Right over the raw, aching beat of Fox’s heart.
“What’s in the water that scares you, Fox?” Summer whispered. “Because it’s not her. You know she’s not there. You know, even if you don’t want to admit it.”
Fox stared at him, a horrid, hollow feeling building behind his eyes, spreading throughout him until he felt like this thin shell filling up with so much pain.
As if he really was her.
Trapped in a sinking vessel, the air crushing out of him, beating against the walls of his own heart as the anguish rushed in to drown him.
As he forced himself to answer a question that he refused to even acknowledge himself, even if it had been there inside him for two decades, crouched and waiting and cold and dark and so very, very terrible.
“I... I’m afraid...” Every word a struggle, every sound a raw wound cutting his tongue, reaching down into his throat to pull it tighter and tighter like closing purse-strings into a choking clutch, and the only reason he could speak at all was because those yearning, sweet blue eyes begged him to, held him fast, kept him from collapsing into silence. “...I’m afraid I’ll be tempted to join her. To just...let myself sink, and not come back up ever again.”
“Fox,” Summer whispered, and slipped his other hand into Fox’s hair, steady fingers weaving in deep, strong and comforting and warm and so very sure, drawing him in until their brows touched and he could taste Summer’s breaths on his lips. “But you don’t really want that, do you?”
Fox took several heaving, rasping breaths; he felt like he was drowning already, drowning on dry land, but Summer was anchoring him, keeping him afloat.
“No,” he choked, closing his eyes, shaking his head, rubbing temple to temple with Summer. “But I don’t... Summer, I don’t know how to live.”
“You don’t have to know how.” Summer’s smile was in his voice, in the soothing rumble of it, the sigh at the edges of it. “You just do.”
Fox didn’t know what to say. What this breaking was inside him, that felt at once like falling apart and like clawing free from his own rubble, but it was awful and yet...yet...
He didn’t want to stop.
Didn’t want to pull away, to let go of Summer when something about this felt so terrifyingly good, too.
So he stayed—stayed, and leaned into that touch, and unclenched one hand to rest it to Summer’s chest, taut bare skin and the steady slow beat of a wild and beautiful heart underneath his palm.
“How do you know these things?” he whispered. “How can you even be so certain of yourself?”
“I’m not,” Summer answered, before sweet lips brushed against Fox’s cheek. “I just never stop hoping that no matter what’s wrong...it’ll get better.”
Then he drew back, his body heat receding—but didn’t let Fox go.
Instead he captured the hand Fox held against his chest, wrapping those strong, rough fingers around his, and when Fox opened his eyes, Summer cocked his head to one side, messy spears of wetly spiked hair falling across his brow as he smiled.
“Will you try something with me?” he asked. “Something brave.”
Fox let out a broken, startled bark of laughter, brief before it strangled off again. “Are you trying to turn the tables on me?”
“Fair play.” Summer stopped, then, but still pulled at Fox’s hand, drawing him in close one hesitant step at a time. “Step in the shallow end with me. I’ll hold your hand all the way. And if you can’t stand it...it’s okay. We’ll get out, and we won’t even talk about it if you don’t want to.”
Fox’s breaths turned to ice, and he tore his gaze from Summer to stare at the pool, luminous pale blue and clear all the way down to the bottom—and yet suddenly it seemed a limitless ocean, bottomless, airless, the depths a thing of sucking darkness only waiting to capture him and drag him down.
“I... I...”
I can’t, he started to say.
But why couldn’t he?
How could Summer face down fears he couldn’t control every day, wired into his brain by chemical reactions and triggers, and still smile...
...yet Fox wouldn’t even try?
He ran his tongue over his lips; his breaths felt too cold against his damp mouth, as if the life and heat were already sucking out of him to leave him cold as a corpse, his fingertips numbing.
Stop it, he told himself. You are having a panic reaction for no reason.
“I do not...do not have appropriate attire,” he started, and Summer chuckled, squeezing his hand reassuringly.
“Never went swimming in your underwear when you were a kid?” he asked, and Fox stared at him flatly.
“Can you picture me as a child?”
“We all were, once.” Thoughtful eyes dipped over him, then, before Summer stepped closer and reached up to finger the top button of Fox’s shirt, toying with it before gently slipping it open. “So yes, I can picture it. I bet you were short and chubby and happy and cute, and then one day puberty hit and you shot up and turned lean and tall, and didn’t even know what to do with yourself when suddenly you had all this extra you and no idea where to put it.”
Fox scowled. “That is annoyingly accurate.”
“Yeah?” Summer only smiled, starting on the next button, tugging it open as slowly as he was teasing Fox out of himself. “Tell me about where you grew up, then. Tell me what it was like for you as a kid.”
Fox hesitated.
He knew what Summer was doing.
Focusing his mind on his memories from before the trauma, the pain, the locked-in grief, giving him something to distract him from the thoughts threatening to paralyze his limbs and his lungs even while Summer gently, so gently, pushed him toward testing himself as he parted his shirt one button at a time.
He had simply never expected to be in the position to have such
