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

I made sure he had food and water before I
left, and headed on my way.

When I arrived at Penny’s apartment, I
parked in the only available spot, near the corner, locked my
briefcase in the trunk of the car and walked down to her door. I
pushed the button, and Penny’s voice crackled over the tinny
intercom. “Hey! Come on up! We’re unit B.”

Entering the building, I was immediately
taken back to my days as a younger man in the city, though I’d
never had the money to live in Manhattan proper. Penny’s building
was dingy, but not disgusting; it actually smelled as though
someone had recently bleached something. There were water stains on
the walls of the foyer, and a few missing octagonal tiles under
foot. It was a walk-up, but thankfully B was on the second level.
Penny already waited at the open door. Even though I was tired and
my knees ached and my eyes felt like they were full of sand, I had
to smile at the sight of her.

I tried to discreetly ogle her. She wore
yoga pants—they were a miracle of modern fashion, and I one day
hoped to the meet the inventor so I could heartily shake their
hand—and a blue tank top, and her hair was rolled up in an
impossibly huge bun on the top of her head. She looked like she was
ready to teach a spin class, rather than die of uterine hemorrhage.
“You sounded like you were dying on the phone. I’m glad to see
you’re not in imminent danger of expiring.”

“
No, just generally
miserable.” She waved me inside. “This is the place.”

“
Not a lot of it,” the woman
on the couch said. Rosa, if I remembered her name correctly. When
she wasn’t frowning in the harsh blue glow of a mercury light as I
felt up her roommate, she was quite pretty, with long, curly black
hair. She stood, revealing a slender body and Amazon height. “I’m
Rosa.”

“
I think we met before,” I
reminded her, clearing my throat. “Downstairs.”

“
Right, when you two were
making out.” She smiled at me as if to make it clear that she
wasn’t going to play protective pseudo-parent. “We weren’t properly
introduced.”

Penny turned to me. “I was thinking we could
watch TV in my room. Keep one foot on the floor so Mom doesn’t
worry?”

“
Sure. Except for the foot
thing.” I winked at her then looked to the roommate. “Sorry, but I
have nothing but lascivious intentions toward your
friend.”

“
Hey, as long as I don’t
have to listen,” Rosa said with a shake of her head.

Penny led me to her bedroom, which was
immediately off the living room. I filed that away for future
reference; I wasn’t exactly champing at the bit to have a roommate
overhear any potential sexual encounters.

My feeling of nostalgia for my younger years
intensified as I looked around Penny’s room. There were, as I had
anticipated, fairy lights decorating the ceiling. Her bed was a
full; it would be a tight squeeze, but I could think of worse fates
than having to touch her too much in the night. A small flat-screen
television balanced precariously on top of a plastic storage cube
at the end of her bed. It was every twenty-something’s apartment in
New York, and it was fantastic.

“
Wow.” My chest ached a bit
at the memories that rushed back. “This reminds me so much of my
first apartment in New York.”

When she turned around, she looked
absolutely crestfallen. “Because it’s so small and shitty?”

“
Well, it is small. But this
place is better kept than my apartment was. And I shared a bedroom
about this size with another guy.” I laughed, trying to make up for
whatever it was I’d said that had hurt her feelings. “We didn’t
even have beds.”

Trying to make things better did not work.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think about the fact that you
probably didn’t want to hang out in some dingy twenty-something’s
crappy apartment.”

“
Did you not just hear what
I said about sleeping on the floor?” This was silly. I toed off my
sneakers, hoping the gesture would affirm for her that I wasn’t
going to run out the door. “I didn’t expect you to have a
million-dollar penthouse. Besides, I’m here to make you feel
better, not do a property appraisal.”

From the other room, Rosa interrupted us
with a loud, “Food’s here!”

It was good enough to distract Penny. “Wait
right here. The remote is in my nightstand.”

I stood in the small space for a moment,
unsure of what to do. I was sure it would put her at ease if I made
myself at home, so I sat on the edge of her bed and pulled open the
nightstand drawer.

