Page 18 of The Sunday Brothers Novellas

“I did not destroy your life, Sunday,” I went on in a much calmer voice.

“Nor do I believe I was ever a jerk . By the end of the semester, I may have been… less patient with you than I would have liked,” I admitted, “but that was not without reason. And unlike certain people who appear to have been carrying a grudge for half a year, I’m capable of reacting in different ways to different situations.

It’s called being a mature and fully articulate human being. Try it sometime.”

Yeah, I was totally failing at professional distance , too.

I winced, expecting an angry retort, but Porter merely blinked at me some more.

While he didn’t seem as drunk as he had been—probably because most of the tequila he’d ingested was now fertilizing my lawn—he clearly wasn’t capable of processing all the words I’d spoken.

Instead, he latched onto one fragment of my first statement and ignored the rest.

“Pffft. No storm tonight, silly. Storm’s Friday .” He shifted his huge frame lower in the chair cushions, and his eyes drifted closed.

Oh, no. Nope.

“Yes. Friday . Which is today , as of…” I consulted my watch. “Two and a half hours ago.”

Porter’s eyes opened, and that deep, perfect green assessed me for a beat. “Are you sure?”

“Porter Sunday, you would try the patience of a saint.” And needless to say, I had never been a candidate for sainthood.

I turned to the collection of fall jackets and hoodies on the hook behind my front door and tossed the largest, warmest one into Porter’s lap.

“Put that on. The no-puking rule still applies, both for the jacket and my car.” After jamming a wool hat on my head, I grabbed my keys from the hook on the wall, pulled open the front door, and made a sweeping motion with my hand.

“Come on now. We’re leaving. And we will never speak of this incident after this day. Understand?”

In just the short time Porter and I had been inside, the snow had started falling in earnest. Not much had accumulated by local standards—maybe an inch—but what there was refused to lie still.

Wind stronger than any we’d gotten since a brief round of summer storms back in July positively whistled through the trees, stirring up the flakes around my feet on the doorstep like I’d been caught in a snow globe.

Contrary to popular belief—at least, popular amongst people like my mother, who refused to leave Palm Beach after Halloween—it was relatively rare to get much snowfall in Vermont in autumn unless you lived up on a mountain.

It was rarer still to get full-on blizzard-force winds this time of year.

And the likelihood of getting this kind of wind, plus this much snow, plus the student I’d spent way too much time trying not to think about last semester landing on my doorstep all at once?

Infinitesimal. Microscopic. So statistically improbable that it didn’t bear consideration.

And yet here we were. I have a bone to pick with fate , indeed.

“I was supposed to be sleeping my way through this storm tonight,” I muttered to Porter, who was grinning goofily at the fire.

He didn’t appear to be listening to me, let alone moving from his comfy spot…

by which I meant my comfy spot. “When I came home this afternoon, I promised myself I wasn’t leaving the house again all weekend except to shovel.

I brought in firewood. I downloaded a new novel.

I got all the grocery foods you’re supposed to get for snowstorms—enough milk and bread and eggs to feed the whole town french toast, and I don’t even like french toast! It was going to be delightful.”

Now my lovely three-day weekend was being delayed by a child’s revenge fantasy gone wrong.

“Sunday? Sunday!” I nudged his knee with my own none too gently. “ Christ. ”

Porter’s eyes had slid shut, and he startled guiltily. “I… yes? Sorry. I was just…” He yawned, his jaw opening so wide it cracked.

“Yes, I’m sure sonnet-bombing really takes it out of a man,” I said waspishly, but fucking Porter had already zoned out again.

Hauling his semiconscious self to my truck wasn’t going to be easy. Driving in these conditions wouldn’t be ideal either, but the storm was only going to get worse. It was now or never.

I yanked Porter up and slid an arm around him to help him to the door. The warmth of his body permeated my clothing layers, and thankfully, the scent of warm woodsmoke and mint wafted off him rather than the stench of vomit. Even though he hadn’t been in the cabin long, he still smelled like home…

I quickly cut that thought off, then leaned away from him and took a deep breath of frigid mountain air to clear my head.

“Where do you live?” I asked, carefully navigating the shallow porch steps with him at my side.

“That’s easy.” Porter took a deep breath, like the cold air was clearing his head, too. “Little Pippin Hollow,” he said confidently.

