With every moment Fox’s mind wasn’t on classwork, on keeping those unruly monsters in line, on planning the next week’s lessons and assignments...
It somehow drifted back to Summer.
And sometimes Fox found himself simply touching his lips, when they always seemed tender and sensitive lately with the pressure of daily kisses stolen between classes, against desks, against the wall in his office, in the secret crevice of a hallway with students passing by utterly oblivious beyond.
With staff meetings and so many other things to worry about, it always seemed every kiss was just a half-second’s stolen moment, over too soon when one thing or another always interrupted.
And it was rather quite annoying Fox that each time a student or a phone call or an authoritative rap on the office door cut them off...
Fox found himself left unsatisfied, and craving more.
He let his drifting steps take him through the overgrowth around Whitemist Lake, the little burrs growing among the grass and flowers catching on his slacks as if trying to drag him back from the edge, the scent of the night clear and damp and at least settling his agitation somewhat, even if it couldn’t calm his thoughts.
His reflection was a quiet murky thing in the depths, and he could only look at it for a moment before he had to turn away.
It made him think too much of drowning; of ghosts sinking away into the dark and the deep, like Isabella of the legend.
Like Michiko, dying alone and trapped in her vehicle, swallowed into the darkness of night, into the blackness of the river, deep down where the moon couldn’t even reach her to light her way.
He hadn’t even been there.
Not to save her, and not to die with her.
He’d failed her.
How, he couldn’t quantify. If he stepped out of himself objectively, he knew he wasn’t being even remotely rational.
But then feelings weren’t rational.
Grief wasn’t rational.
And neither was the struggling, floundering sense of drowning in his own attempts to find himself, when he realized he was ready to stop grieving but didn’t know how.
He tilted his head back, let the wind kiss his cheeks, looked up at the quiet sallow curve of a dim moon shrouded by clouds.
“Were you there with her, that night?” he whispered. “Can you tell me someone was with her, even when I wasn’t?”
The moon didn’t answer.
The moon would never answer, because it was only Fox projecting shallow, selfish needs to imagine that some quiet silver hand had reached down from the heavens and eased Michiko’s pain in those last silent, airless moments.
No matter how many times he told himself that, though...
It still comforted him in small, aching ways.
Maybe he hoped, one day, when he died a day or a thousand days or fifty years from now...
There would be someone to hold his hand, too.
Someone more tangible than fingers of pale moonlight.
“Is this really what I want?” he asked. “To pull myself so far out of reach that one day I’ll only know this empty coldness...where no one can take my hand at all?”
Just as the moon had not answered for Michiko...
It did not answer for him.
He’d known it wouldn’t.
But he smiled, nonetheless.
And bent to pluck a single little daisy from among the rioting wildflowers, before tossing it out onto the water and watching it sink.
Maybe he wasn’t quite ready to wish to Isabella for what he truly wanted, when he couldn’t define that just yet himself.
But one small offering, perhaps.
Just that he wouldn’t ruin whatever this strange bright feeling was, that he had every time Summer was near.
He turned away from the lake, heading up toward the main school building again—but paused as bright rectangles of light caught his attention, spilling across the grass from the swimming annex’s high, narrow rows of windows.
Fox frowned, knitting his brows together.
No one should be in there at this time of night.
He knew quite well that sometimes the students snuck in to skinny-dip despite all the safety warnings, but...
Whenever he caught them at it, he stuck them with grounds duty for months.
This time would be no exception.
Tightening his jaw, he changed his path to find the footstones buried in the grass and leading up to the annex. When he pushed the door open, though...
He didn’t expect to find not the students—
But Summer.
Summer cut through the glossy blue waters of the pool like a seal, sleek and strong and gleaming, the sheen of water pouring over him turning his tanned skin into burnished gold. He was tight and toned from head to toe, with long, graceful legs sculpted into smooth flexions of muscle that kicked powerfully, while hardened arms cut through the water smoothly and made his naked back bunch and coil with kinetic energy captured in sinew, transformed into propulsion, nearly writhing with naked sensuality. The water glided over him as if it loved him, and wanted to cling to him as closely as possible.
From the hot, almost furious yearning in the pit of his stomach, the tightening in his thighs, the pulling at his core...
Fox knew the feeling all too well.
Summer reached the end of his lap and stopped at the edge of the pool, settling to tread water with one hand gripping at the molded concrete rim and the other pushing his hair back out of his face; he wore swim trunks that were barely more than briefs, tiny shorts in a dark, satiny blue that clung obscenely to his hips and thighs, cupping his bottom and seeming to lick at his skin as he pulled himself out, water sheeting off him in caressing droplets and his entire body one perfect flux, a ripple of strength pouring from head to toe as he hauled himself out so effortlessly and twisted to sit on the edge with his feet dangling in the water.
He reached for the towel he’d left folded on the edge of the pool.
Then stopped, eyes widening as they locked on Fox.
“Oh,” Summer said faintly. “Hi.”
Fox realized he’d been
