Beneath the Stain - Part 1 (8 page)

Grant’s jaw clenched so tight, Mackey could see a vein in his temple throbbing. “I don’t know how you do it,” he said roughly. “The stage thing. You get up on stage and… and the music owns you, and you don’t worry about anything. Any day now, you’re going to leap into the crowd and they’ll carry you.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his slender throat. “I’ve always got a part of me thinking, ‘I’ll fall.’ ’Cause I know my folks wouldn’t pick me up if I did. But you—you’ve never had a safety net, and you think you can fly.”

Mackey opened his mouth and closed it, and his brain tried to repaint and recut the jigsaw puzzle of what life was like. Failed. He was left with a pile of rubble, impressions of color, snapshots of sound, minor chords and royal blues, bright major chords and golds.

“The music owns me,” he repeated, feeling dumb. “I
am
the music. I close my eyes and… I
am
that chord, or that moment, or that dance. I
am
….”
The crowd, the guitar, the mood, the lyrics, the heartbeats, the drumbeats, the guitar chords, the sweat, the muscle, the movement, the song.
“You can’t fall when you’re there,” he said and swallowed hard.

“
You
can’t fall,” Grant told him gently. “I can.”

Breathing. When did it get to be such a hard thing to do? “Are you saying you don’t want me?”

Grant made a sound like a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh at all. “God, Mackey—you made me hard just coming down the stairs. Of course I want you. I’m saying… I’m saying my plans for us are… are tonight. I don’t know when there will be more. I don’t know when I’ll get the guts to break up with my girlfriend or tell my parents I’m….”

The silence in the car transcended the stereo, transcended car noise, transcended breathing.

“Gay,” Mackey said. One of them had to. “We’re fags, Grant. And we’re in love.”

Grant nodded. “That,” he said. “I don’t know if—when… I can’t even say it out loud to you.”

Mackey leaned his head against the window and stared sightlessly at the bleached landscape of Northern California. “Gay,” he whispered. “Faggots. Fudge-packers. Cocksuckers. Fairies. Boy pussies. Fruits. Queers. Nancies. Ho-mo-sex-u-als. That’s me. Mackey the faggot.”

“Shut up,” Grant said, his voice thick. “I’m the guy who wants you.”

Mackey took a deep breath, and then another, and shoved the words back down in his throat. “Can you say it to me?” he begged.

“Gay,” Grant said, so quiet Mackey almost missed it. “I’m gay. And I want you.”

Okay, then. Grant, Kell’s friend, who was so handsome and so mature and so self-possessed—if
he
said it, it must not be that bad.

“’Kay,” Mackey said, like they’d decided something important.

They drove quietly for the next hour until finally the music penetrated the thick blanket of silence and Mackey started to sing along with “Stairway to Heaven.” Grant sang counterpoint.

That was the magic line, right there. The music happened, and that conversation got to disappear. They were young and getting the hell out of their hometown, if only for a day—there wasn’t anything wrong with that, was there?

They stopped for lunch in Vacaville at the BJ’s by the outlet stores, and Grant paid for their burgers, which were so big they crated up half of Mackey’s for later.

As they got back on the freeway, Mackey looked over his shoulders at all of the name-brand stores.

“What’re you looking at?” Grant asked, his voice relaxed and warm. It was like that moment when he was scared of falling, scared like a little kid, hadn’t happened.

“I just… you know. That outfit you picked for me to perform in.”

“Getting threadbare?” Grant asked, and Mackey grunted.

“I have to wash it every time we perform,” he said frankly. “God, I sweat like a guilty man up there.”

Grant hmmed. “I’ve got money saved,” he said quietly. “Can I buy you another outfit? For stage?”

Mackey sighed. “I… I mean, I’ve got some money. I could buy it.” But they both knew the money the boys made went mostly to food and groceries and regular clothes and shoes. New clothes from Walmart and not used ones from Goodwill were a luxury to the Sanders boys.

“Let me,” Grant said. “I don’t have any promises for you, Mackey. Can I just…
do
something for you?”

Mackey laughed, low and dirty. “I thought that was the plan,” he said, and Grant laughed too. But for a moment, Mackey had this fantasy, a stupid one, of the two of them walking into a store and not worrying about money, and shopping for clothes to wear out on a good night, like prom.

