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

by Abigail Barnette

  “Danielle, this is Penny. Penny, this is my fiancée, Danielle.”

  Danielle. I knew that name. He’d mentioned her in passing every now and then, when she’d texted him about work, or when he’d gone out with a group of office friends. “About work?” How could you be so stupid, Penny?

  “Penny and I…used to date,” Brad said, and he looked at me with such a pleading expression I was sorely tempted to ask her if she knew we’d both been dating him at the same time.

  But Danielle’s face showed no trace of jealousy or triumph or pity. She smiled wide with perfect, white teeth and put her hand out. “Hi, Penny, it’s nice to meet you.”

  “Wow, fiancée,” I repeated, hoping my smile didn’t look as fake as his did. “And you have a baby.”

  “Yeah.” She looked at Brad the way I used to look at him, love and adoration forged under the heat of his awe-inspiring charisma. And who could blame her? He was the epitome of tall, dark, and handsome, and he could swing from brooding and romantic to open-hearted and vulnerable with every change of his partner’s mood.

  And it was all fake. There wasn’t anything deep or honest about him. He’d drawn me in the same way he’d obviously drawn Danielle in, and we’d both fallen for it.

  I wanted to vomit on his shoes.

  I realized that over the sound of the buzzing in my ears, Danielle was still talking. “—even though she was a surprise.”

  “Aren’t surprises just…the best?” I asked, feeling a knot of tears welling in my throat. “How old is she?”

  “Four months,” Danielle answered, with all the pride of a new mother.

  Meanwhile, I was frantically counting backward. Brad and I had broken up in late May. He’d waited. My god, he’d strung us both along, right up until she was ready to give birth? Or maybe even after?

  How could he have done this to me? To either of us, really? I wanted to hate her, but I couldn’t believe she had any idea. She seemed very nice and enthusiastic to share the details of her romance with my boyfriend.

  But he wasn’t my boyfriend, anymore. And he apparently hadn’t been, for god only knew how long.

  “Well, congratulations, to both of you.” I gestured to my Fitbit. “I don’t want to be rude, but I’m trying to keep my heart rate up. Training, you know?”

  “Of course,” Brad said, as eager to get away from me as I was to get away from him and his perfect new life with his perfect new fiancée who wasn’t me and his perfect baby that wasn’t ours. “It was nice to see you, Penny.”

  I gritted my teeth and replied, “You, too. And it was nice to meet you, Danielle.”

  I managed to keep running until they were out of sight. Then I doubled over, gasping. I stumbled like a zombie to the nearest train and headed back to my apartment, on the verge of tears the entire time. I hated crying in public. I refused to do it.

  By the time I got to the apartment, though, I no longer felt the urge to weep. I was angry. Really angry. But I was numb, too. Numb was the worst thing to be. I showered, replaying every moment of the regrettable meeting in my head. I imagined angrily confronting him, right there in front of his new family. Telling Danielle everything and watching his whole life hopefully crumble. But that would hurt Danielle and whatever the hell the baby was called. I hadn’t caught the name. Brad might hurt them, but he might not. Maybe fatherhood would change his spots. But it wasn’t my place to destroy another woman’s life, just because my ex had acted shitty to me.

  I also thought about calling him and screaming at him over the phone. Or going to his work and physically assaulting him. Obviously, I wouldn’t act on that. I was embarrassed that I actually thought of it. And I considered, for a brief, wild moment, begging him to take me back. But I didn’t want him back. I just wanted to win. Or something. My brain was overwhelmed by a rush of emotion I couldn’t control.

  And I felt guilty. So, so guilty. Because I had moved on, or I thought I had. I loved Ian, and even though it was a new, fragile love, I felt like a traitor for even considering I might still have feelings for Brad. Or that I would want that snake over a guy who had treated me better in four dates than Brad was ever capable of treating me.

