Chapter Four
Sully
“A shame, that.”
Sully nudged his chin out at the kid sitting across from him. “Dean,” he said his name was, and Sully vaguely recalled it from the increasingly desperate flurry of messages he’d been receiving on the website lately.
“Not to me it wasn’t,” Dean huffed, puffing out his small, pigeon chest beneath the soft, featherweight t-shirt.
Sully was still struggling to reconcile his young patron’s age with his slight, lean, trim appearance.
Between the ball cap and the way Dean’s feet hovered just above the floor as he wriggled atop his barstool, he looked more like a freshman than some snooty graduate student.
Sully held his hands up in mock surrender, keenly aware of the way his new pal’s eyes darted from one to the other as if studying every callous and fingerprint one by one.
“Okay, okay, no need to fret,” he said, laying on the country boy act nice and thick in case that was something pretty little city boy Dean was into.
“I’m just saying, a lot can happen in those last two years of high school.
Proms, football games, parties, camaraderie with your friends and classmates, you know? ”
“You would say that,” Dean muttered, not quite under his breath.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Look at you,” Dean blurted. “Of course a guy like you is gonna be Big Man on Campus, a girl on each arm, a jersey for every sport, his dance card full at every event.”
Sully frowned, glancing down at his own beer bottle and the gently peeled Lucky Suds label in his own fingers.
Between his father’s health problems and the upkeep on his family’s various properties in town, Sully had grown up fast. Too fast for anything as frivolous as sports teams or fancy uniforms or being able to take some girl out on a fancy date.
“You think so, huh?” he asked, quieter than before, as if suddenly worried what Big Red, Tiny, and Phil might think as they chatted and frittered away another quiet, lazy day at Pappy’s.
“I know so,” Dean insisted. Sully just frowned and shook his head.
Another time, he told himself. He’d tell him another time, about the missed school days, the summer school, the barely graduating, the dances he’d missed because the roof over the drugstore needed fixing or the compressor in the beer cooler went to shit at the last minute.
Sully shook the thoughts away, fixing on a customer service grin and peering back at Dean curiously. “Anyway, we’re getting sidetracked here.”
Dean looked surprised, then sounded even more so. “We are? I thought we were having a good time!”
Sully chuckled at Dean’s wide-eyed enthusiasm. “You might be,” he snorted, nodding at the kid’s half-empty beer. “Day drinking and such. But one of us is still working, you hear?”
“This? Is working?”
“Like I say,” Sully muttered over the lip of his beer, drinking in his sexy companion far more eagerly than another cheap bottle of suds. “What did you want a ghost tour for? In spring? While I’m working?”
Dean bit his lower lip and glanced up at the beer sign above their quiet, cozy little table for two.
“I’m doing my spring project on Gravel Gulch,” he insisted, face growing more serious, even studious, with every new syllable.
“Or, more specifically, the mob mentality that comes from urban legends once seeped in the familiar locale of a gentrified society.”
Sully literally held onto his hat about halfway through that little mouthful. “The hell you say?”
Dean batted his eyelids, as if suddenly coming out of a trance. A quiet blush rose to his pale, hollow cheeks, making his soft brown eyes twinkle. “Sorry. Too much?”
“Not if you’re a rocket scientist, I guess,” Sully teased, hooking a thumb at the three pals hunkered down at his bar. “But go easy on me, okay? I’m used to talking to those guys, not ... not ... brainiacs.”
“It’s not as complicated as it sounds,” Dean insisted. “I’ve done all the parenthetical research, gathered the statistics from other urban legends in Clay County, now I just need some photos, measurements and other physical data to round out my report, that’s all.”
“Your report about what?”
“About ... why people believe things emotionally they know to be unlikely rationally.”
Sully nodded. Finally, the kid had toned down his academic talk for some words he could actually understand. “So basically, you came all the way down to Pistol Creek to call bullshit on one of our local landmarks?”
