First Time: Ian's Story (First Time (Ian) Book 1) (2 page)

There might have been a touch of a smile on
her mouth. Or I could have been imagining it. Her eyes met mine—I’d
never particularly fancied brown eyes before, but she was changing
my mind—as she said, “And I…would like to get to know you,
too.”

“
Excellent.” I tried to
restrain myself from coming off too eager; that was one of the
dating tips I’d read. “Although, at the moment, I’d like to get to
know the menu. They brought them while I was waiting. I think they
were hinting I should do something or surrender the
table.”

She winced. “Sorry I was late.”

“
No, no, don’t worry about
it. It’s New York, for Christ’s sake, everybody is late going
somewhere.” I looked down at the menu. The text on the page was too
small for as fucking dark as it was in the restaurant.

Ah, who was I kidding? It could have been
printed in actual neon tubes and it wouldn’t have held my attention
the way she did. I watched her eyes as they flicked over the items
on the page. She seemed even more nervous, now, and the realization
as to why hit me full-on with my own stupidity. No matter how
generous Sophie was, there was no way Penny was making enough money
to drop her cash on this meal. Not without doing some massive
financial restructuring.

I tapped the top of her menu with one
finger. She met my eyes with the guilty gaze of a teenager trying
to pass off a fake ID.

That’s a fucking disgusting
comparison to make,
I scolded myself. “I
hate to sound old fashioned, but when it comes to some things, I
am. Since I picked this restaurant, dinner is on me.”

“
Well, thanks,” she said,
and quickly looked down again. She probably thought I’d said that
to initiate some complicated social negotiation that would lead to
sex, but this woman was so far out of my league, I had no illusions
of that ever happening.

I tapped her menu again. Her gaze met mine,
and I added, “Just so you know, that’s not me angling for sex.”

Ian Pratchett. You fucking idiot.

“
I didn’t think it w-was,”
she near-whispered. Her face went pink all over. “That was
mortifying.”

“
I know, I’m sorry. I heard
it as it was coming out, and I couldn’t stop it.” I cursed under my
breath. “I haven’t done this in a long, long time, and I just
didn’t want you to get the wrong impression. I tried to look all of
this up on the internet, and—”

“
You researched how to date
on the internet?” Her lips pressed together as she tried not to
laugh at me.

“
I did,” I admitted. Might
as well get all that honesty out in the open. “I’m not sure how
great the advice was…”

“
Tell me some of it. I can
coach you.” She laid her menu aside and folded her arms on the
tabletop. “I’m excellent at dating. I do it all the time.
Sometimes, even twice with the same guy.”

“
Then, you sound like quite
the expert.” I scanned the menu one last time and made my decision.
“All right. Well, the first suggestion was ‘don’t talk about your
exes’.”

“
That’s definitely good
advice. Don’t talk about that until… Well, I don’t know when. But I
don’t want to hear about it.” She started to laugh, and her
expression fell. “Oh my God, that sounded so rude. I’m so
sorry.”

“
Don’t worry about—” I
began, but the waiter had snuck up behind me.

“
Have you made your
selections, then?” he asked, looking eagerly between us. I
suspected we might be the last hurdle to clear before he could
sneak a quick smoke break; as a recent former smoker myself, I
recognized the anxiety radiating from him.

I gestured to Penny. “If the lady is
ready.”

“
Oh, you go first,” she
insisted, biting her lower lip and never raising her eyes from her
menu. Her bottom lip was full, and her lipstick shimmered; it would
have been lovely to draw her expression, but there was no way I’d
ever be able to capture the physical ache that simple, unconscious
gesture made me feel.

If you were twenty years younger, mate.

“
Sir?” the waiter prompted,
and I looked away from Penny.

The bastard was onto me and my lecherous
ways. I could feel the judgment radiating from him, so I didn’t
look him in the eye. “I’ll have the warm octopus eschabeche, I
think.”

A strangled little “eep” burst from Penny’s
throat.

I leaned forward. “Is there something
wrong?”

