Beneath the Stain - Part 7 (3 page)

“
Yes
!”

Mackey let go of his cock, which seemed like madness, but it let him keep up that angle, keep driving into Trav hard. Trav closed his eyes tight enough to see explosions of red sparks with every thrust.

“Grab it, Trav,” Mackey commanded. “I like it when you grab your cock!”

A year. They’d had a year, and they’d done almost everything they could think of—except for this. Mackey had seen Trav half-asleep as the sun came through their hotel window, palming himself into a sleepy orgasm, not sated, not even close, from the lovemaking the night before. He wasn’t sated now, would never be sated after this, would always need Mackey,
crave
him, scream for the touch of Mackey inside him, the feel of Mackey’s come saturating his skin.

Trav grabbed his cock with one hand and pillowed his face on the toilet seat, sprawled inelegantly like a rutting animal, begging to be fucked.

He closed his hand on his prick and it didn’t matter. Mackey picked up speed and Trav hit his cockhead just so, and those fireworks stopped, Trav’s breath stopped, everything in the goddamned world
stopped
as Mackey groaned, pumping frantically, shooting into Trav’s body. Trav’s body exploded, particles of light and air hurtling through the sterile white room to the clear sky outside.

Mackey collapsed across his back, panting against Trav’s skin, still sheathed in Trav’s ass.

Trav felt Mackey’s come leaking out and half laughed. “We’re going to need another shower.”

“No,” Mackey rasped. “I need to smell like you for a while.”

The thought made Trav shiver—such a visceral, animal thing for a man who liked to think he had it all on his laptop.

“Okay,” he whispered. He didn’t have any other words. Like it or not, he’d just sold his soul to Mackey James for the price of a shower curtain and a bottle of lube.

T
HEY
DRIED
off in awkward silence, made it to the bed, and Trav extended his arm for Mackey to pillow his head on Trav’s chest.

“God, I needed this last night,” Mackey muttered.

Trav tightened his arm and held him tight. “I was overwhelmed,” he confessed. “I—I can’t keep you guys safe from this place. I mean, over a year, and my job has been to protect my boys, you know?”

Mackey grunted, rubbing his cheek against the damp skin and silky hair of Trav’s chest. Almost absent-mindedly he licked Trav’s nipple, and Trav arched his hips.

“Stop that,” he ordered. “I’m sore.”

Mackey stopped obediently, but throughout the rest of their conversation, he rubbed Trav’s stomach, his ribs, his pecs, his neck. It was like he was feeding himself on Trav’s skin, and Trav couldn’t make him stop.

“You can’t protect us from this,” Mackey said after a moment of rolling his face on Trav’s chest. “But we got things—not just drugs, Trav, just… like Jefferson and Stevie. They ain’t been apart—hell, they probably go to the bathroom together. With Shelia there it’s even tighter. Kell laid down the law with Cheever—he got to be the man of the house. Blake, he ain’t said two words—he had his own small town. He knows to lie low and figure out the local customs if you don’t want to find yourself getting beat the fuck up.”

“And you?” Trav asked, letting a little of his worry out, a little of it rest on Mackey’s shoulders.

Mackey grinned at him, showing his canines. “Were we or were we not arrested for being in a bar fight?”

Trav blinked. “You are
so
proud of yourself,” he said, horrified.

“Oh yeah.” Mackey nodded with complete satisfaction. “
That
was probably the best moment I’ve had in this piece of shit town.”

Trav had to laugh. He was helpless to do anything else. “Thank you for making me a part of that,” he said, irony dripping from every syllable.

Mackey nestled into him again, his naked body stretched out and rubbing all over Trav’s. Trav was too sexed out to be horny, but it
did
make him sublimely happy to be touching Mackey again.

“My pleasure,” Mackey said, purring, with no irony at all.

They dozed for an hour and then got up, dressed from the contents of Mackey’s bag, and checked out.

“Where’s Heath?” Mackey asked as Debra pulled the rental car around for them.

“Left around six,” Trav said. “Never went to sleep—said he’d sleep on the plane.”

“I like a man who can party like a rock star,” Mackey said with a grin.

