Chapter Twenty-Two
Penny
If Darren and I were going to sleep together again, this is how I wanted to do it: outside under the stars with the wind warm on my face.
After our first time, I had felt a range of conflicting emotions. I liked that he wanted me, but I didn’t think I deserved him. I felt dirty and ruined because I had slept with a man before marriage, something I had promised myself I would never do. I cried into my pillow at night and washed my hands often.
Darren clearly wanted me tonight—he was already reaching his arms around my waist and fumbling for my belt. But I stood there motionless and trembling.
“Are you sure this is okay, what we’re doing?” I asked.
Darren paused with his hands on the top button of my high-waisted jeans. “Do you not want to do it? If you don’t want to, that’s totally fine. Just say so.”
“It isn’t that. I just worry that someone is going to drive out here and catch us. I feel so exposed under these stars.”
“It’s not very likely,” Darren said. “We’ve been out here for about twenty minutes, and not a single car has driven past. And the building hides us from anyone who might drive past and see us from the highway.”
“I guess that’s true.”
But he must have known I was still worried, for he placed his hands on my shoulders and said in a concerned voice, “What’s wrong? You look scared, and I can’t figure you out. If you’re worried that I’m only going out with you out of pity, you can put that away. I wouldn’t keep asking you out if I didn’t really like you.”
It felt like the right moment to come clean about what had been bothering me. “Do you mind if we sit down for a minute?”
I knelt down on the grass, buttoning the top button of my jeans, and motioned for him to sit down beside me. The wind whistled loudly in the branches of the evergreens that bordered the field to our right.
“You know how I have anniversaries for days of my life that are important to me? Well, today is the day my first and only boyfriend broke up with me.”
Confusion shown in Darren’s eyes. “I thought you said you had never dated anyone.”
“Well, I say ‘boyfriend,’ but we were never official. But we might as well have been given the amount of time we spent together. Liam was like my best friend.”
“Liam.” He turned the name over in his mouth as though trying out how it sounded. “You’ve never mentioned this person before.”
“I don’t like talking about it because it hurts so much. I’m over him now, but days like this are hard because they bring back all those memories I had been struggling so hard to forget. He’s married now, and there’s no way we would ever get back together; this is just one of those things I have to get through because I’m a sensitive person, and I never forget someone I’ve cared about.”
“How long ago was this?”
“We met six years ago at a church bake sale. I had just dropped out of college, and I was devastated because I felt like a failure to my dad and I worried that I would never be smart enough to make it in the real world. Liam took me under his wing and took care of me.
“We did so many things together. We used to sit on his couch for hours and hours eating gluten-free ice cream and watching Doctor Who and Bananas in Pyjamas. I couldn’t get anyone else to watch them, but we would sit there and laugh until we cried over the antics of the Banana brothers and Rat in a Hat. I would call him up late at night when I was hungry and wanted snacks, and we would go to Wal-Mart together because who wants to go to Wal-Mart at midnight by themselves? At Christmas, we would get in his car and drive around looking at Christmas lights, even though he didn’t like looking at Christmas lights, but he would do it for me.
“I tried to tell myself we were just friends, that I wasn’t in love with him. But we were getting dangerously close. We were always talking, always texting. I knew if I had a random thought I could just pick up the phone and text him whenever I wanted, and that would lead to an hours-long conversation. He could just look at me and know what I was thinking without me even having to tell him. He loved my little rituals and holidays because he was a creature of habit, and they made him feel all safe and cozy. We had our own words and phrases and inside jokes that nobody got but us. He was my person. My Liam.”
“Did you ever tell him how you felt about him?” asked Darren.
“No, because I don’t think even I knew until it was too late. I kept trying to shove it down hoping it would go away. I knew eventually he would leave and move on because as perfect as we were, I wasn’t the right girl for him. He needed to marry a girl who was bookish and cultured and intelligent, and I could never give him that. I couldn’t change myself to become someone else.
“And then one day he just stopped coming over. He stopped texting me and stopped responding to my texts. I went from seeing him four or five times a week to seeing him four times in a year. And I knew there had to be someone else in the picture, but he steadfastly insisted there wasn’t. Until one morning I logged into Facebook and found out he was engaged. Her name was Leslie Murkowski, and she was a teacher’s assistant at an Austin-area university working on her Ph.D.
