by Cole McCade
Fox thought maybe, one day, he could be—when at first he’d thought it was a lost cause.
So why did that make him feel so empty?
As if something precious was slipping through his fingers, water pouring out of his hands no matter how he tried to stop it.
He leaned back in his desk chair, toying a pen between his fingers and watching as Summer paused at Eli Schumaker’s desk, offering a warm smile that Eli answered a bit uncertainly, before stretching up to murmur something in Summer’s ear. Summer listened with grave attention, his expression utterly focused, before nodding and murmuring something in return, cocking his head, messy hair falling in a dark shag across his eyes—eyes that, Fox noted, still subtly avoided direct eye contact, focusing somewhere else on Eli’s face. Then he tapped something on Eli’s worksheet, before stealing his pencil and scribbling something down. Then, at a nod from Eli, he grinned and straightened, moving away.
And pausing, lifting his head, catching Fox’s eye.
Before smiling brilliantly, his eyes creasing and glittering with warmth, before turning away.
Fox huffed under his breath, scowling, looking away, pitching his pen onto the desk.
Summer really needed to stop being so obvious.
They didn’t speak again, though, until the third period let out, and Fox settled to lean his hip against the edge of his deck, propping the papers he’d just collected against his thigh and stacking them neatly into place.
Summer settled down next to him, resting almost thigh to thigh, his strong, square hands gripping the desk to either side of his hips.
“You,” he said sunnily, “have been watching me all day.”
Fox tossed him a glower. “I’m your supervisor. It’s my job to monitor your progress and your performance.”
With a playful smile, Summer rolled his head toward Fox, resting his cheek against his upthrust shoulder, the taut muscle straining against the linen of his crisply ironed off-white button-down. “So that’s the only reason?”
“Why are you so annoyingly confident around me?” Fox threw back. “I can make any other teacher in this school quiver in his boots with one look. And yet you, the most anxious, awkward person I have ever met, refuse to cower appropriately.”
“It’s simple,” Summer said, before his voice dropped, low and soft and just a touch heated, hungry, husky. “I’m the only one who knows what you taste like.”
Why, that damned—“Are you so certain of that?” Fox bit off, slitting his eyes.
Summer’s smile vanished. A touch of hurt flashed in his eyes, before he looked away, quiet, expression going still and empty and carefully blank.
“No,” he murmured. “I guess I’m not.”
Hell and damnation.
Fox, you are an asshole.
He twisted to set his papers down on the desk, then shifted to settle closer to Summer, until their shoulders and arms pressed in close-held warmth and his thigh rested against the knuckles curled against the edge of the desk, Summer’s hand hot through Fox’s slacks.
“You are,” Fox said. “You’re the first one brave enough to even try.”
Summer lifted his head, haunted eyes watching Fox with unspoken questions, before he murmured, “So anyone will do as long as they’re brave enough to keep pushing at you?”
“...no.” That...shouldn’t hurt so much, or hit so close to home, when Fox had been wondering that himself. “Anyone else wouldn’t get a second chance to keep pushing at me. You puzzle me in more ways than one, Summer...and one of those ways is that I cannot seem to tell you to, quite frankly, go fuck yourself and give up on this bizarre notion you have of wanting me.”
Summer recoiled slightly, blinking, face blanking.
Before he snickered, covering his mouth and trying to hold it in but failing.
“I’ve never heard you say anything worse than ‘damn’ before,” he said through his fingers, muffled. “And ‘hellfire.’ Always hellfire, every time you get annoyed.”
Fox rolled his eyes. “Please do not act like a child and remind me exactly why I should be against allowing someone your age to be so forward with me.”
That just made Summer laugh more, eyes delighted and bright. “It’s not my age that bothers you and you know it. It’s that you can’t scare me off.”
“Not for lack of trying,” Fox growled.
“You really only have to do one thing to make me give up, you know.”
“And what, pray tell, would that be?”
