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 choicewhen 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—donothave 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 aresonot 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?”
