by Joyner, GP
The downside was that now many of the Kutus were now shooting at him rather than into the village. Of course, this gave Sara and her parents time to round up the villagers and get them to safety. However, this proved to be a bad position for Harry to be in. As bullets flew past him in all directions, Harry was at least glad that he would go out in a blaze of glory like he had always hoped. Behind him, Harry could hear the trucks starting up and he knew that he only had to hold off the advance of Kutus for a little while longer.
Taking a deep breath to calm his nerves, Harry stepped around the concrete pillar that he had been using for protection and began spraying bullets into the Kutus. Bullets flew in both directions and Harry felt nothing but a rush of adrenaline, his fear replaced with a bloodlust. This bloodlust quickly died out when Harry felt a sharp pain in his leg. He looked down and saw blood pouring from his left thigh and knew immediately that he had been shot. Dropping to the ground, Harry knew that his time on this earth was quickly coming to a close.
Just a few short months ago, Harry would have gone willing into a war to die. Now, now that he had Sara in his life, Harry felt a desire to live. With a searing pain in his leg, Harry rolled onto his stomach and kept firing into the crowd of Kutus. Soon, the bullets stopped flying and everything went quiet. Harry looked through the smoke and saw the few surviving Kutus running back across the river. With a smile on his face, Harry allowed the darkness to overtake him.
Sara sat by Harry's bed and watched him resting while her father replaced the bandages on his leg. She had been sitting by his bed for two days while he slept. Her father explained that Harry had lost a lot of blood, but he should survive. She held onto Harry's hand and prayed to any god that would listen that he would pull through this. Once her father had finished checking up on Harry, he walked out of the room and went to go tend to the many other victims of the Kutu attack.
Sara heard a soft groan and looked down. Harry's eyes began to flicker open. Sara's heart began to race. She squeezed tightly onto Harry's hand and she felt him squeeze back. “Welcome back, Harry,” Sara said softly.
“I'm not dead?” Harry asked.
“No, you survived,” Sara said, unable to stop smiling. “And thanks to you, a lot of us survived too. The Nguntu are calling you a hero.”
“I didn't do it for the Nguntu,” Harry said plainly. “I did it for you.”
“What do you mean?” Sara asked, blushing slightly.
“I thought that I was going to die out there,” Harry explained. “I would have given up and let them kill me, but all I could think about was you. I wanted you to survive. I wanted to survive so that I could see you again.”
Sara's heart raced when Harry said this. She smiled so widely that her cheeks hurt. She couldn't resist herself and began to kiss Harry all over his face. “I'm glad that you survived,” she said when she was finally done covering Harry in kisses. “I was really worried about you. I didn't want to think about having to go home without you.”
“Speaking of going home,” Harry said, “what is going to happen with us when we get back to the real world?”
“What do you want to happen?” Sara asked shyly.
“Well, I almost lost you once and I don't want to lose you again. You are incredibly smart, sexy, funny woman. For the first time in my life, I can't imagine being with anyone else but you. I don't have the Army to go back to and you don't have to keep following your parents around the world. I was thinking that maybe you and I could see if this thing between us really stands a chance.”
“There is nothing in this world that I would like better than to be with you for as long as possible,” Sara said with a wide smile, her blue eyes dancing with joy. “I think you are a wonderfully handsome and brave man. You might be a bit rough around the edges, but deep inside I know that you are a good man. Just promise me one thing will you?”
“Anything you want,” Harry said.
“Don't go getting shot again,” Sara said with a laugh.
After a couple of weeks in the hospital, Sara was happy to see Harry finally back on his feet. His recovery was slow, but Sara held his hand the entire way through it. With her support, Harry was soon back to work. He couldn't do as much as he used to, but Sara was more than happy to pick up his slack.
After the attack by the Kutus, Sara and Harry no longer felt the need to hide their relationship. Sara was worried that her parents would reject the idea of her and Harry being a couple, but they seemed very supportive of it. Sara was happy that her and Harry could be affectionate with each other in public. Harry wasn't very fond of kissing in public, but Sara thought that it was cute to sneak in a kiss when people were looking at him.
Finally, it was time to head back to America. Sara was excited to be going back to the real world where her and Harry could begin their lives together. The trip back to the states was made much more entertaining with Harry by her side. Sara slept less on this flight, but when she did sleep, she slept in the arms of her lover which was her favorite place in the world to be.
Back in the states, Sara and Harry applied to start college in the spring at a university out in California. They were both accepted and began studying Environmental Management. In their third year, Sara was surprised when Harry gave her a diamond ring and asked for her hand in marriage. One year later, the two of them were married. Sara was as happy as she had ever been on her wedding day and she thanked her lucky stars every day that she had been dragged along on that trip to Africa to spend time with the Nguntu.
THE END
Bad Boy, Brother
Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance
G.P. Joyner
WARNING: This ebook contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language. It may be considered offensive to some readers. This ebook is for sale to adults ONLY
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Copyright 2015 by G.P. Joyner - All rights reserved.
