Damon jerked, snapping his head up with his entire chest giving a painful thump. Without meaning to, he immediately looked right at Rian—and Rian was looking right back at him with the same wide-eyed, guilty stare.
Before he smiled—small, thin, goddammit, that shallow smile Damon hated so much when there was not a single fucking thing of Rian in it.
Just a careful self-protective façade, without a bit of that fire that made him such a pain in the ass to deal with.
Damon scowled, looking away from that empty smile and focusing on Walden. “We’re fine,” he grunted. “What did you want?”
“Mr. Falwell?” Walden lilted with lethal cordiality.
“Seriously, it’s fine,” Rian said softly. “I’m listening.”
“Then perhaps you could tell me if you intend to hold dance and music curricula next semester,” Walden asked flintily. “You have two students in your music theory course, and four in dance. Hardly a full complement, and your salary will not be affected if you choose to only pursue art curricula for the time being.”
“No.” Rian shook his head, his voice firming. “If even one student wants to take the classes, I’ll teach them. It’s not something I mind doing.”
From the corner of his eye, Damon caught himself lingering, watching. Watching the steady way Rian looked at Walden; the calm acceptance of work he didn’t have to do, just because he wanted to do it.
That shouldn’t make Damon feel fucking...fucking proud of Rian.
It wasn’t even his goddamned place.
Silently grumbling to himself, he made himself look away—but as he turned his head aside, he caught the Iseyas watching him. Those two fucking nauseating lovebirds; he never thought he’d see Fox fucking Iseya of all people defrosting enough to dote on someone the way he doted on Summer, but the two of them were so inseparable they were practically one entity.
And that entity was currently watching him knowingly, one pair of gray eyes, one pair of blue looking him over as if they knew something he didn’t.
What the fuck ever.
Damon slouched down in his chair, folding his arms over his chest with a suppressed growl.
Let them stare at him.
There was nothing to see.
Just...focus on doing his job, and on figuring out what to do to help Chris.
And then he wouldn’t give a good god damn if Rian Falwell smiled at him like they’d never spoken a word to each other at all.
Chapter Nine
An entire school week without talking to Damon Louis shouldn’t be this miserable.
Five days of silent phones. Five days of pointedly pretending not to notice each other when they happened to pass in the halls or cafeterias. Five days of increasing frustration, while Rian tried not to think about—about—anything. About that kiss, about days of arguing that couldn’t possibly have been denial of a wild and hungry instant attraction, but God...
What else could it be?
Rian felt like he was trying to look at something by refusing to stare directly at it, with the way his brain kept skittering around the idea that he could actually want Damon.
He’d read once about how, often, spacecraft launched out beyond Earth’s orbit started not on a direct trajectory, but moving toward some large gravitational object where they could actually fall into orbit around that object and then use the momentum and energy gained to slingshot off in their intended direction, which was apparently a much more effective method of directional navigation than any other.
Somehow, Rian didn’t think that sort of thing worked well for humans.
Giving in to the attraction of a large body to send themselves slinging off in another direction, their path defined straight and true.
There was nothing straight about his attraction to that particular large body.
But everything true about the reasons why Rian couldn’t stop thinking about Damon.
Couldn’t stop hurting with every day that passed without a single message.
Couldn’t stop the tingle in his lips every time he remembered the pressure of Damon’s, the heat of them, the way they turned just soft enough when mouth met mouth and claimed so fiercely.
Couldn’t stop how his pencil turned to the contours and steely glide of Damon’s musculature every time he let himself drift and started idly doodling in the corners of his pages.
Couldn’t stop thinking of how Damon had felt against him, as if Rian had imprinted the shape of him against his fingertips and now nothing else would flow from his hands to the canvas but Damon. Until it felt as though the tree in the painting—the tree he imagined as a man, yearning and reaching—was beginning to take on the same stark, graceful angularity as Damon, reflecting the aestheticism of his physique in how each branch curved and joined the next; in the way the trunk seemed to slouch slightly forward with the same casual arrogance as the way Damon slouched his hips forward, shoulders back, body a sinuous coil of perfection.
Settled at his desk, Rian hid his flush by burying his face into his folded forearms, just barely keeping his head lifted enough to see his last period class over the upper edge of his arm.
He had it bad.
And he didn’t want to dismiss it as just physical attraction, when that meant rendering Damon down to a lust object to satisfy his curiosity, a thing to be enjoyed and then discarded, instead of...of...
A complex, layered man Rian was only just beginning to see past the surface of.
But everything he saw just made him want to know more.
Even if that curiosity, despite how it consumed his thoughts so fully and left him constantly turning his face away so no one would notice how he couldn’t stop blushing...
...it didn’t hold a candle to the burning question of what to do about Chris.
Rian had taken that Let me think to mean Give me space. Whether space from Rian after that kiss or space to sort out what was happening with Chris and figure out what to do, he didn’t know—but although Chris had had better days over the last week, days when he’d looked more rested, more alert, actually smiling while he talked to his friends in class, actually seeming engaged when he held court in the cafeteria...
The boy still looked just so...tired.
Like there was something drawing the energy out of his very soul, and it was devouring what it could from his flagging body just to try to sustain itself.
Rian paused in flipping through the daily sketchbook a student had been working on, reviewing progress as the underclassman tried to get used to drawing in short, merging, feathery sketch lines as Rian had shown him rather than insisting on trying to do everything in a single contour line; last period would be over in a few minutes, the restless energy in the room picking up a fresh new charge as the clock counted down closer and closer to the end. It was always more tense on Fridays, that crackle of freedom for the weekend waiting breathlessly until, sometimes, Rian felt like he was standing on the other side of a very fragile fence just barely containing a herd of cattle right on the verge of a stampede.