“
No, it’s nothing.” She
shook her head and forced a smile that stalled a few times before
it really got going. “I just really, um. I really like
octopods.”

So, that’s what the plural
of that is.
I couldn’t remember ever
meeting someone who loved
octopods
so passionately. “Really?”

She nodded. “I do this
donation thing to conserve the habitat of the giant Pacific
octopus.
Enteroctopus
dofleini
? But I love all of them. I even
have a tattoo of one.”

I had to squeeze my fist so hard I could
have crushed a diamond to stop myself from asking where it was. It
seemed rude, and I didn’t need to know since I was never going to
see it, anyway.

“
Then, I revise my
selection…” I considered. “And I will have the lobster pappardelle,
instead.”

“
And for you, ma’am?” the
waiter asked.

Penny handed him her menu like we were in a
greasy spoon. “The frog legs, please.”

“
Very good. Do we have a
wine selection?”

“
What goes with frog legs?”
It was a legitimate question, but I got the impression she thought
I was teasing her. Her expression was neutrally pleasant, but I
could see the annoyance under it. Here I was, a jerk who’d already
planned to eat her favorite animal, and now, I was poking fun at
her dinner selection.

This wasn’t going well.

“
Could you give us a
moment?” I asked the waiter, and he nodded, drifting away with just
a hint of annoyance at me. It seemed to be going around.

I tried a smile at Penny. She stared back
with a pained sort of expression, the kind someone would have while
listening to their boss’s child sing the same off-key bars of an
Abba song through an entire dinner party.

Drastic measures were necessary.

I leaned over and made a motion like I was
inviting her into espionage. She tilted her head in, wary, and I
stage whispered, “This is, quite literally, the worst date I have
ever been on. And I think you’re in that same boat with me. Do you
want to start over? Somewhere that we’re not so pressured to be on
our best behavior, and actually be ourselves?”

Her eyes glittered, and a smile slowly
transformed her face. It was like watching a fucking rainbow
appear. My mouth went dry, and my pulse sped up. Jesus Christ, my
palms were sweating. I hadn’t been this nervous around a woman in
years. I’d never been nervous around women, in general.

Perhaps I was in over my head.

Chapter Two

After a bit of quick thinking on my part, I
managed to come up with some effortless romance.

Effortless in the sense that we took a cab
to her neighborhood and got Chinese takeout, and that bit was her
idea. Romantic because I suggested we eat it in the park down the
street. Sure, it was a cheap date, but she was in her twenties. A
late-night picnic in a park round the corner from a Chinese
restaurant probably counted as spontaneous and sexy.

To my surprise, a late-night picnic wasn’t
all that bad for a person my age, either. As I’d suspected, being
out of the stuffy atmosphere of the restaurant had lightened the
mood considerably. Once she wasn’t so nervous, Penny could
talk.

And talk.

“
And then, when I was
seventeen, I had to have my wisdom teeth out, and they made me take
Percocet. Have you ever been on Percocet?”

“
Wait… Weren’t we talking
about Shakespeare in the park, a moment ago?” I blinked at her, my
chopsticks halfway to my mouth. It wasn’t easy eating a meal out of
cartons balanced on your lap as you sat on an uncomfortable park
bench.

She scrunched up one side of her face. “I
talk too much. Sorry.”

“
No, you talk just enough,”
I assured her. “Any more than this and you’d be overwhelming. But
you’re at a good level right here.”

Her lips quirked into a reluctant smile.

“
Unfortunately, I know the
name of the cat you left behind to go to college, and I know that
cherry is your favorite flavor of cough syrup. But I think we
skipped over some important information.” I reached for the
takeaway cup of soda beside me. “Tell me about your
family.”

Her eyebrows rose, and she swung her foot a
little as she searched for the answer in her food. “Ugh. Okay,
please don’t tell me this sounds lonely, but I’m an only child, and
my parents are not close to their families, so it was kind of just
the three of us.”

