Just Like That (Albin Academy)

by Cole McCade

  He perceived a great deal, as well.

  And had a way of looking at people as if he understood far too much about the aches inside them; the darkness and the pain, all the raw places that eventually hardened into sharp-edged armor keen enough to cut anyone who got too close.

  Fox had grown accustomed to making himself unseen, in his own way.

  And it was discomfiting to be looked at by someone who seemed to want to know every last agony that still haunted him, in those secret places where he could not let go.

  He turned his face away, folding his arms over his chest, waiting for the unspoken thing that seemed to hover on Summer’s lips. Likely some platitude, some useless bit of comfort that had lost meaning years ago when one of the first things Fox had learned was...

  Words did not change anything.

  Not for him.

  The words of reassurance, of useless sympathy, only gave comfort to those who had lost nothing.

  They were empty, to those who had lost...had lost...

  Everything.

  So he wasn’t expecting when that low, quiet voice said, “You aren’t the one who drowned, you know. I’m not sure you know that.”

  It struck with the precision of a sword-thrust, and the cruelty of a death blow—a sensation as though his heart had split in two, striking rough and deep as Fox whipped his head back to stare at Summer, at that seemingly innocent face that could utter such terrible and hateful barbs, poison disguised as sugar in soft words.

  “Excuse you?” he threw back, and hated how for a moment his voice quivered—then halted, his throat closing sharply, unexpectedly, with a rush so hard and so wretched he thought he would scream. “You have no right—”

  “You’re right,” Summer said. “I don’t. I don’t have any right because I have no idea how you feel, and I have no idea what it’s like to lose someone the way you did.” He stood, unfolding his body with feline grace, steps silent on the concrete rimming the pool as he rounded the edge to draw closer to Fox. “I just know this hurts. It hurts seeing you living like you’re already dead, when you’re not.” His mouth actually trembled, before firming as he stopped in front of Fox, looking up at him with something dark and determined sparking in nightshade eyes, in the set of his jaw. “I know she left you behind and it’s terrifying, Fox. I know you feel like...like you’re completely alone. But you’re not. So you don’t have to hold on to the loneliness, the fear...like if you let go of them, you’ll have nothing left.”

  “I won’t!” Fox flared, and he didn’t know why it hurt to breathe but it was abysmal, this horrid pain inside his chest, this dull heavy thing like a pounding fist smashing against the tender meat of him with every cursed word. He glared at Summer, fingers clenching, digging hard into the fabric of his sleeves, the flesh of his elbows. “I wasn’t even there, Summer. I wasn’t there for her. She died alone, crushed under that water in the darkness, and I wasn’t even there so she wouldn’t have to be the only one.”

  “But you can’t change that by giving up on living at all.”

  For all Fox’s harshness, Summer was gentle, soft—and he rested one warm hand against Fox’s chest, fingers splayed, the ridges of knuckles and tendons standing out against tanned skin, his warmth pressing...pressing...

  Right over the raw, aching beat of Fox’s heart.

  “What’s in the water that scares you, Fox?” Summer whispered. “Because it’s not her. You know she’s not there. You know, even if you don’t want to admit it.”

  Fox stared at him, a horrid, hollow feeling building behind his eyes, spreading throughout him until he felt like this thin shell filling up with so much pain.

  As if he really was her.

  Trapped in a sinking vessel, the air crushing out of him, beating against the walls of his own heart as the anguish rushed in to drown him.

  As he forced himself to answer a question that he refused to even acknowledge himself, even if it had been there inside him for two decades, crouched and waiting and cold and dark and so very, very terrible.

  “I... I’m afraid...” Every word a struggle, every sound a raw wound cutting his tongue, reaching down into his throat to pull it tighter and tighter like closing purse-strings into a choking clutch, and the only reason he could speak at all was because those yearning, sweet blue eyes begged him to, held him fast, kept him from collapsing into silence. “...I’m afraid I’ll be tempted to join her. To just...let myself sink, and not come back up ever again.”

