Summer peeled out of his yellow rubber gloves, pitched them onto the sink, and stepped out to open the living room door.
No one there.
Empty hallway.
But his thick, bulky suitcase sat right there in front of the door.
The suitcase he’d left in Professor Iseya’s suite, and had been too nervous to retrieve.
There was a note tacked to it now, though, folded on a piece of softly textured, semi-translucent paper. Summer tilted his head, frowning as he picked it up and flicked it open on a short note written in angular, slanting handwriting with a certain razor-like grace to it.
Simple black letters.
Two words, and nothing more.
Challenge accepted.
His chest seized. His fingers clenched, before he hastily unclenched them, smoothing the delicate paper.
What...?
Did...did Professor Iseya mean...?
His mouth dried. His chest hurt, and he thought...oh.
Oh.
Then, tomorrow...
Tomorrow, if he was brave enough...
Maybe, just maybe...
Professor Iseya might just kiss him.
Summer was a wreck for the rest of the day.
He finished cleaning the suite, rattling between one wall and the next in a mess of nervous energy just to keep himself busy. If he didn’t keep moving, he’d probably break down.
So he cleaned. He unpacked and put away his things. He shelved Liu’s books on the low built-in shelves lining the walls of the living room, and just hoped he left them in some kind of order that would let Liu find what he was looking for when he came back to...whatever he was doing. He headed into town on a short drive to stock up on groceries, pick up a few necessities, and buy his own sheets and duvet to replace the institutional ones provided by the school, stripping bare white to instead pile his bed high in deep oceanic blue threaded through with star-shot silver, and enough pillows to bury himself in until he’d wedge himself in place and not be able to kick and toss and turn all night.
That didn’t mean he didn’t, by the time he wore himself out, showered, and threw himself into bed.
Sprawling on his back, walled in on either side by pillows and surrounded by the vaguely chemical scent of new bedding with its fabric dye still fresh, he stared up at the ceiling—wood beam rafters, when he was so used to the white stucco of dorm room after dorm room. He’d probably stayed at school at the University of Maryland longer than he needed to, just...
Trying to find his way.
Trying to figure out what he wanted to do.
No—trying to figure out who he wanted to be.
He should know, after all these years.
But all he’d ever known was what he didn’t want.
He didn’t want to be the quiet boy everyone had snickered at because he was poor, a local townie, his mother insisting on sending him to the boarding school because it was what his father had wanted, before he’d died. He’d been an administrator at Albin once, long ago—before even Professor Iseya’s time. Albin was part of Roark Hemlock’s legacy, and in some ways it was part of Summer’s.
His father’s name was on a plaque in the main hall, below a painted portrait.
That still didn’t mean Summer ever felt like he’d belonged here.
Like he’d belonged anywhere in Omen, as if the small gray town had made him a small gray person and if he just got out, he’d be...he’d be...
He didn’t know.
Bolder.
Happier.
Someone with a purpose, instead of someone who just coasted along day by day, trying to figure out how to fit in, how to get by, what he should be doing with this illusion of a life while he was busy trying to find a real one.
He hadn’t found anything out in Baltimore except the realization he wasn’t cut out for his original career choice in forensics; that he couldn’t handle the blood, couldn’t stare down the horrors of humanity without breaking down into a hyperventilating anxiety attack. So he’d transferred his psych credits into the only other MA track where they’d still count: education.
That didn’t mean he wanted to teach.
Or that he knew what he wanted at all.
The only thing he’d brought home with him was a tan, a few more inches in height...
And, he guessed, a resurgence of that old crush, even if it felt like a wholly new thing.
It had to be a wholly new thing, when he was seeing Iseya with wholly new eyes.
He idly ran his fingertips over his stomach, touched the fingers of his other hand to his lips, remembered...
Professor Iseya’s mouth.
That hand on his throat.
But more...
The way Iseya’s breath had caught, wild and warm and quick, when Summer had captured just a few strands of that tumbling wispy black hair he’d always wanted to touch, to bury his fingers in, to tease down from its clip and wrap himself up in until he and Iseya were tangled together inextricably.
That moment.
That moment had told him he was very much interested in the man Iseya was now, rather than the legend he’d been back then.
Summer wasn’t yet sure what to do with that.
But as he rolled over and buried his face in the pillows and hugged one close to his chest, he hoped...
He hoped tomorrow he would have the chance to find out.
Fox had never been on friendly terms with sleep.
Not when sleep brought memories.
Not when sleep brought dreams, horrible things of a lightless dark where there was no air and only the choking, frigid sensation of water pouring endlessly down his throat and into his lungs while he fought for eternities for breaths that would never come.
Not when sleep somehow never let him escape from the awareness that his bed was painfully empty, when he rolled over in the middle of the night to drape his arms against a warm body.
And there was no warm body there.
He stared out the window of his bedroom, in his private family suite that he should have given up long ago and yet the school administrators had allowed him to keep out of something
