“You were in a bad place. It won’t be the last time, I promise.” He laughed softly. “And you’ve yet to see how badly I can fuck things up. But I’m ready to be in this with you. All of you.”
“I just thought…” I shook my head and finally made eye contact with him again. “I was kind of desperate. After all that stuff we talked about… I didn’t want to make you wait.”
He took my hands in his and raised them to his mouth to press a few kisses to my knuckles. The soft sounds of his lips on my skin were all I heard, the gentle drift of his breath over my hands the only thing that mattered in the moment. He looked into my eyes, a few strands of hair falling over his forehead. He usually looked so put-together when I saw him that one change in his appearance was enough to make everything around us more vivid and real.
“I’m not them, Penny,” he said. “I’m the guy who’ll actually wait for you.”
I used his grip as leverage to launch myself at him and wrapped my arms around his neck to squeeze him tight. We nearly went over backwards. He caught me with an “oof!” of surprise.
“Careful.” He laughed, one hand coming up to push my hair back from my face. “I’m not as shiny and new as you are.”
I sat back and wiped at my eyes. “Sorry. I’m overly enthusiastic with expressions of affection. If you’re in this with me, you have to get used to that.”
“I’ll buy protective equipment.” He leaned his forehead against mine—oh god, I finally had someone who would do that with me!—and whispered, “Penny?”
“Yeah?”
“I want to kiss you, but your breath is fucking terrible.”
I laughed but with my mouth as closed as possible. I shielded it with one hand. “Do you have any mouthwash?”
“I do.” He laughed with me. “Go use it.”
My pounding headache didn’t even seem as bad, anymore. I got out of bed carefully, because the shirt I’d slept in seemed a lot shorter than it had the night before, when my veins had coursed with liquid courage. But I wanted to skip with every step I took toward the bathroom. “I want a kiss when I get back,” I called over my shoulder, a hand still in front of my mouth.
“Well, obviously.” He grinned, and I hurried into the bathroom. When I shut the door behind me, I had to lean against it to get my bearings.
Ian was right. He wasn’t the other guys I’d dated. He was the best guy I’d ever dated.
Chapter Eleven
As much as I would have liked to spend the day with Ian, I felt the kind of thoroughly gross that only a shower at home and clean clothes of my own could fix. Instead of asking him to drive me, I made up an excuse about needing to swing by the office for something and took the train.
My phone rang its generic ringtone as I climbed the steps from the subway. My heart dropped into my stomach at the picture of my parents that popped up on the screen.
“Hello?” I answered as I reached the sidewalk.
“I’ve been trying to reach you all morning,” my mother said, sounding put out, as always, that I’d been momentarily unavailable to her. “I saw your Facebook status about Brad. Why didn’t you call us?”
Because it’s taken you five months to call me. The last time we’d spoken had been the week before Brad and I had broken up.
“I guess I’ve just been really busy. But I’m fine, don’t worry about me—”
“How could I not worry about you?” Mother said with a heavy sigh. “You’re twenty-two, Penny. Tick-tock.”
Sometimes, I felt like my parents thought we were living in an actual Jane Austen novel.
“I know. But I am seeing someone else now. He’s an architect.” That was going to be my golden ticket, right there. Dating a good guy with a steady income.
“An architect?” I heard the caution in mother’s voice. “They don’t make very much money, do they?”
“He does,” I assured her. “He owns his own company. He’s, um, a lot older than me.”
“Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, if he can give you a secure future. God knows you won’t have one working as a secretary. And you certainly weren’t having much luck with men your age.” Mother laughed. “I’m so relieved. When I read about Brad, I thought, oh, Penny, here we go again.”
My stomach always hurt when I talked to my parents.
“Well, I’m calling because your father is speaking at a symposium in the city in two weeks. It’s on a Saturday, but we would love to have dinner with you on Friday night.” There was no suggestion that maybe I would have plans or anything. Then she said the words I didn’t know I’d been dreading: “You could bring your new boyfriend.”
