Page 5 of Bone to Pick
With that dire warning, I left him just long enough to retrieve a spare toothbrush and toothpaste from the bathroom cabinet. When I returned, he was bent over on the counter by the sink with his eyes closed, resting his face on his bent arms. I tried not to notice the muscular ass on display in his wash-worn jeans.
Eyes up here, Professor.
I blinked into the bright kitchen light to punish my eyeballs for straying. Only the creepiest of teachers got visible hard-ons for their students. Especially students they weren’t even sure they liked much on a personal level.
I cleared my throat and nudged his cheek with the toothbrush package. “Here. Clean your teeth, and then I’ll drive you home myself.” I retreated to the living area, trying to put as much physical distance between myself and that ass—I mean, thatman—as I possibly could in a twenty-by-twenty-foot space.
After taking three scream-inducing minutes to get the brush unwrapped, another four to puzzle out how to apply toothpaste to it, and ten full minutes brushing every surface of his teeth at least twice, Porter finally turned to me.
“I’m done,” he said dully. “My head hurts. Can I have a glass of water? Please?”
Impatient as I was, I couldn’t say no when he tacked that polite littlepleaseon the end.
“Yeah. Of course. There’s a glass on that shelf,” I said, pointing. But then I recalled all the very good reasons I had to be annoyed and scowled as I added, “You have precisely one minute to hydrate while I get my parka out of the closet, then you can wait by the door.”
Unsurprisingly, Sunday ignored my firm command. He was not waiting by the door when I’d unearthed my heavy winter coat a few minutes later. Instead, he’d collapsed into my reading chair by the roaring fireplace and propped his big feet on my footstool, looking entirely too comfortable in my space.
I folded my arms over my chest. “Is now a convenient time for me to drive you home, Mr. Sunday?” I asked. “I’dhateto rush you.”
“You shouldn’t be nice,” my uninvited guest informed me. “It’s confusing.”
“Iwasn’tbeing nice. I was being sarcastic—”
He rolled his eyes tiredly. “I’m not talking about what you said. I meant, like… bringing me inside. And lending me a toothbrush. And giving me a ride home.” He squirmed, unable to meet my eyes. “You were a grumpy, life-destroying jerk all last semester for no reason. Now, when you actually have a reason to be mean, you’renot. It’s weird. And wrong.”
I opened my mouth to inform him of all the wayshewas wrong in that little diatribe—not to mention insulting and impertinent—but then I remembered that despite having the body of a fully grown person, Porter Sunday was still a Hannabury student. Adrunkstudent. Whereas I was not only a sober thirty-four-year-old, but I was a Hannabury professor. One of us needed to show a little sense tonight, and it was clearly not going to be him.
Professional distance, I told myself.Do not engage.
As if in agreement with my thoughts, the wind picked up, pushing icy snowflakes against the window. It was an audible reminder that I had a limited window to get my interloper safely away from here before the situation got worse.
Which was why I was mystified to find myself propping my hands on my hips and smartly retorting, “Excuse me if I refuse to take criticism from a man who drives aroundhurlingpoetry at people in the middle of the night, without so much as awinter coaton him, when a fuckingsnowstormis coming.”
So much for not engaging.I shut my eyes and blew out a breath.
“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 atprofessional 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’sFriday.” He shifted his huge frame lower in the chair cushions, and his eyes drifted closed.
Oh, no. Nope.
“Yes.Friday. Which istoday,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 jacketandmy 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 willneverspeak 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,plusthis much snow,plusthe student I’d spent way too much time tryingnotto think about last semesterlanding on my doorstep all at once? Infinitesimal. Microscopic. So statistically improbable that it didn’t bear consideration.
