First Time: Penny's Story (First Time (Penny) Book 1) (30 page)

“
Are you going to take your
top off?” he teased. “Start shouting obscenities?”

“
Of course not.” Maybe I was
being a little silly. I looked down. “I have to admit, there’s
something…weird about it. It’s really intimate, people praying
around you.”

“
And that’s why I want to
share it with you. I don’t expect you to understand or share in my
beliefs. But I want you to know me.” He shrugged. “Think about it.
I’m not going to pressure you. If somewhere along the line you
decide—”

“
Do you want me to come on
Sunday?” I blurted.

“
If you’d like.” His lips
bent in a close-mouthed smile of gratitude. “You’re coming over
tomorrow night, aren’t you?”

“
Yeah. No. Should I do that,
though? I mean, spend all night having sex with you then go to your
church? It sounds…disrespectful.” I chewed my lip, imagining how
awkward it was going to be sitting in a church full of people I was
sure knew we’d been getting totally dirty the night
before.

Ian took my hands and kissed them, then held
them in his lap. “I appreciate your concern. We can stick to oral
tomorrow night, then.”

I grabbed my pillow and smacked him with it.
For a supposedly mature adult, he could be a real dork
sometimes.

We didn’t keep Ian’s “just
oral” promise on Saturday night, but I wasn’t going to break
my
promise. I got up with
his alarm and went to get ready in his bathroom, which he
graciously ceded to me most mornings. I showered and scrubbed extra
hard, like there were going to be sin-detecting dogs at this
place.

Not “this place”, Penny. Church.

There had never been a time in my past that
I’d had to actually face going to church. I’d gone to a bible camp
a few times with a friend, but that had been more of a
non-denominational sleep over. I’d been to weddings, and while god
had been mentioned at those, they’d been barely religious. It was
like hearing about god in the pledge of allegiance or something.
Just a word.

But it wasn’t just a word to Ian. It was a
huge part of his life, one I couldn’t ignore. I wanted to be with
him, and that meant trying to learn some of this Catholic stuff,
even if I had no intention of joining the club.

One of the things I hadn’t figured out was
how, exactly, I was meant to dress. I should have asked him. He
wore suits every Sunday—I’d appreciated watching him get dressed in
the mornings, from my vantage point in his warm, comfortable bed,
just as much as I’d appreciated pulling his tie off and having my
way with him when he’d gotten home later—so I’d taken a cue from
that and chosen a navy, boat-necked dress with gray polka dots. I
paired it with a gray cardigan and a thin red belt around both then
ditched the belt. Something about red leather in a church seemed a
little too rebellious for a guest.

I used my straightening iron to smooth my
hair and curl under the ends, put on just a touch of makeup, and
took a deep breath. Usually, I would still be in bed, waiting for
Ian to leave so I could get up and go on my Sunday run and
luxuriate in his amazing bathtub before he got home. Now I was
worried I was dressed to offend his god.

So just another relaxing Sunday.

I checked my phone as I headed down the
stairs. Ian had said we’d need to leave by nine-thirty. It was
twenty-five after, and he was still in the bathroom. Diva.
“Ian?”

“
Yeah, Doll, on my
way.”

I leaned against the back of the couch, my
black wool peacoat folded over my arms. Ian rounded the corner from
the bathroom, rocking the funeral director look hard. It was
actually starting to grow on me.

I pointed to my dress. “Is this conservative
enough?”

“
Yeah, it’s fine,” he said,
as though he were bewildered I wouldn’t realize it on my own. “I
like your hair.”

“
Thanks.” I touched it
self-consciously. I liked it a lot better when it was messy and
textured. “I thought since your sister would be there I should
forgo the bedhead look. I didn’t want her to think it was, you
know…”

“
Actual bedhead?”

My stomach roiled with nerves, but I tried to
smile. “Yeah. That.”

