First Time: Ian's Story (First Time (Ian) Book 1) (6 page)

I got out the two foil-wrapped bundles. They
were still warm. “Grilled Cubans. You said you liked ham, so here
you go.”

She took one and carefully peeled back the
foil. With a deep inhale, she sniffed and said, “I’m going to be
rude and dive right into this.”

“
I don’t mind, at all.” I
was starving. I’d been too nervous to eat anything all day. We’d
spoken on the phone a few times during the week, tactical picnic
conversations that had always included some brief small talk, and
just hearing her voice had made me a giddy schoolboy again. The
prospect of seeing her today had been more nerve-wracking than
getting my hand up a girl’s shirt for the first time.

She took a bite of the sandwich, closed her
eyes and moaned. Not just the normal orgasmic food noise people
make. It had a higher pitch to it, like the pleasure of the
sandwich was so intense it overwhelmed her. Seeing her face scrunch
up, hearing that sound, it was impossible not to imagine her making
the same noise while I pinned her to the mattress and drove into
her.

I don’t think my cock had ever gotten hard
so quickly.

At least I had time to adjust before she
opened her eyes. She wiped a bit of grease from her lower lip with
her ring finger. “Oh my God. This sandwich is a religious
experience.”

“
I told you.” I’d been so
entranced by watching her eat, I’d forgotten to. I took a bite. It
was moan-worthy, but I restrained myself.

“
Where did you get these?”
She took a bottle of water from the bag and handed it to me before
opening her own.

I swallowed and said, “There’s a deli not
far from my place that makes fantastic grilled sandwiches. They do
a portabella panini that’s phenomenal.”

“
Where do you live?” She
took another bite while I answered.

“
Brooklyn. Dumbo,” I quickly
added. The acronym for “Down Under The Manhattan Bridge Overpass”
always sounded stupid to say aloud.

“
Get out!” She bounced a
little. “I work in Brooklyn!”

“
I know you do.” I had to
laugh at her enthusiasm. She still had the wonder of a small-town
transplant to the big city. I remembered coming to New York, not as
a tourist but to actually live here, and how magical it had seemed.
“Do you know the gray building with the clock tower? Used to be a
textile factory, but now it’s all condos?”

“
I wouldn’t know what it
used to be, but you mean the big square clock tower with the green
roof?” she asked. “Is that your building?”

“
It’s my clock tower.” I
hated to brag, but I was very proud of the place. I’d gotten it at
a steal when we’d redesigned the building, and I’d customized it to
be exactly the clean, modern living space I’d always
wanted.

“
You live in there?” Penny’s
eyes got even bigger. “That’s so cool!”

I didn’t want to say, “Yes, it’s very
fucking cool to get amazing morning views from a fuck off huge
clock on all four sides of my apartment,” so I just nodded.

“
I would love to see it,
sometime,” she said, then sheepishly added, “You know…if you’re
cool with that.”

“
I think I could be very
cool with that.” I hoped. What if I did bring Penny home and I had
some kind of meltdown? That was something that hadn’t occurred to
me since Gena left. How was I going to feel about having another
woman in what had been our marital home?

“
Ian?” she asked, and I
cringed, realizing my mind had wandered off with Gena.

“
Sorry,” I said quickly. But
I didn’t have an excuse to follow it up with.

Penny pursed her lips and
narrowed her eyes, and I thought,
this is
it. She’s going to walk
. Instead, she said,
“You seem really tense. You weren’t reading a bunch of bad dating
advice, again, were you?”

God bless her for providing
me with the perfect out. Because I really
had
been reading online dating
advice, and she would know better than I would if it was of the
terrible variety. “I may have done.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“
You should be impressed.”
My defensiveness was about ten percent serious. “Do you know how
difficult it is to find
second
date advice?”

She leaned toward me. “You made it to the
second date. That means whatever you did on the first date was
fine.”

“
Was it?” I shrugged
helplessly. “I don’t know these things. I’m rubbish when it comes
to dating.”