“Oh. Um.” I reached into my purse for my keys as I neared my building. “You know, it’s kind of new—”
“Excellent. I’ll tell your father. Will you be able to pick a suitable restaurant? I don’t want a disaster like the last time.” She chuckled, but the last restaurant we’d gone to had seemed totally suitable to me. I’d have to try harder to find someplace impressive enough.
“Yeah, I’ll find someplace.” I would ask Ian. He would know better restaurants than I would.
Oh god. I would have to ask Ian. To dinner. With my parents.
Mother and I hung up with our usual sign-off, which consisted of her saying goodbye and ending the call before I could respond. It used to bother me. It didn’t anymore.
I trudged up the stairs to the apartment.
My other mother was waiting for me on one of the wooden stools at the kitchen pass-through, drumming her fingertips on the counter. “Well, I’m glad you’re not dead in a ditch.”
“Where would I possibly find a ditch in New York?” I asked with a roll of my eyes.
“At a construction site,” Rosa shot back. “Like one an architect might try to bury a body in?”
“Ian isn’t going to kill me. Actually, if he hadn’t cut me off from drinking last night, I might be dead.” My head was still killing me, despite the pills I’d gobbled down at Ian’s place. “Can you take Tylenol for a hangover?”
“Only if you want to die.” She slid off the stool and walked into the kitchen. “Cake, however…”
“You have cake!” My headache almost entirely disappeared. Then it came pounding back on a wave of suspicion. “Wait. Wasn’t it—”
“Yes, it was Amanda’s birthday. Yes, I went to her party,” Rosa said defensively. “But if you had checked your phone, you would have known the exact location of said party and a reassurance that I hadn’t been murdered.”
I went for the forks. “Why did you think I was being murdered?”
“Do you know how many people I know of who have been murdered?” she snapped back, bending to pull a tinfoil covered paper plate from the oven. “Sorry if that’s immediately where my mind goes.”
Okay, that chastened me. I had a bad habit of forgetting how dangerous life could be for Rosa and women like her. “Okay. Point. But Ian isn’t going to kill me. I don’t get what you think is so weird about him.”
“Well, he’s almost sixty, and he’s dating a teenager—”
“He’s fifty-three, not sixty. And I’m not a teenager, Miss I’m-So-Twenty-Six-And-Know-Everything.” I went to the bar stool and hopped up. Rosa leaned over the counter and snagged a fork from me.
“I know, I know. But haven’t you thought about it?” Rosa asked around the bite of cake she put in her mouth. She swallowed and frowned. “You know, like, what’s wrong with this guy, that he’s into chicks thirty years younger than him?”
“Yeah,” I lied. I hadn’t really thought about it. At least not deeply enough that it had occurred to me that something might be “wrong” with him. “I mean, he’s brought that up, too, a couple of times. We both realize how weird it probably seems to other people. We already get looks.”
“Because you look like a sophomore out on a date with her math teacher.” Rosa snorted. “I just don’t want this to go badly for you. You really like this guy. I don’t want to see you get
hurt.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure he won’t pull a Brad and cheat on me with his future wife,” I said, and even buttercream frosting couldn’t take the bitterness out of my mouth.
Rosa’s eyes flared wide. “No!”
“Yes.” I nodded miserably. “I ran into him yesterday. Literally. I mean, literally, I was running, not literally we collided—”
“Focus up.”
“He was with his fiancée. And their baby.” I swallowed the lump in my throat, which was definitely not cake. “Their four-month-old baby.”
Rosa slapped her palm down on the counter. “Motherfucker.”
“And then, he had the gall to text me after!” Now, I was less bitter, more angry. It was the mark of a good friendship, that our anger could combine into one giant ball of sheer outrage. “To thank me about being so cool.”
“You were cool about it? Why? What did you say?” she demanded. She chewed vigorously while I responded.
