Just Like This (Albin Academy #2) - Cole McCade Page 0,4

eyes snapped. “As if I would ever—I—oh hell.” Rian sighed, bowing his head, one slim hand coming up to press his fingertips to the indentations on either side of his nose, just inside the corners of his eyes. His skin was so pale that his hands were white as the iridescent edges of oyster shells save for the very tips of his fingers, the knobs of his bony knuckles, and a crescent moon curve at the heels of his palms, flushed pink as if all the blood in that translucent flesh had gathered there; Damon wondered if he knew what the sun outside even looked like. “... I suppose we’ve got a responsibility, don’t we?”

“You sound so goddamn excited about doing your job.”

“It’s not my job that’s the problem,” Rian muttered, almost under his breath. “It’s you.”

“Trust me, the feeling’s mutual.”

“At least we agree on something.” With a thoughtful sound, Rian clasped his palms together as if praying, tilting them against his nose and lips until they bisected his face, his eyes unfocused. “What can we do? Even if we’re assigned as the boys’ primary caretakers, there are limits. Legal limits. Unless he’s involved in something illegal or life-threatening, there’s not much we can do if he’s not breaking the rules. Technically, skipping an extracurricular isn’t breaking the rules.”

Damon frowned, rubbing his forefinger and thumb along his chin and jaw, until he could press along the tendons over his temporomandibular joints, squeezing at them to relax a bit of the tension making his head and neck kink up in irritating knots. Unfortunately, Rian had a point.

That didn’t mean there was nothing they could do about it.

He tossed his head, turning in the cramped space—and trying his damnedest not to bump up against something that looked like a department store mannequin made out of barbed wire, and something else that looked like...he didn’t know, but it seemed fragile and he’d probably break it. “C’mon.”

“What?” drifted after him. “Why? Where are we going?”

“To talk to Walden,” Damon said grimly, ducking through the door and into the broader, neater space of the art classroom, long wooden worktables arranged in ordered rows and dotted with various student projects in progress. “And get to the bottom of this.”

As he threaded through the tables toward the classroom door, though, the faint sound of soft sandaled footsteps followed, then the creak of the workroom door closing, before Rian’s thrumming voice called his name softly, almost too sweetly.

“Damon?”

Damon stopped, keeping his back to Rian. Something about his name in that luring, richly enticing voice was even more irritating than the haughty, scathing sarcasm.

And he didn’t want to look at him while Rian said his name that way.

“What?” he asked, clipping the word through his teeth, then snapping his mouth shut.

“...could you put a shirt on first, please?” Rian asked in that same beguiling tone, and Damon snarled.

“Why?”

“... I live with Walden. I know what he’s like.” And this time there was no mistaking that sweet, bewitching tone for anything but what it was: lightly mocking laughter, as Rian breezed past Damon with an arch sidelong look, hazel eyes sly beneath raised brows, glowing in their frame of smoky black eyeliner. “Just put a shirt on, Mr. Louis. Trust me.”

Not as far as I could throw you, Damon thought, but just let out a noncommittal sound.

Before reluctantly following Rian from the room, and wondering just what it was about the man that just...just...

Royally pissed Damon off. More than he had any right to be. Especially when if he’d admit it out loud...

He’d been in the wrong.

Goddammit.

Walden first. Apologies later.

Even if he wasn’t quite sure which one he was dreading more.

But, well...

Some things just had to be dealt with.

And Rian Falwell was apparently one of them.

Chapter Two

Rian supposed he’d give Damon Louis a touch of credit in that he did, in fact, put a shirt on before they reconvened outside Assistant Principal Lachlan Walden’s second floor office.

The problem was...it was hard to really call that scrap of white fabric a shirt when it was thinner than gauze, and Damon must have used it as a towel to absorb the sweat filming his body; the shirt clung to his torso in a wet-soaked, translucent layer, molding to the tight flow of an athlete’s honed muscles.

As Damon approached down the narrow hallway in a casual, graceful jog, the only spot of color against gray-worn wood, his body pulled and flowed like a piece of powerful machinery moving in time to music,