Back in that bed with Fox, kissing him and touching him and begging him to talk to Summer until they sorted everything out and made this better.
Fuck.
He couldn’t think, like this.
And he couldn’t leave things open-ended this way with Fox, everything festering in silence until class was over. He shouldn’t have walked away this morning at all.
Summer marked off a few more things, then stood, locked up Fox’s office, and headed back to their floor.
But he stopped the moment he crested the stairs.
Fox’s door was just down from the stairwell, the first thing Summer saw every time he came up or down the steps and spilled into the hallway.
And his door stood open, right now.
Just by a marginal inch, but still unlatched.
Summer hadn’t left it that way.
Sick fear lodged in his throat. A million nightmare scenarios ran through his mind. Fox more sick than he let on, struggling to get to the door and almost collapsing. Someone breaking into the room to hurt him for some obscure reason. Fox getting an emergency call and dashing out carelessly. A million other thoughts about why that door could be open, none of them good.
Summer didn’t want to look.
But he had to, when...when...
What if Fox was inside, hurt?
What if Fox needed him?
He forced himself across the hallway, his heartbeat timing his steps in thunderous roars, his head spinning as his anxiety tried to steal his breath and weave terrible things from it out of whole cloth. Tentatively, he pushed the door open with just his fingertips, sending it swinging easily inward.
No sign of Fox.
But many of the books were missing from the shelves.
The box of herbs, the mortar and pestle, gone.
Summer rushed inside, into the bedroom, where the closet stood open. Empty. No clothing, no shoes. He stumbled backward, fumbling back into the living room. No—no, he didn’t want to believe it, couldn’t believe it, but as his gaze fell on the cabinet mounted against the wall, that shrine...
He had no choice.
The Buddha, the photo, the scrap of framed kanji inside...
Gone.
Summer’s vision blurred, his knees weakening as he sank down on the sofa and buried his face in his hands.
Fox had left him.
Fox was gone.
And Summer only let himself cry about it for five minutes.
No.
No, goddammit, he was not going to let Fox Iseya do this.
Just...just...leave like this, without even giving Summer the chance to talk to him about it, to ask, to say please, please let me try. Let us try.
He tried his phone first, tried calling, tried...but there was nothing. One ring, voicemail, and Summer closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to his screen, blinking back the wetness in his eyes, sniffling, breathing deep.
“Goddammit, Fox,” he whispered. “You never charge your fucking phone.”
He sent a text anyway—Please don’t leave like this, please—before he was out the door, pelting down the stairs again, one more quick text fired to Walden—cancel psych classes, personal emergency—and he only stopped on the last step to let disappointment crush him that the terse, buzzing response wasn’t Iseya before Summer was spilling out into the rain, into the parking lot, staring through the drizzle.
Fox’s Camry was gone, too.
Like the final nail in the coffin.
That didn’t stop Summer from sliding behind the wheel of his car and sending it down the hill, into town. He didn’t know what he was looking for. As if he hoped he would catch Fox parked somewhere, just casually waiting right where Summer needed him to be, but there was nothing. Nothing as he scanned the streets through the windshield wipers, nothing as he struggled to breathe when every fear inside him was trying to crush him, choke off his air, cloud his head into a foggy mess.
Maybe that fog was how he somehow ended up at his mother’s without even realizing he’d driven there.
He stared over the steering wheel at her bright little house, turned gray and drab by the rain.
If he went inside she would comfort him, hug him, tell him to move on, it was okay to let go, because he’d never really had Fox in the first place.
That was what hurt so much, wasn’t it?
That he had never really had Fox in the first place, but somehow he’d still lost him and Fox had kept him at such careful arm’s length that Summer didn’t even know the first place to look.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, clutching the steering wheel with his mouth twisted up in this crumpled thing that was struggling not to become a sob...but he stiffened as his mother’s voice floated distantly across the lawn, filtered through the pattering rain and the exterior of the car.
“Summer...?” she called. “Are you coming in...?”
He lifted his head, watching her miserably. She stood under the porch overhang, her arms wrapped around herself against the spray-drizzled breeze, her expression dark with concern.
She would stay like that, getting herself soaked when she was too old and frail for this sort of thing, until Summer came in.
Swallowing back the taste of tears, he shut the engine off, pulled his shirt up in a useless shield over his head, and ducked out into the rain to trot to her door.
She stepped back, making room to let him in, fussing and fluttering her hands at him. “Look at you, you’re soaked, you’ll catch your death!” She clucked her tongue, pulling at him, but he stayed on the mat, biting his lip.
“I’ll get everything wet,” he said faintly, and she scowled.
“As if I care about that. Come in, sit down, get warm.”
That was how he found himself bundled up, settled on the sofa, wrapped up in a blanket and his shirt and undershirt replaced by one of his old T-shirts from his childhood bedroom, while his mother pressed a hot mug of tea on him and dropped a towel on top of his head.
“Now get yourself dry,” she said briskly, “and tell me what happened.”
Summer half-heartedly scrubbed at his hair, managed a sip of his tea—but at that question the horrid
