First Time: Ian's Story (First Time (Ian) Book 1) (8 page)

I wasn’t sure if the bashful thing was
supposed to turn me on, but when she looked down, presumably to
hide her reaction to my return of affection, I wanted to grab her
and kiss her again. A kiss that would make the last one look like
an atheist kissing the Pope’s ring to be polite.

“
Look, I ruined our picnic—”
she began.

“
They ruined our picnic,” I
interrupted. “And it’s not ruined. We can still have a good time
here.”

“
Yeah, we could do that,”
she agreed. She tilted her head to one side, as if she were
considering other options. “Or…we could go to my place and do that
make-out thing I just mentioned.”

Oh, fuck
me
. I wanted to. I wanted to so badly my
teeth ached. And my testicles, but that wasn’t likely to change
with more kissing. “What happened to going slow?”

“
I didn’t say you were going
to get to round all the bases.” She arched a brow.

I couldn’t do it. There was real potential
for us, no matter how improbable that seemed to me when I took the
thirty years between us into account. And I’d done what Danny had
suggested I do and prayed about things. It seemed strange to me
that Penny and I would ever end up meeting in the first place, so
clearly I was supposed to have met her for a reason. While God’s
intended plan very well could be for Penny and me to be together in
a long-term situation, that could also be why she’d wanted to go
slow. Every other relationship I’d been in had moved fast, and I
was single in my fifties. This could be a sign I was meant to try
something new.

Turning her down without hurting her
feelings, now, that would be the trick. “I’m tempted. I’m sorely
tempted. But you said you wanted to go slow. And I want to respect
that.” I glanced up. The teenagers drawing at the edge of the water
gave me a flash of inspiration. “I’ve got an idea. I’ll be right
back.”

I headed toward the pair. They were dressed
like they’d wandered in from nineteen ninety-four with their
flannel shirts, stocking caps, and ripped backpacks.

Every time I realized I had lived to see
another returning trend, I wanted to jump off a fucking bridge.

“
Hello there,” I called as I
approached, hoping they were the well-mannered mature kind of
teenagers everyone liked and the not some wretched little arseholes
who’d grown up with a nanny who never told them no. They looked up
with interest, and they didn’t tell me to piss off, so I took that
as encouragement. I gestured to the sketchbook in the hands of the
kid on the left—she had a lip ring, freckles, and short ginger
hair. “I couldn’t help but notice you were drawing. It’s very good,
by the way. Are you in art school?”

“
Thanks. Yeah, I go to
Pratt.” She tilted the wire-bound sketchpad so I could look at it.
I wasn’t interested in drawing buildings in my downtime, but this
girl was quite good.

“
I studied fine art at
Exeter, in Oxford.” For a time. The unpleasant hollowness that came
with that memory was easier now, years away. My name is Ian, by the
way.”

“
Lexi,” the girl said. “And
that’s Nate.”

“
Lexi. Nate. Nice to meet
you.” I gestured over my shoulder. “Do you see that girl behind
me?”

The boy on the other side of me glanced
behind him quickly. He had a goatee and sandy blond hair that
dipped into his eyes. “Yeah?”

“
Well, I’m on a date with
her, and I’d really like to impress her. I was wondering if I could
buy your notebook.” The girl’s posture stiffened, and I added, “Not
the pages you’ve already done. Just the paper and a pencil. I’ll
give you…” I reached for my wallet and opened it. I had one bill.
Damn it. “Look, I have a hundred dollars—”

The girl snatched the bill from my hand.
“Sold.”

“
Thanks, I appreciate it.” I
waited as she carefully tore a handful of pages free then handed
the blank tablet to me.

The other kid fished a pencil from behind
his ear. As I took it, he said, “Good luck. Girls like it when you
draw them.”

“
Yeah, they do,” the other
one agreed.

“
Yes, and good luck to you,
with school.” I shook their hands and stood. I turned to see Penny
standing at the edge of our picnic blanket, watching me with an
amused smirk.

“
Um, what was that?” she
asked as I came back.