  “Fox,” Summer whispered, and slipped his other hand into Fox’s hair, steady fingers weaving in deep, strong and comforting and warm and so very sure, drawing him in until their brows touched and he could taste Summer’s breaths on his lips. “But you don’t really want that, do you?”

  Fox took several heaving, rasping breaths; he felt like he was drowning already, drowning on dry land, but Summer was anchoring him, keeping him afloat.

  “No,” he choked, closing his eyes, shaking his head, rubbing temple to temple with Summer. “But I don’t... Summer, I don’t know how to live.”

  “You don’t have to know how.” Summer’s smile was in his voice, in the soothing rumble of it, the sigh at the edges of it. “You just do.”

  Fox didn’t know what to say. What this breaking was inside him, that felt at once like falling apart and like clawing free from his own rubble, but it was awful and yet...yet...

  He didn’t want to stop.

  Didn’t want to pull away, to let go of Summer when something about this felt so terrifyingly good, too.

  So he stayed—stayed, and leaned into that touch, and unclenched one hand to rest it to Summer’s chest, taut bare skin and the steady slow beat of a wild and beautiful heart underneath his palm.

  “How do you know these things?” he whispered. “How can you even be so certain of yourself?”

  “I’m not,” Summer answered, before sweet lips brushed against Fox’s cheek. “I just never stop hoping that no matter what’s wrong...it’ll get better.”

  Then he drew back, his body heat receding—but didn’t let Fox go.

  Instead he captured the hand Fox held against his chest, wrapping those strong, rough fingers around his, and when Fox opened his eyes, Summer cocked his head to one side, messy spears of wetly spiked hair falling across his brow as he smiled.

  “Will you try something with me?” he asked. “Something brave.”

  Fox let out a broken, startled bark of laughter, brief before it strangled off again. “Are you trying to turn the tables on me?”

  “Fair play.” Summer stopped, then, but still pulled at Fox’s hand, drawing him in close one hesitant step at a time. “Step in the shallow end with me. I’ll hold your hand all the way. And if you can’t stand it...it’s okay. We’ll get out, and we won’t even talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  Fox’s breaths turned to ice, and he tore his gaze from Summer to stare at the pool, luminous pale blue and clear all the way down to the bottom—and yet suddenly it seemed a limitless ocean, bottomless, airless, the depths a thing of sucking darkness only waiting to capture him and drag him down.

  “I... I...”

  I can’t, he started to say.

  But why couldn’t he?

  How could Summer face down fears he couldn’t control every day, wired into his brain by chemical reactions and triggers, and still smile...

  ...yet Fox wouldn’t even try?

  He ran his tongue over his lips; his breaths felt too cold against his damp mouth, as if the life and heat were already sucking out of him to leave him cold as a corpse, his fingertips numbing.

  Stop it, he told himself. You are having a panic reaction for no reason.

  “I do not...do not have appropriate attire,” he started, and Summer chuckled, squeezing his hand reassuringly.

  “Never went swimming in your underwear when you we
re a kid?” he asked, and Fox stared at him flatly.

  “Can you picture me as a child?”

  “We all were, once.” Thoughtful eyes dipped over him, then, before Summer stepped closer and reached up to finger the top button of Fox’s shirt, toying with it before gently slipping it open. “So yes, I can picture it. I bet you were short and chubby and happy and cute, and then one day puberty hit and you shot up and turned lean and tall, and didn’t even know what to do with yourself when suddenly you had all this extra you and no idea where to put it.”

  Fox scowled. “That is annoyingly accurate.”

  “Yeah?” Summer only smiled, starting on the next button, tugging it open as slowly as he was teasing Fox out of himself. “Tell me about where you grew up, then. Tell me what it was like for you as a kid.”

  Fox hesitated.

  He knew what Summer was doing.