There was no remote.

There was, however, a sparkly purple
vibrator. With pink and white rhinestones on it.

I closed the drawer so fast the whole
nightstand rocked, and the lamp on it wobbled precariously. Beside
it lay the remote control for the television.

She’d said
on
, not
in.

And I’d just invaded the hell out of her
privacy.

I pulled my legs up on the
bed and tried to lean against the headboard casually, but I
couldn’t find any position that didn’t shout, “I just saw your
vibrator.” Perhaps that was just my paranoid perception of things.
But all I could think about was the fact that the adorable power
tool in the drawer beside me had known Penny
intimately
, and I couldn’t stop
imagining her using it. I thought about her lying in this bed, the
room lit only by those strings of fairy lights, her knees up and
apart as she rubbed the toy over her clit. She wasn’t naked in my
fantasy, but wearing a white T-shirt that just so happened to
resemble the one she’d worn at my place, the neck slipping down to
reveal one shoulder. Somehow, that was more painfully sexy than
total nudity. Just the suggestion of her body, a slightly darker
outline beneath the illuminated fabric, her nipples standing out
against the shirt as she threw her head back, moaning—

“
I kind of over-ordered,”
she said as she burst back in with a pizza box and some Styrofoam
containers. “Owing to my condition.”

Can she read my thoughts,
right now? God, this would be a bad time to find out she was
telepathic.
This close to the scene of the
crime, I was sure she’d hear my guilt like a telltale heart buzzing
away in her nightstand drawer. “Are you sure you want to eat in
here? When we’re going to get pizza sauce all over your
bedding?”

She frowned. “I don’t know
how
you
eat pizza,
but I try not to turn into a yard sprinkler of tomato sauce when I
do it. Besides, you’ve had roommates before. You know how important
space is.”

“
That’s true. It was fairly
awkward for me when I wanted to bring a girl back to my sleeping
bag.” Not as awkward as accidentally snooping on a new girlfriend’s
sex toys but awkward enough.

She sat beside me cross-legged and started
opening boxes. Then we ate. And she really, really ate. It would
have been comical, if I hadn’t been a little concerned that I might
lose appendages. She asked me about my day, how work was, if I’d
done anything interesting for lunch, and her responses were mostly
monosyllabic, as her mouth was busy. I’d never seen her devour a
meal so voraciously.

“
What about you?” I asked
finally, when she took a chewing break to sip her soda.

“
Nothing out of the ordinary
really happened. Your job seems a lot more exciting than
mine.”

Perhaps it was because I’d used so many
expletives in describing everything that had gone wrong. “Or less
frustrating, depending on how you look at it. I’m dreading going in
tomorrow.”

More aptly, I was already dreading
disentangling myself from Penny’s arms and vacating her bed. I’d
yet to have a proper wake-up with her, where we could laze about
all morning without the obligation of work or the scourge of a
hangover. I craved that intimacy with her, with an intensity that
frightened me.

She wiped her hands then put one on my knee.
“Well, thank you for coming over here, even though you’re having a
bad week. I’ve been feeling progressively better since I got off
the phone with you.”

“
Happy to help.” I could
talk to her on the phone for seven hours and it still wouldn’t be
as satisfying as being near her. Which was going to be an issue if
I took the job Carrie was offering me. I’d spent some of my day
researching the properties she already managed, trying to find ways
to avoid replicating the style she wanted to break away from. I’d
been in the middle of doing that before I realized I was actively
considering taking on the project.

Now, things with Penny were moving so fast,
it seemed like something I should bring up sooner, rather than
later. Just thinking about leaving for eighteen months without
telling her about the possibility seemed like a betrayal. Maybe it
wasn’t smart to bring it up when she felt so miserable, but I had
to throw it out there.

I cleared my throat. “Since we’re on the
subject of work, there’s something I need to discuss with you.”

