First Time: Penny's Story (First Time (Penny) Book 1) (29 page)

“
Thank god, because it was
nerve wracking.” The next time, I would squash my nerves and be a
total pro. “Okay, go do the postal thing. I love you.”

“
I love you, too.” She
paused. “And I’m really glad you’re happy.”

I smiled to myself and hung up, then looked
to the stairs. I could have gotten into Ian’s fridge and started
making some breakfast—he actually had the supplies to do it, this
time—but the thought of getting back into his bed and curling up
next to him was so much better. But when I got upstairs, he was
already awake, his head resting on one arm stretched out on his
pillow. He squinted at me as I stepped inside. “Are those my
jeans?”

“
Yeah, I found them.” I
tossed the throw across the end of the bed, standing in front of
him topless. I held out my arms. “The Mickey Mouse look isn’t as
sexy as the Donald Duck look, huh?”

“
Oh, no, I think it’s
sexier,” he said, his eyes wide, as though the answer were
bewilderingly obvious. “Your tits are out.”

I laughed and folded my arms
over my chest, suddenly self-conscious.
He
had his dick in you last night. I think you’re safe to be naked in
front of him.

“
So…thanks, by the way. For
making last night…” I shivered, remembering it, and he grinned at
me.

“
You’re speechless and
trembling. I get the picture.” He pulled back the blankets. “Get
back in here.”

I shimmied out of his jeans and got into bed
beside him, chewing my lower lip. “Don’t take this the wrong way,
but I don’t want to have sex, right now.”

“
Feel it this morning?” he
asked gently.

“
Yeah.” I rubbed my inner
thighs. “I think I pulled a muscle, too.”

“
A nap is always good for
that,” he suggested, and I laughed.

“
We just woke up!” I scooted
up close to him. “But I’m fine with staying naked in bed all day.
It’s so relaxing.”

“
I’m loathe 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.” He leaned over to kiss me, and I didn’t even mind his
morning breath.

“
Don’t look at my sad, flat
arse while I’m walking away,” he ordered as he headed
off.

Pff. I was totally going to look. “I love
your sad, flat arse!” I called after him.

When the bathroom door closed, I snuggled
down in the bed and held a pillow over my face as I squealed and
rolled from side to side. I’d done it. I’d had sex with someone,
and things hadn’t fallen apart. He still respected me, he wasn’t
going to walk out and leave me heartbroken for life, he was still
here, and happy to be.

God, my parents had really fucked me up,
hadn’t they?

A memory of last night’s war crime of a
dinner stopped me. The thing about Ian’s siblings had been stuck in
my mind, but I’d been too distracted to ask. I heard the toilet
flush then the water running. I had to figure out how to ask him
what was up with the two missing siblings. Were they estranged?
Were they…were they dead?

Maybe you shouldn’t
ask.
But my curiosity got the better of me.
When he walked out of the bathroom, still totally, comfortably nude
but for the thick-rimmed hipster glasses he’d replaced his contacts
with—and holy cats, was that sexy—I sat up a little.

“
I wanted to ask you about
something you said at dinner last night,” I began.

He grimaced and slid into the bed with me.
“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.” It wasn’t a shock to realize it, but a shock to
realize how little the statement mattered to me. “What I wanted to
ask about was your family.”

He paled slightly.

I went on. “You told me on our first date
that you were one of nine children. And then last night you
said—”

“
One of seven. Yeah.” He
cleared his throat and did his looking-off-over-there thing that he
always did when the discussion became uncomfortable for him. Now,
though, I could tell it wasn’t about nerves.

“
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?”

He looked down and picked at the sheet
absently. He didn’t need to answer. I already understood.

“
They died, didn’t they?” I
asked softly.

“
Yeah.” He cleared his
throat, paused as though he would speak, then cleared his throat
again. “I don’t, uh. I don’t generally talk about it.”

“
Oh. Sorry.” Now I felt
really bad, because I’d stirred up some horrible tragedy in his
mind.

“
No, it’s fine. I don’t like
to tell people, but I should tell you.” He took a deep breath and
exhaled noisily, as though he were resigning himself to jump into
an ice-cold pool. “My brother, Robby, and my sister, Cathy, were
uh. They were murdered.”

His sentence went up at the end, as though it
were a question.

I gasped without thinking.

“
Yeah,” he responded, as
though I’d said something. “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—“

He broke off and closed his eyes. I reached
for him, but he tensed, so I drew my hand back.

“
Anyway, he beat her so bad
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—” He stopped. “I’ve gone
over what
should
have happened enough.”

I had to touch him. I couldn’t stand to see
him in pain.

“
When Cathy got out of
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,” he said, forcing a laugh, as though he’d
done something silly, but not serious.

