by Elia Winters
Fox blinked again.
And again.
And had to look away from this strange young man with his equally strange smile, clearing his throat. “Perhaps you’re only imagining what you’re reading between my lines.”
“It’s possible. Projection is a thing.” Even without looking at him...that smile was still in Summer’s voice. “But it’s not the only reason I’m attracted to you.”
“I can’t imagine more than one reason,” Fox muttered.
“I can imagine a thousand. Only I don’t have to imagine, because they’re as real as the color of your eyes and the way you wear your hair.” Summer laughed. “I don’t know how I’m not hyperventilating right now, but I guess I hit ‘fuck it’ mode and can freak out later. Why do you think I wouldn’t be attracted to you?”
“I...”
It was almost instinct for Fox to want to deflect around that, and yet somehow Summer’s quiet faith in his honesty, his straightforwardness, made him at least want to be somewhat truthful.
“I consider myself a non-entity on that front,” he said. “If romance is a playing field, I benched myself long ago. Most do not pay attention to players who are not actively on the field.”
“You’re bad at sports analogies,” Summer teased softly, and Fox scowled.
“I have little interest in the sports ball.”
“...‘the sports ball.’” That prompted a soft snicker, barely repressed. “And there’s another reason. You’re funny without meaning to be. But just because you’ve benched yourself doesn’t mean you aren’t still someone’s favorite MVP.”
“Now who is making terrible sports analogies?”
“I don’t watch the sports ball either.” Summer shrugged one shoulder ruefully. “Swimming turned out to be my thing.”
Fox arched a brow, risking a glance back at Summer. The way he’d tanned and filled out, building into compact athletic musculature with a sort of flowing, liquid grace to it rather than thick-honed bulk...he could see it. Summer cutting through the water in smooth, fluid strokes.
He should not be picturing this.
“So is that how you finally hit puberty?” he shot back. “Swimming?”
“There it is. The defensive barbs because I managed to fluster you when you’re supposed to be made of stone.” Summer was still looking up at the sky, but his lips curled sweetly, almost slyly. “Keep insulting me, Professor Iseya. It just means I get under your skin a little. Although that’s kind of regressing, don’t you think? Child psychology. I thought we universally agreed as a field to stop telling children when a little boy pulls your pigtails and kicks dirt in your face, it means he likes you.”
“I don’t like you!” Narrowing his eyes, Fox growled, tearing his gaze away and glaring at the water.
What was even happening here?
How was this shy, anxious young man sitting here with that smile on his lips, needling at Fox and leaving Fox completely uncertain of how to handle this at all?
Yet that smile never wavered, even as Summer lowered his eyes from the sky, looking at Fox with a strange and quiet frankness, a soft ache in his voice when he said, “I know.”
That...should not sting.
A sudden sharp pang, as if an arrow had been fired straight from Summer’s bleeding heart to Fox’s own.
With a soft hiss, he clenched his jaw and looked anywhere but at Summer. At the mist slowly beginning to burn away from the surface of the lake, hovering like the last remnants of ghosts that refused to let go with the dawn.
“This,” he bit off, “is the most absolutely ludicrous conversation. What makes you think I’m even attracted to men?”
“Hope,” Summer answered simply, softly, and yet everything was in that one word.
Hellfire.
Fox closed his eyes, breathing in and out slowly, if only so he could keep his tone even and calm. He wasn’t accustomed to this—to feeling out of sorts, shaken out of place, his stone foundations cracked and no longer holding him so steady.
Being around Summer was like seeing the sun after decades buried in a subterranean cave.
And the light hurt his eyes, when all he wanted was the quiet and comforting dark.
“You don’t want me, Summer,” he said firmly. “I’m quite old, used-up, and I don’t even know how to be with someone anymore.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Summer murmured.
“Isn’t it?”
Silence, before Summer said slowly, “Maybe I’m wrong... I’m probably wrong. Or maybe you were a good enough teacher that I can figure some things out. But either way, I think you shut yourself away while you needed to...but your protective walls turned into a cage when you didn’t need them anymore, and now you can’t find your way out.”
Shut yourself away while you needed to.
The simple memory of just why he’d shut himself away cut deep, digging down to a tiny pain that lived at his heart. He’d made it tiny deliberately, so he could compact it down into a thing so small it could fit in the palm of his hand, all of that agony crushed down into nothing so that he could never touch too much of it at any one time, its surface area barely the size of a fingerprint.
