Their Wonder Years: Season 1: Fall 1998
Copyright© 2025 by Tantrayaan
66: Family, Even Now
Coming of Age Sex Story: 66: Family, Even Now - Bharath always thought going to America would mean fast love, wild parties, and maybe a stewardess or two. What he got instead? A busted duffel bag, a crying baby on the plane, and dormmates he never thought could exist in real life. Thrown into the chaos of Georgia Tech’s freshman year, Bharath begins an unforgettable journey of awkward first crushes and culture shocks. A slow-burn, emotionally rich harem romance set in the nostalgic 90s - full of laughter, lust, and longing.
Caution: This Coming of Age Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa mt/ft mt/Fa Consensual Fiction Humor School Sharing Group Sex Harem Orgy Polygamy/Polyamory White Female Hispanic Female Indian Female
The first slash burned like fire across his forearm. Bharath grunted. He staggered back. More shock than pain, really. And then ... to his dismay ... the metallic smell of his own blood filled his nose.
“YOU TOOK THEM!” Maria shrieked, “BRUJO! DIABLO! YOU WILL GO TO HELL!”
“MAMI, NO!” Mia’s voice broke. She threw herself forward - not toward the knife, toward her mother - trying to get her arms around those shaking shoulders. “Mami, please! It’s me! It’s Mia! Look at me!”
Maria didn’t even see her. Just threw an elbow back ... hard ... into Mia’s ribs. The gasp, the stumble, the cry - none of it registered. All Mia saw was the blood on Bharath’s arm, her own loyalties tearing her right in two.
But Maria was lost to her rage. She elbowed Mia hard, catching her in the ribs. Mia gasped, stumbling back with a pained cry, but didn’t even register the pain. They were fixed on the blood welling from Bharath’s arm, her face a mask of torn loyalties.
However, that wasn’t what hurt Bharath the most. The pain from the cut was nothing compared to Mia’s devastation. Seeing Mia, his joyful, effervescent Mia, his princess, forced to choose between the mother who raised her and the man she loved. Seeing the foundation of her world crack right before his eyes, and knowing he was the one that caused this to happen - that too on her birthday.
“GET OFF HIM!” Sarah yelled, her voice all sharp-edged fury. She dove for Maria’s knife arm, grappling with a strength born of terror. Zara was right behind her, trying to pin Maria’s other arm.
But Maria was a force of nature, fueled by a mother’s feral grief. She shook them off, her focus absolute, her eyes burning into Bharath. “I WILL KILL YOU AND BRING THEM BACK! BRUJO! DEMONIO! RELEASE THEM!”
Ayesha, ever the peacemaker, was crying, her hands fluttering uselessly. “Mrs. Rivera, please! He would never hurt us! He loves us!”
The scene hit Marisol like a physical blow. Her mother was deranged. Bharath, bleeding. Marisol looked shattered. She was in hell. Her mother - the woman she admired most in the world - was trying to kill the man that she loved. All that escaped her was a shattered whisper. “Mami ... please...”
Bharath’s heart shattered for her. This was his lioness, his rock, the first love of his life, being crushed between the two people she probably loved most in the world.
Before Maria could cause more damage with the knife, his hand snapped out and caught her wrist in a vice like grip. Despite her rage induced strength he managed to twist her hand to break her grip on the knife. The movement caused shooting pains due to his injured forearm as fresh blood poured out of the wound. However, it was worth it as the knife clattered to the floor.
But, she wasn’t done. Something in her had broken open, just pure animal. Her nails came next, scraping fire across his cheek. He felt the skin split. She was kicking too, those stupid fluffy slippers doing nothing but telling him everything. She was all of it at once-nails and teeth and that raw, gut-deep Spanish she usually saved for bad drivers and politicians.
“HIJO DE PUTA! TE VOY A MATAR! You and your foreign ways! You think your foreign gods care about a mother’s curse?”
Each word hit like a punch. Foreign. Devil. She was trying to make him the outsider again. But worse than the words was watching her fall apart-this woman who’d once fed him empanadas with a smile, now coming completely undone because of him.
He just took it. Didn’t block the slaps, just let his head snap back with each one. Didn’t shove her away, just wrapped his arms around her, this awful violent hug, just trying to contain the storm until she burned herself out.
“Stop, Maria. Please, just stop,” he murmured, his voice hoarse, his mouth near her ear. He was speaking to the woman he knew was trapped inside this storm. “No one is taking them from you. I would never...”
