Beneath the Stain - Part 3 (3 page)

Trav nodded. “Yeah. I believe it. Well, Mackey’s going to have to leave some of that stuff behind if he wants to move on with his life, you know?”

Jefferson snorted. “You still don’t know shit. But you asked more questions in half an hour than Gerry did in a year. You might not be a total asshole.”

Trav had nothing to say to that, but that was okay because in that moment, Heath’s announcement came on the television.

Trav turned the volume up, and Trav’s oldest friend announced to the whole world that the person responsible for Mackey’s aggravated assault (as the police were calling it to the press) had been captured. Trav turned down the television and sighed.

“What’s that mean?” Jefferson asked, subdued and not nearly as cocky as he’d just been.

“It means Mackey’s going to have to make a decision when he wakes up.”

“What’s that?”

Oh, this was such a shitty choice. “It means he can tell the cops to press for assault and maybe get two years from it, or it means he can tell the cops he was raped and this Charleston Klum can get fifteen or twenty years. But it’s going to have to be Mackey’s call.”

“I’m picking the thing that has me move the least,” Mackey slurred.

Trav turned to him, relief washing his body cold. “You little shit—how long have you been awake?”

“I heard, like… your last sentence.”

“Oh. That’s bad.” Trav didn’t have any words for how bad that was. “I… I’m so—”

“How come I don’t remember?”

“You were drugged out of your tiny little body, Mackey. I bet your head aches like—”

“Like it was popped off my tiny little body and used for soccer.”

Trav laughed helplessly, because it was a funny image and because the tightness in his chest, in his stomach, was so overwhelming that if he didn’t laugh soon, he’d throw up or forget to breathe or both.

“Yeah,” Trav said when he could talk. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

Mackey grunted. “Jefferson?”

“Yeah, Mackey?”

“Go away.”

Jefferson squeezed Mackey’s shoulder, then Trav’s, and turned around to leave the room. “I’ll call that Debra person—she’ll send the car for me.”

Trav pulled up a chair and sat eye level with Mackey so he didn’t have to sit up.

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 assau
lting 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 an
hour
, because your band would have thought you went somewhere to get high and get laid. You
need
it, 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? How
excited
would 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 to
help
! “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.

“Middle-class—not enough money to pay for college, but lots of expectations that we’d make it through.”

Mackey laughed a little. “Yeah. I hear you. Took me a while, you know?” It sounded like he was growing tired.

“To what?”

“To realize that rich wasn’t just the way you spent money, it was the way you think.”

That had never occurred to Trav before he started doing the books for and management of Mackey’s band. “Yes—well, I’m starting to think you’re right.” He sighed and made himself more comfortable, wiggling back into the chair. He couldn’t stroke Mackey’s hair from this angle, but he kept his hand there, fingertips touching his head. He felt weary deep in his bones, and he figured he was going to fall asleep in this uncomfortable hospital chair. Well, Mackey was okay, so he didn’t mind.

“So that was it? You saw a guy you couldn’t have—”

“I saw a guy I might have loved.” Might haves. Painful might haves—Terry was becoming one of those. Trav hadn’t seen Mackey for five minutes, and he’d panicked. But he and Terry had been split up for almost a month, and it hadn’t occurred to him that Terry wouldn’t be where Trav had left him. Yeah—Trav hadn’t learned much from that encounter in Paris, had he? “Anyway, I realized I wanted that for myself. I wanted to love. I mean”— Trav’s laugh rasped in his throat, bit into his tissues, poisoned his bones—“I’m not very
good
at it. I’ve had some really false starts, but I want the job and lover and the home. It’s what people get when they live well, you know?”

Mackey didn’t say anything, and Trav wondered if he’d fallen asleep. Then Mackey pulled both of his hands under his chin, being careful of the IV needle. “What’s that have to do with rehab?” he asked when he was comfortable.

Trav sighed. “I had to be honest with myself about what I wanted before I could get it. You want drugs, Mackey, and you can’t let yourself have them. You need to be honest with yourself about why you want them, and that second part might be easier.”

Mackey made a sour sort of gurgle. “I’ll think of a good argument for this tomorrow,” he said. That sounded pretty wise. “Heath said they had the guy in custody—can they get him for drugging me without the whole….” Mackey’s voice skewed and clattered. He didn’t want to say it. Trav didn’t blame him.

“I’ll talk to the police tomorrow,” he said gently. “I don’t know why he targeted you—”

“’Cause I’m easy ass. Everyone knows that.” God—no apology, just frank admission. Trav’s heart hurt even more.

“Well, you don’t have to be,” Trav muttered. “But that’s another discussion. We don’t have to mention the rape, to the press or anyone else. But you should know….” Oh hell. Trav had seen court cases destroy as many victims as perpetrators. As an MP, he’d always thought the cost was worth it, but here, in this hospital room with a kid whose whole life had been a case of coming up from behind, he wasn’t sure. But Mackey wasn’t a child—hadn’t Trav maintained that from the beginning? He was old enough to make his own decisions.

“He’ll get less time,” Mackey grunted. “Yeah, well, more power to him. Can we get a restraining order? If he comes anywhere near us, you can kill him?”

Trav’s shoulders shook. “I may do that without court approval,” he said, not entirely sure he was kidding. “You’re rambling, Mackey. Now go to sleep and think about what I said, okay?”

“’Bout what? You talked a lot.”

Well, he had. “About rehab. I want you to take care of yourself.”

Mackey closed those big gray eyes and yawned into his hands. “Thank you for the story. The one about the boy, in Paris. It was pretty. Like a song.”

A few moments later, his breathing changed, and Trav was left in the hospital room feeling wrung out.
So much to talk about, Mackey. So much you got wrong.
But who was Trav to talk? Trav had let him down too. Trav was about to room with his band because he was so fucking lost. Who did that? Sure as shit,
Debra
wasn’t going to sleep in the hotel room or the new house when that came around. Debra
probably had her own home and her own spouse and a bunch of boys who played on the football team or something, but Trav?

Trav was staying right here, next to Mackey, next to his brothers and his band.

Because apparently that was where Trav belonged.

T
RAV
FELL
asleep just after
Mackey, leaning his head on the mattress.

He awakened just a few inches from Mackey, close enough to smell his sweat and the faint patchouli of his body wash and the antiseptics from the cleaning the hospital had given him. Mackey still slept, and Trav had spent moments just looking at his small, peaked face, the pointed cheekbones, the slight overbite, the slightly darker freckle that rode the crooked bridge of his nose.