Page 23 of The Sunday Brothers Novellas

After all the Porter revelations of the past few hours, maybe it shouldn’t have felt so strange that this man would understand immediately what my parents and former colleagues still struggled to comprehend, but it did.

“That.” I nodded. “Yeah. And it wasn’t just the house.

When I talked to the dean about openings in the department, it turned out Hannabury was so eager to hire me they gave me tenure and told me I’d be the top candidate for the department head position once Jim Burton retired.

It would have taken decades to get that at Brown, if it ever happened at all. It was all?—”

“Serendipity?” Porter supplied. I nodded. “Yeah,” he sighed. “I keep waiting for that to happen for me, but… I mean, I guess you have to put yourself in the right place first, right? The stars didn’t just align for you—you made them align.”

He sounded doubtful and hopeful all at once.

“I suppose that’s true,” I agreed.

“And did you regret it?” he asked. “Leaving your family behind, knowing they didn’t understand?”

“Nope. Because I knew it was the right thing for me, and that made everything worthwhile. Even dealing with know-it-all students who refuse to listen.” I gave him a pointed look.

“I know you’re not talking about me .” He lifted an eyebrow.

“All I do is listen and study. Check out the GPA I had before your class last semester—people who don’t listen don’t get 3.

8’s, Theo . And I’ll have you know, I busted my ass in your class.

I can’t help it if you’re a…” His voice trailed off, and he cleared his throat. “Never mind.”

I stood up and carried both of our dirty dishes to the sink, mostly so I could hide my grin. That little Theo said Subdued Porter was on his way out.

Good.

After setting the dishes down, I turned and leaned my hip against the counter, crossing my arms in front of my chest.

“Why are you censoring yourself with me?” I challenged. “I’m not your professor, you’re not my student anymore, and we’re stuck together for at least a few more hours. Clearly, you had a reason for coming here last night, so finish your thought. I’m a… what?”

His nostrils flared. “Fine, then. You’re an asshole with an overblown sense of authority who gets off on making students beg. ”

Well. That was uncensored, at least. Also, categorically incorrect.

“My job is to teach my students. I want to see them succeed. Sometimes that means pushing them and holding them to a high standard. But I’m not on some power trip here?—”

He shoved his chair back and stood up. “Then explain why I worked my ass off in your class and you still failed me.”

“Because you didn’t do the assignments properly,” I shot back. “You fundamentally misunderstood what I wanted. I asked you time and again to come to my office hours, to let me explain things to you, but you clearly thought you knew better than I did.”

“I’m a good writer,” Porter said, voice vibrating with emotion. “Dozens of other teachers and professors have said so, and I didn’t put nearly as much effort into their classes as I did yours?—”

“I know you’re a good writer! For fuck’s sake, Porter.

Everyone in the department sang your praises to me.

Porter Sunday is a unicorn student. Porter Sunday spins gold with his words.

Porter Sunday wrote a classic Shakespearean sonnet on sexuality discrimination that made the entire department weep.

When Professor Chenault told me you wanted to take my class, I actually wondered, ‘What can I teach this person? It’ll be like trying to teach Marlon Brando how to act. ’”

Porter made a scoffing noise.

“But I was here for it anyway,” I informed him.

“Hell, I couldn’t wait to read your first assignment.

And then you turned in this… this… beige fucking cardboard .

Technically accurate, every comma in place, but just…

bland as fuck. So, okay, I thought. No problem.

Porter Sunday clearly has talent; he just needs to understand what creative non-fiction is.

How cool that I get to show him. But I couldn’t show you because you can’t teach someone who refuses to be taught.

I gave you feedback, Porter. So much feedback.

But you refused to incorporate it into your work… ”

“Bullshit!” His chin firmed, and his eyes sparked green fire.

“You said to put my heart into it, my personality, my soul. For that last piece, about our family home, I wrote about Sunday Orchard—a place that’s been in my family for generations.

The place where my dad is buried. The place where my uncle and almost all my siblings and their partners still live to this day.