“LIAR!” she screamed, spitting in his face. She tried to bite his shoulder, her teeth sinking into the fabric of his shirt. “You have five! Five! And you want my daughters too? You greedy, selfish boy! Your mother would be ashamed of you!”
That one cut the deepest. A vivid image of his own Amma flashed in his mind - her gentle face, her devout heart. The sheer, unimaginable scandal this would be. The pain he would cause his family. The guilt was a cold stone in his gut. Maria wasn’t wrong. He was turning his back on his culture, his parents’ hopes. For a terrifying moment, he understood how she saw him: not a boy in love, but a home-wrecking monster.
He met Marisol’s eyes over Maria’s thrashing shoulder. They were wide, full of tears, but in them, he saw no doubt. He saw only pain for him, for her mother, for this impossible situation. She gave a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of her head. Don’t you believe it. Don’t you dare believe what she’s saying.
It was all the strength he needed.
He tightened his hold on Maria, not allowing her to continue on her rampage. “I’m not letting go Maria,” he whispered, more to himself than to her. “I won’t let you break. And I won’t let you make them choose. You are my family Maria.”
Mia was back, sobbing, pressing a wad of paper towels from the kitchen against his bleeding arm. Her tears mixed with his blood. She was touching him, trying to heal him, while her mother was trying to destroy him. The symbolism was almost too much to bear.
Those twelve minutes felt endless. The whole room fell apart around them. The five girls formed a desperate, orbiting circle around the central, tragic struggle. It was a symphony of sobs, broken prayers, and the raw, animalistic sounds of a heart breaking in the most violent way possible.
Suddenly, a new sound pierced the chaos as there was a loud and rapid knocking at the front door. This was followed by a shout of, “THIS IS EMERGENCY SERVICES! PLEASE OPEN THE DOOR! NOW!”
The spell of primal fury was broken for a single, suspended second. All heads turned towards the sound.
“I’LL GET IT!” screamed Zara. She ran towards the front door, her socked feet nearly going out from under her on the polished floor. Someone had to get help. Someone had to stop this madness.
Ayesha, finding a core of steel beneath her tears, dropped to her knees and scrambled for the discarded butcher knife, sliding it far across the floor and under a cabinet, her hands trembling as she removed the immediate weapon from the equation.
Marisol snapped out of it. Not toward her mother - toward Bharath. Her hands found his arm alongside Mia’s, pressing down on the bleeding. No hesitation. Her touch was solid, real. When she looked up at him, tears were streaming down her face, but her voice came out low and fierce. “Don’t you let go, mi amor. They’re almost here, just don’t let go.”
The door flew open under Zara’s pull.
What the paramedics walked into looked like something from a bad movie. There was blood on the floor. A boy covered in scratches, holding onto a screaming woman in his arms and five girls - one holding the door like a lifeline, another trying to contain the chaos, three more desperately trying to stop the bleeding. They were all of them crying and falling apart.
“Step away from her!” Evans commanded, his voice a boom of authority as he and his partner moved in, a gurney and a medical kit between them.
Bharath didn’t move. He couldn’t. His entire world had narrowed to this single point of containment. He looked at the EMT, his eyes pleading, exhausted. “She’s ... she’s not herself,” he managed, his voice a shredded whisper.
“Sir, I need you to let go so we can help her,” the other EMT, a woman, said, her tone firm but less confrontational as she prepared a sedative.
It was Marisol who got through to him. She put a hand on his cheek, turning his face to hers. “Bharath. Mi amor. They can help her. You have to let them take over. It’s over.”
Slowly, with a shuddering exhale that seemed to drain the last of his strength, Bharath’s grip loosened. The moment he did, Maria surged forward with a final, guttural scream. “DEMONIO!”
The lead EMT was ready. He caught her, his partner swiftly administering the tranquilizer into her shoulder. Maria’s scream cut off mid-shriek. Her body stiffened for a moment, her eyes wide with a final flash of incoherent fury, then went completely limp. She slumped forward, and it was Bharath, despite everything, who caught her dead weight, gently lowering her to the ground before the EMTs could, his arms cradling her head.
He looked down at the woman who had just tried to kill him, now peaceful in unconsciousness, and a fresh wave of grief so profound it stole his breath washed over him.
