I laughed and folded my arms over my chest, suddenly self-conscious. He had his dick in you last night. I think you’re safe to be naked in front of him.
“So…thanks, by the way. For making last night…” I shivered, remembering it, and he grinned at me.
“You’re speechless and trembling. I get the picture.” He pulled back the blankets. “Get back in here.”
I shimmied out of his jeans and got into bed beside him, chewing my lower lip. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want to have sex, right now.”
“Feel it this morning?” he asked gently.
“Yeah.” I rubbed my inner thighs. “I think I pulled a muscle, too.”
“A nap is always good for that,” he suggested, and I laughed.
“We just woke up!” I scooted up close to him. “But I’m fine with staying naked in bed all day. It’s so relaxing.”
“I’m loathe to get out of bed, but my contacts are glued to my fucking eyeballs. I want you to stay right here, and when I get back, we’ll talk about breakfast.” He leaned over to kiss me, and I didn’t even mind his morning breath.
“Don’t look at my sad, flat arse while I’m walking away,” he ordered as he headed off.
Pff. I was totally going to look. “I love your sad, flat arse!” I called after him.
When the bathroom door closed, I snuggled down in the bed and held a pillow over my face as I squealed and rolled from side to side. I’d done it. I’d had sex with someone, and things hadn’t fallen apart. He still respected me, he wasn’t going to walk out and leave me heartbroken for life, he was still here, and happy to be.
God, my parents had really fucked me up, hadn’t they?
A memory of last night’s war crime of a dinner stopped me. The thing about Ian’s siblings had been stuck in my mind, but I’d been too distracted to ask. I heard the toilet flush then the water running. I had to figure out how to ask him what was up with the two missing siblings. Were they estranged? Were they…were they dead?
Maybe you shouldn’t ask. But my curiosity got the better of me. When he walked out of the bathroom, still totally, comfortably nude but for the thick-rimmed hipster glasses he’d replaced his contacts with—and holy cats, was that sexy—I sat up a little.
“I wanted to ask you about something you said at dinner last night,” I began.
He grimaced and slid into the bed with me. “Yeah, that wasn’t my finest hour. I’m sorry if I made things… Well, I’m sure I made things difficult for you down the road with your parents.”
“You did, but I don’t care about them.” It wasn’t a shock to realize it, but a shock to realize how little the statement mattered to me. “What I wanted to ask about was your family.”
He paled slightly.
I went on. “You told me on our first date that you were one of nine children. And then last night you said—”
“One of seven. Yeah.” He cleared his throat and did his looking-off-over-there thing that he always did when the discussion became uncomfortable for him. Now, though, I could tell it wasn’t about nerves.
“So…if this is out of line, you don’t have to answer. I was just wondering…why did you leave out the other two?”
He looked down and picked at the sheet absently. He didn’t need to answer. I already understood.
“They died, didn’t they?” I asked softly.
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat, paused as though he would speak, then cleared his throat again. “I don’t, uh. I don’t generally talk about it.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Now I felt really bad, because I’d stirred up some horrible tragedy in his mind.
“No, it’s fine. I don’t like to tell people, but I should tell you.” He took a deep breath and exhaled noisily, as though he were resigning himself to jump into an ice-cold pool. “My brother, Robby, and my sister, Cathy, were uh. They were murdered.”
His sentence went up at the end, as though it were a question.
I gasped without thinking.
“Yeah,” he responded, as though I’d said something. “It was… Cathy was going with this guy. A right arsehole. We never trusted him, not a one of us. But Cathy was Cathy, and she was going to do her own thing. So, she moved in with him—broke my mother’s heart, that they were living in sin—and she got pregnant. And he started beating her. I mean, really, just… She would come over with black eyes and bruises all up and down her—“
He broke off and closed his eyes. I reached for him, but he tensed, so I drew my hand back.