  Focusing his mind on his memories from before the trauma, the pain, the locked-in grief, giving him something to distract him from the thoughts threatening to paralyze his limbs and his lungs even while Summer gently, so gently, pushed him toward testing himself as he parted his shirt one button at a time.

  He had simply never expected to be in the position to have such a therapeutic technique used on him.

  Or for it to actually work, his mind wandering unbidden to the memory of dark green water, white sand, rocks cresting in strange formations silhouetted against a brilliant evening sky.

  “I grew up in Miyako,” he said softly. “At least until I was a teenager. You may have seen it on the news a few years ago, when a tsunami struck the town after a major earthquake...but before that, it was...calm. Always calm, the bright sun on water so deep a green it was like this...rippling layer of bottle glass. The rocks just past the shoreline—Joudogahama—always drew tourists, but I loved to splash in the shallows around them.” He smiled faintly. “I’d scare the crabs, sending them scuttling away. My mother came to Japan from the States for work, met my father, fell in love...and I remember walking with them on the beach, with the sand breaking up in warm crumbles between my toes and the sound of the waves, while the lighthouse farther along the coast came alight with dusk.”

  Summer let out a soft, almost pleased sigh, as he reached the last button on Fox’s shirt; Fox hadn’t even realized he’d continued pulling them open, until Summer was tugging his button-down out of the waist of his slacks. “So you have good memories of water, too. Of the ocean.”

  “I...yes.” Fox’s brows knit, as he looked down at Summer; Summer just smiled at him with his eyes crinkled at the corners and soft. “Why did you ask?”

  “Because I want to know you. Not just what I think I know about you from meeting you here.”

  Summer finished tugging the hem loose, the fabric pulling and sliding against Fox’s skin, before those angular, strong hands slid over his shoulders, slipping beneath the shirt to draw it, one inch at a time, down his arms, catching and rasping lightly against his sleeveless undershirt.

  As much as Summer lingered, as close as he was, his radiance like sunlight...there was no seduction in this, even when Summer’s fingertips grazed over the outer edges of Fox’s arms.

  Yet even without seduction...

  It was still so very intimate.

  Comforting.

  Soft words, soft touches between them, and Fox submitting to let Summer tease him out of his clothing one piece at a time while he spoke of memories long past.

  “You are still very strange, Summer,” he whispered, and Summer let out a sweet little laugh as he let Fox’s shirt fall from his fingertips to crumple on the cement.

  “I’m okay with being strange,” he said. “When did you come to the States?”

  “When I was fourteen.” Fox didn’t stop Summer, as Summer gathered up bunched handfuls of his undershirt next, lifting it up along his stomach, his ribs, rough knuckles grazing his bare skin. “My mother’s job moved her back, and she brought us with her.”

  “That must have been a culture shock,” Summer murmured, nudging at Fox’s arms, and Fox lifted them over his head.

  For a moment the world was white, as his undershirt lifted away, before Summer tugged it over his head and drew it down his arms.

  Goosebumps prickled down his arms, but it wasn’t from the cold.

  It was from that intent gaze locked on him, taking him in as he was—naked in words, naked in flesh, simple and accepting.

  He almost flinched from it, looking away as he answered, “My life has been a culture shock. In Japan I was too tall, too large, too obviously haafu...in America I was too foreign, and although I learned English in the home, somehow everyone here seemed to speak a different sort of English that I never quite understood.”

  “So you know how it feels.” Summer’s hands settled against his waist, rough palms against his waist, skin to heated skin, thumbs idly sweeping over the crests of his hipbones as Summer drew him closer. “Not to fit in.”

  “I do,” Fox admitted—and didn’t pull away, when their bodies pressed flush together, insulating heat between them and soaking into his flesh with the warmth of human contact that he would never confess to needing, craving, starved for simple affections more than he had ever been for sex, for love. “Even if I had a slightly different coping mechanism than you did.”

