Paint It Black Read online

  “He’s nobody,” Cheever whispered. “He’s a sniveling baby, crying on the floor, just letting shit happen to him that nobody wants to know.”

  Blake made a hurt sound. “I’ve been that kid,” he said softly. “That kid can grow into a decent person. You just gotta let him cry a little, let him know he’s heard.”

  Cheever’s breath was long and shaky, and his eyes kept leaking tears, but that terrifying storm of weeping seemed to be kept at bay. “Who wants to listen to that kid?” Cheever asked after that long breath. “I sure don’t.”

  “I do,” Blake said, surprising himself. “I’ve been waiting for that kid to talk to me for eight long goddamned years.”

  Cheever’s eyes fastened hungrily on his face. “I wanted to not be a fuckup,” he moaned. “I wanted to be someone worth listening to.”

  So needy. This kid—all his coolness, all his arrogance—he’d been trying to earn their approval?

  Blake cupped his cheek. “Aw, kid. You wanted to not be a fuckup? You were born into the wrong damned family. We are fuckup city here. We just make that work for us. Welcome to Outbreak Monkey, right?”

  That got a smile from Cheever, surprisingly enough. He used his free hand, the one not cuffed to the rail, to capture Blake’s palm against his cheek.

  “I’m glad it was you,” he said, which surprised the hell out of Blake, “who found me.”

  He didn’t say why, but his eyes fluttered closed, and Blake breathed a sigh of relief. That rot was still there, festering, needing to be bled out, but maybe Cheever’s heart could rest for a little bit before it did.

  Shelter

  CHEEVER CHECKED out after that storm of weeping, letting the procession of nurses and doctors and directions wash over him. He understood three things at this point.

  One of them was that if he ever did coke again, especially in quantity, he would probably suffer a brain aneurism and die.

  The other was that he’d needed a pint of blood and fluids after his failure with the razor blade, and that people were not going to stop looking at him as if he might try to jump off a bridge again any time soon.

  The last thing was that he’d somehow acquired Blake Manning as his own personal guardian angel in the past few hours, and the part of him that wasn’t positively wilting in shame was pathetically grateful.

  Cheever couldn’t define the emotion when he’d opened his eyes to see Blake’s narrow, average face over his bed. He’d forsaken his scruffy beard for a handlebar mustache for the past few years, but he’d shaved even that over this last tour, and what was left was surprisingly appealing. He looked like a businessman or a shopkeeper, and the only rock star thing about him was his dark brown hair, slicked back from his brow and hanging in loose curls at his nape.

  But his eyes—plain hazel, ordinary—had held so much compassion, it was like transmutation. Blake’s average features, as everyday as river rock, were suddenly transformed into gold.

  Cheever wondered if he could ever see the man as ordinary again.

  As the doctors consulted and Blake signed the papers and talked to the nurses and made sixty-dozen arrangements that had Cheever’s head spinning, all he could feel was the heat of Blake’s callused hand against his cheek.

  It was like the only thing he’d really felt since Aubrey Cooper had violated his space, his trust, and his person.

  Even as he closed his eyes in exhaustion and felt himself being carted off to another hospital with different doctors, he held on to that heat and began to hope.

  HE CAME to in what looked like a really nice hotel room, with personally chosen artwork and an in-room basin and flowers on a small table at the foot of his bed.

  Blake was there too, asleep in an armchair by the bed, his head tilted back, snoring softly. The fluorescent light wasn’t flattering—Cheever could see the acne scars on Blake’s cheeks from when he’d been a kid, and the crookedness of his nose. He’d had his teeth fixed sometime in the last few years—but Cheever remembered.

  It was one of the reasons Cheever’s brothers had trusted Blake, he guessed. Because Blake had come from a shitty background, just like theirs.

  Cheever couldn’t seem to remember being hungry or hating his clothes or being crowded into a two-bedroom apartment, like they did. He just remembered his brothers, all around him, until suddenly they weren’t.

  “Do my brothers know?” he asked into the silence.

  Blake choked on a snore and flailed, looking around. “Wha’? You okay? You feeling okay? They said to watch for tingling in places.”

