“Yeah, we could do that,” she agreed. She tilted her head to one side, as if she were considering other options. “Or…we could go to my place and do that make-out thing I just mentioned.”
Oh, fuck me. I wanted to. I wanted to so badly my teeth ached. And my testicles, but that wasn’t likely to change with more kissing. “What happened to going slow?”
“I didn’t say you were going to get to round all the bases.” She arched a brow.
I couldn’t do it. There was real potential for us, no matter how improbable that seemed to me when I took the thirty years between us into account. And I’d done what Danny had suggested I do and prayed about things. It seemed strange to me that Penny and I would ever end up meeting in the first place, so clearly I was supposed to have met her for a reason. While God’s intended plan very well could be for Penny and me to be together in a long-term situation, that could also be why she’d wanted to go slow. Every other relationship I’d been in had moved fast, and I was single in my fifties. This could be a sign I was meant to try something new.
Turning her down without hurting her feelings, now, that would be the trick. “I’m tempted. I’m sorely tempted. But you said you wanted to go slow. And I want to respect that.” I glanced up. The teenagers drawing at the edge of the water gave me a flash of inspiration. “I’ve got an idea. I’ll be right back.”
I headed toward the pair. They were dressed like they’d wandered in from nineteen ninety-four with their flannel shirts, stocking caps, and ripped backpacks.
Every time I realized I had lived to see another returning trend, I wanted to jump off a fucking bridge.
“Hello there,” I called as I approached, hoping they were the well-mannered mature kind of teenagers everyone liked and the not some wretched little arseholes who’d grown up with a nanny who never told them no. They looked up with interest, and they didn’t tell me to piss off, so I took that as encouragement. I gestured to the sketchbook in the hands of the kid on the left—she had a lip ring, freckles, and short ginger hair. “I couldn’t help but notice you were drawing. It’s very good, by the way. Are you in art school?”
“Thanks. Yeah, I go to Pratt.” She tilted the wire-bound sketchpad so I could look at it. I wasn’t interested in drawing buildings in my downtime, but this girl was quite good.
“I studied fine art at Exeter, in Oxford.” For a time. The unpleasant hollowness that came with that memory was easier now, years away. My name is Ian, by the way.”
“Lexi,” the girl said. “And that’s Nate.”
“Lexi. Nate. Nice to meet you.” I gestured over my shoulder. “Do you see that girl behind me?”
The boy on the other side of me glanced behind him quickly. He had a goatee and sandy blond hair that dipped into his eyes. “Yeah?”
“Well, I’m on a date with her, and I’d really like to impress her. I was wondering if I could buy your notebook.” The girl’s posture stiffened, and I added, “Not the pages you’ve already done. Just the paper and a pencil. I’ll give you…” I reached for my wallet and opened it. I had one bill. Damn it. “Look, I have a hundred dollars—”
The girl snatched the bill from my hand. “Sold.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.” I waited as she carefully tore a handful of pages free then handed the blank tablet to me.
The other kid fished a pencil from behind his ear. As I took it, he said, “Good luck. Girls like it when you draw them.”
“Yeah, they do,” the other one agreed.
“Yes, and good luck to you, with school.” I shook their hands and stood. I turned to see Penny standing at the edge of our picnic blanket, watching me with an amused smirk.
“Um, what was that?” she asked as I came back.
“Oh, those are my new friends, Nate and Lexi. Lexi was kind enough to sell me her sketchbook.” I held up the pencil. “What do you say? May I draw you?”
An “eep” sound of surprise came out of her throat. “Wow. Yeah. I can’t believe you would pay someone for their sketchbook, just to draw me.”
I shrugged. “Money well-spent. It gives me an excuse to stare at you without being creepy or uncool.”
That wasn’t a joke, but I was pleased that she took it as such, with a little smile as she crossed her legs under her skirt and straightened her spine. Holy God, her nipples were hard beneath her thin sundress. The thought of untying those straps at her shoulders and pulling down the top, cupping those perfect breasts in my hands and running my thumbs over those tight peaks almost made me throw out the drawing idea and go with her plan of heading back to her place.