Having never been in a sexual relationship
with someone before, I didn’t know how to deal with meeting
someone’s family when the night before that someone had been
fucking me from behind so hard the bed had rattled. Meeting that
family in church? That only seemed ten times more wrong. But I’d
promised Ian, and this was such a big part of his life. And I
totally wasn’t willing to skip Saturday night sex for the rest of
our lives.

“
You’ll be fine. If it
helps, she’s not going to like you the first few times she meets
you, anyway.”

“
That doesn’t help.” I
sighed “I just want this to go well. I know this is important to
you.”

“
It is. But what’s most
important to me is that you were willing to come along, even if
it’s just this once.” Ian reached for my coat and helped me pull it
on, then donned his suit jacket and long, gray trench
coat.

Outside, a few bastard snowflakes blew down
from the dreary clouds.

“
Oh, no. This is crazy. It
can’t snow yet,” I objected, as though I had some power to stop the
weather.

“
You’ll be in church today.
Pray that it doesn’t,” he said. After a pause, he added, “I’m
sorry. It wasn’t a comment on your beliefs or trying to change
them. I was just trying to be funny.”

Wait, he thought he’d offended me? If he was
as worried about that as I was about offending him, we were on a
level playing field. I grinned. “Oh, I know. You were just failing
to be funny.”

St. Basil’s was located in a tidy
working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, about a twenty-minute drive
from Ian’s apartment. There was a church closer, but St. Basil’s
was where Ian’s nephew worked. If that’s what it was called. I
wondered if it was weird, having a family member wield the power of
god’s approval over you. Of course, I was still pretty murky on how
that worked. Despite how much I enjoyed knowing random trivia about
science stuff, I’d never really bothered to look into the whole
religion thing. I had a feeling I was about to get a crash
course.

I was so jumpy, even my skin tingled as we
walked across the small, cracked parking lot toward the brick
building. It looked exactly as I imagined a church should look,
with a steeple on top and a tall, peaked roof and stained glass
windows. We went up the front steps and through the wide open
doors, into a vestibule with a checkered floor. People were
greeting each other, hanging up their coats, standing around and
blocking doors. It was far busier and noisier than I had
expected.

Ian took my coat and hung it
up on the long rack provided, which seemed like a pretty trusting
thing to do. I mean, it was a church, sure, but if I wanted to
steal coats, this would be the ideal venue. I followed Ian into the
main part of the building, where the pews were, and it was
comforting to see that it, too, looked just like I’d imagined from
the movies. Actually, quite a lot like the church from that episode
of
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia
that had roped me into coming here to begin
with.

I could have titled this day, “The Gang Makes
Penny Do Something Extremely Uncomfortable.”

“
I feel really overdressed,”
I told Ian in a low voice.

“
Don’t feel that way. You
look beautiful, and besides, my parents always insisted that you
should dress well for mass, since you’re in the presence of God.
It’s just respectful.” If he’d meant for those words to reassure
me, they did not. I was meeting his sister
and
his god?

This was insane. Panic clawed up my throat,
and I smoothed my skirt down with clammy palms. “Okay, is there
anything I have to do?”

Ian shook his head. “No, God knows you’re not
Catholic.” He kept talking about god like he was a real person, and
it was starting to freak me out. “You just have to come into the
church, sit in the pew beside me, stand when we stand, sit when we
sit, kneel if you’d like, and smile warmly at my sister.”

Oh, is that all, Ian?
I wanted to snap.

He went on, “Oh, and don’t take communion.
You can just stay in the pew when we go up.”

“
Go up?” I blinked in
confusion. I hadn’t read about that term when I’d googled
Catholicism on my phone this morning.

“
I promise I’ll give you
direction. Please, don’t be nervous,” he said, and I wanted to kick
myself for being so uptight. Of course he wouldn’t let me do
anything to embarrass myself or him.

I followed Ian to a rack of glass votive
holders. Some of the candles burned already. He dropped a
twenty-dollar bill into a slot on the rack, then picked up a long
wooden taper and started lighting candles.