“
You’re doing fine. But
where are you getting your advice?” She pulled out her phone.
“Never mind. I’ll look it up. What did you google?”

I settled for the least embarrassing search
terms I’d used, because I certainly wasn’t going to tell her about
“how to impress a lady” or “dating tips for middle-aged men.”

“‘
Dating don’ts for men.” I
could barely look her in the eye.

She turned her phone screen toward me.
“Which one?”

I couldn’t believe I was admitting this. I
tapped the first result. “Why are you so interested in this?”

“
Because. We are going to
break every single one of these rules.” She nibbled her bottom lip
as she studied her phone screen. Glancing up to me, she said, “That
way, you won’t be so nervous anymore.”

“
Ah, because the worst will
have already occurred.” It made sense, though I wasn’t sure I was
comfortable broaching any of the topics I remembered from the
list.

Penny took another bite of her sandwich
before reading, “‘Don’t talk about money.’ Okay. Ian, I make thirty
thousand dollars a year.”

Thirty! How could she live
on that?
And now, I was going to sound
seriously awful when I told her how much I made a year. “I, uh… I
make three hundred.”

“
Three hundred thousand a
year?” She didn’t sound impressed so much as confused. “I thought
architects made like eighty or something.” She winced. “This sounds
so nosy of me, but I looked it up.”

“
No, it’s fine. That’s one
of the first questions anyone asks me, anyway. After, ‘so, uh, do
you like, draw buildings and stuff?’” I put on a dopey sounding
American accent for the last bit. “I’m a partner at our firm, and
we do big ticket commercial work. It’s not the average
salary.”

“
You’re doing better than
me, at any rate. Okay, next on the list…” She cocked her head.
“It’s ‘Don’t bring up the b-word.’ I assume they mean babies and
not Beetlejuice?”

I hadn’t been sure about that one, because
Sophie had already told me Penny wanted a family. Maybe it was
still jumping the gun to discuss it on a second date, but Penny
wanted to break the rules. “You want them, right?”

“
Yup. And Sophie said you
did?”

“
I do. In fact, that could
lead us into number four. It’s why my ex-wife and I divorced.” I
took another bite of my sandwich. The pickles on it were excellent,
and I definitely wasn’t having any sort of squeezing chest pain at
the casual mention of Gena being my ex-wife.

“
Yikes,” Penny said, and I
realized why number four had been bolded and underlined. She took a
deep breath and asked, “Well, how many do you want to
have?”

“
Ex-wives?”

She rolled her eyes. “Kids. How many kids do
you want?”

“
Not as many as my parents
had.” I wanted to dispel that idea, right away. “Three or four, at
most. But I’d be happy with just one. You?”

“
Three, I think. Any more
than that and they can overpower you.” She folded the foil around
the rest of her sandwich and fished a napkin from the
basket.

“
Isn’t that the truth?” I
hesitated to ask my next question. Mostly because I didn’t want to
learn something about her that would make this new, exciting
connection futile to pursue. But I’d made this mistake once, and I
needed to know before I became too attached to the idea of Penny.
“About when, do you think, you’d like to have kids?”

She sighed, and her mouth pressed together
like she was holding back the answer. “I’m still really young, and
I know that. But I want to have my kids young. Within the next two
to three years.”

“
Well, it would never work
out between us,” I said with a smile, to let her know I was joking.
“I was going to wait another fifteen years.”

“
Oh, shut up,” she laughed.
“But seriously, that’s a pretty important one. If we ended
up…”

“
You’re right, it is
important.” Were we agreeing on when we were going to have
children? It felt like that was what was happening. There was
clearly a reason people weren’t supposed to talk about this on a
date. “I would say that if something were to work out, and I were
to find myself in a committed relationship within the next year or
so, and things were just right… I’d be ready to start. I’m not
getting any younger. I just turned fifty-three in July, so the
clock is ticking.”