Jesus Christ. Clearly, the cold wasn’t clearing his head much . He’d named a town over an hour away.

“I wasn’t asking where you’re from,” I said through my teeth. “I mean where do you live at Hannabury? An apartment? Dorm? Frat house?”

He snorted. “I’m twenty-six. Not really dorm or frat material anymore, Professor.”

This surprised me, perhaps more than it should have. Tonight’s debacle aside, Porter Sunday had always seemed more mature than my average undergraduate student—he never missed a class or turned in a paper late—but I hadn’t guessed he was a full four years older than most of the seniors.

Not that it mattered. Or made it any more acceptable to be unreasonably turned on by the feel of his heavy frame against me.

“Address. Please,” I repeated, picking my way carefully over the slippery ground to the passenger-side door of the truck.

He looked around us at the snow-covered branches of the encroaching forest. “Your address?” An adorable little divot formed between his eyebrows.

“Don’t you know? Or are you like that guy in that movie from the film class where it’s all backwards and tattoos and…

oh my God, does that make you the killer? ”

He laughed so hard I lost my grip on his waist, but rather than tumbling to the ground, he managed to get his feet under him. Then he began stumbling down the driveway as if he planned to walk back to town in the cold, dark night.

“Mr. Sunday,” I snapped. “I haven’t killed anyone yet . Stop where you are before you nosedive into the bushes.”

“I figured I’d check the mail in your box and figure out where we are,” he called back with a careless wave of his arm that nearly sent him sprawling again. “That’s what we call smart thinkin’.”

Jesus fuck. It was something alright.

But it was a good thing Porter wasn’t facing me because I couldn’t help letting out a soft laugh, despite clapping a hand to my mouth to restrain it.

I hadn’t been charmed by a drunk college guy since I was a drunk college guy nearly a decade ago. I wasn’t sure why Porter Sunday was the exception… but then, he was the exception to a lot of people’s rules.

People at Hannabury College were drawn to Porter Sunday like he was the damned Pied Piper.

Faculty members in every department found him charming and magnetic.

Students regarded him as friendly and kind.

And everyone knew the man was gorgeous, judging by how many of the men on campus got hearts in their eyes when he flirted with them.

But I’d still been surprised when Jean Chenault, my English department colleague and Sunday’s academic advisor, had come to me at the start of last semester and positively gushed about what a “brilliant young man” Porter was, with a “keen eye for social justice” and a “poet’s soul.

” She’d begged me to find a spot for him in my Creative Non-Fiction class, and I had. Gladly.

Later in the semester, Jean had come to me again, asking for clemency on Porter’s behalf—the first and only time I’d known her to interfere on behalf of a student that way, which just went to show that Sunday could talk anyone into anything—and I’d told her sadly that if he had bothered to display his supposed “brilliance” in his classwork, I wouldn’t have had to fail him.

Another gust of wind blew in, and a sharp crack like a gunshot filled the snowy air, drawing my thoughts back to my current ridiculous predicament.

I whipped my head back and forth for the sound of the noise as Porter continued to meander slowly toward the street, shuffling along to a beat only he could hear.

Crack ! The sound came again, this time followed by a strange creaking sound. My body identified the noise long before my brain did, and I began rushing down the driveway.

“Porter!” I grabbed his hood and hauled him back toward the safety of the house. “Porter, come on. Move !”

I’d only managed to pull him a few stumbling feet before he lost his balance and fell on his ass, knocking me backward.

Both of us hit the snow-covered driveway with jarring force.

Before I was able to process more than stunned surprise, a shower of snow fell from a nearby tree, and another crack rent the air, this one followed by a horrific series of pops as a giant tree halfway down my driveway fell toward us in slow motion.

We sat there frozen, watching in horror as the thick branches of the falling tree landed against the smaller tree beside it.

For a second, it felt like the whole world went motionless, as if someone had pressed pause on a video.

Porter and I each held our breath, waiting.

Then the branches of the second tree gave way with a shower of white snow pellets.

The tree landed with a dramatic crash lengthwise up the driveway, its heavy branches scattered atop and beside it so that it almost looked like the forest had reclaimed the land.

The tips of the closest branches landed maybe six feet away…

exactly where Porter had been before I grabbed him.