I take another sip, a bigger one this time, just to prove to him that I can handle a beer just fine. But after three sips I look at my glass and see that I haven’t made a dent in it. God, I could use a good girly drink about now.

A mango daiquiri would taste so much better and go down far more easily.

Somehow we drink our drinks and make requisite small talk when my brain isn’t conversing at all but analyzing the situation and thinking, Sex.

Wondering what sex would be like with Kai. Wondering what sex would be like, period. It’s been so long… it’s been… too long. I’m quite sure I wouldn’t even know what to do with the various parts. Although strictly speaking, parts are parts, and part P seems to go in part V.

And now we’re leaving the bar and walking toward my hotel and Kai keeps looking at me and I just look at him back and we’re not saying anything. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say even if he wanted to talk.

It’s like the now or never point.

We’re half a block from the Halekulani and Kai stops walking, faces me. He’s got that half-smile that makes everything inside me go crazy and the air catch in my throat, and oh God, I don’t know what I’m doing.

What does he see in me? What does he think is so interesting when he looks at me?

Or maybe there’s nothing interesting and I’m just a battle to be won.

“Kai—” I start, stop.

He reaches out, pushes hair back from my face.

“What, baby girl?”

Baby girl. It’s enough to bring tears to my eyes. Between his touch and his words, I’m falling apart on the inside. It’s been so long since anyone made me feel like this. So long since anyone made me want like this.

I exhale slowly, scared to say what I want. What I need. What I fear.

I haven’t been with a lot of men. And I’ve slept with only one person since Daniel and I split, and that one time was hugely pathetically forgettable. He was a nice man—someone I’d known forever—but definitely not lover material. And after being a wife and a mother, I’m a little anxious about my desirability factor.

“You don’t have to do anything,” Kai says now, and he’s stepped back, put his hands in his pockets, and he looks young. Damn young. And I feel like a cradle robber.

I don’t know if I can do this… I mean, I want to, but can I? Should I? What’s a woman to do? “Have you been with a lot of… had a lot of… you know.”

“Know what?”

“Sex.”