Page 90 of Beneath the Stain

We’re a hope.

I’ll hope for you too.

Mackey smiled and pocketed the phone, then looked up to where Blake was standing.

“Your mom’s real nice,” Blake said wistfully.

Mackey managed a smile with only a little twist at the ends. “Yeah, well, she liked you. Welcome to the family.”

“You mean she doesn’t wish I was the almighty Grant Adams?” Blake asked, but without too much bitterness.

Mackey had gotten good at telling the truth in the last two weeks. “Nope,” he said as they turned back to the facility. “In fact, she never did take a shine to Grant.”

“No?”

Mackey shook his head, remembering his mom’s veiled warnings, her inarticulate fears. “She was never sure how, but she always sort of knew he was gonna break our hearts.”

“Hot damn!” Blake said, a smile lighting up his thin, scruffy face. “For once I am not second-best!”

Mackey sighed inwardly. Well, he was never going to be Mackey’s best friend. But hewasKell’s, now that Grant had bowed out of the band. “Man, if you practice the bridge of that new song a little more, you might even tie with Kell. That asshole never practices when I don’t ride him. Let’s go fix that up.”

Blake’s smile turned gentle, like he knew Mackey was talking bullshit just to make him feel better, and Mackey shook his head and stomped off. But he knew his friend would follow him, and he knew they’d play music, and for now, that was plenty.

Sweet Emotion

TRAVWATCHEDthe interview with the guys when it aired onE!, and wondered if he’d ever been prouder of another person.

Mackey had asked that Trav not see him awful—and he’d apparently hired a stylist to come in and cut and dye his hair to make sure. He’d put some makeup on and hidden the shadows of his eyes, and he didn’t look quite so thin, quite so pale, and he was wearing his concert clothes—a red-and-yellow-striped jacket and a salmon-colored shirt with a lot of froth at the collar over jeans that almost showed his scrotum.

God, he was sexy, cocking his hips in the sunshine, front of the center, waiting for Blake to finish talking.

“Yeah, well, you go from the streets when you’re lucky to eat to being surrounded byeverything, you’re going to lose your head, you know?” Blake smiled, and he managed to look both shy and sure with the same smirk. Trav had to hand it to him: he’d grown up too in the last month. He was even wearing a sports coat over his jeans. Kell had brought him one—Blake’s request, but probably Mackey’s suggestion, just like the clothes Trav had fished from Mackey’s closet.

“How about you, Mackey?”

Travis had handpicked the reporters, and he’d gone with a bevy of women and men in their thirties—older, wiser, not pushy. The woman asking this question was in her forties but dapper and fit. Mackey smiled at her with the same kindness he’d used on his mother.

“How ’bout me what?” he asked, smirking.

After a spattering of laughter, the reporter nodded. “What do you think brought you here?”

Mackey smiled grimly directly at the cameras. “Well, a bunch of stuff, really, and some of it’s private. But part of it was I’d had a breakup before we came down to LA, and it was something I didn’t really get over.”

Good, Mackey. Make ’em come to you.

“Is that why we never see you with any women, Mackey?”

Yup—sweet middle-aged woman asking that question, she made it sound like a joke, nothing invasive, nothing earth-shattering.

“Well, the reason you don’t see me with any women is that I’m gay,” Mackey said casually, and then he winked at the camera, like he and the audience could ignore the fact that all of the reporters had just lost their fucking minds.

“Mackey!” cried one woman, a little taller, a little louder than the others. “Do you think your sexual orientation had anything to do with your drug addiction?”

Mackey grimaced like this was the world’s dumbest question. “Sweetheart, it’s not the gay that made me want to use drugs, it was the fear of how you people react. You all promise to behave, I promise to lay off the hard stuff.”

And like that, the atmosphere went from charged like a feeding frenzy to gentle laughter. Yup, he’d made them promise to behave—they had to play nice or they’d look bad.

“What was it that prompted you to come out?” called another reporter, and Mackey and Blake made eye contact while Blake nodded enthusiastically.