Trav rolled his eyes. “Since I live with them, I guess I’m not as impressed.”

Mackey laughed as they slid into the car. By the time they got back to his mother’s house, he was still chuckling. Trav didn’t think it was that funny, but then, he really didn’t always get Mackey’s sense of humor.

That was okay. Apparently h
e got Mackey.

G
RANT
CALLED
that evening and said he’d needed to rest the whole day, but he was glad they’d gotten out of jail. He thanked Trav personally, apparently because Trav had made sure he got out of there so he wouldn’t get hurt.

His voice broke a lot, rasped, and he was probably stoned to the gills for pain. Mackey hadn’t said anything to Trav or Kell, but he’d had dreams when they’d set up the gig at the Nugget. He’d wanted Grant up with them one last time. But Grant’s fingers—they’d been so fine and strong and sure—were now swollen and clubbed and sore.

“Besides, Mackey,” Grant said when Mackey suggested it, “I haven’t played guitar in months. You guys play every day.”

He’d been the best of them after Mackey.

Now he was telling them he would probably be down the next day—but the day after that, he wanted them out to his parents’ house for a visit.

“To your
house
?” Kell said on the conference call, stunned. “Grant, we didn’t go out to your house when we were kids!”

Grant made a humorless sound on the other side of the line. “I know. That was my folks. I sort of bypassed their consent here—which reminds me. Mackey, is Mr. Ford there?”

“Yeah, I’m here,” Trav said, sounding surprised. “What do you need, Grant?”

“I’m going to be talking to the guys, showing them the place since they never saw it when we were kids. I need you to talk to my dad and my lawyer. There’s stuff there I need you to make sure Mackey’s going to get. Are you a lawyer?”

Trav grunted no. “A business major. But I can have a lawyer on standby so I can text him questions if you like.”

“That would be great, Mr. Ford. My dad’s gonna try to wiggle out of things—be ready for it. I was sort of counting on you helping me do right by Mackey and the guys.”

“Yeah, Grant. I’ll be ready.”

Grant’s relief was palpable, even over the phone in a conversation with all of them, huddled around Mackey’s mom’s kitchen table. “Thank you, Mr. Ford. It’s good to know you’ll be there.”

The last thing Grant did before they signed off was ask Mackey to bring his guitar.

Mackey was so happy he almost started to dance right there. God, music. It had tied them together for most of their lives.

He needed to give Grant music.

T
HEY
SPENT
the next day at the music store. Mackey’s old bosses were probably the only people in the town thrilled to have him, and Trav had brought a hundred free CDs to give away. The band signed free CDs and posters and smiled at high school students for two hours.

Mackey sort of loved it.

“Do you play?” He asked the same question to every kid who gave him something to sign, and he loved hearing the answers.

The answer that particularly tickled him came from the angular kid with dyed black hair and all the piercings, who said, “The steel guitar or the trombone?”

Mackey looked the kid over and saw him arching his spiked eyebrows suggestively.

Mackey laughed. “Well, I meant the guitar, but you know, that other thing is fun too!”

The kid laughed, blushing, and then shuffled uncomfortably, not meeting Mackey’s eyes. “It meant a lot,” he mumbled. “That you came out. Thank you.”

Mackey scrabbled for something to say, but the kid had already snatched his free poster and run away. Mackey stared after him for a minute, a smile twitching at his lips.

“I wasn’t the first one,” he said softly. He turned to the person next to him humming “Holiday” in the back of his throat.

B
RIONY
SPENT
that night in the bunk bed above them, which was fine—Mackey was too keyed up, wound tight by a cranked string from his groin to his throat.

“What’s wrong with you?” Trav asked for the fifteenth time when Mackey tried to lodge himself between the perpendicular bottom bunk and the stairs to the top.

“I don’t know,” Mackey said shortly. “It’s like… not like a date exactly, but like… like something big’s going to happen, like Christmas or something, except bad. You know—you’re the one who said he doesn’t have long. It’s like, no matter how I feel about him—love, hate, friendship, brotherhood, whatever—it’s like…
bigger.
It’s
louder
in my head!”

