More Than I Could (75)

“Talk to me about this, Megan. I can’t even breathe the word sex in front of Dad, and if I say it to Gram, she’ll probably douse me with holy water.”

I smile. “I doubt that.”

“Then you don’t know her.”

“Okay,” I say, exhaling. “Ultimately, it is your choice when you have sex. No one can stop you. Your dad, Gram, me—we can all tell you that you should wait until you’re older. But the truth is that you will do it if you want to.”

Kennedy smiles smugly.

“But let’s back up a second,” I say. “It should be your choice when you do it. If someone is pressuring you at all—if they’re telling you some bullshit like if you love them, you’d do it, or all the girls are doing it, or if they threaten you that someone else will if you won’t—do not have sex with that person. They don’t want to have sex with you. They want to control you. They’re forcing you to give them something you can never get back. That’s not the person you want to have sex with, okay?”

She considers this. “Okay, fair. No one has ever said it like that to me.”

Thank God. “Next is that having sex isn’t like piercing your ears. You can’t just wake up one day and think you’d like to make this decision, and then that’s it. It stops there. Because sometimes it doesn’t.”

“Like if you get pregnant.”

“Or an STD. Or many things. Sometimes you don’t find out until years later, so you can’t just trust people or be careless about it.”

“Again, fair.”

“Also,” I say … I groan. How do I do this? “You shouldn’t feel like sex is dirty. Or shameful. Or that something is wrong with you because you’re thinking about it, okay?”

“Wow. You are so not my dad.”

I cover my face with my hands. “And he might kill me if he heard this.”

“Well, let him know—not really, don’t tell him I asked you about this—that you’re making much more sense to me than he would.”

I smile at her. “Sex can be a great thing. It should be a great thing. And if it’s not great, if you aren’t safe and consenting, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

“Got it. Sex should be great.”

Please don’t repeat that to your dad.

We sit and stare at each other. The longer we sit, the harder it is to keep a straight face. Then finally, we both start laughing.

“Are we done with this conversation?” I ask, exhausted.

“Please?”

“How about you let me go upstairs and get my manicure stuff, and we can do our nails?”

“And not talk about sex?”

“That would be phenomenal.”

She grins. “I’ll find the remote so we can see who the bandanna man is.”

I climb off the stool. “What?”

“Your show. We’ll finish it while we do our nails.”

I smile at the pretty girl in front of me. I see why Chase worries about her. He’d be wrong not to be concerned, but something tells me Kennedy will be okay.

She’s a lot smarter and stronger than he gives her credit for.

I head toward the hallway when she stops me.

“Megan?”

“Yeah?”

“You’ll be a really good mom someday.”

All I can do is return her smile because if I try to speak, she’ll hear the lump in my throat.

I walk toward the stairs with my head held slightly higher.

Perhaps she’s right. Maybe I could be a good mom someday.

Will I ever trust someone enough to share a child with them?





Chapter Twenty-Eight





Chase




“Three hours of sleep is getting rough,” Jason says, yawning as he climbs out of his work truck.

“You’re telling me.” Imagine how rough it is when you’re getting used to sneaking into a woman’s room in the middle of the night and instead wake up in a shanty motel alone. “I don’t know how long I can do this shit.”

“Well, I’ve got bills to pay and mouths to feed. I’ll be doing this shit for the rest of my life.”

“You just got spoiled, Marshall,” Robbie says, clamping a hand down on my sore shoulder. “You got out of the habit of traveling since the front office let you stay close to home for so long.”

I shove his hand off me.

The sun isn’t up yet, and the sky is just starting to wake up. Our crew worked until two this morning before we returned to our hotel to catch a few hours of rest.

The storm that ripped through central Illinois was a doozy. Power lines and poles are down everywhere, and if locals stopped asking us when the power would come back on, it’d be on much faster.

And I could go home a lot faster, too.

“I’m gonna go call the office and check in,” I say. “You guys good?”

Jason nods. “Yeah. I’m gonna down this coffee, and then we’ll start prepping to restring this section.”

“I’ll be back.”

I stomp through the tall grass and splash across the creek parallel to the road. The cab of my truck is still warm as I slide back into my seat.