Page 15 of Hot Chicken (Sunday Brothers #6)

CHAPTER SEVEN

PORTER

They say love makes you do crazy things, and I believed that wholeheartedly.

One might say that love (unrecognized, at the time) had led me to recite angry sonnets at my former English professor’s cabin on a snowy night.

Love had made him give me shelter when he could’ve left my drunk ass out in the snow.

And love had turned our one-night stand into a capital- R relationship, despite the potential complications from Theo dating a student.

But standing in a walk-in closet, sweating like a sinner at a revival while trying to hide a possibly magic rooster behind a stack of Theo’s old sweaters?

This might be a bridge too far down the path to crazy-town for even love to excuse.

“Porter?” Theo’s voice called from the living room. “Babe, where’d you go?”

“Coming!” I called. I draped Theo’s old cardigan over the chicken… which made it look an awful lot like a cardigan-draped chicken, so I pulled it off again.

Fuck , I was bad at subterfuge .

In general, this was a good thing. I didn’t like lying, and I especially didn’t like lying to the man I loved.

But when Hawk had finally explained to me and Theo what the fuck they’d been talking about at dinner earlier—that he’d found the rooster he’d dubbed the “Cock of Good Fortune” at a rummage sale last weekend, that it was “powerful,” and that it had “made me and Jack closer than ever, if you know what I mean ”—well, I’d been intrigued, even though I knew Theo had probably pulled a muscle restraining his eye roll.

And when it was time to go home, I’d done what any wildly in love, mildly desperate man would do.

I’d smuggled the cock home with me.

Now that I had it, though, I wasn’t sure what the fuck I was supposed to do with it.

Did it just… sense your need and bestow its favors?

Hawk hadn’t mentioned any magic words, and there was no handy On switch.

I really hoped it wasn’t one of those things that needed to be charged under the full moon because I didn’t have that kind of?—

“Porter?” Theo’s voice was closer now. Right outside our bedroom.

I whirled around, leaned fake-casually against the closet doorframe with my arm above my head, and adopted a pose I considered sexy but natural. You know, just enough flex to make the shoulders pop, not enough to actually make them pop .

“Porter, seriously, are we playing hide-and—? Oh .”

Theo stood in the bedroom door and blinked, taking me in from my decades-old Sunday Orchard T-shirt to my probably equally old athletic shorts and flip-flops.

He lifted one dark eyebrow. “Practicing our thirst traps, are we? Is this why you sprinted in from the car and pretended you didn’t hear me calling you? ”

“Sprint? Pfft. I didn’t sprint .” I straightened, a little annoyed that my beloved was calling me out that way, but also a little proud because I was almost positive my professor had never used “thirst trap” in a sentence before we met, and definitely a little amused because… well, he had a point.

“If I didn’t hear you, it’s probably that the cabin is so much bigger now than it used to be,” I said, not quite able to look him in the eye.

“Not like back when we first got together, huh? When we only had one room, we couldn’t help seeing each other every minute of every day!

I couldn’t take a deep breath without bumping into you. Man, those were some good times.”

Theo frowned like he was concerned I was having some kind of amnesiac event and…

well, he might have a point about that, too.

When Theo and I had first gotten together, the cabin hadn’t just been cozy but tiny , making it hard to have family over or for both of us to work at the same time.

No one in their right mind would be nostalgic for those days.

And the truth was, when we’d put on the first addition—our bedroom suite—a few months into our relationship, I’d been so thrilled I’d promised the contractor who’d helped us that we’d name our first daughter after her.

Theo had been so starry-eyed over our big bathtub, our walk-in closet, and our room with a door he hadn’t even argued, despite us having no plans to have a daughter at all, let alone to name her Jimmi-Lou. It had been that incredible.

But our second addition, last fall, of a home office where Theo could work uninterrupted? That might have seemed practical at the time, but in the last couple of weeks, I’d realized it was the worst idea we’d ever had. A soul-crushing nightmare. I mean, not to be dramatic or whatever.

“Porter, baby.” Theo walked closer and put his hands on my shoulders, his touch so warm and grounding that despite everything, I wanted to lean into him. “What’s wrong?”