Summer shrugged, the corners of his lips curling wistfully. “Just tell me no.”
That was the crux of it, wasn’t it?
Every time, Summer had given him ample opportunity to say no.
And every time, Iseya had growled and glared and gone stiff...
...and not even hinted at that one word that would end it all.
He made a soft sound in the back of his throat, and this time he was the one to look away. “...I know that,” he bit off, and Summer only chuckled.
“Good.”
They said nothing else for several moments, just sitting in the quiet classroom, with its scents of old wood and chalk dust and old paper, worn pages.
Until Summer murmured, “Would it be okay if I used your office for an hour or two after last bell tomorrow?”
Fox lifted his brows. “For what?”
“Counseling,” Summer admitted sheepishly. “Eli’s agreed to talk to me, and I think it could help.”
“That’s not your job,” Fox pointed out. “Be careful. I know you mean well, but at times overstepping boundaries with students can create problems no matter what your intent might be.”
“Don’t worry. Everything above board. I just...” He shook his head. “They need somebody, Fox.”
He froze, then, his breaths drawing in sharp and fast, and darted a glance at Fox. “I...sorry. Professor Iseya.”
But Fox just looked into those twilight-shot eyes, and let the feeling of his name on someone else’s tongue settle over him.
Coming from Summer...
It was like the taste of warm caramel on a crisp cool apple, that tart-sweet feeling exploding over the tongue at that first burst of broken skin.
It shouldn’t feel so luscious to hear someone else saying his name.
So intimate.
And he let his hand fall to rest next to Summer’s on the edge of the desk, their pinky fingers just touching. “You can say it,” he murmured. “And you may use my office tomorrow.”
Summer’s gaze darted back and forth, searching, deep, his lips parting, red suffusing his cheeks, the tips of his ears. “Fox,” he said again, and Fox’s stone heart beat hard enough for its outer granite shell to crack.
“Just like that,” he said, and leaned in toward Summer, drawn by the warmth of him, by the way he lingered over Fox’s name like a prayer. “Say it just like that.”
“Fox,” Summer breathed, reverent, hot, as the tips of their noses touched.
And Summer closed the last distance between them to seal their lips together in a burning, molten lock.
Heat rushed over Fox as if it had been waiting to consume him, to ignite him, dragging him under in simmering sensations that stole his air and left his lungs seared, left his entire body aching. Summer shouldn’t be able to do this to him with just the simple touch of sweet lips; with the slow needy way Summer teased at his mouth with hot sounds in the back of his throat, practically begging Fox to taste him, to seek inside him, to take control.
Against the desk, their pinky fingers overlapped, interlaced, curling together.
And Fox gave in, letting Summer’s magnetism draw him into letting go of his tight control of himself.
Summer’s sweetness was in every honeyed wet taste of his lips, in the slickness of his tongue, in the depths of his mouth. Absolutely indece
nt, in his wanton willingness, in the way he opened for Fox—the way he leaned into him, eager hands reaching up to cup Fox’s face, teasing back into his hair, threatening to send it ripping free from its tie.
Fox nearly arched into the sensation of fingers against his scalp, letting out a little groan that melted between their lips, his body vibrating with Summer’s warmth. And he couldn’t help leaning into that lean, strong body, the soft sounds of their slacks and shirts sliding together as he pressed chest to chest with Summer, caught him about the waist, jerked him in close just to feel how Summer shivered and tensed and then melted so liquidly; bit his lower lip just to hear Summer’s soft, erotically pained hiss, just to taste the bruising of his flesh.
God, Fox couldn’t remember feeling this kind of heat in far too long. It had receded to just a memory, buried in the fog of time, but now it came flaring to life until he thought he would scorch apart from the inside out, and the only thing that could ease the burning, hurting tension inside him...
Was also the thing coiling him tighter and tighter, until this raw, unexpected burst of desire was almost too painful to endure.
