Ian took my coat and hung it up on the long rack provided, which seemed like a pretty trusting thing to do. I mean, it was a church, sure, but if I wanted to steal coats, this would be the ideal venue. I followed Ian into the main part of the building, where the pews were, and it was comforting to see that it, too, looked just like I’d imagined from the movies. Actually, quite a lot like the church from that episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia that had roped me into coming here to begin with.
I could have titled this day, “The Gang Makes Penny Do Something Extremely Uncomfortable.”
“I feel really overdressed,” I told Ian in a low voice.
“Don’t feel that way. You look beautiful, and besides, my parents always insisted that you should dress well for mass, since you’re in the presence of God. It’s just respectful.” If he’d meant for those words to reassure me, they did not. I was meeting his sister and his god?
This was insane. Panic clawed up my throat, and I smoothed my skirt down with clammy palms. “Okay, is there anything I have to do?”
Ian shook his head. “No, God knows you’re not Catholic.” He kept talking about god like he was a real person, and it was starting to freak me out. “You just have to come into the church, sit in the pew beside me, stand when we stand, sit when we sit, kneel if you’d like, and smile warmly at my sister.”
Oh, is that all, Ian? I wanted to snap.
He went on, “Oh, and don’t take communion. You can just stay in the pew when we go up.”
“Go up?” I blinked in confusion. I hadn’t read about that term when I’d googled Catholicism on my phone this morning.
“I promise I’ll give you direction. Please, don’t be nervous,” he said, and I wanted to kick myself for being so uptight. Of course he wouldn’t let me do anything to embarrass myself or him.
I followed Ian to a rack of glass votive holders. Some of the candles burned already. He dropped a twenty-dollar bill into a slot on the rack, then picked up a long wooden taper and started lighting candles.
“What’s this for?” I whispered. Everyone in the seats were mumbling prayers together, and I wasn’t sure if things had started or what, but I didn’t want to be rude.
He lit a final one, the fifth, as he said, “You light them to remember your loved ones who’ve passed on.”
“Oh.” I counted them off in my head. I knew his parents had died, and obviously two were for his brother and sister. The fifth I didn’t know, but if he had another sad family secret, now was not the time to ask about it.
Ian crossed himself before we walked away. He seemed to do that a lot; when we walked in, he dipped his fingers in holy water and crossed himself, too, and when we got to an empty pew, he took a knee and crossed himself. Didn’t his arms get tired?
He gestured for me to go ahead of him into the row. He sat beside me and asked, “I have to go bother Danny for absolution. Will you be all right on your own for a second?”
What? He was going to drop me in the middle of totally unfamiliar territory with a bunch of strangers—chanting strangers—and leave me alone? “Um. Maybe?” I looked around at all the parishioners on their knees, dangling beads over the pews in front of them. “I’m a little freaked out by all the chanting.”
A guy at the front of the church bellowed, “The fifth glorious mystery: The coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth,” and everyone started saying the Lord’s Prayer in unison.
What was even happening?
“Ah. Yeah, I could see why that would be unsettling,” Ian said guiltily as he scratched his neck and looked away. “It’s just praying the rosary. Nothing scary. Sit tight a minute?”
“Oh, the rosary!” I said, a little too loudly, and smacked my forehead with the palm of my hand. I lowered my voice at the startled look from the woman in front of us. “Sorry. I should have known. I’m just a little nervous.”
“Don’t worry, you’re doing fine,” he said with a reassuring smile as he slid from the pew.
It would have been easy to be peeved at Ian for not adequately preparing me for this, but I wasn’t. None of this was foreign to him, so he probably took it for granted that everyone knew what Catholic Church was like. I took a deep breath and reached for the thick, laminated paperback book in the rack bumping my knees. At first, I thought it was a bible, but upon further inspection, it was full of songs—a lot of songs—and various biblical passages. I thumbed through it. The whole production seemed to be outlined. Oh my gosh, it was a manual! Exactly what I needed to keep from embarrassing myself today.
“Cutting it close this week. I should be out there getting ready for the processional. You better not have many sins.” I heard a voice say, and I looked around. Everyone else was looking around, too. It seemed to be coming from the speakers attached to the walls.
I frowned and flipped to the front of the book. It sure didn’t sound like it could be a part of the script inside.
“I always have many sins.”
Oh my gosh. That was Ian’s voice. It was quieter than the other voice—Danny’s, I realized with crashing dread—but unmistakably Ian.
“I don’t have time for the full rigmarole today. Penny’s waiting out there,” Ian went on, and my face flushed. I heard a few chuckles in the back of the room, but mostly there was a lot of muttering as the conversation went on over the PA system.
“Penny! You brought her?” Danny said in surprise. I thought Ian had told his family I was coming.
“Things have been going really well. I thought it might be a good time. Did I mention things are going well?” Ian said, and I cringed. I really hoped he wasn’t about to go into how well things were going.
Oh my god, he was going back there for confession.
I thought I might actually consider crossing myself, at that point.
“You’re lucky Mom’s not here,” Danny said. “No, you’re not lucky. You’re going to hear about it when she finds out she missed the chance to meet the woman who’s been stealing her baby brother away.”
