She couldn’t stop thinking about what it meant. She was no longer a virgin, was the bewildering, incredible realisation that kept ricocheting around her mind while she pottered about her flat achieving very little. She was no longer unusual. Well, not on that front, at least. She was still a great, unwieldy giant, and the boost that Theo’s rampant need had given her would no doubt fade, but losing one’s virginity was a rite of passage others took for granted and she’d finally made it.
And now she had, it was as if a light had suddenly switched on in her head, illuminating the shadows and making sense of things that deep down she’d always found baffling. Such as why she’d never found anyone willing to date her when out of a potential population of millions surely there would have been someone somewhere. It wasn’t even as if she were particularly fussy, so how come she’d never met a single man who’d been up for it?
Maybe she just hadn’t looked hard enough, she thought now. In fact, maybe she hadn’t looked at all. Maybe it had been easier, safer, to resign herself to the status quo. Maybe she’d even become accepting of it. Happy with it.
And when she asked herself why that might be, it began to dawn on her that when she’d told Theo about the relationship between her height and her virginity she hadn’t furnished him with the whole truth. What she hadn’t revealed, what she hadn’t even known at the time, was that for years she’d been scared. Of sex. Scared of doing it wrong and making even more of a fool of herself than she already felt.
It was so obvious now she could see it from the other side. When she forced herself to look back to her troubled adolescence, to the time when her school friends had started losing their virginity and talked about it in great detail, she remembered she’d been fascinated and so excited about her turn, so desperate to be normal and fit in.
But when her turn never materialised, when it became apparent that she would always be on the outside, always rejected, she’d become quieter and had hidden her embarrassment and shame behind an air of mystery. Over the years that embarrassment and shame had escalated and had eventually turned into fear, which had put her off even more, creating a vicious circle that she hadn’t even been aware of and which had possibly spread to other areas of her personal life, preventing her from trying new things in case they didn’t work out and she made even more of an idiot of herself in the process.
But she’d had nothing to fear. Sex with Theo had been incredible. And momentous. And not only because she’d finally got rid of her virginity at the grand old age of twenty-six. Didn’t it also prove that even though she would probably never be normal and would most likely never fit in, she might just not make a fool of herself? Theo certainly hadn’t laughed at her, and he’d seen her stripped of not just her clothes but also of the protective shield she’d always kept wrapped round her.
So what was she going to do going forward? Was she really going to spend the rest of her life not trying things, just in case? Didn’t that seem a bit of a waste? And hadn’t there already been too much waste of life in the Cassidy family?
Surely she owed to it to herself, to her parents and her siblings, to make the most of what she had. To live life to the max. She’d allowed her virginity to hold her back by tethering her to a time of her life dominated by painful memories and teenage angst for too long.
Well, no more.
Now she’d recognised her fears she was going to confront them and let them go. So there’d be no more hiding. No more slouching. No more trepidation about the unknown. She was going to pull her shoulders back and hold her head up high as she sallied forth. She was going to be brave and bold and fabulous, and nothing was going to stop her.
CHAPTER FIVE
A MONTH LATER, Kate made herself a mint tea and took it into the sitting room to sit cross-legged on the sofa. It was one thing deciding to hold your head up and your shoulders back while you blazed a trail, she thought wretchedly, quite another to put it into practice. Because not only had it become apparent that decade-old deep-seated issues couldn’t be wiped out quite as effortlessly as she’d assumed, but also life really did have the habit of suddenly walloping you about the head when you least expected it.
And to think that everything had been going so well. Theo, clearly a man of his word as well as action, had wasted no time in instructing his lawyers, and in the aftermath of a flurry of correspondence between her and his legal team, the monstrous debt her brother had accrued had been paid off and the fund Theo had promised for her sister had been set up.
As she’d hoped, the worries that had been hanging over her like the sword of Damocles disappeared in an instant and the relief was indescribable. Her home was safe and she’d been able to give up her extra jobs, and she had no regrets. Every time she visited her sister and saw how happy and settled she was, she knew she’d done the right thing, even if her visit the first Sunday after That Friday had momentarily shaken that conviction.
‘Those are pretty,’ she’d said to Milly, spying the huge bouquet of
yellow roses sitting on the windowsill having dumped her bag on a chair and given her sister a hug.
‘They’re my favourite.’
‘I know. But where did they come from?’
‘Theo.’
At the mention of his name her pulse had leapt and questions had spun around her head but her smile hadn’t faltered. ‘That’s nice.’
Milly had grinned. ‘He’s very good-looking, isn’t he? He said he was a friend of Mike’s. I liked him.’
And then her smile had faltered. ‘He came here?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘What did he want?’
‘To find out what my favourite flowers were.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I don’t think so. I don’t remember.’