  Summer’s laughter was a close and sweet thing, a vibration melting from skin to skin, as he leaned in and nuzzled at Fox’s jaw. “I turned into a wallflower. You made everyone afraid of you so you wouldn’t have to be afraid of them.”

  “Not quite.” But Fox chuckled—chuckled, and leaned in, letting his cheek rest to Summer’s hair. “I thought, if I could not understand the way they spoke...then I should learn the way they thought, so I could decipher their motives and intent even when their words weren’t as honest as they should be.”

  “So you learned psychology as a defense mechanism, and it became a lifelong passion.”

  “Mm...something like that.”

  “It’s not a bad reason.”

  Then Summer’s fingers danced along the waist of Fox’s slacks, found the button, flicked it open, before the long rasp of the zipper sounded between them, hoarse and almost ominous. Fox tilted his head, looking down at Summer, the set look of concentration on his face.

  “I would almost think,” he murmured, “that you were trying to seduce me, in this moment.”

  “Not right now,” Summer teased, catching the pink tip of his tongue between his teeth, eyes lowering to the hands working so deftly between them. “But I can’t promise I won’t try later.”

  Then Fox’s slacks went sheeting down his legs, falling to pool around his ankles, leaving only his black boxer-briefs clinging to his hips and thighs; he took a shaky breath and stepped out of them, toeing out of his shoes and socks at the same time until he stood in his bare feet on the cool concrete.

  And when Summer took both his hands, drawing him backward...

  His gut clenched tight, as he pulled out of the haze of warm memories and into the cold reality of what he meant to do.

  He couldn’t, he wouldn’t—but he was following, trailing one slow numb step at a time, holding fast to Summer’s hands and never looking away from that warm smile, those warmer eyes, the gentle encouragement there.

  Promising that Summer believed he could do this.

  Even if Fox didn’t.

  Even if Fox’s breaths were coming shallow and thin, his chest binding up horribly as each rapid wash of air came in and out without giving him enough oxygen, his head swimming as Summer guided him around the corner of the pool and toward the steps, the railing, leading down into the shallow end.

  It was only three feet of water, if that.

  It wouldn’t even come up to Fox’s waist.

  He had nothing to be afraid of, he told himself.

  Nothing.

 
But he felt sick to his stomach, as he watched Summer step backward into the pool—the water closing around his feet, his ankles, his calves, and he was so perfectly calm when Fox just wanted to snatch him back from that insidious, falsely innocuous horror before it could rise up, swallow him down, take him away—

  His fingers tightened convulsively.

  Stop.

  He forced himself to breathe slowly, evenly, counting to three on each inhalation before counting to five on each exhalation.

  It was an indoor swimming pool. Safe. Sheltered.

  Summer was fine.

  Fox was fine.

  But still his breaths seized, as the first cold lapping edge of water touched the tips of his toes.

  He closed his eyes, and told himself it was no different from stepping into the shower, the thin skim of water accumulated on the bottom of the bathtub, something so ordinary and commonplace he never even noticed it.

  But the shower was never this cold.

  And the shower never made his pulse turn into a roaring river, a rushing, a horrible thing screaming in his ears until he couldn’t hear Summer, only knew he was saying something in soothing murmurs as his grip drew lightly on Fox’s hands, pulled him down, guided him down the steps as the sucking embrace of the water rose up around his calves and thighs and hips like the wet fluid mouth of the dead.

  He reached the bottom step, eyes still squeezed shut, and stood there, hating how his bones shook inside his flesh, hating how everything inside him rattled and roared in a clattering cacophony of fear, all the brittle bits of himself tossed around inside his trembling shell.

  So icy, clinging to him, and he couldn’t breathe, his chest caving in as he sucked desperately at the air, but the air was too thick and he couldn’t open his eyes; if he opened his eyes he would be underwater, would be staring up not at the ceiling of the annex but at the dark sky and the loveless moon receding away through black waters, and he—he—