Just Like This (Albin Academy)

by Cole McCade

Damon had never really paid much attention to Rian Falwell over the last few years. He vaguely remembered the day he’d noticed a new hire at the table in faculty meetings, mostly caught by the startling fountain of rippling black hair that fell over the man’s body like a shawl and trailed to his hips—but he couldn’t say if that had been Falwell’s first day there, or if he’d been there for weeks before Damon had finally glanced up to notice the way he smiled like a store mannequin, frozen and fake and empty. Shallow. Distant. That had been Damon’s first thought, before he’d stopped thinking about the new art teacher at all and only absently noted his presence in subsequent meetings.

  They were technically in the same department for athletics and recreation, since Falwell taught a dance class for the teenaged monsters who didn’t want to take mandatory P.E. credits, but that was about the closest they’d ever come to overlapping. Rian was the art teacher. Damon was the football coach. Something something something, never the twain shall meet.

  Except they were meeting right now.

  Because Damon’s star quarterback hadn’t been to practice in nearly a week.

  Until about thirty seconds ago, Damon had thought the slim wisp of a man in front of him was the cause.

  And now—now, well, he really didn’t know what to think.

  Because if Chris Northcote had been lying to both of them, assuming they wouldn’t talk...

  Well, that was a problem.

  Especially when Damon didn’t think Chris would lie without cause. He was a good kid. Almost too good. Straight A student, nice to every damned body. Honest to a fault. Thought he was everyone’s meat shield.

  So if he was lying, it had to be for a pretty fucking good reason.

  Which meant, in every mind except that of a desperate sixteen-year-old, it was probably a pretty fucking bad reason.

  While Damon turned that over, Rian worked his mouth, wrinkling his thin, straight nose, before letting out a rather dramatic sigh and slumping his narrow shoulders. He was almost as tall as Damon, maybe an inch or two below Damon’s six foot four, but he looked like he weighed maybe half as much soaking wet—although the airy voluminous flow of his layered, taper-sleeved linen tunics in deepening shades of ivory, sand, and gold paired with wide-legged linen trousers obscured all but the vaguest outlines of his shape. With his skinny, bangle-draped wrists and delicate movements, he made Damon think of a butterfly, the drape and fall of his crinkle-edged tunics like the subtle twitch of a butterfly’s wings at rest. He carried himself with a certain elegance that reflected in even his smallest of motions, and it just made Damon grit his teeth.

  Because it looked so damned affected, like he’d practiced the poise of some kind of Bohemian SoHo hippie princess but just came out looking...looking...

  Stuck up.

  But Falwell sounded less stuck up and more plaintively confused when he just let out a single soft, almost hurt, “Why?”

  Damon shrugged. Now that the realization had slapped the damned temper right out of him, he—well, fuck. He didn’t have words, and he sure as hell didn’t know how to answer that question.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” he forced out. “He sure as shit can’t afford to miss practice. Too much longer and I won’t have a choice but to report it. Participation’s part of his scholarship. He gets seven days without a doctor’s note. He’s on four.”

  Rian’s brows wrinkled. His gaze slid off Damon, flitting over the room, before settling on him again. Those hazel eyes didn’t look shallow now; instead they looked troubled, the set of his mouth pensive. “I wasn’t aware Christopher was on a scholarship.”

  “Rich private schools operate a lot like universities.” Damon snorted. “Most of the kids here are rich. We got a few, though. Academic and sports scholarships. Though Chris’s family’s pretty set, so don’t know why he even needs it, but he’s gonna lose it if he doesn’t stop skipping out.”

  “So you’re worried about more than your code of discipline, then?” Rian tripped out flippantly, his velvet tenor lilting. “I suppose I’ll forgive your rather presumptuous intrusion.”

  “What fucking code of discipline? You—”

  Damon stopped himself short.

  God damn, he wished he could’ve gone another three or thirty or three hundred years without being more than peripherally aware of this snotty little man’s existence.

