Beneath the Stain - Part 4 Read Free

letting that warmth and that smell seep into him.
    “I want more of these,” he insisted, his voice muffled against Trav’s pectoral.
    “Yeah, fine,” Trav said breathlessly. He pulled back and grimaced at Mackey. “You need to finish the program first,” he cautioned.
    Mackey managed to pull a blazing smile from his toes. “Man, fucking try and stop me. I’m not doing this again. It’s gonna be a slide down a snow hill on a sled after this, you feel me?”
    To his delight, Trav tightened his arms. “Like I’ve got a fucking choice,” Trav muttered, and finally let him go.
    The band walked down the nice concrete walkway to the limo, and Mackey’s pocket buzzed. It was his mother.
    Trav seems nice. You two an item?
    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 he was Kell’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
     
     
    T RAV WATCHED the interview with the guys when it aired on E! , 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 by everything , 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