As they strapped her to the gurney, the soft shush of the restraints a cruel sound, Bharath finally collapsed backward, landing hard on the floor. He braced his hands behind him, his head hanging low as he gasped for air, his entire body trembling from the adrenaline crash.
The female EMT was immediately at his side. “Sir, we need to get that arm cleaned and bandaged. It appears to be bleeding quite heavily.” She reached for his wrist.
Bharath flinched, pulling his arm back instinctively, cradling it against his chest. “It’s not deep,” he muttered hoarsely, the words thick with unshed tears and exhaustion. He looked past her, at Maria’s still form on the gurney. “She needs more help than I do.”
“We’ll check you both out,” the EMT replied, her voice softening at the edges. “Protocol.”
Across the room, the dam broke completely. With the immediate threat gone, the girls crumbled. Marisol sank to the floor, her face burying itself in Mia’s lap, her body wracked with uncontrollable, silent sobs. Mia held her sister, her own tears falling into Marisol’s hair, her eyes vacant with shock. Zara stumbled over to Sarah and Ayesha, the three of them collapsing into a single, trembling heap of shared trauma, arms wrapped tightly around each other as if they were the only solid things left in a world that had just exploded.
No one could speak. The blare of the sirens outside, now idling, still echoed in their skulls, a permanent soundtrack to their nightmare.
Two gurneys were wheeled out into the cool night air.
One carried an unconscious mother.
The other, a broken boy who refused to lie down, his haunted eyes fixed on the first gurney until the ambulance doors closed between them.
The ER smell - bleach, alcohol, whatever it was - stung his nose. It made everything feel worse. The harsh white light overhead buzzed faintly, indifferent to the human wreckage laid out beneath it. It was the kind of light that showed every flaw, every crack, and right now, it was illuminating the one that ran straight through the center of his soul.
Bharath sat on the narrow hospital cot, the stiff sheets crinkling under his weight. A clean white bandage was wrapped snugly around his left forearm, a neat, professional contrast to the chaotic violence of its origin. A minor wound, the doctor had said with detached efficiency. A clean slice, nothing serious. It would heal in a week, leaving only a thin, pale line as a souvenir. His face and body stung with a constellation of shallow scratches, and his ribs ached a dull, persistent rhythm from the wild kicks and elbows he had absorbed. But none of that compared to the heaviness in his chest, a leaden anchor of guilt and dread that threatened to pull him straight through the floor.
That ... would not go away.
Through the narrow pane of glass on the emergency room door, he could see them-his apsaras, his girls, his reason for being. But the sight, once a source of boundless comfort, now felt like an accusation. They were in the brightly lit hallway, huddled on a row of plastic chairs, their world reduced to this sterile waiting area. They couldn’t see him; the glass was a one-way mirror from his side, a cruel portal that let him witness their suffering without offering them any comfort in return.
He was there, but not really. Just watching them hurt while he couldn’t move.
Zara sat on the floor, her back against the wall, her knees hugged to her chest. She was rocking slightly, a self-soothing motion he’d never seen from the bold, unflappable girl who commanded every room. Ayesha paced in tight, frantic circles in the confined space of the hallway, like a beautiful, caged bird, muttering prayers or curses under her breath, her hands trembling as they wrung the air. Sarah was hunched on a chair, her eyes vacant, staring at the opposite wall, her head resting on a fist that was white-knuckled with tension. And Marisol ... his lioness. She had her arm around Mia - his princess, who was sobbing openly into her shoulder, her whole body shaking with the force of it. Marisol wasn’t crying. She was just ... still. Her composure was a fortress wall after a siege, still standing but scarred and blackened, her gaze fixed on the floor, seeing only the ghost of her mother’s deranged face.
They looked shattered. And he was the one who had handed them the hammer, safe and unseen in his sterile box.
He closed his eyes, the image seared behind his eyelids, a permanent scar on his memory.
When he opened them again, as if drawn by a morbid gravity, he turned his head.
Maria lay in the opposite corner of the room.
Her body was strapped at the wrists and ankles with soft, padded restraints. An IV fed clear fluid into her arm. Her chest rose and fell in a slow, calm rhythm, as if she were sleeping off nothing more than a fever. Not the blood on his arm. Not the guttural screams that still echoed in his skull. Not the way she’d lunged at him with murder in her eyes, a holy warrior fighting a devil of her own making.
She looked ... peaceful.
