Poked (A Standalone Romance) (A Savery Brother Book)

by Naomi Niles

  “That’s sweet, I guess,” said Penny in that same infuriatingly petulant tone.

  I turned all the way around in my seat. “Is there a problem? Did I say something to upset you? Because you’ve been acting quiet and sort of reserved since the end of dinner, and it makes me think maybe I did something wrong.”

  Softening a bit, Penny said, “Sorry. I don’t take criticism very well, and I’m still kind of upset about what my dad said. But also, when I hear things like that, it makes me think that maybe you would be better off with some other girl. Someone who’s a good writer and not an idiot and won’t embarrass you. And then I get mad because I can’t understand why you like me so much.”

  “Hey,” I said firmly. “If I thought you were an embarrassment, I would never have asked you out. I really like you, but you’ve got to start loving yourself more. Sometimes you get so lost in your own head, worrying about what others think.”

  “I guess that’s true. Whenever I’m writing, it feels like there’s a team of judges reading over my shoulder and holding up scorecards. I felt the same way the first time we slept together, like you were judging me—like you were probably thinking you couldn’t wait to get it over with because you had better things to do.”

  “That’s not what I was thinking at all,” I replied. “I think I was enjoying myself too much to be thinking much of anything.”

  “That’s sweet.” This time it sounded like she meant it. “You want to get going, then?”

  The rest of the way to the store, we were silent as I brooded over our conversation. I wanted to show Penny in more than words that she wasn’t an embarrassment—that I loved being with her and had every intention of continuing to go out with her.

  We pulled up in front of Car Quest. The lights were out in the store, and only a single street lamp illuminated the empty parking lot. Penny retrieved a key ring from her purse and went to unlock the door. I followed close behind, the wind warm on my skin.

  Rather than switching on the overhead lights, Penny used her phone to light the path in front of us. An eerie stillness lay over the room that reminded me of an aquarium after all guests have gone home for the night.

  “It’s so spooky back here at night,” Penny whispered. “One time I had to be back here by myself while I was doing inventory, and I heard a noise, and I honestly thought a burglar had broken into the building. Turns out it was just a large rat, so large that it didn’t run away, it just waddled.”

  “I think I’d take my chances with the burglars,” I replied.

  Penny stifled a laugh. “You were supposed to say, ‘I don’t think those exist.’ Haven’t you ever seen that movie?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “It’s one of my favorites.”

  It occurred to me as I followed her toward the back that I had no idea where we were going or how I was going to pay for my muffler, given that the store was closed for the night. She led us through the back room where the green-tinted bulb glowed with a pale, sickly light, then glided on like a ghost through the door and out into the grass.

  I ran along behind with a growing feeling of curiosity. There was never any telling what Penny might do next, and that unpredictability was both exciting and a little worrying at times.

  I found her standing barefoot in the grass staring up at the sky. Out here, away from all the lights of the city, we could see the stars shining in the fullness of their splendor. For a moment, I stood there in silence, lost in awe.

  “Is this where you’re keeping my muffler?” I asked her after a long pause.

  She smiled and shook her head. “I just like to come out here and look at the stars sometimes. I like to think of them as friends.”

  “Doesn’t it ever make you sad, though?”

  “No, why would it?” She turned toward me with a look of mild curiosity, her hair blown by the wind.

  “Because it makes you feel so insignificant, thinking about how many other worlds there are, and how we live for a moment and die in a moment.”

  “I think it’s comforting in a way,” Penny said with a shrug. “There have to be better worlds than this one, and maybe death brings them closer. Maybe we’ll be up there one day together.”

  “Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it. Even if we continue to live after death, we’ll be so changed from what we were. This moment is the only thing we can really call ours.”

  She tilted her head to look up at me, and her eyes shone in the starlight. “Don’t you think our relationship could survive, though?”

  “Babe, I think a relationship is lucky to last for more than a few decades, let alone eternity. Let’s just take things a step at a time.”

  “Okay,” she whispered. Her face was as full of freckles as the sky was of stars, and the longer she went on looking at me, the harder it became not to kiss her. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore; I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close to me.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Penny

  If Darren and I were going to sleep together again, this is how I wanted to do it: outside under the stars with the wind warm on my face.

  After our first time, I had felt a range of conflicting emotions. I liked that he wanted me, but I didn’t think I deserved him. I felt dirty and ruined because I had slept with a man before marriage, something I had promised myself I would never do. I cried into my pillow at night and washed my hands often.

  Darren clearly wanted me tonight—he was already reaching his arms around my waist and fumbling for my belt. But I stood there motionless and trembling.

  “Are you sure this is okay, what we’re doing?” I asked.

  Darren paused with his hands on the top button of my high-waisted jeans. “Do you not want to do it? If you don’t want to, that’s totally fine. Just say so.”

  “It isn’t that. I just worry that someone is going to drive out here and catch us. I feel so exposed under these stars.”

