Page 10 of Bone to Pick
But, like, better and smoother than that, obviously. Possibly something in haiku form. Something eloquent enough to get him to push me into his bed and ravish me.
Instead, it seemed likely that I’d passed out and he’d been stuck dragging me into his bed since the snow had prevented him from sending me off in a cab.
Chalk up another failure for Porter Sunday.
But even as awkward and ashamed of that as I was, my fingers still itched to touch the guy. I wanted to smooth over the place where his brows had puckered. To brush back a strand of golden-brown hair that had gotten tangled in his eyelashes. To drink in this precious, fragile moment, thisprivilegeof seeing him up-close and vulnerable, since clearly I would not get this opportunity again.
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 yourmorning woodmere 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 ofraging 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,couldsnap. “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,Idiscovered 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 theonlyappropriate word. I’mnaked.” My voice had gone high, and the last word came out as a squeak. I knew my face was on fire.
