First Time: Ian's Story (First Time (Ian) Book 1) (18 page)

She giggled and swatted me away. “If you
don’t get your hand back to where it was, I’m going to cry.”

“
Well, I don’t want that.” I
leaned down to kiss her as I put my hand exactly where she’d asked
for it. Without her jeans to hamper me, I had far more space. I
cupped her, and she lifted up, spreading her legs apart. Was she so
hot and slippery just from sucking my cock? I wondered how often
she’d gone home from a date this miserably turned on. At least she
was letting me do something about it, and for that, I would be
forever grateful.

When I slid my finger between her labia to
find her clit, her body jerked like I’d shocked her. She grabbed my
shoulder and her nails cut into me, even through my shirt. “Easy. I
appreciate the compliment, but I also appreciate having skin.”

“
Sorry.” She gasped and
pulled me closer.

Rolling her clit in slow circles seemed to
be a good place to start, if I didn’t want to be flayed alive. Her
jerky breathing followed a pattern, hitching every time my
fingertip reached the top of the circle. A frown of concentration
bent her brows above her tightly closed eyes. Her pulse beat under
my fingertip.

“
May I go inside?” I asked.
It was clumsy phrasing, and desperate; I wanted to feel her
clenching around my hand. I wanted to learn everything about her
pleasure.

To illustrate my question, I let my fingers
wander down, not parting her folds but skimming the crease where
they touched. I let my thumb do the work my finger had been doing,
and she let out a shaky, “Yeah.”

I held my breath as I pressed my middle and
index fingers inside. Not too far, just enough that I felt her cunt
grip my fingertips like a goddamn vise, and I groaned because I
swore I could feel it around my cock.

“
It’s just a little deeper,”
she whimpered, shifting beneath my hand.

It took me a moment to realize she was
talking about her G-spot. “Thank God you know where it is,” I
laughed. “That makes it much easier to find.”

I knew when I found it, because her hips
thrust upward and she grabbed the back of the sofa, shouting, “Oh
fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!”

“
Oh, fuck,” I echoed to
myself. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever heard her curse. She rocked
her hips as my fingers worked tirelessly inside of and against her.
All at once, her body seized up, and her mouth opened in what
should have been a cry of release, but no sound escaped her. Her
cunt clenched four times—I committed each one to memory, so I could
fantasize about this moment later—and her right leg jerked. Then
she melted into the couch, her face flushed and sweaty.

It had been beautiful and sweet, and far too
brief. The enormity of her trust overwhelmed me. She’d let me be
the first man to make her come. My fingers were still inside her,
my thumb pressed to her clit. I pushed my other hand under her
shirt, to stroke the soft skin of her stomach. “Do you want to keep
going?”

Her eyes flew open in shock. “What?”

I smiled at the hoarseness and disbelief in
her voice. “Do you want to come again? Honestly, I could do this
all night.”

“
Yes!” she shouted, without
hesitation.

If another orgasm was what the lady wanted,
then another orgasm the lady would have. It had been long enough
that touching her again wouldn’t be too sensitive, but she wouldn’t
have cooled off completely. That was the trick of it—waiting just
long enough for the oversensitivity to pass but not missing the
window of opportunity for the second. I started up the same motion
as I’d done before, but now her cunt was snug and swollen around my
fingers. And wet, God, she was so wet. Soft sucking sounds followed
every slight withdraw of my hand. She arched up, and I moved the
hand under her shirt higher, to cup her breast and circle her
nipple with my thumb. She was so beautiful laying there, panting
and whimpering, that I couldn’t resist kissing her. She grabbed my
face and held my mouth hard against hers, sucking my tongue and
bucking her hips.

Our lips muffled the loud wail of her
release, and she pushed away, pleading, “Okay. Okay, that’s
enough.”

I slowly withdrew my fingers and, without
thinking, brought them to my mouth to savor the taste of her.
Someday I wanted to lick all that salty, musky juice straight from
the source, to hold her hips down and feast on her while she
thrashed and begged to come again.

