s prep bench in my oldest jumper, frowning at a tortellino.
It’s her twelfth today. The first eleven were the collapsed tents Mamma held up to the light one by one this afternoon, in front of three aunts. The twelfth Mamma folded for her, holding her hand. This is the thirteenth, and she’s made it on her own, at midnight, because she can’t bear to leave a thing unfinished.
“It’s lopsided,” she says.
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s lopsided, Matteo. You’re not looking at it. You’re looking at me.”
“Yes.”
She puts it down on the floured steel with great care, next to the twelve. Then she turns round and leans back against the counter with her hands braced either side of her on the edge, and her chin comes up the way it does in a stewards’ office.
“Your sister told you not to touch her counter.”
“She told me to wipe it down after.”
“That isn’t the same instruction.”
“No.” I put the mop in the bucket. “It isn’t.”
I take my time crossing the kitchen. Eleven steps; I’ve counted them since I was seven. She watches every one.
In September, in Jericho, she put me against her counter and told me where my hands went, and I’ve thought about it most days since. On aeroplanes. On grids. In the bath. The way her voice went quiet. The way my head went quiet with it. The way she didn’t touch me till she’d decided to, and then decided everything.
I’ve thought about doing it back.
Not as a joke. Not to win. Because I’ve seen her face when she’s had nothing left to run, in a bed in Oxford, the night before the leak, and I’ve wanted to give her that again, somewhere that was mine.
This is mine. Every tile. Every pan. The burn on my wrist from this oven when I was fourteen.
I stop in front of her. Not touching.
“In here,” I say, “rule three applies.”
Her eyebrows go up a millimetre. “Lucia is the chef.”
“Lucia has gone home. Tonight I’m the chef.” I put my hands on the edge of the counter either side of hers, close, not quite touching her fingers. “Unless you say carrot. Then I’m a man with a mop.”
Something goes over her face. It isn’t a smile. It’s better. It’s the look she had in a lift in Milan, the second before she said yes to a closing door.
“Go on, then,” says Sabine. “Chef.”
“Hands flat on the counter. Behind you.” I watch her hear it. Her own words, word for word, in my accent. “Keep them there.”
She breathes out through her nose, slowly. Then she lifts her hands off the edge and lays them flat on the steel behind her, palms down in the flour, and her shoulders go back, and her breasts lift under my old jumper, and she looks at me.
“Like this?”
“Like that.” I put two fingers under her jaw and tilt her face up a few degrees, the way she did to me. “If they come off the counter, I stop.”
“For how long?”
“Until I decide.”
Her pupils go wide. I watch it happen. It’s the most expensive thing I’ve ever seen.
I kiss her the way she kissed me that first night. Slow. Like I’ve got all night, because I have, and nobody’s waiting for this kitchen till Monday.
I don’t put my hands on her. I keep them on the counter either side of hers and I take her mouth and nothing else, soft, and then the edge of my teeth on her lower lip, and then my tongue, and she tastes of the Lambrusco Zio Franco wouldn’t stop pouring and of the cinnamon off the last of the panettone. She makes a small sound into my mouth. Her hips come forward off the bench an inch, looking for me.
I pull back.
“Hands,” I say.
“They haven’t moved.”
“I know. You did.”
Her eyes narrow. I smile at her. Then I kiss her again, deeper, and this time she keeps still for it, and I can feel what it costs her in the way her breath shakes against my lips.
I find her throat. The pulse under her jaw that gave her away on a staircase in the first week, going now like the end of a straight. I put my open mouth on it and stay there. I lick it. She says my name under her breath, not quite a word.
Then I take hold of the hem of the jumper.
“Arms up,” I say, and then, “no, wait. Hands stay.” And I push it up her body instead, slowly, over her ribs, until it’s bunched above her breasts, and she’s standing in my sister’s kitchen in a black bra and her good trousers and nothing else, with her palms still flat in the flour behind her.
She’s flushed down to the top of her bra. I’ve seen her in a swimsuit in the English Channel and she’s never looked this naked.
“You did that on purpose,” she says.
“Everything I do in a kitchen is on purpose.”
I open the front of the bra. It’s the kind that does that. I knew; I’ve watched her put it on. Her breasts spill into the light from the pass and I just look for a while, the way she taught me to look, until her breath goes uneven.
Then I bend my head and put my mouth on her.
She arches. Her shoulders come off the shelf behind her, and her hands, I watch them, her hands jump. A centimetre. Then press back down.
I suck her nipple into my mouth, slow, and roll the other one between my finger and thumb, and she makes a sound I’ve only heard from her twice. I go back and forth between them. I take my time. I bite, gently, and she says “Gopfertami,” which I now know is not a polite word, and her knuckles go white against the steel.
“Still there,” I murmur against her skin. “Brava.”
“Don’t you dare praise me—”
“I’ll praise who I like. It’s my kitchen.”
I undo her trousers. I go down on one knee on the floor I’ve just mopped and I take them down her legs with her underwear, all the way, and she lifts one bare foot and then the other for me without being told. I fold them and put them on Lucia’s chair. Clean as you go.