“
Oh, those are my new
friends, Nate and Lexi. Lexi was kind enough to sell me her
sketchbook.” I held up the pencil. “What do you say? May I draw
you?”

An “eep” sound of surprise came out of her
throat. “Wow. Yeah. I can’t believe you would pay someone for their
sketchbook, just to draw me.”

I shrugged. “Money well-spent. It gives me
an excuse to stare at you without being creepy or uncool.”

That wasn’t a joke, but I was pleased that
she took it as such, with a little smile as she crossed her legs
under her skirt and straightened her spine. Holy God, her nipples
were hard beneath her thin sundress. The thought of untying those
straps at her shoulders and pulling down the top, cupping those
perfect breasts in my hands and running my thumbs over those tight
peaks almost made me throw out the drawing idea and go with her
plan of heading back to her place.

“
Okay, but if you’re going
to draw me, you have to make my nose a little shorter,” she said,
straightening her skirt around her legs.

“
Never. Your nose is
perfect.” I opened the sketchbook and set about studying her face.
Her nose wasn’t the only thing I found irresistibly perfect about
her. Her features were as symmetrical as a face could be without
looking unnatural. One eye sat just fraction of a centimeter higher
than the other, and was just slightly smaller. Her jawbone was a
bit sharper on one side, and there was the matter of that single
dimple, the one I wanted to kiss every time she smiled. These were
the things that made a portrait, even a quick sketch, look
convincing.

Of course, to the subject of a drawing,
these perceived imperfections were rarely thought of as assets, and
a person could become unnerved by such focused attention. Penny
expressed this with a wide-eyed grimace of terror. I smiled. “Just
relax. You’re not sitting for your presidential portrait.”

“
I’ve never had someone draw
me before. It’s kind of nerve wracking.”

“
It’s nerve wracking for
you? I’m the one performing here.” The worst thing in the world was
drawing someone and having it come out unflattering to them. Or to
have them just outright hate it but lie to save your
ego.

I had enough practice putting that out of my
mind. I started a rough sketch of the shape of her skull and the
angular guidelines of her jaw. The place where her eyes rested on
the bottom curve of the circle I’d started with. The tip of her
nose. The space between her bottom lip and her chin. And the
placement of that singular dimple. It was a battle to keep my eyes
on the page between the short glances I gave her.

I have a bad tendency when I draw to
second-guess every line. With Penny as my subject, I didn’t have to
do that; I knew her face as if I’d seen it a thousand times. The
force of my attraction to her unnerved me. I wiped perspiration
from my brow with the back of my arm. Could men get hot flashes
from hormones?

“
I’m trying to not say
anything,” Penny said after a while. “I don’t want to break your
concentration.”

I carefully shaded in a bit more at the
juncture of her ear and jawline. “You’re not going to break
anything, Doll. I’m almost finished, anyway.”

“
Doll?” she laughed, and I
realized with crashing embarrassment that I’d used the term of
endearment on her.

“
It’s like honey, or baby,”
I explained, cringing at my lack of self-preservation. “It just
slipped out. More creepy second date behavior on my
part.”

“
I’ll just interpret it as
you being comfortable enough with me that you could accidentally
give me a cute nickname. Where did you come up with
‘Doll’?”

“
If I tell you, I’m going to
sound like a desperately clingy person you’ll want to run away
from.” Damn. I’d made the divot above her lip too long. I flipped
the pencil and erased.

“
No, you won’t, I promise,”
she said, and added, “If I didn’t try to run away from you when you
tried to murder a defenseless octopus, I won’t run away
now.”

I didn’t get the feeling either of us were
running from each other any time soon, so I just told her. “My
father used to call my mum that. It’s very common.”

Though, I’d never used it with anyone else
before. I’d called Gena “Peach”. Maybe that was a sign. Or maybe
Penny bringing the nectarines instead of peaches was a sign.

I thought about Penny and the fortune cookie
from our date before. Clearly, her superstitious nature was highly
transmissible. There was something in the Bible about soothsayers,
but there were a lot of things in the Bible I didn’t listen to,
Catholic or not. It couldn’t hurt to ask, “So, you’re
superstitious. What about, besides fortune cookies?”

