Beneath the Stain - Part 3 (7 page)

And, well, owing Trav for that whole saving-his-life thing that Trav tried to forget a lot.

“I’m earning it,” Trav said soberly. “The boys need a lot of help—and I haven’t even started booking their tour. But it was nice of you to bring by the stuff.”

Terry dropped his gaze. “I brought the chess set—”

“I told you—”

Terry held out his hand. “Think of it as a peace offering,” he said. “Dammit, Trav, I just need to know it meant something. Because the way you left—man, that was cold.”

Trav hated the misery roiling in his stomach, hated it worse than poison because he liked to think he was over this bullshit. “Well, I’m a cold bastard,” he said through a thin smile.

Terry looked at him hard.

Then his face softened and his chin quivered. “Yeah, that’s you. Cold to the bone,” he said, but his lips were playing with a bitter smile, and Trav knew he hadn’t hidden as much of himself as he’d wanted to.

“How’s the kid from the shower?” Trav asked, hoping that topic at least would pull them both back emotionally. God,
something
needed to.

“Working at the bookstore, waiting for me to get over you,” Terry said simply.

Trav put his shake glass down with a thump and slid off his stool. “Well, go take him out for wine or a soda or something. You need to be over me, water under the burned bridge or something. I wasn’t good enough, I was a fucker who didn’t listen, I’m just a fucking soldier who can’t read a poem or look at a picture or—”

“Stop!” Terry begged, rubbing a shaking hand in front of his eyes. “Stop—I’m sorry I said that shit, okay? Do you want me to beg? I’ll beg. I’ll fucking beg for you to come home, quit this job—”

“Quit this job?” Trav stared at him, appalled. “Quit this job? This isn’t a
job
, Terry—it’s a… this thing I’m doing is
important.
These guys
need
me. Like I thought I needed you, but I was wrong about that. I’m not wrong about this. The whole fucking world has walked out on these kids—”

“This isn’t a musician’s foster home for burnouts!” Terry snapped.

Trav literally saw red. “Get out, or I will hurt you.”

Terry took a deep breath. “I didn’t mean—”

“You slapped me in the face, Terry. Do you remember that? And I didn’t fight back, because I could level you. Well, I’m
begging
you—walk out the door. Do you understand?”

Trav’s jaw was clenched, and he could feel a pulse throbbing in his eyes. He was violent, when he’d never been violent unless the situation called for it. You didn’t just walk into this house with the cute girl and the bewildered brothers and the broken, healing camaraderie and say it wasn’t important. You didn’t call Mackey James Sanders a burnout. You just fucking
didn’t
. Not when you knew what Trav knew. Not when you knew the boys like Trav was coming to know them. And it didn’t matter that Terry didn’t know it—Trav couldn’t forgive him anyway.

God
dammit
.

A red haze still threatened his vision and he turned around. “Just go.”

“I’m sorry,” Terry murmured. “Please—at least keep the chess set.”

“Go.”

“But I just got here.”

Trav whirled around just in time to see Mackey Sanders walk in before Terry walked out, and for a moment he wondered if it was possible for your jaw muscles to constrict so hard you strangled yourself and died.

“Holy fucking mother of fuckity fuck fuck fuck—
Jesus Christ
, Mackey, what are you doing here?”

Mackey turned around and watched through the glass panes in the entryway as Terry walked toward his car in the long shadows of the early autumn evening. “That guy was crying. What’d you say to him, Trav? I mean, you don’t got a lot of poetry in your soul, but I didn’t think you made pretty guys cry.”

“That guy was the shitty part of my day,” Trav said, taking in the kid’s appearance as he tried to breathe. “The
good
part of my day was supposed to be that you were in rehab, getting better.”

Mackey was still thin and still pale. His hair wasn’t back in a ponytail, though, it was hanging in his eyes, and looked like he’d dragged his hands through it about six thousand times. His eyes were red-rimmed—not like he was high, but like Terry’s had been before he’d walked out—and his goddamned new jeans were hanging off his hips.

“Why’s it gotta be rehab?” Mackey asked, and his chin quivered like Terry’s had too. “I’m sorry I interrupted your… breakup or whatever, but why’s it gotta be rehab? Man, I don’t know those people, and I’m supposed to be talking to them, and it’s like everything I say there hurts. Hurts Blake, hurts… hurts to say. Why can’t I just not do drugs? Just not drink? C’mon, Trav, whatya say? How ’bout I just don’t do the bad shit?”