  “It’s not very likely,” Darren said. “We’ve been out here for about twenty minutes, and not a single car has driven past. And the building hides us from anyone who might drive past and see us from the highway.”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  But he must have known I was still worried, for he placed his hands on my shoulders and said in a concerned voice, “What’s wrong? You look scared, and I can’t figure you out. If you’re worried that I’m only going out with you out of pity, you can put that away. I wouldn’t keep asking you out if I didn’t really like you.”

  It felt like the right moment to come clean about what had been bothering me. “Do you mind if we sit down for a minute?”

  I knelt down on the grass, buttoning the top button of my jeans, and motioned for him to sit down beside me. The wind whistled loudly in the branches of the evergreens that bordered the field to our right.

  “You know how I have anniversaries for days of my life that are important to me? Well, today is the day my first and only boyfriend broke up with me.”

  Confusion shown in Darren’s eyes. “I thought you said you had never dated anyone.”

  “Well, I say ‘boyfriend,’ but we were never official. But we might as well have been given the amount of time we spent together. Liam was like my best friend.”

  “Liam.” He turned the name over in his mouth as though trying out how it sounded. “You’ve never mentioned this person before.”

  “I don’t like talking about it because it hurts so much. I’m over him now, but days like this are hard because they bring back all those memories I had been struggling so hard to forget. He’s married now, and there’s no way we would ever get back together; this is just one of those things I have to get through because I’m a sensitive person, and I never forget someone I’ve cared about.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “We met six years ago at a church bake sale. I had just dropped out of college, and I was devastated because I felt like a failure to my dad and I worried that I would never be smar
t enough to make it in the real world. Liam took me under his wing and took care of me.

  “We did so many things together. We used to sit on his couch for hours and hours eating gluten-free ice cream and watching Doctor Who and Bananas in Pyjamas. I couldn’t get anyone else to watch them, but we would sit there and laugh until we cried over the antics of the Banana brothers and Rat in a Hat. I would call him up late at night when I was hungry and wanted snacks, and we would go to Wal-Mart together because who wants to go to Wal-Mart at midnight by themselves? At Christmas, we would get in his car and drive around looking at Christmas lights, even though he didn’t like looking at Christmas lights, but he would do it for me.

  “I tried to tell myself we were just friends, that I wasn’t in love with him. But we were getting dangerously close. We were always talking, always texting. I knew if I had a random thought I could just pick up the phone and text him whenever I wanted, and that would lead to an hours-long conversation. He could just look at me and know what I was thinking without me even having to tell him. He loved my little rituals and holidays because he was a creature of habit, and they made him feel all safe and cozy. We had our own words and phrases and inside jokes that nobody got but us. He was my person. My Liam.”

  “Did you ever tell him how you felt about him?” asked Darren.

  “No, because I don’t think even I knew until it was too late. I kept trying to shove it down hoping it would go away. I knew eventually he would leave and move on because as perfect as we were, I wasn’t the right girl for him. He needed to marry a girl who was bookish and cultured and intelligent, and I could never give him that. I couldn’t change myself to become someone else.

  “And then one day he just stopped coming over. He stopped texting me and stopped responding to my texts. I went from seeing him four or five times a week to seeing him four times in a year. And I knew there had to be someone else in the picture, but he steadfastly insisted there wasn’t. Until one morning I logged into Facebook and found out he was engaged. Her name was Leslie Murkowski, and she was a teacher’s assistant at an Austin-area university working on her Ph.D.

  “She was right for him, and I tried to tell myself I was happy for them, but that didn’t stop me from crying myself to sleep at night. That didn’t stop me from sitting up in bed, shaking so hard I could barely speak. For about a year, everything reminded me of him, and I had to give it up because the memories were too painful. No more eating ice cream, no more watching Doctor Who, no more Christmas lights. After that, all I did after I came home from work was change out of my clothes and write long novels about women who got married and had babies and lived the kind of life I wanted but couldn’t have. And for a long time, there was no dancing.”

  Darren was quiet for some time after I had finished talking. He kicked off his shoes and lay back in the grass with a thoughtful expression.

  “I wish I’d known,” he said finally. “You always said you had never dated, so I assumed there had been no guys in your life.”

  “I’m sorry if you feel like I lied to you.”

  “No, it isn’t that. I’m just sorry you had to go through that. I know how much it hurts when your best friends move on and forget about you.”

  “I wish now I had told him how I felt. I always do this. I keep my distance from boys because I ‘just want to be friends,’ when all along I would have given anything to go out with him. But of course, he didn’t know that because I never told him. As far as he knew, we were just friends.”

  “Maybe you ought to look at how far you’ve come in the last five or six years,” said Darren. “You had the courage to come right out and tell me you liked me. I know that couldn’t have been easy for you.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to make the same mistake again. I didn’t want to lose you.”

  “You’re not going to lose me.” He sat up and looked me in the eyes. “You haven’t scared me away yet, and you’re not going to.”

