Chapter Nine
Dean
“Fine. Fuck it. That’s it, I’m going over there.”
He was still dressed from dinner. Hell, he’d never changed from his drive down from college.
Hadn’t even taken off his sneakers, pacing the floors of his borrowed living room for the last however many hours, restless and excited and scared and nervous and wired ever since the moment Sully had dropped him off at the curb and, true to his word, waited in the rumbling truck until Dean had stumbled upstairs and thrown on the kitchen light.
Then he’d heard the telltale roar of the old Ford engine, racing off into the night.
But a quick peek out the living room told Dean he hadn’t gone far, simply peeling around the block to park beside his bar, the winking neon Paddy’s Pub sign far more evocative at night than it had been during the day.
He’d even walked in through the front door, the neon glare gracing his handsome face until he disappeared from view.
Dean kept waiting for him to leave again.
Head back to his truck and maybe drive out into the country, where he probably lived in some log cabin surrounded by horses and cows and chickens and cornfields and tractors and whatnot, cutting wood shirtless every morning before cooking ham and eggs over a blazing fire in the front yard.
But he never did. Patrons did, each one a younger or older version of the three regulars Dean had met that day.
Lots of tractor company ball caps and blue jeans, cowboy boots and shiny buckles and big, wheezing trucks chugging away from what appeared to be the town’s most popular (perhaps only?) bar.
There were ladies, too. Of the flashy, showy, cowgirl variety—tight jeans and crop tops, wriggling hips and jangly boots and pigtails aplenty, stumbling out of the bar after one-too-many Lucky Suds and clamoring on the corner as their designated driver pulled around to carpool them home.
Eventually the block calmed down, Dean still pacing, the curtain still pulled back, waiting patiently as the cocktail waitresses left, one by one, boasting a uniform of short denim skirts and Paddy’s Pub tank tops, calling out muted goodbyes before drifting toward the parking lot and heading for home after another long night shift.
Dean thought that might be it. Then, a while later, another woman, older than the waitresses, a little tough looking, in jeans and a denim Pappy’s Pub collar shirt, walked out the front door, turning to lock it with a manager’s keen resolve.
She straightened up, lit a cigarette in the pale moonlight, took a long puff and then exhaled, walking briskly down the well-lit sidewalk to the parking lot behind the old, warehouse style brick building that housed Pappy’s.
Dean waited by the window, feet tired from pacing the floor of the tiny storage room, heart pounding despite having not been in Sully’s presence for too many long, quiet, lonely hours.
A solitary creature, Dean was used to his own company. In class, in the dorms, in the library, late at night or early morning, he’d never feared being alone nor had he longed, in particular, for the company of others. But suddenly he felt more than lonely.
He felt ... homesick.
Not for his crummy off-campus apartment back at State.
Not even for the family home back in North Carolina, where his single mom was a librarian, buried in books both at her work and at their cluttered, almost Hoarders-worthy home.
He was homesick for Sully, the first person—and clearly the first man—who’d ever looked beyond Dean’s bookish little eyes to the heart and soul beyond.
No wonder he was double-timing it down the stairs, face flushed from more physical effort than he’d expended in the last nine or ten years.
The sidewalk at the bottom of the steps was quiet, dark and desolate, making Dean feel like the last man on earth as he gently crept across the empty street, sneakers whispering on dark, quiet pavement.
The lights were still on in the Pub, despite the late hour and the lack of customers.
And yet, somehow, instinct drew him away from the front door and back, to the parking lot where so many of the Pappy’s employees had headed before driving stealthily away.
There, beyond clearly marked parking spaces, was a door marked “Deliveries Only”.
Dean walked straight to it, the sound of music faint but noticeable coming from just inside.
He knocked quickly, persistently, pale knuckles rapping against the scarred metal door.
Pressing his ear to it between frantic knocks, he heard grumbling, a curse or two and, eventually footsteps.
He straightened, lest he be seen eavesdropping, and stood as casually as possible for someone who’d just spent the last six hours stalking his favorite bar owner from an upstairs window across the street.
