Stitches

“No one-night-stands or anything in between?”

“Not really my style,” she answers. “If I’m going to have a sexual relationship with someone, I want to be able to get comfortable with them and open up. To be honest, had I known I would end up with Sebastian, I would’ve just waited for him. I didn’t think men like him existed in real life.”

“He would’ve enjoyed corrupting you,” I tell her, imagining her dressed up in lacy, virginal white, spread across his bed, waiting for him to pounce.

She nods, almost remorseful. “I would have enjoyed letting him. Plus, I would have liked if you two were the only men who’d ever been inside me.”

That shouldn’t be so hot, but fuck, it is. Now I sort of wish that, too.

“You’re the only two to find my G-spot, though,” she says, brightly. “So maybe we can just say the first two don’t count.”

I can’t help rolling my eyes. “Lazy assholes. We’ll definitely say they don’t count.”

Glancing across the table at me, she swallows a bite of her eggs and asks, “What about you?”

I grimace. “You don’t really want a number, right?”

Seeming to reconsider, she grimaces. “No, probably not. More than four?”

I start to laugh, then shift it to a cough when she levels an annoyed look at me. “Yes, slightly more than four.”

“How old were you the first time? That’s probably a safe one.”

“Fifteen.”

“That’s so young.”

I shrug. Didn’t seem young to me. “I think my fifteen and your fifteen were probably a lot different.”

“That’s true,” she murmurs, a little sadly.

I lift my coffee and take a sip, regarding her newly solemn expression. I can tell it makes her sad to think about my childhood, and I hate for Moira to be sad. “No reason to look like that,” I tell her, lightly.

“I just wish I could fix it. I know I can’t take away the pain, but I wish I could’ve at least been there to help you guys through it.”

I shake my head, dismissing the notion. “I didn’t enjoy it at the time, but hardship forms a man. Maybe I come from rough beginnings, but I’d rather go through all I went through and come out a full-grown man than be coddled and grow up to be the cheating little bitch who couldn’t even find your G-spot.”

At that, Moira grins. “True. No one wants to be like him.”

I shake my head. “He doesn’t get to touch you anymore and he incurred your sister’s wrath.

“Bad luck all around.”

“Not luck,” I disagree. “He made his own shitty choices and he paid for them. People who have it too easy in life don’t have to grow. They can rest on their laurels. Men like me and Seb, we learned early to hustle and make our own way. Hell, if I lived a stable life, who knows what kind of asshole I would have grown up to be.”

“I don’t think you could have ever grown up to be an asshole,” she puts in, loyally. “You’re noble and sweet and good.”

I don’t see what she sees when I look in the mirror, that’s for damn sure.

“That’s funny,” I tell her. “That’s not how I see myself, but it is how I see you. Always have. I thought you must have had either the worst possible life, or a completely fucking magical life to come out the way you did.”

Moira smiles faintly, watching her orange juice glass. “No in-between, huh?”

“None.”

“Well, it wasn’t magical,” she informs me. “I can’t say it was the worst, though. Yours was obvio

usly worse than mine since you had no one.”