Beneath the Stain - Part 1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

cock.
    But Tony was shaking his head. “I’m so stupid,” he muttered, almost to himself, turning toward the drum set for no real reason. “Your brother’ll probably stuff me in a trash can again, and Jesus, this town just fucking sucks, and—” He looked up miserably, almost in tears, his chin wobbling. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. I just—”
    “I won’t tell my brother,” Mackey blurted, pulled out of his shock by the thought that, yeah, Kell probably had stuffed Tony in a trash can, because Kell wasn’t real nice to anyone weaker than him. Wasn’t nice, was probably just Kell.
    Tony’s chin wobble eased up. “Thanks,” he whispered, still miserable. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
    “I….” Mackey stood up, looked at the little gym, decked out with paper flowers and streamers by Tony and his friends, and had the sudden realization that this gym would never be for him. Or for Tony, either, really, who had just spent two hours making it pretty.
    “What’d you think?” Mackey asked, his voice gentle and confused. “We’d… dress nice and dance, like everyone else?”
    Tony shrugged, rubbing his finger on the hi-hat. “Maybe just someone to hang out with,” he mumbled, and Mackey grimaced.
    “I did not expect this,” he said, so startled he found the word/rhythm place without thinking. “That the person in my skin was so plain to someone else, I didn’t expect it. How is it you can see the guy I’ve hidden mostly from myself?”
    Tony was suddenly looking at him—really looking at him, his mouth parted, too, softly, like he was begging to be plundered. “Because you say things like that, Mackey,” he said, half-strangled. “Man… just your voice makes me hard.”
    Mackey hardened his face against that want.
    “So,” Tony said nervously into the silence. The gym was deserted, and without the people to pad it, his voice seemed to echo, unnaturally loud. “You, uhm….”
    Grant’s face popped up in the dark of Mackey’s vision. The angle of his jaw, the way his dark lashes fluttered across his gold-skinned cheeks, the unusually straight bridge of his nose.
    The way he’d turned away.
    The way Mackey would follow him.
    “I….” Mackey started, and his eyes flew open when he realized Tony had moved closer, was close enough that Mackey’s voice didn’t echo off the walls like Tony’s just had. “I can’t,” Mackey whispered, and he hurt inside when he saw Tony’s hurt on the outside. “He’s… he’s got a girlfriend.”
    “Oh,” Tony said softly. “That sucks. Straight guys—it hurts.”
    And because he could, because Mackey had been kissed, because he’d had Grant’s mouth on his body, he had to spill this secret. To somebody.
    “He’s not straight,” Mackey whispered, turned away. Because if Grant wasn’t straight, and Tony wasn’t straight, neither was Mackey.
    “Oh.”
    Mackey busied himself looping the cords from the amp to the guitars. He knew the trick to it that kept them out from underfoot but let the guys on stage have some movement. “This conversation goes nowhere but us,” he muttered.
    “That’s a rule,” Tony said, like he was teaching.
    “What is?” Okay, this cord to Grant’s axe, this cord to Kell’s, this cord to the keyboard….
    “You don’t out anyone without their permission. It’s a violation.”
    That , of all things, actually made Mackey laugh. “Where do you learn something like that?” he asked, actually looking up from the cords.
    “The Internet,” Tony said, relaxing in increments. “It’s the only place you can see other gay people without being hunted by torches and pitchforks.”
    Mackey sighed and looked around the gym. Kell made fun of prom, but he’d heard Jeff and Stevie say something quiet to each other about how the right girl wouldn’t be there and it was a shame.
    “I’m sorry,” he said after a minute. “All this work and it’s not for you.”
    Tony shrugged. “See, what