Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I don't know why I am the way I am
There's something in the static, I think I've been having revelations

Not Strong Enough - boygenius

*

The fight is horrible.

She knew it would be, she knew it was an inevitability. But part of her had convinced herself that the bond she shared with Eloise, their over a decade of close friendship, would overpower Eloise's hurt feelings and sense of betrayal.

That is not what happens. Eloise learns, from what source Penelope isn’t sure, that the infamous gossip blog that posts about London’s high society social climbers and celebrities, is run by none other than her best friend and she goes, what can only be described as, nuclear.

Penelope’s first mistake is trying to reason with her. Of course the person posting about upper class society has to be from the upper class. (The Featherington family is old, if no longer wealthy, and hold onto their place in society by the skin of Portia’s conniving teeth, but still, they have it.) Penelope tries to point out that everything written about the Bridgertons had been largely positive and only situationally negative and Eloise shouts, “What the fuck does situationally negative even mean, Penelope?”

So she switches tactics, moving to apologizing and telling Eloise that she’s right, of course, and has every right to be angry and if they need to take some time to work through things—

“Time?” Eloise says, suddenly quiet instead of shouting which is honestly the scariest part of all. “How about space?”

“Sure,” Penelope says. “Anything.”

“This is my apartment,” Eloise says. “I want you out of it. I want you gone by morning.”

So that’s where she is now. Booking an Airbnb on her phone while she sobs. Packing her essentials while she sobs. Ordering an Uber while she sobs. She writes a long note explaining how sorry she is once more, how a hobby had become her best source of income, how she loves Eloise and loves her family, how she’ll arrange for movers to come clear out the rest of her things.

And then she leaves.

She gets one last text from Eloise early the next morning.

I’m blocking you. My entire family is blocking you. If you need to relay important information about retrieving your things, you may do so through Simon. After you’re completely out of my apartment, Simon will block you. Have a good life.

And that’s it. That’s how Penelope Featherington loses the Bridgertons. Quick, like a blade falling in a guillotine. She is severed from them completely.

***

The first six months are honestly a blur. Because there is no lie strong enough to explain her falling out with one of London’s most high profile families, she tells her sisters the truth. The London Whistler blog belongs to her and every single article on the site, always written under the byline of A Shady Lady, was penned by Penelope. She built the site from scratch, maintained it single handedly for years before the traffic grew so much that she’d had to hire out a company to do the back end stuff.

The site is so popular that now most of her content comes from submissions from people out and about who spotted one of the Royal granddaughters snogging some commoner at a nightclub or juicy celebrity gossip from anonymous production assistants or restaurant servers or any number of regular people who have a chance encounter.

Instead of outing her to their mother, Prudence and Phillipa surprise Penelope by supporting her. It’s the one good thing to come out of her friendship with Eloise and her family turning to ash. Now The London Whistler is run by all three sisters and it’s growing even more. Prudence is the cattiest among them and can write the most acerbic, but most popular articles, focusing mostly on blind items. Phillipa has branched out into fashion review, something that Penelope could have never managed on her own. Penelope reduces her role to a weekly round up of submissions and editing everything her sisters write. The site never talks about the Bridgertons anymore.

She’s working less and making more and she’s absolutely miserable. It’s the most depressed she’s ever been. She hops from long term rental to long term rental, each one a little farther from her old neighborhood. She orders take out, she never leaves her flats. She lives in ratty sweats and buns, trolling the internet for gossip and torturing herself by checking up on the Bridgerton socials. True to Eloise’s word, everyone had blocked her on everything. Too mortified by that, she’d deleted all her own socials and created a finsta, telling herself that she wouldn’t look at them, but she does.

She’d blocked Colin herself, though. She couldn’t bear the thought of his anger, his disappointment, or his pain. He is so protective of his family and she’d hurt them. She deserves the lecture he has for her, no doubt, but she’ll save him the trouble.

And then, at some point, she realizes she can do her job anywhere. She never leaves her rentals anyway and London is expensive. She could simply leave and start over somewhere else and never see another Bridgerton ever again. Never worry about running into one at the flower market or the ice cream parlor or walking along the river. She doesn’t go to any of those places, but that’s because she’s afraid of seeing them. They’d all surgically removed her from their lives like a cancer and she’s still fretting about upsetting them with her presence in a city of over eight million people. It’s madness. Something has to change.

The only answer is to start over somewhere else. She’s tired of not having a place to call her own. She’s tired of paying for rentals and a storage unit. She’s tired of her only contribution to society being gossip.

