Risk: A Military Stepbrother Bad Boy Romance Read Online Free PDF

Mitch murmured, practically star-struck. Damien just smiled politely.
     
    As we broke off, going to our respective classes, Mitch caught up with me and grabbed me hard by the arm.
     
    “Ow!” I yelped. “You dick!”
     
    “Sarah, he is fucking gorgeous,” he gasped.
     
    “Oh my god, I know!”
     
    “You think your brother is gorgeous? Ew, you skank!”
     
    I giggled and playfully swatted him as we headed to our first period class.
     
    “No, it’s not like that. It’s just… He’s so, so, so…”
     
    “Hot,” Mitch finished for me. “Tall. Dark. Handsome. The strong, silent type. He’s not…”
     
    “Sorry. I don’t think he’s gay.”
     
    “But you don’t know he’s not for certain, right?”
     
    I had to admit that I didn’t and Mitch punched the air.

 
    Damien
     
    What a surprise. School was just as lame as I remembered it being.
     
    My class was three hours long and totally focused on passing the GED. They offered a night version of the class too, so the people in my class were the ones who couldn’t go to the night class—in other words, people who worked at night. Single moms working as bartenders and strippers, Chinese guys who all seemed to have a restaurant together (I hoped) judging from the stains on their shirts, and some bleary eyed security guards.
     
    And… Me.
     
    There was no effort to get to know anyone. We started off with grammar, something I was surprised to find I excelled in, just by virtue of being a native English speaker. Then, math and science, which I had always struggled with.
     
    And then, before I knew it, it was lunch time. Lunch had always been my favorite part of school.
     
    Not knowing what else to do, I made my way towards the cafeteria. I remembered the school layout only vaguely from my few months there. But now, passing through streams of students, I felt like a time-traveller returned from the future. God, they all looked so young.
     
    But I had served alongside men their age. I had killed men and boys younger than them too, in the war. These were really just children. Naïve children. God, but this was strange.
     
    I found my way to the packed cafeteria. It smelled vaguely of old cheese and frying grease, like any good cafeteria should. Screams and squeals, shouts and groans, the sound of someone’s prohibited boom box—the symphony of American high school greeted me.
     
    I picked out a tray, got in line, selected a sad looking slice of pizza and a side salad for my meal, plus a big cup of Sprite that was mostly ice.
     
    Some things really don’t ever change, I supposed.
     
    And then, the perennial difficulty of deciding where to sit.
     
    There were the obvious cool kids: a surprisingly heterogeneous group of jocks of both sexes, plus some tragically hip kids who seemed to be the school’s hipster royalty. Not far from them were the more extreme hipster kids—too cool to even hang out with the cool kids.
    From there, we had—kids in the band, based on the instruments and music books sprawled around their tables; stoner kids, judging from their dazed, vacant gazes; preppy nerds; sloppy nerds; ghetto kids; skateboarder kids; gamer kids all glued to their Gameboys; and more, as far as my way-too-old-to-be-here eyes could see.
     
    “Damien!” I heard a voice call out. I turned and there was Sarah and Mitch, plus a handful of kids looking somewhere between hipsters, band geeks, and outright nerds. Of course, the theatre kids.
     
    I sat down next to Sarah and Mitch: they had already started eating, surrounded by a small mountain of textbooks and schedules.
     
    “We’re trying to see if we can both switch into AP Calculus,” Sarah told me.
     
    “The Honors Calculus class is terrrrrible,” Mitch drawled, rolling his eyes.
     
    “That’s ambitious of you two,” was all I really had to offer as they began to chatter away about their classes, their teachers, the local gossip.
     
    I was a fool for thinking I might fit in here.