It almost felt like dreaming, being the only one in the halls, the only one ghosting through these passageways, like he was a haunt and everyone hid away behind their doors to keep his wandering, baleful eye from landing on them and pulling them into the dark.
He was so caught in this thought, in the quiet sleepy delight of it, that he didn’t realize when his skimming fingertips skipped over the carved edge of a doorframe to land not on the door, but on empty air.
Until he touched skin, warm and firm and smooth.
Skin, and the tight-honed curve of a shoulder.
He jerked his hand back, pulse thumping faster through his veins, and lifted his head, stopping where he stood.
And found himself face to face with Fox Iseya, those silver eyes piercing into him like diamond spears, rooting him in place.
Iseya leaned in the doorway of his suite, arms folded over his bare chest, a pair of loose, dark gray linen pajama pants holding for dear life on to the sculpted, trim angles of tightly defined hips. He was the same smooth shade of pale gold all over, like sunlight pouring over white sand—his skin taut and weathered and drawn tight over firm shoulders, over the pronunciation of collarbones as sharp as an indrawn breath, over the hard-toned breadth of his chest, over the rolling fluid rows of muscle tapering down his abdomen to the dip of his navel and the sinful slope of his pelvis. The neatly pressed shirts and suspenders he wore tended to slim his figure, disguising the true bulk of him.
But like this, shirtless and radiating heat and towering over Summer with such forbidding intensity...
He was somehow even more intimidating.
And even more alluring.
Especially when his glasses were absent, leaving those angled, long-lashed, penetrating eyes fully unguarded.
And his hair was barely caught up in a knot, endless skeins of it spilling loose to pour down his back in a tangled mess tumbling to his thighs, several wispy locks drifting across his brow and coiling over his shoulders, clinging lovingly to the long, elegant slope of his throat.
Summer’s mouth dried. His heart tried to stop, petrified in its place, as rooted as his feet were to the floor.
He tried to say something.
And all that came out was a broken, ragged, “Ulp.”
Iseya arched one sharp, dark dash of a brow, inclining his head as though acknowledging something perfectly normal. “Summer,” he said coolly.
Fuck.
Iseya shouldn’t...be like that. Shirtless, radiating this wild animal sensuality at once dangerous and inviting, saying Summer’s name in that voice. Looking at Summer with those eyes, when without the glasses chilling them...
Summer realized they weren’t the glacial, pale ice he’d always thought.
They were molten silver, burning-hot and leaving his skin, his entire body feeling far too warm.
He struggled to pull himself together, told himself to stop when he was just tired and overreacting.
But he had to look away to find his voice again; to even be able to breathe, when he was caught up in the stifling, oppressive need to just...just...
Touch, and his fingers curled against his palm, holding fast to the tingling after-impression still left in his fingertips.
“Is...is everything okay?” he managed to straggle out. “I sent the boys back to their room, and I’ll report everything to the principal in the morning.”
“The boys returned to their room as they were told. Considering I doubt you did much to discipline them, they were remarkably obedient,” Iseya lilted mockingly. “I was waiting for you.”
Summer’s breaths skipped as he darted a look at Iseya. “For me...? Wh-why?”
“Because it would appear that I was correct in anticipating your behavior.” Iseya’s gaze roved down Summer’s body, drifting, yet every lingering look as palpable as a touch of liquid fire slipping over his skin, coaxing the breath from his lungs until his chest ached and burned. “You saw to the students...and not to yourself.”
It took a moment to click, to realize where Iseya was looking.
The bruise over Summer’s ribs.
He’d already gotten used to ignoring the pain, so tired that the throbbing was just a quiet counterpoint to his exhausted heartbeat.
He flushed, face and neck warming, and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, craning to try to look down at his own chest. The mark over his ribs was starting to turn a dark, ugly purple in the shape of a kneecap.
Great.
“It’s just a bruise,” he mumbled. “I’ll get it checked out in the morning. Wasn’t worth bothering the nurse again.”
Iseya clucked his tongue, then let out an exasperated sigh. “Inside,” he ordered, then turned away sharply, his hair flicking out in a lash of dark wisps to lick against Summer’s chest before drifting away as Iseya disappeared inside his suite.
Leaving Summer blinking after him, staring through the open doorway.
Iseya...wanted him to come inside?
He stood numbly out in the hallway for several seconds longer, then cleared his throat, glancing side to side. No one in the hallway. Not that it mattered, it wasn’t like anyone would think anything seeing him going into Iseya’s suite this late at night.
So why was Summer so flustered, his face so hot?
“You have ten seconds before I close the door in your face and lock it,” drifted sharply from inside.
Summer scrambled over the threshold, and pushed the door firmly shut behind him.
And stood there like a giant dork, unmoving and staring around the suite.
He’d been here before, but Iseya’s suite looked somehow different by night. The standard-issue furniture had been replaced by quiet things in dark wood, tastefully arranged for a combination of comfort and elegance; the dark wood flooring was, in places, covered over by large tatami mats in paler tan colors, pinned in place by low long lacquered tables and chairs and a sofa made of black wicker so delicate it was like spiderwebs, accented by
