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    Code Yellow
    Code Yellow
    Code Yellow
    Ebook97 pages1 hour

    Code Yellow

    By Susan Laine

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Sequel to Yellow Streak
    Heroes at Heart: Book Three

    Two years have passed since that long, dark, night of despair and near death when English-lit geek Yancy Bell met dancing jock Curt Donovan. Now a couple living in New York, they appear happy and well suited to one another.

    But appearances can be deceptive.

    Yancy feels Curt is growing distant, and they barely see each other. At Juilliard, Curt has bonded with a new friend, Greg. Yancy fears his relationship with Curt is coming to a head. Meanwhile,Curt harbors a secret that could spell the end of Yancy’s love for him.

    Yet neither man dares to confront his fears—or the other.

    Will their fate be a code yellow or a golden opportunity?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamspinner Press
    Release dateMay 4, 2016
    ISBN9781623807528
    Code Yellow
    Author

    Susan Laine

    Susan Laine, an award-winning, multipublished author of LGBTQ erotic romance and a Finnish native, was raised by the best mother in the world, who told her daughter time and again that she could be whatever she wanted to be. The spark for serious writing and publishing kindled when Susan discovered the gay erotic romance genre. Her book, Monsters Under the Bed, won the 2014 Rainbow Award for Best Gay Paranormal Romance. Anthropology is Susan’s formal education, and she could have been happy as an eternal student. But she’s written stories since she was a kid, and her long-term goal is still to become a full-time writer. Susan enjoys hanging out with her sister, two nieces, and friends in movie theaters, libraries, bookstores, and parks. Her favorite pastimes include singing along (badly) to the latest pop songs, watching action flicks, doing the dishes, and sleeping till noon, while a few of her dislikes are sweating, hot and too-bright summer days, tobacco smoke, purposeful prejudice and hate speech. Website: www.susan-laine-author.fi Email: susan.laine@hotmail.com Blog: www.goodreads.com/author/show/5221828.Susan_Laine/blog Facebook: www.facebook.com/Susan-Laine-128697277229180 Twitter: @Laine_Susan

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    • 4/5
      Good continuation of the story. I do wonder the reason for writing them as novellas instead of one novel though. I'm glad one of the protagonists finally gets professional help; took two books too long if you ask me. Given the YA nature of this series, I think that gives readers a wrong impression of how to handle these types of issues, and can become dangerous.

    Book preview

    Code Yellow - Susan Laine

    Code Yellow

    By Susan Laine

    Sequel to Yellow Streak

    Heroes at Heart: Book Three

    Two years have passed since that long, dark, night of despair and near death when English-lit geek Yancy Bell met dancing jock Curt Donovan. Now a couple living in New York, they appear happy and well suited to one another.

    But appearances can be deceptive.

    Yancy feels Curt is growing distant, and they barely see each other. At Juilliard, Curt has bonded with a new friend, Greg. Yancy fears his relationship with Curt is coming to a head. Meanwhile,Curt harbors a secret that could spell the end of Yancy’s love for him.

    Yet neither man dares to confront his fears—or the other.

    Will their fate be a code yellow or a golden opportunity?

    Chapter 1

    I KNEW we’d be all right.

    Hard to fathom it was a mere eight months since I’d thought and believed those words. Lately my faith in us had dwindled.

    Sorry, babe. I’m, uh, gonna be late tonight. Rehearsals. Don’t wait up. A smooching sound spelled the end of the voice message. One of dozens of messages exactly like this over the past two months.

    It was late Sunday, with Thanksgiving week ahead. This would be my second such celebration with Curt Donovan, my boyfriend, a dancer at Juilliard, and I’d been looking forward to it for six months. He and I, Yancy Bell, had a lot to be thankful for. Curt had been accepted to Juilliard, and I’d gotten some positive feedback from my professors on the novel I was writing about gay youths in high school and college—coming out of the closet, support… and suicide.

