Just Like This (Albin Academy)

by Cole McCade

  Before he’d bought blankets like some kind of fucking tourist just to say he had something from his people.

  And then run the fuck away.

  Rian lifted his head, looking at Damon with a curiosity so frank it almost looked innocent; Rian looked so entirely different when they weren’t scowling at each other, his face open and fresh and sweet, freckled and warm with unspoken laughter. “Do you go every year?”

  “I...no.” Damon averted his eyes, dragging a hand over his wet hair and mussing it. He really didn’t know what to do with Rian bright, enthusiastic, interested. “I just... I don’t.”

  He couldn’t get the real answer out.

  That he felt like he didn’t belong, and every time he walked the fringes of spaces claimed by the Mashpee Wampanoag nation he felt like an outsider looking in at something that should have been his, but had been taken away from him.

  And he didn’t know how to get it back.

  Fuck, he didn’t want to be thinking about this right now.

  Or trying to figure out what to do with the weird flutter-hot feeling in his chest, watching Rian dance around his suite like it was the most delightful thing he’d ever seen.

  Fucking hell.

  Damon cleared his throat, turning away and reaching up to open the cabinet over the range. “You eat dinner?”

  “Ah?” Rian’s sandals rasped softly on the old wooden floorboards, hinting he was turning toward Damon. “Oh, no. I, er, was thinking about ordering in after we were done talking.”

  “I can make enough for two.” Damon drew down a wide, deep Teflon-coated wok and set it on the range. “You okay with stir-fry?”

  “Sure.” Rian’s steps skipped closer, and then he was just a burst of color and pale skin in Damon’s peripheral vision, peering over at him curiously. “How do you make stir-fry? Maybe I can help.”

  “You cut up whatever you want...and then stir...and fry it together. That’s what stir-fry means,” Damon said, and jerked his chin toward the mini-fridge. “There’s some vegetables and mushrooms in there if you want to wash them off and get started.”

  “No mushrooms,” Rian said immediately, and wrinkled his nose up in distaste. “They’re gross.”

  Damon fought back his smile.

  No.

  Not even thinking it.

  Not even thinking that Rian was cute, right now.

  Definitely something wrong with me.

  “Okay,” he said, and leaned over to pull the freezer open, feeling in until he found the rump cut of beef he’d put away until he felt like doing something with it, before tugging it out and slamming the door shut. “No mushrooms. But there’s carrots, broccoli, bell peppers...think I got some snow peas in there.”

  “Oh,” Rian answered faintly. “Do I cut the snow peas...? Or just wash them?”

  Damon stopped, one hand on the hot water lever on the sink, and just looked at Rian. “You can’t cook, can you?”

  “I...” Rian cleared his throat, and toyed at one of his dangling pendants, eyes darting left and right before fixing on Damon sheepishly. “I can microwave things...?”

  “...how old are you?”

  “Thirty-two,” Rian shot back defensively. “You?”

  “Thirty-eight.” Damon arched a brow. “Cooking isn’t a life skill you pick up at thirty-seven, by the way.”

  “I know.” Rian’s lower lip jutted out. He turned his face away, chin practically resting on his narrow, upthrust shoulder as he folded his arms over his chest and glared across the apartment. “I know. Okay? I know. I just...”

  Whatever he said next was just an unintelligible mumble, mangled through his teeth. Damon finally remembered to turn the hot water on, and dropped the cling-wrapped package of frozen beef into the sink to run under the water and defrost.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “... I had a chef,” Rian threw out defiantly, pout deepening.

  “A chef.”

  “Yes. And a nutritionist, and...”

  Damon held one hand up. “I don’t need to hear any more. I get the idea.”

  Yeah, they were definitely from different worlds.

  Damon hadn’t wanted for anything growing up, had been safe and comfortable and settled with his family, but...he hadn’t been private chef comfortable.

  Shaking his head, he pulled a drawer open and retrieved two out of his stack of slender plastic cutting boards, setting a bright green one down on the other side of the sink and tugging a knife from the wooden block next to the coffee pot. Setting the knife down atop the board in an unspoken invitation, he said, “That kind of rich, huh?”

  After a few hesitant moments, Rian straggled closer, unfolding the defensive lock of his arms and pulling the fridge open. The pale light inside fell over his face, highlighting the thin bridge of his nose, as he bent to peer inside.

  “My parents are,” he said, oddly muted.

  Damon set his own cutting board down on his side of the sink, but left it for now, waiting for the beef to soften under the hot water a little more. Instead he leaned his hip against the counter, watching Rian curiously. “Seems like an important distinction to you.”

  Rian moved with the tentative touch of someone uncertain in someone else’s space, reaching into the fridge and then drawing back, before starting again, carefully picking up a bundle of carrots and another of broccoli. He straightened and set them on the cutting board, then went back again with a bit more confidence, tucking his trailing hair behind his ear before going after the carton of fresh snow peas and a little rustling plastic bag full of red and yellow and green bell peppers.

  Damon thought Rian might just ignore what he’d said, when he seemed completely puzzled by the bag of bell peppers, staring down at them. “Do we really need all of these?”

