but legal pads and pencils neatly slotted in their cases, and a fresh gradebook waiting for the current one to run out of pages. He leaned over to check the side drawer, dragging it open and peering past the stacks of file folders; had he left it in his suite?
Summer watched him curiously. “You can’t find your phone?”
“It is an accessory, not a necessity,” Fox bit off, then clamped his lips shut if only because yes, he heard himself quite clearly, and knew exactly how old he sounded.
Too old for Summer to be watching him with that sort of quiet fondness, as if...as if...
He found even Fox’s irritability endearing.
He didn’t have to be so obvious about it.
“So...that means I don’t have to wonder who’s texting you at three in the morning and asking if you’re up,” Summer said, just a little too innocently.
“Anyone texting me at three in the morning would know very well that I am not up, and if they wake me they may forfeit their lives,” Fox growled, before finally unearthing his phone from beneath last semester’s third period gradebook. “Ah.”
He tapped the screen.
Nothing happened.
Pressed the power button.
Nothing.
Summer lightly drummed his fingertips against his own phone with a humming sound. “I think you have to charge it more than once a month, Professor Iseya,” he lilted, and Fox glowered at him, dropping his phone on the desk and leaving it there, silent and dead.
“Silence, impudent whelp,” he hissed.
And Summer just snickered, before clapping a hand over his mouth.
Hmph.
Disobedient and yet obedient at the same time.
Irritating, and just as much of a contradiction as Summer himself.
Thinning his lips, Fox folded his arms over his chest, staring at Summer flatly.
Years ago, Summer would have recoiled, shrinking into himself and scuttling away.
But now the incorrigible, irrepressible thing just smiled wider, a choked half-laugh muffled behind his hand and in the back of his throat.
“Are you quite finished?” Fox said flatly. “I’ll see your text once I’ve charged my phone. That should be quite enough. And if you text me at three in the morning, I should hope it is actually important.”
“Wanting to talk to you isn’t important enough?” Summer asked, a husky little hitch in the words, and Fox let out an exasperated sound, thrusting his hand out and pointing firmly at the door.
“Get out.”
Summer just burst out laughing, a raspy-sweet sound with a touch of shivering depth to it.
Before he gathered up the papers once more, stacking his phone atop them and turning to stroll out, somehow once again managing to do exactly what he was told while still being entirely intolerable about it.
“Have a good night, Professor,” sailed back over his shoulder, before he hooked the door with his foot and pulled it to in his wake.
Fox just glared after him, sinking down deeper into his chair with a grumble.
What an odd, odd young man.
It was quite annoying, how Fox couldn’t ignore him.
And quite annoying how, the following morning, Summer was practically vibrating during office hours, restless and clumsy and dropping his pen, his near-empty cup of coffee, the textbook he was referencing to double-check Fox’s lesson plan for the day. Always the constant glances from under his lashes, the blushing, the way he caught his lower lip in just one canine tooth so that it drew in on one side and only turned more lush, plush, reddened and enticing on the other.
Fox absolutely refused to look.
Just as he absolutely refused to look at the way, when he concentrated, Summer would catch the tip of his pen between his lips and chew at it delicately, his mouth working over it in soft caresses and the pen indenting his mouth in yielding, pillowy curves, the pressure and friction turning it redder and redder.
Fox wasn’t watching.
He was grading an essay, damn it all to hell. He wasn’t—
“Stop that,” he hissed, and snapped a hand across the desk to pull the pen from between Summer’s fingers, his lips, his teeth. “You’ll damage your teeth.”
Summer froze, fingers still poised in the shape of the pen, wide eyes flicking from the textbook to Fox. His button-down shirt was pale blue today, the perfect color against suntanned skin, and he was far too casual with the sleeves cuffed to his elbows to bare toned forearms, his collarbones stark ridges past the open V of the neck.
Honestly, had no one spoken to him about the dress code?
“Um,” Summer said, eyes still a little too wide. “Sorry?”
“Simply don’t do it again.” Fox set the pen down