And a moment later, something cool fell over Summer like rain, lashing and licking against his skin in silken washes.
He opened his eyes, sucking in a soft breath, watching as the spill of Fox’s hair cascaded down in threads of black diamond, fine and wispy and floating like feathers in looping arcs to spill over Fox, over the bed, over Summer. It was longer than he’d ever imagined, pouring in a river over the dark gray sheets, shining like thin threads of starlight shooting through a black night sky, liquid as water and silken-fine and wreathing Fox in a cloak that made him look ethereal, unreal, almost inhuman.
Summer’s heart thumped harder still, as he looked up into gray eyes that seemed to whisper a sorrow older than even Fox himself, older than the sky, older than the moon.
“Sleep, Summer,” Fox breathed, and bent over him, pressing his lips to Summer’s brow like a blessing. “Sleep...and this will all look different in the morning.”
Fox felt as though he had committed a crime.
A desecration. A sin. A defilement against everything he held dear.
A betrayal.
Not against Michiko; not against the memory that still perched on his shoulder like a silent thing, whispering in his ear endlessly in a constant stream of sounds he couldn’t understand but that would never give him peace.
Against Summer.
Fox curled on his side with his head pillowed on one arm, his other arm draped around Summer, gathering him close against his chest. Summer slept tucked tight into him, resting in the crook of Fox’s arm and burrowing his face into his shoulder, the mess of his hair spilling in black arcs over Fox’s chest and mixing with his own until they were just a sea of ink together, and all that tanned, taut skin pressed up against his in dark contrast, Summer’s body heat as tangled with him as the young man’s long, agile legs.
He looked so peaceful, in his sleep. So relaxed.
So young.
But even this, right now...
This was hurting him, and Fox was only making it worse by letting Summer’s attachment grow deeper.
That moment of impulse, that burst of passion, of desire, had been wrong—so wrong. No matter how good it had felt, no matter that for a few minutes he had no longer been a grieving widower or a frozen shadow locked away with his ghosts, but simply a man entwined with another man and completely lost in the rapture of him, the passion of him, the wildness and so much dizzying, spinning emotion and pleasure building up into a thing of crashing, interlocked beauty...
In the end, he could only hurt Summer.
And he’d just...just callously made certain that when it came, that hurt would be ten times worse.
All because he was selfish.
He was selfish, and wanted to hold on to this for a few months longer before he...
Before he gave up, he thought.
He didn’t know what he would do once he left Albin Academy.
He just knew that he was tired, and had no reason to stay...and he thought, perhaps, once he left he would give up on trying to be a man at all, and simply find somewhere to be until time finally did its work and ended this haunting when he’d been a ghost for so very long already.
His body just hadn’t figured that out yet.
Summer shifted against him, letting out a soft sigh in his sleep, a murmur, one that blended into a tired call of “...Fox...”
Fox tightened his hold, smoothing his hand down that strong, sloping back. “I’m here, Summer,” he whispered, even if that felt like a lie, a false promise. “I’m here. Sleep.”
Summer settled against him with a low sound of contentment, and Fox closed his eyes, pain reverberating through him like the echoes of a struck bell.
What am I doing?
What can I offer him, while I continuously take and take and take as if I can feel alive again on his vitality alone?
He found no answer inside himself.
No answer in the beat of Summer’s heart against his chest, strong and vibrant and seeming as if it would beat for the both of them, until the dead thing inside Fox’s chest remembered how.
And so he only told himself to sleep, to let go, to rest, to forget.
Only to lie awake well into the night, his only companion the sound of Summer’s sleeping breaths.
Chapter Twelve
Summer was alone when he woke in the morning.
At first he didn’t quite realize where he was, when he rolled over and his arm sprawled across a bed that...wasn’t his.
His bed was piled high with pillows, and if he was waking up he should be smelling something burning as Dr. Liu torched whatever he made for breakfast.
But instead he was alone against cool sheets, and as he fumbled out groggily his fingers brushed against something dry that crinkled like paper.
He creaked one eye open on gray sheets.
Only to slam awake as if he’d been struck, awareness rocking through him with an earthquake’s force as his senses started to filter in. The scent of honeysuckles that seemed burnt into the sheets beneath his cheek; the sensation of a body that had been pressed against his own; the deep, sore ache inside himself where Fox had filled him and teased him and made him burn for that deep-stroking sensation coursing wildly through him.
That...that had really happened last night, hadn’t it?
Right there at the pool, where anyone could have caught them.
Summer let out a breathless laugh, burying himself into the pillows and breathing in deep of Fox’s scent. Of Fox himself.
And remembering the bittersweet ache of watching Fox take his hair down, something that had felt so painfully intimate and yet somehow not enough when Fox had told Summer in no uncertain terms...
This was temporary.
But it was something.
And Summer had been telling the truth, when he’d said he’d always had hope.
Hope that maybe, just maybe, he could change Fox’s mind.
...maybe, just maybe, he could...he could make Fox
