“It’s okay. I think probably a little bit of sex the first time is better than way too much sex.” She reached between her legs. “But it didn’t hurt at all.”
“Thank God!” I covered my face, because I thought I might cry from the relief. “That was my biggest fear, doing this.”
“I know. Which was why I wasn’t nervous.” She was a terrible liar; she’d been as terrified as I had.
“This may sound a bit creepy. You’ll have to just forgive me for that.” I paused. “But thank you. I know you waited a long time, and I know how much this meant to you. So, thank you for letting me share it with you.”
We kissed, and it was every bit as sweet and tender and thrilling as that first kiss in the park. “I love you. I know I didn’t say it when you did, but I felt it, then. I just wanted it to be…special.”
“You’re special, Penny Parker.” Ah, my voice was going to break. So much for being tough and stoic and manly for the virginal maiden I’d deflowered. Somehow, I didn’t think she minded. I cradled her jaw in my hand. “And I love you, too.”
* * * *
An absence of snoring woke me. When I opened my eyes, I truly expected to find Penny dead, because there was no way she’d just suddenly started sleeping quietly. The room was hazy, growing worse with each painfully dry blink.
Damn, I’d slept with my contacts in.
Penny wasn’t in bed with me—she hadn’t died in her sleep after all, and that was a relief—but I could still make out the dark shapes of her discarded clothing against the floor, so she hadn’t left, either. Which meant a beautiful blond woman with an arse you could bounce a quarter off of was free-range roaming in my apartment, stark naked.
There were worse ways to wake up, but it would have been better if I didn’t have soft plastic melded to my fucking eyeballs.
I heard her footsteps in the hall before the murky shape of her body appeared in the doorway, outlined in light like an angel appearing to a coma patient in a movie. I squinted to try and clear my vision, to no avail. “Are those my jeans?”
She tossed something across the end of the bed and stood there, blurry and topless. “Yeah, I found them. The Mickey Mouse look isn’t as sexy as the Donald Duck look, huh?”
“Oh, no, I think it’s sexier.” I just wished I could see it. “Your tits are out.”
She laughed, the blurry shape of her arms moving across her chest. “So…thanks, by the way. For making last night…” Even as hazy as my vision was, I could see her full body shiver.
“You’re speechless and trembling. I get the picture.” And I’d never felt so fucking proud of myself. I should have gotten out of bed and taken care of the situation that was rapidly blinding me, but she was so close, and the memory of her silky, warm skin seduced me into staying. I pulled back the covers. “Get back in here.”
She lost the jeans and got in beside me. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want to have sex right now.”
“Feel it this morning?” Not that physical discomfort was the only reason she should decline sex; I hadn’t meant it to come off that way.
Before I could correct myself, she said, “Yeah. I think I pulled a muscle, too.”
That, I could sympathize with entirely. I felt as though I’d run a marathon without any training. “A nap is always good for that.”
“We just woke up!” She wriggled in closer, laughing. “But I’m fine with staying naked in bed all day. It’s so relaxing.”
“I’m loath to get out of bed, but my contacts are glued to my fucking eyeballs. I want you to stay right here, and when I get back, we’ll talk about breakfast.” I kissed her; I didn’t give a damn about our morning breath, when she was so close and her body felt so perfect against mine. Before we could start anything that she didn’t want to finish, I rolled out of bed and started for the bathroom. Ah, but Penny’s vision wasn’t as affected as mine. She could see fine. “Don’t look at my sad, flat arse while I’m walking away.”
“I love your sad, flat arse!” she called after me, and I grinned to myself as I shut the door.
I poured a ridiculous amount of saline into my eyes and stumbled to the toilet for a piss. Then, after a mighty fight, I managed to peel out my contacts. I took my horrible, black-rimmed glasses from the medicine cabinet, put them on, and frowned at myself. I’d been going through some kind of midlife panic when I’d picked out the frames, and I’d mistakenly thought I could pull off the cool, ironic, ugly glasses look.
