“You’re right, it is important.” Were we agreeing on when we were going to have children? It felt like that was what was happening. There was clearly a reason people weren’t supposed to talk about this on a date. “I would say that if something were to work out, and I were to find myself in a committed relationship within the next year or so, and things were just right… I’d be ready to start. I’m not getting any younger. I just turned fifty-three in July, so the clock is ticking.”
She seemed pleased with my answer. Then, her face fell as she read the next item. “Okay, we talked about number four, so let’s go on to number five. ‘Don’t talk about sex.’”
“We just did, in a roundabout way,” I reminded her. “Unless you don’t know where babies come from. In which case, I have some shocking news for you.”
Her eyes met mine. There was absolutely no humor to be found anywhere in her expression. “Look, Ian. I have to tell you something, and it might be a deal breaker.”
“All right,” I said cautiously. “I suppose if it is, this is only our second date, so it’s better to find out now?” I wasn’t sure of that, myself. Sitting there next to Penny was like orbiting a beautiful star. Though I didn’t believe in love at first sight, I did believe in potential at first sight. It wasn’t difficult for me to imagine being with Penny six months to a year from now. Whatever she had to say, I would try not to make a snap judgment on it.
She took a deep breath, which made me extremely nervous, though I wasn’t sure what I was dreading. Then she said, “I’m a virgin.”
Chapter Five
There was no way I’d heard her correctly. “I’m sorry, what?”
Her cheeks practically glowed, she was blushing so hard. She looked down at her hands twisting the napkin. “I’ve never had sex with anyone.”
“Huh.” There wasn’t anything I could say to that. I didn’t think I’d ever met a virgin over the age of twenty. At least, not that I had known of. “Well, I hope this isn’t a deal breaker, but I’m not.”
She laughed, a short, sharp bark that didn’t sound entirely comfortable. “You have no idea how often I hear that.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.” This was a bit of a minefield. I didn’t want to pry when we still didn’t know each other well, but there was a huge difference, in my mind, between going slow and not going anywhere. “Do you mind if I ask why?”
“No, I don’t mind. The why is, I haven’t found anyone yet that I wanted to have sex with. I’m not super religious, or waiting for marriage or anything. I’ll just know when it’s the right guy.” She shrugged. “If you can’t handle that in a relationship, I understand. That’s where my ex-boyfriend went. I think he saw himself as being able to conquer my virginity.”
“He sounds like a shitty boyfriend,” I said without thinking. Especially since I wasn’t sure how I felt about the idea of a celibate dating arrangement. I’d never had to consider the importance of sex. It had always been a given that I would be having it with the person I was dating. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.”
“No, you’re right. He was a shitty boyfriend. It just took me a while to see it.” She held up her hands. “So, now you know what I mean about ‘going slow’. Like I said, there won’t be any hard feelings if—”
If? That was a big if. On one hand, I liked sex quite a lot. But on the other, I hadn’t had sex since before Gena left, so I’d managed to survive four months without it. I hadn’t even been interested, probably because of the crushing depression I’d fallen into after she’d moved out. And, hypothetically, if I had a third hand, if it was between me walking away and not seeing Penny again, or staying and not having sex for a bit longer…the choice was a lot easier to make than I’d expected. “Well, I don’t know if you noticed last Sunday, but I’m a Catholic. Not having pre-marital sex is something we’re supposed to be very good at.”
“Oh.” Her eyebrows shot up. “I kind of assumed that would be a date-ender. It has been in the past.”
“Nah. I said I was fine with slow. I wasn’t expecting to have sex with you any time soon, anyway.” I took another drink of water. Talking about sex with Penny—even in the context of not having sex with her—made my mouth go dry from nerves. I was like a teenager again, but in all of the shy, awkward ways and with none of the physical benefits.
“Good. Glad we’re on the same page.” She looked down at her phone with a little smirk. “But, just so you know, I give great hand jobs, so there’s that to look forward to.”