So nine months after the falling out, she looks at a map of the world and tells herself to pick somewhere. The south of France or the Sydney harbor or America is pretty big. She scans a map of the endless amount of states and thinks, no one would find me in a place called Kentucky.

A quick google search tells her Brexit has complicated her ability to pick up and move to the continent and immigrating to the United States is not easily done. She’s better off going to Northern Ireland or Scotland. She has some relatives still in Northern Ireland from her mother’s side. An aunt and some cousins, at least, but after Portia married into the nobility, she’d not stayed particularly close with that side of her family and so Penelope doesn’t know them well enough to invite herself to their country and burrow herself into their lives.

Anyone who knows her at all will want to know why she decided to leave London and there’s not a good answer. Better to move to somewhere no one knows her. Scotland it is.

At first she’s going to go as north as she can stomach, Aberdeen, perhaps, but as she’s flicking through the Scottish offerings on Airbnb, she sees the world’s most charming looking cottage near Edinburgh is available at a reduced rate, likely because someone had canceled the booking last minute and she snatches it up. It’s small. One bedroom, one bath, a living space and a kitchen. Two weeks in the country will be good for her, she thinks. She’ll have WiFi, so she can work, but no one she knows will be lurking around corners. Every corner of London is haunted and she must get out.

She clears out of her latest flat, tossing everything in her car. She swings by the storage unit and grabs the rest of her clothing, leaving the furniture behind. Maybe Phillipa and Al will want her old stuff or be willing to sell it on her behalf if they can keep the money. She’ll ask them when she’s already in Scotland.

When she arrives, the cottage has a seafoam green door and the place is spotless. She hauls her things inside, collapses onto the bed and has a cry, like she does every time she gets to her latest rental. Then she showers off the sweat and the tears, orders take out from one of the three restaurants available to her in this small village, and settles in for a night of editing and watching Love Island.

It’s ironic, really. All this bouncing around reminds her of Colin and the kind of life he must lead constantly traveling, always in new places, new hotels, or unfamiliar beds. Away from the people who love him the most.

Colin is the one Bridgerton she doesn’t ever check up on. It’s tempting now, to open instagram and type @colinabroad into the search bar, but like always, she doesn’t.

Instead, she reaches over to the nightstand and turns off the lamp.

The village is so quiet, though it’s just after ten o’clock. She hears nothing and the silence settles over her like snow falling in the night. Softly enveloping her and wooing her to sleep.

***

After four days of adjusting to being this removed and remote, she drives the twelve miles into Edinburgh to have a poke around. Her mistake, she thinks, is visiting this city for the first time in October. It’s so relentlessly beautiful and autumnal that all thoughts of moving farther north to Aberdeen disappear. This city is too historic and lovely to ever leave. Edinburgh makes London look like a grimy cesspool. Edinburgh is magic. She takes herself to the National Museum and spends the whole day there, wandering around exhibits and staring at artifacts and pondering the death of Mary Stewart.

She takes herself to the castle the next day, and peers at the crown jewels. It’s the thing to do in Edinburgh, so she does it. After that, she plants herself at a nearby coffee shop and searches for flats. Edinburgh is a little cheaper than London, though not as much as she might have liked. She’d do better to search farther out, like the smaller village she’s staying in. Buy a condo, perhaps, or a small house. The problem is, her only income is from the blog and if she purchases property, she will have to keep on with the blog to afford it.

The Whistler is her baby, in a way, but in another way, it’s the thing that has destroyed her, so obviously her feelings about it are mixed. Does she want to spend her whole life peddling gossip? Making fun of celebrity’s outfits? She’d accidentally broken the news of one celebrity divorce by piecing together several submissions and blind items and then had felt horrible about it, despite the spike in traffic making it so she could give her sister’s bonuses for the holidays.

It’s one thing to talk about a socialite being drunk and rude to the help and quite another to have an actor blast your blog on the Graham Norton show.

Maybe Eloise had been right. A festering though Penelope has often.

She extends her rental for another week and is walking down a small lane just outside the city center when she comes across a little bookstore with a navy blue storefront. It’s called Rare Bird Books and in the window is a small sign that says For sale.

***

Penelope purchases the shop from an octogenarian called Hamish who is finally ready to retire. What seals the deal for her is not the lovely old man alone, but the fact that the shop comes with the flat over it which means purchasing both her own home and a business to bring in income. Hamish is honest about the flagging sales.

“Most people order on their computers these days,” he explains, like perhaps Penelope has been unaware of the internet thus far. (Part of her wishes it was true.) But it doesn’t take long to suss out that Hamish is having trouble managing the stairs to the flat. He’s going to move in with his nephew in Avonbridge where there is only one story.