Grant had good taste and Mackey had a tiny body, and it would be fun to buy Grant something butch and leather and badass and slick, to go with his chest and his height. They could dress to match and laugh at that shit and dress totally opposite and see how they looked together and….

Mackey shook his head. Like all the Sanders boys, he was practical to the bone. Clothes were for wearing. If they needed something good to perform in, that was fine, but otherwise? No. Not for Mackey James Sanders.

He swallowed hard, already playing with words like
suit
and
slick
and
badass
and
hick
, his brain trotting in a rhythm of swagger and strut.
Well, why not
? the practical side of him asked, even as the other half of his brain was engaged with the song.
ZZ Top did it and no one accused
them
of being fags.

By the time Grant pulled up to his uncle’s house, Mackey had opened the ever-present notebook and written the song down, notating it with chords and basic rhythms and everything. (One of the best things he’d gotten from working at the music store was his own book on music notation. He’d known how to read it, basically, but learning the complicated stuff—time, sixteenth notes, drum rhythms—that made telling the band what to do
so
much easier.)

When he met Grant’s aunt and uncle—two nice people who seemed straight out of the television with their almost coordinating slacks sets, blond-streaked hair, and long-faced features—he was able to get his head in the people space and shake hands and smile and talk and not be freakish and distracted. When Grant’s uncle Davis asked them if they didn’t want to sleep on the couch and the floor, he even managed not to send Grant a panicked look, because after that bitter, painful conversation on the way down, the last thing he wanted was a reason to back out.

“That’s nice of you, Uncle Davy,” Grant said politely, “but Mackey here has never been to the pier—I thought I’d take him and get some clam chowder and see some seals and stuff.”

His aunt Ashleigh eyed Mackey’s faded cargo shorts and thin T-shirt with bare grace. “Are you sure the Embarcadero is your little friend’s scene?” she asked delicately. “It’s sort of a… a merchandise trap, you know?”

Grant blinked at her. “It’s my treat,” he said evenly. “Mackey here writes all the songs for our band—this is my way of giving back.”

Davis laughed, sort of over-hearty. “Yeah, your dad told me about your band. He says if those boys put half their energy into school as they put into the band, they could have all gone away to college!”

Grant swallowed and pulled out a smile that had stiff plastic edges. “Well, I
did
put that much energy into school, and Dad
still
wanted me to stay home, so I get to play in the band whether he likes it or not,” he said, and Mackey wanted to grab his hand. Yeah. Money didn’t buy an education, and it didn’t buy easy.

Davis held out both hands like an adult to a tantruming child. “Okay! Okay, don’t get testy, Grant. We’re just saying, you know—”

“You’re saying you expect me to run back into the gutter where I came from,” Mackey said, but he batted his eyes at Davis and winked. “Don’t worry, Mr. Adams, this rat knows how to find the ship back home.”

The condescending smiles fell from Davis and Ashleigh like flaking makeup.

“We weren’t implying…,” Ashleigh said, her fair skin flushing as they stood out in the driveway in the eighty-degree day.

Mackey lowered his chin and looked out at her from under his brows and bangs. “Of course you did, Mrs. Adams, but don’t worry. Grant doesn’t hang out with stupid people—he knows exactly what you were saying. Are you ready to go, Grant? IHOP was a long ways away.”

Grant was glaring and smirking at him at the same time. Mackey got that a lot—and often from Grant—so he figured they were okay. “Yeah, Mackey. Uncle Davis, you got the keys?”

“Grant,” Davis said, his eyes darting to Mackey, who was still giving him the faintly predatory, faintly flirtatious look that he usually reserved for the stage. “You don’t have to… you boys don’t have to—”

“McKay is my best friend’s brother,” Grant said, and Mackey could hear a sort of hurt in his voice: these people had let him down. “He’s my friend. You couldn’t have been nice to him for a conversation in the driveway? I’ll take the keys now.”

Davis handed them over with a miserable look. “We’ll look forward to seeing you around the holidays,” he said weakly, and Grant shrugged.

“Yeah, why not.” Then they got into the old car—which was almost as nice as the new car, even if it was a really lame champagne Mercedes instead of a black Lexus—and drove away.

