Page 1 of Pick Me
Chapter One
Gage
After two weeks, I was beginning to think moving to Vermont had been a miscalculation. I blamed the lumberjacks.
I’d decided to leave Whispering Key on the spur of the moment for the same reason most small-town guys probably left home. First, because my town was rich in pretty vistas and quirky people, but a wasteland for new jobs… and new men. Second, because Florida island vibes were overrated IMO, and I craved the structure and bustle of a city. And third (but most importantly), because my extended family had been driving me utterly batshit—by which I meant even more batshit than the usual low-level batshit—since I’d graduated from college and moved home for the summer.
“Seeing anyone, Gageling? Because a friend of a friend just became single and… wait, how do you feel about guys who sob quietly during sex? Is that a deal breaker?”
“Why not consider grad school, Gager? Programming phone apps sounds boring as fuck. Not too late to trade computer shit for something more interesting.”
“You know, precious, you should have just continued backpacking around Europe all summer instead of limiting yourself to a couple weeks! After all, you’re what the kids call a ‘cheddar baby.’ You know, young and wealthy? The opposite of a sugar daddy? It absolutelyisa real thing, look it up!”
“You know, Gage, my boy, what you need is some time on the open seas to really find yourself. Your mother and I named you for a treasure hunter, after all…”
I figured this extra batshittery was because both of my older brothersandmy cousinandmy dad had all gotten happily paired off within the last year or two. Evidence suggested that people in relationships couldn’t resist poking their noses into the lives of perfectly content single folks like me, and I hypothesized that this was due to the lack of sexual variety making their lives so epically boring.
So when I’d gotten a random LinkedIn request from a family-owned orchard in a tiny town in Vermont—less than an hour from the capital city of Montpelier! Two-ish hours from scenic, gay-friendly Boston! A mere three and a bit hours from New York! But a solidsevenhours from Whispering Key, even if you used the fastest combination of commercial flights and rental cars—I hadn’t let the rural location put me off.
My potential new boss—a chill dude named Webb—said Sunday Orchard needed their systems updated, optimized, and automated via a custom app that would allow him and his brothers to control everything. It’d be a monthlong project, he figured. Maybe two? But since I’d need to be on-site in Vermont to handle things, they’d be happy to pay my room and board locally for as long as it took,pluspay me a monthly salary that was really fair for a recent grad whose only job experience—besides unpaid work with my professors—was working on my dad’s tour boat.
I’d been sorely tempted.
I didn’t need the money, per se, but I sure as heck needed the experience and the reference Webb Sunday would provide. Not to mention, Vermont was light-years closer to the cities where I planned to end up than Florida was. And, when Webb described the town of Little Pippin Hollow—the closest town to Sunday Orchard—he’d made it sound like something out of the fairy-tale TV movies my mom used to watch: sweet and simple, culturally diverse and friendly.
So I’d dragged up their ancient, shittastic website—a relic that had clearly been designed during the days of the dial-up modem—to get a feel for the place. There’d been all sorts of shit about heirloom varietals, and sustainable practices, and farm-to-table. There’d been pictures of apples and picturesque barn-type structures. And then there’d been a picture dated five years before of the whole Sunday family and their “crew” standing in the orchard under a bright blue sky.
And that had been that. I’d agreed to take the job that day with no additional questions asked.
What? I was a sucker for trees, okay?
Ugh, fine.Fine. I was actually a sucker for tall, dark-haired muscle bears, and at least five men in that picture fit that description, complete with jeans that had been lovingly painted over their thick,thickthighs, plaid, flannel shirts rolled up to their elbows, and grins peeking out from behind dark beards.
I don’t know how my fascination with lumberjacks began. I mean, it started with porn, obviously, since lumberjacks aren’t exactly thick on the ground in beachy Florida. But whatever specific porn I’d stumbled across had long since faded from my memory bank, and in its place was a very broad-ranging love of all things lumberjack. I could not stop this obsession, I could not subdue it, and I didn’t bother trying. Beards were my kryptonite. Flannel was my siren song. If the Sundays had been wearing knit hats in the photo, I probably would have come on the spot.
As it was, they’d been hatless, so I’d waited until that night before I’d jerked off to the mental image of one of the guys in the picture, the Sunday brother who stared at the camera—atme—with a quirk to his brow and a happy-go-lucky smile on his face, like he was laughing at a joke no one else could hear.
I figured, as vices went, my lumberjack obsession could have been way worse. I mean, I could have been free-jumping off buildings, or huffing glue, or sending weekly Instagram DMs to Zac Efron and sobbing when he wouldn’t follow me back, like my freshman roommate Nick.
So, if fate was offering me the chance to live in the Land of Lumbersexuals, to bring them home to the quaint bed-and-breakfast accommodations I’d envisioned and lick maple syrup off their solid bodies before they went out and slaughtered trees, where was the harm?
I’d signed my contract with Webb Sunday, invested in a wool sweater that my almost-but-not-officially brother-in-law Toby solemnly swore made my dull brown eyes lookamber, and headed north with a kind of desperate optimism, figuring I’d known all I needed to know.
Spoiler: I hadn’t.
For example, I hadn’t known that, beginning in September, all the roads around Little Pippin Hollow, which called itself “small in size but big in charm” on its town website, would be absolutelycloggedwith tourists. I’d later heard Webb’s best friend, Jack, refer to this scourge as the “damn flatlander leaf peepers,” and after watching them pull intoevery. single. one.of the scenic overlooks on the way to Sunday Orchard, making me arrive ninety minutes late for supper and so hungry and tired I could cry, I understood the sentiment.
I hadn’t known that the orchard, a place that grewapples, would also inexplicably have cows—loud, menacing, territorial, possibly violent cows—loitering like a group of thugs near the orchard’s pea gravel parking area so they could taunt me with their bellows and rolling eyes as I exited my Prius.
I had for sure not known that Webb’s offer of “room and board” would mean eating all my meals with the Sundays in their farmhouse kitchen andsharinga convertedapartment over the orchard’s barn turned gift shop—an apartment whose cutesy sliding barn doors offered zero privacy for lumberjack shenanigans, even if a guy could find an amenable lumberjack, which I hadn’t.
I hadn’t known Sunday Orchard’s systems would be quite so firmly entrenched in the Dark Ages, or that when Webb had said he wanted to automate “things,” he meant literallyall the things, from irrigation, pruning, and fertilization schedules, to tracking retail prices for apples, to the processes in his Uncle Drew’s cider press, to time and personnel management for the farm stand and the jam kitchen, all of which would take until Christmas, minimum.
But the widest and most glaring gap in my knowledge? The gravest miscalculation? My biggest rag-ret?
I had not counted on Knox Sunday.
“Are you even listening, Goodman?” the man demanded. “Blink twice if you’re aware of my presence.”