Like the mother who had once held her daughters’ hands through their nightmares, who had sung them lullabies and kissed their scraped knees. The woman who had welcomed him, the nerdy Indian boy, with warm empanadas and a cautious smile, choosing to see his heart over the differences in his creed and culture.
And what had he given her in return? The utter desecration of everything she held sacred.
Bharath swallowed thickly, but the lump in his throat refused to go down, a jagged stone of remorse.
“I destroyed a family tonight,” he whispered to the sterile, uncaring air.
The words fell into the silence like stones dropped into a sacred well, sinking into a darkness he could no longer fathom. They were not just words; they were an admission. Maria’s rage had been a mirror, and in its cracked and furious surface, he saw the terrifying truth he had been willfully ignoring.
He blinked, and hot tears, finally breaching the dam of his shock, rolled sideways down his temples, tracing paths through the dried blood and grime on his skin.
He hadn’t cried when she tried to kill him. He hadn’t cried when she screamed that he was the devil or a snake. He hadn’t cried when he’d seen his girls sobbing in horror as he bled all over their mother’s carpet, the very fabric of their home life stained crimson.
But now - seeing Maria, the architect of his pain, rendered so helpless and small, and his apsaras, the beneficiaries of his love, falling apart just outside that glass, utterly unaware that he was witnessing their collapse - now the dam broke. The flood was not of self-pity, but of a horrifying, clear-eyed clarity. His isolation was complete. He was the author of this tragedy, forced to watch the second act from a soundproof room.
“I was supposed to strengthen them,” he choked, the words a ragged confession to the empty room. “Not tear them apart.”
He turned his face away from the window, pressing his hot cheek against the cool, starched pillowcase, and let the tears come. Silent. Shaking. Endless.
He thought about that first night with Marisol - her fire, her defiant laughter, the way she had chosen him, pulling him from his loneliness. He thought about Mia, pouring herself into his arms in that alleyway like she had been waiting her whole life to be caught, her devotion a radiant, unearned grace. He thought about Sacred Tuesdays, the silly, sacred rituals, the warmth of their intertwined lives, the intoxicating joy of playing house.
Playing house.
The phrase echoed in his mind, and Maria’s voice, laced with venom and truth, answered. “This isn’t a romance novel. This is real life.”
And she was right. They had been living in a beautiful, self-contained bubble, blissfully ignoring the world outside. But the world had just kicked the door in, in the form of a mother’s broken heart.
What future was he truly offering them? He, an eighteen-year-old boy with no degree, no career, no societal standing. He could promise them his heart, his soul, his every waking breath. But could he promise them respectability? Security? A place in the world that wouldn’t scorn them? Zara, with her social ambitions; Ayesha, with her gentle, dreamy soul; Marisol, with her fierce independence - could they truly withstand the constant judgment, the whispers, the outright hostility? They said they could, now, in the fervor of first love. But in ten years? Twenty? When they were tired?
His own family. The thought was a fresh wave of ice water. His Amma, her face a picture of gentle devotion, her life a tapestry of tradition and prayer. His Appa, a man of quiet pride, his dreams of a single, brilliant daughter-in-law, of a grand, traditional wedding in Chennai. They had sacrificed everything to send him here, their brilliant boy, to take his father’s company - that he had worked a lifetime for - into a success. They dreamed of bragging to their friends about his wife, his children.
What would he tell them? Amma, Appa, I have found five. Five women I love. Please welcome them all. He could picture it with terrifying clarity-the stunned silence, the dawning horror, the shame that would crush them. The scandal would ripple through his entire extended family, a stain they would never live down. He was willing to walk away from that for his girls. But was it fair to ask his parents to bear that burden? To become pariahs in their own community because of their son’s sinful, foreign choices?
And what of Zara’s parents? Or Ayesha’s? Would they see a devoted man, or a cult leader who had ensnared their daughters? Maria’s words, “Your Indian prince will marry a nice girl his parents choose,” were not just an insult. They were a plausible prophecy. He was asking these girls to bet their entire futures on his ability to single-handedly dismantle centuries of cultural and religious expectation. It was a staggering, arrogant gamble.
Maria loved her daughters. It was a fierce, possessive, terrifying love, but it was love. She was trying to save them from a life of hardship and scorn. And as he lay there, the phantom sting of her nails on his face, he asked himself the most devastating question of all: Would I ever accept this for my own?
