Just Like This (Albin Academy #2) - Cole McCade Page 0,25

down harder through the next slice of beef and then just leaving it, hand tight on the handle. “My parents loved me like I was their blood. I don’t need pity.”

“No, I—!” Rian made a flustered sound. “That’s...that’s not what I meant, I just... I was sorry I asked so rudely, I...”

He sounded so distressed that Damon couldn’t help looking up at him.

And found Rian standing there clutching the red bell pepper to his chest like he was clutching at his own beating heart, and looking at Damon with his eyes wide with chagrin, his pale little mouth trembling.

Damon just...groaned, setting the knife down and using his elbow to nudge Rian aside so he could thrust his hands under the cold spray, rinsing the thin sheen of runny liquid red from his skin.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m just...a little touchy about it. My parents were white, and...you know, I just...”

“Felt disconnected,” Rian filled in softly, and Damon stilled, his heart turning over sharply.

It was strange to hear it said out loud by someone else.

So easily, so naturally.

As if it was entirely normal to feel that way.

When every time that frustrating feeling came bubbling up inside him, Damon just...wondered if he was being ungrateful.

“Yeah,” he exhaled, curling his fingers under the spray. “Life with Mom and Dad wasn’t bad. But I don’t know who my birth parents are. I don’t know how I lost them. If they died, if they gave me up, if I was taken away from them...and you know, records and confidentiality and shit...my parents don’t know, either. I was too young to even remember where I came from. For all I know I was born here in Omen...or maybe I was born on Mashpee Wampanoag land with...with people who looked like me. Who have all these traditions I don’t know a damned thing about even though they’re mine by birthright.”

Goddammit. Why was he telling Rian this?

Why was he spilling out something this personal, this painful, to someone he’d only shared more than two words with for the first time yesterday?

There was just...something about Rian.

Something that ripped all these raw things out of Damon that he kept suppressed in the day to day. His questions about who he was, about what he wanted...

...about where he belonged.

In the moments of silence that followed, Rian had said nothing—but after a few moments he said hesitantly, “I saw them in the news a little while ago. Didn’t the government do something awful with their land? I mean...the Wampanoag up in Mashpee.”

“...yeah. Last I heard the courts were siding with them, but it’s still not certain.” Damon let out a frustrated sound and shut the water off, hitting the lever with the heel of his palm. “It doesn’t even affect me. Like, those are my damned people, aren’t they? But I have this whole life separate from them, until I don’t even know them and I’m standing on the outside watching while they could lose everything, and it doesn’t even have any impact on me. I don’t even know enough to know what it means to them. I can’t even feel right saying I’m Indigenous, just...of Indigenous descent. Do you know what that’s like?”

“No,” Rian admitted—and yet that honesty was better than any false platitudes he could have trotted out, pretending someone like him could have any idea what left Damon feeling so...so...

Lost.

But he still wasn’t expecting the touch of cool, damp fingertips to his forearm, just barely resting to his skin, butterfly-light and yet narrowing every perception down to those four tiny points against his arm. Damon turned his head, his chest pounding as he looked down at that thin, long white hand against the dark skin of his arm, before lifting his head to find Rian looking up at him with his hazel eyes warm, liquid-thick honey so very soft.

“But I know that’s not your fault,” Rian said, quiet and thrumming. “We don’t choose the lives we’re born into. We just choose the lives we make from that.”

“Yeah,” Damon said numbly.

But he wasn’t thinking about that, right now.

He was thinking about Rian so close—looking up at him like that, in that searching, quiet way that seemed to offer some kind of understanding, acceptance. When he still had the pepper clutched in his other hand, held against his chest, he looked like Eve in the garden of Eden, offering an apple of temptation that Damon wasn’t about to damned well take a bite out of when he didn’t need to be