I choked and dribbled water down the front of my shirt. “Jesus!” I coughed. “Give a man some warning.”
She laughed. “Let’s go onto the next one, since you just mentioned it. We’re not supposed to bring up religion.”
“Technically you brought it up, by running into me in the park on Sunday. So, are you religious? ‘Not religious but spiritual’? Are you a druid?”
“No. I wanted to be a druid, but I just couldn’t get past the human sacrifice.” She reached into the bag and brought out a nectarine. “I’m not religious. Or spiritual. I wasn’t raised in a religious family, so it never occurred to me to pick up a faith. I went to bible camp with my best friend when we were in high school, but it didn’t change anything. But I am very superstitious.”
“That’s fair. At least you’re not a godless Protestant,” I said, and when she gave me a puzzled look, I added, “Catholic joke.”
“Right, because of Henry the Eighth,” she said, in the sort of polite way someone dismisses a joke they don’t get. She shined the nectarine on her skirt like it was an apple. I watched her bring the fruit to her mouth, captivated by those pretty pink lips sucking away the juice as she took a bite.
“Sure, yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Are there any more items on the list we haven’t covered?”
“Pets.” She shrugged. “It says guys don’t like hearing about our cats on first dates. That’s rude. It’s not like every woman who has a cat is a cat lady.”
“I have a cat, and I’m not a cat lady. Of course, I’m not a woman, either.” Maybe this was why it said not to talk about pets on a first date. I couldn’t have been the only man in the world who owned a cat of his own free will, but I was certainly the only one I knew of.
“You have a cat?” Her eyes lit up. “I love cats!” Her expression immediately fell. “Which is probably the exact reaction ‘don’t talk about pets’ was warning you about.”
“Ambrose is a great cat. And I’m not just saying that. He’s never once peed in my shoes.” I looked down at my shirt self-consciously and picked a long gray hair from it, hopefully surreptitiously. “Except for the shedding. I could do without all the fucking shedding.”
“Hey, you used the f-word!” She sounded like she was congratulating me for overcoming some kind of obstacle.
Still, I felt the need to apologize. “I’m sorry. I do curse a lot. It’s something I should work on.”
“No, it’s fine! I think it’s a sign that you’re loosening up. Maybe all the taboo topics did you some good.” She dropped her phone to the blanket. She took another bite from her nectarine and sucked some juice off the tip of her middle finger. God, she had to know she was doing that, didn’t she? There was no way she could walk around without knowing how stunningly sexy she was when she did things like that. “So. Do you feel any better, now that we’ve made all the mistakes?”
Considering what I’d learned about her… “I do. Honestly, I don’t know why they say not to talk about these things on first dates. It would get a lot out of the way right at the start.”
“But imagine if we’d had this conversation on our first date.” She arched an eyebrow. “At the restaurant. Where you wanted to kill an octopus.”
“The octopus was probably already dead. I didn’t realize you were so passionate about them. I didn’t realize anyone was that passionate about them.” The memory of her tattoo confession came to the front of my brain and lodged there. Since we’d already talked a
bout God and sex, tattoos weren’t likely to be off-limits, were they? “Speaking of which… I have to know where the tattoo is.”
“You don’t have to know,” she countered dryly. “But if you want to know…”
She smoothed her skirt, her other hand still occupied with the nectarine. I took the free hand and held it between my own. Her chest rose with a quick breath, and her pupils dilated a little as we made deep eye contact. Her lips parted.
“Penny,” I said, struggling to keep a straight face. “May I please know where the octopus tattoo is?”
She laughed and pushed my hands away. “Yes, fine. It’s on my right hip, in front. And it’s about the size of a fifty-cent piece.”
Now that I could somewhat imagine it, I wished I hadn’t asked. All I could think about was the shadow of a little octopus tattoo peeking above the line of a pair of white cotton panties. I mentally revised them to pink lace, to lessen the perversion factor, and it still didn’t stop me from imagining dragging those panties down and kissing the illustration on her hipbone before heading farther south, while her back arched and her belly quivered…
“Do you have any tattoos?” she asked, tilting her head as she regarded me. “You seem like the type.”