Ah well. Penny had already seen my trash bin full of plastic spoons and peanut butter leavings, and she hadn’t run from that disaster. The glasses weren’t likely to be the final nail in the coffin.
When I came back to the bed, Penny sat up a bit. I thought she was going to make some smart remark about the glasses. Instead, she frowned and said, “I wanted to ask you about something you said at dinner last night.”
Oh, but this was a conversation I’d hoped we’d already gotten past. I got in beside her. “Yeah, that wasn’t my finest hour. I’m sorry if I made things… Well, I’m sure I made things difficult for you down the road with your parents.”
“You did, but I don’t care about them. What I wanted to ask about was your family.”
My family. My guts twisted as I frantically tried to remember what I may or may not have said the night before.
“You told me on our first date that you were one of nine children,” she went on. “And then last night you said—”
“One of seven. Yeah.” I cleared my throat, hoping to push down some of the bile that had crept up it, and looked away from her. The morning had been going so well. Why this discussion? Why now?
“So…if this is out of line, you don’t have to answer. I was just wondering…why did you leave out the other two?”
I looked down at the sheet and pretended there was lint there I could pick away. But I didn’t see the clean cotton. I saw cheap linoleum, covered with smears and pools of sticky red. I could smell it, the copper stench in that hot, dark apartment, even now.
Penny’s voice was soft, pulling me slightly toward the surface of the sea of memory trying to drown me. “They died, didn’t they?”
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat a couple more times, but the taste was still there. I could taste that thick, horrible smell, even all these years later. “I don’t, uh. I don’t generally talk about it.”
“Oh. Sorry.” She didn’t press further.
Maybe it was because she didn’t demand more details that I felt I could share them with her. But I rarely told anyone about what had happened to my family. Gena had known. It had taken me three years to finally tell her, only after we’d gone to Scotland to meet my family and she had asked questions about the pictures on the walls. I’d been nervous when I’d told her, my palms sweaty and my eyes wet with tears. At the time, I’d expected that telling her would be some kind of emotional release, and that I would be fine after I got it all off my chest.
It hadn’t worked like that. All of the nightmares that had taken years to fade away, all of the baseless paranoia and righteous anger had charged destructively back into my life. None of it had helped, and every time I thought of Cathy, of Robby, the grief was as fresh as ever.
Well. Not ever.
“No, it’s fine. I don’t like to tell people, but I should tell you.” I should tell you, so that I don’t feel like I’m hiding anything from you, or lying to you. “My brother, Robby, and sister, Cathy, were uh. They were murdered.”
She sucked in a loud breath, which was really the best reaction I’d ever gotten, from the relatively small sample size.
“Yeah.” There wasn’t a more eloquent way to agree with Penny’s shock. The words came as a shock to me, too. “It was… Cathy was going with this guy. A right arsehole. We never trusted him, not a one of us. But Cathy was Cathy, and she was going to do her own thing. So, she moved in with him—broke my mother’s heart, that they were living in sin—and she got pregnant. And he started beating her
. I mean, really just… She would come over with black eyes and bruises all up and down her—”
I paused and closed my eyes, to regain some of my emotional equilibrium. I felt Penny’s body shift on the bed beside me, and though I would have loved the physical comfort, I couldn’t stand to be touched. That was the thing about grief; it made you isolate yourself, especially when you didn’t want to be alone. “Anyway, he beat her so badly she lost the baby. Kicked her in the stomach hard enough that he ruptured, ah, I don’t know. Something you don’t want to rupture, I suppose. I was nineteen at the time. I didn’t ask questions. The police were fucking useless. If they had—” No, there was no sense in wandering down that road. I’d already worn it down to gravel. “I’ve gone over what should have happened enough. When Cathy got out of the hospital, Mum said that was it, she was coming home. If the police weren’t going to help, well, there were plenty of us to keep him away from her. We thought the prick was at work, so Robby went with her to collect her things, but the guy was waiting and he…he shot them. Both of them.”
