by Cole McCade
If he stayed, then he would have to love Summer.
He would have to love Summer in the bright, eager way he threw himself at everything, the way he gave his heart without question and without shame, the way he cared so much about other people, the way he fought himself to be brave so often even when it did terrible and terrifying things to him. The sweet way he put up with Fox’s cantankerousness. The way he made Fox want to be bright, too, to remember how it felt to be someone who created things, who helped others, who touched and held and cradled others’ feelings tenderly instead of cutting them off so cold and living numb.
But if he had all of that, he...
He would just lose it again.
Just like he’d lost Michiko.
And if that happened again...
He wouldn’t survive it.
He wouldn’t survive that shattering of his heart a second time.
He sat on the shore of Whitemist Lake, staring into the water as he pulled up flowers, threaded them together, letting his hands move out of habit to give himself something to do. Something to keep himself occupied so his thoughts wouldn’t run in circles as endless as the loops he formed with delicate flower stems.
These hands...these hands had done so many things in his lifetime. Splashed about the shallows of Joudogahama. Drawn kanji in wet sand. Written line after line of intense studious work, throwing himself into his schooling. Learned herbs by touch and texture, by their scent when they bruised, by the softness on the underside of their leaves. Held slender fingers in his own, caressed hair back from a delicate face.
Slipped a wedding ring onto a slim finger.
Slid a wedding ring off his own, wrenching it away hard enough to rip his knuckles and not even sure, now, where he’d left it in his grief, his denial.
Touched the strong line of a tanned jaw, a muscular throat, the beat of a wild young heart and the powerful lines of a beautiful, lean body.
Stroked the shape of laughing lips.
Yes, these hands had done so much...
...yet they couldn’t seem to reach back to the one who was reaching for him so desperately with all his heart.
And that one wouldn’t let him run away, he realized.
When he heard the soft scuff of footsteps at his back, that familiar stride, before Summer sank down to sit next to him, close enough to make the blades of grass between them shift and tickle and poke against the undersides of Fox’s slacks.
Summer draped his arms over his upraised knees, looking out over the water, expression thoughtful. “Hi,” was all he said, quiet and neutral.
“Hi,” Fox said, and immediately felt more the clumsy old fool for it.
And rather than say anything else, he just...plucked up more flowers, and threaded them into the slowly thickening crown.
Summer glanced at him, darkened blue eyes on his hands, the work, before he asked, “Making a wish?”
“I don’t know yet,” Fox whispered, and wove another blossom in. “I just...don’t know.”
Summer let that lie between them for several long seconds, then looked away again, watching the water, his brows lowering. “I never made wishes here, when I was a boy,” he murmured. “With throwing the flower crowns in for the dead girl’s wedding so she’ll hear my plea. The story of Isabella always made me so sad. That she couldn’t be with the girl she loved, and they called her a witch...so she drowned herself. Don’t you think it just...hurts her, people asking her for things when she could never have what she wanted?”
“Perhaps that’s where the legend came from,” Fox answered. “Wanting to believe that someone who lost everything would feel for others’ plights enough to want to spare them her suffering.”
He almost laughed to himself, then.
If only he could claim such selfless reasons for his own denials.
If only he could say he was trying to spare Summer the pain he’d already known himself...instead of trying to protect his own shriveled heart.
He pushed the thought down, plucked another flower, ran his thumb along its fronded petals. “But Isabella was real. And her story is not at all what the legend says.”
Summer’s head came up sharply enough to make his tousled hair tumble across his eyes. He stared at Fox, with that wide-eyed curiosity that made him such a bizarre mixture of ingenue and minx. “She was real? What happened to her?”
“She died of old age many, many decades after her supposed suicide,” Fox said, tracing his thumb along the flower’s stem, then inserting it into the band of the crown, weaving it in and out until it was securely affixed, spacing the heads of the blossoms so they formed an even circlet among the green. “With her lover by her bedside. When the girls were forbidden to be together, they ran away to New York City, and lived long, happy lives as lovers and partners. Neither ever drowned themselves. They chose another path, instead.”
Summer inhaled audibly—then let out a soft laugh, pressing his knuckles over his mouth. “I... I like that a lot better. But...if you know the legend’s not real, why are you making a crown to make a wish?”
“Because,” Fox admitted, the words like spears in his throat, digging deep. “All I ever wanted was what she had. A long, happy life with someone I loved...and that was taken from me.” His breaths were barbed, his throat closing, and he clenched his fist against the crown, the stems in his grasp crushing wetly, the petals crumpling against his palm. “It was taken, and I don’t know how to get it back.”
He glared out at the water—but the water was suddenly somehow running together, the reflections of the gray, moody sky in the surface of the pond turning into fuzzy watercolor impressions, and he closed his eyes tightly, struggling to push it down, to ignore it.
But Summer wouldn’t let him escape this feeling.
Not when that warmth drew closer, settling shoulder to shoulder...before Summer’s hand pressed hot to the small of his back, and Summer’s voice was a close and intimate thing in the dark space behind his eyelids.
