“I’ve been talking to some of the students,” he said. “The ones who get bullied the most. Asking when it started... I’m not clueless enough to ask who, or they’d clam up. No one wants to be the snitch. But based on the conversations...” He sighed, his body going a bit heavier in Fox’s arms. “The slow decline in their grades almost exactly matches up with when their bullying started.”
Fox kept his smile to himself, if only because the urge to smile unbidden was so strange he naturally suppressed it.
Of course Summer cared about that, to the point of going far beyond his duties.
Of course.
He pressed his mouth against the back of Summer’s shoulder, watching one tanned fingertip skim down the lines, stopping on specific names. As expected, Jay Corey and Eli Schumaker were on the list...but several others, as well.
“You know the Assistant Principal won’t like this,” he murmured. “He’s still worried about risk of liability, when you’re only a TA.”
“I know,” Summer said. “There’s not much I can do, but...” He bit his lip. “A teacher, an actual tenured teacher, could call parent-teacher conferences, couldn’t they?”
With a groan, Fox rested his brow against Summer’s back, tightening his hold around his waist. “Did you seduce me simply so you could use your wiles to convince me to call their parents in so you might intervene?”
Summer made a strangled noise. “I... I didn’t seduce you at all! I...i-it...it just happened, you were there and I was there and then you kissed me and...and...”
“Breathe, Summer.” Fox smoothed his hand against the tight planes of Summer’s stomach, feeling the shallowness of his inhalations. “I suppose my utter lack of tone makes attempts at humor fall short.”
“Dick,” Summer said, but laughed, reaching back to lightly thump Fox’s thigh. “Will...will you help, then?”
Fox wrinkled his nose. “I suppose they cannot fire me if I already intend to quit. But are you certain you know what you’re getting into? You do recall who the parents of these students are, don’t you? It will likely take two weeks simply to wrangle them into showing their faces.”
“And they’ll probably be assholes, I know.” Summer sighed. “But I have to try, Fox. What’s the worst that could happen if I try? That those boys know someone cares about them, even if their parents threw them away like trash?”
Fox just...looked at Summer.
He didn’t know how anyone could be so very terrified of the world at large, and yet still open his heart so freely and invite the very world that frightened him into its inner chambers.
Summer was a strange beast, indeed.
And, with a deep exhalation, Fox offered a smile. “You did not have to convince me,” he said. “I already knew I would say yes the moment you asked.”
In a flurry, he had his arms full of Summer—as the gradebook landed messily on the desk, and Summer landed messily across Fox’s lap again, that soft sweet mouth finding his with a quiet urgency, a need that was almost clumsy in its eagerness, only making it that much more alluring for its guilelessness.
“Thank you,” Summer breathed against his lips. “You won’t regret it.”
Fox had his doubts about that.
But he had other things on his mind, right now, as he pushed Summer back against the desk, leaning into him, leaning into that enticing, wetly stroking mouth, sliding his fingers over the buttons of Summer’s shirt.
“If that was all you wanted,” he rumbled, “I suggest we find a reason to make better use of our office hours.”
And better use they made, indeed.
As Summer arched beneath him, and the desk shook and rattled while Summer twisted his gloriously golden body against it, making a mess of the papers and books, making a mess of himself. The door was unlocked, Summer’s voice a rush of gasps and cries stifled against the back of his hand, but in this moment...
Fox didn’t care.
Because sweet thighs were around his hips, sweet flesh tight around his cock...
And a sweet voice called his name on slick, needy lips, and he couldn’t stop even if he wanted to.
If he had only months...
Then for those months while he gave himself to Summer without thinking of the consequences of the future, he might as well live.
Summer thought he might just have to get used to being sore.
Not that he minded it.
Especially when it gave Fox another reason to use those long, devious fingers on him, slipping them inside Summer coated with a soothing, specially handmade herbal cream that at once eased the pain and made it burn that much deeper as the warming salve soaked into his abused, battered, swollen flesh.
He just...hadn’t been particularly sexually active before, save for a few one-night stands while he was figuring out himself and what he liked, and he hadn’t really built up any stamina for the perpetual feeling of being stretched open and filled until he thought he would burst, then left throbbing with the perfect empty ache of it that wouldn’t let him forget Fox even when they weren’t in the same room.
But it sure as hell made sitting an interesting prospect.
And he’d thought, over the past few days of quiet mornings working over assignments and lesson plans, quieter evenings taking work back to Fox’s suite over dinners they made together with a sort of familiar comfort that shouldn’t have come so easily but that did...
He’d thought for all his stoic expressionlessness, Fox had enjoyed watching Summer squirm to get comfortable on the sofa, in the easy chairs, in the office chairs, on the little café stools where they’d gone out for lunch yesterday, just a simple thing and yet it had brought Summer such pleasure to be out under the midday sun with Fox’s eyes always on him, trailing him with so many things left unsaid.
Things that made Summer’s heart seize up tight.
Things that told him by the time they got back to the