“Ian…”
“Ah, I shouldn’t have burdened you with that.” I tried to laugh, because it was too fucking pathetic. Penny made me happy. With her beside me, I should have been happy and thinking only of the future. Not dwelling on the past and terrible things I couldn’t change.
I knew they couldn’t be changed. I’d tried again and again in my head, imagining ways it could have been different. If I’d gotten there in time, if they hadn’t gone alone. If Robby and I had just had the nerve to kill the bastard, to go through with the plan we’d made the night before.
That was something I would never confess to anyone. Not even a priest.
“It’s not a burden,” Penny said gently. “You went through something terrible. I can’t even imagine it.”
No, she couldn’t. No one could, and it was a strange comfort to know that she understood it. “I was at university at the time, but I’d come home when Cathy was in hospital.” My chest tightened. “She was my twin, you see. And when you’re a twin, you do, I know it sounds like an old wives’ tale, but you do know.”
Every time I looked in the fucking mirror, I saw Cathy’s eyes, Cathy’s nose. They’d looked better on her, that was for sure. There were times when I spoke, and I heard the inflection of her voice. And all of these things left me cold, like waking up the morning after someone has died, and you remember they’re gone before you realize you’d forgotten.
My eyes stung, and I couldn’t pretend it was my contacts bothering me. I reached behind my glasses with one finger to wipe at my eye. Crying in front of my girlfriend, this was fantastic. I’d dated women for years and never cried in front of them.
But I also hadn’t told them about the worst part of my life. And to her credit, Penny didn’t appear to be uncomfortable.
“I knew the minute she died.” The story kept pouring out of me, though I’d told Penny all she really needed to know. But not enough for her to understand, and I needed her to understand, more than I’d ever needed anyone to. “I was in a pub, having lunch, and I just got this feeling. It was like all the color in the world vanished. I got there before the police did, but there was no chance of saving either of them.” That didn’t mean I hadn’t tried. I could still remember the feeling of Robby’s blood under my shoes and my hands. “He’d just…” My stomach turned over. “Her head was…”
“Don’t, you don’t have to tell me.” Penny pulled me into her arms, like I was a child, not a man thirty years older than her. I squeezed back, pressing my face into her neck and shoulder, and let my tears fall, though I tried not to come apart completely. She didn’t tell me not to cry, she didn’t try to find a bright side. She just held me.
God, but she was going to be a fantastic mother.
But she wasn’t my mother, and I was embarrassing myself. I lifted my head and sniffed. “Well, now, you know it. I’m sorry you do. And I’m sorry to ruin our morning—”
“Stop it. I asked,” she scolded gently.
“You’re the second person I’ve told. Mostly it’s just family who knows. After it happened, I went to Glasgow to be closer to home for my mum, went for a more practical profession, and moved here as quick as I could.” It had kept me from constructing elaborate revenge fantasies against the murderer and his family, who’d unwaveringly supported him in court.
I rolled to my back and looked up at the ceiling, wiping my eyes. “Ah, here I am, blubbering like a fool when I should be making you breakfast or going on about how fantastic last night was.”
“No, don’t…” She paused, her brow creased with a slight frown. “Don’t feel like you have to be happy all the time. Or that you have to protect me from who you are. I want to know all the stuff about you, good and bad and…fucking horrible.”
Obscenity from her sweet little mouth was adorable. “All the stuff?”
“All the stuff,” she repeated.
I shifted to my side and took her face in my hands. “And I want to know every fucking detail about you, Doll.”
I wanted everything about her. Forever.
Chapter Fourteen
The thrill of new love was one I hadn’t experienced in a very long time. Penny and I spent more time together than we would have dared in the “just dating” phase. We were, after all, in love, a very serious state, despite all the silliness and giggling.