“You don’t get it back, Fox,” he whispered. “What’s gone is gone...and instead of trying to get it back, you have to let it go and build something new. Every new thing is its own thing. You can’t...turn it into something else.”
Fox knew what he was really saying.
You can’t turn me into her.
And he didn’t think he wanted to.
Not when deep down, he was...he was angry at her, and he couldn’t even understand why.
Or why he’d been taking that anger out on Summer all this time.
Breathing in harshly, Fox lifted his head, glaring at Summer miserably through the wet sheen over his eyes. “I don’t know how to make something new,” he bit off. “I don’t know how to be anything other than cold and selfish and horrible. Do you know what I thought, when I realized you were about to ask Walden for the guidance counselor job?”
Summer watched him with those soft eyes. So soft, but soft things were so easily hurt by rough handling, and Fox didn’t know how to be delicate right now.
“Tell me,” Summer urged gently. “It’s okay, Fox.”
But it wasn’t. Fox smiled bitterly, a brittle and awful thing. “I thought, ‘You can’t. You can’t, because the school will need me to stay and if I stay, then you’ll need me,’ and I can’t stand that. You needing me.” He let out a harsh bark of laughter. “I don’t know how you can need me when I’m not... I’m not anything, I’m not anything anyone needs, I’m just awful when I know damned well that you would be the best guidance counselor this school has seen. Even more, I know you. I know it would make you happier than teaching, and yet...my first thought was of me.”
He expected that handsome, bright face to crumple with hurt.
With betrayal.
Yet instead, Summer only sighed patiently, shaking his head.
Before his arms came around Fox tigh
tly, drawing him in. Drawing him in the way Fox usually drew Summer in with his anxiety attacks, only somehow now it was Summer wrapping around him and resting his chin to the top of Fox’s head; Summer enveloping him with the half-crushed flower crown between them, with its broken cloying scent rising up to fill the space around them.
“You know me,” Summer murmured, his voice a soft vibration between them, “because you pay attention to me. Because you care what makes me happy and unhappy. And caring that much scares you, because caring means you can be hurt. But I’m going to tell you what my mother told me.” Strong arms tightened, an encouraging, gentle squeeze, as if Summer could knead all his bright, effusive emotions into Fox. “You want what anyone wants. To never hurt again. But that’s not possible unless we shut ourselves off from feeling at all...and I think you’ve been shut off long enough, Fox. I think you know that, too...and it frightens you, but it’s okay to be scared.”
“Just because it’s acceptable doesn’t mean I want it,” Fox hissed—but he couldn’t pull away from Summer, couldn’t seem to break back from that gentle yet sheltering hold. “Something as old and broken as I am...you can’t fix, Summer. You can’t fix me just by caring enough. You’ll never make me someone whole enough to care for you the way you care for me.”
“What you don’t seem to understand is that I’m not trying to fix you.” Here, now, was Summer’s strength, his steadiness, how his anxiety seemed to vanish when Fox was the one to break down, leaving Summer the one speaking in calm, soothing tones, giving back that warmth and care he seemed to possess in infinite supply. “I love you just as you are, Fox. Broken bits and all. I don’t want to make you someone else. I want you, and for you to care for me as you would...not as anyone else.”
No three words should cut with such knifelike keenness.
The last person who had said them to him had said them idly, an afterthought, on the way out the door to an ordinary day that would turn into a shattering, life-changing night.
Fox jerked back, staring at Summer. Staring at him as if those words would crumble Summer into nothing before his very eyes, but there was only a solemn young man looking at him with his heart written on his face and...and...
Fox was shaking.
He was shaking, everything in him building up to a scream, his lips parting and—
And the sky crashing open in a cracking roar of thunder, as if it was calling out for him, as if it cried in his voice. Heart slamming, he stared up at the sky; so did Summer, as lightning slashed across the darkened clouds and the storm that had been building since morning finally broke.
The rain came down as if a bucket had been tipped over, sluicing down in icy slashes. Summer yelped, covering his head, then stumbled to his feet, reaching for Fox’s hand with a laugh, rain soaking his hair to his skull in a black cap, immediately darkening his shirt to a translucent layer of pale blue that let golden skin shine through.
“Come on!” he gasped, and before Fox could protest he found himself hauled up, dragged along, dropping the flower crown from lax fingers to send it flying into the lake, his dress shoes slipping on the wet grass but they were dashing, running, darting inside and he felt like those words were on his heels, chasing him, nipping at his ankles, even if he could never escape them when the one who had spoken them held him so fast.
As if Summer would never let him go.
They didn’t stop until they reached Fox’s suite, tumbled inside, dripping all over the floor. Summer shook himself like a puppy, then let out a breathless laugh.
“I kind of feel like nature had a little color commentary for my big confession,” he said sheepishly. “And she didn’t approve.”
Fox flinched, pushing loose strands of wet hair back from his face. “You...you...”
You love me, he tried to say.
But he couldn’t seem to get the words out.
He didn’t need to, because Summer went quiet, bowing his head, but still watching him with that hopeful gaze. “Yeah,” he said thickly. “I do. I love you, Fox.”
Being loved shouldn’t feel like heartbreak.