“Okay, but if you’re going to draw me, you have to make my nose a little shorter,” she said, straightening her skirt around her legs.
“Never. Your nose is perfect.” I opened the sketchbook and set about studying her face. Her nose wasn’t the only thing I found irresistibly perfect about her. Her features were as symmetrical as a face could be without looking unnatural. One eye sat just fraction of a centimeter higher than the other, and was just slightly smaller. Her jawbone was a bit sharper on one side, and there was the matter of that single dimple, the one I wanted to kiss every time she smiled. These were the things that made a portrait, even a quick sketch, look convincing.
Of course, to the subject of a drawing, these perceived imperfections were rarely thought of as assets, and a person could become unnerved by such focused attention. Penny expressed this with a wide-eyed grimace of terror. I smiled. “Just relax. You’re not sitting for your presidential portrait.”
“I’ve never had someone draw me before. It’s kind of nerve wracking.”
“It’s nerve wracking for you? I’m the one performing here.” The worst thing in the world was drawing someone and having it come out unflattering to them. Or to have them just outright hate it but lie to save your ego.
I had enough practice putting that out of my mind. I started a rough sketch of the shape of her skull and the angular guidelines of her jaw. The place where her eyes rested on the bottom curve of the circle I’d started with. The tip of her nose. The space between her bottom lip and her chin. And the placement of that singular dimple. It was a battle to keep my eyes on the page between the short glances I gave her.
I have a bad tendency when I draw to second-guess every line. With Penny as my subject, I didn’t have to do that; I knew her face as if I’d seen it a thousand times. The force of my attraction to her unnerved me. I wiped perspiration from my brow with the back of my arm. Could men get hot flashes from hormones?
“I’m trying to not say anything,” Penny said after a while. “I don’t want to break your concentration.”
I carefully shaded in a bit more at the juncture of her ear and jawline. “You’re not going to break anything, Doll. I’m almost finished, anyway.”
“Doll?” she laughed, and I realized with crashing embarrassment that I’d used the term of endearment on her.
“It’s like honey, or baby,” I explained, cringing at my lack of self-preservation. “It just slipped out. More creepy second date behavior on my part.”
“I’ll just interpret it as you being comfortable enough with me that you could accidentally give me a cute nickname. Where did you come up with ‘Doll’?”
“If I tell you, I’m going to sound like a desperately clingy person you’ll want to run away from.” Damn. I’d made the divot above her lip too long. I flipped the pencil and erased.
“No, you won’t, I promise,” she said, and added, “If I didn’t try to run away from you when you tried to murder a defenseless octopus, I won’t run away now.”
I didn’t get the feeling either of us were running from each other any time soon, so I just told her. “My father used to call my mum that. It’s very common.”
Though, I’d never used it with anyone else before. I’d called Gena “Peach”. Maybe that was a sign. Or maybe Penny bringing the nectarines instead of peaches was a sign.
I thought about Penny and the fortune cookie
from our date before. Clearly, her superstitious nature was highly transmissible. There was something in the Bible about soothsayers, but there were a lot of things in the Bible I didn’t listen to, Catholic or not. It couldn’t hurt to ask, “So, you’re superstitious. What about, besides fortune cookies?”
“You know, horoscopes. Numerology. I believe in signs.” She shrugged. “So do you, right? Signs from God? Isn’t that a Christian thing?”
“It is. I wouldn’t say that I listen to them. But yes, I have had times when I’ve thought maybe I was being pushed in a certain direction.” Toward you, for example. “Sometimes, when something illogical is happening, you have to look for a pattern to make things make sense.”
“Yeah. I know that feeling.” She tried to suppress her smile, but it broke through, radiant, and I had no doubt we were talking about the same thing. What we were doing was absolutely illogical. I should have been wracked with guilt and embarrassment at being interested in a woman so much younger than me. I’m sure she was wondering why she wanted to spend time with me. The mutual attraction between us was obvious; the reasoning behind it was not. If ever there were a time when signs from mysterious forces were required, this would certainly be it.
