Bitter Kisses (It's Just High School #3) - Thandiwe Mpofu Page 0,149

information.

“That was pretty young.”

Who am I to say that? I was the same age when I met Julian.

“Yes,” he says with a small smile. “But I used to tell her that it wasn’t fair. I wished I had known her years before that, maybe then we would have had longer together.”

Holy shit!

“I met her at this friend’s party. She was literally the life of that party, but she did in such a way that had so much grace and class. She was considerate of others, and when she smiled, I promise you, people would gasp at her beauty. She just shined so bright that girl.”

I don’t know what to say to that, but I’m fully engaged. John is looking at the flames, as if deep in thought.

“I won’t waste my time by keeping this PG even thought I know Nicky and even Nancy would kill me for being this blunt, but I wanted her from that moment,” John says, now looking at me. “You have to understand, at that time, I was just a mess. I was getting in all sorts of trouble. My parents were… well, there we so many wrong turns that have brought me here where my oldest son assumed responsibility of my own brother because I couldn’t step up to the bitch of a woman I married through a contract.”

My breath catches as soon as he says that.

“In all that time, it was Nancy who got me through my mother’s illness and the way my father became an abusive jerk who sunk us so deep in debt, here we are. It didn’t surprise me when he married Helen Montague.”

“Nathan’s mother?”

“Yes, that bitch. She liked was something else, and she came with her own set of trouble into a house that was already in shambles,” he says. “She’s the one who introduced my father to some pretty dark stuff. And it’s from there that my father found the Mason family from where…”

Courtney was bred into the bitch she is.”

“Precisely,” John says. “This is why I like you.”

I can’t help but smile at that, but I do have one question.

“If you had the chance, if the contract wasn’t signed, if you could change things, would you have married Nancy?”

“In a heartbeat,” he says almost immediately. The way he says it reminds me of his son, and again, my grief strings start knotting together. “If only she had accepted any one of my four proposals.”

“What? You proposed four times?”

“Hmm, five if you count the day we met,” he says casually. “I mean, with what was happening at the place I called home and what was happening at her house, there we some periods of time we couldn’t see each other. And even after my father died in a car accident, I couldn’t see Nancy for at least four years.”

I can hear the pain in his voice as he says that. The regret is so potent it travels down my back like a shiver.

“Why was that?” I ask. This time, he looks at me, holding my gaze as if he’s about to relay some pretty important information.

“Because of the responsibilities I had to assume,” he says simply.

Silence. I don’t have to read in between the lines to get what he means.

“You mean you took over the family business?” I mutter.

“In a way, yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“I can’t exactly divulge much about it, but I wanted to tell you something,” he says, watching me. “I don’t know if you remember me but there was time, when you were maybe five or six, you, Nancy, Julian and I took a trip to Paris.”

“Excuse me?” I whisper. He just smiles.

“It was a last-minute trip on my part. I knew Nancy wanted an out, I mean, it’s because of you years later after she’s gone that I now know that she hid a lot of stuff from me because if I knew what that imbecile was doing to her…”

“I don’t think she could face telling you,” I mumble. I’ve had some time to think about a lot and one those things is this. Why didn’t Nancy go to the love of her life for help. Then it came to me. “She was a proud woman who never backed down but more than that, she wanted to protect me.”

John is quiet for beat.

“It was on that trip that I asked her to marry me for the last time,” he says. “I mean don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t exactly aware of the fine print of