Primperfect by Deirdre Sullivan Page A

saving Mum from stupid drunken drivers, I could get up to all sorts of mischief with hilarious consequences. Romance-novel time travel doesn’t work like time-machine time travel, though. It’s a little different. You don’t have control over where you get sent. It’s either a mystical love wind, or the curse of a spurned warlock, or those meddling faerie folk that send you wherever, and initially you’re all, ‘AGH!’ and ‘How will a hard-nosed career woman (albeit with a tragic back-story and secret mushy centre) like me be able to cope in a medieval keep? They don’t have electric showers or anything.’ But it works out in the end, because you adapt and the handsome warlord who distrusted you initially comes to fall in love with you and then you do kissing and things in an apiary or a solar or somewhere else that is quintessentially of its time. And then something happens to tear you apart, but it all gets sorted. And while that would be fun, I’d really rather have a mum and still be friends with Joel than know
    A
LOVE
STRONGER
THAN
TIME
ITSELF,

    thank you very much.

I wonder if there’s anything I could do to make Fintan more excited about the baby.
    Quote from Prim’s mum’s diary
    need, like, a love-potion. But for friendship. Ciara thinks I am in the wrong for blackmailing Joel.
    â€˜It just seems so needy, Prim. Make him chase you.’
    â€˜He is a friend, not a boy.’
    â€˜Nevertheless.’
    She does not take her own advice, this Ciara, she is constantly texting me, wanting to hang out and things. Which I love, because she is my good friend. But when we started being friends, she was always texting. And it’s not like there is another solution to the Joel problem. I mean, I could just wait him out and keep on intermittently apologising, but that hasn’t been working so far and I really want to see him.
    Ciara actually had an ulterior motive in calling around today. She wants me to go with her to the family planning clinic so she can start planning her family. Her current plan is for it not to happen for at least a decade and a bit. But things with Syzmon have been heating up a little. She’s mainly worried about pregnancy, because they’re both virgins and you can’t catch STDs from being a virgin. Being a virgin is, like, the opposite of how you catch STDs. You can get HIV if you’re one, from blood transfusions gone wrong and other things. But you’d be hard pressed to get chlamydia. When I think about things like chlamydia, I feel confident in the fact that I’m (probably) definitely not ready to have sex yet. But even if you’re never going to take a ride on the marital love train, as Grandma Lily liked to call it, it is best to be informed about these things, so you can give advice to passing Ciaras.
    â€˜Not that things with Syzmon weren’t hot before,’ she said, flicking her hair as if daring me to judge her. ‘But I keep getting caught up in stuff and almost going all the way.’
    â€˜How can you do that accidentally?’
    â€˜Stuff gets rubbed against other stuff and things start to seem like good ideas and possibly needs. It’s all very passionate and so on and so forth, but I had intended waiting until things were nice and legal until we did THE DEED .’ She widens her eyes when she says ‘ THE DEED ’, emphasising it’s deedy importance.
    â€˜You mean wait for marriage?’
    â€˜No. Until my seventeenth birthday. Or shortly afterwards.’
    â€˜Cool. That makes sense. Do you, like, feel ready and stuff?’
    Ciara looked out the window, at the garden. There were bees but no birds, which may have been an omen but probably wasn’t. (The bees love our lavender plant.) ‘How do you know if you feel ready? I mean, I totally want to sometimes, but other times I’m, like, “ WHAT IF I GOT PREGNANT ?” and “ AAAGGH ”. It