Chapter Five
Dean
“You sure about this?”
Dean stood in the middle of the small, cramped room, skin flushed with heat from the brisk trek up the stairs to the second floor and the room’s stilted, dead air.
Sully must have felt it, too, crossing the room easily on those long, cowboy legs of his and quickly hoisting up the three long, narrow windows that looked down over Lonely Street.
“Sure,” he insisted, grunting as the third window begrudgingly slid up.
“I mean, it’s just going to waste over here and, well. ..”
He seemed shy, suddenly, here in the intimate setting and, perhaps, away from the familiar audience of regulars back at Pappy’s Pub.
“What?” he asked, fiddling with his ball cap and revealing a smattering of sweaty brown curls hiding beneath until he straightened it once more. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“No reason,” Dean lied, leaning gently against a pile of cardboard boxes that hid what looked to be a small kitchenette behind them. “It’s just, when we first met, you seemed all crusty and local, growling and grunting but, here you are, letting me stay in your spare room for free.”
“It’s not free,” Sully growled, more playfully than he had back in the bar. “Remember?”
Dean glanced around the crowded room, boxes stacked hither and yon as far as the eye could see.
“I mean, it should be,” he harumphed, feeling a smidge playful himself.
After all, he’d expected the proprietor of Grayson’s Ghost Tours to be an eccentric old kook, wiping his Coke bottle glasses with a confederate handkerchief or some appalling shit.
To find that he was the spitting image of some cowboy romance novel cover model, boots, ball cap, cheekbones and all, had him feeling downright giddy.
Sully snorted and blushed and clapped his hands together, a smattering of dust from the windows he’d just thrown open fanning out in front of him like dull, grey glitter.
“Probably, yeah, but...” He reached for the closest box, snatching it up with ease as the sinews in his biceps danced like ripples across his long, wiry arms. “After this you can buy me dinner and we’ll call it even? ”
Dean nodded uncertainly, dry-mouthed and trembling with fear.
Dinner? With a hunk like Sully? The actual fuck were they going to talk about?
“Uh, sure,” he stammered, struggling with a box in Sully’s wake as they made short work of uncluttering the main living area by cluttering up a back bedroom instead.
When it was all said and done, when the boxes had been moved and the coffee table straightened, with the windows open and Sully behind him, rooting around in a small but still-humming fridge, Dean sank onto the stiff, dusty couch and blinked the sweat from his eyes.
Sully turned, pausing as he rounded the corner from the small kitchenette. “Dang, bub,” he chuckled, continuing his progress until he sank onto the couch cushion beside him. “You’re gonna need a shower and a change of clothes if you’re gonna look presentable at the Wagon Wheel later.”
“The what now?”
Sully handed over a bottle of water, disappointing Dean to no end. Sure, Lucky Suds wasn’t exactly French champagne, but in the company of Sully, he’d grown used to enjoying the soft, dull, low key sensual thrill of a midday beer buzz and some major league eye candy.
“The Wagon Wheel,” Sully said casually, draping one long, casual arm over the top of the couch as if he owned it or something.
“It’s a cozy diner just outside of town.
You know, the kind of place that won’t raise a ruckus if they see me breaking bread with another fella, especially a little brainiac like you. ”
Dean turned ever so slightly on the creaky old couch, kicking up dust bunnies aplenty as he peered more closely at Sully.
While Dean was an absolute mess, dripping sweat and still panting from, say, twenty minutes of actual physical labor, Sully had blossomed under the brief exercise—glowing and radiant, shimmering sweat stains under the arm pits of his faded Pappy’s Pub t-shirt and his flat belly almost concave as he sat casually next to him on the couch. “Breaking? Bread?”
Sully frowned. “I’m beginning to think you don’t actually speak English, City Slicker!”
“I do,” Dean insisted, blushing under Sully’s close proximity and the intense physical heat wafting off of his washboard body. “I just, I’m not sure the folks in Pistol Creek do?”
“Sure we do,” Sully teased, turning gently to face him as the couch gently creaked beneath his weight.