That seemed like paradise to me, but
apparently, that wasn’t the reaction she’d gotten from people
before. “I don’t think that sounds all that lonely. Honestly,
around the time my last little brother was born, I would have been
happy to live on my own in a cave somewhere.”

She swung her hair over her shoulder. Her
neck was impressively long.

God, I wanted to touch it.

I shook myself out of my momentary stupor
when she asked, “Why? What’s your family like?”

Taking a breath to distract myself from my
increasingly intrusive thoughts about her neck, I told her, “I’m
the fourth of nine children—”

“
Nine?” She covered her
mouth to keep her kung pao chicken from escaping.

I was too used to the reaction to do more
than nod. “Four boys, five girls.”

“
Wow. And do they all live
in…You’re from Scotland, right?” She sipped from her drink, those
glossy pink lips closing so slowly around the straw I swore I could
feel them on my cock.

Pull yourself together, man!

“
Yes. I am originally from
Scotland. And, yes, all but one of my siblings still live there.”
That was a bit of a fib. Two of them had passed away long ago. Even
though “don’t talk about dead relatives” hadn’t been on the list of
don’ts for a first date, common sense suggested it might be a
downer.

“
So, how long have you lived
here?” she asked, then added, “The country. Not New
York.”

“
Oh, about…” I hadn’t
thought about it in so long it took me a moment. “Twenty…seven?
Yeah, twenty-seven years now.”

“
Wow. I didn’t know they’d
let you stay that long.” She set her cup down. “So, you were here
before I was born.”

Ah, that one smarted. I decided to ignore
it. “Well, they don’t really have much of a choice about letting me
in. My dad is American.”

“
You’ve got dual
citizenship?” Her eyes widened. “I’ve never met anybody who had
that before!”

“
Well, I’m glad to be your
first. I hope it was amazing.” The joke fell flat. That had been on
the list of don’ts; don’t joke about sex.

I didn’t want to go back to the horrible,
awkward way the date had started out, so I shifted to something
more neutral. “What about you? Where are you from?”

“
Pennsylvania. Harrisburg.
Very upper-middle and boring. But then, I moved here—” her face lit
up like she was talking about her first love, “—gosh, almost five
years ago, and it completely changed me.”

“
You grew a second head?” I
joked. “Or you shed the superfluous head you already
had?”

“
Thank God. That second one
was totally ugly.” Her nose crinkled when she smiled. “I just meant
I went from having a personality that had been written for me by
all the people around me to coming to this place where I was a
blank slate. I didn’t have to fit in with my clique back home,
anymore—we were so The Plastics—”

“
Plastics?” I interrupted
her.

“
Yeah, from
Mean Girls?
” She waited
for a sign of recognition, but I couldn’t give her one. I had no
fucking clue what she was talking about, but she just went on like
a verbal wildfire. “It’s a movie. Anyway, I felt like I had to fit
in with them, I had to get perfect grades, make my parents happy.
Now, I’m here, and I get to be whoever I want.” She nodded slowly,
a self-aware smile bending her lips. “And, someday, I’ll figure out
who that person is.”

“
I hate to break it to you,
but no, you won’t.” I had no idea why I said it. I wasn’t trying to
terrify her, but it felt good to be able to spill some of my
midlife crisis out. Sloshing it onto someone who probably would
never see me again was even better, because if she judged me, what
harm was done? “Look at me. I’m fifty-three years old, newly
divorced, absolutely none of my life goals accomplished, and I’m
out on a blind date.”

“
I’m on a blind date, too,”
she reminded me.

“
Yeah, well, you’re on a
blind date, but you’re on a blind date thinking you might meet
someone new and exciting you can really connect with. I’m just
terrified that you’re going to start laughing at me.” When she did
start laughing at me, I added, “See? We’re there
already.”

“
Gosh, is that what I have
to look forward to at fifty-three?” Her nose wrinkled when she
laughed. She studied me, a little too intensely, for a second
before she smiled and turned back to her food. “You know, I like
you a lot better here than in some stuffy restaurant.”