First Time: Ian's Story (First Time (Ian) Book 1) (3 page)

I wasn’t sure how she made that sound like a
compliment, but it was possible I focused too much on the part
where she’d said she liked me.

I cleared my throat. God, I couldn’t be cool
for one moment, could I? “I find you just unbearable, with your
beautiful face and your infectious laughter. I haven’t had a fun
night like this for a while, and I just hate it.”

Some of that online advice had warned that I
shouldn’t give her too many compliments. I supposed it was too late
for that.

She dipped her head, but I still saw the
pleased smile she subdued as she looked up. Her eyes still smiled,
though. “Sophie told me you’re an artist?”

“
Ugh.” It actually came out
of my mouth. An “ugh” because while I loved to draw, probably more
than I loved doing anything else, I hated talking about it. It was
private and just for me, like jerking off. People knew I did it,
but it wasn’t something I wanted to share with everyone.

Penny picked up on that. “Am I not supposed
to ask?”

“
You can ask.” My stomach
crawled inside out whenever I had to discuss my work with someone,
but I would force myself to endure it.

She shrugged and daintily plucked a pea pod
from within the container she held. “What do you do? Painting,
sculpture—”

“
Drawing. Portraiture,
mostly.” I was already shading the contours of her face in my mind
as I spoke. “Figure drawing.”

“
So, people.” She nodded,
digging her chopsticks through her food. “Are you any
good?”

Ah, the dreaded question. “Now, how am I
supposed to answer that? Am I any good? If I tell you, ‘yeah, I’m
fuckin’ great,’ I sound like I’m bragging. If I say, ‘No, I’m
shite,’ it’s like I’m fishing for compliments. Either way, I come
off like a fucking prick.”

Good fucking Christ,
Ian!
I had been trying so hard to control
my natural vocabulary, but she was so easy to be with, I’d relaxed.
Let my guard down. And now the F’s were flying out all over the
place.

She giggled and covered her face with one
hand. “That is the most swearing I’ve ever heard on a first
date.”

“
This is me on my best
behavior. I may as well own up to it now.” I hoped she took that
for the full disclosure it was and not just a pithy
response.

Penny set aside her carton of food and
rummaged in the paper bag between us, coming up with two fortune
cookies and a welcome change of subject. “Okay. We have to find out
what our future holds.”

“
Or our lucky numbers and
how to say ‘pork’ in Chinese.” I took the cookie from her and
popped open the wrapper.

“
I’ll have you know, I take
these things very seriously,” she warned as she tore the plastic
open.

“
What, fortune cookies?” Was
that endearing, or a warning sign?

“
A fortune cookie is the
reason I walked into that restaurant tonight.” She cracked hers in
half. “Aren’t you glad I did?”

Beyond glad. Even sitting in the anemic glow
of a park light, she was like a warm ray of sun on my face on the
first day of spring.

It was probably better to downplay that. “I
am. Maybe I’ll start putting more stock into these, then.”

I pulled the strip free from an open end of
the cookie and read it, developing what was certainly some kind of
fatal arrhythmia as I did.

The love of your live will step into your
path this summer.

Fuck me.

“
Mine says, ‘Humor usually
works at the moment of awkwardness.’” Penny declared. “What does
yours say?”

“
Nothing, it’s stupid.” I
tried to fold it up, fairly certain that this amount of awkwardness
would not be fixed with humor. “And it’s got a typo.”

“
A lot of them have typos,”
she argued, reaching for my hand. Our game of keep away had the
unintended effect of bodily closeness; she put her hand on my knee
to steady herself as she leaned over to chase my arm.

“
No,” I said again, holding
the paper higher. “I don’t want you to see my lucky numbers and
steal the lottery winnings that are rightfully mine.”

One of her breasts brushed my chest, and my
awareness of her sharpened. She wasn’t some adorable little pixie
who said funny things and filled out a dress well. She was a flesh
and blood woman, and the flesh was…pretty fucking spectacular. I
was so distracted by her tits pressing against my chest and arm
that I fumbled the paper. She snatched it triumphantly and sat
back, her blond curls bouncing.