“
What’s this for?” I
whispered. Everyone in the seats were mumbling prayers together,
and I wasn’t sure if things had started or what, but I didn’t want
to be rude.

He lit a final one, the fifth, as he said,
“You light them to remember your loved ones who’ve passed on.”

“
Oh.” I counted them off in
my head. I knew his parents had died, and obviously two were for
his brother and sister. The fifth I didn’t know, but if he had
another sad family secret, now was not the time to ask about
it.

Ian crossed himself before we walked away. He
seemed to do that a lot; when we walked in, he dipped his fingers
in holy water and crossed himself, too, and when we got to an empty
pew, he took a knee and crossed himself. Didn’t his arms get
tired?

He gestured for me to go ahead of him into
the row. He sat beside me and asked, “I have to go bother Danny for
absolution. Will you be all right on your own for a second?”

What?
He was going to drop me in the middle of totally unfamiliar
territory with a bunch of strangers—
chanting
strangers—and leave me alone?
“Um. Maybe?” I looked around at all the parishioners on their
knees, dangling beads over the pews in front of them. “I’m a little
freaked out by all the chanting.”

A guy at the front of the church bellowed,
“The fifth glorious mystery: The coronation of the Blessed Virgin
Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth,” and everyone started saying the
Lord’s Prayer in unison.

What was even happening?

“
Ah. Yeah, I could see why
that would be unsettling,” Ian said guiltily as he scratched his
neck and looked away. “It’s just praying the rosary. Nothing scary.
Sit tight a minute?”

“
Oh, the rosary!” I said, a
little too loudly, and smacked my forehead with the palm of my
hand. I lowered my voice at the startled look from the woman in
front of us. “Sorry. I should have known. I’m just a little
nervous.”

“
Don’t worry, you’re doing
fine,” he said with a reassuring smile as he slid from the
pew.

It would have been easy to be peeved at Ian
for not adequately preparing me for this, but I wasn’t. None of
this was foreign to him, so he probably took it for granted that
everyone knew what Catholic Church was like. I took a deep breath
and reached for the thick, laminated paperback book in the rack
bumping my knees. At first, I thought it was a bible, but upon
further inspection, it was full of songs—a lot of songs—and various
biblical passages. I thumbed through it. The whole production
seemed to be outlined. Oh my gosh, it was a manual! Exactly what I
needed to keep from embarrassing myself today.

“
Cutting it close this week.
I should be out there getting ready for the processional. You
better not have many sins.” I heard a voice say, and I looked
around. Everyone else was looking around, too. It seemed to be
coming from the speakers attached to the walls.

I frowned and flipped to the front of the
book. It sure didn’t sound like it could be a part of the script
inside.

“
I always have many
sins.”

Oh my gosh. That was Ian’s voice. It was
quieter than the other voice—Danny’s, I realized with crashing
dread—but unmistakably Ian.

“
I don’t have time for the
full rigmarole today. Penny’s waiting out there,” Ian went on, and
my face flushed. I heard a few chuckles in the back of the room,
but mostly there was a lot of muttering as the conversation went on
over the PA system.

“
Penny! You brought her?”
Danny said in surprise.
I thought Ian had
told his family I was coming.

“
Things have been going
really well. I thought it might be a good time. Did I mention
things are going well?” Ian said, and I cringed. I really hoped he
wasn’t about to go into how well things were going.

Oh my god, he was going back there for
confession.

I thought I might actually consider crossing
myself, at that point.

“
You’re lucky Mom’s not
here,” Danny said. “No, you’re not lucky. You’re going to hear
about it when she finds out she missed the chance to meet the woman
who’s been stealing her baby brother away.”

Oh, that was great. Ian hadn’t been joking
about Annie not liking me, apparently.

“
She’s not going to be
here?” Ian asked, sounding pretty upset. “I told her I was bringing
Penny. Where’d Annie run off to?”

“
She and Dad are on the
ladies’ altar society marriage retreat to D.C. She must have
forgotten to mention it. They’re going to mass at the National
Basilica today.”