  Because Rian Falwell was getting on his goddamned nerves.

  “Look,” Damon growled. “I don’t give a fuck what you think of me or my reasons. What I care about is that kid fucking up his academic year. And since he always looked like a fucking kicked puppy when he said he was staying after, I had my reasons for thinking something bad was going down. And if he’s lying to both of us, something bad probably is. So...”

  Rian jutted his stubborn lower lip out, his brows loftily arched. “So?”

  “So what the hell are we going to do about it?”

  “We?” Hazel eyes snapped. “As if I would ever—I—oh hell.” Rian sighed, bowing his head, one slim hand coming up to press his fingertips to the indentations on either side of his nose, just inside the corners of his eyes. His skin was so pale that his hands were white as the iridescent edges of oyster shells save for the very tips of his fingers, the knobs of his bony knuckles, and a crescent moon curve at the heels of his palms, flushed pink as if all the blood in that translucent flesh had gathered there; Damon wondered if he knew what the sun outside even looked like. “... I suppose we’ve got a responsibility, don’t we?”

  “You sound so goddamn excited about doing your job.”

  “It’s not my job that’s the problem,” Rian muttered, almost under his breath. “It’s you.”

  “Trust me, the feeling’s mutual.”

  “At least we agree on something.” With a thoughtful sound, Rian clasped his palms together as if praying, tilting them against his nose and lips until they bisected his face, his eyes unfocused. “What can we do? Even if we’re assigned as the boys’ primary caretakers, there are limits. Legal limits. Unless he’s involved in something illegal or life-threatening, there’s not much we can do if he’s not breaking the rules. Technically, skipping an extracurricular isn’t breaking the rules.”

  Damon frowned, rubbing his forefinger and thumb along his chin and jaw, until he could press along the tendons over his temporomandibular joints, squeezing at them to relax a bit of the tension making his head and neck kink up in irritating knots. Unfortunately, Rian had a point.

  That didn’t mean there was nothing they could do about it.

  He tossed his head, turning in the cramped space—and trying his damnedest not to bump up against something that looked like a department store mannequin made out of barbed wire, and something else that looked like...he didn’t know, but it seemed fragile and he’d probably break it. “C’mon.”

  “What?” drifted after him. “Why? Where are we going?”

  “To talk to Walden,” Damon said grimly, ducking through the door and into the broader, neater space of the art classroom, long wooden worktables arranged in ordered rows and dotted with various student projects in progress. “And get to the bottom of this.”

  As he threaded through the tables toward the classroom door, though, the faint sound of soft sandaled footsteps followed, then the creak of the workroom door closing, before Rian’s thrumming voice called his name softly, almost too sweetly.

  “Damon?”

  Damon stopped, keeping his back to Rian. Something about his name in that luring, richly enticing voice was even more irritating than the haughty, scathing sarcasm.

  And he didn’t want to look at him while Rian said his name that way.

  “What?” he asked, clipping the word through his teeth, then snapping his mouth shut.

  “...could you put a shirt on first, please?” Rian asked in that same beguiling tone, and Damon snarled.
>
  “Why?”

  “... I live with Walden. I know what he’s like.” And this time there was no mistaking that sweet, bewitching tone for anything but what it was: lightly mocking laughter, as Rian breezed past Damon with an arch sidelong look, hazel eyes sly beneath raised brows, glowing in their frame of smoky black eyeliner. “Just put a shirt on, Mr. Louis. Trust me.”

  Not as far as I could throw you, Damon thought, but just let out a noncommittal sound.

  Before reluctantly following Rian from the room, and wondering just what it was about the man that just...just...

  Royally pissed Damon off. More than he had any right to be. Especially when if he’d admit it out loud...

  He’d been in the wrong.

  Goddammit.

  Walden first. Apologies later.

  Even if he wasn’t quite sure which one he was dreading more.

  But, well...

  Some things just had to be dealt with.

  And Rian Falwell was apparently one of them.