“A ‘City Slicker’ equals some clean looking do-gooder who doesn’t know enough to book a hotel room before driving three hours to beg for a ghost tour during the slowest part of the year.
A ‘brainiac’ is someone who uses five dollar words to tell me what I already know. And ‘breaking bread’ is...”
“Yeah, yeah, eating dinner, I know, it’s just ... tonight?”
Sully took a swig of bottled water and made it look as sexy as a hot girl in a 70s porno movie sucking on a popsicle. “Sure, you got other plans?” He glanced around the recently cleared out living room with a confident grin.
“No, it’s just... Don’t you have to work the bar?” As if to remind him of his professional responsibilities, Dean nodded out the open window beside him, admiring the bucolic brick building downstairs and the winking neon beer signs in its windows.
Sully shrugged his broad shoulders. “Jessy Mae comes on at 4:00, and she can handle the happy hour crowd until we get back.”
“We?”
“Sure, I mean, what kind of a host would I be if I didn’t see you home after our dinner?”
Dean shook his head. “I can just pay you money, you know?”
Sully scoffed. “Where’s the fun in that?”
Dean frowned. “Have you met me?” he asked, head still reeling from Sully’s spontaneously sexy proposition, to say nothing of his solid weight one couch cushion over. “In case you can’t already tell, I’m about the opposite of fun.”
Sully sighed, glancing down at his knees.
“Kid, lemme tell you, those guys back in the bar? Big Red? Tiny? Phil? I spend more time than I’d care to admit with them, and guys just like them.
This whole town? Is full of guys like them.
The ladies, too. Even the pretty young ones, talk and act and spit and chew and guffaw and snort and belch like those three.
So for you to stroll into my bar today, asking me for a ghost tour off season, and staying up here in my storage pad, plumb out of nowhere?
Well, let’s just say, you could fall asleep and still be more fun than my regular routine, okay? ”
Dean nodded quietly. “I know we’re different,” he confessed, meeting Sully’s rich green eyes. “In probably mostly every single way we’re different. But I can’t help but notice that your days? Sound a lot like my days.”
Sully looked more than surprised. “Yeah?”
“Boring,” Dean expanded. “Routine. Dull. The guys in the Study Lab may not wear overalls or chew tobacco, but they don’t have a lot to offer in the way of excitement, you know?”
“So what’s the big deal then?” Sully grumbled, shifting slightly so that he had turned to face Dean just a little more, his knee gently creeping across the middle couch cushion between them. “You, me, a little chow, some chit-chat, no big deal.”
“I just...” Dean tugged at the collar of his t-shirt, as if it had suddenly grown two sizes too small. “I’ve never been out with a guy before.”
Sully did that sexy little head cock thing again, shadows from the midday sun behind them caressing his lean, chiseled, manly face.
“Probably because you skipped most of high school,” he cautioned him.
Again. “You know, hanging out with your bro after football practice, sharing a shift meal with your coworker at your after-school job. Wiling away the hours in detention. It probably stunted you in some way.”
Dean made a playful little raspberry sound with his rippling lips. “Hate to break it to you, Sully, but even if I’d spent six years in high school, repeated senior year three times, I still... All that stuff still wouldn’t have happened for me.”
“Why?” Sully pressed, in that probing way of his.
He might have looked like the Marlboro Man with his faded jeans and jaunty ball cap, his big belt buckle and taut, sinewy body, but his eyes were soft and kind, his words quiet and probing, his patience curious and genuine.
It was oddly flattering and disconcerting at the same time.
“I’m just not ... great with people?”
“I’m people,” Sully insisted, as if unwilling to let Dean off the hook so easily. “And you’re not that bad.”
Dean snorted. “Trust me, I’m just not like other guys you probably ‘break bread’ with.”
“Good!” Sully leaned forward, slapping Dean on the knee in a macho “good old boy” gesture before standing abruptly.
Dean felt the ripple of energy radiate from where their flesh had connected, searing him in place as he sat, frozen, watching Sully stand before him, literally radiant in the late afternoon light filtering through the recently opened windows.
“I just told you I’m tired of being around people from here, kid.
So let me take you to dinner and get tired of being around someone new for a change! ”