  “Nah,” Damon said. “For just the two of us, one red and one yellow will do. We’ll have the snow peas and broccoli for a little green.”

  “I wasn’t aware the color aesthetics and balance of stir-fry were so important,” Rian said wryly, and started plucking the knot on the plastic bag open with slim fingertips. With his head lowered, his eyes on his hands, and his voice muffled... Damon almost didn’t catch when he murmured, “... I didn’t earn any of it.”

  Ah.

  Yeah.

  Damon could understand that.

  But Rian seemed to almost be flinching away from Damon’s scrutiny—so Damon managed to mind his manners and look away, shutting off the hot water in the sink and fishing out the beef, pressing at it with his thumbs. Defrosted enough on the surface, he thought, and if he cut the strips thin enough the wok should be enough to cook them through and through without leaving any frozen raw spots in the center.

  The only sound between them was the crinkle of plastic as Damon started unwrapping the beef, and the quiet shushing of the faucet turning on again as Rian flicked on the cold water and started washing one of the yellow peppers. Damon watched him surreptitiously from the corner of his eye; Rian handled the vegetable like he was handling some kind of exobotanical organism, holding it gingerly and looking so intently focused on making sure he rinsed every last crevice and bulge in its surface.

  “So what do you think you have earned?” Damon asked carefully.

  Rian started, glancing at him wide-eyed, before looking away once more. He tucked his hair back again, and this time delicate fingertips left diamond-spangled droplets clinging to the ripples of his black hair; rosettes bloomed against pale cheeks.

  “This,” he answered, just as quietly, his gaze shifting sidelong to drift over the room—but it wasn’t hard to tell he was looking at the room as part of the school, especially when he said, “This place, here.” Then he smiled—that bitter crease that seemed so much more honest than his artificial ones, and yet still a sad echo of that singular bright, genuine smile he’d flashed as
he’d taken in Damon’s apartment. “Well...maybe...maybe not wholly earned. You know. The whole whisper network around this place.”

  “Have to know someone who knows someone. Yeah.” Damon dumped the hunk of beef out onto the cutting board and reached across the sink to fish out a second knife; for a moment his body brushed against the faint, wispy warmth of Rian’s, his body heat as thin and ephemeral as smoke, before Damon jerked back, carefully angling the blade away from Rian as he drew it close. Swallowing, he focused on his hands. “We all got hired that way. That’s not the same as having things handed to you.”

  “You too...?”

  “Yeah. That Hemlock guy.”

  “Iseya,” Rian corrected.

  “Right. Iseya. The counselor? Forgot he married the psych teacher. But I’m talking about the other Hemlock guy. His father.” Damon kept his gaze down, rather than letting the curiosity in Rian’s voice draw him to meet hazel eyes; instead he watched his fingers as he started slicing the beef into thin, precise strips of white-veined red. “His dad was some kind of bigshot here, before he died when Hemlock was just a kid. Did a lot of local work. My parents knew him. Involved with a lot of charity stuff together. When I was looking for a job after burning out on football in college and giving up on the Navy...” He shrugged. “A few people here remembered that. Easier to work here when you’re hometown, anyway.”

  “Are you from Omen...?”

  “Mostly,” Damon said tightly. “As much as I can remember. Though my parents moved from Omen up to Vermont to retire.”

  In his peripheral vision, he caught white hands moving delicately, replacing the yellow pepper with a red one, washing it just as meticulously. “I don’t understand...as much as you can remember?”

  “I mean I don’t know where I’m from,” Damon threw out, more harshly than he intended. “I’m adopted.”

  Rian’s breath sucked in. “...oh.” Then, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t,” Damon snarled, snapping the knife down harder through the next slice of beef and then just leaving it, hand tight on the handle. “My parents loved me like I was their blood. I don’t need pity.”

  “No, I—!” Rian made a flustered sound. “That’s...that’s not what I meant, I just... I was sorry I asked so rudely, I...”

  He sounded so distressed that Damon couldn’t help looking up at him.

  And found Rian standing there clutching the red bell pepper to his chest like he was clutching at his own beating heart, and looking at Damon with his eyes wide with chagrin, his pale little mouth trembling.

  Damon just...groaned, setting the knife down and using his elbow to nudge Rian aside so he could thrust his hands under the cold spray, rinsing the thin sheen of runny liquid red from his skin.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m just...a little touchy about it. My parents were white, and...you know, I just...”

  “Felt disconnected,” Rian filled in softly, and Damon stilled, his heart turning over sharply.

  It was strange to hear it said out loud by someone else.

  So easily, so naturally.

  As if it was entirely normal to feel that way.

  When every time that frustrating feeling came bubbling up inside him, Damon just...wondered if he was being ungrateful.

  “Yeah,” he exhaled, curling his fingers under the spray. “Life with Mom and Dad wasn’t bad. But I don’t know who my birth parents are. I don’t know how I lost them. If they died, if they gave me up, if I was taken away from them...and you know, records and confidentiality and shit...my parents don’t know, either. I was too young to even remember where I came from. For all I know I was born here in Omen...or maybe I was born on Mashpee Wampanoag land with...with people who looked like me. Who have all these traditions I don’t know a damned thing about even though they’re mine by birthright.”