Then I stand back up, and put my hands on her waist, and lift her.
She’s not small. She swims sixty lengths a day. I’ve lifted heavier things out of gravel traps, but not many, and never anything I cared about more. I set her on the edge of the steel bench, next to her thirteen tortellini, and the cold of it makes her gasp out loud.
“Matteo—”
“Hands.”
They’ve come forward to grab my shoulders. She stares at them as if they belong to someone else. Then, very slowly, she takes them back and puts them flat on the steel behind her, braced, her arms straight, so she’s leaning back on them with her whole body open to me.
“Better,” I say. “Open your legs.”
She does. Her eyes don’t leave mine.
She’s wet. I can see it from here, in the light from the pass. All that control. All those clauses. All day in a kitchen full of my aunts, being shown how to fold pasta, being polite in her terrible Swiss Italian, and this underneath it the whole time.
I go down on my knees in front of her. It’s what she did to me in September. She said knees and I went down like I’d been shot. Nobody told me to tonight. I’m doing it because I want to watch her try not to move.
“You may look,” I tell her. “Eyes are permitted.”
She laughs. It cracks in the middle. “You bastard. You remembered.”
“I remember everything you’ve ever said to me with your knickers off.”
I put my hands on her thighs and spread them wider, and I put my mouth on her.
She tastes of salt and heat, and I groan into her like the first time. I lick her the long way, slow, from her entrance to her clit, and she makes a noise that echoes off every pan Lucia owns. I do it again. Again. I don’t hurry. I find her clit and circle it, soft, the way she taught me in Jericho with her fist in my hair, and the difference is that her fist isn’t in my hair. She can’t steer. She has to take whatever I give her.
I give her slowness. I give her the flat of my tongue, steady and light, until her thighs start to tremble under my palms. Then I give her nothing, a breath on her, until she swears at me. Then my tongue inside her, deep as I can, and her heels knock against the cupboard doors under the bench.
“Higher,” she says. “Higher, please, there—”
“No.”
“Matteo.”
“It’s not your kitchen, Direttrice.”
I stay exactly where I am. I fuck her slowly with my tongue and I put my thumb on her clit, not moving it, just pressure, and I look up. Her head’s back against the shelf of copper pans. Her mouth’s open. Her arms are shaking where she’s braced on them, and her hands, her beautiful competent hands that sign everything, are spread white in the flour behind her and they have not moved.
She’s never looked less in charge of anything. She’s never looked more like herself.
I take my mouth away. She cries out, outraged.
“How close are you?”
“You know how close I am—”
“Tell me.”
“Very.” It comes out of her through her teeth. “Very. Please.”
That word. We ration it. She knows exactly what it does to me.
I put two fingers inside her, slow, and curl them, and close my mouth over her clit, and suck.
She comes so hard her hands nearly leave the steel. I feel them try. I feel her whole body try to fold forward over me and her arms lock instead, and she holds herself there, braced, coming against my mouth with her thighs clamped round my ears and a sound tearing out of her that the neighbours in the flats above will be talking about at Epiphany. I keep her there. I don’t stop. I gentle it, soft, softer, until she’s shaking and gasping my name and something in Swiss German that I think is either a prayer or a threat.
Then I keep going.
“No,” she gasps, “no, I can’t, it’s too—”
“Carrot?”
A long, wrecked pause. Her hips are rocking against my mouth on their own.
“No,” says Sabine. “Don’t you dare stop.”
So I don’t. I bring her up again, slower this time, two fingers moving now, deep and patient, my tongue light as anything. It takes a while. I’d give it all night. The second one comes up through her from somewhere a long way down and she doesn’t scream this time. She goes silent. Her back bows off the shelves and her mouth falls open and nothing comes out at all, and I feel it everywhere, round my fingers, under my tongue, in the trembling of the long muscles of her thighs.
When it’s done I kiss the inside of her knee, and stand up, and look at her.
She’s leaning back on her arms on my sister’s counter with her legs open and my jumper rucked under her arms, flushed from her hairline to her breasts, hair half out of its knot, flour on her wrists. She’s breathing like she’s swum the sixty lengths in one go.
“Your hands,” I tell her, “didn’t move.”
She looks at them. Then at me. Her eyes are wet and black and absolutely furious.
“Take your clothes off,” she says.
“Is that an instruction?”
“It’s a request.” A long breath. “Chef.”
I take my clothes off. Jumper, T-shirt, jeans, all of it, onto Lucia’s chair on top of hers, folded. I’m so hard it’s stupid. I’ve been hard since she called the tortellino lopsided.
She watches me the whole time without lifting her palms from the steel. When I step back between her knees her eyes go down my body and stay there, and she wets her lips.
“You haven’t been touched all night,” she says.
“No.”
“Neither of your hands.”
“No.”
“How do you stand it?”
“I learned from someone.” I take myself in my hand and set myself against her, and she’s soaked, and hot, and we both make the same sound. “Keep them there.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.”
I push into her.
