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)
Fox tightened his hold, smoothing his hand down that strong, sloping back. “I’m here, Summer,” he whispered, even if that felt like a lie, a false promise. “I’m here. Sleep.”
Summer settled against him with a low sound of contentment, and Fox closed his eyes, pain reverberating through him like the echoes of a struck bell.
What am I doing?
What can I offer him, while I continuously take and take and take as if I can feel alive again on his vitality alone?
He found no answer inside himself.
No answer in the beat of Summer’s heart against his chest, strong and vibrant and seeming as if it would beat for the both of them, until the dead thing inside Fox’s chest remembered how.
And so he only told himself to sleep, to let go, to rest, to forget.
Only to lie awake well into the night, his only companion the sound of Summer’s sleeping breaths.
Chapter Twelve
Summer was alone when he woke in the morning.
At first he didn’t quite realize where he was, when he rolled over and his arm sprawled across a bed that...wasn’t his.
His bed was piled high with pillows, and if he was waking up he should be smelling something burning as Dr. Liu torched whatever he made for breakfast.
But instead he was alone against cool sheets, and as he fumbled out groggily his fingers brushed against something dry that crinkled like paper.
He creaked one eye open on gray sheets.
Only to slam awake as if he’d been struck, awareness rocking through him with an earthquake’s force as his senses started to filter in. The scent of honeysuckles that seemed burnt into the sheets beneath his cheek; the sensation of a body that had been pressed against his own; the deep, sore ache inside himself where Fox had filled him and teased him and made him burn for that deep-stroking sensation coursing wildly through him.
That...that had really happened last night, hadn’t it?
Right there at the pool, where anyone could have caught them.
Summer let out a breathless laugh, burying himself into the pillows and breathing in deep of Fox’s scent. Of Fox himself.
And remembering the bittersweet ache of watching Fox take his hair down, something that had felt so painfully intimate and yet somehow not enough when Fox had told Summer in no uncertain terms...
This was temporary.
But it was something.
And Summer had been telling the truth, when he’d said he’d always had hope.
Hope that maybe, just maybe, he could change Fox’s mind.
...maybe, just maybe, he could...he could make Fox understand that Summer loved him.
Not the terrifying idealization he’d known as a boy.
Cranky, stubborn Fox himself, who didn’t seem to know what to do with himself when someone asked him to just be a person instead of an authority figure.
He was so much more than that, to Summer.
He was sweet, in his own quiet ways. Much more easily flustered than he let on. Awkward, but he hid it behind an intellect that could be terrifying in its incisiveness, used to create a defensive barrier that protected him from others. Quiet. Thoughtful. Sometimes so absorbed in whatever was going through his mind that he was as bad as Dr. Liu, if not as destructive—forgetting his papers in the classroom, forgetting to charge his phone.
And he made Summer feel...
Like he could be something more than this frightened thing he was.
Knowing that Fox had come to the States and felt like he hadn’t fit in, and yet still had managed to survive and become someone others respected, admired, even if they also feared him a little...
It told Summer he could do it, too.
That he could find a place for himself.
That place right now, though, should probably be in Fox’s office, reviewing homework assignments to get ahead of schedule.
He had a feeling that no matter how deeply, how hotly Fox had loved his body last night...
There was no way in hell he’d go easy on Summer in the office.
Grinning to himself, practically bouncing to the beat of his heart, he rolled over and caught up the scrap of neatly folded paper left on Fox’s side of the bed, flicking it open with his thumb.
Faculty meeting this morning. Nothing interesting.
Sleep in.
I left breakfast in the oven for you.
Terse words in Fox’s sharp, slashing handwriting, but with a subtle touch of...something, something that made Summer’s heart beat faster still.
If he didn’t calm down before class, the boys were going to give him hell.
He rolled out of bed, nearly tripped over the over-long hems of his borrowed pajama pants, and padded into the kitchen to peer into the oven—where a thickly piled panini oozing with cheese and bits of egg waited, left to keep warm on low heat. Grinning to himself, he pulled on a pair of oven mitts and tugged it out, transferring it to a plate and settling in to enjoy his breakfast with that hope inside him burning brighter than ever.