First Time: Penny's Story (First Time (Penny) Book 1) (38 page)

An hour ago, we’d been fine. And now, we
were…

Oh god. We were over.

“
Just take me home,” I said.
All the fight had gone out of me. I just wanted to get away from
him, to retreat to my bed and stay there all weekend. Which sucked,
because I’d been planning on spending the weekend in his bed. The
thought crushed me. “No, wait. Take me to the nearest
train.”

For a guy with a passionate need to explain
himself, Ian sure was silent on the drive to the nearest station.
And I was glad. I didn’t want this to be happening, but I would be
an idiot if I let him lie to me, anymore.

As he pulled the car up to the curb, he
finally spoke. “I don’t want to break up, Penny.”

“
Well, you don’t really get
a say,” I snapped. It was easier to be angry than sad.

“
I was going to say,” he
began again with emphasis. “I don’t want to break up. But I do
wonder if you and I both needed more time to get over our last
relationships.”

Why did you say that?
I wanted to punch myself.
If you’d just said you don’t want to break up, either, maybe
you’d still be together. Maybe this wouldn’t be
happening.

“
I do love you, Penny. But
our timing is…” He stopped. “Maybe I go to Nassau, and when I get
back…”

“
When you get back, you
won’t have lied to me?” I didn’t want to face it, but that was the
truth. No amount of time was going to change my hurt. Ian had lied
to me, he’d probably cheated on me with Carrie fucking Glynn, and
now, he was going to move to the Bahamas for a year and a half and
probably cheat on me there, too. There was no sense in setting up
some stupid long-distance maybe and waiting around for him. “When
you get back, I’ve spent two years waiting for you, without being
with you, on the off chance that you’ll be different?”

He didn’t have an argument for that, and I
didn’t care to pursue one with him.

“
I love you, too,” I said,
my voice breaking. “Or at least the parts of you that were
real.”

“
Penny—” he began, but I
pushed the door open and got out. I closed it behind me, silently
praying,
Please follow me. Please stop me.
Don’t let me walk away from you.

My feet and brain had better sense than my
heart. I kept walking. I didn’t need another liar. I didn’t need
another guy who would hurt me. I needed the man I’d been in love
with this morning.

I’d never really had that man at all.

I heard the car’s tires as he pulled away,
and I stopped where I stood, my pulse pounding so hard in my throat
that I thought it would choke me. I wanted to run after him,
screaming and waving my arms and promising that I could just ignore
the gigantic lie he’d been feeding me for months.

Instead, I got on the train.

Chapter Eighteen

“
Okay, Bella Swan,” Rosa
said, plopping down beside me on my bed. “Time to get
up.”

“
It’s Saturday,” I mumbled,
still facing the wall.

“
Yes, and you have been
spending every Saturday in bed.” She gave my butt a push. “Get up.
The holidays are over. You’ve got to get past this before
Valentine’s day or you’ll spiral even worse.”

We’d been going through this every Saturday
since mid-December. Rosa had been fine with it at first, and it
hadn’t affected my job performance…much. But even I had to admit
that this whole weekend depressive thing wasn’t healthy all these
weeks later.

Health be damned. I still wanted to wallow,
and January was a perfect wallow month. “Just leave me here. I’ll
die an old spinster, like the curse says.”

“
The curse is
not—”

“
I know the curse isn’t
real. But I feel like I willed it into being. Look what happened.”
I’d had the same conversation with myself over and over, trying to
decide if it was a good thing I’d picked Ian for my first time if
this was the outcome. It hurt bad. And I couldn’t tell if it felt
so much worse than my other breakups because I’d had sex with him
or because he really was supposed to have been my true
love.

No, he wasn’t my true love. Because your true
love didn’t pretend to be someone he wasn’t. Your true love didn’t
lie to you. I couldn’t remember a single fairy tale where Prince
Charming had cheated on his ex-wife.

