by Cole McCade
“I’m not.”
Then Fox felt something he hadn’t felt in decades:
Fingers in his hair.
Just the lightest touch, catching one of the damnable tendrils that would never stay in the clip, lifting it and making him shudder and tense with the prickling feeling of the strands moving against his neck, kissing his skin, then pulling back to leave him strangely deprived of touch, as if the sensitized flesh was achingly aware that it wasn’t in contact with...skin, warmth, texture.
“I’m just riding my bravery until it runs out.” Summer stroked his thumb down the strands captured in his fingers, handling them delicately. “Think about it, Professor Iseya. I’ll be ready for class tomorrow. Tell me then.”
Then: the feather-soft sensation of his hair free-floating, falling, drifting down to lay against his neck and coil over his shoulder again.
The quiet fall of footsteps, whispering and sighing against the grass.
The wild pounding of Fox’s heart, a drumbeat calling the day into existence.
He turned.
He turned, but Summer was already gone.
And already...
Already, the world was turning gray again.
Chapter Three
Summer barely made it to the suite he’d been assigned to before he nearly hyperventilated.
Holy fuck.
Holy fuck.
He dropped down onto the sofa in the blessedly empty—and ridiculously messy—living room and buried his face in his hands. His heart felt like it would burst, the walls worn thin as paper and ready to shatter.
He’d just—
And then he’d—
And then he’d—
What had come over him?
Just. He. God. What.
When he’d been a boy, the closest he’d ever gotten to Professor Iseya was when he’d scurried up to the desk to hand in assignments under that watchful, cutting eye, feeling as if judgment was hanging over his head like the Sword of Damocles, waiting to drop down and pierce him right through.
Back then Professor Iseya had been an inscrutable taskmaster, larger than life, greater than human.
But knowing what Summer knew now, seeing him, understanding what was behind that stony outer exterior...
He just saw Professor Iseya as a man.
And that man was far more enticing than any childish fantasy or ideal.
Enough to make Summer want to learn what was really behind that cold mask when before, he’d never truly realized it was a mask at all.
Especially when for just a moment, that stone had cracked.
Iseya had responded to him, even if it was with flustered confusion and irritation.
And that feeling...
That feeling had been addictive enough to make Summer bold.
Even if he’d been hyperventilating in the back of his mind, that heady sensation of seeing every minute reaction to him—from the way Iseya wouldn’t quite look at him head-on to the soft, deliciously deep way he said Summer’s name to that annoyed blush—had pushed him further and further toward a reckless edge.
If he wanted to break it down in psychological terms, he’d been riding the dopamine rush. Dopamine could override common sense, sometimes in ways that made people brave, sometimes in ways that made them careless, reckless, deeply unwise.
Summer wasn’t sure which he was.
Nor was he sure his head wouldn’t explode any moment now, either, when he had just—yes, okay, apologize for being a dick and kissing him, then act like a bigger dick as if he could somehow flirt through psychoanalysis? Mission not accomplished.
The only thing he was entirely sure of?
Was that he was terrified of hearing Iseya’s answer in the morning, his entire body prickling like a live wire.
He already knew it would be a solid no.
That didn’t stop him from hoping, even as he buried his face in his hands and breathed in quick shallow breaths through his fingers until he no longer felt like he was going to pass right out on the floor.
He tensed, though, as the sound of the front door latch echoed over the room, a click and a jiggle before the door creaked open. He peeked over his fingers. He hadn’t quite processed when he’d been told who his roommate would be, but now he almost flinched as a tall, somewhat slouched figure stepped into the room, mumbling absently to himself and apparently ticking something off on his fingers one by one.
Dr. Liu.
Oh, God.
Summer was going to have to get a padlock for his room if he didn’t want the things in it to end up on fire.
At least that explained the disaster of the suite.
He’d always imagined, as a kid, that the two-person suites the single teachers shared would be...bigger. More officious. But they were just homey little rooms with dark, worn, unvarnished hardwood floors to match the dark, worn, unvarnished hardwood walls, with a combined living and dining space, an open kitchen, two bedrooms linked by a bathroom with en suite access from both sides.
Everything had that feeling of old spaces, of haunted spaces, quiet and whispered; the kind of place that had lace curtains and ghosts and a fifth step between every floor that creaked when the shades walked on it at night. The window in Summer’s room looked out over the cliff and onto a valley full of trees, bisected by a winding coil of river; if he remembered right, the other room had no window, running along the interior hall.
But the entire living room was filled with books.
Books, a little lab paraphernalia, science magazines, tossed on every surface—the dining table, the sofa, the coffee table, the easy chairs, even on the kitchen island separating it off from the rest of the space. They’d all been left open to one page or another, and bristled with Post-it notes in a rainbow of colors sticking out everywhere. At least a dozen of them had pens left in their open creases.