Trav wasn’t a cuddly guy. He barely hugged his parents. The best thing about having a boyfriend had been the uncensored touching of skin, but even then, it had been all about sex.

But Mackey was standing here, his suitcases at his side, which meant he’d probably taken a cab right out of rehab and packed his own shit, and Trav had the most absurd urge to hug him like he’d hugged Terry sometimes, and just hold him until it was better.

He was so raw from the talk with Terry that he almost didn’t trust his own voice, his own hands, his own body, to even give this kid a hug.

“Mackey?” he asked helplessly. “How bad do you want a pill right now? Or a shot of vodka? Or a snort? Tell me straight up, what would you give for something to make your hands stop shaking or to blur whatever is buzzing around in your pointy fucking head
as we speak
.”

Mackey closed his eyes and dropped his bags. “Shut up,” he begged. “Man, I just want to crawl in next to your bed and—”

“Sleeping in a corner isn’t going to solve it!” Trav snapped, mostly because he envied Mackey’s corner at this very moment. He wanted it—
craved
it. “Whatever’s in your head, it’s not going to get better until you tell someone. You need to get it
out
of your head, make it stop hurting—”

“Well maybe I don’t wanna do that!” Mackey snarled, pacing in the entryway.

Trav heard some restless movements on the stairs behind him and wondered if the brothers were visible or just listening. Probably just listening, because God, who wanted to be there for
this
?

“Maybe I just want to stay here and fall off the fucking wagon and—
”

Trav’s blood ran cold. “Mackey, could you not fucking say that shit? You know the statistics and the names and the histories—probably better than I do. Do you want to be another face on the memorial wall?”

Mackey nodded, his fuck-off-and-love-me smile firmly in place, his slightly crooked teeth showing, a full-fledged panic sweat seeping through the underarms of the new jersey he was wearing. “Yeah! Yeah—why the hell not? I could be like fucking Jim Morrison or Shannon Hoon—Jesus, I could go out
proud
like fucking Kurt Cobain, ’cause that motherfucker didn’t just
go
, he went with a
blast—
”

Crack!

Trav stared as Mackey, all 110 pounds of him, flew back against the coffee table, thrown there by Trav’s right hook.

“Oh God.”

Mackey stared at him, rubbing the rapidly reddening spot on his jaw. “Holy crap, Trav—you just hit me.”

“Jesus.” Trav couldn’t stop staring. “I don’t hit people. I don’t hit people—I don’t. Jesus Christ, Mackey—I don’t fucking
hit people
. Man, just—”

Mackey grinned at him, working his jaw gingerly. “That was fucking
awesome.
I haven’t been hit that hard in ages! And I had it coming—I mean, you gotta admit I had it coming.”

“I don’t hit people,” Trav said numbly. “I don’t—”

Mackey laughed. “Man, Trav, I had no idea I could make you freak out like that. Which part was it?”

“Mackey, you’ve got to go back to rehab, you fucking hear me?”

Mackey’s smile dimmed. “Trav, really? Do I have to? Doc Cambridge is nice and everything, but I mean, you were in the room with me for five minutes and you decked me—”

“That wasn’t your fault.” Trav couldn’t seem to blink. The coffee table Shelia had just picked out had collapsed like cardboard, and Trav could hardly see it. “It wasn’t your fault—”

Mackey shook his head. “Yeah, yeah, it was. I’m an asshole—I mean, a complete waste of skin. Why the hell would you want me to talk to a shrink and dump all my shit out there in the world—I mean, I’ve hurt people, you know? Blake? I’ve been hurting him all year. How do I make that up? How do I tell my mom….” He closed his eyes. “Everything,” he said, his voice cracking like glass. “I know it’s coming, you know? How do I tell people—”

“You have to tell people,” Trav said, numbly echoing what he just
said, feeling stupid. “You have to tell people I hit you—I’ll have to quit—
”

“
No!
” Mackey screamed. “Jesus, Trav, aren’t you hearing me? I’m not worth it! People will find out who I am, and I’m not worth losing your job over, or Blake feeling like shit, or what this is going to put my mom through. I mean, Kell won’t love me anymore if I talk, won’t be my big brother. You… you wouldn’t even care enough to hit me if you knew all of me. I’d rather go out now, be the found body, than be left all a—”

Trav’s heart was going to burst through his skin and turn his bones to shrapnel.