What the fuck had just happened? Incidental
physical contact with a woman hadn’t distracted me like that since
my twenties.

Her brow furrowed as she read the small red
print on the slip. Then, she snorted and said, “Well, I hope she
hurries up. It’s already August twenty-first.”

She turned to me, and a laugh died on her
lips, her smile slowly melting into an altogether different
expression that mingled hints of shock and uncertainty with the
faintest flecks of possibility. Neither of us said anything, for
far too long.

“
Excuse me, sir.
Sir!”

A figure came up the path
toward us, a round man with a head the shape and color of a pink
Easter egg and wearing a dark stocking cap.
Sweet Jesus, let it be a mugger, if only to save us from this
embarrassing situation.

“
Uh-oh,” Penny said beside
me, her eyes wide.

“
NYPD,” the guy said, in a
tone that suggested he was unimpressed with us. “Are you two aware
that this park is closed from sundown to seven a.m.?”

“
No, I can’t say as I
noticed.” I’d noticed. And I’m a terrible liar, so I was sure he
could tell I’d read the sign on the fence and strolled on in,
anyway. I stood and extended my hand. “Terribly sorry. We’ll
go.”

The officer’s gaze moved to Penny, then back
to me as he asked her, “Miss, how old are you?”

“
I’m twenty-two,” Penny
offered, reaching into her purse. “Do you want to see my
ID?”

“
No, ma’am.” The officer
didn’t break eye contact with me to address her. “Are we on a date
here?”

“
Yeah, a blind date,” Penny
said.

I had a terrible feeling that I knew what
the officer was getting at.

“
We were set up by a mutual
friend,” she went on, while I tried to send her mental signals to
kindly shut up before I spent the weekend in jail.

“
A friend? You mind telling
me what kind of friend?”

I could vividly imagine the feeling of the
handcuffs closing on my wrists.

“
A work friend,” she told
him with her wide, dazzling smile.

Her endearing naiveté was about to get me
arrested for soliciting prostitution.

She looked from me, to the officer, then
back. Her expression changed in an instant. Finally, she
understood.

“
Oh, no. No, no, no.” She
stood, waving her hands. “I am not a prostitute. Not that there’s
anything wrong with sex work. I mean, besides the illegality of it.
I don’t know why it’s illegal, I mean, if it’s ethical, and nobody
is getting hurt—I’m sorry. I’ll stop talking, sir. Officer. Is that
impolite to call you sir? I’ve never talked to a police officer
before in a disciplinary… Am I getting arrested?”

Somehow, her ineptitude interacting with the
police gave me a calm like unto a superpower. In the small, deeply
repressed part of my mind that could sometimes instruct me to say
the correct thing in a constructive way, at a crucial moment, I
found the words, “Penny works at a magazine. I’m old friends with
her boss, and she set us up. That’s really all that’s going on
here.”

He looked between us both, reluctantly
surrendering suspicion. “Trespassing’s your idea of romance?”

“
No, I took her to a very
expensive restaurant where neither one of us were having a good
time. This seemed like the better option. So far, I think it’s
going pretty well.” That was quite smooth of me. If it didn’t charm
the policeman, maybe it would charm Penny into bailing me out of
jail.

“
I think it should be going
away from the park.” The officer motioned down the path with his
flashlight. “I’m coming back around this way in five minutes, and I
don’t want to see you here.”

“
And we don’t want to see
you, either,” Penny agreed.

I was never going to take this one with me
to commit a crime, that was for sure and fucking certain.

“
We’re going,” I assured the
officer, and put my hand on Penny’s arm to guide her toward the
bench. Her skin prickled with goose bumps under my hand. “Are you
cold?”

“
No. Or, um. Yeah? A little
bit?” She rubbed her arms.

“
Would you like my jacket,
then?” I was already pulling it off.

She smiled, her cheeks going rosy. “Thanks.
That’s very chivalrous of you.”

“
Aye, I learned it in the
thirteenth century,” I quipped as I draped it over her shoulders.
“Let’s get out of here before Officer Friendly comes
back.”