“
Oh?” She reached for
another breadstick. God, what I wouldn’t have given to have
twenty-two-year-old metabolism, again.

“
There’s a chance I may have
to go away on business for…a while. A temporary relocation.” I
watched as all the blood drained from her face. The fact that she
had paused with the breadstick almost to her mouth without taking a
single bite was also alarming. I rushed to reassure her, “Nothing
permanent. And it’s not final, by any means. It wouldn’t be until
next year. But I thought I should let you know the possibility
exists.”

Her body relaxed, and some color returned to
her cheeks. She took a big bite of breadstick and spoke around it
as she chewed. “Where would you be going?”

“
Nassau. The
Bahamas.”
She probably knows where Nassau
is, you prick. Stop talking down to her.
“To work on a resort.”

“
Oh, wow! Would I be able to
come visit?” She lit up at the prospect. For a moment, I thought
she was imagining sun and surf and tropical drinks, until I
remembered her love of the sea. Did they have octopuses—octopods—in
the Bahamas?

“
I hope you would.” I
pretended to be outraged at the mere suggestion that she might not.
“After I came all this way tonight.”

She bit her lip. “Okay. Well, since we’re
bringing up unpleasant subjects…my parents are coming to town next
week.”

“
And that’s unpleasant?” I
asked.

“
No, but having to ask you
this kind of is. They want to meet you,” she said, her eyebrows
drawing together as though she were waiting for something
unpleasant to happen.

“
They know about me?” To my
surprise, I didn’t feel an immediate stab of panic over a woman
asking me to meet her family when we’d been dating for under a
month. Of course, I’d somewhat thrown any normal timeline out the
window when I’d blurted out that I loved her, and that was no one’s
fault by my own.

“
Yeah. I mentioned I was
seeing someone, and my mom thought this visit would be a good
time.” She shrugged. She was obviously less enthusiastic about the
idea than I was. “We don’t get together often, so I think she wants
to check you out before things get serious.”

Ah, fuck.
It hadn’t escaped my notice that Penny hadn’t
responded to my declaration of love in kind. And it didn’t bother
me. It meant she was a normal person who knew how mad it was to
tell someone you loved them after four dates. But now she was
saying
before things get serious,
and I couldn’t help but wonder aloud, “Are things
not?”

“
That’s not what I meant.”
She chewed her bottom lip. “I mean, I didn’t want to
presume—”

“
Neither did I,” I hurried
to tell her. “But I am quite serious about you, Penny.” Did she
even need to be told?

There was a smear of pizza sauce on her
cheek, despite her earlier claim of neat and orderly consumption. I
reached out wiped it off with my thumb.

“
Oh my gosh, way to ruin the
moment with my sloppy eating.” She laughed. “Well, I’m serious
about you, too. Seriously serious.”

“
Good.” The pressure in my
chest eased, but I wanted to look cool and not breathe a sigh of
relief that would sound like the air going out of a tire. I
realized I was staring at her and looked down. It was the only way
to keep myself from being distracted by how beautiful she looked,
even with pizza sauce on her face. “Of course I’ll meet your
parents. Just tell me where to be, and when.”

“
I will.” She took my hand
and gave it a squeeze. “Thank you.”

“
For?”

“
For giving me a chance,”
she said, looking around the room. “We don’t have much in common.
We’re in such different places, life-wise.”

“
You’re thanking
me
?” Couldn’t she hear
how silly she was being? I was a fifty-three-year-old divorcee who
didn’t have any food in his fucking pantry. Her whole life was
ahead of her, while mine had fallen apart. “If you remember
correctly, Doll, I was the one who fucked up badly on our first
date. And I’m a hundred and thirty years old. So, thank you for
giving
me
a
chance.”

At some point, Penny’s bottomless stomach
was satisfied. S he cuddled up next to me to watch TV.

“
You do the clicking,” she
ordered, laying her head on my shoulder. Though I wasn’t sure how I
was supposed to concentrate on finding something to watch with her
sweet, warm body pressed against my side.