Just Like This (Albin Academy #2) - Cole McCade Page 0,5

and Rian caught himself picking out the sketch lines in his body: where he would overlap lines for the obliques, how he might taper the line weight to indicate depth and motion, how he would shade the joining of the anterior head muscles to the pectorals, and how the stark crease between them tightened and relaxed in and out of focus with each flex of Damon’s shoulders in rhythm with his strides.

But as he drew to a halt on the opposite side of the doorway marked Assistant Principal L. Walden, Damon scowled, swiping his still-damp hair out of his face. “What? Why are you looking at me like that? I put on a fucking shirt.”

...what?

Oh.

He had been staring, hadn’t he?

And he...he really didn’t know why.

Clearing his throat, Rian looked away, lifting his chin and thinning his lips—and only hoped his face didn’t look as red as it felt. “I meant something a little more presentable than a T-shirt.”

“I haven’t fucked with a dress code since the Navy, and I’m not about to start now.”

That probably explained the scars: thick corded ridges visible even underneath the shirt, when the soaked white fabric let the deep, tawny brown of Damon’s skin show through, and brought out the lighter lines of scar tissue making furrows and puckers against his flesh, things that whispered of bullet wounds and worse.

And Rian wasn’t curious about Damon damned Louis, or what had sent him from the Navy to a secluded hole in the wall like Omen, Massachusetts, hidden away in a private boys’ boarding school most people didn’t even know existed unless they had the right connections, knew the right people, or had the kind of wayward sons many wealthy families liked to disavow responsibility for.

“You’re fucking staring at me again,” Damon grit out, one eye twitching.

Rian caught himself, retreating a step, then huffed and looked away. “Excuse me.”

“You got that much of a problem with my damned shirt?”

“Why would I?”

A flat stare fixed on Rian. “You seem to have a problem with everything else about me.”

Just your breathing, Rian thought, suppressing a growl. “Can we talk to Walden and get this over with?”

Damon made a thickly disgusted sound and leaned over Rian—so close that in proximity, without the heavy smell of fresh clay drowning it out, Rian could smell the heat and sweat of his body, a darkly musky warmth—to thump the heel of his palm against Walden’s door. “Be my fucking guest.”

“If the two of you are quite done with your rather loud bickering,” drifted through the door, commanding and cold and ever-so-slightly irritable as always, “you may enter. You have ten minutes.”

With one last glare, Rian cleared his throat and tore his gaze away from Damon yet again.

God, that man annoyed the hell out of him.

He distracted himself by pushing the door of Walden’s office open. He’d probably seen Lachlan Walden in the office more than in their shared suite—where, the few times Rian had caught a glimpse past the firmly closed door of Walden’s bedroom, the space had been just as spartanly neat and organized as his office, furniture so minimalist that the cubicle looked much more expansive than it was.

Most faculty and staff offices were cramped, a hazard of an extremely old building designed in different times, and by someone with a penchant for small spaces; Rian had once heard—and maybe dug up in the dusty, crumbling library archives—that the sprawling main building had originally been constructed in the eighteen hundreds by an eccentric, wealthy family with the intent of housing multiple generations, from the closest brothers to the most distant cousins. But some unspeakable and thus unspoken tragedy had emptied the halls and begun the first rumors of hauntings and curses before, decades later, the manor had been bought, restored, and repurposed as a boarding house for laborers working the river industries on the Mystic. More tales; more histories imprinted the weathered boards, before time and changes in local business left more empty halls, more ghosts.

Until, around the early twentieth century, the estate had been bought one last time and remodeled into a boarding school for boys; some whispered the first founder, Marietta Albin, had established the school as a place to exile her own delinquent sons to shape them up into proper responsible adults, and it had grown from there.

Into what it was today: a secret haven for the rich and spoiled.

Where Lachlan Walden seemed to be having a touch of trouble fitting in, because he seemed even more harried