“There’s a type?” I hated to disappoint her. “No, no tattoos. I’ve never felt the urge.”
“Here I was, imagining that under your suits and ties you were hiding some sexy bad boy past.” She took a last, dainty bite from the nectarine and wadded a napkin around the stone.
“The extent of my sexy bad boy past are some very stupid pranks I pulled in college.” And forty years of sexual deviance. Probably better not to bring that up.
She leaned back on her hands and looked up at the sky. “This was a perfect idea. Even if it’s a little crowded.”
“Is it?” I looked around us. Another couple sat on the grass not far from us, drawing Belvedere Castle in their sketchbooks. On the other side, two young mothers—or nannies, you could never tell in New York—helped their babies stand on the grass. Paths were crowded with cyclists and foot traffic. Yet I hadn’t seen any of it. I’d been too focused on Penny.
“Yeah. I just noticed, myself. I guess I was so caught up in—” She motioned to the basket between us. “Here.” She picked it up and moved it, then scooted closer. “We still have room to stretch out. I want to do something I haven’t done in a really long time. Since Pennsylvania, actually.”
Through various wiggles and shimmies, she ended up lying across the blanket, her skirt neatly tucked around her legs, her hands folded over her stomach. She looked to me, then nodded up at the sky dotted with thick, fluffy clouds. “You have to look up.”
This was a cause for mild panic. I’d never checked in a mirror, but I was sure lying down wasn’t my most flattering angle. Still, I did as I was told and settled down beside her, far too conscious about my stomach. After this, I was going to join a gym, and that was final. “I assume we’re looking for shapes.”
“Yes. And then I’m going to judge whether or not you’re a weirdo or a pervert based on the shapes you see,” she said with a content little sigh. Her arm shot up, and she practically shouted, “Oh my gosh, that one looks like boobs!”
“I was going to say an ice cream sundae, but look who’s the pervert now.” I tilted my head. “The sky today looks like something out of a cartoon.”
“Those are cumulus clouds,” she explained, then said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like a know-it-all.”
I turned my head to look at her. “You don’t sound like a know-it-all. But you do apparently know it all. First octopuses, now this?”
“Octopods,” she corrected me. She winced and didn’t face me. “Sometimes I can be overbearing, I know.”
The casual nature of her apology gave me a clue that she might be used to begging forgiveness for her intelligence. And she was intelligent, almost intimidatingly so. Which was probably why she felt the need to apologize.
Who had made her feel like that in her past? The shitty ex-boyfriend? Her parents? Looking at her, I couldn’t imagine why someone would want to dim the light she exuded.
“Hey, no. Don’t do that,” I said, and she finally turned her face my way. I pushed up on my elbows, praying she didn’t hear how loudly my shoulder cracked, and said, “There’s nothing wrong with being smart, Penny. Jesus, I’m fifty-three, and I didn’t know what that kind of cloud was. I don’t remember what any of the clouds are. I would have said cumulonimbus.”
“Nimbus is only added if there’s precipitation involved,” she said, and caught her bottom lip between her teeth as if to shut herself up.
My desire to touch her presented itself in a physical and a psychological ache. I wanted to do something to make her feel less lonely than she looked in that moment. The smile she gave me was forced, as though she were braced for rejection.
“Penny…” There wasn’t any reason to dance around what I wanted to ask her. “Can I kiss you?”
Her chest rose, suspended on a breath she’d taken but didn’t release. She nodded slowly. “Yes, please.”
Yes, please. Those words did something to me. Something I definitely couldn’t act on in a public park. I rolled to my side and brought one arm over her waist, propping myself on my elbow to lean over her. Her eyes were wide, the pupils nearly obscuring the brown of her irises. Her lips parted, and her hand came up to rest on my shoulder as our mouths touched. And that was all it was, at first, and all I had meant it to be. Just a touch, just to test the waters. And it would have been enough; her lips were as soft as silk, and I could have coasted on the memory of that sensation for some time. But she lifted her head and opened her mouth beneath mine. What the fuck was I was expected to do at that point?