They got back on El Camino Real, which, as far as Mackey could tell, connected the peninsula with San Francisco and hence to the rest of the world, before Grant spoke.

“God, that was uncomfortable. I’m sorry my people are such freaks.”

Mackey shrugged. “I’m sorry I’m an asshole,” he said, but he was chuckling as he said it, and Grant laughed.

“You’re not sorry at all, you little shit!”

Mackey leaned back in the luxurious seat. “Not even a little. Can we go see the ocean now?” He’d never been to the ocean. He lived up in the mountains, so he knew trees and snow and vast sweeps of sky, but he’d had glimpses of the bay as they’d hit Berkeley and then 101, and he liked it very much.

“Yeah. You know, they have ferry rides. We’ve got a hotel—Dad let me book a nice one on the Embarcadero—so how about we go check in, ditch the car in paid parking, and then get something to eat. And then—”

“Ferry ride?” Mackey asked, sitting up excitedly.

He saw Grant slide his eyes quickly sideways, because of the unfamiliar traffic.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice gruff with wonder. “Ferry ride.”

The chow was decent—Mackey ate a hamburger that was grilled right, with bleu cheese and mushrooms and a sort of gravy he could have lived on. They ate in an outdoor area that gave him a view of the skyscrapers, and he held his face to the sun and the shade of the scudding clouds in the dazzling sky and tried to smell the ocean. It was just over the line of shops at his back, but he could feel it in the breeze. It wasn’t until they’d walked the half mile down to Pier 39 that Mackey got a real feel for it, the vast and the cold ocean, looking out into the San Francisco Bay.

Grant dragged him by the hand to the touristy places first, ignoring anyone who might look, and bought him a thick fleece sweatshirt that said
I left my <3 in San Francisco
. Mackey protested, but Grant blew him off, saying it was his fault because he hadn’t remembered a sweatshirt like Grant told him to. Then, still hand in hand, they headed to the ferry with the blue-and-gold insignia.

Within half an hour, they stood on the prow of a ferry, Mackey leaning against the rail and catching the spray in his face as they headed to the big golden bridge that all the songs were written about.

Mackey was cold in spite of the sweatshirt, and Grant leaned against his back, bracing himself on the rail with a hand on either side of Mackey.

Years later, when their lives had turned out very differently, Mackey would remember that moment, the freedom at his face and the safety at his back, and it would be the diamond in his mind, the one clear moment that taught him what love was all about. Even if the diamond was flawed, it was the first diamond he’d ever grasped so tight it left edges imprinted on his palm, and he would clutch it to his chest until his heart bled, sure nobody but Grant Adams, his brother’s best friend and the kid he’d grown up with, could give him that feeling.

When they got back, Grant took him to a nice restaurant, one where they sat down and put napkins on their laps. Nobody looked at Mackey twice, with his tourist sweatshirt and all, and right there, while they were talking about the ferry ride and all the people who had come into the bay hoping for a new life, Grant put his hand on top of Mackey’s in public. Mackey’s whole body grew warm, tingled, caught fire like the pit in the center of the restaurant.

The whole day—the casual touches, the subtle possession, that giddy hour with Grant leaning against his back on the ferry while the deck pitched under their feet—that caught up with him right there, and his body remembered that it was made of hormones, and his cock reminded him that it had been half-hard all day.

Grant paid the bill and left a tip Mackey’s mother probably dreamed about, and then grabbed Mackey’s hand again, lacing their fingers together as they hustled toward the hotel.

Mackey’s brain must have shorted out then, too glutted on the new place, on the new experience, because he came to when Grant closed the hotel room door behind them.

Slowly, like he was dreaming, Mackey turned toward the boy who had brought him here.

He was unprepared for Grant’s charge, and his strong arms taking him at the waist and bearing him back to the bed, mouth fused hotly to Mackey’s like he was pulling in his soul.

Mackey devoured back, shoving at Grant’s pants clumsily, and Grant left him sprawled on the bed while he dropped his jeans and kicked off his shoes. Mackey did the same thing, unashamed and unafraid, wild in his need.

Their bodies, naked, skin on skin, were enough to make Mackey shudder. He started to beg, mouthing Grant’s neck, his collarbone, his shoulders—

“No hickeys!” Grant said roughly, and Mackey pulled back for a minute, remembering his mom’s observation on prom night.