Just Like This (Albin Academy)

by Cole McCade

  Damon only grunted, and tossed his keys on the kitchen counter before snagging the coffee pot and filling it up with water from the sink. He hadn’t had a damned thing to eat since they’d woken up, and hunger probably wasn’t helping the way his emotions felt like the jagged teeth of a rusty saw, digging into him and mangling him all up inside until he felt like he was going to burst apart into ugly scraps of spiky red anger. Fuck, he practically shredded the goddamned bag as he pulled a loaf of wheat bread from the fridge and yanked two slices out to pop them in the toaster.

  Rian hovered near the door, biting his lip and just...just...being Rian. He started to make faltering sounds, then stopped, then said, “...what are you making?”

  “Toast,” Damon grunted. “Want any? Plain, butter, or strawberry compote. Only options.”

  With a humorless chuckle, Rian shook his head. “No—I’m fine. I can wait for the cafeteria.” Then he laced his fingers together, watching Damon with those wide, worried hazel eyes that were just trouble waiting to fucking happen. “Damon...”

  Don’t.

  Don’t you say my fucking name like you need something from me.

  I can’t deal with that right now.

  Stuffing the bread slices in the toaster and shoving the lever down, Damon grunted, “What?”

  “It... I...”

  “Spit it out, Falwell.”

  Rian let out a frustrated sound, this glottal, upset thing in the back of his throat, then blurted, “It’s okay to be upset.” He stopped, breathing in heavily, and Damon glared over his shoulder to see those skinny shoulders rising and Rian lifting his chin like he was nerving himself to do a fucking recital. “It...it really is. I know you’re angry, but you almost seem more angry at yourself.”

  “Why the fu—” Damon caught himself short of snapping, reined himself in, and clamped down on the snarl that wanted to rise. “Why would I be angry at myself?”

  Rather than snap back at him, though...

  Rian only smiled, wistful and small, giving a helpless little shrug. “Because you think of those boys as yours,” he said. “And you’re the kind of person who would blame himself for letting something happen to Chris.”

  “Why would I—”

  For the second time, Damon had to force himself to stop.

  This time, because Rian was fucking right.

  He was fucking right, and it pissed Damon off more than it should that Rian could see right through him that way. That Rian could tell Damon was grinding himself up into pieces and goddamned well tearing himself apart looking through every memory of Chris’s freshman year, every practice, every conversation Damon had had with him, searching for some warning sign that would have told him Chris was in trouble and might need something. Something Damon had missed; something Damon could have stepped in to prevent if he’d been aware enough just a little bit sooner.

  Deep down he knew there was fucking nothing. That sometimes shit just happened, and Chris might not be a good liar but he didn’t have to be to keep shit hidden in a busy school with only so many faculty to keep an eye on the boys day and night.

  It wasn’t Damon’s fault.

  That didn’t stop him from wanting to blame himself anyway.

  But he could at least not lash out at Rian over it, and Damon blew out through his nostrils, scrubbing both hands over his face before forcing himself to say, “No. Never mind. Just drop it.”

  “Okay,” Rian whispered, but then...didn’t fucking drop it. “But it’s not your fault,” he added. “We’re trying. We’re trying our best. It’s not our fault that it’s not enough.”

  Damon dropped his hands, glowering at Rian. “Not enough isn’t good enough. Period.”

  “Then what do we do next?”

  “I—” Damon closed his mouth with a frustrated sound. “I don’t know.”

  Rian just looked at him. As if Damon had any answers; as if Damon could do anything about that quiet entreaty in Rian’s eyes.

  He couldn’t.

  He couldn’t even help one fucking kid; what was he supposed to do about Rian?

  The toaster gave its little metallic-sliding chk-chk, saving him from answering, and he turned away, snagging a plate right from the drying rack next to the sink and dropping the hot, lightly browned slices atop it before dipping into the fridge for the jar of strawberry compote. The coffee pot would be done with the hot water soon; focus on that. Just make his damned breakfast, and get his head on straight before he tried to do anything else.

