Beneath the Stain - Part 7 Read Online Free Page B

to be needed,” Mackey mumbled, and he felt Trav’s kiss on the top of the head.
    “And I am,” he said.
    Mackey thought about the next day and shuddered. “You really are,” he said fervently.
    God. What would he say?
    Everyone knew where Grant Adams lived. People whispered about it when they passed the long, curving driveway lined with decorative shrubs and framed with wrought iron. The suburb sported a couple of massive houses, hollowed out from the oak and manzanita that lined the hills. Landscapers reformed the earth, making things lush and green and trimmed, even in the summer, and even though most of the houses had an attached “farm” for horses and really expensive showpiece stock, what greeted visitors driving up was the grand multistory house—in this case faux brick—with gables and insets and bright black shale tiling the roof.
    Grant’s mom had come from the South, so they’d tried to make it look like Kentucky, which was funny because the terrain in this part of California was hilly and dry. Outside of this tiny little patch of perfect green, the landscape consisted of red dirt and brown grass—even behind the house itself—but driving up, it seemed like a whole other world.
    When Mackey and his brothers were younger, they had never, not once, questioned that Grant would rather hang out in their two-bedroom apartment or, when Stevie’s dad wasn’t there, in Stevie’s garage.
    For one thing, it didn’t feel quite real that their friend Grant, who traded his Lunchables for Kell’s PB&J, would come from such a grand place. Yes, his clothes were better, but he got just as dirty as the Sanders boys when they played at school. Yes, when they started the band, his equipment was always new, but he worked just as hard as they did learning how to play it.
    The fact that when he was sixteen he got to drive his mom’s car was awesome—but he would have been their friend if he’d had to ride his bike.
    He’d told Kell once—when Mackey could hear—that he’d threatened to ride his bike when his mom didn’t give him a ride. He’d been desperate to escape.
    So the house on the hill had never really seemed grand or real to Mackey—or any of his brothers. It had seemed more like a gate-keeping dragon, a brooding presence that allowed Grant to escape its grasp on occasion but that he had to elude if he wanted to play with his brothers. Yeah, sure, the Sanders kids were scrappy and their clothes were torn, they wore their shoes until the duct tape fell off, and sometimes they had PB with no J, but they didn’t have to escape a dragon to play with their brothers.
    After Grant’s first kiss and his first admission that he’d be with Sam when he loved Mackey, that house had seemed even grander, even more imposing, even more of an obstacle to Grant ever coming out to play.
    As the SUV glided up the recently paved road, Mackey had a sudden, absurd thought: The dragon was never going to let Grant out again. After all this time of Grant escaping in little pieces to play with his brothers, it was finally going to swallow him whole.
    Briony and Shelia had stayed with Mackey’s mom. Cheever had gone back to school that morning, so Mackey was glad for his mom, but he missed the two of them. They didn’t talk much to each other, but they had bonded, being the only women in the group, and somehow Briony’s sarcasm made moments like this easier to bear.
    “What are you thinking?” Trav asked next to him. He had his arm slung over the back of the seat, which looked only natural because the lot of them were cramped, even in the big modified Tahoe, but Mackey knew he did it to give Mackey a place to hide.
    “I’m thinking that even if this place is sunshine and fucking roses, I’m going to hate it like poison,” Mackey said passionately, and his voice carried.
    “God, me too,” Kell muttered. “I swear, we see houses bigger than this every day, but somehow… I mean, he used to sneak out. I remember his