completely uncertain of how to handle this at all?
Yet that smile never wavered, even as Summer lowered his eyes from the sky, looking at Fox with a strange and quiet frankness, a soft ache in his voice when he said, “I know.”
That...should not sting.
A sudden sharp pang, as if an arrow had been fired straight from Summer’s bleeding heart to Fox’s own.
With a soft hiss, he clenched his jaw and looked anywhere but at Summer. At the mist slowly beginning to burn away from the surface of the lake, hovering like the last remnants of ghosts that refused to let go with the dawn.
“This,” he bit off, “is the most absolutely ludicrous conversation. What makes you think I’m even attracted to men?”
“Hope,” Summer answered simply, softly, and yet everything was in that one word.
Hellfire.
Fox closed his eyes, breathing in and out slowly, if only so he could keep his tone even and calm. He wasn’t accustomed to this—to feeling out of sorts, shaken out of place, his stone foundations cracked and no longer holding him so steady.
Being around Summer was like seeing the sun after decades buried in a subterranean cave.
And the light hurt his eyes, when all he wanted was the quiet and comforting dark.
“You don’t want me, Summer,” he said firmly. “I’m quite old, used-up, and I don’t even know how to be with someone anymore.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Summer murmured.
“Isn’t it?”
Silence, before Summer said slowly, “Maybe I’m wrong... I’m probably wrong. Or maybe you were a good enough teacher that I can figure some things out. But either way, I think you shut yourself away while you needed to...but your protective walls turned into a cage when you didn’t need them anymore, and now you can’t find your way out.”
Shut yourself away while you needed to.
The simple memory of just why he’d shut himself away cut deep, digging down to a tiny pain that lived at his heart. He’d made it tiny deliberately, so he could compact it down into a thing so small it could fit in the palm of his hand, all of that agony crushed down into nothing so that he could never touch too much of it at any one time, its surface area barely the size of a fingerprint.
And then he’d tucked it away, burying it down where he couldn’t reach it.
But those simple words threatened to expose it, even if it meant cutting him open to do so.
No.
He stood, reminding himself to breathe—to breathe, and to wrap himself in his calm. He was nearly twice Summer’s age, and quite accustomed to rebellious boys who thought they were intelligent enough to outsmart their teacher, put him on the spot, leave him floundering. Summer was just an older, larger version of that.
And Fox could not forget that he was the one in control here.
“Is that so?” he asked, looking down at Summer—the top of his head, the hard slopes his shoulders made as he leaned back on his hands. “If that’s your analysis, you aren’t fit to teach elementary school psychology.”
“They don’t teach psychology in elementary school.” Summer chuckled, those firm shoulders shaking. “Insulting me already didn’t work, Professor. Why do you think it’s going to drive me back from the walls this time?”
Fox turned his nose up. “Is that your intent, then? To breach my walls?”
“Not breach them, no.”
Summer tilted his head back again, then, but this time instead of looking at the sky...he looked up at Fox with his eyes full of that sky, the first morning clouds reflected against liquid blue.
“I’m not going to get inside unless you let me, Professor Iseya. But I can stand outside the walls and wait...and ask.”
Fox stared.
He could not be serious.
One minute Summer had arrived to apologize for that egregious and utterly ridiculous kiss, and now he...seemed to be emboldened to some kind of designs on Fox?
All because Fox had not summarily dismissed him from his position?
Absurd.
He pressed his lips together and took a few steps away from Summer, drifting along the lake’s shore, putting more distance between them. Giving himself space—to think, to sort himself out, when he wasn’t accustomed to this.
Wasn’t accustomed to someone who took one look at his walls and saw not someone cold, not someone cruel, distant, detached, inhuman...
But simply that those walls were made not of stone, but of pain.
He did not like it.
His walls had served him quite well for some time, and they did not need to be broken down.
“Do you think Rapunzel was comfortable