Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 79892 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 79892 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 399(@200wpm)___ 320(@250wpm)___ 266(@300wpm)
He couldn’t breathe.
He couldn’t breathe, and he couldn’t seem to move even though everything inside him wanted to run as Summer drew closer, closer, until he was a warmth at Fox’s back, this bright thing that kept trying to chase away the cold touch of ghosts, of yurei whose icy spirit-fingers wrapped around Fox’s neck, choking off his air, but Fox didn’t want to let them go. Didn’t want to let in the breath they were strangling from him.
When if he remembered how to breathe, that one tiny swelling of his chest might just shatter him.
“What about real lovers, then?” Summer asked, husky, low, his breaths and his voice like a lick of flame on a frozen night.
Fox stared blankly straight ahead, curling one hand against his chest, against his shirt, clutching up a handful of the fabric. He couldn’t turn around. Couldn’t face that warmth.
Didn’t Summer realize?
Didn’t he realize if he burned away Fox’s wall of frost...
There was nothing beneath, and he’d just melt and evaporate and wisp away?
“Why?” he whispered. “Why do you want something like that?”
“You told me to be bold.” Soft, entreating, yet...so inadvertently seductive, too. Fox didn’t think Summer realized just how seductive his sweetness was. “I can’t think of anything bolder than asking the most terrifying man in Albin Academy to kiss me.” Summer drew closer, the crackle of grass beneath his feet, his shoulder brushing Fox’s in a sudden quiet shock-jump of sensation before it was gone as Summer stood at his side, looking out over the water as well with that strange, gently melancholy smile on his full red lips. “Once per day.”
Fox watched him from the corner of his eye, brows knitting. “That’s...a bizarre proposition.”
“Is it?” Summer slipped his hands into the pockets of his jeans, his shirt drawing tight against leanly toned musculature, wrinkles seaming against the flex of his biceps. “It’s motivation. If I’m bolder, if I prove to you I can do this job... I get rewarded with a kiss. With one caveat.”
There. One caveat.
All Fox would need to end this ridiculous game.
“And what would that be?” he asked.
“Only if you really want to.” Summer shook his head slightly, messy hair drifting across his eyes. “I couldn’t stand it if you felt like you had to. Like you were obligated, or like...” He trailed off, eyes lidding, voice quieting. “...like I didn’t really care what you want. I think... I kind of think ‘no’ is the most important word we know, and not enough people listen to it.”
“You have to know that I would say no right in this instant, Mr. Hemlock,” Fox said through his teeth. “Which makes your proposition quite pointless, as it is.”
Summer lifted his head, then, once more looking at Fox directly. Considering how he avoided eye contact so pathologically, Fox...didn’t understand why Summer seemed inclined to so often look at him so fully, so intently, when he claimed to be afraid of Fox, claimed to be so anxious he actually found Fox terrifying.
But perhaps that’s what bravery was, Fox thought.
Summer was afraid of him...
And yet still looking at him.
Trying to see him.
And telling him, in his own way...
That for some bizarre reason, he found Fox to be worth facing down that fear.
He didn’t understand.
And he didn’t understand how intently Summer looked at him, those rich blue eyes subtly dilated, turning them smoky.
“Summer,” he whispered. “Call me Summer.”
Fox’s eyes widened. His fingers clenched harder in his shirt.
Did Summer not...understand what using given names meant, to him?
Perhaps he was only half-Japanese, his mother a white American woman who gave him his gray eyes in a rare genetic fluke, but he still knew so much of so many things from his father, things passed down to him like traditions written in blood.
Given names could be used with fondness for children, for family, for close friends who might as well be family...
But in certain circumstances, someone’s name could be a love word.
Intimate and shivering, rolling off the tongue.
He turned his back on Summer, on those eyes that pleaded with him to be that intimate, to be that close, curling his shoulders in and digging his fingers against his shirt as if he could claw down to his heart and grasp it to stop its erratic and sharp beating.
“Mn.”
“You said it once before,” Summer said softly, and Fox caught his breath.
He had.
Letting it roll off his tongue, easy and fluid, but he’d tried not to taste it, tried to simply use it to capture Summer’s attention, to impress on him that he wasn’t someone Summer should ever want.
But he wondered, now.
Wondered now what he’d let slip past his lips without feeling its texture, its flavor.
He glanced over his shoulder. All he could see was Summer’s profile, the tanned slopes and lines of him catching the sun until he glowed. Amber-soft and gentle, and Fox swallowed thickly.