She seemed pleased with my answer. Then, her
face fell as she read the next item. “Okay, we talked about number
four, so let’s go on to number five. ‘Don’t talk about sex.’”

“
We just did, in a
roundabout way,” I reminded her. “Unless you don’t know where
babies come from. In which case, I have some shocking news for
you.”

Her eyes met mine. There was absolutely no
humor to be found anywhere in her expression. “Look, Ian. I have to
tell you something, and it might be a deal breaker.”

“
All right,” I said
cautiously. “I suppose if it is, this is only our second date, so
it’s better to find out now?” I wasn’t sure of that, myself.
Sitting there next to Penny was like orbiting a beautiful star.
Though I didn’t believe in love at first sight, I did believe in
potential at first sight. It wasn’t difficult for me to imagine
being with Penny six months to a year from now. Whatever she had to
say, I would try not to make a snap judgment on it.

She took a deep breath, which made me
extremely nervous, though I wasn’t sure what I was dreading. Then
she said, “I’m a virgin.”

Chapter Five

There was no
way I’d heard her correctly. “I’m sorry, what?”

Her cheeks practically glowed, she was
blushing so hard. She looked down at her hands twisting the napkin.
“I’ve never had sex with anyone.”

“
Huh.” There wasn’t anything
I could say to that. I didn’t think I’d ever met a virgin over the
age of twenty. At least, not that I had known of. “Well, I hope
this isn’t a deal breaker, but I’m not.”

She laughed, a short, sharp bark that didn’t
sound entirely comfortable. “You have no idea how often I hear
that.”

“
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to
offend you.” This was a bit of a minefield. I didn’t want to pry
when we still didn’t know each other well, but there was a huge
difference, in my mind, between going slow and not going anywhere.
“Do you mind if I ask why?”

“
No, I don’t mind. The why
is, I haven’t found anyone yet that I wanted to have sex with. I’m
not super religious, or waiting for marriage or anything. I’ll just
know when it’s the right guy.” She shrugged. “If you can’t handle
that in a relationship, I understand. That’s where my ex-boyfriend
went. I think he saw himself as being able to conquer my
virginity.”

“
He sounds like a shitty
boyfriend,” I said without thinking. Especially since I wasn’t sure
how I felt about the idea of a celibate dating arrangement. I’d
never had to consider the importance of sex. It had always been a
given that I would be having it with the person I was dating. “I’m
sorry, that was uncalled for.”

“
No, you’re right. He was a
shitty boyfriend. It just took me a while to see it.” She held up
her hands. “So, now you know what I mean about ‘going slow’. Like I
said, there won’t be any hard feelings if—”

If? That was a big
if
. On one hand, I liked
sex quite a lot. But on the other, I hadn’t had sex since before
Gena left, so I’d managed to survive four months without it. I
hadn’t even been interested, probably because of the crushing
depression I’d fallen into after she’d moved out. And,
hypothetically, if I had a third hand, if it was between me walking
away and not seeing Penny again, or staying and not having sex for
a bit longer…the choice was a lot easier to make than I’d expected.
“Well, I don’t know if you noticed last Sunday, but I’m a Catholic.
Not having pre-marital sex is something we’re supposed to be very
good at.”

“
Oh.” Her eyebrows shot up.
“I kind of assumed that would be a date-ender. It has been in the
past.”

“
Nah. I said I was fine with
slow. I wasn’t expecting to have sex with you any time soon,
anyway.” I took another drink of water. Talking about sex with
Penny—even in the context of
not
having sex with her—made my mouth go dry from
nerves. I was like a teenager again, but in all of the shy, awkward
ways and with none of the physical benefits.

“
Good. Glad we’re on the
same page.” She looked down at her phone with a little smirk. “But,
just so you know, I give great hand jobs, so there’s that to look
forward to.”

I choked and dribbled water down the front
of my shirt. “Jesus!” I coughed. “Give a man some warning.”

She laughed. “Let’s go onto the next one,
since you just mentioned it. We’re not supposed to bring up
religion.”