into his thighs felt alien and strange and wrong.
What was he doing?
Desire sank its teeth in deeper, and yet the pain of that bite was more than he could bear.
He thrust back, taking in a sharp breath, letting Summer go quickly.
Summer remained frozen, looking at him in a half-daze, his lips parted, the wet red tip of his tongue just barely visible—the collar of his shirt disarrayed, his cheeks flushed, his eyes so dark they simmered nearly black, as deep as a midnight sky.
“I... I don’t...” Summer stammered, his voice thick, husky, burnt at the edges with a raspy, needy burr. “Professor... Iseya...?”
Fox couldn’t look at Summer’s face.
Not when that lost, utterly absorbed, entirely needy expression made Fox want things he had consigned himself to never wanting again.
He turned his back, fixing his gaze instead on the glow of morning coming through the venetian blinds, even if he didn’t really see them. Didn’t really see much of anything, when he was aching inside and his chest constricted so tight, everything inside seeming to cluster around his heart to crush it beneath the weight of all the things rushing within him.
“Earn that,” he said tightly, and hated how unsteady his own voice sounded. “Do something brave to earn that, and perhaps I’ll consider making this an everyday thing.”
Summer would back out, he thought.
Summer would back out, let his anxiety take control, and retreat from the challenge.
And then this little farce would end, and Fox could return to normal.
But Summer only made a deep, inarticulate sound in the back of his throat, bordering on a growl—before he said breathlessly, “Fine. Give me the lesson plan.”
A pause, as Fox’s eyes widened and he glanced over his shoulder at the fierce way Summer’s brows drew together, the determination in the glint of his eyes, the set of his shoulders.
“You want me to be brave?” Summer said. “Then I’ll lead your next class.”
* * *
Oh, Summer thought. Oh.
He thought, perhaps...
He had made a very large mistake.
He stood up in front of the classroom that had been the focal point of his life for his entire senior year. Still the same dark, peeling walls, still the same row of windows lined with potted plants and psychology textbooks along the back wall, still the same rows and rows of wooden desks that were the only ones in the school not scratched up and marked with pencil and pen graffiti.
Because everyone was too afraid of Professor Iseya to risk it.
But Summer wasn’t Professor Iseya.
Summer was just Summer, and as he looked out over the sea of bored, disinterested faces, a few boys looking back at him with smirks as though sizing him up and wondering just how long it would take to break him...
He thought maybe he’d jumped in a little too fast, feet-first, and gotten in over his head.
Maybe he could blame hormones.
Because even over the hours he’d spent reviewing the lesson plan in Iseya’s office while the professor quite pointedly ignored him without a single word or even a look...
He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that kiss.
That hand on his throat again—he would never stop thinking about that hand on his throat, the way Iseya seemed to need to naturally assert dominance and make Summer go weak with the inherent control in that touch. Such a light thing, a subtle thing...
But it had left him turned to an utter helpless doll, in Iseya’s hands.
While Iseya had kissed him.
Iseya had kissed him.
Deep, slow, a thing of languid strokes and hot, firm lips that completely melted Summer, the teasing exploration of a tongue that knew exactly what it was doing as it slipped against every sensitive point in Summer’s mouth.
If he had ever thought Iseya was cold...
That idea had been completely shattered, this morning.
He’d been completely shattered.
And willing to do anything to convince Iseya to do that again.
But he couldn’t feel that heat, right now.
Not when he’d been trying to speak for the last thirty seconds, but all he could manage was an odd, thick sound as his tongue dried and gummed and stuck to the roof of his mouth.
Not when he could feel Iseya at his back, watching him with those cool, inscrutable eyes, not saying a single solitary word.
And not when every last one of these boys was the mirror of the ones who’d made him feel so small, so invisible, so unimportant and shriveled and worthless every day he’d spent surrounded by people his age who came from a different world—one where he