Page 6 of Beneath the Stain

Red superthin pipe cleaner jeans, the kind with a dropped waist even though Mackey hadn’t had hair down there to reveal until middle school when his voice dropped; a tight white shirt, the kind with almost lacy sleeves and collar and the tailored bottom so Mackey would wear it untucked and flared; a blue velveteen suit coat, cut to let the sleeves and the collar spill over. It was outrageous, stunning, and could only be worn by a pixie-sized leviathan. Mackey would feel like five feet five inches and ninety-five pounds of sheer personality on stage in that outfit and knew Grant saw him that way too.

He stared in awe at the clothes pouring out of the shopping bag and then looked over his shoulder to where Grant was helping Kell on with his sport coat and trying not to make eye contact.

“Do you think…,” Mackey breathed, and Grant met his eyes then. Was Mackey the only one who could see his cheeks were flushed? His eyes wide and shiny? His breathing coming a little fast?

“Yeah, Mackey, try that shit on,” Grant said, gathering up a grin. He could pull his upper lip crooked, and it did something to Mackey that he couldn’t even define.

“Here, I’ll be back in a sec,” he muttered. He was hard. His dick washard. He was fourteen—he knew about wet dreams, and he’d had a few. Grant starred in all of them. And now Grant was looking at him like he wanted Mackey to star in his own private dream factory. He didn’t give a shit how weird it looked to go changing on his own—he was going to have to take off his underwear to fit into those jeans, and he didn’t want anyone to see.

A few minutes later, Grant banged on the bedroom door. “Mackey, let me see!”

“No!” he hollered, looking miserably at the pants barely fastened over his hard-on. The hard-on wasn’t that impressive—he had hopes it would grow as he did. He’d be fifteen in a month, right?

Outside the door he heard Kell, suddenly panicked. “Cheever, goddammit, put down that fucking Sharpie!” and then some general chaos after that.

Underneath the guys screaming at Cheever and Cheever wailing, he heard Grant. “C’mon, kid. It’s you and me. No one else’ll see.”

It was that promise—that illicit promise of privacy—that made Mackey open the door and shut it immediately after Grant snuck in.

Kell had recently moved out to sleep on the couch, so this room held the other three boys—Mackey slept on the bottom bunk, Cheever on the top, and Jeff on the twin bed in the corner. Mackey stood there, between three beds decorated with Star Wars comforters, and gestured to his suddenly adult body, swelling and proud underneath pants that showed off hair he’d barely even gotten.

Grant’s gaze swept over him appreciatively, up and down his skinny body, face lighting up when he came to Mackey’s crotch.

“That’s some package there, McKay,” he drawled, and his eyes bored into Mackey’s.

Mackey’s dick only got harder.

“It hurts,” he confessed miserably. “And you can see my hair.”

Grant licked his lips and then scrubbed at his face with his hands.

“I’ll be back in a sec,” he muttered. “Where’s Kell keep his razor?”

“Bathroom in the hall.”

Grant nodded, and almost like he couldn’t control it, his hand crept out, brushed along the distended zipper of the forbidden jeans.

Mackey groaned, so close to coming he was almost weeping.

“Gimme sec,” Grant reassured.

He slid out the door, and Mackey considered bending over Jeff’s bed and just rubbing his dick until the ache stopped, but Grant was back by the time he figured out that bending over in the jeans hurt.

“Here,” Grant said grimly. “Stand up straight.”

Mackey did, holding his hands behind his head. The shirt wasn’t buttoned, and it gaped across his thin chest, but the jeans loosened and so did the pressure on his cock.

Then he felt Grant’s touch across his stomach, pulling the skin of his lower abdomen tight, and his cock got tight in a whole new way.

Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

Mackey closed his eyes and ignored the yelling and frantic washing of something still going on in the crowded living room. He concentrated instead on Grant’s fingers across his tender skin and the puff of breath across his stomach and the silky, alien sensation of going without hair.

“Mackey,” Grant murmured, and Mackey was shocked into looking into those hazel eyes.

“Yeah?”

“I’m gonna unbutton your fly and pull down your pants. I want to shave lower, okay?”