Page 12 of Bone to Pick
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…anythingfrom 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.
ChapterFour
THEO
I hadn’t known Porter Sunday could be skittish.
I’d seen him being a sexy, overconfident, know-it-all student too many times to count last semester. I’d seen him being a gregarious, good-natured goof with his friends around campus. As of last night, I’d even seen him being an amusingly obnoxious sonnet-screamer. More than once in the months I’d known him, I’d wished that the man would sit still and just fuckinglisten to me.
But now that Porter was sitting silent and subdued at my tiny wooden kitchen table, nearly curled in on himself, I wasn’t sure this was what I’d wanted after all.
In fact, I knew it wasn’t.
I set a plate of scrambled eggs and toast in front of him before taking my own seat on the opposite side of the table. “Eat,” I instructed.
He picked up his fork and began shoveling hot eggs into his mouth pell-mell, like he was on the clock. I frowned at him, trying to figure out what had changed with him in the last five minutes… and whether I should try to address it or not.
