Page 57 of Why Not Now?

I shake my head to dispel the memory. “So what do you say?”

“Sounds great,” Lacey says.

Lacey looks out the window for about half the drive before she turns to me. “Can I ask you a really personal question?”

“Sure, Ace. What’s up?”

Even though she has my permission, she still hesitates. Finally, she says, “When did you lose your virginity?”

I have never been more grateful for stoplights than I am at this moment, because I’m already stopped when she asks the last question I expect.

After a beat of silence, I say, “I’m not sure I should answer that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it involves your sister.”

“Oh.”

I can feel her watching me, but I keep my eyes on the road. We don’t speak again until I park in front of Mom’s house.

I turn the car off and scrub a hand over my face. When that’s not enough, I take my hat off to run my fingers through my hair before replacing it. I have a feeling I know why Lacey is asking this question, and I want to answer it for her. Especially if I’m right.

“Okay, here’s how this goes,” I say. “I’ll give you an answer and we’ll pretend I’m not talking about Ava. Deal?”

“Deal.”

We shake on it. “I was seventeen. My girlfriend was six months older than me and had turned eighteen. We’d just graduated high school.”

“How did you know you were ready?”

There it is, the question I actuallywantto answer, so hopefully she doesn’t rush into something she’ll regret.

“We’d been dating for a year by that time. I was hopelessly in love with her. In fact, I had been for about two years prior to us dating.”

“Really?”

I nod. “I had a massive crush on A—uh, my girlfriend, for a long time before we got together.”

“So why didn’t you do it before then?”

“There’s a lot of consequences that come with having sex. My mom had a rough time while I was growing up. I have two older sisters. My dad isn’t around. He would come into our lives every once in a while, take what he wanted from us, then leave again. I’d never do that if I got a girl pregnant, but I also didn’t want to get a girl pregnant.”

“There’s plenty of ways to prevent that,” Lacey says, reasonably.

“True. But none of them are one hundred per cent effective. And as someone who hadn’t even finished high school, I figured my chances of using contraceptives wrong, resulting in an unplanned pregnancy, was higher than I felt comfortable.”

“You weren’t worried about STIs?” she asks.

I shake my head. “We were both virgins, so no.”

“Was it you who wanted to wait? Or your girlfriend?”

“At first, it was both of us. I was probably ready before her, though. I’m not sure exactly. I waited for her to tell me she was ready.”

“Really?”

I nod, remembering that time. I’d always gone as far as Ava would let me, and not a bit further.

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