Chapter 12
S am had exhausted her feet and her bank card after hours of shopping. Coming home with three new pairs of shoes and four new dresses made her aching feet more than worth it. Pulling up to a stop outside her house, it took only one glance to know that her parents and Dylan were both out.
Their six bedroomed old red bricked farmhouse sat in the middle of six acres, surrounded by a small wood. The dark wooden window frames were something her and Dylan both disliked, but their parents loved. Of course, as their parents paid the bills, they had the final say.
All the windows were covered by curtains and the landing light along with the kitchen light had been left on—the signal to each other that the house was empty. Whoever arrived home first would open the living room curtains and switch on the living room lamp—the signal that someone was in, and everything was ok.
If, by some chance, someone broke into the house and switched on different lights, or opened different sets of curtains, whoever arrived home would know something was up. It had never been an issue but being prepared, especially living in the middle of nowhere in a large house, could never be a bad thing.
Just as Sam unlocked their red front door, the sound of tyres crunching on gravel stopped her from pushing the door open. Looking back over her shoulder, Sam saw Dylan speeding up the driveway, as per usual, in his gorgeous to die for black C63 AMG Mercedes. Sam knew nothing about cars but the grumble coming from that engine combined with its looks made her want to date the next old guy who owned one.
Satisfied the only threat was her annoying brother, Sam kicked the front door with her left foot as she picked up her bags of goodies. Dylan skidded to a stop on the drive, showering gravel everywhere but on his immaculate car. Sam rolled her eyes and sighed. That guy could fall into a heap of shit and still come out smelling of roses.
“How much of sugar daddy’s money have you spent today?” Dylan asked, hopping out of his car and striding up behind his little sister.
Sam marched into the kitchen, dropping her bags onto the oak topped kitchen island. “I earned that money, thank you very much, so it’s my money.”
Dylan headed over to the fridge and pulled out a carton of orange juice. He snorted at his sister. “Sure. Earned it by sucking dick.”
Sam whirled around and faced her brother with her hands on her hips, anger flashing through her green eyes. “I don’t care for your insinuation.”
Dylan finished drinking the orange juice, putting the empty box back in the fridge with all but a dribble left in the bottom. “I couldn’t care less what you think to be quite frank. The fact is you fuck old guys, and they give you money.”
Sam ignored his remark, which was nothing other than him wanting to pick a fight. Instead, she stared at the fridge door as it closed shut, then looked at her brother. “Because you couldn’t have finished that last little bit and put it in the bin, could you?”
Dylan gave her a mischievous grin. “Nope. Because then it wouldn’t annoy you, would it?”
As Dylan walked across the kitchen, the yellow lighting from the spotlights in the ceiling caught his left cheek, highlighting a red imprint across it.
Sam raised an eyebrow and cleared her throat. “Uh-hum.”
Dylan stopped. “What?”
“What is that?” she asked, pointing her index finger at his cheek.
Dylan shrugged his shoulders. “I was falling asleep driving so I slapped myself to stay awake.”
“Please,” Sam said, rolling her eyes in exasperation. “I may be blonde, but I’m not that stupid. Quite clearly that handprint is not yours. It’s half the size for a start, never mind the fact that it’s the wrong way round for it to be your left hand.”
“Since when did you turn into Miss Marple? It’s nothing, leave it be.”
Sam opened her mouth to argue back but then thought better of it. A sly smirk crossed her pink lips as she decided to hit him another way. Her heart pounding and her palms sweaty, she was purely calling his bluff, but she felt ninety percent certain she was right.
“I know about you and Kyla,” she said.
Dylan stopped dead. He drew himself up to his full height and glared down at her. “Excuse me?”
Sam folded her arms over her chest and jutted her chin out in nothing but complete defiance. “You heard me.”
Dylan quirked an eyebrow up. “You’re delusional.”
“That’s not a no.”
Dylan ran through his options quickly. He could continue to lie to his sister and battle on with Kyla alone, or he could confess everything and have Sam on side to help Kyla when he wasn’t here.
As the light bulb flicked on in his head, he realised that was his answer to convincing Kyla to be with him. She was scared about being alone when he was gone, but with Sam on side, everything would fall into place perfectly, like a seamless jigsaw puzzle.
Dylan let out a sigh. “How long have you known?”
Sam grinned at him. “I suspected. I called your bluff. My, my, soldier boy, you wouldn’t hold up well under torture, would you?”
Biting his tongue and refusing to be drawn into another sibling argument, he ignored her last comment and rephrased his question. “How long have you suspected?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I started suspecting the last time you were back. You and her were MIA at the same time more than once. Then the way she looked at you today...your early morning arrival, her being late for breakfast...all seemed a little too convenient.”
“I see,” he replied, a muscle in his neck twitching. “And how exactly do you feel about that?”