“
You have got to stop with
this magical thinking bullshit. Do you really think this happened
because you fucked him? People fuck and breakup all the time.
That’s not a sign. It’s just something that happens.” Rosa sounded
annoyed at having to repeat her lines in this conversation yet
again. “Don’t you have that benefit tonight?”

“
Yeah, for Mr. Elwood’s
charity.” I rubbed my eyes. “I really don’t feel like getting
dressed up tonight.”

“
Normally, I would ask you
if you absolutely had to go, but I don’t really care.” Rosa rubbed
my back then plucked at my gnarly T-shirt. I’d slept in it and
cried myself to sleep on most nights during the week. “Although
staying home and doing laundry would probably be a great
idea.”

I pushed myself up and squinted at the time
on my phone. It was almost two in the afternoon. I really did have
to get up and start getting around. I would need a shower and to
shave basically everything. My gown was black and strapless, so
some light bronzing lotion on my shoulders wouldn’t hurt, either. I
needed to do my nails—there wouldn’t be time to go to a salon—then
put on makeup… Ugh. The whole process was exhausting. “No, I have
to go.”

“
There’s that enthusiasm for
life you’re known for,” Rosa said dryly. “But you might meet
someone. Some rich someone.”

“
I’m not I the mood for
rich.” I’d had rich. Or, at least, richer than I was, and about to
get richer. “It didn’t go well.”

I would take a guy I would have to
financially support for the rest of our lives, just as long as he
wasn’t a liar.

“
Wow, your phone has been
blowing up,” Rosa said, reaching for it on the nightstand. “Are you
answering it?”

“
Just for work stuff.” I
said with a shrug.

“
Is he still calling?” The
way Rosa said it made it sound like Ian was stalking me, and he
wasn’t. He’d tried a few times before he’d given up. My voicemail
had messages from him in it, but I hadn’t listened to them. I’d
been telling everyone my voicemail wasn’t working.

“
He hasn’t called since
before Christmas. Maybe he’s already gone to the Bahamas.” The
thought hurt me more than it should have. He seemed farther away.
Then again, if he wasn’t in New York, there was no chance of
running into him anywhere. Like at the benefit tonight.

“
You haven’t checked your
voicemail since before Christmas?” Rosa’s long curls rustled as she
shook her head. “Penny…”

“
I know.” I took the phone
from her hand. “Is there coffee?”

“
It’s two in the afternoon,”
she reminded me.

I gave her my best big, pleading look.

“
Fine.” She stood and headed
to my door. “But only if you check your messages.”

She was right. I had to do it, sometime.
Besides, I didn’t have to actually listen to the messages. I could
wait until they started playing and hit the delete button. If I was
fast enough, I never had to hear his voice.

My hand trembled. I couldn’t ignore this
forever. I knew it was going to suck, but I would have to just
forge through. I hit the voicemail icon and entered my
password.

“
November thirtieth, three
P.M.,” the voice droned robotically. I wanted to hit delete, I
really did. But another part of me whispered,
This is the last time you’ll hear his voice
. Then, it was too late.

“
Hey, Doll. It’s
me.”

Doll
. My face crumpled into an ugly cry at the word.

“
I know you don’t want to
talk to me. But I’m hoping that you will, eventually. When you do,
I’m here.” There was a long pause, and I imagined him looking away,
running his hand through his hair, unable to think of what to say
next. “I love you. I hope we’ll talk later.”

I sat there, paralyzed for a moment, then hit
delete. It was like cutting off a finger.

“
December seventh, Two P.M.”
All the calls seemed to have come during work hours. Not at drunk
o’clock at night.

“
Hey, Doll. It’s
me.”

I hiccuped back a sob.

“
I was just hoping… Ah, I
don’t know what I was hoping. I love you.”

The message ended, and I hit delete again. It
wasn’t any easier.

The next two messages were the same, just
days apart, both of them beginning, “Hey, Doll. It’s me,” and
ending with “I love you.”

Then I got to the fifth message, the final
time he’d called me, the day before Christmas Eve.

“
Hi, Penny.”