  When I got out of the shower, my phone was blinking. I wrapped my towel around myself and reached out with a shaking hand. It was a text from Brad. Had he sent it while he was still out bonding with his fiancée and baby? The thought made my skin crawl with disgust.

  Thank you for your discretion at the park today. I never meant for you to find out this way.

  Bullshit. He had never meant for me to find out.

  How long was this going on? I texted back. You owe me an answer.

  It took a minute, a full minute of me staring at the screen before I gave up and moved to drop it. But the familiar chime rang out, and like Pandora opening her stupid box, I looked at his response.

  Since last July. I’m sorry, Penny. But you kind of brought this on yourself. You couldn’t really expect me to go on for years waiting for you.

  Waiting for me. Waiting for me to sleep with him. It was somehow my fault he hadn’t been able to stick to the terms of our relationship, or end things with me before picking up another woman and dating her for almost a year before breaking things off with me.

  There were so many things I wanted to say, so many names I wanted to call him, but that would only make him feel smug and right. So I shot back, Lose my number. And then, I erased him from my contacts altogether.

  I sat on the edge of my bed, my hands shaking. I needed to talk to someone. I needed to not be alone in the apartment, where I was dangerously close to snapping and breaking everything that could be broken.

  This is stupid, I warned myself as I dressed. You’re being stupid, and you’re probably going to ruin everything. I tried to pretend I didn’t know my own intentions as I locked the apartment door behind me. But my heart knew better, and it overrode my brain to direct my feet to the subway, to the familiar route I rode every day. I got off a stop early and kept my head down as I walked, ignoring my usual instinct to stay wary of my surroundings, especially at twilight. I reached Ian’s door and pushed the buzzer. There was no answer.

  I’d come all this way for nothing. It was clearly a sign that I shouldn’t have come at all.

  “Penny?”

  I turned at Ian’s voice. He didn’t sound angry, but pleasantly confused. Then he saw my face, and I realized how I must look, standing there with stringy, half-dry hair and no makeup, shivering because I’d worn a tank top and shorts and the night was unusually cool.

  I was so embarrassed. “I’m sorry, I should have called—”

  “Are you all right?” He was still dressed for church, but he carried his tie and his jacket in one hand. With the other, he reached out and cupped my jaw, looking down with such tender concern that I couldn’t hold back my tears anymore.

  “I saw… I ran into my ex-boyfriend at the park, and—” It was too difficult to keep talking through the sobs that wracked my shoulders and back, but I managed to sputter out, “With his fiancée and his baby.”

  “Come here.” It wasn’t a suggestion, but an order, and one I gladly obeyed. Ian pulled me into his arms and held me tight, as if he could squeeze all the pain out of me. The sound of his breath against the top of my head eased my heart. “Let’s get you inside.”

  Chapter Ten

  The only thing I could think of to say as Ian led me to his apartment was, “I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what I was sorry for. For showing up uninvited? For bringing my past boyfriend problems to my new boyfriend’s door? For ever dating Brad in the first place?

  I was sorry for it all, but the last one especially. My heart was in my stomach, and my stomach was ready to expel it onto the floor. I let Ian walk me from the elevator to his couch. I was shivering, and he took it to mean I was chilled. “What you need are some warm clothes and a stiff drink.”

  Was I cold? I was definitely numb. He draped the throw from the back of the couch around
my shoulders. “Stay here, I’ll be back.”

  I pulled the blanket tight around me. The air conditioning in the building was an arctic assault that made me long for the humidity outside. My hair felt like it would never get dry. I should have been embarrassed to be seen like this by Ian, but I didn’t care about anything.

  That scared me. I’d thought I was over Brad, or as over him as I could get after a few months. I hadn’t reacted this badly when we’d broken up. I’d done the days of crying thing, then I’d flown to Las Vegas with Deja and Sophie and Holli on an amazing private jet and partied until I couldn’t see straight. Maybe that trip, and the feeling that I’d left my cares in the desert, had tricked me into believing I was all better, when I wasn’t.

