I should have been mad at him. Insulted. Was it me? I should be in a tizzy, calling Jace Riggs names in my head, wondering what was wrong with me that he didn’t want me. I should be finished with him. Instead I lay on my bed in my bra and panties, still high from the feel of him. I wasn’t mad at all, because we didn’t feel finished. I half-dozed and thought about the sensation of his thumb in my mouth, feeling the electricity from that single thought zip up and down my skin, over and over again.

It was late. Midnight, maybe—I didn’t really know. I was just drifting off when the phone rang on my nightstand.

I didn’t know the number, but somehow I knew who it was. I’d given him my number a few hours ago, after all. “Hello?” I said, answering the phone.

“Okay,” Jace said on the other end of the line. “Now that I’ve beat off in the shower, I suppose I can tell you.”

Did he have to turn me on with everything he said? I pushed away the visuals in my brain and said, “Tell me what, Jace?”

“I’ve never had sex.”

I went still, unable to say a single word.

“Most people think it’s weird,” Jace said into the silence. “I get that. But it’s true.”

I couldn’t process this. Not even a little bit. “Never?” I asked.

“I’ve had the oral kind,” he explained bluntly. “Not very often, and not since prison. The other kind, never.”

I spent a second unpacking that. My file had said Jace was twenty-five. He’d never had sex with a woman at twenty-five. Though at some point, some girl—more than one—had given him a blow job. The crazy, illogical part of my brain wondered who the fuck those girls were, and whether I could scratch their eyes out. Because, it was time to be honest here, I really wanted that to be me.

“Does that answer your questions?” Jace asked me.

“Not even a little bit,” I told him.

He sighed. “Okay, counselor, I’ll try. Fire away.”

I scrambled, because I had questions. So many questions. I sat up in bed, shivering a little now. “The oral sex,” I said. “Was it giving or getting?”

“Both.”

That didn’t improve the visual. I hated the idea of him with his face between some other woman’s legs. “Were you dating these women?”

“No,” Jace said. “They were mostly girls who showed up at my brothers’ parties. One-time things.”

“So you’ve never had a girlfriend?”

“No, counselor, I haven’t.”

There was a tinge of resentment in the word counselor, Jace with his defenses up, but I could handle that. I talked to people who had their defenses up every day, and I’d certainly butted heads with Jace’s defenses more than once. I didn’t blame him for feeling vulnerable, telling me this. In fact, it was a miracle he was answering so many questions at all.

“Why?” I asked him. “If you were, um, in a sexual situation with these girls, why didn’t you just have sex with them?”

“Because I didn’t want to,” Jace said.

“That’s not an answer.”

“I know, but it’s the answer I have. I’ve never wanted to randomly fuck someone I don’t know or particularly like. My body might want to, but my brain never has. My brain puts the brakes on every time.”

I was tense, my breathing shallow and raspy. My counselor’s brain was fired up, but so was my sex brain, and my whole body. I was sitting here in the middle of the night, on my bed in my bra and panties, completely turned on while I tried to analyze Jace Riggs. It was by far the weirdest situation a man had ever put me in.

“I was twenty-three when I went to prison,” Jace said to me. “My head’s been fucked up since I got out. I can’t just introduce myself to a woman and screw her. It’s not what I do. And before prison, I was stealing cars and informing on my father for years. I had secrets, a double life. I couldn’t date. It was tense, I had to be careful, and I was dealing with a lot of shit. So I could go to a party every once in a while, and sometimes one of the girls there would suck my cock and I’d eat her out. Then I’d go home because I was done. There you go. That’s your explanation.”

“Okay,” I said. What it must have cost him to tell me this. The pure, raw courage it took.

“I didn’t want you to think I turned you down because of you,” he said. “That wasn’t the reason. That’s all I wanted to say. Now go to sleep and forget about me.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you’re better off,” he replied. “Good night.”