At the moment, Penny was staring at me with
wide eyes, her chest still heavy with jerky breaths. I couldn’t
help my smirk of satisfaction. “Is there anything I can get
you?”

“
Water.” Her voice was the
very sound of a desert.

I kissed her cheek. “I’ll be right
back.”

As I rummaged through the refrigerator for a
bottled water, I heard her laugh. “What’s so funny?”

“
Nothing. Just tons of
endorphins.”

“
Ah.” My inner caveman
roared with pride. I returned to the couch and handed her the
water. “I suppose I’ve done my job.”

“
More like charity work,”
she said with a snort.

“
Then I’ll consider myself a
philanthropist, because I’m keenly devoted to the cause.” Sitting,
I put my arm around her. She was game to cuddle, pulling her feet
up on the couch and leaning against me, cradled in the crook of my
arm.

“
Thank you,” she said
softly.

“
You’re more than welcome.”
I would do it again, right that moment, if she asked me
to.

“
No, I mean, thank you. For
not pushing me for more.” Her voice wobbled. “It’s really nice to
be treated like a person and not a challenge.”

Jesus
. Was that why she’d never let anyone touch her before?
Because she was afraid they were trying to conquer her?

I gave her an awkward hug with the one arm I
had around her. “Penny, I really don’t care if you sleep with me. I
hope we see each other long enough that we do, but if it never
happens, I won’t feel like you’ve deprived me of anything. Being
with you has been the best part of the last few weeks.”

It surprised me exactly how true that was.
Penny had been better than every family dinner, every night
relaxing in front of the television, even the prospect of a shiny
new job and the bags of money that would come with it. Penny
occupied a huge space in my brain, and every moment we spent
together, she took up more room there. And I didn’t care. She could
have every last bit of space, if she wanted it.

She took my hand and said, “You know…you’ve
been the best part for me, too.”

Even better than the
octopus?
I wanted to ask.

But I figured I should quit while I was
still ahead.

Chapter Ten

Since I
hadn’t been spending as much time with family as I should have
been, I stayed at Annie’s to watch the Yankees get demolished by
the Detroit Tigers. I didn’t live for sports the way some people
did, certainly not the way Bill and Danny did, but it wasn’t the
worst way to spend an afternoon. And it gave me a distraction to
keep me from calling Penny like the lovesick fool I was.

I drove home on autopilot, my brain totally
consumed with Penny. Since I’d met her, she’d been all I could
think about. Every time I blinked, I saw her smile. Or her lips
wrapped around my cock for the entire second I’d lasted once they’d
been there. There was no sense in fighting it anymore. I loved her,
in that first rush of new love way that was irresistible even with
herculean effort. And considering the year I’d had, I didn’t have
that much emotional resistance in the first place.

I pulled into my building’s parking lot and
hesitated before I turned off the engine. My hand curled around my
phone. I’d called her out of the blue last Sunday. I didn’t want
her to think I would make a habit of summoning her, like some
arsehole who didn’t want her to have her own life. And after what
we’d done the night before, I certainly didn’t want her to get the
impression that I was calling because I was after her for sex.

Granted, what we’d done had stopped short of
what most people would call sex. It had been nearly everything, and
almost more intimate. The importance of that wasn’t small, to my
mind. The last thing I wanted was for her to think I was using
her.

You can call her when you
get inside,
I told myself, because it would
keep me from driving over to her place. My feet hurt, my knees
ached, and I was feeling every day of my age after the late night.
I planned to get upstairs and leave my clothes like a trail of
breadcrumbs from the door to the bedroom. Then it would be safe to
call her, because no power on Earth, no matter how sweet and blond
and incredibly wet and tight that power was, would be able to get
me back in the car at that point.

A trail of breadcrumbs from the door to a
very cold shower it is, then.