Of that, we had plenty. When Penny got to know someone, she really let her guard down. Or maybe it was just when she was around me. She could spin from one conversational topic to another with dizzying speed, peppering her speech with enough trivia I felt confident I could go on Jeopardy! and make a fortune. She loved ridiculous comedies over serious films; it was a nice change to be with someone with whom I didn’t feel I had to pretend to like the latest dreary art-house drama. Although, she’d seen far fewer action movies than an American should have.
We could work on that.
I tried to keep our sleep over schedule fair. On the rare occasion she slept at my place during the week, it worked out well, due to the proximity to her office. She’d been late once or twice, as we found we had very little self-control in the mornings, so we tried to keep our weeknights to a minimum. On the weekends, I would spend the night with her at her place on the odd Friday, but she preferred my apartment, and I did, as well; I wasn’t of an age where sagging mattresses and pokey springs provided much rest, and there was an awkwardness now to having sex with roommates about that hadn’t plagued me since my twenties. Still, it seemed rude to not give her at least partial time in her own space.
Saturdays, though, we always stayed at my place, out of necessity, not just comfort. As much as I would have liked to spend Sunday mornings lazily eating Penny instead of breakfast, I couldn’t bring myself to miss mass. Annie would note my absence, like a teacher taking attendance, and she would know exactly why I wasn’t there. She was already quite put out by the Sunday dinners I’d been skipping. Plus, it gave me a chance to confess to all the premarital sex I’d been getting up to, though I wasn’t really sorry for it.
So, while I would rush off to mass, Penny would go for her run, and I would come back to find her freshly showered and ready to grab lunch, or be grabbed, herself. But by November, the arrangement had started to seem a bit sad. I loved the easy pattern of near-domesticity we’d fallen into on the weekends, and going to church alone was a reminder that while I was the happiest I’d been in a very long time, I was still a single man, and there were still parts of my life that I didn’t share with Penny.
I broached the subject one Friday night, as we lay in Penny’s bed watching reruns of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, a program Penny loved but which baffled me; her sense of humor and mine didn’t always line up, but I loved her laugh, so it was worth it. She lay beside me in a long flannel sleep shirt and thick socks, snuggled under the comforter with her head on my chest. Her apartment was freezing these days, because the landlord didn’t turn the heat on until the
Monday after Thanksgiving. The plot of the episode provided me with a tidy way to bring up church; three of the idiots who owned the bar attempted to sit through mass, and Penny asked, laughing, “Oh my God, is there really that much standing up and sitting down.”
“More,” I admitted. Then added, “You should come, sometime.”
She sat up to look me in the eye. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I…wasn’t.” I sat up a bit more, from where I had been leaning on the pillows. “My faith is a very important part of my life, and I’d like to share that with you.”
“I don’t know…” She looked like I’d asked her to donate both of her kidneys to a dog. “Ian, I’m not a…God person.”
“I know.” It was foreign and scary to people who hadn’t been raised in the Church, there was no getting around that. “And I’m not asking you to be. I’m not under any delusion that you’ll come to mass and suddenly feel so moved by the Holy Spirit that you want to be baptized on the spot. But if you wouldn’t mind coming along once, just to see that part of my life, it would mean a lot to me.”
Her inner conflict showed in her expression. “What if I do the wrong thing and embarrass you?”
“Are you going to take your top off?” I asked with a smile. “Start shouting obscenities?”
“Of course not.” She laughed quietly and looked down. “I have to admit, there’s something…weird about it. It’s really intimate, people praying around you.”
“And that’s why I want to share it with you. I don’t expect you to understand or share in my beliefs. But I want you to know me.” I shrugged. “Think about it. I’m not going to pressure you. If somewhere along the line you decide—”
“Do you want me to come on Sunday?” she interrupted, and when she met my eyes, I could see she’d made up her mind. That was something unmistakable about Penny. When she made up her mind, it showed in every part of her expression.
“If you’d like.” I would have to prepare Annie. “You’re coming over tomorrow night, aren’t you?”
First Time: Ian's Story (First Time (Ian) Book 1) Page 20