  So what was I doing here, with Ian, if I wasn’t over my ex? I liked Ian so, so much. I loved him, the new and exciting kind of love, not the kind that destroyed your entire life when you found out the person you loved had basically had a secret family for the last third of your relationship. Now that I’d found out so much of my time with Brad had been a lie, I had to start getting over him, all over again. Did that make the way I felt about Ian a lie, too?

  The thought made me even more furious with Brad. It was one thing to dump me, another thing entirely to lie about having some kind of weird double life while he was dating me. But now his actions and my responses to them made me doubt the one really good thing I had going at the moment.

  That hit me like a physical punch to the chest. Ian was the one good thing I had going for me? I hadn’t realized it, but yeah, I really did think of him that way. And that was depressing, because my life should have been way better than just, “yay, one person!”

  Where had I gone wrong?

  Ian came back with a dark green merino wool sweater and some gray flannel sleep pants. He handed them to me, and all I could do was stare up at him.

  “Go change,” he ordered gently. “I’ll get you a drink. What’s your poison?”

  Crappy boyfriends. “I have no idea.”

  “Okay. Well, I’ll improvise.” He leaned down and kissed my forehead, and my arms tightened around the clothes he’d given me. It was second best to hugging him, which I badly wanted to do, but I was pretty sure would make me cry again.

  When I turned on the bathroom light, my reflection scared me. I looked like I’d just shuffled in from the set of a zombie movie. My hair was stringy, and I was pale. My eyes were bloodshot and ringed with dark circles. At least my nose was an attractive shade of raw red. No wonder Ian thought I needed some kind of John Wayne-esque treatment for shock.

  I took off my top and shorts and pulled on his sweater. I’d kind of expected it to smell like him, but it just smelled like laundry. I had to cinch up the drawstring waist and roll up the legs to make the pants fit, but there was something comforting about wearing clothes that were way too big, especially when I felt so emotionally small and fragile. It was like armor; hurt would have to penetrate a lot of cloth folds.

  All the clothing in the world wouldn’t have made me feel less naked on the walk back to the living room. Vulnerability was the worst, because people expected it of me. Especially men. Being little and blond and cute was fun when people were underestimating me and I got to turn the tables. It sucked when I just wanted to have a human moment and not be treated like a kid whose birthday got ruined. I rolled the ends of the sweater over my clenched fists and tried to ignore the pity in Ian’s expression as I joined him on the couch. He’d left a glass of something for me on the coffee table, beside another that I assumed was for him. I took mine and tossed it back in one gulp. It burned on the way down, but I carefully composed a blank face. It was embarrassing to look…broken.

  My eyes flicked down to the glass in his hand, and he offered it to me. “I’ll go get the bottle.”

  Was I trying to act tough? I didn’t know. I did know that I wanted my head to be as numb as my mouth was from the alcohol, which I was pretty sure was whisky. I finished it off as he came back, and he refilled both of our glasses.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked. The genuine sympathy in his voice made me ashamed of myself. I was acting so…not the way I wanted to be acting.

  I nodded, but I said, “No.” Then I launched right in, because it seemed like maybe it would justify why I was there and why I was behaving so oddly. “Brad and I broke up in May. And today I ran into him with his fiancée and their four-month-old baby.”

  I paused to give him a moment and watched as the realization dawned on him. “Jesus, Penny…”

  “I know. And god knows how long it was going on.” But I sort of did know, now that I was saying it out loud. “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.”

  How could I have been so stupid? Why would he have stayed in that situation if Jeff had been so dangerously unhinged? Brad hadn’t been coming over as often as he had in the past, and it seemed like he would have wanted to be out of the apartment as much as possible if he was having so much roommate difficulty. He hadn’t even mentioned finding a new place, beyond a non-committal, “Uh huh,” when I’d suggested it.