“Anyway, he beat her so bad she lost the baby. Kicked her in the stomach hard enough that he ruptured, ah, I don’t know. Something you don’t want to rupture, I suppose. I was nineteen at the time. I didn’t ask questions. The police were fucking useless. If they had—” He stopped. “I’ve gone over what should have happened enough.”
I had to touch him. I couldn’t stand to see him in pain.
“When Cathy got out of hospital, Mum said that was it, she was coming home. If the police weren’t going to help, well, there were plenty of us to keep him away from her. We thought the prick was at work, so Robby went with her to collect her things, but the guy was waiting and he… He shot them. Both of them.”
“Ian…”
“Ah, I shouldn’t have burdened you with that,” he said, forcing a laugh, as though he’d done something silly, but not serious.
“It’s not a burden.” I thought of the picture he’d been drawing of his brother. “You went through something terrible. I can’t even imagine it.”
“I was at university at the time, but I’d come home when Cathy was in hospital. She was my twin, you see. And when you’re a twin, you do, I know it sounds like an old wives’ tale, but you do know.” He sniffed. Oh god, he was tearing up. He reached behind his glasses with one finger to wipe at an eye. “I knew the minute she died. I was in a pub, having lunch, and I just got this feeling. It was like all the color in the world vanished. I got there before the police did, but there was no chance of saving either of them. He’d just… Her head was…”
“Don’t, you don’t have to tell me.” I pulled him into my arms and held him. He squeezed me tight, his face in the crook of my shoulder and neck to hide the tears I knew were falling. I could tell from every hitch of his breath that he was crying, though his muscles were rigid from trying to hold back.
After a long moment, he lifted his head, sniffed, and said, “Well, now you know it. I’m sorry you do. And I’m sorry to ruin our morning—”
“Stop it. I asked.” There was no way I was going to let him blame himself for sharing something so intimately painful.
“You’re the second person I’ve told. Mostly, it’s just family who knows. After it happened, I went to Glasgow to be closer to home for my mum, went for a more practical profession, and moved here as quick as I could.” He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, wiping his eyes. “Ah, here I am, blubbering like a fool when I should be making you breakfast or going on about how fantastic last night was.”
“No, don’t…” I stopped myself, so I could phrase it just right. “Don’t feel like you have to be happy all the time. Or that you have to protect me from who you are. I want to know all the stuff about you, good and bad and…fucking horrible.”
“All the stuff?” he repeated, cracking a smile.
“All the stuff,” I reaffirmed.
He rolled to his side and took my face in his hands. “And I want to know every fucking detail about you, Doll.”
Yeah. I totally changed my mind about having sex, again.
Chapter Fourteen
Being in love with Ian was like no relationship I’d ever had before. And that wasn’t just limerence talking. We got along so well, it scared me. I seriously considered that I might be in that version of The Matrix where everything was too perfect, so the human mind rejected it. If we did run into situations that called for compromise, we came up with solutions that didn’t require one of us to silently feel we we
re getting the short end of the bargain. If I stayed over at his place during the week, he stayed at mine on Friday, though I knew he didn’t care for my bed. I didn’t care for trying to be quiet while having sex, so I didn’t mind if we spent a little more time at his apartment than mine.
Rosa had been totally right about this stage of a relationship. Ian and I couldn’t get enough of each other, in the very best ways possible. He’d gone down on me for a full hour one night, savoring me slowly while I came again and again in orgasms like gentle waves. Once, we’d had sex in the backseat of his car, parked on a side street at two in the morning, because I’d mentioned it was an experience I’d never gotten to have, and that had bummed me out.
The car thing hadn’t been as great as all the movies made it seem, but it had been great because I’d been with Ian.
He was so different from anyone I’d dated before. He didn’t ask me to wear less makeup or not chew ice or sing along with the radio. There wasn’t anything he did that annoyed me, either, which was a nice change from constantly biting my tongue about someone’s whistling breathing or constant nose sniffing. I never felt like I had to be someone I wasn’t when I was with him. I didn’t doubt myself for a single moment when we were together. I didn’t doubt us.