“She was right for him, and I tried to tell myself I was happy for them, but that didn’t stop me from crying myself to sleep at night. That didn’t stop me from sitting up in bed, shaking so hard I could barely speak. For about a year, everything reminded me of him, and I had to give it up because the memories were too painful. No more eating ice cream, no more watching Doctor Who, no more Christmas lights. After that, all I did after I came home from work was change out of my clothes and write long novels about women who got married and had babies and lived the kind of life I wanted but couldn’t have. And for a long time, there was no dancing.”
Darren was quiet for some time after I had finished talking. He kicked off his shoes and lay back in the grass with a thoughtful expression.
“I wish I’d known,” he said finally. “You always said you had never dated, so I assumed there had been no guys in your life.”
“I’m sorry if you feel like I lied to you.”
“No, it isn’t that. I’m just sorry you had to go through that. I know how much it hurts when your best friends move on and forget about you.”
“I wish now I had told him how I felt. I always do this. I keep my distance from boys because I ‘just want to be friends,’ when all along I would have given anything to go out with him. But of course, he didn’t know that because I never told him. As far as he knew, we were just friends.”
“Maybe you ought to look at how far you’ve come in the last five or six years,” said Darren. “You had the courage to come right out and tell me you liked me. I know that couldn’t have been easy for you.”
“Well, I didn’t want to make the same mistake again. I didn’t want to lose you.”
“You’re not going to lose me.” He sat up and looked me in the eyes. “You haven’t scared me away yet, and you’re not going to.”
“We could break up someday,” I replied, a touch defensively. “We’ve only known each other for a few weeks. You don’t know what could happen in the future.”
Darren didn’t have a good answer for this. He obviously wanted to protest his undying devotion, but he couldn’t argue with the points I had just made. “I’m just saying it’s not going to be like it was with Liam. That was a time in your life that’s passed, and you’ve grown up, and you’re in a real relationship. You never slept with him; you never even kissed him.”
I shook my head sadly. “No. No, I didn’t.”
“I don’t know if Liam ever had feelings for you. If he did, he never told you. But I’m here, and I’m telling you I really like you. I’m crazy about you in a way I don’t even really understand. The fact that I like you as much as I do confuses me. Sometimes it feels like my heart and body have rebelled against me and declared you their queen.”
“Do you not want to like me?” I asked with an effort.
“I’m not upset about it if that’s what you mean. I just don’t understand the intensity of these feelings. I’ve never felt this way about another person, and I’m still trying to get my head around it. Who even are you that you can make me feel this way? Like a meteor, you came out of nowhere and have totally upended my life in a matter of weeks. It’s not going to be the same for a long time, if ever.”
“I think these are all compliments,” I said slowly, “so thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Penny.” He crept over and took my hands in his. His eyes were shining. “I don’t think I can say this often enough: You mean more to me than any car ever has, any amount of money. I feel so unbelievably lucky to have met you.” Motioning to the stars over our heads, he added, “Think of all the billions of worlds in all the millions of different galaxies, and we happened to end up on this planet together at the same time and the same place.”
“When you put it that way,” I said, smiling for the first time, “I suppose I ought to feel grateful.”
“Not as lucky as me, dear one. No one in the universe has the pleasure and privilege of getting to date Penny Shook but me.”
I didn’t care if he was just being smooth; he had almost completely won me over now. The anger and hurt and hesitation I had been feeling when we walked out here had evaporated, replaced by an abiding sense of gratitude: for Darren and the stars and the firm earth around us.
“Did you still want to go home?” asked Darren. There was a disappointed tone in his voice, which he was at pains to conceal.
“No, I want to be here with you.” I took off my cardigan and threw it at some distance into the grass. Then I removed my shirt in a single fluid motion and added it to the pile. Darren watched with a look of interest bordering on fascination. Without once taking his eyes off me, he crept closer.
Although it was a warm night, I felt goosebumps on my arm and began to shiver. “Last time, I don’t know if I was ready for this,” I said quietly. “But now I think I’m ready.”
Darren placed a hand on my face, his eyes firmly fixed on my bare shoulders. “God, I can’t believe I get to be with you. Do you know how much I’ve wanted this?”
“Why don’t you show me?” I whispered.
Over the next hour, he did.