Beneath the Stain - Part 5 by Amy Lane Read Free Book Online Page A

for life.
    Trav was too tired to care at this point. When he let himself into the hotel room, Mackey was wrapped in a robe, towel-drying his hair and talking on the phone to the front desk. Trav’s stomach growled and he caught Mackey’s eye and held up two fingers. “Double,” he mouthed, and Mackey winked and nodded.
    Trav’s soiled clothes hit the tiled floor before he even remembered that he might not have any clean clothes in the morning, and as he stepped under the hot water, he found himself wondering if they’d let him on the next plane wearing a robe.
    He scrubbed hard, glad for the moment that Mackey wasn’t there. He needed the time alone in his own skin, the heat and the ocean roar in his ears his only companions.
    God, so many things about this night he couldn’t believe.
    He couldn’t believe he’d allowed Heath to take over a detail like the equipment. But so much of the past month had been desperately trying not to leave Mackey alone, and he’d needed to take Heath’s word for it for that to happen. He couldn’t believe he’d flown nonstop to get to Oakland just to let Mackey see he could be a stand-up guy. And he couldn’t believe he’d let Mackey haul him into a greenroom and give him the blowjob of his life.
    Especially that last one.
    Get up in the morning, go running, have breakfast, work, have lunch, do some light exercise to keep your mind up, make calls, do work, maybe have a snack, enjoy leisure time, sleep, repeat. He liked the order of things: it had worked in the military, and he’d made it work in his real life.
    But not with Mackey. With Mackey, doing what you were supposed to do, behaving logically, just didn’t fly. With Mackey there needed to be a better reason than logic. He liked sleeping in a corner or on the floor. If he was going to sleep on a bed, he needed a better reason than “you’re supposed to.” Truth was, he could be just as demanding as Trav sometimes—but never just because the world expected a certain thing. He required the best in the name of his craft being its best.
    Mackey had a way of turning things upside down, like making the corner between the bed and the wall home and making a dress shirt sluttier than nothing at all.
    And Trav, for all he liked order, didn’t feel like his life was really in order unless Mackey was in the next room.
    On that thought, he turned off the water and toweled himself dry, feeling strangely at peace. Of all things, knowing Mackey held Trav’s equilibrium in his callused hands evened Trav out. There wasn’t a force in the world that could change Mackey unless Mackey let it happen. Yeah, Trav had taken him early, borrowed him against the time when he’d be completely healthy, whole inside himself, but Trav couldn’t make that happen any quicker if he kept turning Mackey away. All he’d do was maybe lose Mackey by not having any faith.
    He couldn’t bear that thought, not at all.
    When he got out of the shower, Mackey was lying on the bed on his stomach, watching Nick at Nite, eating a hamburger. His robe was rucked up past the bottom of his ass, his thighs spread wide enough for Trav to see everything, including his balls, but Mackey didn’t seem to care. He was laughing at a kids’ cartoon and licking ketchup from his fingers when Trav walked into the room and slid a grateful hand along the back of his thigh.
    And stopped and grimaced at the black marks surfacing on his pale skin.
    “Jesus, kid, did that happen when you were crowd surfing?”
    Mackey turned to him and grinned. “Yeah—ain’t they somethin’? I got a doozy on my hip and my ribs and my shoulder too. It was madness out there tonight!”
    Trav grunted and resisted the urge to flop him over on his back so he could check every bruise and make sure it wasn’t worse.
    “You do that? On purpose?” he asked, trying—failing—to keep the creak of panic out of his voice.
    Mackey threw a look of disgust over his shoulder, still munching on his