And I definitely didn’t feel like I had to look perfect all the time, which was good, because by November, my apartment was freezing. Our landlord paid for the heat, and he never turned it on until after Thanksgiving. So it was a comfort to know Ian would still want to fuck me later even though I was wearing a flannel nightshirt and wool socks under the blankets as I curled up next to him. We were watching the “Charlie’s Mom Has Cancer” episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, with my head resting on Ian’s chest. On the screen, Charlie flipped out at a Catholic mass over the amount of standing and sitting, and I laughed, “Oh my god, is there really that much standing up and sitting down?”
“More,” Ian said, adding, “You should come, sometime.”
What.
I sat up. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I…wasn’t.” He pushed himself up to sit taller against the headboard. “My faith is a very important part of my life, and I’d like to share that with you.”
Had I hurt his feelings by laughing at the show? I guess I could see how he found it offensive, if he did. I wanted to apologize, but I was more hung up on the part where he wanted me to go to church.
Like…church church?
“I don’t know… Ian, I’m not a…god person.” God person? Where do you think you are, Greek mythology?
“I know,” he said gently. “And I’m not asking you to be. I’m not under any delusion that you’ll come to mass and suddenly feel so moved by the Holy Spirit that you want to be baptized on the spot. But if you wouldn’t mind coming along once, just to see that part of my life, it would mean a lot to me.”
I knew he cared about this. I just didn’t know why. The idea of religion wasn’t abhorrent to me, but I really didn’t understand it. Signs, I could understand; you only had to believe that it was possible for coincidences to show you the truth about what you should do or what might happen in the future. Believing that a paternalistic God spent his days either ignoring or torturing the people on Earth, but cared enough about them to send his son down to get murdered, that was a much bigger stretch.
Knowing what I did about Ian, though, and what he’d suffered through over his siblings’ deaths, it made sense to me that he might want a version of the world that had clear rules and a cosmic parent looking out for everyone, and everybody would see each other again in heaven.
And because of all of that, going with him to his place of worship made me even more nervous. “What if I do the wrong thing and embarrass you?”
“Are you going to take your top off?” he teased. “Start shouting obscenities?”
“Of course not.” Maybe I was being a little silly. I looked down. “I have to admit, there’s something…weird about it. It’s really intimate, people praying around you.”
“And that’s why I want to share it with you. I don’t expect you to understand or share in my beliefs. But I want you to know me.” He shrugged. “Think about it. I’m not going to pressure you. If somewhere along the line you decide—”
“Do you want me to come on Sunday?” I blurted.
“If you’d like.” His lips bent in a close-mouthed smile of gratitude. “You’re coming over tomorrow night, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. No. Should I do that, though? I mean, spend all night having sex with you then go to your church? It sounds…disrespectful.” I chewed my lip, imagining how awkward it was going to be sitting in a church full of people I was sure knew we’d been getting totally dirty the night before.
Ian took my hands and kissed them, then held them in his lap. “I appreciate your concern. We can stick to oral tomorrow night, then.”
I grabbed my pillow and smacked him with it. For a supposedly mature adult, he could be a real dork sometimes.
We didn’t keep Ian’s “just oral” promise on Saturday night, but I wasn’t going to break my promise. I got up with his alarm and went to get ready in his bathroom, which he graciously ceded to me most mornings. I showered and scrubbed extra hard, like there were going to be sin-detecting dogs at this place.
Not “this place”, Penny. Church.
There had never been a time in my past that I’d had to actually face going to church. I’d gone to a bible camp a few times with a friend, but that had been more of a non-denominational sleep over. I’d been to weddings, and while god had been mentioned at those, they’d been barely religious. It was like hearing about god in the pledge of allegiance or something. Just a word.
But it wasn’t just a word to Ian. It was a huge part of his life, one I couldn’t ignore. I wanted to be with him, and that meant trying to learn some of this Catholic stuff, even if I had no intention of joining the club.
