by Elia Winters
“You ready?” Megan stood at the table, beaming with excitement, holding her bag and camera.
Scarlett took her hand. “I’m ready.”
* * *
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Acknowledgments
Writing this book has been such a pleasure and privilege, and that’s in no small part due to the people who supported its creation along the way. First, for my amazing agent, Saritza Hernandez, who has been in my corner since I first started publishing. Her words of wisdom and emotional support get me through each manuscript. Next, my incredible editor, Kerri Buckley, who has been excited about this book since I first pitched it. It’s been a pleasure to work with her again. Also, a huge appreciation to all the folks at Carina Press past and present who have been instrumental in getting the Carina Adores line off the ground.
I wrote a lot of this book during coffee shop sessions with Felicia “Ray” Davin, who is simply a wondrous human being with a bottomless well of good sense (and great fashion). My social circle has been invaluable, especially as we all retreated to our homes for the long haul. I’m quite thankful for my people: Laura for commiseration, support, love, and laughs; Amanda for liveliness and steadfast determination; my work buddies who are also real buddies; and the Human Interaction Discord for cocktails and screaming into the void with me. Also, my quarantine pod: Chris and Crystal, who have been sharing this too-small condo with me since mid-March and who have put up with all the shenanigans that come from trying to create art during a global crisis. I love you all.
Finally, I want to thank everyone who’s so excited about this book. My readership has been immensely supportive, and the response and anticipation have been greater than I ever expected. This is a book I would have loved to read when I was first coming to terms with my queerness, and I’m honored to write it and to share it with you. I’m hoping by the time you all read this, it’s safe to take road trips again.
Available now from Carina Adores and Cole McCade!
Summer Hemlock never meant to come back to Omen, Massachusetts... But with his mother in need of help, Summer has no choice but to return to his hometown, take up a teaching residency at the elite Albin Academy—and work directly under the man who made his teenage years miserable.
Read on for a sneak preview of what happens next in Just Like That, the first book in Cole McCade’s new Albin Academy series.
Chapter One
Albin Academy was on fire.
Summer Hemlock saw the plume of smoke before he saw the school itself—just a thick coil of black puffing up into the cloud-locked sky, spiraling above the forest of thin, wispy paper birches that segregated Albin from the rest of the town. He ground his rental car to a halt at the foot of the hill and clambered out, staring up the winding lane...then over his shoulder, at the clustered handful of shingle-roofed houses and stores that barely qualified as a town.
No sign of alarm from the Omen police department. No fire trucks lighting up and screaming out into the streets.
With a groan, Summer thunked his forehead against the top of the Acura’s door.
Business as usual at the boarding school, then.
He guessed seven years away hadn’t changed a thing.
He climbed back into the Acura and sent it coasting forward once more, struggling with the gear shift on the steep hill and the narrow lane that crawled its way up the slope. Thin fingers of branches kissed their tips across the road to create a tunneled archway, a throat that spilled him from the lane and into the academy’s front courtyard.
He remembered, as a boy, walking up this lane every morning as the only local who attended the academy, the thick layer of mist that seemed a staple of Massachusetts mornings coming up to his shoulders, making his uniform cling to him damply. He’d always been a little scared, on those walks. Something about the fog, the thin black trees, the silence of it, where he could hear his own lonely footsteps on the pavement and imagine them echoed back by some strange ghost in the woods.
Maybe the ghost of Isabella of the Lake, the drowned girl who haunted the rowing pond behind the school.
Or maybe just his imagination, chasing him with all the fears he hadn’t been able to face.
At the moment, though, he was driven less by fear and more by resigned curiosity as he forced the Acura to make the steep ascent. By the time he pulled into the courtyard, the plume of smoke had turned into a brooding cloud hovering over the school, wreathing its pointed spires in ominous black. Most if it seemed to be coming from one upstairs window in the front west tower, the pane pulled up to let the smoke escape.
The entire courtyard was crowded with teenage boys, all of them lounging about in loosely knotted groups. They wore ennui like cologne, draping it around them as casually as their expensively tailored uniforms—and utterly uninterested in both the burning school, and the harried-looking teachers trying to shepherd them away from it.
Maybe Summer was a little weird.
Because the chaos of it was a familiar, bittersweet ache of homecoming, and it made him smile.
He stole an empty parking slot, cut the engine, and slipped out to weave through the crowd, holding his breath against the stink of chemical fumes on the biting early spring air. As he pulled the front door open, a severe-looking man in a navy blue suit—someone new, Summer thought, no one he recognized—reached for his arm.
Without even thinking, Summer stepped back out of pure instinctive habit, pulling out of arm’s reach and edging past the man.
Until he was forced to stop, as the man stepped in front of him, blocking the door.
“Excuse me, sir.” The man looked at him coldly through half-rim glasses. “Visitors are not allowed at the moment. In case you can’t see, we’re in the middle of an emergency.”
Summer smiled, not quite meeting the man’s eyes. It made him uncomfortable, always, this feeling like people were crawling inside his skin with a single stare—but most never noticed that he was looking right over their shoulders, instead. “It’s okay,” he said. “I work here. And I’m used to Dr. Liu’s explosions. I’m just gonna grab a fire extinguisher and help.”