And then he’d tucked it away, burying it down where he couldn’t reach it.
But those simple words threatened to expose it, even if it meant cutting him open to do so.
No.
He stood, reminding himself to breathe—to breathe, and to wrap himself in his calm. He was nearly twice Summer’s age, and quite accustomed to rebellious boys who thought they were intelligent enough to outsmart their teacher, put him on the spot, leave him floundering. Summer was just an older, larger version of that.
And Fox could not forget that he was the one in control here.
“Is that so?” he asked, looking down at Summer—the top of his head, the hard slopes his shoulders made as he leaned back on his hands. “If that’s your analysis, you aren’t fit to teach elementary school psychology.”
“They don’t teach psychology in elementary school.” Summer chuckled, those firm shoulders shaking. “Insulting me already didn’t work, Professor. Why do you think it’s going to drive me back from the walls this time?”
Fox turned his nose up. “Is that your intent, then? To breach my walls?”
“Not breach them, no.”
Summer tilted his head back again, then, but this time instead of looking at the sky...he looked up at Fox with his eyes full of that sky, the first morning clouds reflected against liquid blue.
“I’m not going to get inside unless you let me, Professor Iseya. But I can stand outside the walls and wait...and ask.”
Fox stared.
He could not be serious.
One minute Summer had arrived to apologize for that egregious and utterly ridiculous kiss, and now he...seemed to be emboldened to some kind of designs on Fox?
All because Fox had not summarily dismissed him from his position?
Absurd.
He pressed his lips together and took a few steps away from Summer, drifting along the lake’s shore, putting more distance between them. Giving himself space—to think, to sort himself out, when he wasn’t accustomed to this.
Wasn’t accustomed to someone who took one look at his walls and saw not someone cold, not someone cruel, distant, detached, inhuman...
But simply that those walls were made not of stone, but of pain.
He did not like it.
His walls had served him quite well for some time, and they did not need to be broken down.
“Do you think Rapunzel was comfortable in her castle?” he asked. “Perhaps, since it was all she knew...it never even felt like a cage.”
Summer let out a sunny little laugh. “Are we talking Grimm’s Rapunzel or Disney’s Rapunzel?”
“Does it matte
r?”
“Considering in one I end up losing my eyesight trying to reach you, and the other I just get hit in the face with a frying pan?” A wickedly amused sound rose from the back of Summer’s throat. “Yes.”
Fox wrinkled his nose. “Please do not project us into the roles of fictional lovers.”
A soft rustle rose, denim moving against grass, the sounds of fabric against skin. It was an oddly intimate sound, one that made Fox remember the sound of flesh on sheets, the pad of soft footsteps in the dark, a quiet room where he never wanted the light to find him and wake him from a dream of being in love.
He couldn’t breathe.
He couldn’t breathe, and he couldn’t seem to move even though everything inside him wanted to run as Summer drew closer, closer, until he was a warmth at Fox’s back, this bright thing that kept trying to chase away the cold touch of ghosts, of yurei whose icy spirit-fingers wrapped around Fox’s neck, choking off his air, but Fox didn’t want to let them go. Didn’t want to let in the breath they were strangling from him.
When if he remembered how to breathe, that one tiny swelling of his chest might just shatter him.
“What about real lovers, then?” Summer asked, husky, low, his breaths and his voice like a lick of flame on a frozen night.
Fox stared blankly straight ahead, curling one hand against his chest, against his shirt, clutching up a handful of the fabric. He couldn’t turn around. Couldn’t face that warmth.
Didn’t Summer realize?
Didn’t he realize if he burned away Fox’s wall of frost...
There was nothing beneath, and he’d just melt and evaporate and wisp away?
“Why?” he whispered. “Why do you want something like that?”
“You told me to be bold.” Soft, entreating, yet...so inadvertently seductive, too. Fox didn’t think Summer realized just how seductive his sweetness was. “I can’t think of anything bolder than asking the most terrifying man in Albin Academy to kiss me.” Summer drew closer, the crackle of grass beneath his feet, his shoulder brushing Fox’s in a sudden quiet shock-jump of sensation before it was gone as Summer stood at his side, looking out over the water as well with that strange, gently melancholy smile on his full red lips. “Once per day.”
Fox watched him from the corner of his eye, brows knitting. “That’s...a bizarre proposition.”