  “We could break up someday,” I replied, a touch defensively. “We’ve only known each other for a few weeks. You don’t know what could happen in the future.”

  Darren didn’t have a good answer for this. He obviously wanted to protest his undying devotion, but he couldn’t argue with the points I had just made. “I’m just saying it’s not going to be like it was with Liam. That was a time in your life that’s passed, and you’ve grown up, and you’re in a real relationship. You never slept with him; you never even kissed him.”

  I shook my head sadly. “No. No, I didn’t.”

  “I don’t know if Liam ever had feelings for you. If he did, he never told you. But I’m here, and I’m telling you I really like you. I’m crazy about you in a way I don’t even really understand. The fact that I like you as much as I do confuses me. Sometimes it feels like my heart and body have rebelled against me and declared you their queen.”

  “Do you not want to like me?” I asked with an effort.

  “I’m not upset about it if that’s what you mean. I just don’t understand the intensity of these feelings. I’ve never felt this way about another person, and I’m still trying to get my head around it. Who even are you that you can make me feel this way? Like a meteor, you came out of nowhere and have totally upended my life in a matter of weeks. It’s not going to be the same for a long time, if ever.”

  “I think these are all compliments,” I said slowly, “so thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Penny.” He crept over and took my hands in his. His eyes were shining. “I don’t think I can say this often enough: You mean more to me than any car ever has, any amount of money. I feel so unbelievably lucky to have met you.” Motioning to the stars over our heads, he added, “Think of all the billions of worlds in all the millions of different galaxies, and we happened to end up on this planet together at the same time and the same place.”

  “When you put it that way,” I said, smiling for the first time, “I suppose I ought to feel grateful.”

  “Not as lucky as me, dear one. No one in the universe has the pleasure and privilege of getting to date Penny Shook but me.”

  I didn’t care if he was just being smooth; he had almost completely won me over now. The anger and hurt and hesitation I had been feeling when we walked out here had evaporated, replaced by an abiding sense of gratitude: for Darren and the stars and the firm earth around us.

  “Did you still want to go home?” asked Darren. There was a disappointed tone in his voice, which he was at pains to conceal.

  “No, I want to be here with you.” I took off my cardigan and threw it at some distance into the grass. Then I removed my shirt in a single fluid motion and added it to the pile. Darren watched with a look of interest bordering on fascination. Without once taking his eyes off me, he crept closer.

  Although it was a warm night, I felt goosebumps on my arm and began to shiver. “Last time, I don’t know if I was ready for this,” I said quietly. “But now I think I’m ready.”

  Darren placed a hand on my face, his eyes firmly fixed on my bare shoulders. “God, I can’t believe I get to be with you. Do you know how much I’ve wanted this?”

  “Why don’t you show me?” I whispered.

  Over the next hour, he did.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Darren

  Penny was much more composed and confident that night than she had been before. She made out with me for a long while wearing only her high-waisted jeans and a white bra. Her breath tasted of mint and honey, and her hair smelt strongly of soap. As we kissed, the scent worked its way into my brain, slowly divesting me of my ability to reason until I was all want and hunger.

  “I’ve never seen you like this before,” I said as we sat there together under starlight.

  “Like what?” She leveled her eyes like lamps at me and folded her legs to her chest.

  “So aggressive, so sure of yourself and of what you want. It’s kind of thrilling.”

  “You really think so?” The old shyness returned to her
voice for a moment.

  I leaned forward and gave her a small kiss on the lips, then slowly pulled away with a dreamy look. “I do.”

  “Well, what I want is to be with you,” she said. “I don’t know much else, but I know that.”

  “Then we’re in perfect agreement.”

  “I guess so.” She sat hunched over with her arms folded in front of her, looking cold. She had small, sloping shoulders that gave the upper half of her body a kind of oval shape, and her chest was flat and splotchy. “I can’t get over how you look at me like I’m the most perfect thing in the world.”

  “It’s because you are.” I leaned forward and kissed her just under her collarbone, then slowly descended. Penny leaned her head back and wrapped her hands tight around my back.

  ***

  When it was over, we gathered up our discarded clothes and returned to the car. Hardly anyone else was on the road that night, and the trees that lined the highway glowed eerily in the lamplight. Penny sat quietly staring out the window, looking thoughtful.

  “If you want, we can go back to my house,” I said as we approached her house. “I don’t mind you staying with me.”

  Penny hesitated for a moment before saying, “No, that’s okay. I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

  “You sure? I’m not going to force you. I just like having you near me.”

  “I know you do.” Judging from the tone of her voice, it sounded like she was already regretting saying no. She waved miserably as she got out of the car and headed up the driveway toward her house, where a single light was burning in the kitchen. I drove home through the empty streets remembering the feel of her body on mine and wondering why I suddenly felt so alone. There was a space on the bed that belonged to her, but for now, it was vacant, and was likely to remain vacant for some time.

  ***