“Wrong?” I shook my head. “Why would you think something was wrong? One of my favorite brothers is having a baby—actually, two babies—and one of my favorite brothers just got engaged, and one of my favorite brothers is getting married this fall, which means my other favorite brother is going to come back from New York and bring his husband, who makes charcuterie! How could I be less than thrilled?”

The words were like a high-pitched avalanche, gathering speed and strength as they spilled out of me.

“And things at Hannabury Hub are great,” I went on.

“Super great! We got that extra money from the Hannabury Fund, which means we’re installing ten new laptops for the after-school program, and we’re piloting a new mentorship initiative with the high school in the fall. The kids are pumped. I’m pumped.”

“Porter—”

I sucked in a breath. “And you ! Things are going amazing at your work, too, right? I mean, you haven’t talked about your new project very much. Or at all, really. But you’ve been really busy, and you seem happy? Right? You are happy, aren’t you?”

Theo, in his dress shorts and button-down, gave me the sort of look that felt like a hug and an interrogation under Klieg lights all at once. His glasses had slipped down his nose, and when he pushed them up with one finger, it was so freaking cute I felt an irrational spike of fondness.

“I have no idea what’s going on with you right now,” Theo began conversationally.

“I told you?—”

“But,” he went on, “if I can read Beowulf in the original and figure out what my English 101 students are trying to express, I can figure out what you’re not saying, too. I speak fluent Porter. I can learn to read what silent love hath writ .”

“Sonnet 23,” I murmured grudgingly.

Theo smiled, clearly pleased. “Exactly.” Theo tapped his lip with one long finger. “So let’s piece together what we know, shall we? ”

I almost laughed. That response was so Theo. And fuck , but I loved him for it.

When we’d first gotten together, I knew people questioned whether our relationship would last, and I didn’t blame them.

On paper, Dr. Theo Hancock, PhD, head of the English Department at Hannabury College, beloved by students and terror of the administration, didn’t have much in common with Porter Sunday, orchard kid turned community center director.

But in practice? We worked. We really worked.

We’d always shared passions, like books, and hiking, and home improvement, and we’d expanded each other’s horizons over the years, too.

Theo genuinely enjoyed hanging out with the kids at the youth center I ran, he fit with my family like he’d always been there, and he’d even admitted—though only once, in a mutter he refused to repeat—that he enjoyed when I dragged him to two-dollar Marvel movie rerun nights at the campus theater.

While I couldn’t precisely say that I loved Shakespeare, not the way Theo did, I had recited a couple of original naughty sonnets for him on our anniversary, and I’d won us first prize at the faculty’s Halloween family carnival, thanks to the way my legs filled out my hose and doublet, which was sort of close to the same thing.

More than that, though, we complemented each other.

Theo’s tendency to be overly serious couldn’t withstand an impromptu Porter Sunday kitchen striptease.

My bad habit of biting off more than I could chew—“Sure I can help you with your grant proposal the same week I present next year’s budget to the board while half my staff is out with flu!

”—would have really gotten me into trouble if not for Theo’s organized brain breaking every task into color-coded action items. And in bed?

Explosions. Fireworks. The kind of synchronicity I hadn’t known was possible.

Which meant that, all in all, there wasn’t a single thing about my relationship with Theo Hancock that I wanted to change. Nothing about the man that I didn’t down-to-my-bones adore.

Theo’s phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket, glanced at the screen, and smiled. A small, private kind of smile.

Okay, maybe there was one thing I wouldn’t mind changing…

“Was that Remy again?” I asked, trying to sound light. “Does he have a new couplet for you to, ah… parse?”

Theo slid the phone away. “Something like that. I have to get back to him later. But first, I’m parsing my boyfriend.

” He looked me over, studying me like one of the annotated texts on the shelves in his office.

“Let’s work our way backward from now. You were definitely acting odd at your brother’s house earlier?—”

I snorted. “Like that means anything. I’m always odd. Just ask Knox.”

“No,” Theo said with a seriousness that surprised me. “You aren’t. You’re bold, and thoughtful, and competent. You’re joyful , and you make the people around you, including me, joyful too. But the past little while, it’s felt like somebody dimmed your sparkle. You ready to tell me about it?”