He didn’t understand.
And he didn’t understand how intently Summer looked at him, those rich blue eyes subtly dilated, turning them smoky.
“Summer,” he whispered. “Call me Summer.”
Fox’s eyes widened. His fingers clenched harder in his shirt.
Did Summer not...understand what using given names meant, to him?
Perhaps he was only half-Japanese, his mother a white American woman who gave him his gray eyes in a rare genetic fluke, but he still knew so much of so many things from his father, things passed down to him like traditions written in blood.
Given names could be used with fondness for children, for family, for close friends who might as well be family...
But in certain circumstances, someone’s name could be a love word.
Intimate and shivering, rolling off the tongue.
He turned his back on Summer, on those eyes that pleaded with him to be that intimate, to be that close, curling his shoulders in and digging his fingers against his shirt as if he could claw down to his heart and grasp it to stop its erratic and sharp beating.
“Mn.”
“You said it once before,” Summer said softly, and Fox caught his breath.
He had.
Letting it roll off his tongue, easy and fluid, but he’d tried not to taste it, tried to simply use it to capture Summer’s attention, to impress on him that he wasn’t someone Summer should ever want.
But he wondered, now.
Wondered now what he’d let slip past his lips without feeling its texture, its flavor.
He glanced over his shoulder. All he could see was Summer’s profile, the tanned slopes and lines of him catching the sun until he glowed. Amber-soft and gentle, and Fox swallowed thickly.
“...Summer,” he said again.
It tasted like sighs. Like the taste not of summer, but the spice of autumn leaves turning and falling and crackling under every step. It tasted like the color of the sky just as the sun touches the horizon at sunset.
And it felt like silk on his lips and tongue, passing over his skin in liquid, smooth caresses.
He didn’t like it.
He didn’t like how close it felt, when he still remembered the taste of Summer’s lips against his own, that same crackle-bright hint of warmth and sharpness, while Summer’s pulse throbbed and trembled underneath his palm.
“Yeah,” Summer said, a low thrum turning his voice husky. “Just like that.”
Closer he stepped. Closer still, until he was a wall of heat at Fox’s back, this vibrant living thing trying to make Fox remember he was alive, too.
“Would it be so terrible?” Summer asked softly. “To kiss me just once per day. Operant conditioning works better with a reward.”
“I...” Breathing was so hard, right now, and Fox didn’t understand this feeling. “I refuse to answer that.”
“Shouldn’t it be easy to say no, then?”
He scowled. “You are baiting me.”
“Maybe a little.” Summer smiled sweetly, just a faint curve of his lips visible in the corner of Fox’s eye. “It’s not every day I get to make the man I was in love with for my entire childhood blush.”
Fox caught a strangled sound in his throat.
He was most certainly not blushing.
His face simply felt warm because of the rising sunlight, the heat chasing the last of the mist from the pond, the trees.
“If you are attempting to pique my pride, Mr. Hemlock, it won’t work.”
“I’m not.”
Then Fox felt something he hadn’t felt in decades:
Fingers in his hair.
Just the lightest touch, catching one of the damnable tendrils that would never stay in the clip, lifting it and making him shudder and tense with the prickling feeling of the strands moving against his neck, kissing his skin, then pulling back to leave him strangely deprived of touch, as if the sensitized flesh was achingly aware that it wasn’t in contact with...skin, warmth, texture.
“I’m just riding my bravery until it runs out.” Summer stroked his thumb down the strands captured in his fingers, handling them delicately. “Think about it, Professor Iseya. I’ll be ready for class tomorrow. Tell me then.”
Then: the feather-soft sensation of his hair free-floating, falling, drifting down to lay against his neck and coil over his shoulder again.
The quiet fall of footsteps, whispering and sighing against the grass.
The wild pounding of Fox’s heart, a drumbeat calling the day into existence.
He turned.
He turned, but Summer was already gone.
And already...
Already, the world was turning gray again.
Chapter Three
Summer barely made it to the suite he’d been assigned to before he nearly hyperventilated.
Holy fuck.
Holy fuck.
He dropped down onto the sofa in the blessedly empty—and ridiculously messy—living room and buried his face in his hands. His heart felt like it would burst, the walls worn thin as paper and ready to shatter.
He’d just—
And then he’d—
And then he’d—
What had come over him?
Just. He. God. What.
When he’d been a boy, the closest he’d ever gotten to Professor Iseya was when he’d scurried up to the desk to hand in assignments under that watchful, cutting eye, feeling as if judgment was hanging over his head like the Sword of Damocles, waiting to drop down and pierce him right through.
Back then Professor Iseya had been an inscrutable taskmaster, larger than life, greater than human.
But knowing what Summer knew now, seeing him, understanding what was behind that stony outer exterior...
He just saw Professor Iseya as a man.
And that man was far more enticing than any childish fantasy or ideal.
Enough to make Summer want to learn what was really behind that cold mask when before, he’d never truly realized it was a mask at all.
Especially when for just a moment, that stone had cracked.
Iseya had responded to him, even if it was with flustered confusion and irritation.
And that feeling...
That feeling had been addictive enough to make Summer bold.
Even if he’d been hyperventilating in the back of his mind, that heady sensation of seeing every minute reaction to him—from the way Iseya wouldn’t quite look at him head-on to the soft, deliciously deep way he said Summer’s name to that annoyed blush—had pushed him further and further toward a reckless edge.
If he wanted to break it down in