Oh, that was great. Ian hadn’t been joking about Annie not liking me, apparently.
“She’s not going to be here?” Ian asked, sounding pretty upset. “I told her I was bringing Penny. Where’d Annie run off to?”
“She and Dad are on the ladies’ altar society marriage retreat to D.C. She must have forgotten to mention it. They’re going to mass at the National Basilica today.”
We had a national Basilica? What happened to separation of church and state?
Wait, no, I was focusing on the wrong thing. Why hadn’t Annie told Ian she wouldn’t be here? She really didn’t want to meet me. My heart dropped. Ian’s family was important to him. If they didn’t like me, how could we hope to be together?
“Good for them. They deserve to get away.”
A lady who’d been sitting at the front of the church sprinted up the aisle, an amused expression on her face. I assumed she was going to stop anymore of our personal business airing over the speakers for the whole congregation, some of whom were looking at me with interest. My cheeks were probably as red as a tomato.
“Uncle Ian,” Oh, good, he’d used Ian’s name, so everyone would know who they’d been talking about. “If you’re serious about wanting Mom to meet this girl, you’re going to have to bring her to the house. Do you have any idea how much I hear about this?”
“I can only imagine. I wanted to keep my relationship with Penny private while we got to know each other. This is a first step, and a pretty big one. She’s not religious, at all, but she’s here because she knows what this means to me. She’s the one, Danny.”
The one. Ian thought I was The One. Suddenly, his accidental public airing of our private business didn’t seem that bad anymore. Neither did the fact that his sister clearly didn’t want to meet me. I didn’t know what that was about, but I didn’t care, at the moment. He thinks I’m The One.
“I’m happy for you. But if she’s the one, you’ve got to bring
her around to meet Mom. She’s ready to put your tackle in a mason jar over this girl.”
There was a loud thump and crunch over the speakers, and a few people covered their ears.
“Oh no. Tell me that wasn’t on,” I heard Ian say, then, after a pause, Danny said, “Oh, fuck me.”
Gasps echoed all around the room. I pressed my fingers to my forehead. So, cursing ran in the family. I filed that away for when Ian and I had kids.
“For Christ’s sake, turn it off!” Ian shouted, eliciting more gasps. An old woman across the aisle crossed herself. I guess they really took the whole “don’t take the Lord’s name in vain” thing seriously.
The mic cut out then, and I sat, staring straight ahead, totally aware of the eyes on me and the murmurs of outrage from the parishioners. Shoot me now.
No. I wasn’t going to be embarrassed. My true love had just declared me his true love in return. Yeah, it had been in the absolutely most inappropriate way conceivable, but it had happened. When he slunk into the pew to sit beside me, he whispered, “Sorry about that.”
We didn’t face each other but stared straight ahead at the altar.
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. I tried to hold it in with my hands, but it ended up sounding like I was spitting.
“I’m glad you found that funny,” Ian said, a note of humor creeping into his voice. “Danny is going to get a lot of complaints today.”
I giggled and whispered, “Well, tell your sister that if she puts your tackle in a mason jar, she’s going to get a complaint.”
* * * *
I will probably go to hell for even thinking it, but Ian was even sexy at church. Maybe even a little sexier. The suit was a big part of it, but most of it was how genuinely he believed. He wasn’t just reciting words to say them, he truly believed them. Every now and then, he would cast a glance at me, and I would smile to reassure him that I wasn’t about to flee the building. When Danny delivered his sermon—relating to the grim gospel reading about the earth passing away and nobody knowing when it would happen—it was obvious that Ian heard the words of his priest, not his nephew. And when Danny said the gospel was a metaphor not only for living your life free from sin but living your life to the fullest, Ian reached over and squeezed my hand.
After mass, Ian and I bolted. The whole “airing of our personal business over the church PA system” thing was too big an elephant to ignore in the church’s tiny fellowship hall. Once we were in the car, pulling out of the parking lot, he said, “So…”
“If your plan with the microphone mix up was to make my first visit to your church even more awkward, congratulations.” I drew a heart in the foggy glass of the passenger window.
“That bad?”
I looked over at him, and his jaw was tight, like he was clenching his teeth. I shouldn’t have joked. “I’m just teasing. It wasn’t terrible, at all. And I got some really, really good news out of your nephew’s mistake.”
He flushed red and laughed nervously. “Well, now that you know I’m spending my spare time doodling hearts around your name in my notebook, I’m not sure I can look you in the eye.”
“It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have the woman who loves you know how much you love her,” I pointed out. “If you caught me talking about you without my knowledge, you would probably want to change your address.”
He took a quick glance away from the road to smile at me. “It would be that bad, would it?”
“Yeah,” I said, pleased with the still growing grin on his face. “I have a lot of fantasies about our future.”
“So, you’ve picked out the names of our children, then? Planned our wedding?”
He’d poured out his heart without knowing I was listening, so I might as well share the depths of my new love feelings, to even the score. “Have I named our children? Are you kidding? I’ve seriously researched the benefits and risks of epidurals on pregnancy websites.”