The man just blinked at him, cocking his head with a quizzical frown.
So Summer stole his opportunity and slipped inside, just barely managing to squeeze past the suit-clad man without touching.
He barely had a moment to register the disorienting feeling of familiarity—as if he’d traveled back in time, back to that rawboned thin pale boy he’d been, walking into the eerily quiet, high-ceilinged entry chamber of dark paneled wood and tall windows with his shoulders hunched and head bowed—before he vaulted up one side of the double stairway, taking the steps two at a time, and dashed for the northwest wing. The smell of bitterly acidic smoke led him on, beckoning him through vaulted corridors where the air grew thicker and thicker, until the murk fogged everything gray and stung his eyes.
Coughing, he pulled the collar of his button-down up over his mouth, breathing through the cloth and squinting. Just up ahead, he could barely make out a few shapes moving in the hallway—but a familiar voice rang down the hall, low and dry and authoritative, this thing of velvet and grit and cool autumn nights.
“Extinguisher first, then sand,” the voice ordered. “Dr. Liu, if you insist on getting in the way, at least make yourself useful and remove anything else flammable from the vicinity of the blaze. Quickly, now. Keep your mouths covered.”
Summer’s entire body tingled, prickled, as if his skin had drawn too tight. That voice—that voice brought back too many memories. Afternoons in
his psychology elective class, staring down at his textbook and doodling in his notebook and refusing to look up, to look at anyone, while that voice washed over him for an hour. Summer knew that voice almost better than the face attached to it, every inflection and cadence, the way it could command silence with a quiet word more effectively than any shout.
And how sometimes it seemed more expressive than the cold, withdrawn expression of the man he remembered, standing tall and stern in front of a class of boys who were all just a little bit afraid of him.
Summer had never been afraid, not really.
But he hadn’t had the courage to whisper to himself what he’d really felt, when he’d been a hopeless boy who’d done everything he could to be invisible.
Heart beating harder, he followed the sound of that voice to the open doorway of a smoke-filled room, the entire chemistry lab a haze of gray and black and crackling orange; from what he could tell a table was...on fire? Or at least the substance inside a blackened beaker was on fire, belching out a seemingly never-ending, impossible billow of smoke and flame.
Several smaller fires burned throughout the room; it looked as though sparks had jumped to catch on notebooks, papers, books. Several indistinct shapes alternately sprayed the conflagration with fire extinguishers and doused it with little hand buckets of sand from the emergency kit in the corner of the room, everyone working clumsily one-handed while they held wet paper towels over their noses and mouths with the other.
And standing tall over them all—several teachers and older students, it looked like—was the one man Summer had returned to Omen to see.
Professor Iseya.
He stood head and shoulders above the rest, his broad-shouldered, leanly angular frame as proud as a battle standard, elegant in a trim white button-down tucked into dark gray slacks, suspenders striping in neat black lines down his chest. Behind slim glasses, his pale, sharply angled gray eyes flicked swiftly over the room, set in a narrow, graceful face that had only weathered with age into an ivory mask of quiet, aloof beauty.
The sleek slick of his ink-black hair was pulled back from his face as always—but as always, he could never quite keep the soft strands inside their tie, and several wisped free to frame his face, lay against his long, smooth neck, pour down his shoulders and back. He held a damp paper towel over his mouth, neatly folded into a square, and spoke through it to direct the frazzled-looking group with consummate calm, taking complete control of the situation.
And complete control of Summer, as Iseya’s gaze abruptly snapped to him, locking on him from across the room. “Why have you not evacuated?” Iseya demanded coldly, his words precise, inflected with a softly cultured accent. “Please vacate the premises until we’ve contained the blaze.”
Summer dropped his eyes immediately—habit, staring down at his feet. “Oh, um—I came to help,” he mumbled through the collar of his shirt.
A pause, then, “You’re not a student. Who are you?”
That shouldn’t sting.
But then it had been seven years, he’d only been in two of Iseya’s classes...and he’d changed, since he’d left Omen.
At least, he hoped he had.
That was why he’d run away, after all. To shake off the boy he’d been; to find himself in a big city like Baltimore, and maybe, just maybe...
Learn not to be so afraid.
But he almost couldn’t bring himself to speak, while the silence demanded an answer. “I’m not a student anymore,” he corrected, almost under his breath. “It’s...it’s me. Summer. Summer Hemlock. Your new TA.” He made himself look up, even if he didn’t raise his head, peeking at Iseya through the wreathing of smoke that made the man look like some strange and ghostly figure, this ethereal spirit swirled in mist and darkness. “Hi, Professor Iseya. Hi.”
* * *
Fox Iseya narrowed his eyes at the young man in the doorway.
He had nearly forgotten his new TA would be arriving today—or, more truthfully, he had put it out of his mind, when he was not particularly looking forward to training and shepherding an inept and inexperienced fresh university graduate in handling the fractious, contentious group of spoiled degenerates that made up the majority of Albin’s student body. He only needed a TA to ensure his replacement would be properly trained when he retired. Otherwise, having a second presence in the classroom was little more than an unwanted but unfortunately necessary nuisance.