Dean nearly snorted out his latest sip of beer. “I mean, not exactly. I believe the genesis of the town’s origin story, but am more interested in how the townsfolk who fled in its aftermath, good, hardworking, honest people, fell victim to mass hysteria over their own usual, good sense.”
Sully glanced around the empty bar, the quiet moments ticking away like they did every other day.
He hadn’t been expecting a sexy stranger to saunter into his bar that day, all slight and aloof, boyish and shy, so rare and exotic in this neck of the woods he might as well have had a sign hanging around his neck that read, “Shy, Awkward Virgin.” And he sure as hell hadn’t been expecting to give a personal ghost tour to someone as tempting and delicious as pretty little Dean.
Then again, what the hell else did he have going on?
“Where are you staying?” Sully grunted after a long, meandering pause.
Dean blinked twice, then twice more, before straightening. “You mean, you’ll do it?”
“I’ll think about doing it,” he insisted, lying through his teeth. “But you’ll need someplace to crash for the night in case I say ‘yes’.”
Dean straightened all the more, then sagged. “Oh, I hadn’t, hadn’t thought about that part.”
Sully cocked his head and flashed a surprised smile. “You hadn’t?”
Dean shook his pretty little head. “No, I...” His eyes searched the sprawling bar frantically, as if looking for an answer.
“It’s spring break. I’ve got nothing going on back at school, I really, really wanted to get an answer from you and figured, since you weren’t responding to my messages, why not drive down? ”
“And?” Sully nudged, the vaguest hint of anticipation making his big, thick, overflowing blue balls twitch with something he hadn’t felt in a mighty long time. Something raw and naked and hungry. Something very much like ... desire. “Then what?”
Dean hung his head. “I hadn’t quite thought that all the way through, I suppose.”
“You?” Sully chuckled. “Mr. Big Words. Mr. Righteous Indignation. Mr. Blow Up My Webform until my inbox was crammed plumb full? Didn’t think it all the way through?”
Dean shook his head. “I guess not,” he sighed. “I mean, I could drive home. But it’s three hours back to campus, then just to sleep and drive all the way back in the morning, for you to just say ‘maybe some other time’ and I’d have to drive all the way back and...”
“Come on, kid,” Sully growled, even as he stood from his creaky old barstool and slugged down the last of his lukewarm beer.
“What? Where?” Dean stood tentatively, a good five inches shorter and, judging by the way his preppy little cargo pants were about to slither off any minute, a good twenty to thirty pounds lighter, too.
“I’ve got a place over the hardware store, across the street.”
Dean had been following him, taking another tentative step away from where they’d been sitting, when he froze. Utterly. Completely. “I mean, I... We hardly know each other?”
Sully broke out laughing. “Not with me, Jesus, kid, you’re something else, you know that?”
Dean’s face literally lit up with relief. “Oh, well, but you said...”
“I own a place,” Sully reiterated, more clearly this time, enunciating as if he was speaking another language. “Over the hardware store. Across the street. Use it for storage, mostly, but it’s clean and neat and won’t cost you much.”
Dean froze again. Damn, Sully thought, reaching for his keys. At this rate, it’d be morning before he lured the sexy little fucker out the damn door, let alone across the whole ass street! “Much?”
Sully ignored him for the moment, turning to address the three men at the bar.
“Boys?” he announced with a playful grin.
“Duty calls. You know the drill. Peanuts are under the bar. Y’all can have one more beer each and if, in the unlikely event, some other random stranger stumbles through the door, you have him wait for me, hear? ”
The boys were too busy hootin’ and hollerin’, arguing over which one would actually stand his lazy ass up and get the next round, to notice the easy, almost protective, way Sully held the door open for Dean as he whispered through, the grateful grad student glancing up at the last minute with a most appreciative grin.
Thank heaven for small miracles, he thought to himself, nodding toward the almost hidden stairwell to the left side of Handy Dan’s Hardware across the street.