“It was too intimate,” she went on, seeming a bit uncomfortable with the subject. “O-orgasming in front of someone.”
Having experienced the crushing confusion of that intimacy just moments ago, I sympathized. “Fair enough. In that case, forget I mentioned it.”
She laughed nervously. “I don’t want to forget it. I want you to do it.”
While I was struck positively speechless, she added, “Let’s do it. I’ll call it a trial run.”
I smiled in response, though I remained wary. “A trial run?”
“In case I ever decided to have sex with you, obviously.” She wiggled a little and licked her bottom lip. “So…what do I do?”
You likely continue to knock me off my guard and keep me in a constant state of horny panic. Not that I was complaining. Maybe Annie had been right, maybe Penny did make me feel younger. Because I felt like a fumbling teenager.
I bent my head to kiss her. Kissing bought me time to consider. I gripped her hip then slid my hand up, under her shirt and bra, to palm her breast. A sudden, shocked breath lifted her chest, and I broke our mouths apart to whisper against her cheek. “What you should do is tell me if I do anything you don’t like. And tell me what you do like. I want to learn how to make you come, and it works a lot better with direction than trial and error.”
“Oh God.” Her head tipped back. “Just keep talking like that.”
I moved my hand to the fly of her jeans and tentatively pulled down the zipper. You’ve done this thousands of times, Ian. You know what you’re doing. And I was right. I did know what I was doing. I just had to trust myself to do it well.
And I could do it well.
I petted the front of her lacy panties with one finger and felt a bit more like my sexually confident self. “What? Talking about how much I want to make you come?”
“Mhmm.” Her breath quickened. Fuck, I would make it my goal to give her an orgasm-induced asthma attack, if that’s what it took to make up for the way other men had treated her.
“I bet it’s beautiful when you do.” I stroked two fingers up and down over her panties. They were damp; I bit my cheek to keep from groaning. “I can’t wait to hear how you sound.”
She made a noise, held back by her tightly closed lips.
“Don’t do that. Nobody will hear you but me.” I didn’t relish ordering her about, but if she was so self-conscious as to monitor every moan and whimper, she wasn’t going to have any fun, at all.
“Make me get loud, then.”
Those words, in her sexy, breathy tone, wrenched a groan from me. I couldn’t stand the separation of that scrap of lace, anymore. I tried to push my hand beneath, but her jeans hindered me. While I considered the problem, she simply asked, “Do you mind if I take these off?”
What man in his right mind would? “Not at all. It’ll definitely make things easier.”
She shimmied her jeans down without ever having to stand but left her panties on. That seemed a clear signal that they would be staying on. While I would have loved to see her, I’d rather she be comfortable. Besides, I would be feeling those slick petals soon enough. I would visualize them from the touch of my fingers. Maybe I would sketch her, at least, that intimate part of her, after she’d gone.
Although, there was at least one thing under her panties that I desperately wanted to see again. I hooked a finger through the leg and tugged the lace down, just a bit, revealing the octopus tattoo I’d see fleetingly at the pool. “Ah. Now there is the octopus I have been wanting to meet.”
She giggled and swatted me away. “If you don’t get your hand back to where it was, I’m going to cry.”
“Well, I don’t want that.” I leaned down to kiss her as I put my hand exactly where she’d asked for it. Without her jeans to hamper me, I had far more space. I cupped her, and she lifted up, spreading her legs apart. Was she so hot and slippery just from sucking my cock? I wondered how often she’d gone home from a date this miserably turned on. At least she was letting me do something about it, and for that, I would be forever grateful.
When I slid my finger between her labia to find her clit, her body jerked like I’d shocked her. She grabbed my shoulder and her nails cut into me, even through my shirt. “Easy. I appreciate the compliment, but I also appreciate having skin.”
“Sorry.” She gasped and pulled me closer.
