“Yeah. Have a good one. I’ll call you.” In case she didn’t hear you the first seven hundred times you mentioned calling her?
I tried not to watch her as she jogged off. I blame my penis for the fact that I did. She looked over her shoulder, and I was totally caught. Since there was no sense in denying it, I nodded in return to the wave she gave me.
Danny almost staggered into me as he came back. His eyes were as glued to Penny as mine were. I made a mental note to give him the worst friction burn of his life next time I had the chance.
“That’s her?” Danny didn’t even bother to lower his voice. He was practically shouting while he pointed her way. “That’s the girl you were with Friday night? Jesus Christ, Ian!”
A man walking past us whipped his head around to glower, and I shushed Danny with my hands. “Will you keep your voice down? Father?”
“That’s the girl you think you’re going to ‘go slow’ with?” Danny shook his head ruefully. “It’s no wonder. I would wait for that.”
“You’re not waiting for anything. You gave the keys to your chastity belt to the man upstairs.” I, on the other hand, had been freely expressing my sexuality whenever and with whomever I liked for almost forty years. That wasn’t something you could just turn off. And nothing about Penny turned me off, either. When I was twenty-two, if I’d been asked on a date by a fifty-three year old woman, I would have been… Well, I might have tried it out, just because I was curious, so that was a bad example. But there was no reason Penny should want to go out with me, let alone a second time.
Echoing my inner turmoil, Danny sighed heavily and said, “I don’t know, Uncle Ian. She’s definitely into you. Maybe she’s got bad eyesight. Or a daddy fetish.”
That hadn’t occurred to me. And I didn’t like it now that I’d heard it. What if she really did have a “daddy” thing? If that were all she saw in me, I would never feel all right with it. But, for the moment, I wanted to relish the idea of Penny being interested in me.
I’d just assume she was attracted to my classically handsome features and sparkling wit, and deal with the rest should it come up.
Chapter Four
While I had spent my Sunday in a dreamy haze of infatuation with Penny, when I got to work on Monday, everything was still in a state of total clusterfucktastrophe. Everyone thinks being an architect is sitting around and designing buildings all day. Sometimes, a very, very small part of the time, that’s true. But I’m a principal architect and a partner at Pratchett & Baker, and when your name is on the sign you don’t want it to show up attached to headlines like “Office Building Collapses; Dozens Still Missing”, so most of my job involves supervising other people as they fix all of their cock ups. By midday, I was exhausted beyond belief. I slumped into my office and shut the door, then went to my couch and collapsed on it. I put my arm over my face, because blocking out the light made it easier to pretend I was dead.
If I died, people would hopefully stop asking me for things.
“Knock knock,” my partner, Burt, said in lieu of knocking as he barged right in.
“I thought I’d locked that,” I grumbled.
“So, is Ingham back on track?” he asked. When I didn’t move my feet for him, he leaned on the corner of my desk.
Burt Baker looks like a guy from a Cialis ad. He had shiny white Sears catalogue hair and teeth he’d purchased from the best dentists in Manhattan. I’d always liked him as a business partner; he was a better face for clients than my scowling Scottish mug. Sometimes, he was too Pollyanna for my tastes, though, and today was one of those days.
“Absolutely. If by ‘on track’ you mean there’s still not a chance in Hell those schematics are going to clear us any permits.” I hated what I had to say next. “We have to let Kyle go.”
Burt cupped his chin and took in a thoughtful breath through his nose. “Production hasn’t gone smoothly.”
“Well, no shit.” I was irritated and cranky, and I knew I shouldn’t take it out on Burt, but he’d made the mistake of coming to my office. “This was his team, and I don’t have a lot of confidence that he won’t drop the ball next time, either.”
“Ingham has been hell,” Burt admitted. “You’re burned out.”
“Do you think so?” I laughed bitterly.
“Maybe a change of scenery would do you some good. Somewhere warm and tropical,” he suggested.
“Let me just hop on my magic carpet and go to Tahiti, then.” I was getting a headache behind my eyes.
“I was thinking…Nassau.”
That was oddly specific. I sat up, eyeing him warily. “Yeah?”
“Do you remember Carrie Glynn?” Burt asked. I should have known better than to think he’d just come in for small talk. He didn’t talk unless he had something to say.
Carrie Glynn. Of course I remembered Carrie Glynn. “Sure I do. We were interns together at the Stafford group back in the eighties.”
