First Time: Penny's Story (First Time (Penny) Book 1) (22 page)

“
Hey, hey.” Ian put his arms
around me. “What’s that for?”

“
Because I ruined
everything.” I’d gotten drunk and tried to use him to make myself
feel better over stupid Brad. Or maybe I’d wanted to sleep with Ian
because I was afraid he would walk away? Maybe both.

Either way, I’d messed up, when things had
been going so well.

“
By trying to have sex with
me? I wasn’t rejecting you, Doll, I—”

“
I know, I know.” I pulled
back and wiped my eyes. “I wouldn’t have wanted to fuck me,
either.”

The corner of his mouth twitched, ruining his
sympathetic expression. “Believe me, it wasn’t that I didn’t want
to fuck you.”

“
But I was trying to use you
to make myself feel better about some other guy. It was so awful of
me.” I covered my faced and rubbed my forehead, both to hide my
stupidity and to try to ease the pounding in my head. Failed on
both counts.

“
You were in a bad place. It
won’t be the last time, I promise.” He laughed softly. “And you’ve
yet to see how badly I can fuck things up. But I’m ready to be in
this with you. All of you.”

“
I just thought…” I shook my
head and finally made eye contact with him again. “I was kind of
desperate. After all that stuff we talked about… I didn’t want to
make you wait.”

He took my hands in his and raised them to
his mouth to press a few kisses to my knuckles. The soft sounds of
his lips on my skin were all I heard, the gentle drift of his
breath over my hands the only thing that mattered in the moment. He
looked into my eyes, a few strands of hair falling over his
forehead. He usually looked so put-together when I saw him that one
change in his appearance was enough to make everything around us
more vivid and real.

“
I’m not them, Penny,” he
said. “I’m the guy who’ll actually wait for you.”

I used his grip as leverage to launch myself
at him and wrapped my arms around his neck to squeeze him tight. We
nearly went over backwards. He caught me with an “oof!” of
surprise.

“
Careful.” He laughed, one
hand coming up to push my hair back from my face. “I’m not as shiny
and new as you are.”

I sat back and wiped at my eyes. “Sorry. I’m
overly enthusiastic with expressions of affection. If you’re in
this with me, you have to get used to that.”

“
I’ll buy protective
equipment.” He leaned his forehead against mine—oh god, I finally
had someone who would do that with me!—and whispered,
“Penny?”

“
Yeah?”

“
I want to kiss you, but
your breath is fucking terrible.”

I laughed but with my mouth as closed as
possible. I shielded it with one hand. “Do you have any
mouthwash?”

“
I do.” He laughed with me.
“Go use it.”

My pounding headache didn’t even seem as bad,
anymore. I got out of bed carefully, because the shirt I’d slept in
seemed a lot shorter than it had the night before, when my veins
had coursed with liquid courage. But I wanted to skip with every
step I took toward the bathroom. “I want a kiss when I get back,” I
called over my shoulder, a hand still in front of my mouth.

“
Well, obviously.” He
grinned, and I hurried into the bathroom. When I shut the door
behind me, I had to lean against it to get my bearings.

Ian was right. He wasn’t the other guys I’d
dated. He was the best guy I’d ever dated.

Chapter Eleven

As much as I would have
liked to spend the day with Ian, I felt the kind of thoroughly
gross that only a shower at home and clean clothes of my own could
fix. Instead of asking him to drive me, I made up an excuse about
needing to swing by the office for something and took the
train.

My phone rang its generic ringtone as I
climbed the steps from the subway. My heart dropped into my stomach
at the picture of my parents that popped up on the screen.

“
Hello?” I answered as I
reached the sidewalk.

“
I’ve been trying to reach
you all morning,” my mother said, sounding put out, as always, that
I’d been momentarily unavailable to her. “I saw your Facebook
status about Brad. Why didn’t you call us?”

Because it’s taken you five
months to call me.
The last time we’d
spoken had been the week before Brad and I had broken
up.

