Bitter Kisses (It's Just High School #3) - Thandiwe Mpofu Page 0,159
but you,” he says softly. “I haven’t touched anyone but you since the night Liam almost died in that car bomb years ago and no one’s touched me since you grabbed my ass in your little bedroom, begging me to fuck you on your twentieth birthday.”
“I thought that was a dream,” I snap. “I didn’t think you’d come…”
“I had to, baby,” Julian says as he steps closer to me, swallowing the distance I had put between us. “I had to see you. We missed your eighteenth. I couldn’t get to you on your nineteenth but fuck, baby, I had to get to you.”
“What happened that night?”
“You really don’t remember?” I shake my head. “Okay, then. When I got in your room, you whispered my name. Your eyes were open. When you saw me, you reached out for me in a way that brought me down to my knees. All I wanted to do in that moment was give you everything you wanted. I swear I thought you wanted me, you even begged me to fuck you. If I had known how sleepy you were, I would’ve stopped but I was already starved. I only wanted to see you, hold you in my arms if I could, but when you looked up at me…”
“I was awake,” I whisper, the admission falling from my lips. “I was awake, but somehow it was easier to compartmentalize your sudden experience that night as dream than to face the reality that you left me. But nothing hurt more than when I woke up and you were gone. You didn’t even kiss me on the lips!”
“Somehow, I thought it would be easier.”
What part of that would be easier for me, Julian?”
“Both, baby. You never asked me to kiss you and I know better than to just demand it, not your kisses. They mean more to me than you’ll ever know, and I wanted you to give that to me willingly,” Julian says, his voice husky. “As for the slipping way before you woke, I just thought you’d want that, so I left.”
“That’s just it, Julian,” I cry. “The ease you have to just walk out of my life, it terrifies me.”
“Baby—”
“I know I made it seem like I didn’t want you anymore, but Julian, I was a girl who had just gone through the worst thing anyone can experience. I was hurting. I wanted you to fight for me, but you sent me two fucking carts and then… nothing.” I turn around to look at the house. “And now, after all the misery of these past years, you bring me here, to this gorgeous house, and you look at me like that, telling me that you left to save me… what do I do with that?”
What do I do with that? And why do I feel like I’m hardly breathing as I look up at him. I turn back to look at him.
“You accept it, Mia. You accept me.”
That’s what I want, but I have questions. Difficult questions that I need answers to now because they’ll haunt me forever and I don’t want them to have any more power over me.
“What happened to Nathan?” I finally ask.
“Didn’t my father tell you?” he says, watching me with a. guarded look in his eyes.
“He did, but I want to hear it from you.”
We stare at each other in silence.
“My father had him killed.”
There it is.
“What happened to Shane?”
“He’s still in hiding, and I hope to God he stays underground because when I find him, and I’m fucking working on it, I will kill him.”
He means it. Every word holds a heaviness to it.
I struggle to breathe, but I keep going. “Kristine?”
“I never kept tabs on her, to be honest but she was spotted in Texas two years ago.”
I nod, looking at the house.
“What happens now?” I whisper. “Because I missed you more than more soul can bare and you… you saved me from a life that could’ve been horrifically worse and I’m so, so grateful.”
“Now, baby, now you have to give me what I’ve been dying for all these years. I’ve been a wreck. You were out of reach and your kisses… fuck, I can’t go a second longer without them,” he says stepping closer to me. “We’re going inside this house but first, I need you to tell me I can finally kiss you.”