“Ah, but those few years make all the difference, my sweet summer child.”
“No. No puns on my name. None. I forbid them.”
Rian grinned. “Do you have the authority to forbid anything, Mr. Iseya?”
Summer went bright red, his eyes rounding; he spluttered. “I—you—ohmyGod.”
Unable to help laughing, Rian pushed lightly at Summer’s arm. “Go up to your room. I bet your husband’s wondering where you are.”
“...he’s probably so busy grading papers he doesn’t even realize what time it is.”
But from the fond way Summer said it—and the lingering looks Rian frequently caught Summer and Fox giving each other in faculty meetings—Rian deeply doubted it.
Over the last semester, Summer and Fox had bloomed so obviously that no one around them could miss the fact that they were so deeply in love it was almost painful to watch, that anyone should wear such intense emotions so openly, so nakedly, hanging them out where anyone could see them and touch them and hurt them.
But it looked...
Beautiful, too.
Like the kind of moment that arrested the eye until the heart ached to capture it in pen and ink and soft washes of carefully brushed color, only it was a thousand and a million and an eternity of such moments caught again and again and again until they made a book of fanning pages in sweet colors the shades of heart’s blood.
And the naked longing in Summer’s eyes as he turned his head toward the stairs made Rian’s breaths catch; what was it like, to want someone that deeply that the thread connecting the two of you was nearly visible?
Why was Rian even thinking about such things?
He tried to smile, but it felt strange. He touched his fingertips to Summer’s arm lightly. “Goodnight, Summer,” he said softly. “Thank you for listening to me.”
“Sure,” Summer said. “Goodnight, Rian.”
For a moment Summer’s attention returned to Rian, a question flickering in his eyes, but Rian turned away before he could ask it. Rian just...he needed that air, and he needed it now.
Before he started thinking too much.
Before he started wondering if there was such a thing as hate at first sight, and if it was just as complicated and tangled as...as...
No.
He blanked his mind, and slipped through the arching, cavernous chamber of the entry hall. A few quick presses to the key panel just inside the door, and he was outside, the crisp September air hitting him like a slap of cold waves rushing up against him and breaking against the shore of his body. He sucked in a sharp breath and shivered, but he didn’t turn back, just easing the door gently into place and waiting for it to latch and the light on the external lock plate to flash red.
Then, hands in his pockets, he turned to make his way across the broad front paving and toward the lane leading down the hill, through a tunnel of trees with trunks blacker than the moonless night and leaves whose luminous amber shade offered a false promise of light.
He let those false promises lure him outward...but then stopped as his phone vibrated in his pocket, a little spot of warmth against his hip. He paused at the head of the path, pulling the phone out, glancing down at the screen—and the new listing he’d saved just a few hours ago, the icon just a diamond of black against a white circle. A single text message waited, above the notifications for dozens of missed calls from Rochester, stretching back over several months.
But that text message...
That was new.
Don’t get lost, was all it said.
Rian inhaled sharply, his toes curling against his sandals, his heart rising up into his throat. He looked up against the school, a formidable and eerie thing of aged wood and gabled roofs and dark towers spearing their narrow points up into the night, black against darker black.
But in one of the corner cupola towers, a light burned, brilliant and warm against the night.
And a graceful, solidly muscled silhouette perched against the window.
Rian couldn’t make out the face, but he knew that shape, increasingly familiar.
And he wondered if Damon’s eyes were cold, as he watched Rian from so high above.
Or smoldering hot with something that might or might not be the anger that burst so easily between them.
Rian didn’t know what to say.
So he didn’t say anything at all.
He just turned and walked away, his sandals scuffing against the cracked pavement of the road.
Let the forest swallow him, slipping into dappled shadows where he could lose himself for a while.
And try not to think about Damon Louis at all.
Chapter Five
Operation “Not thinking about Damon Louis” wasn’t...exactly going to plan.
Rian had almost slept through morning bell; he’d stayed out much too late last night, wandering off the beaten path and into the trees with the first browned fallen leaves crunching under his feet and the soft sounds of calling owls in the distance and the night filled with the fire-crackle scent of fall coming on hard and impatient and fast. Now and then he’d caught the rustle of things in the trees and brush—rabbits darting away from the sound of his tread, and he thought he glimpsed red, the night swallowing the colors of a fox’s black-tipped tail as it vanished beneath a low tangle of brambles; once, too, he’d thought he’d seen something almost human-sized through the branches, his heart stopping at the thought that there might be a bear out here, but then it had moved away, swift and silent and leaving him alone.
He hadn’t stopped though, until he’d wandered on a glade where a birch tree stood naked and white against the darkness, seeming to create its own light with how it reflected back the soft starlight in its pale flesh. It looked like its bark had been blown off in a lightning strike, exposing the tender smooth wood underneath, judging by the deep pointed fissure of scorched wood framed in crumbling gray ash, bisecting between two of its thickest central branches and down half the length of its trunk.
He’d stood there for some time, just letting himself follow every twig and branch, memorizing their placement, their spindly reachings, as if they grasped up toward the sky at...
Something.
Maybe the tree didn’t know, any more than Rian knew what he was grasping at with this sudden desperate need to do and be something more than what he was.
He’d thought being content with the life of a simple teacher was enough.
But if it wasn’t...what would be?
What would be enough for him?
Or was he just so accustomed to a life of excess—the chef, the marble-colonnaded house his parents laughed about because it was just a small mansion, how humble, sleeping and flitting about and playing at curating fine art, dabbling at making his own—that he couldn’t appreciate that simplicity itself was the point, and worthy of being enough?