  Chapter Two

  Rian supposed he’d give Damon Louis a touch of credit in that he did, in fact, put a shirt on before they reconvened outside Assistant Principal Lachlan Walden’s second floor office.

  The problem was...it was hard to really call that scrap of white fabric a shirt when it was thinner than gauze, and Damon must have used it as a towel to absorb the sweat filming his body; the shirt clung to his torso in a wet-soaked, translucent layer, molding to the tight flow of an athlete’s honed muscles.

  As Damon approached down the narrow hallway in a casual, graceful jog, the only spot of color against gray-worn wood, his body pulled and flowed like a piece of powerful machinery moving in time to music, and Rian caught himself picking out the sketch lines in his body: where he would overlap lines for the obliques, how he might taper the line weight to indicate depth and motion, how he would shade the joining of the anterior head muscles to the pectorals, and how the stark crease between them tightened and relaxed in and out of focus with each flex of Damon’s shoulders in rhythm with his strides.

  But as he drew to a halt on the opposite side of the doorway marked Assistant Principal L. Walden, Damon scowled, swiping his still-damp hair out of his face. “What? Why are you looking at me like that? I put on a fucking shirt.”

  ...what?

  Oh.

  He had been staring, hadn’t he?

  And he...he really didn’t know why.

  Clearing his throat, Rian looked away, lifting his chin and thinning his lips—and only hoped his face didn’t look as red as it felt. “I meant something a little more presentable than a T-shirt.”

  “I haven’t fucked with a dress code since the Navy, and I’m not about to start now.”

  That probably explained the scars: thick corded ridges visible even underneath the shirt, when the soaked white fabric let the deep, tawny brown of Damon’s skin show through, and brought out the lighter lines of scar tissue making furrows and puckers against his flesh, things that whispered of bullet wounds and worse.

  And Rian wasn’t curious about Damon damned Louis, or what had sent him from the Navy to a secluded hole in the wall like Omen, Massachusetts, hidden away in a private boys’ boarding school most people didn’t even know existed unless they had the right connections, knew the right people, or had the kind of wayward sons many wealthy families liked to disavow responsibility for.

  “You’re fucking staring at me again,” Damon grit out, one eye twitching.

  Rian caught himself, retreating a step, then huffed and looked away. “Excuse me.”

  “You got that much of a problem with my damned shirt?”

  “Why would I?”

  A flat stare fixed on Rian. “You seem to have a problem with everything else about me.”

  Just your breathing, Rian thought, suppressing a growl. “Can we talk to Walden and get this over with?”

  Damon made a thickly disgusted sound and leaned over Rian—so close that in proximity, without the heavy smell of fresh clay drowning it out, Rian could smell the heat and sweat of his body, a darkly musky warmth—to thump the heel of his palm against Walden’s door. “Be my fucking guest.”

  “If the two of you are quite done with your rather loud bickering,” drifted through the door, commanding and cold and ever-so-slightly irritable as always, “you may enter. You have ten minutes.”

  With one last glare, Rian cleared his throat and tore his gaze away from Damon yet again.

  God, that man annoyed the hell out of him.

  He distracted himself by pushing the door of Walden’s office open. He’d probably seen Lachlan Walden in the office more than in their shared suite—where, the few times Rian had caught a glimpse past the firmly closed door of Walden’s bedroom, the space had been just as spartanly neat and organized as his office, furniture so minimalist that the cubicle looked much more expansive than it was.

  Most faculty and staff offices were cramped, a hazard of an extremely old building designed in different times, and by someone with a penchant for small spaces; Rian had once heard—and maybe dug up in the dusty, crumbling library archives—that the sprawling main building had originally been constructed in the eighteen hundreds by an eccentric, wealthy family with the intent of housing multiple generations, from the closest brothers to the most distant cousins. But some unspeakable and thus unspoken tragedy had emptied the halls and begun the first rumors of hauntings and curses before, decades later, the manor had been bought, restored, and repurposed as a boarding house for laborers working the river industries on the Mystic. More tales; more histories imprinted the weathered boards, before time and changes in local business left more empty halls, more ghosts.

