Or for it to actually work, his mind wandering unbidden to the memory of dark green water, white sand, rocks cresting in strange formations silhouetted against a brilliant evening sky.
“I grew up in Miyako,” he said softly. “At least until I was a teenager. You may have seen it on the news a few years ago, when a tsunami struck the town after a major earthquake...but before that, it was...calm. Always calm, the bright sun on water so deep a green it was like this...rippling layer of bottle glass. The rocks just past the shoreline—Joudogahama—always drew tourists, but I loved to splash in the shallows around them.” He smiled faintly. “I’d scare the crabs, sending them scuttling away. My mother came to Japan from the States for work, met my father, fell in love...and I remember walking with them on the beach, with the sand breaking up in warm crumbles between my toes and the sound of the waves, while the lighthouse farther along the coast came alight with dusk.”
Summer let out a soft, almost pleased sigh, as he reached the last button on Fox’s shirt; Fox hadn’t even realized he’d continued pulling them open, until Summer was tugging his button-down out of the waist of his slacks. “So you have good memories of water, too. Of the ocean.”
“I...yes.” Fox’s brows knit, as he looked down at Summer; Summer just smiled at him with his eyes crinkled at the corners and soft. “Why did you ask?”
“Because I want to know you. Not just what I think I know about you from meeting you here.”
Summer finished tugging the hem loose, the fabric pulling and sliding against Fox’s skin, before those angular, strong hands slid over his shoulders, slipping beneath the shirt to draw it, one inch at a time, down his arms, catching and rasping lightly against his sleeveless undershirt.
As much as Summer lingered, as close as he was, his radiance like sunlight...there was no seduction in this, even when Summer’s fingertips grazed over the outer edges of Fox’s arms.
Yet even without seduction...
It was still so very intimate.
Comforting.
Soft words, soft touches between them, and Fox submitting to let Summer tease him out of his clothing one piece at a time while he spoke of memories long past.
“You are still very strange, Summer,” he whispered, and Summer let out a sweet little laugh as he let Fox’s shirt fall from his fingertips to crumple on the cement.
“I’m okay with being strange,” he said. “When did you come to the States?”
“When I was fourteen.” Fox didn’t stop Summer, as Summer gathered up bunched handfuls of his undershirt next, lifting it up along his stomach, his ribs, rough knuckles grazing his bare skin. “My mother’s job moved her back, and she brought us with her.”
“That must have been a culture shock,” Summer murmured, nudging at Fox’s arms, and Fox lifted them over his head.
For a moment the world was white, as his undershirt lifted away, before Summer tugged it over his head and drew it down his arms.
Goosebumps prickled down his arms, but it wasn’t from the cold.
It was from that intent gaze locked on him, taking him in as he was—naked in words, naked in flesh, simple and accepting.
He almost flinched from it, looking away as he answered, “My life has been a culture shock. In Japan I was too tall, too large, too obviously haafu...in America I was too foreign, and although I learned English in the home, somehow everyone here seemed to speak a different sort of English that I never quite understood.”
“So you know how it feels.” Summer’s hands settled against his waist, rough palms against his waist, skin to heated skin, thumbs idly sweeping over the crests of his hipbones as Summer drew him closer. “Not to fit in.”
“I do,” Fox admitted—and didn’t pull away, when their bodies pressed flush together, insulating heat between them and soaking into his flesh with the warmth of human contact that he would never confess to needing, craving, starved for simple affections more than he had ever been for sex, for love. “Even if I had a slightly different coping mechanism than you did.”
Summer’s laughter was a close and sweet thing, a vibration melting from skin to skin, as he leaned in and nuzzled at Fox’s jaw. “I turned into a wallflower. You made everyone afraid of you so you wouldn’t have to be afraid of them.”
“Not quite.” But Fox chuckled—chuckled, and leaned in, letting his cheek rest to Summer’s hair. “I thought, if I could not understand the way they spoke...then I should learn the way they thought, so I could decipher their motives and intent even when their words weren’t as honest as they should be.”
“So you learned psychology as a defense mechanism, and it became a lifelong passion.”
“Mm...something like that.”
“It’s not a bad reason.”
Then Summer’s fingers danced along the waist of Fox’s slacks, found the button, flicked it open, before the long rasp of the zipper sounded between them, hoarse and almost ominous. Fox tilted his head, looking down at Summer, the set look of concentration on his face.
“I would almost think,” he murmured, “that you were trying to seduce me, in this moment.”
“Not right now,” Summer teased, catching the pink tip of his tongue between his teeth, eyes lowering to the hands working so deftly between them. “But I can’t promise I won’t try later.”
Then Fox’s slacks went sheeting down his legs, falling to pool around his ankles, leaving only his black boxer-briefs clinging to his hips and thighs; he took a shaky breath and stepped out of them, toeing out of his shoes and socks at the same time until he stood in his bare feet on the cool concrete.
And when Summer took both his hands, drawing him backward...
His gut clenched tight, as he pulled out of the haze of warm memories and into the cold reality of what he meant to do.
He couldn’t, he wouldn’t—but he was following, trailing one slow numb