Slow. All the way. I watch it happen, her body taking me inch by inch, and then her face, because her face is better. Her eyes fall shut. Her mouth opens. I’m in her to the hilt, standing between her knees at the counter I learned to cook at, and her arms are trembling where she’s braced on them, and she can’t put them round me. She can’t pull me in. She can’t do anything except take it.
I hold still. I put my hands on her hips. I wait until she opens her eyes.
“I’ve wanted this since September,” I tell her. “Your kitchen. Your counter. You said hands, and I stood there gripping the oak like a steering wheel, and all I could think was, one day. One day it’s going to be her.”
“It’s me,” she says, barely a breath.
“It’s you.”
Then I fuck her.
Long and deep and not fast, not yet. All the way out and all the way back in, and the steel bench takes it like it takes everything, dead solid, not a rattle, built in 1971 by a man who knew what kitchens are for. The tortellini skitter in the flour beside her hip. I don’t care. My hands are on her hips, holding her where I want her, and every stroke drives a sound out of her, and her hands stay flat behind her, and that, Dio, that’s the thing. Her hands staying there because I said so. The sporting director of Vesper Racing, who has never let anyone decide anything for her, keeping still for me because she wants to.
“Look at you,” I say. “Look at you doing as you’re told.”
“Shut up—”
“You love it.”
“I—” Her voice breaks on the stroke. “Yes. Yes. I love it. Harder.”
I give her harder. I pull her to the edge of the bench and lean over her and drive into her properly now, deep, my pubic bone grinding against her clit every time, and her heels lock round the backs of my thighs. Her head’s back against the copper pans and they’re ringing faintly, a little bright chorus of them, every time I hit home.
Somewhere above us a neighbour’s television is playing a carol service, very low. I’m going to hell. I don’t care.
“Matteo,” she says. “Matteo, I need—”
“What?”
“My hands. I want my hands on you. Please. I want to hold on to you.”
I stop. Buried in her. Both of us panting. Her eyes are on mine, wide and wet, and she’s asking. She’s asking me.
I take her wrists, one and then the other, out of the flour, and I put them round my neck.
“There,” I say. “Hold on.”
She holds on. Both arms, hard, her floury hands in my hair and on the back of my neck and her mouth on mine, and I pick her up off Lucia’s counter with her legs locked round me and I fuck her standing up in the middle of my sister’s kitchen, and she comes almost at once, shaking, crying out into my mouth with her nails in my shoulders. I hold her through it. I turn us and put her back against the cold door of the walk-in and I don’t stop, and she says yes and don’t stop and I love you into my ear, and that’s it. That’s the end of me. I come buried in her against the fridge door with her name breaking out of me in pieces, and her arms round my neck holding on, and my knees nearly going.
They don’t. I don’t drop her. I’ve never dropped anything in this kitchen.
Afterwards we sit on the floor, because it’s the cleanest floor in Bologna. I mopped it.
She’s in my lap with my jumper back on, inside out, and nothing else. I’ve got my back against the walk-in and my T-shirt on and nothing else. There are flour handprints on my shoulders, on the back of my neck, in my hair. Probably on the fridge door. Definitely on the counter.
“Lucia,” she says, against my collarbone, “is going to know.”
“Lucia knew when she gave me the keys.”
“She said not to touch her counter.”
“She said wipe it down after.” I kiss her hair. “I’ll wipe it down after. I’ll wipe it down three times. Clean as you go.”
She laughs. The big one. The one from the lay-by in Dorset, with her whole body, and I feel it all through me, and I think, not for the first time, that’s my job.
Then she goes quiet, and reaches up over her head without looking, and feels along the edge of the bench until she finds what she’s looking for. She brings it down and opens her hand.
The thirteenth tortellino. Lopsided. Slightly flattened now, with a thumbprint in the dough that might be mine.
“It survived,” she says.
“It’s the best one you’ve made.”
“It’s the worst. It’s been under a racing driver.”
“It’s the only one you made on your own.” I fold her fingers back over it. “Mamma will want to see it.”
“Your mother is never seeing this tortellino.”
“I’ll tell her you made it at midnight.”
“You’ll tell her nothing.” She looks up at me, very serious, flour on her cheekbone, her hair all the way down at last. “That’s an instruction.”
“We’re in my kitchen.”
“We’re on your floor.” She puts her free hand flat on my sternum, the place she always finds. “Different rules.”
I look at her for a long time.
Then I take the card down off the extractor hood. Lucia’s rules. Green felt tip, brown at the edges. I find a pen in the drawer, the cheap one we use for the delivery book, and I hand it to her.
She looks at it. Then at me. Then she writes, small and square, under the bit about the chef:
4. After close, see above, except on the floor.
And under that, S.K., and the date.
She hands me the pen.
I sign under her, big enough that Lucia will be able to read it from the door. That’s the point.
Tomorrow Lucia will find it before she finds anything else. She’ll read it twice, standing at the pass in her coat with Ferrari under her arm, and then she’ll take the biro out of the delivery book and add, underneath, in very large letters:
5. YOU WIPED IT DOWN THREE TIMES AND I STILL KNOW.
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