Free Forever Mine by Carrie Noble Page B

his happiness
obviously, try to convince him that he would be happier without me,
that he could do better than me.
    It didn’t
take me long to realise the weak spot that I could use to my
advantage. Although John loved Jennifer, he was not a big fan of
Ben. He found Ben to be obnoxious, belligerent and arrogant. Three
traits that he hated in other people. I had thought that people
were exaggerating when they talked about Ben, but even I couldn’t
believe how quickly he could rub a room full of people up the wrong
way and not even seem to care. I knew it would only be a matter of
time before he provided me with the ammunition I needed.
    By mid-June I
had been spent two months feeding back everything that Ben had said
about John or his family to John, and put my own, unique spin on
them. ‘Oh John, I couldn’t believe the way that Ben spoke to
Charlie and Emily on Sunday,’ or ‘Did you hear what Ben said to
Patrick about Charlie’s hair.’ John always made the same excuses,
‘You know what Ben is like,’ but I could see the constant highlight
on Ben’s criticisms were wearing John down and the time was right
to sort this out once and for all.
    After an afternoon in the
pub I went back to Jennifer’s with her whilst Ben and John stayed
to watch the football. Jennifer had been drinking and let down her
guard more than usual. We started talking about
holidays,
    ‘Oh me and Ben haven’t
decided if we will be able to go away this year, you know, with
things the way they are.’
    ‘Why, what’s
wrong love?’
    ‘Oh, it’s nothing, don’t
worry about it. I mean, I’m sure that John will sort
it.’
    ‘John, what’s John got to
do with your holiday. Your worrying me now Jen. Tell me what the
bloody hell is going on.’
    ‘Calm down Michelle, it’s
fine. It’s just that we can’t book anything until John gives us the
money back.’
    ‘What money?’
    ‘Oh sorry Mich, I thought
you knew. I think it was around the time that he met you actually.
John was having some financial problems and so he asked if we could
help him out. We only had our holiday money so we lent him that. So
we just don’t want to book anything until we know we have the
money, that’s all.’
    Bingo. This should do the
trick.
    Later that
night John was worried about me. ‘Your quiet babe, anything
wrong.’
    ‘Oh no just ignore me,
it’s probably nothing, you know me, just a bit
sensitive.’
    ‘Don’t be
silly, tell me what’s on your mind.’ Got him. Hook, Line,
Sinker.
    I told John that Jennifer
had been really nasty and had been blaming us for the fact that
they could not go on holiday. I made out that she had called John
for everything and accused us of robbing them.
    I suspected
this would be enough to cause a problem but I didn’t expect the
explosive response that came from my loving John. I have never seen
anybody so angry, so abusive and so nasty. This was not the person
I knew. Within minutes he had phoned Jennifer and Ben. The rest of
the night was spent emailing increasingly abusive text messages to
each other. I was sure now that I had solved the problem of
Jennifer, once and for all. I couldn’t believe that the damage
caused by the numerous messages could easily be resolved,
especially with me advising and ’supporting’ John. But what price
had I paid. That night I couldn’t sleep. Was this the person I
loved? Was this the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life
with? By morning I had convinced myself that no, this wasn’t my
John. It was them. It was what they had driven him to. I was right
all along. These people were no good for John. He needed to be away
from them. All he needed was me. Forever, just me.
    The next day John was
back to the perfect, thoughtful man I knew. Nothing was going to
come between us. Nothing was going to spoil my
happiness.
    ‘So you see Louise, she
was just awful. She never liked me and then the way they treated
John. I just couldn’t take it.’
    ‘Oh Michelle,
she sounds