Summer’s lips twitched faintly. “Pavlovian conditioning is a little 101 level, sir. Are you trying to make me assert my own authority?”
“I’m not trying to make you do anything,” Fox replied. “My only goal is to see if you can take the steps needed to face down a classroom of unruly, disrespectful children on your own. Do I need to hold your hand in that, or do you feel capable of attempting it under your own impetus?”
Summer plucked at his jeans. “The children don’t scare me.”
“Oh? Then what does?”
No answer. Simply a heavy silence, fraught with meaning, and yet—for all his understanding of psychology, of psychiatry, of the small markers that gave away intent and thought and emotion... Fox couldn’t quite read what that meaning might be. Not when the Summer he had known as a boy was necessarily a stranger to him, with the appropriate distance between teacher and student; not when the Summer he saw now was a new person, shaped by years of experiences Fox as yet had no insight into, and technically stood on almost equal footing as his peer and assistant.
And if he were honest with himself...no matter how he tried, no matter what clinical understanding he possessed...
He somehow always felt at one remove from other people’s feelings, observing them and yet never quite understanding them, the soul of his own emotions locked away.
Summer took a deep, slow breath, his shoulders rising and falling. “Every day? Does that include today?”
“You don’t technically start work until Monday, so you may take the weekend to consider, if you’d like,” Fox said. “Or you may start today. But that is still not an answer as to what frightens you.”
“Okay,” Summer said shakily, rising to his feet with wooden motions. “Okay then. I’ll show you what scares me.”
He stepped rigidly across the living room, navigating the low polished coffee table with an awkward bump of his shins against the wood. Fox watched, brow raised, as Summer drew closer to the couch—but startlement prickled down his arms in a rush like goosebumps and fine hairs raising as Summer bent over him, bracing one hand to the back of the sofa.
Before the young man captured Fox’s chin, his jaw, in roughened fingertips.
Tipped his face up.
And kissed him.
Chapter Two
Summer had no idea what he was doing.
He hadn’t meant to kiss Professor Iseya. He’d just—he—after sitting there listening to Iseya list Summer’s faults and remind Summer that he hadn’t changed at all, something had risen up inside him. Something irritated, that whited out his thoughts and smothered his common sense until he wasn’t really choosing to do anything; just reacting to provocation. If he wanted to look at it from a psychology perspective, Iseya had pricked at Summer’s id.
Until it had bitten back.
But Freud had been a hack, and dissection of the psyche couldn’t explain why Summer was bent over Professor Iseya with his mouth pressed hot against the man’s and the taste of him on his lips.
Iseya’s mouth was a stern thing of cruel sensuality, made for whispering cold-edged, cutting words of emotionless logic with articulated precision, every curve and dip of his lips defined as if they’d been shaped by the razor of his tongue...but for just a moment, those lips went soft. Slack. A moment that shot through Summer with a wilding heat; a moment that charged him with a vibrant rush and made his entire body go so hot he felt as though he burned with every harsh draught of smoke he’d inhaled just minutes before.
He’d thought about this more times than he cared to admit, as a boy. Back when he’d been fascinated by the older man’s frosty demeanor; by the glint of eyes a silver as pale and inscrutable as the forest’s mist; by the controlled elegance in his minimalistic movements; by the quiet hint of command in his every gesture. When Summer had been a teenager, Professor Iseya had been a fantasy, out of reach, unreal.
Yet he was very much real, now.
Summer wasn’t a boy anymore.
And the man whose mouth went fiery and firm against his own was very much not the icy caricature of his dreams.
That softening, that parting of Iseya’s lips promised heat, promised more—and with a low sound Summer slanted his mouth against Iseya’s, only for firm lips to lock and hold him, the lash of a rough tongue to whip him, his fingers curling and tingling with the sudden rush of warmth as Iseya’s teeth grazed his mouth, teased him, left him shivering.
Until a hand pressed against his throat, seizing his breaths and stopping his heart.
He froze as long, firm fingers wrapped against his neck, a heated palm pressing down on his pulse just hard enough for him to feel it; just hard enough to make his next breath come shallow and tight. His knees trembled, an odd, weakening sensation seeming to cut the strength from his limbs and leave his gut liquid-hot and tight as slowly, Iseya pushed him back. That one hand held him in complete thrall, controlling his every movement and keeping him trapped in place in silent command as Iseya parted their lips from each other.
Frigid eyes as pale as cracked ice fixed on Summer, piercing him. For all the breathless heat that had lived in that stolen moment...those eyes were cold enough to smother it, frostbite in every slowly spoken word.
“I,” Iseya said softly, “would thank you not to be inappropriate, Mr. Hemlock. And if I am what frightens you...you have every reason to fear.”
For just a half-second longer, Summer’s focus remained on those lips—their redness, their fullness. On the pressure of that hand against his throat. On the confusing and aching feeling it roused inside him, taut and shaking and thrilling with something not quite fear at all.
Before it hit him just what he was doing, when he had never been so reckless or so forward in his life.
He flinched back, breaking free