Her tongue slipped against my bottom lip. She tasted like the nectarine she’d just eaten, and I wanted more. I stroked my tongue against hers, and her hand came up to sink into my hair.
I loved first kisses, the pop and fizzles of your nervous system blasting sensation through your body from your mouth to your genitals, the overwhelming nervous feeling in your gut warring with the endorphins flooding your brain in celebration. And this one…oh, this one was perfect.
“Excuse me!”
Penny jerked her head away, and I looked up. The young mothers sitting nearby were glaring at us in disgust. Penny sat up, her face bright red, and reached to adjust her ponytail.
I needed to adjust something, as well, but not with the yoga pants mafia staring at me. I sat up and hoped my cock was keeping a low profile.
“Excuse you,” I said, nodding toward Penny. “The lady and I were occupied.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t be occupied with that in public.” The woman who’d interrupted us had sandy blond hair pulled up in a bun and a black tank top that said serenity across her chest. She was the least serene looking person I could imagine.
“Maybe you should mind your own business.” It was the kindest response I could think of.
The second woman got to her feet, hefting her baby onto her hip. The first woman followed suit, angrily collecting her diaper bag from the grass. The second mother leaned over to strap her baby into its ridiculously oversized stroller—it was the M1-fucking-Abrams of strollers—and turned her head to snap at me, “You’re old enough to be her father. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Ah, fuck. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought of what Penny and I looked like together. I’d agonized over that awful run-in with the law last week and come to the conclusion that any time I went out with her, people would assume she was an extramarital acquaintance of some form, or worse, that she was my daughter. In theory, it hadn’t seemed like more than an annoyance. I’d forgotten to factor in the number of assholes in New York and how upfront they could be about their rudeness. I couldn’t trust my tempter enough to let myself speak; I didn’t want to go my dinger in front of two babies and a woman I very much wanted to kiss again.
I didn’t have to.
&nb
sp; With a sharp turn of her head, Penny fixed them with the coldest narrow-eyed glare I’d ever seen. It was like something out of Orange is the New Black. I was actually frightened on behalf of those terrible women. “Take your ugly babies and fuck off.”
Holy…mother. I almost crossed myself.
I thought the women were going to ignite with their fury, but it was more an anger of the paralyzing variety. They didn’t sputter or try to say anything further, and within seconds, they disappeared into the foot traffic on the path.
“Well,” I finally said, slightly afraid she would bite my head off, too.
She covered her face with her hands. “I am…so sorry, that was totally inappropriate and immature.”
“Well, you didn’t have to insult their babies. That was a bit over the top.” I reached out and stroked the backs of my curved fingers down her arm. “But if this is something…ah.” There was no delicate way to broach the subject. “I know we just met, and this is our second date, but I’m hoping there will be more in the future. And if there are, people are going to comment on the age difference.”
“I know.” She rubbed her arms, a self-conscious move, I assumed, since it wasn’t cold out, at all. “And I know people will be rude, because people are people. But I like you, Ian. I want to go out with you again. I want to make out with you again,” she added with a laugh.
“Well, I’m not going to turn you down.” My throat went dry, and I tried to clear it. “And I like you, too. Just so we’re even on that score.”
I wasn’t sure if the bashful thing was supposed to turn me on, but when she looked down, presumably to hide her reaction to my return of affection, I wanted to grab her and kiss her again. A kiss that would make the last one look like an atheist kissing the Pope’s ring to be polite.
“Look, I ruined our picnic—” she began.
“They ruined our picnic,” I interrupted. “And it’s not ruined. We can still have a good time here.”
First Time: Ian's Story (First Time (Ian) Book 1) Page 5