If he had a daughter, his little girl, and she came to him one day with a boy - a boy of a different faith, a different culture, who already had four other women he called his own - what would he do? Would he smile and give his blessing? Or would every protective, paternal instinct in his body scream in revolt? The answer, a truth that shamed him, was immediate and visceral. He would fight it with every fiber of his being. He was asking Maria to accept what he knew, in his heart of hearts, he would never accept himself.
He was not a demon. He was not a sorcerer. He was just a boy in love. But in the cold, fluorescent light of the ER, he saw that love could be a destructive force. It could blind you to consequences. It could make you selfish. His love had not built a new family; it had shattered an existing one. He had taken a single mother’s life’s work, her pride, her joy, and driven her to the brink of madness and incarceration.
He remembered the knife - how sharp it had felt, the shocking, clean pain of it. The numerous scratches were already beginning to itch as they healed. But the true wound was deeper, somewhere inside his spirit, a gash that poured not blood, but a torrent of doubt and fear.
Open. Festering.
Would Maria ever forgive him for this night? Could she? And his girls ... would they, in the cold light of dawn, when the adrenaline faded, look at him and see the source of their greatest pain? The man who came between them and their mother?
He looked back toward the window, a silent, helpless voyeur to their grief. Sarah had her head in her hands now. He was completely, utterly alone with the consequences of his love, trapped in a room with the woman he had broken and separated by a pane of glass from the girls he was failing.
The weight of it all - the guilt, the fear, the impossible choices, the sheer, staggering unfairness of what he was asking of everyone he loved - came crashing down. A sob, raw and ragged, tore from his throat. He covered his face with his free hand, his shoulders shaking, and cried like the child he still was - for the family he broke, for the parents he would betray, for the impossible future he had promised, and for the terrifying, beautiful, destructive power of a love that asked for everything, all while he grieved in solitary silence.
A jolt, like a faulty wire sparking behind her ribs. Maria stirred with a gasp, her eyes snapping open to a blinding, sterile white. It was the ceiling, but it was all wrong-too clean, too close, humming with a faint, fluorescent life of its own. Disorientation washed over her, thick as syrup. This was not her bedroom with its familiar water-stain in the shape of Florida near the light fixture.
She tried to push herself up, a simple, morning instinct, but her body met a firm, unyielding resistance. A dull pull at her wrists and ankles. Her heart gave a frantic, rabbit-like thud. She looked down.
Restraints.
Clean, white, padded cuffs held her to the cold metal rails of the bed. They were not cruel, but they were absolute. A clinical, terrifying finality.
Hospital. The word formed in her mind, cold and sharp. Why am I in a hospital?
Panic, thin and acidic, began to rise in her throat. Had she been in an accident? Was she sick? Her mind, still fuzzy at the edges, scrabbled for purchase. And then, as if drawn by a morbid magnet, her eyes drifted across the small, curtained room.
There, opposite her, slouched on another narrow bed, was him.
That Indian boy.
Bharath.
Marisol’s boyfriend.
The sight of him was a punch to the gut, knocking the air from her lungs and bringing the memories flooding back not as a trickle, but a tidal wave. He was a wreck. His left arm was wrapped in a thick, pristine bandage, a stark lie against the rest of him. His shirt - a nice shirt, she distantly noted, not the nerdy ones he used to wear-was torn and stiff with great, rust-brown patches of dried blood. Angry red scratches, some already purpling with bruise, lined his cheek and neck, as if he’d been attacked by a feral cat. His breathing was shallow, his lips were cracked, and his eyes were closed. And he was crying. Silent, weary tears that tracked through the grime on his face without a sound.
He looked like ... minced meat. The thought was unbidden, visceral. He looked like something that had been brutally used and discarded.
Maria blinked, her mind reeling, trying to reconcile this broken creature with the golden boy she had once trusted. Then, the dam broke.
The kiss. Mia’s kiss under the oak tree. Her niña, her baby, wrapped around him with a possessive passion that had stolen the very air from Maria’s lungs. The way Mia had looked at him - not with a schoolgirl crush, but with the same deep, soulful yearning she used to have for the heroes in the telenovelas they watched when she was twelve.
And Marisol. Her rock, her practical Marisol. She had done nothing. She had just ... watched. A silent, complicit statue. And the other girls - Sarah, Zara, Ayesha - they had been a united front, a wall of defiance protecting him from her.