There’s no topic that has more of my heart?—”

I sucked in a deep breath. “Then for fuck’s sake, why didn’t you let that come across?

Porter, you wrote about apple varietals and growth timelines.

About profit shares and hybridization. It was supposed to be a personal narrative, but it read like something out of an almanac, circa 1875.

You took yourself out of the narrative almost entirely, which was the opposite of what I asked for.

You’re a brilliant writer, but it doesn’t matter how accurate or technically perfect a piece is if you’re not accomplishing what you’ve set out to do.

And you wouldn’t come and talk to me about it. ”

Some complex emotions worked across his face.

Hurt, disappointment, anger, and then hurt again.

“ Forgive me if I wasn’t willing to come listen to you tell me how awful my work was.

Forgive me if I wasn’t interested in one person’s opinions on how to write creative non-fiction.

And fucking forgive me for walking out on you right now before I say or do something we’ll both regret. ”

He turned and stormed out of the kitchen area, shoving his feet into his shoes and yanking my jacket on before disappearing out the front door.

I closed my eyes and bit out a curse. Well done, Dr. Hancock.

I’d spoken the truth. I had tried my best to teach Porter.

I also had been progressively more annoyed each time he turned in an assignment that was technically proficient and entirely missing the point.

I had asked him repeatedly to come to my office hours…

even if part of me had been secretly relieved that I hadn’t had him in my space, where I’d be forced to deal with my inappropriate thoughts about the man for hours at a time.

But what had I just been saying to Porter about how it didn’t matter how accurate your words were if you didn’t accomplish what you set out to do? I definitely hadn’t intended to make him storm out.

I scrubbed at the dishes a bit more savagely than necessary, hoping the manual labor would serve to calm me down and that a walk in the frigid morning air would do the same for Porter.

Once I finished the dishes, I threw several ingredients into the slow cooker for a stew I’d planned to make for dinner. Then I looked at my tablet, sitting right beside my comfortable, empty reading chair, and contemplated starting the new novel I’d downloaded.

For once, though, reading a new book didn’t appeal to me. In fact, nothing about being alone in my cabin was appealing all of a sudden.

I decided I might as well clear a path to the wood pile before the next round of snow came, so I stepped into my boots. But just as I was lacing them up, I heard the deafening brrrum of a chainsaw out in the yard.

I grabbed my parka, pulled the front door open, and rushed outside to find Porter cutting branches off the giant downed tree in the driveway, handling the heavy saw as easily as he’d handled his fork at breakfast.

Meanwhile, I hadn’t remembered that saw was in the shed, let alone the safety goggles and ear protectors Porter had found along with it.

“What are you doing?” I yelled. Stupid question. I gestured for him to give me the chainsaw. “Let me do that.”

Porter looked me up and down as if judging whether or not I could be trusted with my own chainsaw…

which was all th e more embarrassing because his concern was valid.

I’d gotten pretty competent with certain power tools while helping my grandfather, but that hadn’t extended to chainsaws. “I don’t think so,” he decided.

I narrowed my eyes at him before reaching for the chainsaw. He yanked it away and held it up out of my reach. The edge of his mouth quirked up in a teasing grin.

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself, Porter.” The very idea of it made me shudder. “And I’m quite confident that I can do it at least as well as you can,” I insisted.

“Really? Because this thing hadn’t been oiled in years until I got to it, far as I could tell. And I grew up on an orchard. I’ve been using chainsaws since middle school.” He gave me a look that could only be described as smugly innocent. “If you want, I could teach you .”

He was worse than a know-it-all. He was a know-it-all who actually knew it all. I was suddenly filled with the childish urge to throw him into a snowbank.

“No, thank you,” I said primly. “You can hand it over right now. This is my chainsaw and my property, and I can figure it out just fine on my own.”

Porter shook his head and sighed. “Can’t teach a man who refuses to be taught,” he mocked, throwing my own words back at me.

Infuriating .