And Fox knew exactly how broken he was, now, that he couldn’t say those words back.
Couldn’t say anything to them at all.
Couldn’t find his voice past the shattering, cracking feeling inside him, and so...
Rather than speak, Fox kissed him.
Lingering, slow, he kissed him as if this was the first time and would be the last; as if he had to make this kiss count for every kiss he might never know again in the future. He tasted every tiny crease in Summer’s lips, pressed his teeth gently against the soft giving flesh of his mouth, suckled softly at his lower lip and stole inside where Summer always seemed filled with some intoxicant that rode his breath and slipped into Fox and took him over until his senses were full of Summer and only Summer.
He didn’t have words for these feelings inside him. He couldn’t stand words for them, when words would make them real. Real enough to hurt. Real enough to be torn away, to become something fragile he could break or crush or ruin the same way he kept ruining those soft feelings Summer dashed against Fox’s walls again and again.
No...he couldn’t tell Summer what he felt.
So he showed him.
With every kiss, every slow deep exploration of yielding lips, he tried to show him. With every touch, every tracery of Fox’s fingertips over Summer’s pulse-pounding throat, over his shoulders, the shivering sensitive spots Fox had memorized over his chest and ribs and stomach, with that suntanned skin gliding so hot and firm beneath his fingertips, with Summer shuddering and sighing out his pleasure as their flesh made friction and charged kinetic energy shivered between them like static... Fox tried to say what he couldn’t say.
That Summer’s love was too good for Fox.
But that Fox was too needy, too greedy to reject it.
He didn’t know when he’d become so desperate for this beautiful strange summer child of a man, but somehow Summer had become a compulsion, pulling on him in ways that made him feel like his blood moved to Summer’s rhythm, his body drawn to his magnetism. The way Summer sighed and melted for him, so luxuriously pliant as Fox kissed him, one step at a time, into the bedroom...
How could he give himself so sweetly to someone who gave nothing back at all?
And so Fox tried to give.
In his own way, he tried to give, tumbling Summer back to the bed, stripping him in a fevered rush until that sensuously compact, tightly muscled body lay bare beneath him, touching every inch of him until he knew how Summer tasted in the hollow of his throat, the peak of his collarbone, the flat round circle of his nipple, the tight skin of his inner thigh, the sensitive underside of his wrist. Fox tasted him everywhere, mapped his body with his tongue, savored when Summer whispered his name, when he dug his fingers into Fox’s hair, when he spread his thighs until he was a portrait of beautifully luscious obscenity, when he betrayed an erogenous zone with an arch of his back and a shudder of his hips and his hard, straining cock leaking clear, tart-scented wetness from the tip, splattering against the fluxing ridges of his toned belly.
Irresistible.
Enthralling.
And Fox only hoped Summer could feel how beautiful Fox found him in every touch of lips, of hands...of desperate fingers that sought out Summer’s heat from within, that touched him just to feel how tight he gripped as Fox plunged and twisted and sought inside Summer’s body with wet-slicked fingers; he was so hot inside, like he was trying to melt Fox into him, and the way he threw his head back, the way he twined his arms together over his head and rocked his hips up into every slow thrust, the way he made those needy keening sounds when Fox slowed down to deny him then thrust hard to give him satisfaction the moment he seemed on the verge of breaking...lovely. So lovely the way Summer gave himself up with such bliss, such abandon, putting himself so wholly in Fo
x’s hands that Fox could have done anything to him, he thought, and Summer would welcome it no matter what.
When all Fox wanted...
All Fox wanted was to love him without feeling like he was too broken to even try without leaving Summer as empty and hollow and shattered as himself.
Please, he thought as he gathered Summer’s thighs around his hips, as he kissed his name from Summer’s honeysuckle-dripping lips, as he lifted that receptive body into his own, as he found that perfect point of heat and buried himself, melted himself, sank himself into the tight-slick fire of Summer’s flesh. Pleasure was more than pleasure, his flesh almost an afterthought of building, coiling tension when his heart was tearing itself apart, ripping itself open, destroying itself in violent shredding beats that rushed in rhythm with their flowing bodies.
As if the only way he knew how to give himself to Summer was to break himself.
And put those fragile, shattered, jagged-edged pieces into those tender hands.
Again and again, losing himself in the sheer drugging immersion that was Summer, drowning himself in the pleasure of his cries, of his grasping hands, of his rushing breaths, of his needy flesh that tried to devour Fox whole and sucked him in deeper, deeper, until his thighs turned weak and his knees shook with the sheer erotic intensity of it and Fox hardly recognized his own voice, calling out desperately as he arched over Summer and buried his face in his throat and tried to find his way to that deep place inside Summer where all of his brightness, his beauty was born. Please.
Please don’t let me ruin this.
...please don’t let me ruin him.
Chapter Fifteen
Fox, Summer thought to himself, didn’t look very well.
Maybe he was coming down with something from the few minutes they’d been out in the rain yesterday, but...he looked grayer, somehow. Sunken. Ashen, even, in the dim light filtering through the curtains, the storm still raging outside and leaving the day swallowed in gloom.