I wanted to keep her for as long as I could, and now I’d been slapped in the face with the reality.
She wasn’t a little girl anymore.
And I couldn’t shelter her without serious consequences.
She had to know about sex, if only to protect her from men like her father.
“Can you forgive me?” I whispered. “And you’re wrong about me loving Cassie more than I love you. No one will ever come close. You have my heart. You know that, and it kills me to hear you doubt it.”
In a scramble of pink and purple splashes, she kicked away her dress and launched herself across the bed and into my arms.
Her weight was solid and warm and familiar, and it took everything inside not to give in to the wet ache to grieve over everything I was losing by saying goodbye to the kid I’d raised through impossibilities and miracles.
I kissed her hair, inhaling her scent; clutching her so tight, she squirmed for air but made no move to get away.
I wanted to smother her in hugs if it meant I could buy a few more innocent years, but when she finally sat up and her gaze fell on the book in my hands, I knew my time was up.
I felt the acres of distance that would slowly grow bigger and bigger between us as she read the title as easy as breathing and revealed that my sacrifices had been worth it.
“The Business of Babies and Everything in Between.” Her voice cut me deep because I’d refused to hear it until now—underneath the childish tone hinted a rich depth that would rival any woman’s.
Husky and melodic with just enough sweet and sour to drive boys insane.
And she could read.
Better than I could at half my age.
She could understand.
Better than me at any age.
She wasn’t just my equal anymore, she was my shooting star, sending her far out of my reach.
Keeping my arm around her tiny waist, I cleared away the heartache in my voice and smiled with all the light-hearted lies I could manage. “You want answers. Let’s get answers.”
She looked up. “Truly?”
“Truly.” Opening the cover, I schooled myself not to flinch against the first graphic image. A penis with muscles and tubes and scientific sketches but still a penis and something far too crude for her eyes. Clearing my throat again, I said carefully, “Well, this…is a penis. And…um, you already know that, eh, I have one and…um, you don’t.”
My head ached with pressure and embarrassment. “You have a, eh…vagina. And it will get hair on it one day like…um…my penis did…remember? You asked why I had hair between my legs and on my face?”
She soaked it in, her cheeks pink, but her eyes alive and desperate for more. “Okay.” She turned the page, reading aloud, “Males have penises that grow hard with blood in order to have int—inter—” She looked up, meeting my tortured gaze. “What’s that word, Ren?”
My entire body flushed with humiliation.
I couldn’t tell her that if she couldn’t read it, there was no way in hell I could. The word was nothing but jumbled up letters.
Instead, I flicked to the next page where the sketches of a woman’s vagina gave way to a detailed drawing of a penis inside it.
“I think they mean sex.”
“Sex…” She rolled the word slowly on her tongue. “Ssseeeeeexxxxx.” She insisted on making me suffer by asking, “What exactly is sex?”
I looked at the ceiling, wishing something up there would swap places with me, and this terrible evening could be over with.
I wanted to stutter. I wanted to stall. But I gulped deep and said quickly, “Sex is when a male animal puts his penis in a female animal. His hips thrust a little and then he comes and the stuff he releases makes a baby in the female, and she gives birth a few months later.”
I dreaded how uninformative that was and how many questions I was about to receive.
“Is there squirms in the stuff?” she asked, deadly serious.
“Squirms?”
“At school, a boy said his mum told him that squirms make eggs turn into babies that are delivered by birds.”
I groaned under my breath. “Sex has nothing to do with birds.”
“Bees?” Her eyebrows rose.
“Bees, either.”
“So all it is, is a man putting his worm into a woman’s pee place?”
I hunched into myself. Hell, this was my worst moment so far. “Something like that.”
She bit her lip, chewing over my terrible answers, obviously finding me lacking in the professor position. It wasn’t like I had personal experience yet. This was all theory and barnyard knowledge, and I was failing…drastically.
A few minutes passed while she read the book, flicking a few pages to more graphic images of a man on top of a woman and her hands on his ass.
My own body reacted, and I unwrapped my arm from around Della, putting some distance between us.