“The fuck?” Sully spat, looking beyond radiant in a fluffy lavender bath robe he’d barely had time to cinch at the waist. “Dean?”
“Hurry,” Dean grunted, slipping in the half-open door before he lost his nerve. “Before I chicken out!”
There was a clatter and a clang as the heavy back door swung shut behind him, Dean glancing past his scantily-clad host to find them standing in a small, clean kitchen.
“We said tomorrow,” Sully growled, even as he turned the lock on the door at their backs.
“It is tomorrow, silly,” Dean practically purred, having expected Sully’s argument and practiced his witty retort for half the long, lonely night. “Practically morning, sheesh.”
They stood face to face, Sully’s eyes roving over Dean in the dim light of a single bulb left on over a range oven. “You’re still dressed,” he noted.
“You’re not,” Dean teased.
Sully glanced down, subtly cinching his sash tighter as if only just now realizing what he was wearing. Then lower still, until he wriggled the toes in his fuzzy matching slippers. “I ... wasn’t expecting guests.”
“Clearly,” Dean snickered before shifting gently away, leaning against a stainless steel counter as if to hold himself up. “Is this how you always dress after a shift?”
Sully snorted, shaking his head and reaching in a nearby fridge for two Lucky Suds. “This is how I dress for sleep, kid.”
Dean took one of the beers. “So that makes this ... a nightcap?”
Sully rolled his eyes, leaning back against a butcher block table in the middle of the kitchen. “That makes this a really bad idea.”
Dean savored the crisp, cold beer on his hot, eager tongue. “I mean, it is spring break, right?”
“For you, maybe,” Sully huffed, quaffing a loud, eager swallow himself. “Some of us have to work for a living.”
Dean set the beer down beside him, nodding at Sully’s fluffy lavender robe and matching slippers. “This is you working?”
“This is me getting ready for bed.”
“At 3:00 in the morning?”
Sully shrugged. “Okay, yeah, I mean... I’ve been a little restless, okay?”
“So you decided to wander around your pub in a bathrobe?”
Sully finally snorted, shoulders visibly softening beneath the fuzzy terry cloth that covered them. “I live upstairs.”
“What? Here?”
Sully rolled his soft green eyes, the perfect complement to his rumpled brown curls. “Not here, here,” he harumphed, waving his hands around the small but tidy kitchen. “Upstairs, on the third floor.”
“What?” Dean clapped back. “Does anyone in your family have, like, a house? I mean, a house not attached to some store or pub or...”
Sully started to answer, then frowned, quietly nodding.
“Come to think of it, no,” he confessed.
“Not that there’s much of a family since Pappy passed, but the Graysons have always believed in sticking close to their investments.
Buy the building, use the bottom floor for a store or pub or whatnot, why let the upstairs go to waste? ”
“You could always rent out the rooms,” Dean suggested, as if they were at a business meeting and not still flirting the fuck out of each other in the middle of the dead ass night.
“Plenty times we do,” Sully insisted. “Like over the laundromat down the block, for instance. Or the dime store across the street from that.”
“Damn, cowboy,” Dean marveled, breath whistling across the top of his beer bottle. “What are you, some kind of low key, undercover, secret billionaire?”
“Hardly,” Sully scoffed, though the jut of his chiseled chin showed the slightest trace of family pride just the same. “Just the beneficiary of some fairly shrewd investors in the family, you know? All I did was ... be born?”
Dean gave a little grandmotherly “tut-tut” cluck of his tongue. “I saw you work the bar today, Sully. Seems like you were kind of born to run a small town, big empire, you know?”
He shrugged, avoiding Dean’s eyes. “What?” Dean pressed, suddenly on the offense after playing defense since the first minute Sully’s probing green eyes saw straight into his pure little virgin heart. “Not used to compliments?”
“Around here?” Sully groused, waving his beer bottle around the kitchen as if to encompass all of Pistol Creek itself.
“With my customers. They all think the beer’s not cold enough, the food’s not hot enough, the barstool’s not soft enough, the pool cue’s not hard enough.
Last time I got a compliment around these parts was, let’s see .