“So, horoscopes, then,” I said to lighten the moment. “I’m a Cancer, and you’re a…”
“Scorpio. My birthday is actually October thirty-first. I was crushed when I realized that the cause for all the dressing up and candy collecting wasn’t a celebration of my birth, but something that had been going on for a really long time.” She shook her head with a little sigh at the ridiculousness of it.
I chuckled and tilted my head, frowning at a shadow that didn’t seem quite right. “Well, that explains why you’re superstitious. What do the stars have to say about us?”
“What, like, romantic compatibility?” When I nodded, she went on, “Scorpios and Cancers work together really well, actually. I mean, you’re probably stubborn and opinionated, but I’m stubborn and opinionated, too. But both signs have a lot of energy relating to family and home. Our relationship would probably be pretty intense.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“No, it’s not a bad a thing,” she assured me. “I’m Mars. You’re the moon. Your sign is all about the loving and nurturing in a relationship, and mine is about the romance and the passion.”
“You can’t claim exclusivity there. I’m dead romantic when I put my mind to it.”
“I can tell.” The corners of her eyes crinkled when she smiled. “This is probably the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.”
“I’m not going to take too much credit, because this is really the bare minimum.” Titanic had done artists huge favors in the drawing-equals-romance department, but I’d never considered it a grand sweeping gesture. I’d wanted to draw Penny, anyway. I handed the sketchbook to her. “Here, all finished.”
It took effort not to ask what she thought, or immediately make excuses for its quality. Downplaying my skill was something I was trying to overcome. Instead, I watched her expression, perhaps more intently than when I’d actually been sketching her.
Her lips parted; she took a breath. Her eyes moved quickly over the page, and her hand came up to touch her own cheek, as though she were comparing it to what I’d drawn. “Oh my God. Ian…I don’t know what to say.”
“That bad, is it?” Old habits die hard.
“It’s incredible.” Her eyes met mine, and she laughed nervously. “I had no idea I was so pretty.”
“Yes you did,” I accused, gently mocking her.
She nodded. “I am really hot. But this is…this is beautiful. Can I keep it?”
I told her, “Of course,” because as well as the drawing had turned out, I much preferred the physical version of Penny.
Cradling the sketchbook to her chest with one arm, she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. “I love it. I really do.”
It was easily the best hundred bucks I’d ever spent.
Chapter Six
I wasn’t surprised at how easy it had been to spend the day with Penny. What had surprised me was how fast the day had gone. We’d spent eleven hours together. That had to be some kind of record for a second date that didn’t involve a sleepover or a kidnapping. Instead, we’d gone on a walk—during which she’d insisted her high-heels weren’t absolutely killing her—then to drinks that, somehow, had segued into dinner. I’d driven my car into the city, though I hated to do it, but I was glad I had. When we’d pulled up at the curb beside her building, goodnight didn’t happen. We’d kept talking until the sun went down and the foot traffic had become sparse on the sidewalk.
It was bafflingly easy to talk to Penny. She asked questions and was genuinely interested in the answers. When she hadn’t understood what I was talking about, she’d said so, and that had made it much easier for me to do the same in kind. When she’d asked me the difference between a structural engineer and a production architect, I didn’t feel stupid asking her why Sophie’s magazine issues came out a month ahead of time and had to be worked on for weeks in advance. There were no awkward silences; it felt to me like we were soaking up as much as we could hold from each other.
When I happened to look at the clock on the dash, I felt like the kid who has to leave the birthday party early. “I hate to cut this short, but mass is at ten a.m. And Danny is going to kill me if I don’t come to his church tomorrow.”
“Cut it short?” She laughed, her fantastic laugh that had hooked me from the very moment I’d first heard it. “Ian. We’ve been hanging out since two this afternoon. I’m pretty sure we broke a dating rule here.”
