by K. A. Linde
Still, my stomach turned as the what-ifs piled up in my mind.
With confidence I didn’t feel, I threw the sheet off my very naked body and went in search of my clothes. My thong was crumpled on the floor where Penn had bitten it off last night. I pulled it back on, my cheeks flaming at the memory. My dress was discarded near his desk. I had no recollection of how it had gotten there. The last thing I remembered was him sliding it off my shoulders. Last night was a wonderful, glorious blur.
And, now, the blur was a dull ache in my very, very sore vagina. Holy Jesus, no one had ever mentioned how much it would hurt the next day after getting ridden into next Tuesday. Or maybe…none of my friends had ever had this problem. And by friends, I mostly meant Amy.
Shit, Amy.
I hastily pulled my dress back on and then located my purse, which was on top of a stack of papers on his desk. No idea how that had gotten there either. I reached inside and removed my phone, which had roughly a million text messages. And the time…noon.
Fuck! How had I slept until noon? I never slept in. I had my dad’s internal alarm clock from years in the military.
We were leaving the city today, and I still needed to pack. God, she was going to kill me.
I quickly jotted out a text that I wasn’t dead and would be back soon.
To which I had an immediate response that said, Tell me everything, and a GIF of a girl wagging her eyebrows up and down.
I giggled and then pocketed the phone again.
Now, the problem of Penn. Did I just stroll out there? Did I say anything? Were we supposed to get breakfast?
My inexperience was glaringly obvious in this scenario. I’d seen enough romcoms to know what to expect, but at the same time, I had no idea.
I couldn’t stay in here all day and wait for him to come find me. I needed to make my move. Maybe get his number and meet up with him again in New York. I wanted to kick myself. When would I be in New York? He didn’t know yet that I had no money. That I hadn’t even had an invite to that party and that Amy and I had totally crashed it. I was a nobody. And his family owned this insane flat in Paris that he’d been coming to since he was a kid. He’d taken backstage tours of the Paris opera house, and the chef was a family friend. Last night had been magical, but in the fresh light of day, we felt worlds apart.
I took a steadying breath. I could do this. Maybe our backgrounds wouldn’t even matter. Or maybe I could just say that I’d had the most amazing first time and then leave. Just throw that one out there.
Ugh! I wanted to scream with indecision. Where had all my confidence from last night gone? It was as if I’d lost it all in my sleep.
No, I could do this. Penn felt natural. We got each other on a base level. We could make this work, and even if we couldn’t, then I didn’t need to be shy around him. Lord knew I hadn’t been last night.
I nodded my head once, picked up my heels from the foot of the bed, and then strode from the room. I walked down the long hallway I remembered from the night before and into the living room. The empty living room.
I furrowed my brows.
“Penn?” I called softly as I padded through his flat.
I found the kitchen, which was also empty. A French press was the only thing out of place in the massive room. I turned around and headed back toward the living room. There were clearly a dozen rooms that Penn could be in. Maybe he had a library or an office? Maybe a balcony that he worked on?
I had no idea. But I couldn’t stop the unease that hit me. The sick feeling that snaked through my veins.
Maybe he was just gone.
I swallowed back the rising panic and started back down the hallway to try to figure out what the hell was happening. When I turned the corner, I nearly ran smack dab into a woman in a black dress and white apron.
“Oh my god,” I said, nearly jumping out of my skin. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know anyone else was staying here.”
The woman was a French beauty—tall, lithe, and polished. She spoke to me in swift French. I didn’t catch a word of it.
“I’m sorry. Pardon,” I said, holding out my hands, placating. “I don’t speak French.” I repeated it again in the jointed French I used to get by in the city, “Je ne parle pas Français. Parlez-vous Anglais?”
The maid dramatically turned her nose up. “So, he found an American one.”
“An American…what?” I asked in embarrassment.
She gestured to me as if it were obvious, which only made it worse.
“I see,” I said softly. “Is Penn still here?”
“He left.”
“For the morning?” I asked, my voice getting smaller and smaller.
“What do I look like, his secretary?” the woman asked dismissively. “I’m a housekeeper. I take out the trash.” She looked at me pointedly.
I felt about an inch tall. Maybe less than that. Her disapproving stare only made it all worse.
I’d misjudged him. Oh dear god, how I had misjudged him.
I felt light-headed. I was definitely going to be sick. Or faint. Yes, maybe fainting was in order. I didn’t care how dramatic that made me, but everything was crashing down around me. I wasn’t sure I could bear the walk of shame back to my flat. Or facing Amy. Oh god…that conversation.
“I’ll just…” I gestured toward the elevator.
“Au revoir,” the woman said. She lifted her chin and strutted her tiny hips straight toward the kitchen.
I jammed my finger on the button to take me downstairs. I was a fool. An utter and complete fool. Penn had played me like a fiddle…and hadn’t even had the decency to send me away on his own.
Young, naive, and stupid.
What a way to lose my virginity.
Chapter 12
Down Penn’s elevator, three buildings over, and up another elevator was the distance between our two places, and it felt like miles. I wasn’t sure if anyone noticed me, the girl struck dumb, as I stumbled around in last night’s clothes. France wasn’t prudish like America, but still, I was sure I was a sight.
