Free Beneath the Stain - Part 3 by Amy Lane

asked in the sudden silence. He knew, but he needed Mackey to say it.
    “Grant,” Mackey whispered. “Grant Adams. He and my brothers were friends since the third grade.”
    Trav swallowed, then swallowed again. He closed his eyes and saw the colors of rage, and then opened his eyes and tried to breathe. A part of him, the rational part, told him that Kell wasn’t that much older than Mackey. Mackey was precocious as hell—there was no real abuse here, just kids getting it on.
    The part that was in the ER with an aching wrist and a devastated, emotionally stunted rock star wanted to hunt Grant Adams down and put him in a room with the guy who’d raped Mackey in an alleyway.
    Not the same thing.
    No, it wasn’t. Grant, with his heartache and his baby daughter and his leaving, had probably done more damage to Mackey than his rapist. The assault was par for the course, as far as Mackey was concerned. One more proof that everything in the world was out of control, including who you loved and what you could do to make them stay, or who took advantage of you when you were passed out in an alleyway.
    But it couldn’t be fixed now, not while Trav’s wrist was swelling exponentially and Mackey was probably running probabilities on leaving the hospital high. Trav saw the orderly coming and dropped a kiss on Mackey’s hair.
    “Time to go,” Trav said reluctantly. God—all this time hoping Mackey would break, and now he’d broken and it was Trav they were putting back together.
    “Don’t quit,” Mackey begged, whispering through a clogged throat.
    “I’ll make you a deal,” Trav said, standing up gingerly to wait for the wheelchair. “I won’t quit if you go back to rehab. And make it stick.”
    Mackey wiped his cheeks on the knees of his jeans. “Tomorrow morning,” he said. He hopped off of the ER bed and waited for Trav to sit himself wearily down in the wheelchair. After the orderly grabbed the handles, Mackey moved to the side with Trav’s good hand. “I’ll see you through this first,” he assured him.
    Trav breathed through his nose and squeezed Mackey’s hand. “It’s a deal,” he said.
    Trav had been shot before—more than once. He’d been beaten and knifed, and he’d been through the hospital just fine. His parents had freaked out, and he’d gotten the best care packages in Afghanistan while waiting for active duty, but he’d never been scared and had never needed reassurance. Life or death, Trav was steady. He knew right from wrong and he knew to enforce one and not to tolerate the other, and he was happy living and dying by that.
    But he didn’t say a word of this to Mackey. Mackey stood by his side, clutching his good hand, while they X-rayed him and set his wrist in a splint with a promise to put it in a cast the next day. He clutched Trav’s hand while they got his pain meds and then called for a town car and were driven home.
    It was late when they walked back into the house. The others had left dinner out for them—some sort of health-food casserole from Shelia—but neither of them ate. They went without speaking to Trav’s bedroom.
    If Trav was hoping for approval, he was disappointed. Mackey looked around the bedroom with dead, exhausted eyes, kicked his shoes and jeans off in a puddle, and then grabbed the coverlet from the top of the bed, wrapped himself up in it, and curled up next to the bed, by the end table. He fell asleep before Trav could get back with more blankets.
    Trav lay in the darkness, listening to him breathe as he slept, and wished he could do the same. The feeling of that lithe little body, limp and sad next to his in the ER, seemed to be imprinted on his skin, etched into his muscles. He started doing math in his head. Mackey was twenty-one, right? Mackey was almost twenty-one? Trav was thirty-five. That was fourteen years. That made Trav a pedophile. He was worse than Grant Adams, the kid who’d loved Mackey and left him. He was Daddy—Mackey had obviously