That wasn’t as bad as the clothing thrown everywhere, though.
Shirts, jackets, pants, tossed over the backs of chairs or piled in a heap beneath the living room window, and Summer... Summer was pretty sure that was a pair of boxer-briefs stuffed into a potted plant next to the small flatscreen television.
Whomever had left Dr. Liu unsupervised clearly hadn’t been thinking with their forebrain.
Liu himself stopped in the doorway, blinking at Summer owlishly through his oversized eyeglasses, his dark brown eyes narrowing as he leaned forward and peered at Summer through the untrimmed shag of his fluffy black hair. He was unshaven, scruffy, a mess of stubble dotting his cheeks and jaw, and that stubble made a scratchy sound as he scrubbed the backs of his knuckles against his chin.
“I know you,” he said quizzically.
“Er...yeah. Hi.” Summer dropped his hands from his face and offered a smile, a sheepish wave. “I’m Summer Hemlock, the new psych TA.” He stood, navigating around the coffee table to offer his hand. “I used to be a student here.”
“Oh, yes, I remember you.” Liu looked down at Summer’s hand with a confused stare, as if he didn’t know what to do with it, then absently adjusted his glasses as he pushed the door closed behind him. “You’ve gotten very big.”
“Not that big.” Summer let his hand drop, then glanced around the suite. “Um...do you need help around here? It’s a little...”
“A little what?” Liu blinked.
“Messy,” Summer said.
“Oh.” Another blink, and then Liu looked around the suite as if seeing it for the first time. “I hadn’t noticed,” he said.
Before shrugging, beelining for his bedroom, and disappearing inside, shutting the door with a firm click of the latch.
Summer stared after him, before smiling faintly.
You wouldn’t, would you.
At least it was Liu. He wasn’t sure he’d have been able to room with any of the other
older teachers, when he’d likely revert back to the stammering boy he’d been and never come out of his room, too anxious to be around someone who was hard-coded in his brain as an authority figure.
Liu, though...
Liu was kind of like apples.
Harmless on the outside, mostly. Sweet, sometimes tart. But apples had sugar-cyanide compounds that could be digested into lethal hydrogen cyanide, and too many apples could kill someone.
Twenty-two.
Summer thought that’s what the number was.
Twenty-two.
And just like apples, Dr. Liu was only dangerous in large doses.
Or when left unattended in the chem lab.
Summer could live with that.
It wasn’t really any different from having Liu for a teacher, all those years ago—and he smiled to himself as he bent to start gathering up the clothing scattered on the floor.
Even when things changed, they stayed the same.
* * *
It took him well into the day to finish cleaning the apartment, including scrubbing the kitchen and bathroom from top to bottom; Liu needed a keeper, and apparently that was Summer’s job now.
But halfway through digging out what looked like crusted fire extinguisher foam from the bathroom sink, a heavy thump sounded outside the suite’s door, followed by a sharp rattle on the door.
He lifted his head, scrubbing the back of his forearm over his sweaty forehead, and listened—but there was no sign Liu had even heard, let alone that he was coming out of his room.
Summer peeled out of his yellow rubber gloves, pitched them onto the sink, and stepped out to open the living room door.
No one there.
Empty hallway.
But his thick, bulky suitcase sat right there in front of the door.
The suitcase he’d left in Professor Iseya’s suite, and had been too nervous to retrieve.
There was a note tacked to it now, though, folded on a piece of softly textured, semi-translucent paper. Summer tilted his head, frowning as he picked it up and flicked it open on a short note written in angular, slanting handwriting with a certain razor-like grace to it.
Simple black letters.
Two words, and nothing more.
Challenge accepted.
His chest seized. His fingers clenched, before he hastily unclenched them, smoothing the delicate paper.
What...?
Did...did Professor Iseya mean...?
His mouth dried. His chest hurt, and he thought...oh.
Oh.
Then, tomorrow...
Tomorrow, if he was brave enough...
Maybe, just maybe...
Professor Iseya might just kiss him.
* * *
Summer was a wreck for the rest of the day.
He finished cleaning the suite, rattling between one wall and the next in a mess of nervous energy just to keep himself busy. If he didn’t keep moving, he’d probably break down.
So he cleaned. He unpacked and put away his things. He shelved Liu’s books on the low built-in shelves lining the walls of the living room, and just hoped he left them in some kind of order that would let Liu find what he was looking for when he came back to...whatever he was doing. He headed into town on a short drive to stock up on groceries, pick up a few necessities, and buy his own sheets and duvet to replace the institutional ones provided by the school, stripping bare white to instead pile his bed high in deep oceanic blue threaded through with star-shot silver, and enough pillows to bury himself in until he’d wedge himself in place and not be able to kick and toss and turn all night.
That didn’t mean he didn’t, by the time he wore himself out, showered, and threw himself into bed.
