Page 49 of Beneath the Stain

Mackey squinted at him. “I don’t want to think about it,” Mackey murmured. “I feel like shit and I don’t want to think about it. How bad is that? How bad is that gonna fuck me up?”

Trav swallowed. He’d once imprisoned a woman who had taken out five guys in her platoon with her weapon. Only two of them were responsible for assaulting her repeatedly, but by the time she picked up the gun and released the safety, that hadn’t mattered.

“Really fucking bad, Mackey. I got no words for how bad that’ll fuck you up.”

Mackey whimpered. “I got… man, how do people deal with all that shit in their head? I got all this shit in my head and I can only write so many songs—how do I deal with all this crap?”

He closed his eyes then, and helpless tears slid through the creases. Trav stroked his hair again, because someone should. Someone should comfort him. It was all Trav had.

“You go to rehab,” Trav said, his voice shaking with conviction.

“I didn’t take anything!” Mackey struggled to sit up and then whined in pain and fell back down. The IV tube in his arm bled a little.

Trav flicked him gently on the forehead. “I know you didn’t,” Trav snapped, hating everything about life at this moment, including Mackey. “But you took the damned beer from a stranger, and that left you open. And your body was stripped thin from detoxing two weeks ago, and that made it worse. And if you and me hadn’t made eye contact about five seconds before that guy got to you, you would have laid in an alleyway, choking on your own goddamned vomit, for anhour, because your band would have thought you went somewhere to get high and get laid. Youneedit, Mackey. You talk to the doctors about all this shit in your head, all the shit that made you get high, all the shit that’s in there now. You talk to them and you yell at them and they tell you the things that help make it better—”

“Oh, how would you know?” Mackey demanded, his voice thick. “How would you know? Howexcitedwould you be to have your insides all spread out and messy? Isn’t it bad enough the whole world’s got a microscope up my ass right now as it is?”

Trav snarled. God, he was trying tohelp! “How would I know? Do you think I came back from the Middle East all happy fine?”

“I didn’t know you’d been there,” Mackey said, his lower jaw still thrust out. “How in the fuck would I know you’ve been there? Two weeks, and it’s all ‘Mackey, go here,’ and ‘you need to eat’ and ‘don’t be a dick to Blake.’ I don’t even know what Trav stands for, unless it’s ’cause you travel all the time, and I doubt you got parents, ’cause I think you were named for a goddamned truck!”

Trav laughed a little, but his hand never ceased that gentle motion. “Yeah, well, I get that too.” Hell—he’d buy a Ford Trav, right? Sounded like a solid SUV. “It’s short for Travis. My parents live in upstate New York in a nice suburb, and they both teach, so they don’t have too much money. I joined the military right out of high school to pay for college, and I joined the MPs for six years out of eight because I liked the idea of being a badass and my peers pissed me off. How’s that? Do you need a bigger résumé than that?”

“Yes,” Mackey mumbled, “but not now. My head hurts. You saw a shrink?”

Trav sighed and paused his stroking of Mackey’s hair. “I’ve seen bad shit,” he said simply. “Heinously bad shit, Mackey. And I was in the military during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and I didn’t have a soul I could share that with.” Trav grunted, because the memory hurt. “Not even a one-night stand, in case I got caught.”

Mackey made an indeterminate sound in his throat. “Keep doing that thing with my hair,” he said after a minute, and Trav resumed. “What made you leave? You like being a badass. I can tell.”

Oh Lord. Trav wasn’t going to tell this story—he wasn’t. But looking at Mackey, curled on his side, he realized he’d seen this kid naked and bleeding—and Mackey hadn’t seen any part of Trav.

“I do,” Trav said quietly after a moment. “I like it when life makes simple patterns and I can understand them. But….” He stood and stretched and sat down again—and resumed touching Mackey intimately, gently, because Mackey needed it.

“But what?” Mackey murmured, obviously determined that Trav didn’t get to delay the game.

“I was lonely,” he confessed—a thing he hadn’t even confessed to Terry. “A bunch of us—Heath included, and Heath knew, because he’s smart and knew I never looked at girl porn—were on leave. We were walking down this street in Paris—and it’s a beautiful city. All the things they have in those pictures and posters? Yeah. It really is like that in places. So we’re walking down this little street with cafés and bistros and flower vendors, and there’s this kid….” Trav examined the memory for a moment so he could get it right. “He was drawing chalk pictures on the sidewalk—probably about your age, you know? But I was only twenty-six, so it was okay. But he was pretty—so pretty. He had big brown eyes and curly brown hair and these full lips—”

“Stop it, Trav, you’re giving me a woody.” Mackey’s voice dripped with irony.

Trav tousled his hair gently. “Yeah, well, I think you’re just sort of naturally horny,” he said, knowing sex was the last thing on Mackey’s mind. “But all my buddies were going to get laid, and I was going to—I don’t know. Sleep in the hotel. And this kid and I—you ever make eye contact with a stranger and know it’ll be phenomenal?”

Again that self-deprecating laugh. “Man, I think that’s the only kind of sex I’ve had for the last year.”

“Has it been?” Trav asked, wanting him to be honest.

“Has it been what?”

“Phenomenal?”

Mackey pulled in a deep breath and let it out slowly, like sand trickling off a table. “No,” he admitted after a moment. “It’s sort of sucked. I mean, I used to think sex was… never mind. Sex sucks when you’re high. You can barely remember it and you don’t give a shit who you’re with. Go on with your story.”

“This would have been phenomenal,” Trav said. He still knew it in his bones. “Whatever he saw, he wanted me. And I… I nodded to him and just walked on by. Because I wasn’t supposed to be gay in the Army.”

“That sucks a whole lot,” Mackey mumbled. “And that’s why you quit?”

“Well, it took two more years—I had to let my tour run out. But yeah. And when I got out, well, living in the States was hard. My family believes in shrinks—”

“Rich and educated, right?” Mackey asked, and since there wasn’t any censure in his voice, Trav answered him.