The bookstore is dark and dusty and the stock is old. But the shop has a large window and plenty of space and she thinks if she can freshen up the space, get some new stock in, and maybe order some other things to sell like stationary supplies or little trinkets good for gifts, her foot traffic will increase.

“How is your website?” she asks.

Of course, there isn’t one.

Hamish stays with her for another month after the purchase goes through. She moves to a rental in town. He’s lived above his shop for decades, so she doesn’t find it right to rush him out. In return, he teaches her how to work the old register, how he’s kept the books, how to place orders, and how to process payroll. She does have a university degree, but it’s in literature so while she feels perfectly qualified to order the books, she’s grateful for the crash course in running a small business.

When Hamish moves out and Penelope moves in, she closes the bookstore for two weeks so she can refresh the space. She takes all the books off the shelves and cleans them, scrubbing the years of dust out of the corners. Then she sands them. Then she paints them all a pale blue. It makes sense to her that a book shop called Rare Bird would have the color scheme of a robin’s egg but it’s only after three long days of back breaking labor that she realizes she painted her shelves Bridgerton blue and bursts into tears.

***

The flat upstairs is another issue entirely. It’s largely untouched by time and, unfortunately, light. The lack of windows and taller building across the street do an effective job of making sure no light ever gets into the four rooms and she quickly realizes that if she’s going to survive here after growing up in Mayfair, living with a posh Bridgerton, and bopping around between several newly renovated rentals, she’s going to have to give as much love to the flat as to the shop.

It’s all starting to feel overwhelming. Phillipa calls her and says, “You know we haven’t seen you in a while.”

She wondered how long it was going to take them to notice. It’s not like they spent a great deal of time together anyway, but her response times have changed too. She’s not constantly staring at her phone or laptop these days.

“Yeah,” Penelope says, tucking her phone against her ear and looking down at the old carpet, wondering if there were wooden floors underneath. “I moved to Scotland.”

“What?” Phillipa asks, her tone piercing. “When? Why?”

“Like almost two months ago,” Penelope says. “I was tired of paying London prices.”

“You can’t just move to Scotland without telling anyone. Who did you move with?”

“Who… Who did I move with? No one, Pip. I moved with me.” Penelope looks at her phone in exasperation. What a stupid thing to ask.

“Mum asked about you the other day,” Phillipa says. “Am I supposed to tell her to call you via Scotland?”

Penelope hasn’t seen her mother in a year and hasn’t spoken to her in nearly that long. Portia made some snide comment about the number of chins Penelope had and it was no worse than any of her snide comments but for some reason became the straw that broke her back. Penelope went low-contact and then, after a particularly frustrating phone conversation where Portia was convinced that she was the victim, no-contact.

“I would prefer you not tell anyone I moved to Scotland, least of all Portia.” Penelope did a lot of research about adult children going no contact before she’d pulled the trigger and someone commented on one of the articles that calling their parent by their given name helped them. Penelope does find it helpful, actually.

“Not even Prudence?”

“She won’t care,” Penelope says. “But she will tell Portia, so maybe just try to avoid the subject.”

“What about The Whistler?” Phillipa asks, sounding worried. Prudence stopped working once she got married, but Penelope knows that Phillipa still has her job at the nursery school. The extra income really helps her make ends meet.

“Nothing has to change,” Penelope reassures her. “I can work from anywhere. Besides, you and Prudence do eighty percent of the work now anyhow.”

“Good,” Phillipa says, sounding relieved. “Well, I mean… Good luck in Scotland?”

Penelope pries up the corner of the carpet and releases a cloud of dust into her own face. She’s going to need good luck.

***

The first few months are lonely and they’re slow. Even with the shop open, there’s so little foot traffic that she can continue to work on the interior. She tries to focus mostly on keeping the front window looking inviting, but it takes time for the new books to come in, so mostly she focuses on hanging up inviting lights to brighten the space, bringing in some plants, some new tables, and packing up some of the old books to either send off to a charity or simply recycling some of the more hopeless ones, yellowed and brittle with age.

It doesn’t take her long to ditch the old register and replace it with something smaller, sleeker, and half the size. It also knows about credit cards, so once she figures out how to get that all in working order, she declares the empty shop now part of the twenty-first century.

The only hope she has for foot traffic is thanks to the family run cafe next door. The daughter, Saanvi, does the daily managing of the shop and she and Penelope have become almost friendly. The smell of her chai had finally lured Penelope in and now she stops by most days to get one. Saanvi’s parents, however, are old. They haven’t been here as long as Hamish was but it was still a long stretch and Saanvi confesses that they have been thinking about selling as well.

