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.
Professor Fox Iseya.
Forbidding, aloof, commanding: psychology instructor Iseya is a cipher who’s always fascinated and intimidated shy, anxious Summer. But that fascination turns into something more when the older man challenges Summer to be brave. What starts as a daily game to reward Summer with a kiss for every obstacle overcome turns passionate, and a professional relationship turns quickly personal.
Yet Iseya’s walls of grief may be too high for someone like Summer to climb…until Summer’s infectious warmth shows Fox everything he’s been missing in life.
Now both men must be brave enough to trust each other, to take that leap.
To find the love they’ve always needed…
Just like that.
Carina Adores is home to highly romantic contemporary love stories where LGBTQ+ characters find their happily-ever-afters.
A new Carina Adores title is available each month:
The Hideaway Inn by Philip William Stover
The Girl Next Door by Chelsea M. Cameron
Hairpin Curves by Elia Winters
Better Than People by Roan Parrish
Full Moon in Leo by Brooklyn Ray
If You Can’t Stand the Heat by KD Fisher
Just Like That by Cole McCade
Also available from Cole McCade
and Carina Press
The Criminal Intentions Serial
The Blossom + Bite Series
The Crash Into Me Series
The Undue Arrogance/Cocky Series
Over and Over Again
Pinups
Writing as Xen
Shatterproof
From the Ashes
The Whites of Their Eyes
Sweet Vermouth
Cracks
Content Note
Some content in Just Like That may be triggering for some readers, due to depiction of trauma or other topics that may be difficult to read. Content warnings for this story include the following:
• A main character dealing with the death of a spouse, including grief, guilt and PTSD flashbacks.
• A main character with chronic anxiety, including graphic depictions of panic attacks and anxiety reactions with physical responses.
• A main character with a dead parent.
• Graphic depictions of nightmares involving drowning.
• Brief mention of suicidal ideation.
• A subplot that seems to depict the tragic death of two queer characters.
• Use of derogatory Japanese slurs toward mixed-race people, by a character and directed at himself.
• Penetrative cis male/cis male sex without a condom, and including exchange of bodily fluids.
• A relationship that includes multiple uneven power-exchange dynamics, including May/December, mild hints of D/s kink with breathplay and senior/junior employee.
• Depiction of bullying between high school age boys, including brawling and extreme methods of harassment, specifically recollection of urinating in a sports drink.
• Depiction of neglectful parents and their impact on the students.
• A moment in which both main characters recklessly endanger themselves for the sake of their relationship and each other, with the threat of drowning involved. (It’s their TSTL moment for the drama, y’all. Just let it be what it is.)
As always, if you feel you can’t handle these subjects, I’d rather you put the book down and walk away than hurt yourself.
And as always…
Take care of yourselves, loves.
Just Like That
Cole McCade
I haven’t met you yet.
But this is for you.
Author Note
Omen, Massachusetts, and the Albin Academy School for Boys are both fictional locations. While Omen is meant to be a take off Salem, nonetheless the town does not represent any real location or correlating events.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from Girl Next Door by Chelsea M. Cameron
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