The nuisance he had been expecting, however, was not the man standing awkwardly in the doorway, face half-obscured by the collar of his shirt.
The Summer Hemlock he remembered had been a gangly teenager, so pale he was nearly translucent, all angles and elbows everywhere. Fox recalled seeing more of the top of his head than anything else, a shaggy mop of black falling to hide blue eyes and a fresh, open face; he’d always huddled in his desk with his head bowed, and mumbled inaudible things when called on in class.
The young man in front of him almost mirrored that posture...but that was where the resemblance ended.
Summer was tall and athletic now, a lithe runner’s build outlined against his dress shirt and low-slung jeans; pale skin had darkened to a glowing, sunny tan that stood out vibrant even in the smoke-filled murk of the room. The lank mess of his hair had been tamed into a stylishly bedheaded tousle, perhaps in need of a trim but framing his face and rather strong jaw attractively. Too-wide, nervous blue eyes had deepened, shaded by firmly decisive brows.
Considering that Fox guided his students through to senior graduation and rarely ever saw them again, it was rather bizarre to contrast the boy he had taught with the man who had apparently come to take Fox’s place, when he retired next year.
But right now, he didn’t have time to think about that.
Not when Dr. Liu was currently racking up exponential increases in charges for property damage.
Fox flicked two fingers, beckoning. “Sand. Join the chain. Let’s do our best to keep this contained.”
Summer’s head came up sharply, and he looked at Fox for a single wide-eyed moment—and that drove home that sense of bizarrely unfamiliar familiarity, when Fox recalled quite clearly that direct eye contact could turn the boy into a stammering wreck, cringing and retreating. That moment of locked gazes lasted for only a second, before Summer nodded quickly and averted his eyes.
“Of course, sir—yes.”
Summer strode forward swiftly on long legs, and skirted around Fox to pick up a bucket and scoop up sand from the massive black trash bin that had been repurposed specifically to deal with Dr. Liu’s regrettably frequent “accidents.” The man was a nightmare and a half, and Fox supposed they could consider themselves lucky it had been two months since the last time the good doctor had practically burned the school down.
But they were running out of empty classrooms to repurpose for chemistry lessons while previously damaged rooms were repaired, and Fox intended to have words at the next faculty meeting.
Honestly, he didn’t understand how Dr. Liu still had a job.
And he quite firmly directed the chemistry teacher out of the way once more, as he returned to marshalling the emergency response group to put out the secondary fires that had erupted from jumping embers and ample fuel throughout the room. Fortunately this was rather a practiced habit, at this point—and within twenty minutes the blaze was contained, the last of it smothered beneath sand and fire extinguisher foam. They had, regrettably, learned years ago that Liu frequently worked with substances that only burned hotter when doused with water.
At Albin, the students weren’t the only ones who often had to learn from experience.
Yet throughout the suppression efforts, Fox repeatedly found his gaze straying toward Summer. His apparent shyness had vanished the moment he dove into the fray, joining the others rather energetically and hauling bucket after bucket of sand to chase down one sparking blaze after the other befo
re it could get out of control.
By the time the clouds of smoke began to thin, Summer was a mess—his once-white shirt smeared with soot and ash, streaks of it along his cheeks and jaw, underscoring one eye in a rakish dash like face paint. But he was laughing, as he helped an older student shovel sodden, charred remnants of notebooks into a trash bag.
But the moment Fox called, “Mr. Hemlock,” Summer went stiff, every bit of ease bleeding out of his body to leave his back rigid and his shoulders tight.
Hm.
Interesting.
Summer glanced over his shoulder, looking toward Fox but not quite at him. “Yes, Professor Iseya?”
“Leave the cleanup to Dr. Liu. It’s the least he can do to compensate for his crimes.”
“Hey!” came from the corner Liu had sequestered himself in. Fox ignored him, crooking a finger at Summer.
“If you’ve brought your possessions, fetch them. You can use my suite to clean up and change. We have matters to discuss.”
Summer ducked his head, scrubbing his hands against his jeans. Beneath the smears of soot streaking pronounced cheekbones, tanned skin turned a decided shade of pink. He nodded quietly, obediently.
“Yes, Professor Iseya.”
Fox frowned. There was something...off about Summer’s furtive behavior, something more than just a reticence he clearly hadn’t shaken over seven years away from Omen and Albin Academy.
It didn’t matter.
Summer’s demons were Summer’s demons, and Fox wasn’t staying at the school long enough to figure them out.
* * *
Fox waited only long enough for Summer to retrieve his suitcase from his car, then retreated to his private suite in the southwest tower. While he let Summer have the run of the bathroom, Fox wiped off his face, washed his hands, and changed into a clean shirt, slacks, and waistcoat, then settled in the easy chair in the living room to wait; to keep himself busy he flipped to his last page marker in the absolutely abysmal Jordan Peterson book he was forcing himself to read for a class exercise.