“Some rules are made to be broken.” And some clichés will fly out of your mouth before you can stop the wretched fuckers. I turned off the car and braced myself for the temperature change between the ice-cold interior and the humid August night outside. “Come on. I’ll walk you to your door.”
Her door wasn’t far enough away to merit a walk for a walk’s sake. I wanted to kiss her again, and she damn well knew it, from the way she dipped her head as she came around the back of the car. There had been so many times during the day I’d wanted to take her hand and hold it, or in a more extreme sense, push her up against a tree in the park and absolutely ravish her. But we were going slow. A kiss at her door at the end of the night, that wasn’t too sinful, was it?
As she passed me, reaching in her purse for her keys, a hopeless sort of frown passed over her face. My first thought was I had done something or said something, or worse, not done something or said something I should have done. “You look very grim.”
“I was just thinking about how much fun we had today.” She paused, as though more words had been coming, but she’d thought better of them.
And that sad expression never changed, which didn’t convince me she’d been thinking about fun at all. “If that was meant to be reassuring…”
“No,” she said, too quickly, and made a pained face. “I mean, I had a really good time, and I hope we keep having fun. I want to know how this story ends.”
She could have shot me in the heart with a fucking elephant tranquilizer and it would have had less of an effect on me. I’d been completely smitten with her all day. We’d talked about those forbidden, extremely personal topics at the park, but I hadn’t realized that every moment we’d spent together, every laugh—there had been many—and every new revelation, had been another press on an emotional accelerator. Now my heart was a metaphorical car teetering on the edge of a cliff, and I still wanted to slam my foot on the gas pedal.
Fuck it. I wasn’t getting any younger. If the fortune cookie had been right, Penny was the one. I’d waited long enough for her to show up, there was no sense in holding back now. “Maybe it’s better to hope that it doesn’t.”
I leaned against the building with one forearm, and she didn’t move away from the broad expansion of my personal space. She was physically small, but she had a presence as big and bright as a fir
ework. She gazed up at me, wetting her bottom lip with the tip of her tongue—I could still remember exactly what it had felt and tasted like in my mouth—and I leaned down.
“This is ill-advised, at the very least,” I warned her.
“Yeah, I’m way too young for you.” Her breath teased my lips. She pressed her palms against my chest then tugged me forward by two handfuls of my shirt. Our mouths found each other as though we’d done this a hundred times. I truly hoped we would do this at least a hundred times. Her enthusiasm wasn’t just flattering. It was a drug that only made me crave her more. I wrapped my other arm around her waist, still using the wall for balance, which was lucky because our feet became an awkward, clumsy tangle between us.
I heard a car door slam and jerked my head up, praying police intervention would not become the hallmark of our dates.
She gripped my shirt tighter and said, in a half-whispered plea, “Nobody’s going to see. And if they do, they won’t care.”
Far be it from me to argue with her about her own neighborhood. I caught her up in both of my arms, and she leaned against my body like I’d kissed all the strength out of her.
A loud, jingling crash cut startled Penny, and she looked away to shriek, “Rosa!” at a dark-haired woman leaning down to scoop up her keys.
“I’m sorry, I was trying to sneak past.” The woman, Rosa, gave me a steely-eyed assessment. I had the distinct impression she found me wanting. But she looked to Penny, said, “Carry on,” and disappeared through the door.
I stepped back, scratching my neck. “Remember those signs from God you were talking about?”
“Yeah, he is clearly reminding you that you have church in the morning.” She sighed. “That’s my roommate. You’ll have to meet her sometime when you haven’t just been feeling me up in front of her.”
Ah, the over-protective friend. In the past, I would have taken an immediate dislike to the very idea of Rosa. After all, her sage advice might end up being an obstacle to overcome, as it had gone with women in my past. Though I didn’t know her, I was relieved Penny had someone looking out for her. A person would have to be totally oblivious to not notice Penny had been through some painful relationships in her past, no matter how cheerful a face she might try to put on.
First Time: Ian's Story (First Time (Ian) Book 1) Page 6