“Yikes,” he laughed.
“Kinda makes ‘she’s the one’ seem less embarrassing now, doesn’t it?” I paused. “You like to read, right?”
“Aye, I do.”
Ah, that occasional “aye” that hadn’t been fully replaced by American speech patterns. I was a sucker for that. So much so, I almost forgot my original point. “Right. So. Okay, are you ever reading along, and something happens, something so earth-shattering for the characters that you can’t believe they’ll ever recover from it, so you skip ahead to make sure that everything turns out okay?”
“Chapter sixty-nine of A Dance With Dragons,” he answered without hesitation.
“And when you saw that whatever was happening actually turned out okay, you still wanted to read the book, right? Knowing the ending at that point didn’t ruin the rest of the chapters for you.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Yeah, after I saw that everything in A Dance With Dragons turned out all right for Jon Snow in the end, I felt much better.”
“Well, that’s how I feel about us. No matter what happens between us between now and then, I know that at the end, we’re together forever, and it takes the pressure off. That’s what your nephew’s bad judgment with AV equipment helped me realize today. So, don’t worry about it.” I waited for the rush of fear I would inevitably feel, having spilled all of that out. It never came. The pressure truly was off, because Ian wouldn’t freak out to hear that.
He put his hand on my knee as we pulled up to a traffic light. “So, epidural or no epidural?”
“Oh, epidural all the way,” I laughed. “But that’s a little ways off.”
“Agreed. Right now, we should be focusing all of our efforts on rehearsing the conception.” He glanced in his rearview mirror to change lanes. “Would you care to do that, right now?”
“I think that’s a fine idea.” I walked my fingers up his thigh, thrilling at the way he visibly stirred beneath his trousers in anticipation of my touch.
Practice makes perfect, after all.
Chapter Fifteen
It was too bad I wasn’t religious. I could have used the power of prayer to help keep my hands off Ian as we drove back to his apartment. He’d stayed in the car when we’d stopped at my place for clothes, which was good, because if he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have left for a while. I wanted him so bad, I was already wet and could feel the silky glide between my thighs with every dazed step I took.
There was a high probability I hadn’t even grabbed the stuff I needed in the morning; for all I knew, I’d dragged sweatpants out of the hamper instead of a skirt out of my closet.
But I was a good girl and exercised so much self-control that I deserved a gold star. I even almost made it up to his apartment in the elevator without jumping him.
Almost.
“Easy now,” Ian said with a bark of laughter. “If you want to fuck in an elevator, I have a more private option upstairs.”
“I know,” I teased to cover up my frustration. “I just can’t keep my hands off you. Don’t complain, just go with it.”
Even though I wanted to maul him with both hands, once we were inside, the windows distracted me. Ian had remarked more than once I was dating him for the view, but I couldn’t understand how he’d become so used to just living in a place with clocks for windows. It was amazing! I took my coat off and rushed over to the one in the living room, like I always did, and peered out between the Roman numerals. “Wow, it’s really snowing.”
“Maybe you’ll get snowed in,” he said as he hung his coat in the closet in the entryway. He came over to join me. “We could have a ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ situation on our hands.”
Oh, that song was so gross. “I hope you don’t drug my drink.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“That’s a line from the song. She’s like, ‘hey, what’s in this drink,’ or something. That song is disturbing.” I gazed out at the blowing flakes with a pang of homesickness. I remembered sitting at the kitchen table—I was never allowed in the din
ing room—eating my grilled cheese and tomato soup lunch as my nanny, Theresa, washed up the dishes, watching the snow fall. Though I’d been only six or seven at the time, I remembered thinking, this is normal. This is how other kids live. Later, I’d gone outside and tried to make a snowman, though there’d barely been enough to cover the grass, let alone make into a ball.
I looked at the man standing beside me, whom I planned on being with for the rest of my life. Or…his life. I didn’t like thinking about that. But here we were, watching our very first snowfall together. I wanted it to feel as memorable and as real as that moment at my kitchen table, when I’d felt a sliver of normal. “You know what we should do?”
“Fly to Miami and escape the winter while we still can?”
I pulled a face. “I like the snow. I mean, not this early. But after Thanksgiving, with the lights on everything and the stores playing holiday music, I really dig the snow. I was going to say that we should grab a blanket, go up to the roof, and snuggle.”
“In the snow?” he asked incredulously.
“Not in the snow. You have that little roof thing.” I pointed up. “Come on, if it’s too cold and you don’t like it, we can always come back inside.”
He was going to like it, though. Because I was going to make it worth his while.
“Coming inside is exactly what I wanted to do today,” he said with raised eyebrows.
Even though we had regular sex—and some irregular sex, like when he’d had me bent over the kitchen counter earlier in the week—I still blushed at all of his dirty little insinuations. “Shut up.”
“Fine,” Ian said with heavy finality. “I’ll go upstairs and freeze my bollocks off, all in the name of pleasing you.” He even sighed for dramatic effect.
I rolled my eyes. “I promise I’ll warm them back up for you.”
First Time: Penny's Story (First Time (Penny) Book 1) Page 22