Epilogue
Dean
“Precious! Just. Precious!”
Dean stood just outside his bedroom door, wobbling on the new cowboy boots that would have to be broken in before he could ever walk comfortably.
If he could ever walk comfortably, that is.
Meanwhile, Sully was still golf clapping in the living room, circling him like a hawk to a field mouse as he watched Dean wobble closer toward him.
The stiff heels of his new boots clattered on the rustic wood flooring of the old apartment above Grayson’s Ghost Tours, gleaming in its newness in the late afternoon light.
“You don’t think it’s a little much?” Dean asked as he wriggled the big, gold belt buckle into place above his crotch, long since deflated after Sully’s surprising welcome home.
He’d been expecting couch sex, tearing off each other’s clothes after Dean’s long drive home from State.
Or maybe wall sex. Kitchen sex? Hell, he’d settle for a handy in the bathroom after a month away from the long, cool stud.
Instead Sully had greeted him with gift bags galore, fancy labels and scratchy tissue poking out like some episode of Real House Husbands of Gravel Gulch, insisting he “try them on” first thing.
Now he stood, blue balls filling his stiff blue jeans, the ones Sully insisted on tucking in his brand new boots.
“A little much?” Sully sounded offended, chin cupped in one big, velvet fist as he continued to circle his prey.
“It’s perfect. You’re perfect.” He beamed, straightening the slightly too big cowboy hat atop Dean’s head.
Patting the shoulder of his checkerboard cowboy shirt, the one with the big, frilled collar and predictably rhinestone buttons down the front, he winked. “My perfect little cowboy.”
“Stop,” Dean murmured, even as he blushed and withered under the rapt affection. He glanced up into Sully’s admiring eyes, warm and liquid and gooey, just like he’d remembered them. “Do I really have to wear this?”
“Have to?” Sully pretended to be offended, slinking into the kitchen on those long, fine legs of his, opening up the brand spanking new fridge door to snatch two Lucky Suds from inside.
The familiar clinking of the brown bottles between Sully’s fingers was music to his ears.
“You should want to, Dean,” he insisted.
“I mean, as Grayson’s Ghost Tours newest summer employee?
I should think you’d be honored to wear the duds of my ancestors. ”
“Please,” Dean chuckled, taking the beer Sully offered him. “You only wear this stuff to impress the tourists.”
Sully nodded, winking eagerly. “And now, by my side every day this summer, you will, too!”
They clinked bottles, cheering to Dean’s new summer job.
He sipped gratefully, eagerly, embracing the first day of summer break in a way he never had before.
With someone he never had before. The beer was good, cold, cheap and familiar, their nectar of choice during that long, sweltering spring break they’d shared together less than a month earlier.
Now here he was, back in Pistol Creek. Back in his borrowed apartment over the ghost tours office, recently refurbished to within an inch of its life.
Dean ran a finger along the waist-high counter that separated the small kitchen from the small living room. “I love what you’ve done with the place,” he said emphatically.
Their eyes traveled around the recently refurbished living room, buttery leather love seats topped by comfy tasseled throw pillows.
Retro teardrop coffee tables topped by dog-eared, thrift shop western novels for that lived-in touch.
The walls had been freshly painted, too, a kind of tortilla shell color before being classily covered in black and white cowboy prints—ranchers and cowpokes, horses and cattle, sunsets and old, crumbling barns.
Just the right touch for a fake cowpoke in his stiff cowboy boots.
“You do?” Sully wore a cringe face. “Not too much?”
“It’s perfect,” Dean insisted, vaguely recalling the stacks of file boxes and old fold-up chairs that had littered the living space while he’d stayed there, half-naked and covered in his own juices for that hedonistic spring break.
“It’ll really get me in the mood while I’m having my cup of coffee before work every morning. ”
“It’s supposed to,” Sully insisted, himself dressed casually in khaki cargo pants, flip-flops and a simple white V-neck t-shirt that hugged his taut, lean torso.
It was as if, somehow, in the month they’d been apart, Dean and Sully had traded places, Dean now kitted out in cowboy garb and Sully looking every bit the college boy in his casual weekend fit.
Not that Dean was complaining, mind you.
He’d wear a suit of armor to be back in Sully’s arms again.
Dean sank into a buttery leather wing chair, gently moving the rust and cream striped throw pillow to one side as he wriggled to get comfortable in his tight blue jeans. “I barely remember what it looked like before.”
“That’s the point,” Sully harumphed, sinking down across from Dean in a matching wing chair. “I’ve been hard at work getting the place ready for you.”
Dean felt the old familiar flutter of adoration fill his chest. “I appreciate that.”
“My pleasure,” Sully teased in all his casual radiance.
Dean had gotten a late start on his drive home, packing hurriedly and forgetting he had to do a walk-through with the landlord before he could get his deposit back.
And, of course, she was backed up because of all her tenants escaping campus for the summer, yada-yada.
Now, precious hours later, the sun was gradually sinking across the soft blue Kentucky sky, painting Sully in its usual orange and red hues.
Dean had been anxious the whole way home.
Would Sully still feel the same way as he had the day Dean had left, both of them tearful and trembling in the parking space downstairs?
Would he still need a summer employee for the ghost tours business, as they’d discussed in hushed whispers and dewy anticipation before he left town?
Or was that just so much pillow talk designed to put Dean at ease?
“You okay?” Sully asked, beer bottle halfway to his lips.
Dean shrugged in his stiff new cowboy shirt. “I think?”
Sully smiled. “Same here,” he teased, wiping the big, broad palm of his free hand across his bare knee. “I’m nervous all over again.”