It was like this flood had been building for decades, and now his walls could no longer contain it, that last bit of pressure sending him spilling his banks, crashing over everything that tried to restrain it, to tell him to calm down, to move slower, to remember they were in a public classroom and he wasn’t meant to need this, to want this, to crave this so deeply that he nearly devoured Summer’s mouth until the enticing young man actually whimpered, his tongue flicking and stroking with soft, helpless hunger against Fox’s.
If his dam was going to break...
Then let it break.
He leaned harder against Summer—then tumbled him back, spilling him against the desk, pushing him down onto his back. Summer hit the desk with a startled sound, eyes widening for a moment, their lips breaking apart as Summer stared up at him with his chest rising and falling sharply, his hair tumbled against Fox’s desk blotter, textbooks toppling aside and a pencil cup spilling over.
Fox didn’t care.
He raked his gaze down that agile body spread beneath him, Summer’s thighs parting around Fox’s hips.
Slid his hands up Summer’s arms, coaxed them over his head, pinned his wrists with gripping fingers that clasped tight to the sensation of Summer’s pulse fluttering out of control against his fingertips.
And locked his body against Summer’s, heat to heat, fitting them together in perfect contours as he bent to once more seize Summer’s mouth for his own.
This—this was heady, perfect, enticing, Summer arching beneath him, willing and submissive and so very warm as he pressed his body eagerly to Fox’s; as he opened himself entirely for him, letting Fox take and plunder and claim his mouth as if he could leave a permanent mark if he just kissed him hard enough, deep enough, hot enough, searching down inside Summer as if he could touch him in ways no one else ever had.
Did he want that, he asked himself?
Even as he slid his tongue in velvet-wet strokes along Summer’s, leaning into the suggestion of it, the lasciviousness of it, the mimicry of the slow, shuddering movements of their bodies, the rushes of sensation spearing up inside him and making him throb, want, need something more than the sensuous grind of hips to hips...he asked himself.
Did he want Summer, and not just this wild reawakening of any feeling at all?
The answer seemed to lie in the rush of Summer’s breaths, in the way he moved so wantonly beneath Fox, in the strong slink and flex and flow of his body, and Fox—
Fox froze, ice crystallizing in his gut, as someone rapped imperiously on the door, before a mockingly acerbic voice floated over the room.
“I assume this isn’t part of the lesson plan.”
Fox sighed, letting go of Summer’s mouth to instead drop his forehead to Summer’s shoulder, slumping in exasperation.
He knew that voice.
Insufferable authoritarian prick.
And he gathered his dignity around himself as he released Summer’s wrists, straightening and smoothing over his suspenders and his shirt, lifting his chin as he stared down the man watching them from the door with one platinum blond eyebrow sardonically lifted, glacially blue eyes hard with disdain.
“Assistant Principal,” Fox said flatly, and almost dared Lachlan Walden to say a single word.
While Summer went scrambling up, making distressed noises and clumsily fumbling his way off the desk, knocking over a stapler, a stack of Post-it notes, before he managed to find his feet. He was red all the way down to the collar of his shirt, his mouth bruised to a lush dark fullness as if he was wearing lipstick, his hair a mess.
He looked exactly like what he was.
Completely debauched, and Fox felt an unexpected flare of possessive irritation that Assistant Principal Walden was even allowed to see Summer that way.
Summer stood at rigid attention at Fox’s side, clearing his throat. “M-Mr. Walden!”
His voice actually cracked.
The corner of Fox’s mouth twitched.
He shouldn’t find that so amusing.
Walden, however, clearly didn’t. He stared at them over the rims of his glasses, his mouth a forbidding line as sharp-edged and stiff as his crisp navy blue three-piece suit.
“Are the two of you done?” he bit off.
Fox arched a brow. “Quite,” he said firmly, only for Walden’s eyes to narrow, locking on Fox rather sternly.