“
You know, horoscopes.
Numerology. I believe in signs.” She shrugged. “So do you, right?
Signs from God? Isn’t that a Christian thing?”

“
It is. I wouldn’t say that
I listen to them. But yes, I have had times when I’ve thought maybe
I was being pushed in a certain direction.”
Toward you, for example
. “Sometimes,
when something illogical is happening, you have to look for a
pattern to make things make sense.”

“
Yeah. I know that feeling.”
She tried to suppress her smile, but it broke through, radiant, and
I had no doubt we were talking about the same thing. What we were
doing was absolutely illogical. I should have been wracked with
guilt and embarrassment at being interested in a woman so much
younger than me. I’m sure she was wondering why she wanted to spend
time with me. The mutual attraction between us was obvious; the
reasoning behind it was not. If ever there were a time when signs
from mysterious forces were required, this would certainly be
it.

“
So, horoscopes, then,” I
said to lighten the moment. “I’m a Cancer, and you’re
a…”

“
Scorpio. My birthday is
actually October thirty-first. I was crushed when I realized that
the cause for all the dressing up and candy collecting wasn’t a
celebration of my birth, but something that had been going on for a
really long time.” She shook her head with a little sigh at the
ridiculousness of it.

I chuckled and tilted my head, frowning at a
shadow that didn’t seem quite right. “Well, that explains why
you’re superstitious. What do the stars have to say about us?”

“
What, like, romantic
compatibility?” When I nodded, she went on, “Scorpios and Cancers
work together really well, actually. I mean, you’re probably
stubborn and opinionated, but I’m stubborn and opinionated, too.
But both signs have a lot of energy relating to family and home.
Our relationship would probably be pretty intense.”

“
Is that a bad
thing?”

“
No, it’s not a bad a
thing,” she assured me. “I’m Mars. You’re the moon. Your sign is
all about the loving and nurturing in a relationship, and mine is
about the romance and the passion.”

“
You can’t claim exclusivity
there. I’m dead romantic when I put my mind to it.”

“
I can tell.” The corners of
her eyes crinkled when she smiled. “This is probably the most
romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.”

“
I’m not going to take too
much credit, because this is really the bare minimum.”
Titanic
had done artists
huge favors in the drawing-equals-romance department, but I’d never
considered it a grand sweeping gesture. I’d wanted to draw Penny,
anyway. I handed the sketchbook to her. “Here, all
finished.”

It took effort not to ask what she thought,
or immediately make excuses for its quality. Downplaying my skill
was something I was trying to overcome. Instead, I watched her
expression, perhaps more intently than when I’d actually been
sketching her.

Her lips parted; she took a breath. Her eyes
moved quickly over the page, and her hand came up to touch her own
cheek, as though she were comparing it to what I’d drawn. “Oh my
God. Ian…I don’t know what to say.”

“
That bad, is it?” Old
habits die hard.

“
It’s incredible.” Her eyes
met mine, and she laughed nervously. “I had no idea I was so
pretty.”

“
Yes you did,” I accused,
gently mocking her.

She nodded. “I am really hot. But this
is…this is beautiful. Can I keep it?”

I told her, “Of course,” because as well as
the drawing had turned out, I much preferred the physical version
of Penny.

Cradling the sketchbook to her chest with
one arm, she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. “I love it.
I really do.”

It was easily the best hundred bucks I’d
ever spent.

Chapter Six

I wasn’t
surprised at how easy it had been to spend the day with Penny. What
had surprised me was how fast the day had gone. We’d spent eleven
hours together. That had to be some kind of record for a second
date that didn’t involve a sleepover or a kidnapping. Instead, we’d
gone on a walk—during which she’d insisted her high-heels weren’t
absolutely killing her—then to drinks that, somehow, had segued
into dinner. I’d driven my car into the city, though I hated to do
it, but I was glad I had. When we’d pulled up at the curb beside
her building, goodnight didn’t happen. We’d kept talking until the
sun went down and the foot traffic had become sparse on the
sidewalk.