Page 21 of The Sunday Brothers Novellas

My eyes devoured him inch by inch, memorizing each detail. The stubble on his chin and neck leading into the soft collar of the hoodie he still wore. The everyday nicks and scratches on his hands. All those little things that made my sexy, aloof professor so wildly, fascinatingly, complexly human.

He made another little sleep noise—almost a moan this time—and I felt my dick rise in response.

Oh , no . Oh, fuck . Down, boy.

What was worse than being a sixth-year senior, stuck repeating a class so you could graduate, and finding yourself passed out in your former professor’s bed? Finding yourself in that situation with your morning wood mere inches from him.

As quietly as I could, I pressed a hand to my rapidly inflating dick through the coverlet and clamped my lips shut against the urge to groan. Not helping!

Erections were normal and not always controllable, even at twenty-six.

But if he woke up and saw it… if he multiplied all of last semester by the sum total of my antics last night and then raised it to the exponent of raging boner …

Well, I was no mathematician, but I had to imagine the end product looked a lot like Professor Hancock reporting me to the administration and me not graduating at all.

I sucked in a panicked breath, nearly trembling as I tried to get the blood to exit my dick by force of will.

Was this how all my years of hard work, all my hopes of the future, ended?

The gaping maw of my undefined future opened up like a quicksand trap waiting to suck me down into its depths forever?—

“Christ alive, Sunday. You’re as intense outside of class as you were in it,” he grumbled without opening his eyes. “Stop thinking so loudly.”

“Oh fucking fuck!” I yelped, jumping headfirst off the bed with all the grace of a newborn calf—which was to say no grace whatsoever.

My legs were still all tangled in the duvet, so while my face and arms landed on the frigid wood floor near the bathroom door, the lower half of my body remained in the warm bed.

If panic-attack-yoga wasn’t already a thing, I’d just invented it.

“Fuck,” I breathed again.

If biting back a giant guffaw had a sound, Dr. Hancock had perfected it. “I have to admit I’ve never had a man so horrified to wake up in bed with me that he tried to jump to his own doom… from the bed . But then, you always had to be just that little bit extra, didn’t you, Sunday?”

I groaned but didn’t dare move. I could feel my pulse in my eyeballs and knew I had to be flushed to a cardiac-event-level red. All the blood in my body that hadn’t already rushed to my dick was now rushing to my head, which did not bode well for the other parts of me.

“What… what happened?” I managed to croak. I tried to push my torso back up onto the bed, but that only succeeded in pushing the duvet lower—as in, dick-visibly lower. Then I tried to crawl fully onto the floor, but the duvet was too firmly tucked around my feet, and there was no room to maneuver.

“Well, I don’t know exactly. I assume you woke up with morning wood, freaked out spectacularly, landed face-first, and possibly concussed yourself.”

“Yes, thank you,” I snapped… as much as a man who found himself marooned ass up in a strange bed, tangled head to toe in bedsheets, could snap.

“I meant, how did I end up in your bed? Why didn’t you make me sleep in the chair, or push me onto the floor, or…

hell, leave me laying out in your driveway covered in snow?

I remember coming back inside after you saved me from the, uh, the tree incident. But then… nothing.”

“So you don’t remember taking a shower?”

The moment he said it, I did remember. The water had been incredibly hot and soothing, and the man’s bodywash had smelled musky and intense, just like its owner.

This memory did nothing to help my dick situation.

“I… I think I discovered I was light-headed and decided to lay down to warm up afterward,” I explained.

“Uh-huh.” He leaned over and began yanking the covers to untangle my legs and hips.

“Very Goldilocks of you. But as it happens, I discovered that I am not a person who leaves people to suffer hypothermia, even when they richly deserve it. You would have frozen on the floor with just this one extra throw blanket.”

With a final yank of the duvet, I finally fell the rest of the way to the floor. It only took a split second to feel the cold air on my balls before I realized the situation had somehow, impossibly, gotten even more awkward.

“Arrghhh!” I yelped and scrambled for the sheet again, yanking it clear off the bed and wrapping it around my crumpled body. “Fucking fuck!”

