I didn’t frown on it. My mother taught me it was not my place to judge. Not anything. Not anyone.
“You never know, Izzy, what the story is,” she’d told me more than once. “You never know what’s deep inside a soul. You just never know. And since you don’t know, you’re never, not ever, in the position to judge.”
So yes, I’d learned not to judge.
But I didn’t do that kind of thing, meeting a man at a bar, having a few drinks with him and then going home to have sex with him (lots of sex), sleep naked with him and wake up in his bed while he was outside wearing not much and enjoying a cup of coffee.
I’d often wished I was that kind of girl.
In fact, my mom was that kind of girl.
And until she’d gotten married, my sister was too.
I just wasn’t.
I was too shy.
To be honest, I was also a hint of a prude. I tried to drive that out of me, the need I felt to be proper, modest, good. However, I’d learned from a young age what “bad” could bring you, and my inherent shyness and that lesson didn’t allow me to be anything else.
I’d also learned at a not-young age the way men could be, falling into a trap that from my history (and my mother’s) I should have seen from a mile away.
So I wasn’t just shy. With men, these days especially, I was skittish.
But not with Johnny.
Not Johnny Gamble.
And not just because he was so handsome.
It was also not just because he bought my drinks. Though it was partly because, between drink three and drink four (all of which he bought me), he’d stopped the waitress and said, “Could you bring my girl here a glass of water?”
That said that he didn’t want to get me drunk so he could then have his way with me. He didn’t mind me feeling relaxed and loose, but he didn’t want to take advantage.
That also said a lot of good about him. But it wasn’t just that either.
And it wasn’t just because he listened. He didn’t talk much, but he listened and he did it in an active way, asking questions as I talked about my job, my mom, my sister, my pets, my house. He was interested. He was following everything I said. His gaze didn’t roam to other women at the bar or the game on one of the television sets.
His attention was all on me.
It also wasn’t just because he had a great grin and an even better smile. His grin was broken, hitched at one corner, creasing one side of his face in a way that made his dark eyes seem like they were twinkling.
His smile was more. Big, bright and white in that dark beard, curving those full lips, it was sweet and it was sexy, both achingly so, both in equal measures.
And he gave me both a lot, his grin and his smile, which was also another reason why I was right then naked in his bed. He thought I was funny. And I liked that. It felt good to make him grin and smile, and definitely chuckle (something he did a lot of too).
Adding all this together, after drink four, when he’d leaned into me and asked in his deep voice, “You wanna get outta here?” I said yes.
I didn’t hesitate.
I nodded and verbalized my agreement with a shy, somewhat breathy but still definite, “Yes.”
That earned me another smile.
I would find it only got better after that.
It started with the fact that he opened the door to his truck for me.
And after I was in, he closed it behind me.
Then, as he started us on our way and it hit me it might not be the smartest thing to do, to get in a strange man’s car and go to his house, I looked at his profile in the dashboard lights, the timidity hit me along with some panic, which made me blurt, “Am I . . . uh, going home tonight?”
He didn’t ask my opinion on the subject. He also didn’t hesitate.
He just said, “No.”
At that point, after I experienced a pleasant trill down my spine, I pulled my phone out of my purse and told him haltingly, “I just . . . need to text my friend. I have dogs. Cats