Amy came running out of her bedroom as soon as she heard me enter the apartment. “Oh my gawd!” she squealed. “You were gone all night. All night! I know what that means. Did it happen? Huh? Did it?”
“Yep,” I said, gritting my teeth. “It happened.”
“Oh no, honey, was it…bad?”
I laughed a slightly hysterical thing. “Bad? No. No, it wasn’t bad at all.”
“Okay, I’m hearing your words, but you seem to be saying something else. What happened?”
She followed me back to my room where I stripped out of last night’s clothes and pulled on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. Comfort clothes. I handed Amy back her dress and heels. Thank god, they weren’t mine, or I might have burned them.
“Uh, thanks,” she said. “Now, spill the details. What’s wrong?”
“I think we need icing for this.”
“Oh fuck,” Amy said. “That bad?”
I nodded, and Amy disappeared to go find a container of icing in the kitchen. It was her mother’s defense mechanism. Every time something went wrong at work or with Amy’s dad or with Amy’s grandparents, we would come home and find her mom sitting in the middle of the living room with her hair in a messy bun and a half-empty container of icing in her hand. Icing was now a go-to for trauma.
Amy came back with a container of icing and two spoons. “Here you go, sister. Spill the deets.” We plopped down on the bed and dug in.
I took a heaping portion of chocolate icing and devoured it. Sugar hit my system like a two-by-four. “He left.”
“Be more specific.”
“We had the most amazing night. Dinner on the Seine in front of the Eiffel Tower, sneaking around the Paris opera house, dancing all night in a club. Then, we went to his place and did…” My eyes cut to hers. “You know.”
“Yes. That is the part I’m interested in,” she said with a laugh, taking her own bite of the frosting.
&nb
sp; I held up three fingers, and Amy nearly choked on her icing.
“Three times?” she gasped.
“Yep.”
“How are you walking? I was so sore after my first time that I pretended to be sick the next day, so I wouldn’t have to walk around like a camel.”
I snorted in disdain. “No idea. Everything hurts.”
“But not just your body.”
I shook my head and stared blankly out the open window. “I woke up, and he was gone. He had a maid tell me to leave. She said she took out the trash.”
Amy hissed between her teeth. “He didn’t!”
“Yeah. So, you were right. Go ahead. Tell me you told me so.”
“I don’t want to,” Amy said. She pulled me forward into a tight hug. “I hate that this happened. I don’t want to be right this time.”
“You knew from the start what kind of guy Penn was. And I just dismissed everything you’d said. I have next to no experience with men and certainly not with someone like him. And he just played me.”
“You don’t know that.”
I shot her an exasperated look. “I do know that. I thought we were connected on some other level.” I rolled my eyes at myself. “What a crock of shit. He was acting the whole time.”
“Do you really think he needed to act with you to get in your pants?” Amy arched her eyebrows and held her hands up. “I’m not saying he didn’t, just that I don’t know that he needed to work that hard.”
“He didn’t,” I agreed. “But I just don’t think he wanted to be at that party. All our conversations are just…well, I see them in a whole new light.” I laughed bitterly at myself. “He told me that he didn’t believe in happily ever afters. That he preferred tragedies and didn’t agree with my romantic notions. It was all in front of me.”
“There was no way for you to know what he was going to do.”
I scoffed. “Except the fact that you told me.”
“What he did was elaborate,” Amy said. “I didn’t know he was going to do all that.”
“Great. So, I found the one guy I wanted to give my virginity to, who happened to be a total con artist. Look at Natalie, great choice in men.” I ate another huge dollop of icing.
“Maybe he just…had somewhere to be?”
I glared at her.
“Okay,” she said. “Maybe he’s just a dick who took advantage of you, and we can burn him in effigy.”
“And now, I’m turning into my mother.”
Amy laughed. “That’ll be the day.”
I flopped back on the bed and sighed. “Did you at least have a good time with Enzo?”
“Truthfully?” Amy asked. “He drank way too much and had whiskey dick.”
I snort-laughed. “You’re joking?”
“Nope. Couldn’t get it up at all.”
“Oh my god!”
“So, at least you got three orgasms in before Dickface left. That’s three more than me.”
I held up my hand. “Five.”
“Five?” Amy asked in disbelief. “You’re not human. What the fuck?”
“Dickface he definitely is, but the man sure knows what he’s doing,” I said wistfully.
“Ugh, I both hate and love that this was your first time. It was so good, and he totally ruined it.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well, forget about him,” Amy said, pulling me back into a sitting position. “We’re going back home today. We’ll be going off to college in a few short weeks. So, it’s like you got it out of the way. Now, you can have as much fraternity dick as you want and not feel like you wasted your first time on some idiot.”
I arched an eyebrow. “That’s your argument?”
“Oh, whatever! College is going to be so much fun. We’ll be roommates. We’ll have as much sex as we want. And we’ll forget all about Dickface. What do you say?”
I laughed. “Let’s do it.”