  Cheever stared at him, nonplussed. “Tingling?”

  Blake grimaced. “They were worried. About bubbles in your brain. But you haven’t stroked out in the last twelve hours, so I think you’re safe.”

  Cheever groaned, not even wanting to think about all those chemicals buzzing through his body. “Safe?” Then he remembered… oh God. Not just his body. How many? How many guys had taken him while he’d been rolling around on that shitty bed? He closed his eyes and swallowed. “Never safe,” he whispered. But he didn’t want to go there. Not now. Not here. Not with Blake looking at him with those oh-so-sympathetic eyes.

  Too late. Blake was squinting at him a little.

  “What did you ask me?”

  Cheever turned away, his wrist still clanging on the bedrail. Shit. He remembered someone taking him to the bathroom the night before and handcuffing him again when he got back. So much for a room full of flowers.

  “My brothers,” he said, his chest feeling thick. “Do they know?”

  “I told Trav,” Blake said softly. “He will probably tell the others this morning. But not Mackey.”

  Cheever looked at him, frowning. “Why not?”

  “’Cause Mackey fell off an amp right before you had your little adventure, Cheever. He’s probably still in the hospital, in traction, trying not to take any painkillers and driving the staff batshit.”

  “Aw God-fucking-dammit!” Cheever tried to sit up. “My brother got hurt and nobody fucking told me—”

  “Well, we were going to tell you, but before we could even call you, your mom called us, panicking because the school wouldn’t give her a fucking answer. So how’s that?”

  Cheever scrubbed his face with his free hand. “Well, great. So you should be in Seattle; that’s what you’re telling me. You should be with my brother, making sure the family is okay, but instead, you’re here, cleaning up my fuckup. Goddammit!” He banged the bedrail with his fist. It was like his worst nightmare. His own bullshit coming back to hurt his family.

  “Now wait up there,” Blake said, standing up and stretching before coming to the bed. “You got that wrong. I am exactly where I should be, and I gotta tell you, running along the top of those amps was not the best idea Mackey ever came up with.” Blake grimaced. “But the road crew was supposed to leave a plank up there, and they fucked up and didn’t. He was going to make a leap and his foot got tangled in the mic wire, and… well, let’s just say that for once, it wasn’t Mackey’s fault.”

  Cheever let out a strangled laugh. “Jesus fuck, Blake. Is he going to be okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah!” Blake pulled out his phone and checked, smiling tiredly. “He’s gonna be fine, see?”

  He held the phone out, and Cheever checked the messages, his eyebrows going up when he realized it was a group text, and his brothers bitched at each other in text like they did in person.

  Mackey: I know you’re checking on my little brother, Blake. How the fuck is he?

  Kell: Stop bothering Blake, Mackey. He’s doing his best and you’re gonna hurt yourself.

  Mackey: I’m fine. I’m peachy. I’ll run a goddamned marathon tomorrow. HOW’S FUCKING CHEEVER, MAN, TRAV WON’T TELL ME SHIT!

  Stefferson: Trav won’t tell you shit because he’s trying to keep you from struggling in traction, dumbass!

  Jeevie: Somebody text Trav and tell him to take Mackey’s goddamned phone!

  And then, from Trav to everybod
y involved: You assholes could always fucking TALK to each other and get off the goddamned phones!

  Kell: What’s wrong with Cheever? Goddammit, how come nobody tells me shit?

  Trav: FAMILY MEETING MACKEY’S HOSPITAL ROOM NOW! Except you, Blake. Keep us posted. Tell Cheever we love him. Out.

  Cheever laughed a little, chewing on his lower lip and reaching out to touch the screen of the phone. “God, they’re a fucking circus.”

  “Yeah, they are,” Blake said, taking his phone back. “But they’re our monkeys, and we love them. Did you notice the subtext there?”

  Cheever nodded. “They love me,” he said a little sadly. “I don’t want to worry—”

  “Well, tough shit. You want to know the truth? They’ve been worried about you for a lot longer than the last three days.”

  Cheever couldn’t look at him. “What do you mean?”

  Blake wasn’t having any of it, though. He caught Cheever’s chin in his fingers, and Cheever found he had to meet those average hazel eyes again.