  He wasn’t even sure why Rian was still here, the silence between them awkward and strained, punctuated only by the sounds as Damon scraped strawberry compote out onto his toast, slung a teabag and sugar into his mug, did everything with a little more force than was necessary just because it helped vent some of his mounting, unreasonable frustration to snap the cap on the compote jar just a little too hard or crash the cabinet door when he put the sugar bin away.

  He was being an oversized child.

  He didn’t care.

  Making himself feel better by banging a cabinet door was better than taking his frustration out on anyone else.

  And sometimes?

  Sometimes, you just needed to slam something.

  But he nearly slammed his own hand in the refrigerator door as Rian broke the silence between them, asking out of goddamned nowhere:

  “Have you ever looked at adoption registries?”

  Damon knocked the fridge closed sharply and straightened, whipping about to glare at Rian. He felt like a nuclear reactor on the verge of meltdown, and one more ounce of pressure and he was going to blow.

  “What?” he demanded. “Why are you asking me that?”

  “I... I was just wondering...” Rian recoiled, before his throat worked in a swallow and he looked away. “I don’t know. I just wanted to help, that’s all. If...if you wanted to find them. Your parents.”

  “I don’t want help with that,” Damon snarled.

  Then, for the millionth fucking time, forced himself to take a deep breath and calm the fuck down.

  He should be used to this by now, anyway.

  Everyone wanted to stick their fucking noses in and fuck around with a thing they just didn’t goddamned well understand.

  But instead of the frustrated, hurting anger that usually rose, he just felt...so fucking tired. Drained. Maybe because he knew Rian, as much as he could by now—and where from most people that question came out of patronizing pity, he had a fucking feeling Rian was taking all his helplessness and casting around to be able to do something, anything, to feel like he was accomplishing something useful where he couldn’t do a single damned thing for Chris.

  Even if it meant rummaging around in a few of Damon’s sore spots and fucking around with a subject Damon didn’t like getting poked in.

  He rolled his shoulders, trying to ease some of the tension in his neck and get his hackles to settle, opening his eyes. “Look. I get that you feel like you have to do things for people so they’ll think you’re useful and worth keeping around,” he grit out. “But I don’t need you doing shit for me where my parents are concerned. Birth or adopted. I don’t need anyone making decisions for me there.” He leaned back against the counter, eyeing Rian and ignoring his breakfast; he suddenly had no damned appetite anymore. “I told you. I closed the book on that. No one asked you to fucking open it again.”

  That’s not what I fucking want from you.

  I don’t know what I want...but it sure as fuck isn’t that.

  Rian stared at him, his eyes glassy. “I wasn’t trying to open anything again!” he protested.

  “Then what were you trying to do?” Damon threw back. “Stick your fingers in an open wound? Maybe throw in a little salt and lemon juice?”

  “No!” It came out as a broken gasp, Rian’s breaths hitching, his chest heaving. “I was just
trying to...to...”

  “What, Falwell?” Fuck, it felt more desperate than angry, this building frustration inside him when he was just so...so fucking tired of fighting with Rian. “The fuck were you trying to do?”

  Rian drew himself up as if he was about to throw something back, eyes sparking—then dimming as he just deflated, seeming to shrink in on himself, his head bowing.

  “...get you to talk to me,” he whispered, nearly swallowing the words, before with an irritable sound he looked away, glaring across the room and rubbing his knuckles against dry eyes, his movements restless and jerky. “I get it. Maybe I’m trying to push you too much, but God, if we’re in this together then we’re in this together, and you’re so locked up inside your own head and I’m left out here fucking alone with my own thoughts and no idea what to do. At all. If I walked out of here right now, you would ignore me for another week, refuse to answer my texts, my calls—because when I have problems I just explode everywhere, while you just completely shut yourself up as if you can wall away and try to fix everything on your own, and won’t come out until you’ve figured out how.”

