Page 27 of That Birthday in Barbados
“No,” he says in a level voice. “I’m trying to understand what your expectations were.”
“And what if I didn’t have any?”
“I would be surprised.”
“Sex can’t be for the sake of sex?”
“It can be for some people. I don’t happen to think you’re one of those people.”
“I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but you don’t know me, Dr. Baker.”
“I know pieces of you.”
She stares at him, daring for a moment to let him see behind the curtain she attempts to wear as her expression. “Then you know I’m not a very good person.”
“I don’t know that at all.”
She scoffs. “Good people betray their sisters?”
“Is that how you see what you did?”
“Isn’t that how you see it?”
“It doesn’t matter how I see it.”
“Doesn’t it? Why else would I be here?”
“I hope you’re here because you want to see yourself in a way that would make such choices in the future an impossibility.”
She laughs a light laugh. “So I’m suddenly going to start liking myself so much that I’ll be above hurting my sister?”
“I would rather see it as you reaching a point where you respect yourself too much to be taken advantage of.”
She leans back, looks at him through narrowed eyes. “You think I was taken advantage of?”
“Yes. I do.”
She laughs outright now. “What would make you think that?”
He’s silent long enough to make her uncomfortable. “The fact that anyone who knows you as well as your brother-in-law almost certainly knew you would have known you have a low sense of self-worth.”
The words strike her chest like nails from a carpenter’s gun. The sting they leave in their wake is enough to rob her of words. Never before has she thought of herself as being taken advantage of. In fact, she has seen herself as the one who opened the door to what happened in her sister’s apartment that night. Invited it somehow even though it had honestly never occurred to her until the moment he had leaned in and kissed her and the pizza box had slipped from her hands.
She wants to deny the doctor’s assertion, feels the need to tell him he is wrong. But any response she’scompelled to wave as a flag of objection, sticks in her throat, and she can think of nothing to say.
Deep down, in a place she doesn’t want to look at, she wonders if he is right.
Because if she is honest with herself, truly honest, she cannot deny that she has always thought her sister, her family, would be far better off without her.
Chapter Ten
“Learn to enjoy every minute of your life. Be happy now. Don’t wait for something outside of yourself to make you happy in thefuture. Every minute should be enjoyed and savored.”
?Earl Nightingale
Catherine
SO HE CLEANS up amazingly well.