“
I guess I’ve just been
really busy. But I’m fine, don’t worry about me—”

“
How could I not worry about
you?” Mother said with a heavy sigh. “You’re twenty-two, Penny.
Tick-tock.”

Sometimes, I felt like my parents thought we
were living in an actual Jane Austen novel.

“
I know. But I am seeing
someone else now. He’s an architect.” That was going to be my
golden ticket, right there. Dating a good guy with a steady
income.

“
An architect?” I heard the
caution in mother’s voice. “They don’t make very much money, do
they?”

“
He does,” I assured her.
“He owns his own company. He’s, um, a lot older than
me.”

“
Well, there’s nothing wrong
with that, if he can give you a secure future. God knows you won’t
have one working as a secretary. And you certainly weren’t having
much luck with men your age.” Mother laughed. “I’m so relieved.
When I read about Brad, I thought, oh, Penny, here we go
again.”

My stomach always hurt when I talked to my
parents.

“
Well, I’m calling because
your father is speaking at a symposium in the city in two weeks.
It’s on a Saturday, but we would love to have dinner with you on
Friday night.” There was no suggestion that maybe I would have
plans or anything. Then she said the words I didn’t know I’d been
dreading: “You could bring your new boyfriend.”

“
Oh. Um.” I reached into my
purse for my keys as I neared my building. “You know, it’s kind of
new—”

“
Excellent. I’ll tell your
father. Will you be able to pick a suitable restaurant? I don’t
want a disaster like the last time.” She chuckled, but the last
restaurant we’d gone to had seemed totally suitable to me. I’d have
to try harder to find someplace impressive enough.

“
Yeah, I’ll find someplace.”
I would ask Ian. He would know better restaurants than I
would.

Oh god. I would have to ask Ian. To dinner.
With my parents.

Mother and I hung up with our usual sign-off,
which consisted of her saying goodbye and ending the call before I
could respond. It used to bother me. It didn’t anymore.

I trudged up the stairs to the apartment.

My
other
mother was waiting for me on one
of the wooden stools at the kitchen pass-through, drumming her
fingertips on the counter. “Well, I’m glad you’re not dead in a
ditch.”

“
Where would I possibly find
a ditch in New York?” I asked with a roll of my eyes.

“
At a construction site,”
Rosa shot back. “Like one an architect might try to bury a body
in?”

“
Ian isn’t going to kill me.
Actually, if he hadn’t cut me off from drinking last night, I might
be dead.” My head was still killing me, despite the pills I’d
gobbled down at Ian’s place. “Can you take Tylenol for a
hangover?”

“
Only if you want to die.”
She slid off the stool and walked into the kitchen. “Cake,
however…”

“
You have cake!” My headache
almost entirely disappeared. Then it came pounding back on a wave
of suspicion. “Wait. Wasn’t it—”

“
Yes, it was Amanda’s
birthday. Yes, I went to her party,” Rosa said defensively. “But if
you had checked your phone, you would have known the exact location
of said party and a reassurance that I hadn’t been
murdered.”

I went for the forks. “Why did you think I
was being murdered?”

“
Do you know how many
people
I
know of
who have been murdered?” she snapped back, bending to pull a
tinfoil covered paper plate from the oven. “Sorry if that’s
immediately where my mind goes.”

Okay, that chastened me. I had a bad habit of
forgetting how dangerous life could be for Rosa and women like her.
“Okay. Point. But Ian isn’t going to kill me. I don’t get what you
think is so weird about him.”

“
Well, he’s almost sixty,
and he’s dating a teenager—”

“
He’s fifty-three, not
sixty. And I’m not a teenager, Miss
I’m-So-Twenty-Six-And-Know-Everything.” I went to the bar stool and
hopped up. Rosa leaned over the counter and snagged a fork from
me.

“
I know, I know. But haven’t
you thought about it?” Rosa asked around the bite of cake she put
in her mouth. She swallowed and frowned. “You know, like, what’s
wrong with this guy, that he’s into chicks thirty years younger
than him?”