“Why?”
“Can’t explain it,” Sully mused. “It’s the darndest thing. I thought, you know, how close we felt before spring break ended, I’d feel the same the minute you were back for the summer.”
Dean’s heart fell. “You ... don’t?”
Sully merely shook his head, sexy brown curls hidden under a faded red ball cap that set off his sexy ass outfit like a cherry on top of a quietly melting sundae. “Naw, Dean. Now I feel something ... new.”
“Good new?” Dean asked with hope, inching toward the edge of his seat.
Sully smiled, warm and tender, those thick lips curling into a welcoming smile and suddenly, Dean knew.
He knew the big, sexy fucker was just teasing him.
“Better than good,” Sully announced, polishing off his first beer of the day before standing, abruptly.
There was an old radio on the windowsill behind him, the kind you might find blaring stadium rock in the back of some busy garage.
Sully flicked it on and, magically, country music oozed through the faded black speaker to one side.
He inched closer to Dean, offering one of those big, veiny hands. “Dance with me, cowboy?” he teased, gently hoisting Dean from the comfy leather chair as if he weighed no more than the classy country throw pillow he left behind.
Dean was too awe struck to speak, suddenly overwhelmed by the whirlwind homecoming that had turned out so differently from the one he’d imagined, not just for the long drive home but for the even longer weeks they’d been separated.
Sully took him in his arms as they gently circled a faux cowskin throw rug that somehow managed to pull the whole eclectic, modern cowpoke aesthetic together.
“I’ve missed you,” Sully said quietly into his ear.
“Me more,” Dean insisted as Sully drew him closer, those big, familiar hands clutching his backside so that he could feel their heat all the way through the thin layer of denim that separated them.
“Impossible,” Sully insisted, squeezing each cheek defiantly. “I thought,” he began, before emotion made his voice hoarse and cracked. “I thought you might change your mind. You know, about coming home?”
“Never,” Dean insisted, lacing his fingers at the small of Sully’s back. “I almost dropped out of school just to get home a few days early.”
“Silly boy,” Sully chuckled. “Why?”
“So some other little City Slicker didn’t swoop in and steal you first.”
Sully’s chuckle was pure honey, slow and warm and sweet across Dean’s cheek. “Silly boy,” he teased again. “There’s only one City Slicker for me and he’s standing right here. Right here in my arms where he belongs.”
They shared a quiet embrace, gently circling the Wild West throw rug as country music twanged sweetly, quietly, from the windowsill behind them. “And this summer?” Dean pressed, the same way he pressed his hungry body against Sully’s. “You’re up for that?”
“Can’t wait.”
“Me? Here? 24/7 for the next ten weeks?”
“Hopefully longer if you get that grant to study Gravel Gulch for college credits in the fall?”
Dean blushed. “I thought you forgot all about that,” he sighed, recalling the way they’d discussed it, via text, only a few weeks before.
“Does it have to do with you and me being together longer?” Sully insisted, gently pressing Dean away as he peered down to gently glare at him. “Then, no, I wouldn’t be forgetting something that important to me.”
Dean quietly nodded, too emotional to confess that he’d already gotten the grant.
He thought, maybe, after their first tumble in the kitchen, or maybe right there, on the fuzzy cowhide throw rug, he might tell him.
Or maybe some moonlit night over dinner at the Wagon Wheel.
Or drinks across the street at Pappy’s. But for now?
A little secret between friends wouldn’t kill anybody, right?
Dean pushed himself gently away, too tempted by the close proximity to last a moment longer. “We should probably start testing your theory,” he insisted, reaching for the top button of his scratchy new shirt.
Sully nodded appreciatively, all but licking his lips. “Yeah, which one?”
“You know the one,” he said over the sound of popping, department store rhinestone buttons. “The one where I try to annoy the ever loving shit out of you with my city boy ways, my tight little bod and every sexy come-on line I can think of.”
“I like the sound of that,” Sully drawled, sinking down onto the armrest of the closest chair to admire Dean’s impromptu striptease. “But I like the looks of it, better.”
“Thought you might,” Dean sighed as he shrugged out of the shirt, no longer ashamed to bare his less than perfect body in front of his most ardent fan. He reached for the belt buckle, but Sully clucked his tongue in protest.
“Happy to help you there, pardner,” he teased in his best country drawl.
“Don’t mind if I do, cowboy.” Dean sauntered over, Sully’s capable hands making quick work of the buckle, the belt it held in place, then the buttons and zipper of the jeans themselves.
The boots came off easily, but not quite as easily as Dean’s brand new pair of pale blue boxer briefs, already tented with his thickening member.
It was only when he reached for his new hat that Sully took his eyes off Dean’s hard-on for the briefest of moments.
“No, City Slicker,” he crooned, taking Dean in hand with the practiced ease of a well-versed lover.
“No?” Dean gasped, admiring the way Sully’s hand stroked his stiffening shaft so gently.
“You think I bought you that new hat just to take it off the first time I slid your big old dick in my mouth?” Sully oozed.
“No,” Dean gasped as Sully flicked his tongue around the glossy pink tip. “How could I forget?”
“Leave it on,” Sully insisted, stroking him more insistently as he kissed him up and down and back again.
“All summer?” Dean teased.
Sully winked and glanced up Dean’s naked body until their eyes met. “How about the rest of your damn sexy life, City Slicker?”
Dean blushed and gushed and didn’t mind the soft, gentle tears that drizzled down his cheeks. Sully didn’t seem to, either. After all, what was a reunion if you didn’t shed a tear or two, right?
The End