Atonement(35)
They weren’t exactly cheap. Our flight wouldn’t leave for another four and a half hours and we paid almost four hundred euros per person for the tickets in Economy Extra, what ever that meant.
Colin and I immediately booked our luggage as the young woman at the desk who issued our tickets didn’t mind taking it at all and walked through Charles De Gaulle until we found a food court where we could sit down and have a decent meal.
It was quite strange because neither one of us had had much sleep on the flight over. We had spent so much time talking about our childhoods, past relationships and university that we had each maybe gotten a few hours of sleep, tops. It was starting to take its toll but I opted for a large café au lait—which, ironically, was the size of a tall at Starbucks in the States—and a ham and cheese baguette.
Colin, as usual, bought a round of Guinness and grabbed a baguette with ham and goat cheese as opposed to my ham and Brie. I tried to turn down my Guinness but after devouring my sandwich and polishing off my coffee, I still drank my ale.
“You see, I told you I would turn you into an ale drinker after all,” he bragged as we sat in an airport café.
I couldn’t help but laugh yet again and realized the muscles in my face hurt from smiling and laughing so much. Everything with Colin was so damned easy and why was it a wry smile from him could turn my insides to mush? Hell, why had we just blown almost one thousand euros we hadn’t planned to spend on tickets to see his grandparents?
I know it was silly and I should have really taken the lead and acted like the grown up but part of me loved the idea one day this man might be my husband. He had a great personality, he was easy on the eyes and he was everything women claimed they wanted all the while lusting after sadistic alpha males who rarely gave a damn.
He was a dream man and he could imagine spending the rest of his life with me because he decided I was what he wanted. Damn, that felt good. Of course when he grabbed my left hand and held it in his right, it felt even better.
Colin’s palms were soft and dry. I wanted to hold his hand as much as he wanted to hold mine and for some reason, we both clutched each other at the same time and it felt right.
“Did you really tell your grandparents’ you hoped to marry me one day?” I wondered in a serious tone. “I mean, you wouldn’t play with me like that, would you?”
“What do you mean?” he questioned back as he stared into my eyes with gorgeous blue irises. “You know that isn’t me. What would I get out of playing you for a fool? I’m almost thirty years old, Deirdre. We aren’t twenty-two year old college kids with the rest of our lives ahead of us. If we don’t know what we want out of life by now then we are seriously screwed.”
“Yeah, I know and I didn’t think you were kidding around but I had to ask. I mean, I have loved Drew for so long and he is the man who has been my rock, my salvation but…he isn’t meant for me. I know there is a woman out there for him but she isn’t me—you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, a little bit too well.” He bit his lip and played with my fingers. “There was a woman at university. Let’s call her ‘Carrie’ because I don’t want her to be hurt when I invite her to our wedding and you regale her with stories I have told you about her. We were very compatible and she was a lovely human being. We were…perfect.
“However, something wasn’t right and there was something in our relationship that was missing. I couldn’t put my finger on it and neither could she. Everything about us was just so damned…perfect. Our parents’ thought we were tailor made for one another and we never had a disagreement. I suppose you could say our sex life was satisfactory though it wasn’t anything spectacular.”
He paused and swigged from his Guinness before he continued. “Everyone just knew we would graduate and marry but I wasn’t so sure and to be honest, I loved her but I wasn’t in love with her. So, I did what I thought was the best way to sever our relationship for good. I cheated on her with one of her casual friends and made sure she walked in on it.
“The whole situation devastated her. She couldn’t believe what I had done because we were just so perfect and how could I ruin the best thing that would ever happen to me? The problem was I didn’t think she was the best I could do because I felt stifled in every way by what we had. I wasn’t free and happy, I just felt trapped and what kind of bastard would I be to marry her, convince her I was happy and still fail her in the end?”