“Good! We should probably pack. We have a transatlantic flight in a few hours.”
“Don’t remind me,” I said, eating more icing.
“You’ll be fine.” Amy patted my hair and then smiled at me more seriously. “You really will be fine. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I do. I just feel so stupid. Like I should have seen the game he was playing with me. Instead, I only saw what I wanted to see.”
“We all do that when a hot guy blinds us.”
“Thanks for being here for me, Amy.”
“Let me know if you need me.” She smiled and then darted across the hall to her room.
Amy was right. I’d been blinded by Penn. By his James Bond good looks and the way he talked about writing and books. It felt like we had so much in common. But how much of that was real, and how much of it was him leaning into what we’d talked about? Did I make up our connection? Because I’d certainly felt it in bed.
Apparently, I could have a mind-blowing connection with someone during sex, and everything else could be a lie.
I set the icing aside. That was my takeaway. I wasn’t going to be this stupid again. If I was going to have a one-night stand, then I wanted to know where I stood in that regard. Because I didn’t want to fool my heart into seeing more than there was again.
Penn had taken something from me.
Something I could never reclaim.
My innocence.
Oh, how cruel it was.
Chapter 13
Six Years Later
“Don’t you just miss Charleston summers?” Amy asked.
We were sitting on beach chairs outside of her family’s beachside home in Charleston. It was a roasting eighty-five degrees, and we were both lathered in sunscreen with big floppy hats on.
“Sometimes,” I told her.
I’d spent this last summer in Aspen, Colorado, watching a vacation home for an uber wealthy woman from New York. She had wanted someone to take care of things for her in the off-season. I was finally starting to get used to living in these towns when no one was there. Paris in the fall, Turks and Caicos in the winter, Aspen for spring and summer.
“I don’t know why you are taking these jobs, Nat. You know that you can do better than this.”
I’d heard this routine time and time again.
“I did a year of working here and hated it, Amy. I can’t come back here and do that again. Plus, let’s see…all expenses paid to travel destinations around the world with free lodging and unlimited time to write. Plus, I get paid. You do the math.”
“You get paid enough to eat,” Amy said. “If I’d known, when my parents offered you the opportunity to watch their place in Paris, that this would start an obsession, then I would have told them to hire it out in an Airbnb.”
“You’re such a great friend.”
“Oh, I know.” Amy turned to face me, pulling down her sunglasses. “So, how is the new manuscript coming along?”
I groaned. “Never ask a writer that. The answer is always horrible. It’s horrible. The book sucks. It’s never going to sell. My agent thinks I’m a hack, and basically, my life is over.”
“So dramatic,” Amy said with a laugh. “I doubt your agent thinks you’re a hack. She signed off on your first manuscript, right?”
“Yeah. The one that didn’t sell. And the one after that hasn’t sold either.”
“It’s only been two years since graduation, Nat. You’ll catch your break.”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“You could always self-publish them.”
“I would. I really would if I wrote in a different genre. Do you remember Mindi from that Lit class I took?”
Amy nodded.
“She self-publishes and is making bank. Why did I decide to write literary fiction again?”
“Because you clearly hate yourself.”
“Oh, right,” I muttered with an eye roll.
“How long do I have you back in town anyway?” Amy asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe your dream will come true, and I’ll be here indef
initely.” I tugged my hat lower. “I don’t have a gig waiting for me. I’ve put out my resume and recommendations on my agency website that pairs vacation home watchers with vacation homes. I mentioned that I was looking for something else to Elizabeth when I left Aspen, but she is always up in space.”
“Psh, you’ll find something and be whisked away from me again.”
“You can come stay for a weekend.”
Amy grinned at me. “That is a perk of this weird job.”
“I can’t even believe that you think this is weird. You’re the one who did a study abroad where you fucked your way through the Italian Renaissance.”
“Priorities,” Amy said with a hair flip. “And who are you fucking nowadays?”
My phone started ringing noisily from my beach bag. “Oh, look, saved by the bell.”
“We’re not done with this conversation.”
“Oh, yes, we are,” I said, grabbing my phone.
It wasn’t a number I recognized, but I’d gotten used to that after working in this business. Being a vacation home watcher for the uber wealthy generally meant getting random phone calls at weird times of the day and meeting with strangers at the houses for upgrades during the off-season. It wasn’t my favorite part of the job.
“Hello, this is Natalie.”
“Natalie, this is Larkin St. Vincent. I work for Mayor Kensington’s office.”
I racked my brain for why this information was relevant. “The mayor of…”
“New York City,” Lark said as if I were daft.
“Oh, wow! Okay. Well, so nice to speak with you. How can I help you?”
“You were recommended to Mayor Kensington by Elizabeth Cunningham as a vacation home watcher. She’s looking for someone to watch her Hamptons home after Labor Day weekend.”
My eyes bugged. Elizabeth had recommended me to the mayor of New York? Holy shit! Maybe she was even better connected than I’d thought.
“That sounds like a great opportunity,” I managed to get out.
“Great. I’ll send over the details and everything Mayor Kensington has in mind. Let me know if you have any questions. You can always reach me on this line.”