.. probably when Mrs. Chambers told me I had good penmanship back in third grade. ”
Dean snorted, picturing a squirming, restless little Sully sticking his tongue out while practicing his Ps and Qs on straight lined notebook paper.
“Come on,” he insisted. “It can’t be that bad.”
Sully met his eyes, piercing in the dim kitchen light. “What would you know?” he teased in that syrupy country drawl of his. “You’ve probably been getting straight As since you could piss straight, you little goody two shoes.”
Dean nodded quietly. “Okay, sure, maybe.”
“Well then...” Sully grumbled before his aimless dispute drifted away.
Inspired, Dean looked him up and down, admiring the smooth, marbled chest beneath the robe’s fluffy purple lapels. “I’ll give you a compliment,” he insisted, setting down his half-empty beer for good and propelling himself off the kitchen counter at his back. “Or two.”
“What are you doing?” Sully’s voice was low and deep, and clearly not just because he thought someone else in the deserted country bar might hear.
“You said today we could take things a little further, right?”
“Yeah, and...” Sully reached down to gently clutch the butcher block behind him.
“Well, this is me taking things a little further.”
“I think you’ve come just about far enough,” Sully grunted, making no move to stop him.
Dean inched just close enough to reach his host’s fuzzy purple robe. “That why you locked the door behind us, Sully?” he murmured, risking a trembling hand to gently run up the lapel of one side of the robe. “That why you cracked open a couple of beers in the middle of the night?”
“Dean,” Sully croaked as he shifted uncomfortably beneath Dean’s gentle caresses up and down the soft, fluffy lapel. “By getting closer I meant, like, brunch at the Cracked Egg Café. Maybe a walk through Patchwork Park, you know. Casual. Simple. Safe...”
“You want safe?” Dean asked, hardly believing his big, blue balls at the moment. “That’s why you took me to a restaurant two towns away? That’s why you parked around the corner? Under a shady tree? And kissed me senseless by the side of your big, red truck?”
Sully arched one eyebrow. “What’s gotten into you, kid?”
“Your tongue, for one,” Dean teased, licking his lips and still tasting the sizzle and crackle of that first, gushing French kiss.
“Jesus,” Sully snorted. “You are something else.”
Dean nodded, clutching the other lapel gently. “I am something else,” he marveled, suddenly realizing it. “You made me something else. And now you can’t take it back.”
“It was just a kiss, Dean.”
“Not to me it wasn’t,” Dean insisted, clutching the lapels more urgently. “As first kisses go, that was ... fireworks, Sully.”
Sully grinned. “Felt pretty electric to me, too, Dean.”
“Wanna try for Round Two?” Dean asked, already inching onto his tiptoes to reach his long, rangy partner’s gently pursed lips.
“Sure, kid,” Sully teased. “Isn’t that why you came over here in the first place?”
Dean kissed him silent. Slower this time, gentler, too.
It was a soft, smooth, lazy kiss. No rush, no hurry, a whole, spotless kitchen to themselves in the deep, dark of night.
“No,” Dean gushed, sinking back down onto the soles of his feet and licking the fresh taste of Sully off his lips.
“I came over here to see what’s under that robe, cowboy. ”
Sully snorted and pushed Dean away with ease. Dean stumbled back, still breathless from their kiss. “Bullshit,” he drawled, inching closer in those purple, fluffy slippers. “You didn’t know what I’d have on, or even if I’d be here.”
Dean shrugged. “Caught me,” he teased, hands up in the air as if surrendering to the authorities. “Now what, cowboy?”
Sully grinned. “Now for your punishment, City Slicker.”
Dean swallowed. Hard. He wondered, idly, what a big, strong, strapping hunk like Sully could do to a slight little chump like him.
A hard, naughty spanking, perhaps? Ropes and bonds?
Toys and tools? Dean was far from adventurous.
Hell, he was far from anything, being a V-card carrying, know nothing, do nothing virgin, but there was something about Sully that made Dean trust him. Even with a whip in his hand!
“W-w-what,” Dean stammered, backed against the counter once more as Sully hovered over him, somehow still managing to look menacing, not to mention totally adorbs, in a lavender bathrobe. And matching slippers! “Whatever will you do to me?