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“I don’t really know what to say to that,” he said.
“Don’t say anything about it. It’s not your relationship, and it’s not your business.”
“If you expect for me to adopt that level of... If you expect that that’s what being reformed looks like, you are out of luck.”
“I did tell you. I thought that you should likely abstain from physical...”
“I didn’t think you meant once I found the person.”
“Why not? Would it not be informative? If you had to actually get to know somebody rather than clouding your judgment with...”
“Clouding my judgment. How the hell do you know that would cloud my judgment? I’m not some green virgin, Charity. It’s not like sex makes it impossible for me to think.”
Her ears felt like they’d been scalded.
Virgin.
Sex.
She never really gave a thought to labels like that. They didn’t matter to her. She didn’t feel like she was a virgin. It was a strange, societal construct that didn’t matter to her.
She had never been tempted to have sex.
It seemed...like a whole lot of unnecessary drama in her estimation. She knew that it had caused unnecessary drama in her father’s life. She didn’t like thinking about the fact that she was the product of a physical affair, but she knew that she was. Her father hadn’t been married; he hadn’t been in a committed relationship. It was difficult to reconcile that with the man she’d known.
The end result had been that he had ended up lonely, and she had ended up motherless. She’d never wanted that for herself. It had all seemed like a lot of trauma for what she just wasn’t interested in. People did it because they had nothing else to do, she assumed.
It was just something that didn’t factor into her life.
That was fine. She wasn’t married. She wasn’t in a relationship of that nature, and she hadn’t wanted to have children yet. So...
But for some reason hearing him say that word made her unbearably conscious of the fact that—societal construct though it was—she was a virgin.
“You asked me to help you. Arguing with me isn’t going to make it better,” she snapped.
“Well, now that I know certain things about your relationship, I question whether or not you have a basis of knowledge from which you should be speaking.”
“Which one of us is engaged? Which one of us managed already to find the person that they want to spend their life with? I did. You actually have no basis to be questioning me and what I think. Because clearly, what I think matters.”
“Fine. I’ll be pure and chaste just like Byron.”
Those words rattled around inside her, and she found she didn’t like them very much, particularly not when laden with the judgment that he had managed to slather on them.
“You are an intensely problematic human being,” she said.
“Me?”
“Yes. It is a very good thing that you asked me to help you out, because I just don’t think any woman would ever want to marry you. You’re... You’re such a...”
“Oh no. Are you about to say something scathing? You can’t even get outscathing,it would end up sweet.”
She would show him. She would.
“The fact of the matter is you use alcohol and... And sex so that you don’t have to feel things. If you want to get married, don’t you think that you should feel things?”
“That isn’t even what I’m looking for,” he said, skimming past the insults entirely. Maybe he knew that was what he used alcohol and sex for. Maybe that was why it didn’t bother him to hear it.
“Then what is the idea?”