  Well... God damn.

  There it was.

  Whatever Damon had expected the morning after waking up with Rian naked in his bed, it sure as hell wasn’t having some of his worst personality traits read back to him like Rian had stumbled on a fucking Damon Edwin Louis instruction manual and found every last button to push to make Damon feel like the shittiest goddamned man on earth.

  He sighed, rubbing his fingers along the bridge of his nose. “Okay. I get it. I’ve been pretty close-mouthed ’cause I’m mad as fuck at myself and trying not to take it out on anyone else. But you’re not just talking about Chris, are you.”

  With an upset sound, Rian shook his head, gaze still fixed across the room. “No. I’m not.”

  “You were the one who said it didn’t have to be anything,” Damon pointed out wearily. “Just comfort sex. Meaningless.”

  “I never said it was meaningless,” Rian protested, voice cracking softly.

  Damon just looked at Rian for several moments. “You didn’t have to.”

  A single broken sound escaped Rian’s mouth—before he stopped himself with a hand clutched over his mouth, fingers digging into his cheek hard enough to leave dents. He closed his eyes tightly, his breaths filling the space between them with heavy, hurting rasps, and Damon just...just...

  Damned this fucking wall they’d built between them, higher and thicker than even the barrier of the snappish barbs they’d thrown at each other to start. It felt like they’d created this impassable thing of cruel distance that he couldn’t even cross to pull Rian into his arms and tell him it would be all right.

  Especially when Damon didn’t know what it even was. What the fuck was going on between them, what the hell this horrible feeling was, what the hell he needed or why suddenly Rian’s shallow smiles and careful deflections weren’t enough.

  How the hell could he tell Rian it would be okay?

  So he kept his hands and his thoughts to himself, giving Rian quiet and space to compose himself, averting his eyes so Rian wouldn’t feel like Damon was scrutinizing him, judging him, impatient.

  But he looked back as Rian sucked in an audible breath and straightened his shoulders, wiping his fingers under his eyes once more even though they were still dry, and Damon thought he was betraying more than he intended about what he was repressing with those little gestures.

  “Sometimes,” Rian said softly, looking somewhere just past Damon, not quite meeting his eyes, “when I’m afraid... I say the easiest thing that comes to mind. Anything that lets me deflect, and hide.” He offered a tremulous smile, one full of all the hurt that dwelled in his eyes, even if he seemed so stubbornly determined not to actually let it out. “Anything that lets me smile like I don’t mean it.”

  That hit in ways it shouldn’t have—hard.

  Because now Damon wondered...if, because he’d dared to have any emotion other than perfect patience, because he’d dared to be frustrated, in a bad mood, upset, hurt...

  If Rian now saw him the same way others had. The people who had told him he was only good for brute military service. The kids who had acted like he didn’t have a right to defend himself when they hurt him. The past lovers that had begged him to be rougher, then flinched like he’d done something to hurt them if he was just grouchy and didn’t want to talk.

  As a raging animal, someone to be afraid of, instead of a human being who was allowed to have feelings other than smiling complacence.

  “So,” Damon asked, trying to keep his voice even, “what are you afraid of, Rian?”

  “I don’t know.” Rian shook his head, his hair rippling around him. He stepped back, clutching one hand against his chest, the other wrapped around his forearm in a death grip that made the fine bones of his wrist stand out starkly. He gulped back a ragged sound. “I... I should go.”

  “Running away?”

  Rian stopped in the middle of taking another step backward. “Giving us both space to think.” He blinked quickly, a little too hard. “It seems like we need that...doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

  Yet some part of Damon felt like if he let Rian go...that wall between them would never come down. Maybe it shouldn’t, though. Maybe they should just...fucking keep their distance if they upset each other this much—and he sure as hell wasn’t going to try to force Rian to stay, or talk to him if he didn’t want to. Because Rian was right; just sitting here flinging shit at each other wasn’t going to help anything right now, and it would do them both good to separate and clear their heads.