  I was pacing, but I couldn’t stop. “I keep going over it in my 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,” Ian said, almost before I was finished saying the word. “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.”

  He was speaking from experience, I realized. I didn’t really know what had gone down between him and his ex-wife, aside from what he’d told me at the park. I had a feeling it went deeper than a few tossed off sentences, or else she wouldn’t be his ex-wife. Maybe he would tell me, someday.

  At the moment, I chose to selfishly wallow in my own pain. I nodded in agreement with him and took another drink. I didn’t bother to hide my reaction to the taste this time. The worst part of the entire thing was, I wanted to be mad at the other woman—I didn’t want to think of her name or admit to myself that I even remembered it, even though it would be burned into my brain forever—but I just couldn’t muster up the will to hate her. “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.” From the look on his face, Ian didn’t see it the same way I did. Honestly, I didn’t see it that way, either, but it was the only thing I had to make me feel better about how things had turned out. If Brad was someone else’s destiny, then there was a destiny out there for me, too.

  “It’s not up to you to help her realize what he is,” Ian went on gently. “If you’d told her, do you think she would have believed you?”

  “No. I would have been the psycho ex-girlfriend.” It smarted, but it was true. Brad would have been able to wriggle out of whatever I might have said. I drank some more of my whisky, but it was almost gone. I held it toward Ian. “This stuff isn’t expensive, is it?”

  “No.” He handed me the bottle. “Just don’t get yourself alcohol poisoned.”

  I knew what that meant. “Or vomit in your apartment?”

  “Ah, Penny. There aren’t many people I’d let vomit in my home, but you’re one of them.”

  It was an oddly sweet sentiment, and it made me laugh. I tried to pour myself another, and the liquid ended up teetering right on the rim of the glass. I stopped it from spilling just in time. “I shouldn’t have run over here to tell you all of my ex-boyfriend problems. That’s not fair. You’re trying to be the new boyfriend.” Oh, shit. Was I so drunk that I was really going to start spilling my feelings everywhere?
<
br />   Yes. Yes, I was.

  “I mean, I think you were,” I went on. “I got the impression that you were interested in the position.”

  “Definitely. I hope I’m still in consideration.” He kept a nervous eye on my glass. Pff. I wasn’t going to spill it.

  But I drank about half of it, just to be sure, then put it on the table and wobbled over to sit beside Ian on the couch. “I think it was because I made him wait too long. Two years, you know…”

  “So you were supposed to have sex with him to keep him from cheating on you?” Ian sounded outraged at the idea. Oh my gosh, his outrage was so cute. “That wasn’t your responsibility. If he wanted to go off and fuck somebody, he should have fucking well broken up with you first.”

  “You’re swearing a bunch.” That was so hot. I could barely even get my voice to rise above a whisper. It was nice to have someone swearing on my behalf. Or maybe it was just the whisky. Mostly the whisky. Probably.

  “I can stop,” he offered.

  “No, you can’t.” And I didn’t want him to. I never thought I would really want a guy who would get mad and punch another guy to defend my honor. And Ian wasn’t offering to. But he was saying all sorts of angry, offensive words about the guy who hurt me. It made me want to text Brad and tell him, ha, look! This guy wants me enough to fight for me.

  But Brad wouldn’t care. That just made me feel hollow.

  Ian sighed. “This prick… He’s the kind of man who’ll sleep around on you whether you’re sleeping with him or not. This other woman was sleeping with him, and he was still seeing you. He was just—”

  I knew what he was going to say. Brad had wanted to be the first. He’d wanted to get to the end of the level and defeat the final boss.

  All I could do was nod in defeat and say, “I know. I know why he was still with me.”

  The fact that Ian had figured it out somehow made things ten times worse. It was humiliating. When he put his arms around me, I couldn’t hold back my tears. I leaned on his shoulder, taking comfort in the solid warmth of his body. There was also a sort of pain in it, a feeling of intimacy that defied the newness of our connection, making me ache for more.