He turned toward the wall by the staircase and screamed, “Jesus fucking Christ, Mackey, just go to fucking rehab!” and hammered the blank accepting space with his fist.

And then crumpled on a muffled shriek, because he’d hit a stud in a load-bearing wall and broken three bones in his wrist and hand.

K
ELL
DROVE
them to the hospital. Mackey sat in the back, holding an ice pack over his wrist. The silence in the car was overwhelming.

“Kell, could you put on some music or something?” Mackey asked plaintively, and Trav puffed out a laugh through the black haze of pain in his arm.

“No,” Kell muttered. “Mackey, you sure he wasn’t beating on you?”

“Absolutely,” Mackey said, nodding sincerely.

Trav thought about rolling down the window and throwing up. “I’ll call Heath and resign,” he said, his lungs like lead. “Obviously I’m no good at—”

“Shut up,” Mackey and Kell said together, without heat.

Then Kell spoke up. “Mackey?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t make me find your fucking body, okay? Don’t make me have to tell Mom we let you overdose or shoot yourself or whatever the fuck else you’ve got in mind. Don’t fucking make me. I mean, I ain’t been the greatest big brother on the planet, but dammit, Mackey, I fucking deserve more than that.”

Mackey tried not to whimper. “Kell….” He closed his eyes, and Trav found he needed to look at him,
needed
to see, get a glimpse of whatever was going on through his head. “Man,” he whispered. “If I had a bottle of Percocet, I’d take the whole fucking thing. Trav was right about that. I need it. My insides… what’s inside my head….”

“Then get it out!” Kell yelled.

They pulled up to the ER, and Kell stopped short. They were all thrown against their seat belts, and Trav howled like a wounded badger as he jostled his hand.

It didn’t even put a hitch in Kell’s stride. “Get it out,” Kell repeated, not screaming. “Go talk to the doctor. Talk to Trav. Talk to
someone
if you can’t talk to us, but don’t make me find your fucking body. I swear to God, Mackey, I can’t do it. You’ve got all the words in your heart—what kind of words do you think will be left in mine if that’s what I’ve got to see in my brain every day? Whatever you’ve got to fucking do, you do it, do you understand?”

Mackey took a breath, and another. “Let’s get Trav to the doc,” he said, his voice thick. “One thing at a time, right?”

He slid out of the car and ran around to open the door, and Kell met agonized eyes with Trav in the rearview mirror. “Please, Mr. Ford,” Kell said. “I don’t want you hitting him anymore, but could you please talk some fucking sense into him?”

“It’s going to be hard to do when I have to resign,” Trav said honestly.

Kell snorted in disgust. “Resign? Are you shitting me? It’s like you don’t even
know
Mackey if you don’t want to hit him.”

M
ACKEY
WAS
surprisingly competent with the details, and when he was done talking to the nurse, they sat side by side in the little ER cubicle, waiting for X-rays. They had given Trav some pain meds, which he took, and he was aware and more than aware that Mackey watched him hungrily as his throat worked, washing the pills into his system.

“Why’d you leave?” Trav asked quietly, leaning his head back against the wall and closing his eyes.

“There’s too much stuff I don’t want to talk about,” Mackey said, just as quiet.

Trav sighed and reached for his phone, working a one-handed dial to Heath’s office.

“Who are you calling?” Mackey asked incuriously.

“Heath—I need to tell him I’m resigning.”

And just that quickly Mackey yanked his phone out of his good hand and threw it against the wall.

“You
can’t
!” Mackey begged.

Trav opened his eyes enough to see tears starting at the corners of those luminous gray eyes. “Mackey, I
hit
you—”

“Everyone wants to hit me—”

“But I
did
. Man, do you even
know
how far under my skin you’ve got to be for us to be here? But we are. And you won’t even… won’t even talk to the doc in rehab, and what’s going to happen to me? What’s going to happen to Kell and Jefferson and Stevie when you break loose and get high and your body just fucking can’t take it anymore?”

Mackey hugged his knees to his chest and took a big, shuddering breath. “I’m trying to keep it together,” he confessed brokenly. “But how am I going to tell people? How do I even
look
at Kell when someone else knows? Or Mom. Or Jefferson or Stevie?”