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She turned up the music to cover the moaning. Whoever Geon was entertaining, he was entertaining her very well, it seemed. But it wasn’t anything new to Sally; almost every day, after school, was the same story. It made it hard to focus on her homework, at times, but she couldn’t exactly see herself calling him out on it. What could she even say? “I wish the girls you’re screwing didn’t make so much noise”? “Can you try to be worse in bed”?
It wasn’t that Sally was afraid to call him out on his bad behavior; she did, often. It was more her own particular sense of decency when it came to matters of a sexual nature. Sally blushed even saying the word “sex”. She wanted to pretend those private details of life didn’t exist at all. She liked kissing boys, but anything beyond that made her stomach squeeze up and a bright red blush come to her cheeks. It was a trait that kept her boyfriend, Mike, in a constant state of frustration.
So while Sally would happily protest the smell of weed in Geon’s bedroom, the cigarette butts on the street outside the house, the drinking and loud music and foul language, the sex thing had her stumped.
The only solace was that she knew it would be over soon. Geon’s mother, Sally’s stepmother, would be home by five, and Geon made sure to always shoo his girl-of-the-week off the premises before his mother came home. The last time a girl lingered, she’d stayed for dinner, at his mother’s insistence, and Geon had made everyone distinctly uncomfortable by ignoring the poor thing completely.
Jillae, Geon’s mother, had hoped the girl was a sign of good things for her son. She figured if he settled down with a nice girl, he would stop his hard-partying lifestyle, or at least slow it down. And Jillae had ever
y reason to worry about Geon’s well-being: despite the fact that she was wealthy and raised him in all the comfort and affluence a child could hope for, he’d gone straight down the gutter as soon as high school started.
He’d gotten involved with a bad crowd, caught up in skipping school, drinking, and drug dealing. The friendship that he and Sally had shared throughout their childhood faded as fast as the cheap, poorly-inked tattoos that he’d started getting in his junior year. His skin was covered in the things, the black ink barely absorbing into his dark skin. Skulls, crosses, words in illegible script; they gave him an edgy yet strangely artistic look, something that drew the eyes in while also scaring them away.
Sally’s father, Geon’s stepfather, had given up trying to impart any wisdom on his troubled stepson. The more he tried, the more Geon raged against him. It only made matters worse that at 18, Geon towered over Sally’s father, and didn’t hesitate to use his size as a threat against the soft-spoken professor who’d helped raise him.
Sally could see how much it hurt her father; after he’d married Jillae when Sally and Geon were 7, he’d taken a lot of pride in making the boy feel like he could call him Dad. And, for a long time, their relationship was great. Sally wondered what had happened in 9th grade that turned Geon into the demon he’d become.
Jillae and Todd, Sally’s father, had met at the college they both taught at. Jillae taught Russian Literature, while Todd taught physics. They had loved each other for a long time before marrying, both concerned about trying to join their families, especially considering the issue of race.
Though the small town where they lived was generally very liberal, as many college towns are, the state itself – New Hampshire – was not considered the most accepting of places, and interracial relationships might still be considered risqué by some. Jillae and Geon came from Ethiopian heritage; rather than being descendants of the American slave trade, they were second-generation immigrants. Of course, that made no difference to anyone who took their skin at face value. Todd and Sally, on the other hand, were of pure Irish descent; the whitest of the white.
It didn’t take long after the marriage that Sally realized that the thing about having an interracial family is that you don’t notice until everyone else does. At home, her family was just like anyone else. Joking at the dinner table, fighting over the remote, comforting each other, teasing.
But sometimes when they’d all go out together they got nasty looks, and once in a great while, even comments. As she got older, she found that people would still give her looks if she was out alone with Geon; they were the same age, though he did look a bit older than she did, and it would have been easy to mistake their sibling bond for something more.
None of that was really as bad as Sally’s friends, though. They knew Geon as well as they know Sally – they had all practically grown up together. But, being unaware of the sort of problems Sally and her family had on a daily basis, they thought it was fun to make jokes like “once you go black, you never go back” and “your dad must have gotten tired of white girls” and “does it run in the family, Sally?”
It was all innocent, with no harm meant, but they were the sort of jokes Sally didn’t like no matter the context, and when it was fueled by her own family’s circumstances, it made it all the more hurtful.
It made Sally sad that people were still so cruel and short-sighted. She didn’t understand whose business it was, outside of the people involved. And while Geon used to protect her from those nasty looks and comments by distracting her with a joke or giving an evil stare right back, he could no longer be bothered to even leave the house in the company of his family. The few times he did attend a family event or dinner, he listened to his trashy music the whole time or was glued to his phone, texting whatever girl he was screwing at the time or his no-good friends.