We packed up the remains of our dinner and
gave the crime scene a look over, lest we be tracked down and
penalized for littering. We disposed of everything in the trashcan
down the path then hurried out.

“
I assume we’re safe here,”
she said once we reached the sidewalk. “Try not to solicit sex from
me, though.”

“
I already promised I
wouldn’t. I’m a man of my word.” I would have never guessed it, but
our brush with the law somehow made the evening seem more
successful. We would both at least have a story to tell.

I reached into my pocket and retrieved the
fortune she’d gotten from her cookie. “Here. Hopefully, this rings
true.”

“
We’ll look back on tonight
and laugh,” she said with a smile. “Did you keep yours?”

“
Nah.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Well, won’t you be
embarrassed when you meet the love of your live tomorrow, and you
don’t have the proper paperwork.”

“
Let me walk you home?” I
didn’t want the night to end. Even with the trespassing and my
octopus gaff, I’d had fun with Penny. But it was getting late, and
all the advice had said not to let the date go on too
long.

Penny didn’t live far from the park. I spent
the whole walk wondering if I should offer her my arm. We made a
little small talk, but Penny was suddenly quiet. We stopped outside
a door between a dry cleaner and a sandwich shop, both closed, with
gates and rolling metal shutters pulled over the windows and
doors.

I had a moment of nostalgia remembering my
first apartment in New York. It had been a disgusting little studio
apartment I’d shared with one other guy and his girlfriend. We’d
had to battle with roaches that were too big to hide under the hot
plate and the cold-water-only shower that had nearly given me
pneumonia my first winter in the city.

I didn’t know Penny that well, but I knew
her well enough I didn’t want her to live like that.

“
This is me,” she said,
gesturing to the door. She slipped my jacket off and handed it to
me.

I swung it over my shoulder and held it with
one hand. “So…thank you. I wasn’t joking when I said I was having
fun. Even after the cops came.”

“
Yeah.” She smiled with her
lips closed and nodded. She had a dimple in one cheek. Just the
one.

She was beautiful. And I wanted, badly, to
kiss her. But was that something people did, anymore? I hadn’t
dated in so long. Did women still expect a kiss goodnight? Was it…
Was it harassment?

She was still looking up at
me, her big, brown eyes as earnest as a Disney princess’s in her
porcelain doll face. Then, her gaze flicked to my mouth, and I
thought,
What the hell?

I leaned in, and she leaned out, bending
backwards like she was avoiding a limbo stick on fire.

I’d dramatically misread that signal.

She stepped back. “Nope! No. No, sorry, it’s
not you—”

Well, you could have fucking fooled me!

“—
it’s just that my breath
is really, really bad from dinner.” Her wince of embarrassment
turned into a grimace. “I actually did that on purpose. I thought I
might be tempted, so I went with spicy and full of
cabbage.”

“
Oh.” Wait, what the hell
did she mean by that? I couldn’t tell if she was saying she wanted
to kiss me or she was arming herself against me.

“
It’s just that… I like you,
Ian. And you know how you said you were old fashioned about paying
for dinner? I’m old fashioned about this. I move really, really
slow, and I think it’s only fair you know that, if you were
thinking about…calling me?”

“
I was actually thinking
about how much pepper spray was going to hurt.” My eyes watered at
the thought, and I bracketed them with my thumb and forefinger to
rub my lids.

“
Why would I pepper spray
you?” A spark of amusement lit up her voice.

I was half-laughing myself. “Because this
entire date has been a disaster, and I thought going in for the
kiss might have been the last straw.”

She looked down when she smiled. “It wasn’t
a total disaster.”

I cleared my throat. “I’m a bit out of
practice with dating, and I overstepped my bounds. But slow doesn’t
bother me. Slow, I can do.”

No, you can’t, you lying
bastard.
I’d never been slow a day in my
entire life, at least, not sexually. I’d lost my virginity at
fourteen, but I’d been feeling up girls behind the school since I
was eleven. I hadn’t slowed down since. But maybe a woman like
Penny was worth the wait.