“
It’s not a burden.” I
thought of the picture he’d been drawing of his brother. “You went
through something terrible. I can’t even imagine it.”

“
I was at university at the
time, but I’d come home when Cathy was in hospital. 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.” He sniffed. Oh god, he
was tearing up. He reached behind his glasses with one finger to
wipe at an eye. “I knew the minute she died. 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. He’d just… Her head
was…”

“
Don’t, you don’t have to
tell me.” I pulled him into my arms and held him. He squeezed me
tight, his face in the crook of my shoulder and neck to hide the
tears I knew were falling. I could tell from every hitch of his
breath that he was crying, though his muscles were rigid from
trying to hold back.

After a long moment, he lifted his head,
sniffed, and said, “Well, now you know it. I’m sorry you do. And
I’m sorry to ruin our morning—”

“
Stop it. I asked.” There
was no way I was going to let him blame himself for sharing
something so intimately painful.

“
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.” He
rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, wiping his 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…” I stopped
myself, so I could phrase it just right. “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.”

“
All the stuff?” he
repeated, cracking a smile.

“
All the stuff,” I
reaffirmed.

He rolled to his side and took my face in his
hands. “And I want to know every fucking detail about you,
Doll.”

Yeah. I totally changed my mind about having
sex, again.

Chapter Fourteen

Being in love
with Ian was like no relationship I’d ever had before. And that
wasn’t just limerence talking. We got along so well, it scared me.
I seriously considered that I might be in that version of
The Matrix
where
everything was too perfect, so the human mind rejected it. If we
did run into situations that called for compromise, we came up with
solutions that didn’t require one of us to silently feel we were
getting the short end of the bargain. If I stayed over at his place
during the week, he stayed at mine on Friday, though I knew he
didn’t care for my bed. I didn’t care for trying to be quiet while
having sex, so I didn’t mind if we spent a little more time at his
apartment than mine.

Rosa had been totally right about this stage
of a relationship. Ian and I couldn’t get enough of each other, in
the very best ways possible. He’d gone down on me for a full hour
one night, savoring me slowly while I came again and again in
orgasms like gentle waves. Once, we’d had sex in the backseat of
his car, parked on a side street at two in the morning, because I’d
mentioned it was an experience I’d never gotten to have, and that
had bummed me out.

The car thing hadn’t been as great as all the
movies made it seem, but it had been great because I’d been with
Ian.

He was so different from anyone I’d dated
before. He didn’t ask me to wear less makeup or not chew ice or
sing along with the radio. There wasn’t anything he did that
annoyed me, either, which was a nice change from constantly biting
my tongue about someone’s whistling breathing or constant nose
sniffing. I never felt like I had to be someone I wasn’t when I was
with him. I didn’t doubt myself for a single moment when we were
together. I didn’t doubt us.

And I definitely didn’t feel
like I had to look perfect all the time, which was good, because by
November, my apartment was
freezing
. Our landlord paid for the
heat, and he never turned it on until after Thanksgiving. So it was
a comfort to know Ian would still want to fuck me later even though
I was wearing a flannel nightshirt and wool socks under the
blankets as I curled up next to him. We were watching the
“Charlie’s Mom Has Cancer” episode of
It’s
Always Sunny In Philadelphia
, with my head
resting on Ian’s chest. On the screen, Charlie flipped out at a
Catholic mass over the amount of standing and sitting, and I
laughed, “Oh my god, is there really that much standing up and
sitting down?”

“
More,” Ian said, adding,
“You should come, sometime.”

What
.

I sat up. “You’re kidding, right?”

“
I…wasn’t.” He pushed
himself up to sit taller against the headboard. “My faith is a very
important part of my life, and I’d like to share that with
you.”

Had I hurt his feelings by laughing at the
show? I guess I could see how he found it offensive, if he did. I
wanted to apologize, but I was more hung up on the part where he
wanted me to go to church.

Like…
church
church?

“
I don’t know… Ian, I’m not
a…god person.”
God person? Where do you
think you are, Greek mythology?

“
I know,” he said gently.
“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.”

I knew he cared about this. I just didn’t
know why. The idea of religion wasn’t abhorrent to me, but I really
didn’t understand it. Signs, I could understand; you only had to
believe that it was possible for coincidences to show you the truth
about what you should do or what might happen in the future.
Believing that a paternalistic God spent his days either ignoring
or torturing the people on Earth, but cared enough about them to
send his son down to get murdered, that was a much bigger
stretch.

Knowing what I did about Ian, though, and
what he’d suffered through over his siblings’ deaths, it made sense
to me that he might want a version of the world that had clear
rules and a cosmic parent looking out for everyone, and everybody
would see each other again in heaven.

And because of all of that, going with him to
his place of worship made me even more nervous. “What if I do the
wrong thing and embarrass you?”