  Except they weren’t average anymore. They were gorgeous and kind, and Cheever couldn’t figure out how to make them go back to being ordinary.

  “Remember last Christmas? You and your mom came, and you were supposed to stay for two weeks? Your brother planned for those weeks, you know. Trips to Disneyland for the kids and for you, concerts, art shows. Mackey got on the internet and found fucking breakout artists—had a whole wine-tasting thing arranged for you, ’cause you’d turned twenty-one.”

  Cheever grimaced. “Mackey hates that shit.”

  “He does. But these last years, you being all cool and bullshit—they’ve missed you. Mackey had this grand plan, how he was going to go mix it up in your world. Then maybe you wouldn’t think they were too fucked-up to play with, right?”

  Aw hell. “That wasn’t—”

  “But you left—two days after Christmas. Got a car, grabbed your bag, said you had friends out at the beach. Fuckin’ broke your brother’s heart, you know that?”

  His family, so close, just like that round of texts. They were in each other’s shit, the kids a big swirly mess, and Cheever didn’t know them, and he felt like he was fucking contaminated, like if they knew him, he’d fuck them up somehow, like a curse. If Cheever was their friend, they too could have school bullies sneaking into their rooms to… to….

  “That wasn’t the plan,” he rasped.

  “Then why’d you leave?”

  Cheever closed his eyes. “I… just didn’t belong there—”

  “You didn’t even give them a chance!”

  “I’m just…. It’s just nice that they worried, that’s all,” he said, trying to get back to that shaft of goodness that the text had given him. “They… they don’t need to, you know—”

  “To know you?” Blake said softly. “That’s a great idea, Cheever. You can show up, judge them, and run away before they get to know you. I mean, I know I’ve only known them for ten years, but I gotta tell you, that’s a shitty way to be a part of the family.”

  Cheever tugged at the handcuff on the bed and grunted, tilting his head back against the mattress. “I’m not worth knowing,” he said, his voice clogged. “I just flunked out of art school. Did you know that?”

  “I know you got a C!” And there was a sort of baffled judgment in Blake’s voice that finally, finally gave Cheever something he could be pissed off at.

  “Is that all you see?” he yelled. “The grade? I put my life into that art. All I wanted to do was be an artist. I was so excited, right? Everybody loved that professor, said she really knew her shit. And she looked at me, and she saw my art, and she hated me. She hated my art—no. Worse. She was indifferent to my art. If she’d hated me, she would have given me an F, but she was unimpressed, so I got a C. That’s all I am—oatmeal. Milquetoast. And then she has the nerve to tell me I needed to make art like… like my fuckin’ brothers! Like I’m not even making music, right? And I’m still expected to live up to their fuckin’ names!”

  To his surprise, Blake laughed.

  “What!”

  “That’s you in there,” he said, sounding surprised. “Like, that’s a fuckin’ Sanders kid. Dang, boy—you had me worried there for a second.”

  Cheever gaped at him, suddenly ashamed of himself. “That was not very nice of me!”

  And Blake sobered. “No. But you want to not live in your brothers’ shadow? I get that. That’s fuckin’ human. It’s the most human thing I’ve seen from you besides, you know, the last twenty-four hours or so.”

  Cheever fell back against the pillows, feeling suddenly weak. “You stayed,” he said quietly.

  “You needed me,” Blake replied, just as quietly.

  Cheever nodded. “I… I do. Do… do my brothers know… do they know everything?”

  Blake pursed his lips. “Trav knows some of it. He knows about the drugs and the hotel—he had to hire someone to go clean that up. He knows about the grade and the professor, and is currently talking to CalArts administration. Apparently there’s a nervous breakdown clause somewhere, so you might be able to make up your finals—”

  “Gah!” Cheever ground the palm of his free hand into his eyes. “God, how fucking embarrassing.” And then his voice dropped, as the other thing, the truly embarrassing, humiliating thing, battered insistently at his consciousness. And his aching netherparts.

  “Does he know about them… those—” All of them, rough hands, laughing voices, that heaving breathing that sounded just like Aubrey, like they were pounding meat. “—those guys?”