Geon’s gang couldn’t be neatly tied up in a descriptive bow. Not unlike his family, it was made up of all races – white, black, Latino, even Asian. If you liked drugs, booze, sex, trap music, and getting into trouble, you were welcome. Which made them a common target for the gangs of skinheads and thugs that roamed the town, and more than anything Sally worried that he’d come home one day in a body bag. More than once, she’d caught him slinking into his room trying to had a black eye or obvious limp. When she tried to ask him about it, he’d immediately get defensive.
“None of your fuckin’ business,” he’d snarl. “Go back to your room and do your homework like a good little girl.”
Geon was always acting like he was so much older than Sally even though they were the same age. She guessed he thought that his street life gave him some life experience that her straight-A, drama-club, cheer-squad life didn’t. Now that they were both in their senior year of high school, Sally was on track to go to Columbia University in New York City; Geon, on the other hand, was destined for community college, if that. He seemed as uninterested in higher education as he was in family time.
“What are you going to do? You can’t keep living at home and raising hell, Geon,” Sally had once heard Jillae say to her son while he ate breakfast.
“I’m moving out,” was his gruff response. “Get my own place.”
“With what money? You don’t have a job…”
“I got money,” he’d snapped back, cryptically. And it was true; somehow, Geon did have money. Enough to have bought himself an old Camaro, enough to keep himself fitted out in expensive clothes and watches, enough to throw himself a party every single night. The thing was, no one knew where that money came from, and he was eternally silent when asked. Sally, Jillae, and Todd all knew that wherever he was getting his funds, it was nowhere good. Somehow, Geon had managed not to be arrested yet, but how long his luck would hold out was anyone’s guess.
“I just wish I knew what to say to you to get you to realize you can’t go on living your life like this,” Jillae had said. From her listening point around the corner, Sally could almost hear the tears in her stepmother’s voice, and it broke her heart. Their family had so much hate coming from the outside world; it seemed unfair that Geon should cause so much trouble in their own home. At the clatter of utensils and the scraping of a chair against the hardwood floor, Sally’s heart jumped. She tried to run up the stairs before Geon caught her spying, but she was too slow.
“Get a good listen, sis?” he asked, a sneer on his face. Heart pounding, one hand on the stairwell, Sally turned to him with a lie on her lips.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. Their eyes were locked in a battle of wills, Geon’s dark brown eyes seeming to shoot lasers straight into Sally’s light blue ones. If their personalities were opposites, their looks were even more so. Geon was tall and sculpted, while Sally was small and thin, with small B-cup breasts and an appearance of softness in all her features.
“Whatever, just mind your own damn business,” he said, pushing past her up the stairs to his own room.
“It is my business, Geon,” Sally said with a huff. “Why do you have to be such an ass? You used to be a nice guy. You used to always push me on the swings and watch movies with us. Now you’re like…a monster!”
Geon turned to her, his mouth set in a snarl.
“Sorry, Sal,” he said. “People change. Grow up and stop trying to impress everyone all the damn time and you might just find life is fun.”
“What’s so fun about getting into fights and being hungover all the time?” she countered, walking up the stairs to stand opposite him. Crossing her arms across her chest, she noticed how his eyes flitted briefly up and down her body. Sometimes, when Geon looked at her, it was like he couldn’t believe how much she’d grown up from the young girl she’d once been. And, if she was honest, she sometimes found herself looking at him the same way. He’d filled out a lot since being a too-thin, sunken-chested pre-teen. Now, his shirts almost burst at the sleeves and chests to contain his muscular body, and he was at least a foot taller than she was.
“If you ha
ve to ask, you’ll never know,” he said chidingly, turning to go into his room. Angry at his constant dismissal of her, Sally reached out and grabbed his arm. He shook her off violently, turning on his heel and backing her into the wall. Sally’s eyes widened in shock and fear as the much-larger boy seethed in front of her. Her heart pounded in her chest, and though she knew that Geon would never actually hurt her, the look of anger in his eyes was almost physical in itself.
“What?” he growled.
“Don’t you feel bad making your mom feel like that,” Sally said, gathering all her courage to combat the instinctual fear in her stomach. Geon grinned, but it didn’t make that fear go away. Leaning back and turning once more, Geon gave her a dismissive wave.
“Get bent,” he said before slamming the door, leaving Sally panting, heart racing, in the hallway.
Now, as she heard the moaning down the hall begin to subside, Sally breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, she could do her homework in peace, without the knotted-stomach feeling that she got whenever she knew Geon was screwing some girl’s brains out a few rooms away.
Sally didn’t realize it, but it wasn’t just her uptight attitude toward sex that made those afternoons so hard. It was also the fact that deep in the back of her mind, she wondered what it would be like to feel so good you had to cry out like that. She wondered what, exactly, Geon was doing to those girls that made them abandon any shame, that made them come back day after day when they had to know Geon’s hit-it-and-quit-it reputation.
Sally was only just getting her focus back on the math homework spread before her when her cell phone rang. Looking down, Mike’s smiling, All-American face filled the screen. Sally felt her own lips widening to a grin as she picked up.