I covered my mouth to stifle the shocked wail
that welled up painfully in my chest.

“
This is the last call, I
promise. You don’t want to speak to me. But I had to let you know…
I never lied about how much I loved you.”

Loved
. Past tense.

“
You made me so happy. And
you’re worth so much more than you believe you are. Please, don’t
forget that.”

That was where the message ended. No “I love
you.” No promise that if I wanted to talk, he would be there.

I’d thought we were over before, because I
hadn’t been speaking to him. I’d thought I was letting the
relationship die. Instead, it had languished on life support, until
Ian had been forced to pull the plug. Listening to these messages,
I felt like we were actually, finally over.

Now that his offer had expired, all I wanted
was to speak to him, to tell him how stupid I’d been.

I must have been crying louder than I
thought, because Rosa knocked on my door, then barged right in. She
sat beside me on my bed and pulled me into her arms, petting my
head and soothing me like I was a child.

It was over. Ian and I were over. And I still
loved him.

* * * *

The Elwood Rape Crisis Resource Center was a
huge building on the Lower West Side. It used to be a bank before
it had been remodeled into the hulking facility it was now. There
were several floors for inpatient mental health services, as well
as counseling offices and a temporary shelter for people who needed
to escape abusive situations. There was also an education and
conference center that took up most of the lower level. Sophie had
given a tour to those of us who would be working the party, and
she’d explained her husband’s commitment to his cause.

He’d been all over the media lately, lauded
for being open about being a survivor himself. I was impressed by
how willing he was to talk about the frame of mind that had kept
him from acknowledging his assault for decades and his belief that
better education and a more open dialogue about rape would help
victims seek help when they needed it.

He’d spent so much of his own money on the
place, he’d gone from tenth richest British person to the
thirteenth. When I’d first heard those figures, I’d thought, “Oh,
boo hoo,” but that had passed quickly when I’d realized exactly how
much he’d been willing to part with. It was no small potatoes.

The gala ball tonight was to raise even more
money, and from the looks of the crowd, they would get it. The
brightly lit atrium was filled to capacity with people in black
tie. I’d seen a large percentage of the faces around me in
magazines and on television.

I was pretty sure I’d just been in the
bathroom with Gillian Anderson. But it could have just been another
inhumanly beautiful person.

Guests milled around the fountain, a bronze
rectangle with water that flowed down both sides, and waiters wove
around with trays of champagne. The stairs curving to the second
floor in a long arch could have come out of a palace in a fantasy
movie, the first step an impossibly wide circle, the rest growing
smaller the higher they got, until they were normal stair size.

I wondered if Ian’s firm had a hand in
designing this place, but those stairs definitely didn’t seem like
his style.

A big-band-style orchestra played on a
temporary stage, and a dance floor had been laid over the marble
tile. I stood at the edge, my gaze flicking over the crowd. I knew
I looked super hot, because Rosa had helped me with my hair, which
swept back from my forehead in stiff waves that wouldn’t move in a
hurricane but looked chic and sophisticated, as befitting someone
who worked at the hippest digital fashion magazine on the internet.
When I’d shown Sophie my tight, floor-length, strapless black
velvet gown a week ago, she’d praised its retro look and loaned me
a thick silver choker from her mother’s collection of 1990’s
jewelry. It really went perfectly with the whole Sharon Stone look
I had going on.

So, working my hotness? Not a problem. But
even though there were some incredibly sexy men in the place
tonight, and I’d had more than one approving nod from some of them,
romance was the last thing on my mind. I still had a misery
hangover from my earlier trip down breakup voicemail road.

Which was a shame, considering my cleavage
was impressive enough to hide a cell phone. And it actually was; my
job tonight was to mind Sophie’s phone, and my boobs were the only
place I could think of to put it.

Okay, Penny. Time to snap
out of your funk. You didn’t get this dressed up to do
nothing.
I squared my shoulders and
prepared to find a dance partner. Maybe even an anonymous sex
partner. That might also be fun.