  So he just...watched Rian go.

  Watched Rian turn his back on him, slender hand gripping at the edge of the door as he pushed it open. But before Rian could cross the threshold, Damon caught himself talking before he could stop his lips from moving, little droplets of hurt pouring off his tongue as sounds.

  “I don’t want you to be afraid of me, Rian.”

  Rian stopped so sharply his clothing swayed around him, his hair swirling in an eddying cloud; he threw a wide-eyed, startled look over his shoulder. “It’s...it’s not you I’m afraid of,” he said blankly, then more emphatically, “Not at all. Never. How could I be afraid of you?”

  Damon felt selfish, almost, for how that eased the tightness inside him.

  But he’d fucking needed to hear it, too.

  And it was easier to talk without the lump in his throat choking off his words as he asked, “Nah? Then what?”

  “I...” Rian’s lashes lowered. “I’m afraid of hurting you just by being me.”

  “You so sure that’s how it would be?”

  “I don’t know.” With a halfhearted shrug, Rian’s lips twitched in a pallid attempt at a smile, as if he couldn’t even muster up the energy for one of those damned fake, pleasantly polite things. “But we really shouldn’t let an entire week go without talking again.”

  “We won’t,” Damon promised. “Go clear your head. I get it. It’s okay.”

  “Thank you,” Rian whispered.

  Before, once again, Damon had to watch him walk away, the door closing in his wake.

  Leaving Damon alone, and wondering why he felt like they’d just broken something when there’d been nothing there to break to start with.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Maybe, Rian thought, it would serve him right if Damon ignored him.

  Because if he’d been treating Damon in such a way that Damon thought Rian was afraid of him, then Rian had been absolutely right.

  It was so easy for him to hurt Damon just by being himself, without even realizing the fallout of his casual little careless comments.

  Rian lay on his back in bed, staring up at the ceiling and the patterns the moonlight made against the stucco patterns, filtered throu
gh trees that were slowly starting to lose the first of their leaves, making silhouetted black spider webs of branches against the white stucco. Through the bedroom wall, he could hear Walden moving around; he’d been avoiding the man as much as was necessary considering they rarely crossed paths, when Rian didn’t know if he’d fucking explode at him or not.

  He didn’t know anything right now.

  What had him so agitated, why he couldn’t settle.

  Why it bothered him that he was no longer sore inside; could no longer feel where Damon had been.

  Why he couldn’t fall asleep when it was well after midnight, and he had classes to teach tomorrow, and he’d already straggled through Monday’s classes in a daze after barely sleeping all weekend.

  ...or why Walden was still up at what had to be almost two o’clock in the morning, and from the sound of it...pacing, when Walden was an early to bed, early to rise type who kept his schedules as religiously as a nun and usually slept like the still and silent dead.

  But apparently Rian and Walden weren’t the only ones awake.

  Because while he was watching the silver coins of moonlight shower across the ceiling, his phone lit up on his nightstand, followed by the soft vibrations of an incoming text message. He rolled over, sprawling on his stomach and hugging a pillow to his chest with one arm, the other reaching out to snag the phone and drag it over.

  Only for his heart to stop at the sight of that black and white icon on the incoming message.

  He swiped it so quickly he didn’t even get to see the preview on the home screen, and called himself every manner of name for how fumbly-handed and breathless he turned as he tapped through to read the message.

  You up? Damon sent. Really hope your phone is on vibrate, if not. Uh, if I woke you up...sorry?

  Rian couldn’t help smiling, curling his knuckles against his lips. God, after he’d been lying awake miserable for three nights turning over this mess with Damon, the bigger mess with Chris...he shouldn’t be so giddy at just one text, or the way Damon seemed almost sweetly sheepish. Maybe it didn’t erase the tension between them, but...