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My father practically growls in frustration. Salvatore strolls comfortably across the room, pacing as he waits for my father’s answer. Thunder trembles the house.
“We can arrange something like that. What’s her condition?”
Salvatore looks me over.
“What the fuck am I supposed to answer that with? Fresh off the lot? Low mileage?”
“Is she still innocent?” my father clarifies.
My thoughts stumble over themselves, the words robbing my breath. They land like gunshots. Two to the chest. For several long seconds, I can’t process it at all. Hurt has me in a chokehold.
“Hang up,” I try to say, but my voice only comes out in a rasp.
“What’s the deprecation value if she isn’t?” Salvatore asks.
“Salvatore, hang up!” I snap.
I’m desperate to not hear the ugly number they would come up with.
He ends the call at my command.
Silence washes the room. Little by little, the fine details of my vision grow blurry.
My father’s backwards, old world principles are no secret to me. He never shied from being honest about his beliefs, even when those same beliefs left us estranged. But even I wouldn’t have thought him low enough to reduce his own daughter’s tangible worth to if I’d lost my virginity or not.
My thoughts are a wilder storm than the one outside.
I would really mean less to him if I weren’t a virgin.
I sat in this room and worried about his feelings, while I was the one kidnapped. Hindsight is so humiliating.
“He really fucking asked that.” I hate the way my voice trembles, unable to decide if it’s rage or sorrow that makes it waver. I angrily scrub my hand at my eye.
“There must be some kind of condition,” I seethe at myself, “like how babies don’t have object permanence. But me, I don’t have emotional permanence. If I don’t see someone, I forget what they really are, how I feel about them. I know what he is, and I still try—”
“You want to believe in the best in people,” Salvatore says. “Easy to do when they’re not in front of you, proving you wrong.”
“Well, that’s stupid.”
“It is,” he agrees flatly, not sparing me from my own truth.
I glare at the floor, emotions simmering.
“I want to change the agreement,” I sniff.
Salvatore scoffs.
“I wasn’t going to allow that to happen again whether you asked for it or not—”
“Then I want to replace it with something else,” I say, conviction building with all the urgency of a manic thought. “I want you to take my virginity.”
“That’s already on the docket.”
“No, not on the docket. I mean right here, right now.”
“Contessa, I’m not gonna do it this way—”
His words are interrupted by me pulling off my shirt over my head and throwing it at him.
