Chapter Seven
Dean
“That doesn’t sound foolish at all...”
Dean heard the sound of his own voice above the charming café’s inevitable din of clinking silver and clattering plates: quiet, cautious, tentative. Sully looked almost ... hopeful?
“No?” he asked, his overstuffed cowboy confidence faltering for the first time since they’d met.
“No, Sully,” Dean insisted, heart fluttering at the intimacy of the unfolding tale and in no rush to interrupt it. “I think it sounds ... romantic.”
Sully blushed. He’d foregone his ball cap for their, uh ... whatever this was. Now, unbridled, feathery brown curls framed his lean face, the perfect complement to the faded blue denim dress shirt he’d worn to dinner. “Grady must have, too.”
“Grady?”
Sully blushed a deeper shade of crimson.
“That, that was his name. Grady. He was a bit older than me, new to the area, he’d just moved up the road aways to Carson City a few months earlier.
Got the job with the liquor company and figured he’d give me a shot since I’d never bought from them before.
I told him I was glad he did and, well, after that .
.. we kind of stopped talking about work. ”
Dean smiled hesitantly. “What’d you talk about instead?” he prodded, eager to unfold Sully’s hard, taut exterior to find the soft spots underneath.
Sully smiled, dimples in his richly suntanned face.
“Trying to remember,” he mused, getting that faraway look in his eyes.
The same one he’d had when he’d glanced over Dean’s shoulder to peer at the cash register in the lobby.
“Can’t remember a single thing. It was one of those kinds of, uh, dates, you know? ”
Dean shook his head ruefully. “No, Sully, I don’t.”
“No?”
Dean glanced back, eyes unblinking and chin unbowed. “I’ve never had the privilege before.”
Sully fiddled with his place setting, big, oversized fork shifting back and forth across a wild west map of Clay County beneath it. “You mean, with another guy? Or with a girl?”
“With either,” Dean said diplomatically, though there was hardly any need at this point.
After all, here was Sully—big, bad, macho, sexy, studly, hard as nails and tough as dirt Sully—gushing over his date with another man.
A bro. A dude. Dean could hardly deny his growing attraction any longer.
“And before you say it, it wouldn’t have happened in high school no matter how long I’d stayed. ”
“But college? Freshman year? Dorm buddy? Study buddy? Tutor? Naughty professor? Random hookup at some frat party?”
Dean just cocked his head. “Me? At a frat party? Or batting my eyes at some professor, no matter how naughty? Get real.”
Sully quietly nodded, but for once had no quick retort.
“I mean, we can’t all be you,” Dean nudged, hoping to get a rise out of the suddenly sullen cowpoke sitting across from him, all elbows and knees, long and rangy like a winding road Dean couldn’t even imagine being able to explore.
“What?” Sully clucked at last. “Going out on some hairbrained, cockamamie date once a year? Spending most of my days with hillbillies and farmers, cowgirls and cow pokes, talking about the weather and, oh, yeah, just for a change up, more weather?”
“What a waste,” Dean blurted without thinking of it, only to rethink the minute he saw the quiet scowl creep across Sully’s pretty face.
“Yeah, well,” Sully pretended to snarl, wagging his water glass mock menacingly. “We can’t all live fascinating, academic, college boy lives like you, City Slicker.”
Dean rolled his eyes at the hyperbole. “I meant,” he said, swallowing hard before just going for it. “What a waste to keep a guy like you under wraps, Sully.”
Sully did his little head cock thing, twice as cute without the ball cap shading his teasing expression, more clues to read across his expressive, chiseled face. “Is that ... was that ... a compliment?”
“Shut it,” Dean was barking as the waitress arrived, bearing a tray laded with the sampler they’d ordered, plus steaming biscuits and a sidecar of spiced pear jam to spread atop them.
“Everything in order?” Calamity asked, little hands on her tiny waist, chipped nails tapping the frayed ruffles of her old-timey waitress apron.
“Looks great!” They both said at the same time, making her giggle. And not just for show, Dean thought, as she sauntered away, twice as much wriggle in her jiggle as the last time she’d left their table.
They stared at the bounty in front of them, rustic creations aplenty, from fried okra and green beans to bacon wrapped smokey links to honey mustard short ribs. “I hope you’re hungry,” Sully teased, already slathering thick, spicy fig jam on a still steaming biscuit.
“Not this hungry,” Dean muttered, taking one of each item onto his appetizer plate just to be polite. “I mean thanks for ordering, just don’t be offended if I can’t finish my half?”
“Sorry,” Sully muttered, doing the same. “I eat when I get nervous.”
Dean had a rib halfway to his lips, pausing to regard his dining companion—long and lean and limber and casual and sexy as all get out. “This? Is you? Nervous?”
