The Bad Boy's Dirty Little Secret BL Chapter 109: A New Perspective

Night’s P.O.V

I stared at him, letting myself absorb what he had just said. Part of me felt sorry for him; the incident with Matthias must have changed him so much that he turned his worldview around in a complete 180.

But the other half was angry at myself for feeling pity for him. Angry at him, because I had deserved better than how he had treated me.

“You of all people should know better than anyone that being gay isn’t some kind of disease,” I spat, “or a hobby that you can expect me to give up and move on when it’s no longer of any interest to me. You got angry at Kai when he told you that you never truly loved anyone in your life. How would you feel if I said the same thing and told you that what you and Matthias had wasn’t real? That it wasn’t valid because he wasn’t a woman?”

He didn’t say anything, but from the way he looked at me I knew he was listening intently to what I was saying. Finally—when was the last time he did so? I couldn’t recall.

“Times are different now from what they used to be,” I urged. “Even though I understand that you had loved and lost someone who was dear to you, I still can’t help but feel like it was unfair on me. No, I know you weren’t being fair to me. How does your past justify the way you had been treating me, your son? I had nothing to do with your past, so why did you torment me with your misery?”

I found it really difficult to grasp his logic; it just didn’t make any sense to me. And I was adamant on the fact that he hurt me, and that he should be sorry for it.

But then I saw something flash in his eyes—for the first time what looked like several emotions flickered in his gaze all at once—the most prominent being love and fear.

“You don’t understand, not fully, what I had been through, because you haven’t lost the one person you loved the most, not yet,” he croaked. “You know, I was well aware of when you were fooling around, especially with your past connections with other men, and I didn’t particularly care then, hoping it would stay like that, just you…fooling around. But when things got serious between you and Kai, I was afraid.”

“Why?” I asked, getting a bit frustrated. “What could you possibly be so afraid of that you made it your life’s mission to sabotage my one shot at true happiness?”

He sighed, gaze dropping to the floor. But he looked like he was staring at something beyond it. “If you truly love Kai, then try to imagine a world where he doesn’t exist anymore… Can you do it? Try to imagine being the reason for his death.”

A world without Kai? My heart almost burst out of my chest at the thought. “Are you insane?” I sputtered. “Never talk like that again. I couldn’t… I wouldn’t…”

I thought he would get angry; at least, the Jonathan Winters I knew got angry if his son talked back at him. But he only gave me a sad smile and said something that shattered my heart.

“The world that you cannot even bring yourself to imagine is a world that I am living in everyday. What you cannot bear to imagine… a life without your loved one… is my sad reality.”

Oh.

The anger in my chest slowly started to unravel, replaced by an overlooming sense of dread. It was as if I was watching a train wreck happening but being unable to stop it; being completely helpless in the face of such a fate.

“On the night of the accident,” my father said, and his voice was so low at first that I had to strain my ears in order to hear him, “we were having an argument… it was just a silly thing, really. Now that I think about it, I wonder why I even brought it up at all. We were at the lowest point of our relationship, I think, at least that’s what it felt like. I felt neglected by him, like he was pulling away from me bit by bit. And whenever I told him about it, he just kept denying it.

“It was a constant push and pull between us; me insisting that he was different somehow, him denying my accusations. At one point, I even asked him if he was seeing someone else, and that was when we crashed.” He took a sharp inhale of air. “Stupid, isn’t it? Turns out the changes in his behavior was because of his tumor. And to think that I blamed it on him…”

He swiped a finger across his cheek, wiping the tear stains as best as he could. “Every day until now, I still regret that argument with him. It was one of many, but it was the most devastating. I kept imagining how my life would have been entirely different, if only I had not been so rash with my words. If only I had not poked at his faithfulness and accused him of infidelity. Maybe then my world wouldn’t be as dark as it was right now.”

If I had to be completely honest, I still felt like it was unfair on my part. Nothing could ever excuse the trauma he had given me for manipulating my life the way he did. But hearing his side of the story now gave me some perspective as to why he had been so harsh with me.

As the weight of his words settled in, part of my inner child felt healed as I realized the magnitude of the pain that my father had been through. It wasn’t any sort of justification for the way he treated me, but I understood now that he was just afraid that I would end up like him, so devoted to someone only to have him ripped away from me like that.

And by his logic, that meant protecting me from devastating pain if my lover was to be taken away from me suddenly. And so he fixed my marriage to a woman since I was a child, insisting that I marry Rosalie. It was fucked up, but it turns out that all along he was trying to protect me.

Looking at him now, my father seemed to have aged a decade. His tear-stained face had more wrinkles than I last remembered and the number of grey hairs had increased as well. I wanted to hate him still, for everything I had to endure at his hands, but looking at him now…I saw a pitiful shell of a man whose pride had been shattered and his painful past laid bare for everyone to see.

When I still didn’t speak, my father turned to my mom in the meanwhile. He took her hand, and it was the gentlest that I’d ever seen him be with anyone. “I am so sorry for having betrayed your trust, by keeping this secret from you for so long,” he spoke, his voice cracking. “Just like anyone else, you deserved to spend the rest of your life with someone who could completely and truly love you. Instead, you are stuck with me. Still, you must know that in the years that followed, though my heart still longed for Matthias, you had been my only source of comfort.

“And I think I owe it to you to give you a choice. I understand if you want to leave me now; you probably want to pursue your own happiness. But you also have the choice to stay.” He sighed. “Just know that, no matter how much I try, I will never be able to love you in the way that you deserve. So if you choose to leave me…I’ll understand.”