Atonement(74)
Liam’s blue eyes turned icy before he stood and followed his brother to the indoor balcony. They closed the door behind themselves and I immediately saw Colin light a cigarette.
“Speaking of, have you quit smoking?” Caitlyn inquired as she continued to eat.
“I haven’t had one all day. I only smoked occasionally on the European trip and I always planned to quit for good…again, once we got home so this is as good of time as any.”
I put my fork down and stared at my sister. “Sometimes I think you forget what the dynamics of our relationship are and I’m getting sick of it. I’m your older sister, not the other way around yet you seem to have very little respect for me and that is irksome to me. I am going to live my life however I want and that means you don’t always get an opinion, you got that?”
“If I treat you like less than adult sometimes, perhaps it’s because you seem to act like one and have lived your life as something other than what you are for the past five years? You should have been starting this job at uConnect at twenty-four after you got your Masters, not at almost twenty-nine. You have wasted so much time yet now you want me to treat you with respect you sure as shit don’t deserve!” she exclaimed with cool steel blue eyes.
“That’s not fair. I may not have lived my life the way you envisioned me to live it but it is still my life to live. How dare you think just because I didn’t take the same path as you somehow my life is not to be respected? You should treat me the same way I have treated you and supported every decision you have made in your life whether they were right or wrong.”
“Calm down, Deirdre.” Caitlyn swept a lock of blonde hair from her face. “I don’t know why we are talking about this in the first place. You should take it easy with your condition and we certainly shouldn’t be having knock down, drag out fights. What ever Liam and Colin are talking about is between them. We have nothing to do with it.”
“You’re positive about that? You understand everything that is going on because several times, Colin tried to come clean with me in Europe and I wouldn’t let him. To be honest, I didn’t want to know. He started to tell me about this night he and Liam indulged in Bath Salts. Know anything about that?”
Caitlyn looked away as she refilled her wine glass with one of several bottles of Pinot Grigio set out on the dinner table. “Yes, he told me. According to him, they were experimenting. He was man enough to admit he was the curious one about the drug after they heard about the incidents on television and what happened to that young woman, Ms. McLaughlin, who worked at uConnect. He was open and honest about the experience and told me in truth most of the night was a blur.
“He just knows the next day, he awoke to find his car totaled. It was a BMW and an absolute write-off. They left it in a dicey part of town so anything could have happened. He called a tow-truck and it was taken to some scrap yard where it was stripped and basically his insurance went through the roof due to the incident.”
“Is that all he told you because Colin said to me the night came back to him slowly in bits and pieces. All he realized was he shouldn’t have allowed Liam to drive. He said he acted foolishly that night because his brother was in no shape or form to make that trip home behind the wheel of a car.”
Caitlyn sipped on her wine in a contemplative manner before her pale eyebrows shot up. “That’s funny because Liam told me Colin was driving. He became so erratic on the road, he forced them to pull over and from there they called a taxi that delivered them home. He said Colin was worried about the car but he was much more concerned about their lives.”
I smiled wryly though my look of exasperation and irony was completely lost on my little sister. “How convenient for Liam…seems like he is quite the revisionist when it comes to past events. I am just wondering if he fed you that same cock and bull story when it came to our one night stand? Did he say it was all my idea and I found him so incredibly attractive I just had to have him or I would die?”
My sister stood from the table but she kept her slender, graceful and pale fingers wrapped around the wine stem. “He didn’t tell me much about what happened between the two of you. To be honest, I always got the feeling he was trying to protect your reputation and if I viewed you in a certain light, that wouldn’t be good for anyone so I dropped it and let it go.”
Caitlyn turned around to face me. “It was the reason why I called you in the first place. I was hoping you would shed some light on what happened that night because he was so f*cking vague and you know how I am. I need to know all the facts or I feel like I don’t have the whole story. It wasn’t about you—not really—it was about what he did to you and how he made you feel. I just wanted to believe he treated you like a whore because I couldn’t stand the thought he made you feel special like he makes me feel when we make love.”