Rolling her clit in slow circles seemed to be a good place to start, if I didn’t want to be flayed alive. Her jerky breathing followed a pattern, hitching every time my fingertip reached the top of the circle. A frown of concentration bent her brows above her tightly closed eyes. Her pulse beat under my fingertip.
“May I go inside?” I asked. It was clumsy phrasing, and desperate; I wanted to feel her clenching around my hand. I wanted to learn everything about her pleasure.
To illustrate my question, I let my fingers wander down, not parting her folds but skimming the crease where they touched. I let my thumb do the work my finger had been doing, and she let out a shaky, “Yeah.”
I held my breath as I pressed my middle and index fingers inside. Not too far, just enough that I felt her cunt grip my fingertips like a goddamn vise, and I groaned because I swore I could feel it around my cock.
“It’s just a little deeper,” she whimpered, shifting beneath my hand.
It took me a moment to realize she was talking about her G-spot. “Thank God you know where it is,” I laughed. “That makes it much easier to find.”
I knew when I found it, because her hips thrust upward and she grabbed the back of the sofa, shouting, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck!”
“Oh, fuck,” I echoed to myself. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever heard her curse. She rocked her hips as my fingers worked tirelessly inside of and against her. All at once, her body seized up, and her mouth opened in what should have been a cry of release, but no sound escaped her. Her cunt clenched four times—I committed each one to memory, so I could fantasize about this moment later—and her right leg jerked. Then she melted into the couch, her face flushed and sweaty.
It had been beautiful and sweet, and far too brief. The enormity of her trust overwhelmed me. She’d let me be the first man to make her come. My fingers were still inside her, my thumb pressed to her clit. I pushed my other hand under her shirt, to stroke the soft skin of her stomach. “Do you want to keep going?”
Her eyes flew open in shock. “What?”
I smiled at the hoarseness and disbelief in her voice. “Do you want to come again? Honestly, I could do this all night.”
“Yes!” she shouted, without hesitation.
If another orgasm was what the lady wanted, then another orgasm the lady would have. It had been long enough that touching her again wouldn’t be too sensitive, but she wouldn’t have cooled off completely. That was the trick of it—waiting just long enough for the oversensitivity to pass but not missing the window of opportunity for the second. I started up the same motion as I’d done before, but now her cunt was snug and swollen around my fingers. And wet, God, she was so wet. Soft sucking sounds followed every slight withdraw of my hand. She arched up, and I moved the hand under her shirt higher, to cup her breast and circle her nipple with my thumb. She was so beautiful laying there, panting and whimpering, that I couldn’t resist kissing her. She grabbed my face and held my mouth hard against hers, sucking my tongue and bucking her hips.
Our lips muffled the loud wail of her release, and she pushed away, pleading, “Okay. Okay, that’s enough.”
I slowly withdrew my fingers and, without thinking, brought them to my mouth to savor the taste of her. Someday I wanted to lick all that salty, musky juice straight from the source, to hold her hips down and feast on her while she thrashed and begged to come again.
At the moment, Penny was staring at me with wide eyes, her chest still heavy with jerky breaths. I couldn’t help my smirk of satisfaction. “Is there anything I can get you?”
“Water.” Her voice was the very sound of a
desert.
I kissed her cheek. “I’ll be right back.”
As I rummaged through the refrigerator for a bottled water, I heard her laugh. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. Just tons of endorphins.”
“Ah.” My inner caveman roared with pride. I returned to the couch and handed her the water. “I suppose I’ve done my job.”
“More like charity work,” she said with a snort.
“Then I’ll consider myself a philanthropist, because I’m keenly devoted to the cause.” Sitting, I put my arm around her. She was game to cuddle, pulling her feet up on the couch and leaning against me, cradled in the crook of my arm.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“You’re more than welcome.” I would do it again, right that moment, if she asked me to.
“No, I mean, thank you. For not pushing me for more.” Her voice wobbled. “It’s really nice to be treated like a person and not a challenge.”
