「故事·听力」I Love My Dad's Best Friend But He Has A Dirty Secret

I Love My Dad's Best Friend But He Has A Dirty Secret

Hi! Are you ready to hear a shocking story? Well, I'm about to tell you one. Although, you might just simply laugh at me when I finish… So, my name is Maxine, I'm seventeen, and I'm going to the college in my hometown after graduation: no need to move far away from home, furthermore, my father is a professor there.

My father plays a very important part in my story. And I love him very much, regardless of everything that happened. That’s why I want you to get to know him better. He is a handsome man in his early forties. With an excellent sense of humor and a very sweet disposition.

Five years ago he and my mother got divorced. More often, children stay with their mother after their parents split, but not in my case. My mother had a serious problem with alcohol, which started almost right after I was born. My father tried to fight her habit for more than ten years… for my sake, I guess. But when I grew up I told him that it would probably be better if we lived together, just the two of us. The rest was simple. So it goes.

Many people think that divorce is something bad. I don’t know. I watched it all happen and it seemed to me that my father was breathing freely for the first time in my life! Of course, a couple of years later his friends and I started to jokingly tease him that he needed to find a girlfriend. But he would just smile and laugh it off, replying that he had all he needed in his life.

And you know, it did seem like it! His life was always full and interesting. He likes to go to the theater, he never misses a good art exhibition, and he snowboards. In addition to all that, he spends a lot of time with me and we enjoy hanging out together a lot.

But I don't like to snowboard or ski, so usually he'd go to the mountains alone. And approximately one year ago he met John on a ski slope. Despite the fact that John was about fifteen years younger than my father and he was not in any way connected to teaching (he was a web designer), they quickly became good friends - joined at the hip, as they say. And I understood why about five minutes after I met John! They were so much alike – both in their looks and their personalities, with their habit of finding a way to turn everything into a joke, and the fact that they never get down.

I liked John a lot. And I enjoyed the fact that he began to visit us very often. We had a huge house anyway, where there was enough room for everybody so it never caused any inconvenience. On the contrary actually, it was much more lively when John was around.

A few months passed and I could not imagine our life without John. He loved theater almost as much my father and I did, he helped me with my Spanish, he helped my father with his library research, he played with our dog, who seemed to simply adore him.

And you know, I was nothing but happy when my father told me, in his usual joking manner, that John visited us so often that it would be better and smarter if he just moved in and lived with us, instead of paying somebody else for an apartment somewhere else.

And that was the story of how John moved in with us. And to see him at home, with all of us creating a small crowd in the kitchen while cooking breakfast, teasing each other, arguing about who's next to go food-shopping… and finally just going together…

I have no idea at what exact moment I fell in love with him.

I told you, I'm seventeen. And all of this had nothing to do with a little-girl-falling-in-love-with-Daddy’s-old-man-friend nonsense. Well, at least I didn’t think so. Anyway, I couldn’t find any reason why John and I couldn't be together. We got along really well and he was so much like my father, who was, in turn, an ideal of a man for me… and John was ALREADY like a part of our family.

There was only one problem – I could not figure out how he felt about me. He told me nice and flattering things pretty often, he never avoided my company… but that was all. So I decided that he must be very well-mannered and therefore just didn't know how to behave in any other way with the young daughter of his best friend. And for me, it really only added more points to his charismatic personality. So nothing held me back from dreaming that if he liked me too, I could have a chance to marry the best man in the world!

So there was just one little thing that remained, to work up the courage and clear things up. Well, fortune favors the brave! I couldn’t have picked a better moment! My dad was gone for two days with his students and John and I were left alone...

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