“ Tsk. Hasn’t anyone told you cursing is a sign of a weak vocabulary? Find a more appropriate word.”

I peeked up over the edge of the mattress to see my ex-professor sitting up in bed with his arms resting over his bent knees. One eyebrow lifted at me, but otherwise, his face was impossible to read.

“I promise, I’m using the only appropriate word. I’m naked .” My voice had gone high, and the last word came out as a squeak. I knew my face was on fire.

I expected to see my own shock mirrored on his face, but his expression didn’t change.

“Yes, you are. Not much gets by you, does it, Sunday?” he asked mildly.

I blinked. “But… why am I naked?”

The other eyebrow lifted to join the first. “You tell me, Sunday.”

“Stop calling me that,” I shot back. “Last-naming me only works if we’re buddies, which we aren’t, or if it’s a cute nickname, like my brother calling his boyfriend Goodman, which doesn’t apply here either, or if you’re trying to put distance between us, which is really fucking uncool when I’m naked and tumbling out of your bed.

” I lifted my chin. “The appropriate word is Porter. Por. Ter.”

Professor Hancock regarded me for a long moment—long enough to make me regret my impetuous words and wonder why I’d chosen that particular hill to die on—before finally nodding.

“You have a point,” he agreed. He cleared his throat and inspected the fabric of his pajama pants as he offered awkwardly, “You may call me Theo. ”

A startled puff of sound escaped me, almost like a laugh but not quite. “Uh. No. I may not.”

He turned to me with… ah, yes, there it was. The scowl of disapproval. “Why not?” he demanded. “If you expect me to call you Porter, then you’ll call me Theo. End of subject.”

I shook my head. I would swear before any court of law that Professor— Theo —hadn’t particularly wanted me to call him Theo… until I’d refused. Why did I find that so adorable?

“For the record,” he went on, “I found you passed out on my bed wearing nothing but a towel after your shower last night, despite me giving you spare clothes to wear. I couldn’t tell you why you made that choice any more than I could explain any of the choices you made last night.

But after cursing you heartily, using all the words in my very impressive vocabulary?—”

“Naturally,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“—I opted to let you sleep it off. I debated taking the chair, but I’m still recovering from the last time I fell asleep there, grading papers last semester.

Since the floor wasn’t an option for me either, I came up with the only other viable temporary solution.

” He spread his hands to indicate the rumpled bedcovers.

Despite his calm words, his cheeks were definitely rosy, and it settled something in me to know I wasn’t the only one feeling the awkwardness of the situation.

“Right. Well. Good.” I stood up, clutching the sheet around me like a Victorian gentlewoman. “I… appreciate that. I’m just going to…”

I bolted into the bathroom. Once behind the closed door, I let out a long, slow breath. I deliberately avoided looking in the mirror because I didn’t need to see my bloodshot eyes and bloodshottier face.

“Fuck,” I breathed for the millionth time. Dr. Hancock was right. I had a piss-poor vocabulary for an English Lit student.

I cleared my throat and tried again, this time using the Bard’s own words. “ O, that my tongue were in the thunder’s mouth! Then with a passion would I shake the world. ”

“Sun— Porter ?” Dr. Hancock called through the door. “What the fuck are you doing in there?”

I jumped and banged my hip on the corner of the sink. “Fuck!” I cried again.

“If you’re trying to convert me by showing me the many, many applications of the word, I assure you I have already discovered them all,” he muttered before adding with a definite hint of amusement, “Mostly in the last twelve hours.” His voice trailed off as he wandered away from the door.

I couldn’t help but grin. Theo Hancock had a sense of humor. Who knew?

After splashing my face with frigid water, I looked around for the clothes he’d mentioned and found that someone, possibly me, had hung them on a row of hooks behind the bathroom door.

Navy blue sweatpants, worn to softness, and a hoodie from last year’s Hannabury Faculty Fun Run, which had benefitted the Hub.

I’d been at that event. I ran my fingers over the faded logo while my memory tried to place him there.

I’d been a volunteer, as usual, checking people in and handing out race numbers.

