Page 133 of Beneath the Stain

Trav thought he’d learned a lot about compassion in the past year, but apparently he hadn’t learned enough, because this was the time to show mercy, and instead he found himself twisting the knife.

“Well, you better toughen up, Mackey. I need to know you’re strong enough to face this, because I’m older than you and I’m not getting any fucking younger. And if I don’t drop dead because you give me a heart attack, I could die in a car wreck or a plane wreck or we could break up because you want kids and I don’t orsomethingbad could happen, and I am not going to be all right until I know you can fuckingdeal!”

Mackey blanched, practically green, and Trav realized he’d gone too far. “You take that back,” he hissed. “You take thatback, or I will go out right now and open a vein and dump in a bag of fucking meth—”

“Shut up!” Trav’s eyes would be red with broken blood vessels the next morning from the force of that scream. In two steps he had Mackey pinned up against the back wall. “Drugs aren’t the answer and screaming at me isn’t the answer—you’ve got one thing you can do here, dammit, and you need to fucking own up!”

“What am I supposed to do?” Mackey shouted. “What am I supposed to do? Go back to my hometown and fuck Grant Adams for old time’s sake, proving to you once and for all that all guys are gonna cheat on you and break your fucking heart?”

“No!” Trav choked, fighting against shaking Mackey against the wall. “You’re supposed to say good-bye so I don’t ever have to worry about this guy in your heart again!”

“Why, because he’ll be….” Mackey’s face twisted.

Trav wanted to laugh.Near miss, little man. Near miss with the huge, furry, fanged word.

“No, not because he’ll be dead,” Trav said, softening his grip on Mackey’s shoulders. He would have bruises the next day, and Trav would have to forgive himself for those too. “Because you can admit that you loved him when he was alive.”

Mackey shook his head. “How can that still hurt?” he asked, impossibly young. “How can it still hurt? What do I have to do to make it not hurt?”

“Let it hurt,” Trav said, putting his wide-palmed hand on the side of Mackey’s head and pulling him into his chest. “Then let him go.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Mackey whispered. “I don’t want to hurt him, but I really don’t want to hurt you.”

“You will,” Trav said, knowing in his gut that it would happen. Yeah, it was one thing to tell Mackey to go open up a vein, but Trav was pretty sure there’d be plenty of blood on the ground to spare. “You’ll hurt us both, but, well, backatcha.”

Mackey looked away. “I….” He took a deep breath and broke away from Trav’s arms. “I need a fucking walk,” he said and bolted out of the hotel room, past Blake, Briony, and Kell, who were all standing near the semiopen window and had been, it looked like, long enough for Kell to have heard too much.

“Mackey!” Kell called, but Blake stopped him with a hand on the arm.

“He’s right,” Trav muttered. “Let him go.”

Briony nodded at Trav and took off after him, and Trav blessed the girl. Mackey had people—maybe even the right people for the right pain.

“But it’s raining, Trav,” Kell said helplessly. “It’s raining, and they’re just in T-shirts.”

Trav roared in frustration and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “You wanted something?” he asked, because he didn’t want to look at Mackey’s brother after the bomb exploded. He’d heard. Kell’s eyes were glassy and he kept licking his lips nervously—Trav did not doubt that he’d heard everything.

“How come nobody told me?” Kell asked simply, looking at Trav and then Blake. Blake looked away, and Kell whimpered. “Nobody? Blake, you knew?”

“He told me in rehab,” Blake admitted grudgingly. “It was… he said it so I’d know that all that time he was giving me shit, it wasn’t my fault.”

Kell’s mouth opened and closed and opened again. “Grant and my little brother?” he asked when he obviously knew. “Why… how long?”

Trav wished Mackey was there. He did. But Kell had maybe earned the right to know. “Mackey said he was fourteen.”

Kell let out a little moan. “Oh fuck. Oh fuck. This makessomuch sense. Jesus… fucking Jesus. That trip to San Francisco—Grant kept trying to tell me. God, he… I don’t know, kept hedging with Sam—foryears—and God. He must have thought I was a fucking idiot!”

“He didn’t want to hurt you,” Trav said, sounding flat and wooden even to his own ears. He remembered dully when he thought Kell had it all coming. All the pain of self-realization, all of the horrible guilt of treating other people like shit—Trav would have wished it solidly on Kell’s shoulders.

But not now.

Kell and even Grant had fought for Mackey when nobody else in the world had, and no matter how bad they’d fucked up, Trav couldn’t hate Kell enough for the hurt that was probably welling up like blood in his stomach. In fact, he sort of loved the guy.

“Now you’re just being nice,” Kell said bitterly. “He didn’t want me to cut him off. I was his best friend, and he didn’t want me to stop being his best friend. And… and….”

All of the pain of the past year, and this was the first time any of them had ever seen Kell cry. He dashed his cheeks with his hand. “All that bullshit Mackey went through—nobody told me? I was to blame—”

“No,” Blake and Trav said in tandem, looking at each other through old, self-aware eyes.