Just Like That - Cole McCade Page 0,35

they could turn to someone who would be on their side, no matter what.

Tomorrow.

He’d worry about it tomorrow.

As he didn’t think Iseya would appreciate him showing up completely wiped out, groggy, unable to focus, and manic on a double-shot espresso.

Scrubbing at his eyes, he pushed himself to his feet and stepped back out into the darkened, empty halls. When he’d been a boy, everyone had always found the school to be creepy at night, with the silhouettes of mist-shrouded trees through the windows, the shadows hiding in the rafters, the creaking floorboards and the looming haunts of strange crevices and fixtures. Summer had rarely had occasion to spend time at the school at night as a student, with living in town...

But the few times he had he’d found it comforting, not creepy.

A place where old things lived, silent and settling into their bones.

He ran his fingers along the wall as he walked, the texture of the wood under his fingertips, the coolness of it the same as the coolness of the floorboards under his bare soles. Head down, watching his toes and the deep wood grain, he tracked his progress back to his room in the raised edges of door frames, the turn of hallways, the indentations of recessed doors with numbers tacked on in brass worn down to the dullest of shines.

It almost felt like dreaming, being the only one in the halls, the only one ghosting through these passageways, like he was a haunt and everyone hid away behind their doors to keep his wandering, baleful eye from landing on them and pulling them into the dark.

He was so caught in this thought, in the quiet sleepy delight of it, that he didn’t realize when his skimming fingertips skipped over the carved edge of a doorframe to land not on the door, but on empty air.

Until he touched skin, warm and firm and smooth.

Skin, and the tight-honed curve of a shoulder.

He jerked his hand back, pulse thumping faster through his veins, and lifted his head, stopping where he stood.

And found himself face to face with Fox Iseya, those silver eyes piercing into him like diamond spears, rooting him in place.

Iseya leaned in the doorway of his suite, arms folded over his bare chest, a pair of loose, dark gray linen pajama pants holding for dear life on to the sculpted, trim angles of tightly defined hips. He was the same smooth shade of pale gold all over, like sunlight pouring over white sand—his skin taut and weathered and drawn tight over firm shoulders, over the pronunciation of collarbones as sharp as an indrawn breath, over the hard-toned breadth of his chest, over the rolling fluid rows of muscle tapering down his abdomen to the dip of his navel and the sinful slope of his pelvis. The neatly pressed shirts and suspenders he wore tended to slim his figure, disguising the true bulk of him.

But like this, shirtless and radiating heat and towering over Summer with such forbidding intensity...

He was somehow even more intimidating.

And even more alluring.

Especially when his glasses were absent, leaving those angled, long-lashed, penetrating eyes fully unguarded.

And his hair was barely caught up in a knot, endless skeins of it spilling loose to pour down his back in a tangled mess tumbling to his thighs, several wispy locks drifting across his brow and coiling over his shoulders, clinging lovingly to the long, elegant slope of his throat.

Summer’s mouth dried. His heart tried to stop, petrified in its place, as rooted as his feet were to the floor.

He tried to say something.

And all that came out was a broken, ragged, “Ulp.”

Iseya arched one sharp, dark dash of a brow, inclining his head as though acknowledging something perfectly normal. “Summer,” he said coolly.

Fuck.

Iseya shouldn’t...be like that. Shirtless, radiating this wild animal sensuality at once dangerous and inviting, saying Summer’s name in that voice. Looking at Summer with those eyes, when without the glasses chilling them...

Summer realized they weren’t the glacial, pale ice he’d always thought.

They were molten silver, burning-hot and leaving his skin, his entire body feeling far too warm.

He struggled to pull himself together, told himself to stop when he was just tired and overreacting.

But he had to look away to find his voice again; to even be able to breathe, when he was caught up in the stifling, oppressive need to just...just...

Touch, and his fingers curled against his palm, holding fast to the tingling after-impression still left in his fingertips.

“Is...is everything okay?” he managed to straggle