  “He knows you were assaulted,” Blake said quietly. “But given the amount of drugs in the room, Cheever—”

  “No charges.” Cheever closed his eyes and shuddered. “I deserved it.”

  He was unprepared for the rage suffusing Blake’s mild features. “Now that is total bullshit and the second biggest lie you’ve spoken today, Cheever Sanders—”

  “Justin!” Cheever taunted, maybe to distract him and maybe because dammit, if this man was going to know who he was, he should by fucking God know who he was.

  “Cheever Justin Sanders! You didn’t deserve that! You didn’t deserve any of that. Maybe not even the fucking C in God who gives a shit! But nobody deserves to get their ass reamed like that—no poetry, no fucking consent. What in the hell makes you think that’s the way things should be?”

  “Gay, ain’t I?” Cheever whispered, wondering if it would feel better just to say it out loud.

  “Are you?” Blake asked, the words barbed.

  Cheever cut his eyes to Blake’s face and saw bitterness—and, yes, hurt. “Yeah, so? Who gives a shit.”

  “Well, apparently not you, since you don’t even have a boyfriend, or have never had a boyfriend, or have never even told your mother, who, you should know very fucking well by now, would not begrudge you a single moment’s happiness because you are gay just like your goddamned brother!”

  “Yeah, well, he came out. Why should I?”

  “Augh!” Blake turned around and kicked the chair he’d been sitting in, hard and again and again. “Fucking Sanders boys are gonna drive me back to the goddamned pills, I swear to fuckin’ God!”

  Something perverse awoke in Cheever then, something thrilled to make Blake, the most easygoing of the band members, the mildest, most laid-back, even-tempered man he’d ever met, lose his shit.

  “You got an answer to that?” he taunted. “Why should I? Who gives a shit if little Cheever Sanders is gay? Who cares!”

  “I care, and you should too, because it’s a part of you!” Blake roared, turning on him and kicking the bed with a clang. “It’s a part of you, and not one you felt you had to hide, but some big secret you wanted to hide! Would it be so goddamned hard for you to just fuckin’ let us know who you are!”

  Cheever’s breath caught, and he remembered who he was again, and how he’d ended up here. “Nobody wants to know who I am,” he said again, but this time, he was broken. The fight had go
ne out of him. Aubrey. Those guys. Gay was not the problem. “Too ugly inside to know.”

  “You’re not ugly, Cheever Justin Sanders, but God, you are driving me fucking crazy.”

  Cheever locked eyes with him then, wanting to see… something. Something angry, something wild, something to convince Cheever he was lying.

  What he saw was hurt.

  Hurt and tenderness.

  And worry.

  He opened his mouth to say something. Anything. But a dry, sarcastic voice interrupted anything his brain was putting together.

  “Judging by the racket, I’d say one of the Sanders boys is in town.”

  Blake swung around, a look of such profound relief on his face that Cheever actually felt comforted. “Doc Cambridge!” he said, laughing a little. Cheever saw him swipe at his eyes, and a new wave of self-loathing smacked him in the gut. Blake had stayed—he’d stayed and been kind—and Cheever had repaid him by… by being a shitty adolescent, all over again.

  Wow. Cheever was starting to see the boy who’d bought a hotel room full of drugs and let himself be used and tossed aside like an old coke spoon.

  Same ugly little shit who’d foisted his hell on his brothers when he was in middle school.

  “Blake.” There was such a wealth of kindness in that one word, and Cheever looked to see an older man—maybe edging toward retirement age—giving Blake a warm, familiar hug.

  “Doc Cambridge!” Blake said, lowering his voice like someone would for a parent. “Good to see you here.”

  “Surprised to see you,” Cambridge said frankly. “I saw the footage of Mackey falling off that speaker. How is he?”

  Blake grimaced. “Hurting and pissed off and worried about getting hooked on painkillers and making life fucking insane for everyone in the hospital.”

  Cambridge’s exasperated chuckle told Cheever all he needed to know about how well this man knew his family. “I wish them all luck,” he said cheerfully. He sobered. “As long as he knows he can always come here if he needs to, okay?”