Touch (Touched by the Fae 3)

In my surprise, I blurt out, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Oh. Okay. Maybe you don’t know. You see, when two people love each other very, very much, they will—”

White noise fills my head as a rush of embarrassment has my cheeks flaming up.

Is she...

Oh my God.

She is.

She’s actually trying to give me a sex talk since she—very wrongly—assumes that I have no idea what her crude gesture was referring to.

A sex talk.

Really?

So, yeah. My mom’s a teensy bit late for that.

I lost my virginity when I was twelve or thirteen. It made sense at the time; I don’t regret it. My haphephobia and panic attacks were around then, but they were more manageable then since Madelaine’s murder was the trigger that really put me in a bad place—and I don’t just mean the asylum.

So long as I was the one initiating the contact, I liked to be touched. After a lifetime of feeling unloved, unwanted, and abandoned, in those few moments when I was connected to another person, I wasn’t the reject orphan who was so awful, even her mother threw her away.

I was reckless and, I admit, very, very lucky. So many things could have gone wrong since I didn’t even bother being careful. No STI’s, no pregnancy scares, nothing that was forcibly taken from a hollow girl who was all but willing to give it away.

And then Madelaine died and, despite all of Nine’s warnings, I nearly fell under Rys’s sway. I almost let him touch me—and that was one of the last times I let anyone touch me without a debilitating panic attack getting in the way.

Until Nine.

And, unless I’m really, really misunderstanding Callie, that’s what she’s expecting me to do.

Touch Nine.

Ah, hell. This is super, super awkward.

I clear my throat. “You don’t have to give me the whole birds and the bees talk. I appreciate it, but you’re a little late for that.”

That familiar flash of sadness—the recognition that she missed my entire life while trapped in Faerie—twists her pretty face for a second before she nods. “I thought I would try.”

“Appreciate it. Still, I’m good.”

“So you and Nine already—”

Oof. And I thought my overwhelming embarrassment had started to recede a bit.

I shake my head.

“Oh. Oh. I thought...”

Yeah. We both know what she thought.

Callie winces. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have pried. I just wanted to help.”

The funny thing is, despite how super embarrassing this chat was, she actually did. Since Ash made it pretty clear that he was hoping that I would give up on Nine eventually, no matter how often I reminded him that my only goal was to save my Shadow Man, he didn’t share too much about what it was like to be part of a mated pair.

An awkward discussion with my mom… this was one of those things I regretted not having while I was growing up. She might’ve been a bit late there, but this chat did what I probably wouldn’t have been able to do on my own.

It evaporated my anger, making my frustration at Nine’s reaction disappear like a puff of smoke.