Fox only held his gaze and waited.
Walden had only been hired two months ago to bring some sort of order to the chaos the school frequently fell into, and was a good ten years Fox’s junior.
He had a long way to go before he could outfreeze Fox, when Fox had been the resident ice queen of Albin Academy for decades.
After several moments, Walden let out an irritable sigh and adjusted his rimless glasses, then smoothed back the close, neatly-glossed sideswept part of his hair, transferring his gaze to Summer.
Who squeaked.
“I came,” Lachlan said haughtily, “about your request to repurpose one of the empty reading rooms, Mr. Hemlock.” He pursed his lips. “Are you licensed to act as a psychotherapist?”
Summer cringed, shoulders slumping, and he bowed his head, pure hangdog sheepishness as he peeked through his hair at Lachlan like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “No, I...n-no.”
“Then your request is denied,” Lachlan retorted. “Stick to teaching. After-hours student counseling is for studying only.” His mouth creased downward in a disapproving frown. “You could get us sued.”
Then, without giving Summer or Fox a chance to respond...
He turned and swept out, gliding as if trailing a royal train in his wake and slamming the door quite firmly behind him.
Summer flinched when the door hit home hard enough to echo, then peeked one eye open at Fox. “...could I really get us sued?”
“No,” Fox said, eyeing the door in disgust, before turning his gaze back to Summer. “And a license is not required to fulfill the role of a school guidance counselor. Your teaching certification is quite enough.”
Summer sputtered, then trailed into a groan, slumping to lean against the desk. “So you were bluffing.”
“And you,” Fox pointed out, “fell for it, because you were embarrassed.”
“...he, uh...caught us...um...” With another flustered sound, Summer scrubbed the heel of his palm against one eye, fingers weaving into his hair, and let out a nervous little sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “You know. I just... I guess I’m still working my way toward being brave with people other than you.”
With a sigh, Fox settled to sit next to him once more, just looking down at Summer—how he slouched, how his breaths came in little short pants that told Fox Summer was doing everything he could no
t to give in to the anxiety trying to rise through him, making his pulse flicker erratically until it stood out against his throat, making his eyes dilate long after any lingering desire could account for the expansion of the pupil.
You are such a mess, Fox thought fondly, and slipped his arm around Summer’s shoulders.
“You will get there,” he said, curling his hand against Summer’s arm. “I firmly believe that.”
Summer immediately turned into him—pressing into his side, burying his face in Fox’s chest.
And Fox let him, just wrapping his other arm around him and drawing him in close.
“You do?” Summer mumbled against Fox’s chest, breaths and lips moving warm through his shirt.
“I do,” Fox agreed, and rested his chin to the top of Summer’s head.
Summer said nothing, and just burrowed in closer to him, wrapping his arms in a tight lock around Fox’s waist.
It wasn’t so bad, staying like this—wrapped around Summer, sheltering him, listening as he slowly paced his breaths until they calmed down and he went softer, warmer, against Fox.
Right now...
Fox wasn’t sure who was comforting whom.
When this only made his entire body ache with the awareness of how long he had been starved for such simple human contact that had nothing to do with attraction, with arousal...
And everything to do with just sharing touch.
“I could do it,” Summer murmured, voice muffled and soft, breaking the silence. “Get my license as a therapist.” Fox felt more than saw Summer’s smile, moving against his ribs. “I spent half my credits in a forensic and behavioral psychology track in university, before I switched to education.”
Fox blinked repeatedly. “You? In forensics?”
He recalled Summer mentioning it before, but trying to picture it...
Impossible.
A soundless laugh shook Summer’s body against him, and he only burrowed his face deeper into Fox’s chest. “Don’t say it like that!” he said, before falling still again, adjusting to lean more into Fox, until it was half the edge of the desk holding him up, half Fox. “...though you’re right. I couldn’t do it. The...the blood, the horror...it was too much. I couldn’t face that.”
