First Time: Ian's Story (First Time (Ian) Book 1) by Abigail Barnette Read Free Book Online Page A

so cool!”
    I didn’t want to say, “Yes, it’s very
fucking cool to get amazing morning views from a fuck off huge
clock on all four sides of my apartment,” so I just nodded.
    “ I would love to see it,
sometime,” she said, then sheepishly added, “You know…if you’re
cool with that.”
    “ I think I could be very
cool with that.” I hoped. What if I did bring Penny home and I had
some kind of meltdown? That was something that hadn’t occurred to
me since Gena left. How was I going to feel about having another
woman in what had been our marital home?
    “ Ian?” she asked, and I
cringed, realizing my mind had wandered off with Gena.
    “ Sorry,” I said quickly. But
I didn’t have an excuse to follow it up with.
    Penny pursed her lips and
narrowed her eyes, and I thought, this is
it. She’s going to walk . Instead, she said,
“You seem really tense. You weren’t reading a bunch of bad dating
advice, again, were you?”
    God bless her for providing
me with the perfect out. Because I really had been reading online dating
advice, and she would know better than I would if it was of the
terrible variety. “I may have done.”
    She raised an eyebrow.
    “ You should be impressed.”
My defensiveness was about ten percent serious. “Do you know how
difficult it is to find second date advice?”
    She leaned toward me. “You made it to the
second date. That means whatever you did on the first date was
fine.”
    “ Was it?” I shrugged
helplessly. “I don’t know these things. I’m rubbish when it comes
to dating.”
    “ You’re doing fine. But
where are you getting your advice?” She pulled out her phone.
“Never mind. I’ll look it up. What did you google?”
    I settled for the least embarrassing search
terms I’d used, because I certainly wasn’t going to tell her about
“how to impress a lady” or “dating tips for middle-aged men.”
    “‘ Dating don’ts for men.” I
could barely look her in the eye.
    She turned her phone screen toward me.
“Which one?”
    I couldn’t believe I was admitting this. I
tapped the first result. “Why are you so interested in this?”
    “ Because. We are going to
break every single one of these rules.” She nibbled her bottom lip
as she studied her phone screen. Glancing up to me, she said, “That
way, you won’t be so nervous anymore.”
    “ Ah, because the worst will
have already occurred.” It made sense, though I wasn’t sure I was
comfortable broaching any of the topics I remembered from the
list.
    Penny took another bite of her sandwich
before reading, “‘Don’t talk about money.’ Okay. Ian, I make thirty
thousand dollars a year.”
    Thirty! How could she live
on that? And now, I was going to sound
seriously awful when I told her how much I made a year. “I, uh… I
make three hundred.”
    “ Three hundred thousand a
year?” She didn’t sound impressed so much as confused. “I thought
architects made like eighty or something.” She winced. “This sounds
so nosy of me, but I looked it up.”
    “ No, it’s fine. That’s one
of the first questions anyone asks me, anyway. After, ‘so, uh, do
you like, draw buildings and stuff?’” I put on a dopey sounding
American accent for the last bit. “I’m a partner at our firm, and
we do big ticket commercial work. It’s not the average
salary.”
    “ You’re doing better than
me, at any rate. Okay, next on the list…” She cocked her head.
“It’s ‘Don’t bring up the b-word.’ I assume they mean babies and
not Beetlejuice?”
    I hadn’t been sure about that one, because
Sophie had already told me Penny wanted a family. Maybe it was
still jumping the gun to discuss it on a second date, but Penny
wanted to break the rules. “You want them, right?”
    “ Yup. And Sophie said you
did?”
    “ I do. In fact, that could
lead us into number four. It’s why my ex-wife and I divorced.” I
took another bite of my sandwich. The pickles on it were excellent,
and I definitely