  Until, around the early twentieth century, the estate had been bought one last time and remodeled into a boarding school for boys; some whispered the first founder, Marietta Albin, had established the school as a place to exile her own delinquent sons to shape them up into proper responsible adults, and it had grown from there.

  Into what it was today: a secret haven for the rich and spoiled.

  Where Lachlan Walden seemed to be having a touch of trouble fitting in, because he seemed even more harried and stressed than usual when he glanced up over his rimless glasses, the glint of frost-blue eyes just as sharp as the precision-cut edges of his lenses. Walden’s navy blue suit was perfectly pressed, his platinum blond hair swept back with such neatness it bordered on militant and was most certainly TRESemmé. But a subtle jumping tic in his clenched jaw gave him away—paired with an echoing twitch of one eye, giving him a skeptical look as he studied them both.

  Before letting out an exasperated sound and gesturing to the two simple hardbacked chairs opposite his plain wooden desk. “Sit. Talk. Which student?”

  Rian slid into the room quickly—and told himself it wasn’t to get away from the oppressive heat of Damon filling the space so close to his body. “You’re that certain we’re here about a student?”

  “There is absolutely zero reason for both of you to be in my office if it isn’t about a mutual student.” Lachlan folded his hands together atop the open file folder on his desk. “I said sit. And close the door behind you.”

  Rian expected Damon to snarl at the assistant principal the same way he snarled at Rian.

  But instead, while Rian claimed the chair farthest from the door and crossed his legs, folding his hands... Damon just stepped quietly inside, pulling the door closed before levering himself down in the other chair. He sat with his legs spread wide, a casual slouch of masculine arrogance, and propped his elbows on his thighs, looking at Lachlan steadily over his laced knuckles.

  His hands were so large, Rian thought absently. Perhaps proportionate to his body, but it was still jarring to realize how thick and square his fingers were, blunt, the nails clipped short, the creases in the knuckles deep; Rian found his ow
n fingers itching for a sketchpad and a pencil, and curled them tighter in his lap against the urge to steal a pen from the holder on Lachlan’s desk.

  He had a feeling that might get him fired.

  Or possibly murdered.

  “Staring at me again,” Damon drawled, almost under his breath, then launched on before Rian could let out more than a strangled, embarrassed noise, his pulse skipping. “We’re here about Chris Northcote.”

  “Ah. Our sophomore football virtuoso, is he not?” Walden swiveled his office chair toward the laptop perched to one side of his desk; he tapped over the keyboard with swift precision, his spine perfectly straight. “No detentions. No behavioral demerits. Grades in order. No violations of the residential code. What is the problem with young Mr. Northcote, then?”

  Damon didn’t say anything, and Rian realized he was waiting for Rian to fill in.

  So Rian took a deep breath—why did he feel like he was in trouble, called into the principal’s office for playground brawls?—and said, “He’s been missing football practice. Which is strange enough in itself, but when last bell sounds he tells me he has to run or he’ll be late for practice; practice he never attends. And when questioned about it, he told Mr. Louis he’s been staying late to work on art projects. Except he hasn’t. I’m in the art room well into the evening. Chris is never present.”

  Walden’s typing stopped. He flicked them both a look over the top of the laptop. “Has he missed any assignments? Performed poorly in any classes?”

  Rian faltered, then shook his head. “He’s doing fine in art.”

  “Fine in gym,” Damon said after a moment—slow, reluctant. “He’ll probably be fine on the team if he starts showing up before we really get past pregame season and into the first matchups.”

  “So...” Lachlan drew the word out with icy impatience, as if highlighting every second of his time wasted. “You’re here because a student decided he didn’t want to participate in optional extracurricular activities, and wasn’t honest about it. It’s not affecting his grades, or his eligibility for AP college credits in his advanced classes. In other words, your pride is wounded that your prize student isn’t as interested in being your pet project as you are in having him.”