“I…” Emma squirmed in her seat, looking at the floor. “I don’t want to talk about this, mom.”

“Well, it’s important that we do,” Shirley said firmly. She didn’t like seeing her daughter uncomfortable, but she wanted to do what her own mother never had. If her mother had had this talk with her… well, things would have gone very differently for her.

Emma absently rubbed her eyes, still avoiding her mother’s gaze.

“You see, when a boy and a girl like each other a lot… or a boy and a boy. Or a girl and a girl, I suppose…”

God, that was a great start.

“Mom,” Emma groaned.

“I’m just covering the bases,” Shirley replied. “When two people get intimate with each other, they might start talking about having sex.”

Emma rolled her eyes. Shirley supposed that meant she was doing something right.

“Sex is not something to be taken lightly,” she continued.

For a brief moment, a face came to mind. A handsome face of a 20-year-old stud. His hazel eyes looked at her, his lips cocked to the side in a tantalizing smile, and his brown hair hugged his face.

The image made her sick.

“Sex is very serious, and it’s important that both parties talk about it before doing it.” She felt her stomach turn. “Most importantly, though, both parties need to be in full consent.”

“Mom, I’m not going to rape anyone,” Emma said with another annoyed eye roll.

The fact that the word “rape” came out of her thirteen-year-old daughter’s mouth so nonchalantly shook her in a way she wouldn’t have expected.

“Why would you say that?” She asked. Her voice was gruffer than she would have liked. “Why on earth would you say that?”

Emma finally made eye contact with her mother. All she replied with was a shrug of her shoulders.

“That’s not a joke,” Shirley snapped. “Rape is NEVER a joke. Understand?”

Shrinking into her spot and diverting her gaze back to the floor, Emma nodded.

Shirley sighed and rubbed her eyes, telling herself that what happened to her won’t happen to her daughter. It would never happen, because the fucker that tried to make it happen would have to go through her dead body.

“Listen, why don’t we pick this conversation in the morning?” She asked, calming her tone. “I’m getting a little tired, and maybe we can revisit this with cleared heads, huh?”

Emma nodded again and shot up from her seat and towards her bedroom faster than she could say “goodnight.”

Shirley hadn’t seen the face of the handsome 20-year-old is over 13 years outside of nightmares, and this was the first instance she had so vividly imagined his face while awake. One of Emma’s schoolmates reminded her of him, though, and Levi was a large part of the motivation behind this “talk.”

She would give Emma something her mother never did. She would make sure that her daughter knew she ALWAYS had the choice to say “no.”