But I refused to back down, and he finally gave up the chainsaw with an eye roll. “I’ll get a handsaw from the shed, then.”

I opened my mouth to argue, and he lifted an eyebrow in challenge. “Or did you want me to stay here in this cabin with you forever and ever, amen, Theo ?”

I refused to speak the retort that came unbidden to my brain. Only if I can gag you.

And suddenly, I could imagine it. Porter trussed up in my bed, gagged and pliant.

Telling me, as he had the night before, that he’d do anything I wanted, if I only told him what that was.

Those teasing green eyes would still dance and challenge me even if his sassy mouth had to stay busy with other things, and…

“Christ,” I muttered in disgust, turning away so I could trudge to the tool shed for a handsaw. “One of us won’t make it through this day alive.”

When I returned with the handsaw, he was standing with his feet braced and his arms crossed.

“Theo,” he said slowly, like the word was still unfamiliar and he was testing it out.

“Yes?” I snapped, turned on despite myself.

“I have a wager for you. If, after an hour, I’ve removed more of this tree with the handsaw than you have with the chainsaw, will you admit that I know what I’m doing and let me use the chainsaw to finish getting the branches off?”

We both knew my chainsaw was never going to cut into the tree itself.

The trunk circumference was way too large for the size chainsaw I had.

Until we could get professional help up here, the tree wasn’t moving.

But if we could strip all the branches off and make it easier to access, the pros would be able to make a much quicker job of it.

“What do I get when I win?” I asked. Clearly, the man with the chainsaw would win. It was a no-brainer.

“I’ll cook you dinner.”

I shook my head. “Sorry, already put stew fixings in the Crock-Pot.”

“I’ll do the dishes.”

“Already did that, too.”

He exhaled a white cloud into the cold air. “Fine. What do you suggest? It hardly matters since I’m going to school you with this thing.” He waved the handsaw in the air.

I thought about it for a long moment. What did I want from Porter Sunday? Lots of things, most of them highly inadvisable .

“If I win, I want you to let me critique the last essay you did for Professor Burton’s class,” I blurted, surprising myself as much as him.

Porter’s lips thinned. “Um, no . I’m doing just fine in Burton’s class, thanks, so I don’t need your… help. And letting you point out all the ways I’m lacking isn’t my idea of a good time.”

“You’re doing fine in Professor Burton’s class because this is literally his last semester as a professor, and he’s been half-checked-out since August,” I retorted.

This was mostly an educated guess based on Jim Burton’s behavior in other areas. I’d certainly never done anything as unprofessional as asking him to show me Porter’s work. But judging by Porter’s frown, my guess wasn’t far off the mark… or else he’d been wondering the same thing.

“I would like to explain to you what I wanted to explain last semester. I want you to listen to me now the way you didn’t listen then. Those are my terms. That’s the prize I want.”

“Fine,” he gritted out. “It doesn’t really matter because I’m not losing. We start now.”

We spent the next hour busting our asses, trying to one-up each other as if I wasn’t older and more sedentary and he wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous with a muscular fit body and a really compelling facility with… ahem, tools .

About half an hour into our challenge, he’d worked up enough heat to strip off his borrowed jacket and push up the sleeves on the hoodie I’d lent him…

which was short enough to remind me he was wearing sweatpants with no underwear.

I would have called him out for trying to deliberately distract me, but I didn’t think he was doing anything deliberately. The man was just sex on legs.

If I hadn’t been so determined to win, I might have given up and just sat to watch him. But I wanted my do-over, damn it .

When my chainsaw finally sputtered and died, we were neck and neck—which felt like a win, even though Porter had been doing the job by hand while I had not. I spun toward the shed for more gas, and Porter began laughing.

“Good luck finding gas. The container in there is empty. How do you think I knew for sure I could win?”

I didn’t bother responding, only hid my grin as I went past the shed to the thirty-gallon fuel tank tucked safely away from the buildings. After filling the chainsaw’s tank up, I returned and winked at Porter.

“Never assume, Mr. Sunday. It makes an ass out of you and me.”