First Time: Ian's Story (First Time (Ian) Book 1) (37 page)

Ah, damn it. Another lie, even a lie by
omission, wasn’t going to help this. When this fight was over, if I
hadn’t come clean, it would only reopen this entire argument all
over again when she found out. “We used to work together. And we
slept together a few times.”

Penny took a ragged breath.

“
I would have told you—” I
began.

She cut me off. “And you and Gena. Did you
try to have a baby?”

I looked away, because I didn’t want to see
her face when I admitted the evidence that shouldn’t damn me but
would. “We did see a fertility doctor. And we did try to have a
baby, for over a year.”

When I turned back, her eyes were shut,
tears coursing down her face.

If she’d wanted me to, I would have taken
her into my arms. I knew her body language well enough to know that
any attempt to touch her would be physically brushed off.

“
Penny, I promise you, all
of this… It seems indefensible. I know that it must look like I’m
this…pathological liar, but I’m not.”

Please believe me. You have to believe me,
because losing you… I can’t lose you.

“
No. You cheated on your
ex-wife, and you lied to me about it. You know what I just went
through—”

My anger was so sudden and so fierce, I
couldn’t hold back. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, I am not Brad!” I’d been
dying to say it since the night she’d “caught” me with Carrie. If I
ever saw that man… Well, I wouldn’t do anything, for as much as it
was satisfying to say you’d punch someone or run them over with
your car, it wasn’t something I’d ever do. And that just made me
feel more helpless.

I didn’t want to shout at Penny, but I gave
into my frustration and did. “You were hurt, and I understand that,
but I’m not going to be punished for something someone else did to
you. If you need to work out your feelings about your last
relationship, feel free to end this one!”

And that was where we’d arrived. We were
supposed to have had a nice, slightly awkward family dinner. We
were supposed to go back to my apartment and make love, and wake up
to laugh over breakfast and fall into bed to do it all again. We
were supposed to be together, and yet, with those words, it felt
fairly certain that we were not.

Why did you say them?

“
Just take me home,” she
said, her entire being shrinking before my eyes. There was nothing
to her but hurt, and it was very small, and very hard. “No, wait.
Take me to the nearest train.”

I didn’t know what to say.
So I did what she asked. We drove in silence, and I pulled up to
the closest station I could think of.
You
should offer to drive her home. At least that way, you could talk
more.

She’d made it pretty clear that she didn’t
want to be in the car with me, but I’d made it seem clear that I
didn’t want to be with her at all. Nothing could have been further
from the truth.

Somehow, I found my voice to say, “I don’t
want to break up, Penny.”

“
Well, you don’t really get
a say,” she snapped back.

“
I was going to say,” I
began again, as though I’d meant to continue the thought all along.
Now, I was just looking for a lifeline. “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. I do love you, Penny. But our timing
is…”
Say something, Doll. Say anything to
let me know I should fight for this.
But
she didn’t, and I found myself bargaining for even a shred of hope.
“Maybe I go to Nassau, and when I get back…”

“
When you get back, you
won’t have lied to me?” she asked. “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?”

There was no way for me to prove my
innocence, short of tracking down Gena and begging her to
intervene. That was never going to happen, and what would it prove
to Penny besides that I was a liar, just not to her? Not yet.

“
I love you, too,” she said,
a hitch in her voice. “Or at least the parts of you that were
real.”

“
Penny—” I began, but she
got out of the car without another word and slammed the door behind
her.

Go after her! Get out of the car and beg her
forgiveness! Don’t let her walk away!

I made a deal with myself. If she turned
around by the count of five, I would go after her. I reached five,
and extended the time to ten. And when she still hadn’t turned
around, I realized that she was really walking away from me.

We were really over, just as quickly as we’d
begun.

I put the car in gear and drove away,
glancing into the rearview mirror again and again, until I couldn’t
see her anymore.

She never looked back.

Chapter Eighteen

My first holiday season as a divorced man
could not have been bleaker if Dickens himself wrote the first
three acts of a novel about it then forgot to tack on the fucking
happy ending. I skulked around the streets of New York with a
permanent scowl, disgusted by every happy couple kissing near
Christmas tree lights. The laughter of children filled me with
bitter regret. All I needed now was for Burt to die so he could
haunt me on Christmas Eve and rattle spectral fucking chains in my
face.

He would have to come find me in the
Hamptons. I looked around my personal holiday hell, the living room
of my old friend Neil’s seaside palace. The place was fucking
mammoth, even by Hamptons standards. I hated to be judgmental of my
friends, but even with his billions, there was no reason he and
Sophie needed this kind of space. And the number of people who’d
come to share in the Christmas spirit overwhelmed me.

“
You look like you’re having
fun.” The rich bastard’s crisp upper-crust accent identified him
without me having to turn around.

I took a sip of the whisky neat in my hand
then felt sorry for it; Neil was sober. Even though he’d provided
the alcohol at this party, I felt like a traitor indulging in front
of him. “You should have a party sometime when I’m not miserable,
if you want me to have a good time.”

Neil stood beside me in my sad little
corner, surveying the party from my perspective. “Still not
answering your calls?”

“
I’ve stopped calling. If
she didn’t answer the first five times…” Five, even, was a bit too
much. I should have stopped at three. No, one. But the hope had
been too attractive, every time.
This will
be the time she’ll pick up, and we can work this all out.
“It’s better to move on.”

“
I’m sorry to hear that,
mate.” One of Neil’s many strengths was the ability to know when
he’d said enough. He exercised that ability flawlessly at the
moment, not bothering to implore me to see a bright
side.

I didn’t want to talk about Penny all night.
I didn’t want to talk about her at all. A part of me had wondered
if she would be in attendance tonight, by virtue of her employment.
I was either crushed that she wasn’t there, or immensely
relieved.