“I just said it was nice to meet her and congratulations. What else was I going to do?” I shrugged.
“True. You couldn’t exactly stomp his foot and knee him in the balls in front of his child.” She considered. “Although you did call babies ugly to their faces a couple weeks ago.”
I cringed inwardly. “Don’t remind me. But I wasn’t about to make anymore infant-related missteps.”
Rosa tilted her head. “Is that why you went to Ian’s all of a sudden?”
“Yeah. Not my finest hour. But he was really sweet and supportive about it.” My face flamed, and I couldn’t make eye contact with her, because I was pretty sure she was going to go nuclear scold mode when I said what I was going to say. “He, um… He told me he loves me.”
When she said nothing, I peeked up at her. She was leaning against the vertical beam of the pass-through. Her expression wasn’t critical, as I’d expected, but concerned. “It’s only been a few weeks, Penny.”
“I know.” I don’t know why I felt ashamed. Maybe because I knew it was too early, but I didn’t care.
“Do you think he meant it?”
That wasn’t the question I was expecting. Rosa could be pretty harsh about the guys I went out with. Of course, she’d been one hundred percent right about Brad. I thought about Ian, about how terrified he’d sounded after he’d let slip that he loved me. “I do. The way he said it was kind of accidental. We were in his bed— Wait, listen to the whole thing,” I admonished her. “I was super drunk, and he turned me down for sex. And he told me he loved me.”
My memory was hazy about the order those events had gone in.
“You were in bed with him, you were drunk, and he didn’t sleep with you?” she asked with a skeptically arched brow.
I nodded. “Yeah. I got a little aggressive. A lot aggressive. I kind of…took my panties off and dry-humped his thigh.”
“So, you were sending him subtle signals, then?” she quipped.
I couldn’t help but laugh at how stupid it sounded when I admitted to it. “I was totally wasted. I asked him if I could sleep over, like could I sleep over in his bed, and he said yes. I thought we were going to do it.”
“And he wouldn’t let you, because you were drunk and he…”
“And he loves me. He said he’s the guy who’s going to wait. And I know they’ve all said that. Some variation of it. But Rosa…I think he really means it.”
“Did you say it back?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
I shook my head. “I did not. I didn’t want to say it just because he said it.”
“But do you love him?”
The cake suddenly looked very interesting.
“I knew it. Parker, you fall way too fast.”
“I do.” I couldn’t deny that. “But he’s really great. And oh my god. Multiple orgasms. I mean, I knew about them. I thought they were a myth, but—”
“Yeah, some of us aren’t set up for that, so shut up.” She pushed the plate toward me. “Finish this.”
I pushed my fork into the last bit of cake left, and paused. “Hey, not to change the subject, but do you ever…”
Rosa waited for me to continue.
I sighed. “Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you just did what you wanted to do and said to hell with what everybody expected of you?”
“Yes. It was called setting all my old clothes on fire and never speaking to my family again,” she said with a wry quirk of her lips.
“Ha ha. I mean, what if you hadn’t become an accountant? What if you’d been like, ‘you know, I think I would rather be a professional tennis player?’ and you didn’t let anyone tell you no?”
“You just got your semi-annual call from your parents, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” I admitted miserably. “I have to stop answering.”
“You have to figure out how to deal with this in your own time, is what you have to do.” That was another thing I really liked about Rosa; she might be overprotective, but she wasn’t bossy. Not about things that mattered. I’d had plenty of friends in college who’d been more than happy to tell me I needed to cut off my parents and their toxic influence on my life, but it wasn’t as easy as they all made it sound. Eventually, I’d stopped sharing my issues and anxiety over my parents, and then, piece by piece, I’d stopped sharing other stuff, too, until none of my friends were actually friends anymore. Rosa would never be like that.
“I thought you liked your job,” she reminded me.