“Is it?” Summer slipped his hands into the pockets of his jeans, his shirt drawing tight against leanly toned musculature, wrinkles seaming against the flex of his biceps. “It’s motivation. If I’m bolder, if I prove to you I can do this job... I get rewarded with a kiss. With one caveat.”
There. One caveat.
All Fox would need to end this ridiculous game.
“And what would that be?” he asked.
“Only if you really want to.” Summer shook his head slightly, messy hair drifting across his eyes. “I couldn’t stand it if you felt like you had to. Like you were obligated, or like...” He trailed off, eyes lidding, voice quieting. “...like I didn’t really care what you want. I think... I kind of think ‘no’ is the most important word we know, and not enough people listen to it.”
“You have to know that I would say no right in this instant, Mr. Hemlock,” Fox said through his teeth. “Which makes your proposition quite pointless, as it is.”
Summer lifted his head, then, once more looking at Fox directly. Considering how he avoided eye contact so pathologically, Fox...didn’t understand why Summer seemed inclined to so often look at him so fully, so intently, when he claimed to be afraid of Fox, claimed to be so anxious he actually found Fox terrifying.
But perhaps that’s what bravery was, Fox thought.
Summer was afraid of him...
And yet still looking at him.
Trying to see him.
And telling him, in his own way...
That for some bizarre reason, he found Fox to be worth facing down that fear.
He didn’t understand.
And he didn’t understand how intently Summer looked at him, those rich blue eyes subtly dilated, turning them smoky.
“Summer,” he whispered. “Call me Summer.”
Fox’s eyes widened. His fingers clenched harder in his shirt.
Did Summer not...understand what using given names meant, to him?
Perhaps he was only half-Japanese, his mother a white American woman who gave him his gray eyes in a rare genetic fluke, but he still knew so much of so many things from his father, things passed down to him like traditions written in blood.
Given names could be used with fondness for children, for family, for close friends who might as well be family...
But in certain circumstances, someone’s name could be a love word.
Intimate and shivering, rolling off the tongue.
He turned his back on Summer, on those eyes that pleaded with him to be that intimate, to be that close, curling his shoulders in and digging his fingers against his shirt as if he could claw down to his heart and grasp it to stop its erratic and sharp beating.
“Mn.”
“You said it once before,” Summer said softly, and Fox caught his breath.
He had.
Letting it roll off his tongue, easy and fluid, but he’d tried not to taste it, tried to simply use it to capture Summer’s attention, to impress on him that he wasn’t someone Summer should ever want.
But he wondered, now.
Wondered now what he’d let slip past his lips without feeling its texture, its flavor.
He glanced over his shoulder. All he could see was Summer’s profile, the tanned slopes and lines of him catching the sun until he glowed. Amber-soft and gentle, and Fox swallowed thickly.
“...Summer,” he said again.
It tasted like sighs. Like the taste not of summer, but the spice of autumn leaves turning and falling and crackling under every step. It tasted like the color of the sky just as the sun touches the horizon at sunset.
And it felt like silk on his lips and tongue, passing over his skin in liquid, smooth caresses.
He didn’t like it.
He didn’t like how close it felt, when he still remembered the taste of Summer’s lips against his own, that same crackle-bright hint of warmth and sharpness, while Summer’s pulse throbbed and trembled underneath his palm.
“Yeah,” Summer said, a low thrum turning his voice husky. “Just like that.”
Closer he stepped. Closer still, until he was a wall of heat at Fox’s back, this vibrant living thing trying to make Fox remember he was alive, too.
“Would it be so terrible?” Summer asked softly. “To kiss me just once per day. Operant conditioning works better with a reward.”
“I...” Breathing was so hard, right now, and Fox didn’t understand this feeling. “I refuse to answer that.”
“Shouldn’t it be easy to say no, then?”
He scowled. “You are baiting me.”
“Maybe a little.” Summer smiled sweetly, just a faint curve of his lips visible in the corner of Fox’s eye. “It’s not every day I get to make the man I was in love with for my entire childhood blush.”
Fox caught a strangled sound in his throat.
He was most certainly not blushing.
His face simply felt warm because of the rising sunlight, the heat chasing the last of the mist from the pond, the trees.
“If you are attempting to pique my pride, Mr. Hemlock, it won’t work.”
“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.
Don’t miss Just Like That by Cole McCade, available now wherever Carina Press ebooks are sold.
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Copyright © 2020 by Cole McCade
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