“Well, she remembers you, too.” Burt grinned. “You were quite the ladies’ man, I hear.”
“She wasn’t the only intern I fucked in those days, but I wouldn’t call myself a ladies’ man.” I paused. “You’ve talked to Carrie?”
Burt nodded. “She isn’t with Stafford anymore. Got into the hotel business. And she wants a good, sturdy firm to work with her on a new resort.” He gave me a moment to let his words land.
“She’s looking at our firm?” I asked, though the answer seemed obvious. Burt’s flair for the dramatic could wring these conversations into half-hour meetings.
He nodded. “You could lead the team on this. It’s going to require temporary relocation, but if either of us are going to do it, it would have to be you.”
“And we certainly can’t send Kyle.” The thought of spending some time in the Bahamas had its appeal.
“Carrie is based out of Madrid these days—”
“That’s posh, isn’t it?”
Burt laughed. “I’m not complaining if she wants to send some of that posh money our way. As I was saying, she’s based in Madrid, but she’ll be in New York at the end of November. Maybe, in the meantime, you could get in touch with her and talk about her plans.”
“Yeah, not a problem.” It would be nice to catch up with Carrie, anyway. Even if I didn’t end up helming the project, we’d always been friendly, so I could certainly lend the benefit of that tenuous connection to the firm.
“Great.” Burt got up and headed to the door, then paused and said, “Take it easy on Kyle. He fucked up, but at least he knows how he fucked up and how to fix it.”
I nodded. “I’ve been a bit a prick of to him. I’ll back off.”
“Good.”
After Burt left, I set the alarm on my phone for a ten-minute nap, then lay back down and thought about palm trees and warm white sand.
* * * *
I’d never realized how much planning went into a picnic, but I’m sure we could have launched a manned space flight with less. I was all right with this; it gave me a chance to talk to Penny more.
Central Park on a Saturday in August was a ridiculous place and time for a date, but we’d agreed to meet at two o’clock, across the pond from the castle. You couldn’t get more romantic than that.
I’d managed to get a perfect spot to lay out our picnic blanket and set down the basket by the time Penny rang my phone. “I have managed to get us the perfect spot,” I answered. “But you’ve got to act fast. There are some sinister-looking hipsters nearby, and they’ve got anti-capitalist literature.”
She giggled, and I could hear her smile through the phone. “I am in the general vicinity. Stand up, so I can find you.”
I frowned. “I am standing up. Where are you?”
I startled at the tap on my shoulder, and when I turned, Penny stood behind me, wearing that smile I’d just imagined. She held up the paper bag she carried by the handles. “Fruit and water, as requested.”
“Something so you don’t have to touch the grass,” I said, rep
eating her words from our conversation earlier in the week. “And sandwiches.”
She’d worn her hair in a ponytail that was one big, sleek curl cascading from the back of her head, and just a little makeup. Living with Gena had taught me an important lesson about women and makeup: when men thought they weren’t wearing any, they often were. We were just bad at noticing, or we expected them to look gorgeous all the time.
Not that Penny wouldn’t look gorgeous, even if she had the flu.
“You look very pretty,” I told her, because if I’d said what I was really thinking, she’d probably have taken out a restraining order.
She beamed up at me. “Thanks. You look good, too. I like that you ditched the undertaker look.”
“Undertaker?” I’d certainly dressed down for the occasion, in jeans and a linen button-down with the sleeves pushed up, but I didn’t think it made my suit seem mortician-ish. “That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?”
“Nah. Sometimes, the undertaker look is sexy.”
Jesus. She must have had terrible eyesight to apply that adjective to me.
On impulse, I gave her a one-armed hug. “Let’s sit down. It’s been a battle to not eat both of these sandwiches myself.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have had any water, so you would have gotten thirsty.” She leaned against my side, so my hug instinct had been correct. She sat on the blanket and arranged the skirt of her pretty yellow sundress around her legs. The dress was the kind that had straps that tied at the shoulders. I’ve never understood how women had the courage to wear things like that out into a world full of awful, handsy men.
“So, I brought strawberries and peaches,” she said, pulling fruit from the bag. She held up a nectarine and frowned. “I thought I got peaches. Live and learn.”
“In this case, learn the difference between peaches and nectarines.” I snagged it from her. “I like these better, anyway.”
“Show me the goods. You’ve been bragging up these sandwiches all week.” She reached for the picnic basket and positioned it between us.
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…”
First Time: Ian's Story (First Time (Ian) Book 1) Page 4