Jesus. Was that why she’d never let anyone touch her before? Because she was afraid they were trying to conquer her?
I gave her an awkward hug with the one arm I had around her. “Penny, I really don’t care if you sleep with me. I hope we see each other long enough that we do, but if it never happens, I won’t feel like you’ve deprived me of anything. Being with you has been the best part of the last few weeks.”
It surprised me exactly how true that was. Penny had been better than every family dinner, every night relaxing in front of the television, even the prospect of a shiny new job and the bags of money that would come with it. Penny occupied a huge space in my brain, and every moment we spent together, she took up more room there. And I didn’t care. She could have every last bit of space, if she wanted it.
She took my hand and said, “You know…you’ve been the best part for me, too.”
Even better than the octopus? I wanted to ask.
But I figured I should quit while I was still ahead.
Chapter Ten
Since I hadn’t been spending as much time with family as I should have been, I stayed at Annie’s to watch the Yankees get demolished by the Detroit Tigers. I didn’t live for sports the way some people did, certainly not the way Bill and Danny did, but it wasn’t the worst way to spend an afternoon. And it gave me a distraction to keep me from calling Penny like the lovesick fool I was.
I drove home on autopilot, my brain totally consumed with Penny. Since I’d met her, she’d been all I could think about. Every time I blinked, I saw her smile. Or her lips wrapped around my cock for the entire second I’d lasted once they’d been there. There was no sense in fighting it anymore. I loved her, in that first rush of new love way that was irresistible even with herculean effort. And considering the year I’d had, I didn’t have that much emotional resistance in the first place.
I pulled into my building’s parking lot and hesitated before I turned off the engine. My hand curled around my phone. I’d called her out of the blue last Sunday. I didn’t want her to think I would make a habit of summoning her, like some arsehole who didn’t want her to have her own life. And after what we’d done the night before, I certainly didn’t want her to get the impression that I was calling because I was after her for sex.
Granted, what we’d done had stopped short of what most people would call sex. It had been nearly everything, and almost more intimate. The importance of that wasn’t small, to my mind. The last thing I wanted was for her to think I was using her.
You can call her when you get inside, I told myself, because it would keep me from driving over to her place. My feet hurt, my knees ached, and I was feeling every day of my age after the late night. I planned to get upstairs and leave my clothes like a trail of breadcrumbs from the door to the bedroom. Then it would be safe to call her, because no power on Earth, no matter how sweet and blond and incredibly wet and tight that power was, would be able to get me back in the car at that point.
A trail of breadcrumbs from the door to a very cold shower it is, then.
I grabbed my jacket and tie and headed for the building, jingling my keys in my pocket as I went. Too distracted by my thoughts of Penny, I didn’t notice her standing outside my door until I’d almost run into her. Then I wasn’t sure if she was there, or she was just some horny hallucination I was having. “Penny?”
She turned slowly. Her hair was wet, she didn’t have any makeup on, and though I would have been delighted to see her in her tiny shorts and tight tank top on any other occasion, she was shivering and distraught. That was a bit of a mood killer.
“I’m sorry, I should have called—”
“Are you all right?” How did she expect me to worry about etiquette when she looked so thoroughly broken? I cupped her jaw and gazed down into her red, tear-filled eyes, and wondered what the hell had happened to do this to my normally cheerful, upbeat Penny.
I didn’t have to ask. The answer poured from her, unprompted, riddled with hiccupping sobs that sounded physically painful. “I saw… I ran into my ex-boyfriend at the park, and— With his fiancée and his baby.”
Our Father who art in Heaven, give me the strength to not look up that miserable fucker’s name and do something that would end with me in a holding cell. I couldn’t make Penny’s pain go away, at least, not by slashing someone’s tires. I didn’t know the details of her last relationship, but this clearly affected her deeply, and I hated how helpless I felt in the face of her pain.