Sam took a black leather bar stool out from the side of the kitchen island and sat down on it. “I told Kyla earlier how I felt about that. I want nothing more than for the pair of you to be happy, even if that means putting up with the grossness of you two being a thing, but she can’t give you what you want, Dylan. That’s the end of it.”
Dylan walked around to the other side of the island and bent over, resting his forearms on the oak top, meeting his sister at eye level. “That’s the end of your opinion, yes. That’s not the end of me and her.”
Sam narrowed her eyes at him. “I’m going to gloss over the fact that the pair of you have been lying to me for at least six months. That’s another conversation. You have a responsibility to this family, Dylan, you’ve known about that from day one. Kyla cannot help you uphold that responsibility. Whatever this is going on with you two is completely pointless and will only end in heartbreak. It’s best to cut it off now before it becomes anything more.” Sam inclined her head towards her brother’s cheek. “That from her?”
Dylan pressed his lips together but said nothing.
“Dylan...what did you do? Do I need to be worried about her?”
Letting a long breath out, Dylan prepared himself to be yelled at by a second woman in the space of two hours. “Look, you don’t need to know the ins and out of me and Kyla. It’s been nothing but sex from the beginning. We both agreed NSA. It was just a...a fling. We both found each other hot and decided to screw it out but, well, here we are this far down the line.”
“And? I know there’s more.”
“And I want more. I told her today that I want more. I asked her to commit to me, to trust me, to turn to me when she needs someone.”
Sam let out a groan and buried her face in her hands. “You’re a fucking moron,” she said, lifting her head. “And that’s when you got that?” she asked, looking at the fading mark on his cheek.
“More or less.”
“More or less? What do you mean by that?” Sam jumped off the stool, her heart pounding as a million possibilities of Kyla’s delicate state of mind ran through her thoughts like a carousel on hyper speed. “Is she ok?”
“She’s fine. She’s sleeping. I think...I think she kind of had a bit of a PTSD episode earlier. I put her in the bath, and all was fine. Then she came downstairs, and we revisited our previous chat and she just had a complete and utter meltdown. She beat me.” He stood up and lifted his shirt to reveal fading red marks across his upper torso. “But I think she’s fine now. She got it all out and I put her to bed.”
“Oh my God,” Sam said, running her hands through her hair. “You don’t even realise the damage you’ve done, do you? You absolute blundering buffoon.”
Dylan frowned. “What am I missing here? I figured by now she’d be wanting some stability and some sense of normality. She knows me, you, our family, we get on well, there’s no nasty surprises in the bedroom department either.” He shrugged his shoulders. “What am I not getting?”
Sam cocked her head to one side as she racked her brains trying to think of an appropriate analogy to use on her simple brother to make him understand. “Do you remember when you were little? When you were scared of pigeons and clowns?”
Dylan narrowed his eyes at her and folded his arms over his chest. “What’s your point?”
“Did locking you in a room with a flock of pigeons or a bunch of clowns help?”
“No...”
“What happened? How did you get over it?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “As I grew older, I understood things more and I learned they weren’t a threat.”
Sam widened her eyes at him, as if saying ‘duh’.
“Are you telling me she needs to grow up?”
Sam laughed. “Not in so many words. Her body is obviously a thirty-year-old woman, but her mind, trapped in this permanent PTSD state, is stuck back ten years ago when it all happened. And with that, her emotions too. You’ve just asked her to lock herself in a room with a bunch of clowns playing falconry with a hundred pigeons.”
Dylan unfolded his arms, let out a sigh, and ran a hand through his hair. Staring down at the floor, he felt nothing but a complete idiot. “I get it,” he said. “I didn’t think of it like that.” He looked back up at his sister and asked, “So what do I do now? How do I fix it?”
Sam sat back down on the stool and let out a long breath. “You don’t. We do nothing. She doesn’t know that I know about you two. If I go over there now, after your mess this morning, she’s going to know that I know. I think that will just make her worse.”
“How will she know you know if you just pop over for a cup of tea or something?”
“Because we’re seeing each other later when we go out. I’ve no need to go see her now for a cup of tea. She’ll know something’s up. Knowing Kyla how I do, she’ll sleep it off, pull herself together, and soldier on like nothing’s ever happened.” Sam shrugged her shoulders. “That’s what she does. It’s how she survives.”
“By ignoring it?”
Sam rolled her eyes. “Dylan, she can’t ever ignore what happened to her. It’s in her thoughts all day every day, from the minute she wakes up to the minute she goes to sleep. She lives with it. She confronts it head on and refuses to let it get the better of her, but sometimes, sometimes there is a weak spot where the defences break under the pressure, even if just for a minute, and unfortunately, today, you made that happen.”
Dylan said nothing more and left the kitchen, wandering upstairs to his bedroom. Thinking over his sister’s words of wisdom, he realised he had two ways of looking at this—he either pressured Kyla to the point that she broke, or Kyla broke under the pressure that was already there and he happened to be there to comfort her.
“Definitely the latter,” he muttered to himself.