Beneath the Stain - Part 7 Read Online Free PDF

said, and Mackey wanted to weep when he didn’t sound grudging or hostile or anything. “But Mackey jumped on his back and wrapped his arm around the guy’s throat. Didn’t quite put him down, but it did slow him down before the cops could Taser him.” Everyone laughed, and Mackey brushed Trav’s hand with a careful fingertip. God, he was trying. Thank you, Trav, thank you thank you thank you.
    “Man, Mackey was always the fiercest, but he couldn’t pick his fights for shit. He’d get whaled on by the biggest guys. Kell, how many times did we have to beat up little kids to keep him out of the shit?”
    Kell groaned. “God, it was a nightmare. And Mackey, in like, the third grade—he’s like that cartoon, right? The ‘I’m a chicken hawk and I eat chicken!’—and then he’d walk up to the biggest, toughest guys and nail them in the jaw. It’s like the whole school was lining up to dust his weenie little ass and Grant and I were taking guys out in hallways to keep them from jumping my little pain-in-the-ass brother!”
    “Well, you suck,” Mackey drawled, “’cause I know a bunch of them slipped through!”
    “Well, dude….” Kell looked at Blake and shook his head. “He is so much less a pain in the ass now that he’s come out. Man, I think if teachers knew that, they’d be asking all the scrappy kids at school if they were gay, just to get it out there and stop having to bandage up the poor Mormon kids who didn’t see it coming!”
    Blake grunted. “I’m sayin’.” He looked at Grant and shook his head just like Kell had. “Man, he was insufferable. I was just not ever gonna be you. And then I found out why, and yanno, I didn’t mind so much.”
    The group laughed like it was all a long time ago and it hadn’t ever ripped Mackey into little pieces and stuffed him full of chemicals so he could get up and do it again.
    But that was okay, because Grant laughed too and met Mackey’s eyes in a moment of understanding for just the both of them.
    He’d hurt too. Suddenly Mackey knew—they’d both been hurt. The only thing that had put the hurt to an end for Grant had been the end itself.
    Mackey had been the lucky one.
    “Oh!” Grant said excitedly. “There’s my girl!”
    Samantha had put on weight, but more than that, she’d put on lines , deep, deep, bitter ones in the sides of her mouth. She looked thirty-five instead of twenty-six, and she walked with the kind of aggression Mackey had seen in the women in town. The women Sam’s age who had to buy their eight- or nine-year-olds recorders in the music store but who had to sacrifice their own shoes to do it—those women walked like Sam did. Like she’d given too damned much already and she was going to begrudge the whole fucking world until she got her some back.
    “You said you wanted to see her,” she said, her voice hard.
    Grant smiled hopefully into her eyes. “Yeah we did. Here, let me hold her a minute.”
    She was barely a toddler—still tiny, less than a year and a half old. She was dressed in a little pink sweat suit, with her curly brown hair mercilessly scraped into two corkscrew pigtails on the top of her head.
    “Daddy! Kisses!”
    Grant took her, his arms visibly trembling a little with the weight. “Y’all, I want you to meet Katy. She’s gonna be trouble, and she’s my baby, so y’all need to watch out for her or I’m coming back to haunt you, you hear?”
    “That’s morbid,” Sam said. “Grant, I wish you—”
    “Sam,” Grant said, looking at her beseechingly, “you haven’t even said hi to the guys.”
    “Hi,” she said resentfully. She didn’t even look at Mackey. Her gaze lingered on Blake for a moment, and Grant introduced them. “You don’t look gay,” she said suspiciously.
    Blake caught Mackey’s eye and grimaced. “I’m not, mostly,” he said. “I leave that to Trav and Mackey. They’re good at it, so it’s okay.”
    Mackey chuckled deliberately. “Well, I’m getting better