“
I forgot to mention, I
received the most pretentious invitation in the mail the other
day,” I began, shifting the conversation away from
myself.

“
Oh?” Neil pretended he
didn’t know what I was talking about, lifting his eyebrows in
interest.

“
Something about some silly
rape crisis center,” I went on in good-natured mocking. I knew the
center was a project close to his heart. “They want money out of me
for this black tie fundraiser. Sounds like a real bore.”

“
You’d better not come,
then,” he said, nodding sagely.

“
Actually, I won’t be able
to make it.” I dropped the joke. “I’m sorry. I have to fly down to
Nassau to look at some houses.”

“
The Bahamas?” Neil sipped
his own drink, which I suspected was ginger ale. “Architects are
doing better than I expected these days.”

“
You’re not the only one
with vacation house money,” I reminded him. “This is for a job. I’m
working for Carrie Glynn.”

“
Oh, that’s quite posh,
isn’t it?” said the poshest arsehole this side of the
Atlantic.

“
Very posh, if we’re
discussing paychecks. But I’m going to have to relocate for over a
year. I thought I might get a head start on the real estate
search.”
I’m going to have to leave the
city, to leave behind any chance of ever seeing Penny again.
More aptly, any chance of ever seeing Penny before
she found someone new and settled down with him into the life we
should have had together.

“
Much better to stay in your
own home than a hotel room,” Neil said, but something across the
room caught his gaze. His beautiful, dark-haired wife gliding
around in her cranberry-colored dress and sky-high heels, most
likely. “Of course, hotel rooms have their advantages.”

“
Keep it in your pants,
Elwood. I’m not looking to be romanced.” I didn’t want to keep him
from Sophie. The two of them seemed incomplete when they weren’t at
each other’s sides. “Go on, find your girl and enjoy your party.
Don’t let my sad old arse weigh down your holiday
spirit.”

“
If your sad old arse is
interested to know, Penny will be at the charity gala,” he said,
stepping back casually, hands in his pockets. “I’ll leave your name
on the list, in case you change your mind.”

That night, as I lay in bed in one of Neil
and Sophie’s many guest rooms, watching the ceiling spin, I prayed.
More fervently than I’d ever prayed for anything in my life, I
begged God to give me a sign. Something that would make me sit up
and take notice the way Penny had noticed little coincidences and
tallied them up. The longer I prayed, the more despondent I became
when those signs didn’t arrive.

I wanted Penny. I wanted to hear her laugh
and see her smile. I wanted her gasping my name beside my ear as I
sank into her body. I wanted to watch her hold our baby to her
breast, to see her walk down the aisle, so beautiful she put other
brides to shame.

Maybe that’s why I wasn’t receiving a sign.
I didn’t need one. I knew already Penny was the woman for me. She’d
said she believed that no matter what happened between now and
then, in the end, we would be together. I wasn’t going to wait and
see how we got to that end, and how long it would take. I wanted to
start our lives together now.

I grabbed my phone and flipped through my
calendar. Neil’s black tie charity event was on January sixteenth.
There was no reason I couldn’t push back my house-hunting trip a
week and attend it.

What was I thinking? That I
would show up and Penny would fawn all over me, just because I’d
shuffled my schedule around? It wasn’t as though I could find her
and promise her I wasn’t going to leave. I
was
going to leave. And she was
right, I’d still proven myself a liar, even if I hadn’t lied to
her. Everything was exactly as it was when we’d broken up. Would
seeing her again make a difference?

I had to try. If I had to beg her, I would.
Losing Penny was a mistake I couldn’t afford to make again.

* * * *

The night of the gala, I stood in front of
the mirror in my bedroom and adjusted my bow tie. “I look like I’m
about to roast the most beloved Shriner in the lodge.”

Ambrose yowled in agreement.

“
This is as good as I stand
to get.” My guts roiled. I was going to this stupid thing tonight,
but I had no idea how I was coming back—either as the happiest man
on the Earth or the most miserable bastard on the
planet.

“
All right, Ambrose. Don’t
wait up,” I told the cat. Then, I went downstairs, grabbed my coat,
and headed to the car.

Why Elwood had thought holding a charity
function in one of the most contentious weather months of the year
was a good idea, I couldn’t say, but the forecast didn’t look
promising. The streets were a bit slick, and the snow was beginning
to cake on the road as I drove into the city. But when I arrived
and left my car with the valet, there was a long enough line it was
clear people would show up for Neil Elwood if he threw a fête.

The Elwood Rape Crisis Resource Center was
in a fantastic building in lower Manhattan. Not as fantastic as it
would have been had my firm designed it, but that was neither here
nor there. The remodel had gone incredibly well; what had once been
a bank’s home office was now a towering glass structure with a
welcoming atrium and, from what I’d read on the website, several
floors devoted to temporary housing for victims at risk. Mental
health facilities, both inpatient and outpatient, and an education
center took up the rest of the building.

From the outside, the only thing that gave
the place away as a crisis shelter was a small bronze placard by
the door. Otherwise, it could have been any old office
building.

I knew Neil had sunk a very large amount of
money into the not-for-profit project himself. He’d slipped from
tenth wealthiest Brit to thirteenth, but he was far from eating
beans out of a tin under a bridge.

The party was being held in the
aforementioned atrium, which made up for its lack of daytime
illumination with sparkling golden lighting. The fountain, a very
modern and abstract sheet of textured copper bubbling water down
its face, would create soothing sounds on a normal day, but it
could barely be heard over the din of voices and the ten musicians
playing big band music on a temporary stage. A staircase with wide,
round steps that narrowed as they went up curved toward the second
floor. I would have gone with something less art deco flavored for
this particular space.