“Come here.” The only thing in my power at the moment was whether or not I would hug her, and that was an easy choice to make. She stepped into my arms, and I pulled her close, squeezing her perhaps a bit too hard. If I could have poured all my sympathy into her to displace her pain, I would have. Her skin was shockingly cold, despite how balmy the evening was. “Let’s get you inside.”
“I’m sorry,” she kept saying, all the way up to the apartment. Every single one of them pierced my heart. I wanted to tell her not to be sorry, that she was never going to be an inconvenience to me, but at the moment, I didn’t think it would get through to her.
“What you need are some warm clothes and a stiff drink.” I didn’t actually know if that’s what she needed, but it had been my mother’s go-to remedy for many emotional traumas.
I steered her into the living room and wrapped the blanket from the couch around her shoulders. “Stay here, I’ll be back.”
Gena hadn’t left anything behind, and thank God for that, because it would have been disturbing in the extreme to put my new girlfriend in my ex-wife’s clothing.
If Penny was my girlfriend. I didn’t quite know where we stood on that, and tonight was clearly not the time to find out.
I went to the closet and pulled out the storage tub of my winter clothes. There was a particularly soft green sweater in there, as well as a pair of flannel sleep pants with a drawstring waist she could cinch up. I brought them back to the living room, and she accepted them gratefully.
“Go change. I’ll get you a drink. What’s your poison?”
She stared back at me blankly. “I have no idea.”
“Okay. Well, I’ll improvise.” I leaned down and kissed her forehead, and she hugged the clothes tighter to her chest.
I went to the kitchen and searched the cupboards. The best I could come up with was Glenlivet Nádurra. If that didn’t warm her up, she might actually need to be put in an oven.
I poured her a glass and took one myself, both neat, and went to the living room just as she emerged from the bathroom. My clothes swallowed her up; she’d rolled up the pant legs and pulled the sleeves around her fists, and now, she looked even more vulnerable than she had when she’d been trembling and sobbing.
She sat beside me and took her glass. She swallowed the two fingers as though it were a shot. Then her gaze flicked to mine.
“I’ll go get the bottle,” I said grimly. When I came back, my glass was also empty. I refilled them both and sat. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,”
she said, but she nodded. She pressed her fingertips to her forehead. “Brad and I broke up in May. And today, I ran into him with his fiancée and their four-month old baby.”
I counted backward. “Jesus, Penny…”
“I know. And God knows how long it was going on.” She frowned. “I think they might have been living together. Maybe in January? We suddenly stopped going to his place, then. He said his roommate was off his meds.”
She stood and paced in front of the window, glass in hand. “I keep going over it in mind. I was standing in the shower, trying to think of every little thing, every way I should have known what was going on, and none of this came up. I feel like such an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot.” That probably wouldn’t help her much. Nor would telling her that this ex-boyfriend was the idiot. She already knew that. “Sometimes, we want to love a person more than they deserve to be loved by us. And we’ll do a lot of rationalizing to fool ourselves into believing that they deserve it.”
She nodded miserably and took a drink, scrunching her face up as she swallowed. “This girl was so totally into him. She looked at him like he was every dream come true. I keep thinking I should have warned her, but why? What if they’re actually meant to be together, and he never does anything awful or hurts her at all?”
“Then you’ve ruined their happiness for nothing,” I agreed, not because I thought the scenario was plausible—a man willing to string along two women until one of them is in imminent danger of giving birth isn’t likely to change his stripes—but because Penny couldn’t take responsibility for that. “It’s not up to you to help her realize what he is. If you’d told her, do you think she would have believed you?”
“No. I would have been the psycho ex-girlfriend.” She paused to take another long swallow from her glass. It was nearly empty. She held it out to me. “This stuff isn’t expensive, is it?”
“No.” I held out the bottle. “Just don’t get yourself alcohol poisoned.”
First Time: Ian's Story (First Time (Ian) Book 1) Page 13