One of the things I hadn’t figured out was how, exactly, I was meant to dress. I should have asked him. He wore suits every Sunday—I’d appreciated watching him get dressed in the mornings, from my vantage point in his warm, comfortable bed, just as much as I’d appreciated pulling his tie off and having my way with him when he’d gotten home later—so I’d taken a cue from that and chosen a navy, boat-necked dress with gray polka dots. I paired it with a gray cardigan and a thin red belt around both then ditched the belt. Something about red leather in a church seemed a little too rebellious for a guest.
I used my straightening iron to smooth my hair and curl under the ends, put on just a touch of makeup, and took a deep breath. Usually, I would still be in bed, waiting for Ian to leave so I could get up and go on my Sunday run and luxuriate in his amazing bathtub before he got home. Now I was worried I was dressed to offend his god.
So just another relaxing Sunday.
I checked my phone as I headed down the stairs. Ian had said we’d need to leave by nine-thirty. It was twenty-five after, and he was still in the bathroom. Diva. “Ian?”
“Yeah, Doll, on my way.”
I leaned against the back of the couch, my black wool peacoat folded over my arms. Ian rounded the corner from the bathroom, rocking the funeral director look hard. It was actually starting to grow on me.
I pointed to my dress. “Is this conservative enough?”
“Yeah, it’s fine,” he said, as though he were bewildered I wouldn’t realize it on my own. “I like your hair.”
“Thanks.” I touched it self-consciously. I liked it a lot better when it was messy and textured. “I thought since your sister would be there I should forgo the bedhead look. I didn’t want her to think it was, you know…”
“Actual bedhead?”
My stomach roiled with nerves, but I tried to smile. “Yeah. That.”
Having never been in a sexual relationship with someone before, I didn’t know how to deal with meeting someone’s family when the night before that someone had been fucking me from behind so h
ard the bed had rattled. Meeting that family in church? That only seemed ten times more wrong. But I’d promised Ian, and this was such a big part of his life. And I totally wasn’t willing to skip Saturday night sex for the rest of our lives.
“You’ll be fine. If it helps, she’s not going to like you the first few times she meets you, anyway.”
“That doesn’t help.” I sighed “I just want this to go well. I know this is important to you.”
“It is. But what’s most important to me is that you were willing to come along, even if it’s just this once.” Ian reached for my coat and helped me pull it on, then donned his suit jacket and long, gray trench coat.
Outside, a few bastard snowflakes blew down from the dreary clouds.
“Oh, no. This is crazy. It can’t snow yet,” I objected, as though I had some power to stop the weather.
“You’ll be in church today. Pray that it doesn’t,” he said. After a pause, he added, “I’m sorry. It wasn’t a comment on your beliefs or trying to change them. I was just trying to be funny.”
Wait, he thought he’d offended me? If he was as worried about that as I was about offending him, we were on a level playing field. I grinned. “Oh, I know. You were just failing to be funny.”
St. Basil’s was located in a tidy working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, about a twenty-minute drive from Ian’s apartment. There was a church closer, but St. Basil’s was where Ian’s nephew worked. If that’s what it was called. I wondered if it was weird, having a family member wield the power of god’s approval over you. Of course, I was still pretty murky on how that worked. Despite how much I enjoyed knowing random trivia about science stuff, I’d never really bothered to look into the whole religion thing. I had a feeling I was about to get a crash course.
I was so jumpy, even my skin tingled as we walked across the small, cracked parking lot toward the brick building. It looked exactly as I imagined a church should look, with a steeple on top and a tall, peaked roof and stained glass windows. We went up the front steps and through the wide open doors, into a vestibule with a checkered floor. People were greeting each other, hanging up their coats, standing around and blocking doors. It was far busier and noisier than I had expected.
First Time: Penny's Story (First Time (Penny) Book 1) Page 21