“I do.” I did. Ish. I liked the people I worked with, and I could definitely stand the pay, compared to what I’d been making working at Subway during college. Deja and Sophie could be kind of demanding, but that was the best part of the job, because most of the time, it wasn’t very challenging. “It’s just not that interesting.”
“Maybe once you work in an actual administration position—” Rosa began.
I stopped her, because that wasn’t the issue. “No, I mean…business management? I’m not exactly beating the pavement looking for those jobs. I kind of wish…”
She waited for me to continue, but it was so hard, when I felt like I was saying I wanted to a ballerina or a fireman. What the hell. “I wish I would have gone into something more science-y. Marine biology, you know? Or something with bees. Something interesting.”
“You know what’s cool about colleges?” Rosa asked. “They’re all over the place. I heard there are even some here in New York.”
“There are also these things called ‘student loans’,” I reminded her.
“True.” She nodded ruefully. “Try not to make any big decisions about running away to study bees until after you’ve calmed down from your parental phone call, okay?”
“I’m going to dinner with them.” My stomach roiled. “And they want me to bring Ian.”
“That might not be a bad idea,” she said, surprising me. I’d expected more this-is-going-too-fast lecturing from her.
“Yeah?” I asked cautiously.
“You’ll have a buffer,” she said, dead serious. “And you can gauge Ian’s reaction. If he thinks your parents are great and wants to hang with them all the time, that’s something you need to find out, right now.”
“Oh god, I hadn’t even thought about that.” Although, it didn’t seem like there would be much of a chance of that happening. Not if he really liked me.
“If Ian is as great as you say he is, he’ll pick your side. And he’ll listen to you.” She came over and hugged me, a warmer, better hug than any my mom had ever given me.
“Thank you, my cool mom,” I said with a laugh.
She made a disgusted noise and gave me a shove. “As if I would ever use that kind of alliteration in my daughter’s name, Penny Parker.”
* * * *
Staying true to our slow down plan was pretty easy once the worst period in the world decided to rain blood and cramps all over me. Ian and I were supposed to go out on Friday night, but I didn't feel like spending the whole time worrying about whether or
not I was bleeding through my jeans.
"I hope you didn't have big, big plans," I told him when I called him around dinnertime on Thursday. "I have to cancel on you."
"Exactly what level of disappointed am I allowed to be without appearing needy?"
“You should be totally crushed.” I was. Though we’d spoken on the phone twice already during the week, I missed him.
“Oh, I am,” he assured me. “May I ask what’s come up? This isn’t the permanent brush-off, is it?”
“God, no!” I couldn’t even laugh, the thought was so horrible. “No, I’m just feeling under the weather.”
“Do you need anything? I hear soup is the latest thing for sick people.” From anyone else, it might have sounded pushy, like an attempt to get an invite despite my cancellation. It was Ian, though, so I knew he genuinely wanted to help.
Which made me feel really bad about fibbing. “Um. Not that kind of weather. The…monthly kind of under the weather.”
There was a pause. Then he said, “Penny? I’m fifty-three. I do know about menstruation. You’re not going to shock me.”
“Oh, good.” That was actually a weird relief. It was tiresome, pretending my period didn’t exist just so a man could feel comfortable. “Well, then you understand. I just feel so gross.”
“I do understand. But if you need anything, ice cream, hot water bottle, a hormone-fueled argument—”
“Not funny,” I snapped. Maybe he did have a point though.
“I’m sorry,” he said and I heard the smile in his voice. “But I do mean that. If you need me, I can come over any time this weekend.”
“Oh.” It hadn’t occurred to me that he might want to still see me, knowing that the crimson scourge was bloodying the countryside. “Well, if you wanted to come over.” I glanced around my tiny room. “I do have a television in my room. We could watch a movie or something.”
“Great, then we’re still on for tomorrow?”
It seemed so far away. Unfairly far away. And I had cramps and bloating and tears… “What about tonight?”
First Time: Penny's Story (First Time (Penny) Book 1) Page 16