“
Yeah,” I lied. I hadn’t
really thought about it. At least not deeply enough that it had
occurred to me that something might be “wrong” with him. “I mean,
he’s brought that up, too, a couple of times. We both realize how
weird it probably seems to other people. We already get
looks.”

“
Because you look like a
sophomore out on a date with her math teacher.” Rosa snorted. “I
just don’t want this to go badly for you. You really like this guy.
I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“
Well, I’m pretty sure he
won’t pull a Brad and cheat on me with his future wife,” I said,
and even buttercream frosting couldn’t take the bitterness out of
my mouth.

Rosa’s eyes flared wide. “No!”

“
Yes.” I nodded miserably.
“I ran into him yesterday. Literally. I mean, literally, I was
running, not literally we collided—”

“
Focus up.”

“
He was with his fiancée.
And their baby.” I swallowed the lump in my throat, which was
definitely not cake. “Their four-month-old baby.”

Rosa slapped her palm down on the counter.
“Motherfucker.”

“
And then, he had the gall
to text me after!” Now, I was less bitter, more angry. It was the
mark of a good friendship, that our anger could combine into one
giant ball of sheer outrage. “To thank me about being so
cool.”

“
You were
cool
about it? Why? What
did you say?” she demanded. She chewed vigorously while I
responded.

“
I just said it was nice to
meet her and congratulations. What else was I going to do?” I
shrugged.

“
True. You couldn’t exactly
stomp his foot and knee him in the balls in front of his child.”
She considered. “Although you did call babies ugly to their faces a
couple weeks ago.”

I cringed inwardly. “Don’t remind me. But I
wasn’t about to make anymore infant-related missteps.”

Rosa tilted her head. “Is that why you went
to Ian’s all of a sudden?”

“
Yeah. Not my finest hour.
But he was really sweet and supportive about it.” My face flamed,
and I couldn’t make eye contact with her, because I was pretty sure
she was going to go nuclear scold mode when I said what I was going
to say. “He, um… He told me he loves me.”

When she said nothing, I peeked up at her.
She was leaning against the vertical beam of the pass-through. Her
expression wasn’t critical, as I’d expected, but concerned. “It’s
only been a few weeks, Penny.”

“
I know.” I don’t know why I
felt ashamed. Maybe because I knew it was too early, but I didn’t
care.

“
Do you think he meant
it?”

That wasn’t the question I was expecting.
Rosa could be pretty harsh about the guys I went out with. Of
course, she’d been one hundred percent right about Brad. I thought
about Ian, about how terrified he’d sounded after he’d let slip
that he loved me. “I do. The way he said it was kind of accidental.
We were in his bed— Wait, listen to the whole thing,” I admonished
her. “I was super drunk, and he turned me down for sex. And he told
me he loved me.”

My memory was hazy about the order those
events had gone in.

“
You were in bed with him,
you were drunk, and he didn’t sleep with you?” she asked with a
skeptically arched brow.

I nodded. “Yeah. I got a little aggressive. A
lot aggressive. I kind of…took my panties off and dry-humped his
thigh.”

“
So, you were sending
him
subtle
signals,
then?” she quipped.

I couldn’t help but laugh at
how stupid it sounded when I admitted to it. “I was totally wasted.
I asked him if I could sleep over, like could I sleep over
in his bed
, and he said
yes. I thought we were going to do it.”

“
And he wouldn’t let you,
because you were drunk and he…”

“
And he loves me. He said
he’s the guy who’s going to wait. And I know they’ve all said that.
Some variation of it. But Rosa…I think he really means
it.”

“
Did you say it back?” she
asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

I shook my head. “I did not. I didn’t want to
say it just because he said it.”

“
But do you love
him?”

The cake suddenly looked very
interesting.

“
I knew it. Parker, you fall
way too fast.”

“
I do.” I couldn’t deny
that. “But he’s really great. And oh my god. Multiple orgasms. I
mean, I knew about them. I thought they were a myth,
but—”