“Yeah, Dean, it is.”
Dean simply nodded, scrubbing his head stubble absently in the pale moonlight.His fingers looked long and thin.Delicate, almost.A student’s fingers.Attached to a city boy’s hand.Nervous and tender and awkward and ...sweet.Sully wondered, idly, what those soft fingers might feel like atop his hard, sweaty skin.
“But why?”Dean practically croaked.
“Old habits?”Sully murmured.It wasn’t late.Hardly past 9:00.But in Clay County, they rolled up the sidewalks practically at 8:00 on the dot.The Wagon Wheel was already turning off its sign, the parking lot empty and nary a car cruising past as they stood, just around the block from where they’d shared an electric dinner, as secluded as one could be just off Main Street.
“So the Wagon Wheel?”Dean started.
“Is where I take guys, Dean.”Sully was insistent.He’d already made it clear he was gay.Already made it clear he was single.Unattached.More than available.And horny as hell, judging from Sully’s dancing trouser snake.He didn’t want to pressure Dean.Jesus, the poor kid looked like a deer caught in the damn headlights.But from the way he’d acted at dinner, curious and knowing and quiet and not surprised by Sully’s antics at all, Dean didn’t necessarily seem opposed to the idea of, well, something more.“Guys I want to spend more time with.”
“Yeah,” Dean offered, as if ticking off the last of his excuses.“Guys you want to spend time with ...on a ghost tour, right?”
“Jesus,” Sully snorted, chuckling dryly in the quiet of a cookie cutter country town two over from his own.“I know you’re smarter than that, kid.”
Dean nodded slowly.“I just,” he began, glancing down at his shoes again.“No one’s ever been interested in me before.Not like this.Not the way you talk to me, and what you talk to me about, and how you look at me, Sully.How ...how you’re looking at me right now.”
“I find that hard to believe, Dean.”
“Why would I lie about something that makes me look so utterly pathetic?”
“If that’s true,” Sully countered, stifling a grin at Dean’s budding melodrama.“If that’s the case, then it’s their loss, okay?”
Dean neither shook nor nodded his head.Sully reached out with a trembling hand, gently tucking him under the chin to lift Dean’s head upward so that their eyes could meet.“Their loss.Okay?”
“Okay,” Dean croaked, quivering chin resting gently atop Sully’s big hand, light as a feather and warm as soft butter melting across a stack of fresh, steaming pancakes.“Yes, fine, but ...why?Why me?”
“Whynotyou?”Sully chuckled, letting his hand drift away lest Dean feel the vague tremors in his fingers.“Have you seen yourself, Dean?”
“Yeah,” Dean blurted, eyes shining in the moonlight.“That’s why I’m asking why a guy like you, a whole ass man, with cowboy boots and a bar and dimples and those big, veiny fingers would be interested in a little putz like me.”
Sully had to laugh.“It’s not funny,” Dean insisted, balling up those little fists at his side and squaring off against Sully indignantly.
“I’m not laughingatyou, Dean,” Sully insisted.“I just thought a smart kid like you would know, that’s all.”
“Know what already?”Dean practically begged.
“Know that putzes are all the rage right now,” Sully insisted, inching a little closer.
“Stop teasing,” Dean muttered, even as his back pressed against the truck bed and he found himself no longer able to retreat from Sully’s persistent, if gentle, advances.
“You don’t like it?”Sully murmured, soft and low and urgent.His boots scraped on the pavement as he inched a little closer.He didn’t expect an answer and, predictably, Dean didn’t give him one.“You don’t like me teasing you like this?You don’t like another man being this close to you?So close you can feel the heat from my body, the same way I feel the heat from yours?Tell me to stop, Dean.Tell me to stop and I’ll back the hell up and stay six feet away for as long as you stay in Pistol Creek.”
Dean glanced up, eyes liquid and lips gently parted.“I wish I could,” he croaked, almost helplessly, as if betraying his own best intentions.“I wish I could say I didn’t like it.I wish I could say ‘no’ to you, Sully.But ever since I walked into your bar today, my whole world’s been turned upside down.Right is wrong and yes is no and—”
Sully kissed him then.Soft and sweet and full, right on the lips.He heard the surprised gasp before he tasted it, hot on his tongue and fast in his mouth.Dean was too excited to be a bad kisser, his lips electric and slick, his breath hot and fast, his tongue tentatively dancing along the cusp of Sully’s before he pulled away, licking his lips and glancing down coyly.
“No is yes?”Sully teased, finishing Dean’s thought for him.
Dean merely nodded, gasping, eyes wide and fingers gently clutching Sully’s waist.“Sorry,” he croaked, dragging them away reluctantly and wiping his presumably sweaty palms against the legs of his own jeans.“I didn’t know where to put my hands.”
“You see me complaining?”Sully asked, digging in his pockets for the keys to his truck.Dean watched him warily.“What ...what now?”His voice was hesitant, yet hopeful.
“Now?”Sully jiggled his keys, nodding to the far side of the truck.“Now you get in and I take your ass back home, that’s what.”
“Yeah, but ...then what?”
Sully winked, yanking open his door like a mic drop.“Then?Then I watch you go upstairs and don’t leave until I see the kitchen light go on, that’s what.”
