Bad Boy Romance: Bad Marine (Bad Boy Military Romance) (Alpha Bad Boy New Adult Contemporary Male Stories) (36 page)

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 every 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 9
th
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 have 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.

“What’s up, baby?” she asked. It sounded like Mike was driving from the mixed sounds of traffic and low music.

“I’m gettin’ ready for tomorrow night, gonna pick up some drinks. What do you want?”

The next night was a huge bash for the whole senior class, a sort of “we’re halfway there” celebration. It was one of the school’s longest non-official traditions; and it was the sort of party that you weren’t supposed to remember the day after. Sally generally shied away from raucous events, and from binge drinking, but this event wasn’t really negotiable. If she didn’t go, she’d be ridiculed by her friends and scorned by Mike as being no fun.

“Oh, you know me, babe, I’ll drink whatever as long as it doesn’t taste like booze,” she said amiably enough.

“Really? ‘Cause I was thinking of getting some whiskey…real drinking, you know?”

Sally bit her lip. She knew Mike was hoping to get Sally drunk enough to maybe take things a step further than making out. She trusted him not to take advantage of her, but she also knew how much her prudish nature drove him crazy. They’d been together two years and she’d only ever let him feel her up on his birthday or special occasions.

“Um, well, whiskey is kinda…intense. I mean, you’d have to take care of me all night when I got sick…can’t you just get like, vodka or something? Or just, like, Mike’s Hard…”

“I’ll get vodka,” Mike said, buoyant. “Mike’s Hard makes you fat with all that sugar.”

Sally rolled her eyes, happy Mike couldn’t see her. As a wrestler, Mike was always worried about making weight, and even though Sally’s full schedule and cheer practices kept her slim, his anxiety about weight sometimes made him say things like that to her.

“Sounds good,” she said. “What time are you going to pick me up tomorrow?”