chance; maybe I had been the reason for it.
Calm down, biology. That’s not fair.
“Who doesn’t?” Raphael countered. “Cassius obviously does because he used to be with you. Sorcha was hitting on you hard, inviting both of us to join them.” He must have seen something on my face because I saw a light blush begin to tint his cheeks. “Yeah, Kaliya, you’re stunning. It was one of the first things I noticed about you when we met. A guy with eyes doesn’t miss a woman with a body like yours, and I know I called you an old lady a couple of times, but the white hair works on you. It doesn’t make you look old, it makes you look more fucking gorgeous than I think you’re allowed to.”
“You know how to make a girl confident in herself,” I said, looking back at the road, knowing it should have stayed my focus. We were on the edge of the storm now, which made driving a lot less precarious. I was getting overconfident on the road. “If we’re going down this route to kill time on this drive, do you want to tell me why your girlfriends used to call you Dom?”
“My middle name is Dominic,” he said, that blush growing.
“Hmm.” I wiggled my eyebrows, glad to have turned it around on him again. “Is that the only reason? Because a nickname like Dom when it comes to women…”
“Let’s say I had a reputation,” he finally admitted. “Not that I’ve gotten laid in years, so it’s not a big deal. It’s not like I’m a ladies’ man anymore or anything.”
“What kind of reputation did you have?” I liked having him in the hot seat, and the whole Dom thing had stuck out to me when Paden told me about him. I was too curious for my own good. My fangs had dropped the moment he called me beautiful, and I was trying to dive into the deep end.
“Not a good one. What about you? I know about Cassius, and you drunk hit on me. Does alcohol always…uh…” He couldn’t finish, but I knew what he was trying to ask teasingly. Did alcohol always make me horny? It was pretty common. He didn’t know I normally drank a lot whenever I planned on having sex.
“I have a bad history with alcohol and sex,” I finally said, my fleeting good mood slipping away. “I’m still sorry about that.”
“I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings. When I was younger, I would have said yes, but…I want my first time in a decade to be sober.”
“You didn’t.” He never had explicitly turned me down, just stared at me in confusion as I realized he wasn’t going to take the offer.
Have I ever had sex sober? Even with Cassius?
Sex and I had a difficult history. It started when I was trying to sneak into a really seedy black market, not the well-known fae-run Market but a little alley in some Chinese city where I knew people were selling things they shouldn’t have been. I was seventeen and tried to flirt my way into information, tried to use my body to get what I wanted.
I lost my virginity to a guy who called my bluff, drugged me, and sold me to his friends by the hour for two weeks until he decided I was too used. Then he sold me at auction. I spent the next six months tied down or drugged out of my mind, kept in the back room of some guy’s mansion in the countryside. Hisao found me while he was there for other reasons, killing the guy who bought me for his own purposes. When I met the assassin, I actually asked him to kill me. He didn’t, instead taking me out of there to his home in Japan. The first year I spent with Hisao was just recovering.
It had been another thirty years before I let someone see me naked sexually. I remembered getting incredibly drunk because the idea of sleeping with the guy was so tempting but impossible. I had frozen up. Five drinks later, I had loosened up enough to go through with it. The sex had been decent, and I didn’t cry or puke the next morning. I wasn’t covered in bruises, which had been a major positive.
My hands tightened on the wheel as I remembered how Paden told me to seduce Raphael to get his trust. The thought, even now, made me sick to my stomach.
“Are you okay?”