I grabbed my jacket and tie and headed for
the building, jingling my keys in my pocket as I went. Too
distracted by my thoughts of Penny, I didn’t notice her standing
outside my door until I’d almost run into her. Then I wasn’t sure
if she was there, or she was just some horny hallucination I was
having. “Penny?”

She turned slowly. Her hair was wet, she
didn’t have any makeup on, and though I would have been delighted
to see her in her tiny shorts and tight tank top on any other
occasion, she was shivering and distraught. That was a bit of a
mood killer.

“
I’m sorry, I should have
called—”

“
Are you all right?” How did
she expect me to worry about etiquette when she looked so
thoroughly broken? I cupped her jaw and gazed down into her red,
tear-filled eyes, and wondered what the hell had happened to do
this to my normally cheerful, upbeat Penny.

I didn’t have to ask. The answer poured from
her, unprompted, riddled with hiccupping sobs that sounded
physically painful. “I saw… I ran into my ex-boyfriend at the park,
and— With his fiancée and his baby.”

Our Father who art in
Heaven, give me the strength to not look up that miserable fucker’s
name and do something that would end with me in a holding
cell.
I couldn’t make Penny’s pain go away,
at least, not by slashing someone’s tires. I didn’t know the
details of her last relationship, but this clearly affected her
deeply, and I hated how helpless I felt in the face of her
pain.

“
Come here.” The only thing
in my power at the moment was whether or not I would hug her, and
that was an easy choice to make. She stepped into my arms, and I
pulled her close, squeezing her perhaps a bit too hard. If I could
have poured all my sympathy into her to displace her pain, I would
have. Her skin was shockingly cold, despite how balmy the evening
was. “Let’s get you inside.”

“
I’m sorry,” she kept
saying, all the way up to the apartment. Every single one of them
pierced my heart. I wanted to tell her not to be sorry, that she
was never going to be an inconvenience to me, but at the moment, I
didn’t think it would get through to her.

“
What you need are some warm
clothes and a stiff drink.” I didn’t actually know if that’s what
she needed, but it had been my mother’s go-to remedy for many
emotional traumas.

I steered her into the living room and
wrapped the blanket from the couch around her shoulders. “Stay
here, I’ll be back.”

Gena hadn’t left anything behind, and thank
God for that, because it would have been disturbing in the extreme
to put my new girlfriend in my ex-wife’s clothing.

If Penny
was
my girlfriend. I didn’t quite
know where we stood on that, and tonight was clearly not the time
to find out.

I went to the closet and pulled out the
storage tub of my winter clothes. There was a particularly soft
green sweater in there, as well as a pair of flannel sleep pants
with a drawstring waist she could cinch up. I brought them back to
the living room, and she accepted them gratefully.

“
Go change. I’ll get you a
drink. What’s your poison?”

She stared back at me blankly. “I have no
idea.”

“
Okay. Well, I’ll
improvise.” I leaned down and kissed her forehead, and she hugged
the clothes tighter to her chest.

I went to the kitchen and searched the
cupboards. The best I could come up with was Glenlivet Nádurra. If
that didn’t warm her up, she might actually need to be put in an
oven.

I poured her a glass and took one myself,
both neat, and went to the living room just as she emerged from the
bathroom. My clothes swallowed her up; she’d rolled up the pant
legs and pulled the sleeves around her fists, and now, she looked
even more vulnerable than she had when she’d been trembling and
sobbing.

She sat beside me and took her glass. She
swallowed the two fingers as though it were a shot. Then her gaze
flicked to mine.

“
I’ll go get the bottle,” I
said grimly. When I came back, my glass was also empty. I refilled
them both and sat. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“
No,” she said, but she
nodded. She pressed her fingertips to her forehead. “Brad and I
broke up in May. And today, I ran into him with his fiancée and
their four-month old baby.”

I counted backward. “Jesus, Penny…”

“
I know. And God knows how
long it was going on.” She frowned. “I think they might have been
living together. Maybe in January? We suddenly stopped going to his
place, then. He said his roommate was off his meds.”