  Goddammit. Why was he telling Rian this?

  Why was he spilling out something this personal, this painful, to someone he’d only shared more than two words with for the first time yesterday?

  There was just...something about Rian.

  Something that ripped all these raw things out of Damon that he kept suppressed in the day to day. His questions about who he was, about what he wanted...

  ...about where he belonged.

  In the moments of silence that followed, Rian had said nothing—but after a few moments he said hesitantly, “I saw them in the news a little while ago. Didn’t the government do something awful with their land? I mean...the Wampanoag up in Mashpee.”

  “...yeah. Last I heard the courts were siding with them, but it’s still not certain.” Damon let out a frustrated sound and shut the water off, hitting the lever with the heel of his palm. “It doesn’t even affect me. Like, those are my damned people, aren’t they? But I have this whole life separate from them, until I don’t even know them and I’m standing on the outside watching while they could lose everything, and it doesn’t even have any impact on me. I don’t even know enough to know what it means to them. I can’t even feel right saying I’m Indigenous, just...of Indigenous descent. Do you know what that’s like?”

  “No,” Rian admitted—and yet that honesty was better than any false platitudes he could have trotted out, pretending someone like him could have any idea what left Damon feeling so...so...

  Lost.

  But he still wasn’t expecting the touch of cool, damp fingertips to his forearm, just barely resting to his skin, butterfly-light and yet narrowing every perception down to those four tiny points against his arm. Damon turned his head, his chest pounding as he looked down at that thin, long white hand against the dark skin of his arm, before lifting his head to find Rian looking up at him with his hazel eyes warm, liquid-thick honey so very soft.

  “But I know that’s not your fault,” Rian said, quiet and thrumming. “We don’t choose the lives we’re born into. We just choose the lives we make from that.”

  “Yeah,” Damon said numbly.

  But he wasn’t thinking about that, right now.

  He was thinking about Rian so close—looking up at him like that, in that searching, quiet way that seemed to offer some kind of understanding, acceptance. When he still had the pepper clutched in his other hand, held against his chest, he looked like Eve in the garden of Eden, offering an apple of temptation that Damon wasn’t about to damned well take a bite out of when he didn’t need to be getting his head all tangled up over someone like Rian.

  Someone from a world so completely different from Damon’s own, to the point there was just...no way they could ever really see eye to eye, or even see the same colors.

  What was that saying? Someone else’s blue might be your pink, or something like that—and neither of you would ever know the difference, but that disconnect would always be there.

  Right. Dinner.

  And Damon made himself breathe in, made himself pointedly move away, slipping out of Rian’s reach and instead focusing on turning on the stove to preheat the wok. “You seem to be getting pretty attached to that pepper,” he said.

  Rian blinked, then looked down at the pepper clutched against his chest, the water beading on it soaking in damp spots into his little knitted top. “...oh. I, um, I should probably cut these, shouldn’t I?”

  “Finish washing them, and yeah. And break the broccoli up a bit, and slice the carrots into medallions. Better if you cut them at an angle, slicing away from you.”

  “O-oh. Yes. I’m going to pretend I know exactly what that means.”

  Damon held back his smile, and just settled in to work.

  By the time Damon sliced the last of the beef, covered it in a mixture of pepper and salt, and lashed peanut oil—after a murmured exchange about possible allergies—into the heating wok, Rian had managed to at least break the broccoli apart into clumsy clumps, and cut the carrots into little irregular nubby discs that woul
d probably burn too fast if Damon wasn’t careful, but he’d make do. The peppers, though, Rian seemed to be having trouble with, and Damon tried not to be obvious about watching as Rian sawed a little circle around the stem of the yellow pepper, handling it awkwardly and managing to sort of cut the pepper into a ragged cup before letting out a dismayed sound as he peered inside it.

  “Oh,” he said plaintively. “It’s full of seeds and...like...this pulpy white fleshy stuff.”

  It took everything in Damon not to laugh.

  But he stepped in quickly as Rian tried to poke the knife into the yellow pepper cup, angling it to try to scrape at the inner pulp—and nearly jabbing the point at the base toward his face, as he leaned in close to squint into the opening.

  “Okay then, enough of that.” Damon reached around Rian to either side from behind to pluck the knife away with one hand and the pepper with the other. “How have you not lost a finger by now?”

  Rian sniffed, tilting his head back to look up at Damon upside down. “A cooking knife is very different from an X-Acto knife, thank you, Mr. Louis.”

  “Damon. But don’t say it the way you did before.”

  With mock innocence, Rian rounded his eyes, the eyeliner ringing them turning that hazel into stark, liquid gold. “How did I say it before? Damon.”

  Like that.

  Just like that, rolling and whispering and sighing as if he was wrapping that pale, soft mouth over the arches and curves and points of every letter, tonguing their corners and caressing their peaks and long straight lines.

  Only this time, Damon still stood against Rian’s back, his body heat close enough to brush that slender frame caged between Damon’s arms as he held the knife and the bell pepper out away from Rian’s body.

  And with that scent drifting up into Damon to absorb into him in an intoxicating rush...