But I hadn’t been the only volunteer at the table, and with the crowd that day, it was possible he’d escaped my notice.

Imagining him among the happy crowd wasn’t easy. Even after seeing him in pajamas, it was hard to picture him without his usual dressy jeans, Oxford button-up, and textured blazer. Would he still have worn his dark-framed glasses, or would he have worn contacts for something like that?

Because I was still curious—and, okay, came from a long and proud line of nosy, small-town gossips—I nudged open the medicine cabinet door over the sink and took a peek.

No contact lenses, but among the usual items found in a medicine cabinet, there was also a half-empty bottle of silicone lube, an unopened box of condoms, and a small black enema bulb.

Oh. Oh, shit. Okay.

My heart skittered faster. Professor Hot-Cock liked to bottom.

This knowledge did absolutely nothing to calm my flaming cheeks, so I had to rinse my face off with cold water again. And again. After the third icy-cold douse, my cheeks had faded from “call the paramedics” to “mild sunburn.” That was as good as it was going to get.

I yanked on the clothes, freeballing it since there’d been no sharing of underwear, and opened the door.

Dr. Hancock stood in front of a coffee maker in the small kitchen space. The jeans he’d pulled on did loving things to his ass, which distracted me from… well, nothing, because I’d been fantasizing about his ass before, and now I still was.

“Coffee?” he asked without turning around.

“Please. Yeah.” I felt painfully sober and also incredibly awkward now that I was in his small space, wearing his clothes. “And, uh… could you maybe give me a ride home after that?”

Asking him for the favor made my face heat up to “third-degree burn” again. Apparently, my embarrassment was an endless well where this man was concerned.

And rightly so, Porter. Look at what you’ve done .

Before Theo could answer, I cleared my throat. The man deserved an apology from me—a sober one—at the very least.

“Listen, I’m sorry. Really sorry. I mean, not for reciting an angry sonnet at you, necessarily, because while I can’t actually remember that part of the night, I’m confident it was epic and justified…

” Theo lifted an eyebrow, and I hurried on.

“But coming here drunk? Invading your privacy when it’s clear you’ve gone to great lengths to get some distance from campus?

That was unfair and very much not cool. And I…

I know I don’t have any right to expect, well…

anything from you after that display. In fact, you’ve already been kinder to me than I probably deserve.

But… but I really hope that you’ll accept my apology.

Then you can drive me home, and we can forget all about this. ”

I ran my hand through my hair and tried to ignore how much it was shaking.

This man had my fate in his hands in so many ways. He could report me to the school or maybe even arrest me for trespassing. The last time I’d been at this man’s mercy, it hadn’t gone well for me at all.

Theo turned and faced me. His dark-framed glasses, tidy hair, and stern face were back in full force.

“No,” he said. Then he turned back to finish pouring the coffee.

“No?” I repeated. No, as in he wouldn’t drive me anywhere? No, as in he wouldn’t forgive me? Both? Neither?

As usual with this man, I would have given him whatever he wanted, but I had no clue what that was.

“Not at this time, anyway,” Theo elaborated, which made things zero percent clearer.

I fucking hated being on the back foot with him all the time. I hated feeling like I was constantly misunderstanding the assignment, never smart enough or mature enough to clue in. It made me feel defensive and wary—two emotions I rarely felt with anyone else.

“Right. Okay,” I said lamely to the back of his head. “So… I guess I’ll get out of your hair on my own, then.” A quick glance at the vast whiteness out the window suggested the walk back to the road—or maybe even to town—was gonna be unpleasant.

“Sit, Porter. You’re not going anywhere until I say so.”

My butt was in the chair before he finished speaking, and it was only a few moments later, when he handed me a mug of steaming coffee, that the mortification of my instinctive obedience registered.

Really, at a certain point, I needed to stop registering embarrassment. Wasn’t there some kind of rock-bottom-humiliation level a person could reach when they stopped falling?

I had no interest in finding out. I kept my face down and concentrated on willing my coffee to cool so I could drink it down and make my escape.

Clearly, nothing good would ever come of my fascination with Theo Hancock. At this point, the only option was to walk the heck away.