Bitter Kisses (It's Just High School #3) - Thandiwe Mpofu Page 0,69

been fucking pressed for days over a fucking piece of paper!”

“Okay, boys knock it off.”

“A piece of paper?” Liam seethes, breathing fast and deep. “If it’s just a fucking piece of paper, then why did you keep it from me, J? Did you even tell Mia?”

“Don’t bring her into this.”

“Well damn will you look at that? You didn’t tell her, did you? That’s a fucking surprise, let me clutch my pearls at the shock!”

“Oh, grow up and get over it! Stop being pressed and bent all out of shape because of your hate.”

“I have a fucking right to be fucking pressed!” he blows up. “It’s been a fucking lot lately! Look at you! Look at the fucking state of you!” Then he drops his voice into a deadly whisper, coming closer to me. “What about Mia, J? What about her? Where is she right now and who’s fucking fault is that?”

I want to wring his neck, but the thing is, he’s right. About everything.

“Yeah, just like I fucking thought!” he whispers. “You ditched me, went to war without me and now…”

And now fucking Shane Matthews is out there, probably feeding the flames that I’m the one who killed his brother and now, the fucking mafia will come after me.

Silence falls over us. Cole and Dad are silent, watching us. I think they just decided to let it happen. God knows the truth needs to finally be laid out, all cards on the fucking table.

“I never planned on marrying the Bishops,” I mutter, tugging at my fucking pathetic hospital pajama pants they gave me. “Anyone of them.”

“Julian,” Dad starts but I ignore him, looking at my brother.

Liam stares broodingly down at the floor but looks up when I say the last part.

“What does that mean?” he demands.

“It means it’s been Mia since the day I fucking met her,” I state, the meaning of my words going beyond me, becoming heavy in the room. I dare anyone to say otherwise. I dare anyone to tell me that she isn’t mine, including Mia herself.

I hear Dad blow out a frustrated breath. “It’s not that easy.”

“I didn’t sign anything.”

He’s silent, looking between Liam and me. I’ve never seen him this out of sorts and so alert before. “Listen boys, the contracts, especially these kind, where there’s the union of two families, they are binding in more ways than you realize.”

“Like you and Courtney binding?” Cole asks for the first time.

“Well, that woman and I are still married.”

“Wait, what?” Liam demands, and I realize he didn’t know that either. “Am I the only one shocked with this?” No one says a word. “Well what else did I fucking miss? And how is it possible?”

“Years ago, before either of you… I wasn’t from a family as wealthy or as respectable as the Fitzgerald name is now. I came from a struggling house, with a father who… well, he doesn’t fucking deserve to be mentioned since he broke my mother like a fucking twig and thought it smart to deal with another fucking family that later on bled him fucking dry. It was your great-grandfather who made the deal with the Mason family.”

“When you say he broke your mother…” Cole trails off, but the question is loud and clear.

“He broke her mind, Cole,” Dad snaps, and for the first time I see the rage in his eyes, but it doesn’t take me long to realize he’s been holding it in so tightly over the years, it passed as unnoticeable. “He broke her heart years before but her mind… it happened slowly, over a period of time.”

Holy shit.

I have the answer before I even ask. When he looks at me, I see the confirmation glinting in his anger fueled eyes.

“And Aiden?”

“He was not your brother.”

And there it is.

“Wait, what?” Liam demands, staring wide-eyed at Dad. “What do you mean? If he wasn’t our brother, who was he?”

Dad looks choked up, like he can’t even breathe so I answer for him.

“Our uncle.”

Liam snaps his head in my direction, disbelief radiating from each of his pores. “Dude what?”

Cole is silently bristling beside me, but he calmly answers. “Research shows that sometimes, not all the time, older mothers are more likely to have a baby affected by down syndrome than younger mothers, Liam.”

“But, but…” he trails off, at a loss for words. “Your mother? Our grandmother?”

Dad walks over to the floor-length windows and stares out into, well, his past.

“I took him in as my son because I thought it was just