PICK ME
SUNDAY BROTHERS #1
PICK ME
The job at Sunday Orchard was supposed to be temporary.
A chance to gain some work experience. To have some fun. To get away from my overprotective brothers. To maybe, possibly encounter some lumberjacks in their natural habitat before moving on to the dream career that awaited me in the city.
I had not expected to be welcomed into a family of gorgeous and weirdly efficient lumberjack-types myself. Or to find a purpose in the tiny Vermont town whose claim to fame seemed to be apple-based products and copious amounts of charm.
And I most definitely hadn’t expected to fall for Knox Sunday, my grumpy, burly, fifteen-years-older, reluctant roommate, with his infuriating lectures, his hot-as-fire body, his superior attitude, his snarky humor, and his stealth cuddles.
Now I find myself making excuses to delay my big dreams… just for a little while.
But Knox has unfulfilled dreams of his own. A career he walked away from. A big city life in Boston he left behind when hereturned to his hometown to help his family. He claims he’s not looking for anything permanent, and I’ve never been one to put down roots.
My big life is waiting for me somewhere other than Little Pippin Hollow. So why does it feel like I’ve finally found the home of my heart?
And how can I get Knox Sunday to… 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 affairs 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 Iplanned 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.