Sprawling on his back, walled in on either side by pillows and surrounded by the vaguely chemical scent of new bedding with its fabric dye still fresh, he stared up at the ceiling—wood beam rafters, when he was so used to the white stucco of dorm room after dorm room. He’d probably stayed at school at the University of Maryland longer than he needed to, just...
Trying to find his way.
Trying to figure out what he wanted to do.
No—trying to figure out who he wanted to be.
He should know, after all these years.
But all he’d ever known was what he didn’t want.
He didn’t want to be the quiet boy everyone had snickered at because he was poor, a local townie, his mother insisting on sending him to the boarding school because it was what his father had wanted, before he’d died. He’d been an administrator at Albin once, long ago—before even Professor Iseya’s time. Albin was part of Roark Hemlock’s legacy, and in some ways it was part of Summer’s.
His father’s name was on a plaque in the main hall, below a painted portrait.
That still didn’t mean Summer ever felt like he’d belonged here.
Like he’d belonged anywhere in Omen, as if the small gray town had made him a small gray person and if he just got out, he’d be...he’d be...
He didn’t know.
Bolder.
Happier.
Someone with a purpose, instead of someone who just coasted along day by day, trying to figure out how to fit in, how to get by, what he should be doing with this illusion of a life while he was busy trying to find a real one.
He hadn’t found anything out in Baltimore except the realization he wasn’t cut out for his original career choice in forensics; that he couldn’t handle the blood, couldn’t stare down the horrors of humanity without breaking down into a hyperventilating anxiety attack. So he’d transferred his psych credits into the only other MA track where they’d still count: education.
That didn’t mean he wanted to teach.
Or that he knew what he wanted at all.
The only thing he’d brought home with him was a tan, a few more inches in height...
And, he guessed, a resurgence of that old crush, even if it felt like a wholly new thing.
It had to be a wholly new thing, when he was seeing Iseya with wholly new eyes.
He idly ran his fingertips over his stomach, touched the fingers of his other hand to his lips, remembered...
Professor Iseya’s mouth.
That hand on his throat.
But more...
The way Iseya’s breath had caught, wild and warm and quick, when Summer had captured just a few strands of that tumbling wispy black hair he’d always wanted to touch, to bury his fingers in, to tease down from its clip and wrap himself up in until he and Iseya were tangled together inextricably.
That moment.
That moment had told him he was very much interested in the man Iseya was now, rather than the legend he’d been back then.
Summer wasn’t yet sure what to do with that.
But as he rolled over and buried his face in the pillows and hugged one close to his chest, he hoped...
He hoped tomorrow he would have the chance to find out.
* * *
Fox had never been on friendly terms with sleep.
Not when sleep brought memories.
Not when sleep brought dreams, horrible things of a lightless dark where there was no air and only the choking, frigid sensation of water pouring endlessly down his throat and into his lungs while he fought for eternities for breaths that would never come.
Not when sleep somehow never let him escape from the awareness that his bed was painfully empty, when he rolled over in the middle of the night to drape his arms against a warm body.
And there was no warm body there.
He stared out the window of his bedroom, in his private family suite that he should have given up long ago and yet the school administrators had allowed him to keep out of something too close to pity for his pride to accept. Hour by hour, inch by inch, the shafts
of moonlight pouring through the window slid across his bed, marking minutes in cutouts of light and shadow, time moving forward while Fox himself didn’t move at all.
His hand stretched across the bed, splayed against the sheets, resting in that empty space.
He didn’t remember the shape that was supposed to fill it anymore, when he’d thought he always would.
When he’d thought that hole in his life would always be the same, an outline so precise, so perfect, it would always hold the imprint of her.
But that imprint was fuzzy around the edges, now. Time had eroded away the shape of that hole until it was less precise and somehow more just an impression, an idea, a vague concept without specifics, and he thought...
He thought he was betraying something, somehow.
Thought he was betraying himself.
His memories, the love he’d thought would be forever.
Simply by letting that empty space inside him go vague.
And simply by remembering the taste of another on his lips, a startling and new thing that wouldn’t leave him over a day after Summer had caught Fox’s chin in his hand and made him remember what it was like to breathe in tandem with someone else.
It should hurt more, he thought dimly.
It should hurt, should cut so deep he bled.
But it didn’t.
It only left him frustrated, and wondering.
If he was more upset that he missed her...
Or more upset at the realization that he didn’t.
But he didn’t know what should take the place of that feeling, now.
Or who he was without it.
When he felt as though his entire self was just papier-mâché painted in a thin and crumbling layer over that empty hollow of grief.
Strip that away...
And what was left?
He didn’t know.
And he was almost angry with that bright and beautiful blue-eyed boy...
...for forcing him to ask.
Chapter Four
Summer was up before his alarm.
And changed clothes six times before he headed out to meet Iseya for morning planning.