Trav let loose a sound between a sigh and a grunt. Then he rolled over, smashing Mackey between the railing and his big body, and draped his arm over Mackey, completely engulfing him in his heat, and his smell, and his pressure.

Mackey felt so much relief he had to check to make sure he hadn’t wet his pants. “Ah, God, thanks, Trav,” he murmured. “That’s so much better.”

“Can you even breathe?” Trav asked over his head.

“It’s not air if it doesn’t smell like you.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Briony muttered from above them. “Are you two done? I’ll take my chances with Cheever—”

“No!” they both said in tandem, because Cheever had been lying low, but they didn’t want to tempt fate.

“Briony?” Mackey said, his voice muffled from Trav’s armpit. “Why aren’t you sleeping with my brother yet?”

Briony’s response was a long, wet cough. When she recovered, she said, “Because my inner sex goddess has not yet descended.”

Mackey giggled and Briony did too—and Trav groaned.

“Children, I realize I’m getting no sex tonight, but do I have to separate you?”

“No,” Briony begged, her voice piteous in the dark. “Please, Trav?”

Mackey tapped Trav on the shoulder, and Trav sighed. Trav wouldn’t deny Briony anything, especially when she was sick and away from home.

“You wanted to be needed,” Mackey mumbled, and he felt Trav’s kiss on the top of the head.

“And I am,” he said.

Mackey thought about the next day and shuddered. “You really are,” he said fervently.

God. What would he say?

Everyone knew where Grant Adams lived. People whispered about it when they passed the long, curving driveway lined with decorative shrubs and framed with wrought iron. The suburb sported a couple of massive houses, hollowed out from the oak and manzanita that lined the hills. Landscapers reformed the earth, making things lush and green and trimmed, even in the summer, and even though most of the houses had an attached “farm” for horses and really expensive showpiece stock, what greeted visitors driving up was the grand multistory house—in this case faux brick—with gables and insets and bright black shale tiling the roof.

Grant’s mom had come from the South, so they’d tried to make it look like Kentucky, which was funny because the terrain in this part of California was hilly and dry. Outside of this tiny little patch of perfect green, the landscape consisted of red dirt and brown grass—even behind the house itself—but driving up, it seemed like a whole other world.

When Mackey and his brothers were younger, they had never, not once, questioned that Grant would rather hang out in their two-bedroom apartment or, when Stevie’s dad wasn’t there, in Stevie’s garage.

For one thing, it didn’t feel quite real that
their friend
Grant, who traded his Lunchables for Kell’s PB&J, would come from such a grand place. Yes, his clothes were better, but he got just as dirty as the Sanders boys when they played at school. Yes, when they started the band, his equipment was always new, but he worked just as hard as they did learning how to play it.

The fact that when he was sixteen he got to drive his mom’s car was awesome—but he would have been their friend if he’d had to ride his bike.

He’d told Kell once—when Mackey could hear—that he’d threatened to ride his bike when his mom didn’t give him a ride. He’d been desperate to escape.

So the house on the hill had never really seemed grand or real to Mackey—or any of his brothers. It had seemed more like a gate-keeping dragon, a brooding presence that allowed Grant to escape its grasp on occasion but that he had to elude if he wanted to play with his brothers. Yeah, sure, the Sanders kids were scrappy and their clothes were torn, they wore their shoes until the duct tape fell off, and sometimes they had PB with no J, but they didn’t have to escape a dragon to play with their brothers.

After Grant’s first kiss and his first admission that he’d be with Sam when he loved Mackey, that house had seemed even grander, even more imposing, even more of an obstacle to Grant ever coming out to play.

As the SUV glided up the recently paved road, Mackey had a sudden, absurd thought: The dragon was never going to let Grant out again. After all this time of Grant escaping in little pieces to play with his brothers, it was finally going to swallow him whole.

Briony and Shelia had stayed with Mackey’s mom. Cheever had gone back to school that morning, so Mackey was glad for his mom, but he missed the two of them. They didn’t talk much to each other, but they had bonded, being the only women in the group, and somehow Briony’s sarcasm made moments like this easier to bear.