    I could scarcely believe it sometimes. It was nearly two years since the night Curt and I had met. The night he’d almost killed himself. His father didn’t want a gay son and had shown it by throwing Curt out to survive on his own, without his parents. I had met Curt by a quirk of nature (or call of nature, to be precise, since I’d needed to pee) and ended up saving his life.

    Heck, I could scarcely believe myself sometimes. I wasn’t the bravest person in the world. But for some reason, changing Curt’s mind about dying by his own hand had felt important then, the most significant thing I’d ever done.

    Curt called me his yellowbelly hero. It was an intimate phrase he used when we were, well, intimate. He said it with a smile, and I believed him.

    Only… lately I found myself trusting in him—and us—less.

    The summer had been wonderful. I had met Curt’s brother, Will, and sister, Serena, who had welcomed me with open arms as their little brother’s boyfriend. I’d never felt so accepted by a group of people I had no blood ties to. I’d known Serena was a psychologist but had no idea Will was a criminal lawyer. That sounded kinda cool. Serena’s husband, Thomas, was a drop-dead gorgeous African American psychotherapist, sort of a bigwig in his chosen field.

    With them I could relax and be myself. I’d even told them about my condition. I had a nervous bladder, which basically meant I had to pee a lot. With medication, I coped. I don’t know why it was important to me what they thought about it. I only remember how relieved I’d been at their understanding and kindness.

    I felt like I’d found a new family. Not that I didn’t have one of my own, of course. But being the youngest child of eight meant I was often ignored. After I came out, they started getting this strange look in their eyes sometimes, like they couldn’t understand it. They hadn’t disowned me, thrown me out, disavowed me, or anything like that. They just felt… remote at times.

    Nonetheless, Curt had brought me into his circle of loved ones, and it meant the world to me.

    Which is why it hurt so much that I sensed Curt growing distant.

    We barely saw each other these days. He studied at Juilliard, but we shared a tiny one-bedroom apartment (more like a shoebox, really) close to Central Park (which translated as us being able to see a glimpse of the treetops in the southwest corner if we leaned precariously out of the bedroom window). I’d switched schools and towns to be with him, to support and love him. To me, at the time, it hadn’t felt like a sacrifice.

    I was in my senior year in college, majoring in English lit and minoring in computer studies. I’d come to view the latter as providing a better chance of employment in the long run, unfortunately. For now I worked part-time at a local convenience store as a stock boy. Grueling and underappreciated work for less than minimum wage. Couldn’t recommend it to my worst enemy. But needs must, and we had bills to pay. Thankfully my college was paid for with a scholarship.

    Both Curt and I were busy with school and work. Curt worked on weekend nights at a gay bar as a bartender. I had to admit, he surpassed Tom Cruise when it came to shaking those… um, shakers. I hadn’t known he had any experience with such a job.

    Our daily routine had become just that. Routine. We woke up groggy, swapped hasty blowjobs in bed or in the shower, depending on our schedules, barely ate breakfast, hurried to our respective classes, and went to work after school. We came back in the evening exhausted and so not in the mood, ate takeout, and crashed on the couch or the bed, depending on proximity and levels of weariness.

    We had been in that mundane rut since July.

    Some days we didn’t even kiss. The new relationship smell had definitely faded.

    And for over a month now, I had communicated with Curt mainly via texts and voice mail. He was always late. He left before I woke up and came in when I was already asleep. If the pile of dirty clothes in the hamper and the pile of dirty dishes in the sink hadn’t grown daily, I would’ve assumed he didn’t live there anymore.

    Even the pillowcase stopped smelling like him.

    Had the spark gone for good? Did he still love me? Was the fate of our relationship to become mere roommates with separate lives, separate interests, and no time for one another?

    I sighed, making a deplorable spectacle of myself, and replayed the voice message on my iPhone. I’m, uh, gonna be late tonight.

    Yeah, tonight and every night. I fisted my hands, angry at myself and at Curt. He’d made new friends in class. One in particular. Greg. They’d met at their first partnering dance class

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