Then came the roaring in her ears, the holy fire that had consumed her from the inside out. It had felt righteous, a cleansing fury. The sprint to the kitchen, her hand closing around the familiar, heavy handle of her butcher knife. The weight of it in her hand had felt like justice. The storm back into the living room, her voice screaming words she could no longer fully recall, words of exorcism and damnation.
The feel of the blade meeting resistance. The shocking, vivid red that had bloomed on his arm. The metallic smell that had cut through the scent of her own home.
She had tried to kill him.
The realization landed not as a thought, but as a physical sickness. Her stomach clenched violently. She turned her face away from the heartbreaking sight of him, pressing her cheek into the stiff pillow, her heart hammering against her ribs so hard she felt the vibration in her teeth. Shame, hot and corrosive, flooded her veins. She, Maria Rivera, who prayed the rosary every night, who worked three jobs to keep her girls safe, had become a violent monster in her own home.
And through the horrifying film reel of memory, one detail stood out with impossible, glaring clarity.
He never even fought back.
He had caught her wrists. He had held her. He had taken her blows. He had called her family even when she was doing her best to end him. But he had never once raised a hand to strike her. Why? Why would a demon, a sorcerer, a selfish macho, show such restraint?
Just then, the door creaked open, shattering the heavy silence. A police officer, his uniform a daunting authority in the small room, stepped in. He glanced at her, then his gaze settled on Bharath. He pulled up a chair beside the boy’s bed, the legs scraping loudly against the linoleum.
Instinct, primal and immediate, took over. Maria closed her eyes to slits, feigning the deep, rhythmic breathing of sleep. Her body went rigid with a new kind of fear. This was it. The consequences.
“Son,” the officer said, his voice a low, professional rumble. “The doctor told me you’re ok to talk now. We need a statement. The EMTs said that this was a messy affair. We need to sort it out.”
Bharath’s voice was raspy, shredded from tears and exhaustion. “It’s nothing, sir. Just ... a family thing. She’s like my mother. You know how they can get when they get upset. She had a little too much to drink. Got upset.”
Maria’s breath hitched in her chest. A lie. He’s lying for me.
The officer frowned, a deep crease forming between his brows. He was not a young man; his face had the weary lines of someone who had seen every flavor of human tragedy. “You were assaulted, son,” he stated, his tone leaving no room for argument. “We’ve got five eyewitnesses, and a hospital report that says you’ve got a knife wound. You’re telling me that was an accident? Son, that kind of thing-under different circumstances-could’ve gone much, much worse.”
Bharath opened his eyes. Even from across the room, Maria could see the red rims, the raw pain in them. But his gaze, when it met the officer’s, was steady. “I’m telling you she’s family. This doesn’t concern anyone but us.”
“She could’ve killed you,” the officer pressed, his voice dropping, trying to impress the gravity upon this seemingly foolish boy.
“But she didn’t,” Bharath replied, his tone flat, final.
“You have the right to press charges. It’s your right.”
“I won’t.” The words were quiet but absolute. “I refuse to. She’s my family.”
A long pause filled the room. Maria could feel the officer’s frustration, his confusion. This was not how this script was supposed to go.
His tone hardened, trying to pierce through the boy’s inexplicable defense. “You realize this could qualify as felony assault? We’re not talking about a slap on the wrist. This is serious.”
“I said no.” Bharath’s own tone sharpened, a flicker of fire in the wreckage. “I’m not some random victim. I’m part of that family. This was ... pain. Grief. Confusion. It was not a crime.”
The officer leaned back, studying him. “Kid, I’m just trying to help you.”
“And I’m telling you, you’re not.” Bharath’s eyes burned with a sudden, fierce intensity that made Maria’s feigned sleep feel even more like a coward’s act. “You don’t get to walk in and try to fix what you don’t understand. She is my family. And I don’t throw family away just because they break.”
The finality in his voice was a stone wall. The officer sighed, a long, weary sound that seemed to carry the weight of the entire city’s troubles. He rose from the chair, the metal groaning in relief.
“Well. It’s your call, son.” He stood for a moment, looking down at the battered boy who protected his attacker. “I’m not going to press you since you’re an adult. Besides, I’ve got two overdoses and a shooting waiting. But I hope you know what you’re doing. Call me if you change your mind.”
He gave Bharath his card and then left. The silence he left behind was louder than before.
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