“I mean, yeah?” Sully bit off a wedge of his biscuit, beaming at the sweet and savory combination as it apparently melted on his sexy little tongue.
Dean nibbled on his rib, fall-off-the-bone tender and vaguely spicy with a dry mustard rub under a tangy honey glaze. “The fuck for?” he spat, patting his grateful lips with a checkerboard napkin he’d had spread across his lap.
Sully chuckled, a little biscuit crumb on his lower lip until he licked it off self-consciously. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“No, it’s not, Sully. At least it isn’t to me, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked?”
Sully nodded, patting rib sauce from his lips as he glanced around the crowded diner. “My last date didn’t work out so well...”
“Date?”
“You know what I mean,” Sully hemmed with a slight blush, matching Dean’s expression to a “T.”
“Speaking of,” Dean pressed, seizing his opportunity to hear the story’s end at last. “You were saying? About your date that wasn’t quite a date?”
“Was I?” Sully teased. All the same, he snatched a fried green bean from the platter between them and nibbled it contentedly. “Anyway, Grady and I drank and ate, kind of like we are now. Casual, chill, friendly enough...”
Dean waited for Sully to complete the thought and, when he didn’t, nudged once more. “Friendly enough to talk about...?”
Sully nodded, swallowing the last of a chunk of fried okra. “Drinks, at first. My job, his job and then, after a slight pause where maybe I had made it clear I didn’t want to talk shop, he talked about ... his family.”
“Family?” Dean sat up straight. Sully noticed with a wry, sheepish grin.
“Relax, Columbo,” he chuckled, big hands up as if to ward off Dean’s irrational defensiveness. “His kids.”
“Okay, but still.”
“He was divorced,” Sully explained. “Almost a year before we met. Hence the change of area code, new bachelor pad and entry level career in a brand new town.”
“And a brand new boyfriend?” Dean hedged, struggling to keep the first hint of jealousy out of his tone.
“Not hardly,” Sully harumphed. “Once he got to talking about his kids, it’s all he talked about.
Except his ex, who he talked about even more.
The ex who’d cheated on him. Why? Because she’d found out he swung both ways and, well, a good Christian girl like her wasn’t quite ‘up to that emotional challenge,’ as he put it. ”
“But she was up to cheating?”
Sully clucked his tongue and glanced away. “Trust me, after an hour with Grady? I didn’t blame her.”
Dean snorted, surprised by the comment and, if he was being honest with himself, relieved. The thought of Sully with another man had him suddenly, irrationally jealous. “How do you mean?”
“Listen,” Sully sighed, sitting back in his booth.
“I was flattered, really. He was clearly hot to trot. Said he’d had false starts with other guys but always chickened out at the last minute because, well, married man.
Two kids. He kept getting cold feet. He figured an old country boy like me might be just the ticket to, uh, break him in, per se? ”
“And?” Dean had folded his arms over his chest, like a grumpy father interrogating his virgin daughter after getting home late on prom night. “Did you? Did he?”
“No, Dean, I didn’t. He didn’t. We ate dinner, laughed, talked, and left together.
He had parked a little away from the diner, and I had parked a lot away.
There’s a little side street around the corner.
Not a lot of light, lots and lots of trees for cover, you know?
Just in case. He followed me there. We stood by my truck for a long time.
It wasn’t unpleasant, it just wasn’t ... sexy.”
Dean had to disagree, at least mentally.
He was squirming in his seat, hot under the collar just thinking about leaning against the side of a truck peering up into Sully’s deep, rich brown eyes as the dark, velvet night surrounded them, inviting them to inch closer with every sliver of moonlight and rustle from the overhanging branches. “You sure?”
“Certain. And when we finally kissed? It was ... stiff. Awkward. Wrong. I broke it off, probably hurt his feelings but, in the end, it was clear he just wasn’t ready. For me, or any guy, for that matter.”
“Bummer,” Dean mused.
“For which one of us?”
“Both of you, I guess,” Dean mused quietly. “I feel like, as first times go, for someone in Grady’s position, you might have made a great one.”
“You think?”
“You don’t?”
Sully smiled. “Sure I do, but timing is everything, you know? It just wasn’t Grady’s time yet.”
Dean nodded, silently recalling his own almost first time in much the same bittersweet way Sully was glancing out the window beside them, as if Grady might show up at any minute, ready for a romantic do-over. “And now?” Dean asked, already stuffed and they hadn’t even ordered dinner yet.
“What now?” Sully asked, pushing his plate away. “This is now. You’re now. We’re now. That’s all I’ve got.”
Dean hoped he wasn’t blushing, even as he felt the heat rise to his cheeks just the same. “We?” he asked, nailing the central hypothesis of Sully’s reply.
Sully winked, then steadily met Dean’s curious gaze. “I was hoping you didn’t hear that part, City Slicker.”