For the first time, Penelope starts to worry that she’s made a mistake and taken on more than she can handle. If the coffee shop, which is easily seen from the corner, isn’t there to pull people down the little lane, her foot traffic could quickly fall from slim to none. And while she has the blog to generate income, she’d dumped most of her savings into this new life plan. She needs it to be at least a little successful.

Her new project quickly becomes the website for the shop. She’d thrown together something rudimentary while she was still training with Hamish, mostly to secure a URL and have the basics listed: shop hours, phone number, and street address. Now, she has to quickly figure out ecommerce. She stops purging the collection and instead starts putting the really old things up on the site for sale. Not the yellowed paperbacks, mass market and badly produced, but the things with the leather spine that smell like her grandfather’s study.

She creates an instagram for the shop, and then figures any social platform is more exposure than she’s getting now, and creates accounts everywhere she can think of.

Once her new stock of books starts coming in regularly, and her stationary supplies, the shop picks up a little. She hires a local artist to decorate her front window and that helps too. She posts once a day on at least two socials, and by the time she finishes her sixth month of book shop ownership, she turns a very small profit.

She’s exhausted, and a little lonely, but mostly happy and proud of herself. There was a day this week where she didn’t think about the name Bridgerton once. That feels like the hardest won victory of all.

***

Two years after her fight with Eloise, something she thinks of distantly as the event whenever it flits across her mind, Penelope comes downstairs to the shop around eleven. They’ve been open for two hours already, but Penelope’s lone employee, a woman in her early sixties called Mrs. Cameron, opens most mornings and Penelope takes over after lunch. For a long time she did the whole shift six days a week, closing only on Mondays for life maintenance, but she’d quickly realized that it was no kind of life. Once she’d earned enough to hire a part-time employee, she had.

Deirdre Cameron was a great choice. She’s no nonsense, but warm, practical and reliable in the way only maternal older women can be. She reminds Penelope of Violet a tiny bit, though not so much that it stings to look at Mrs. Cameron.

“Morning,” Penelope greets softly, her hair still damp from her shower. There are three customers in the store, which is always a reassuring first sight to see.

“Morning,” Mrs. Cameron says.

Penelope is dressed down today in denim and a loose-fitting button down shirt. It’s old and already splattered with paint. She’s going to pull down the spring display from the window and put up something a little more summery. Summer is not her favorite season in Edinburgh. She misses those long weeks of summers in Kent, warm and floating in a lake. Edinburgh tends to get stuffy, but never so warm she’d want to don a swimming costume outside. Still, summer is one step closer to autumn, which is her favorite time of year.

But before she gets into all of that, she says, “Would you like something from next door?”

“No thanks,” Mrs. Cameron says, gesturing to a mug of tea she has near her at the counter. Sometimes Penelope will come back with a couple pastries for them, so she’ll see what Saanvi has left in the case this late in the morning.

She takes a deep breath of air and walks a few steps to the next door, about to pull the handle when she sees him.

Sitting at a small round table on the far side of the shop. There’s no mistake. She’d know him anywhere. Those wavy brown locks and that perfect, breathtaking profile. He’d been the love of her life at one point, even if he’d been completely unaware of the fact.

Colin Bridgerton.

She lets go of the handle and turns, her hand in front of her face so she can bolt back to her own shop.

“What happened?” Mrs. Cameron asks. “You only just left!”

“I remembered I have coffee at home!” she calls as she bolts up the stairs.

Of all the coffee shops in all the cities in all the countries in all the world, why is any Bridgerton, let alone that one, here?

It’s a coincidence, it has to be. Because if it isn’t, it would mean Colin is looking for her and there’s simply no reason that would ever happen.

She’ll simply hide up here for an hour or so until she has to relieve Mrs. Cameron and by that time Colin will be gone and he’ll never even know she was here.

Chapter Text

And I'm just getting color back into my face
I'm just mad as hell cause I loved this place
For so long, London
Had a good run

So Long, London - Taylor Swift

*

It’s five minutes past the time she’s supposed to relieve Mrs. Cameron and she knows she can’t hide upstairs anymore. She’d skipped the coffee when she realized her whole body was shaking enough that she couldn't hold her hands steady and now, over an hour later, her heart still flutters like a trapped bird in her chest.

She can’t honestly decide what will feel worse: Colin seeing her again or him being close enough to look at but never even getting the chance to say hello. Anytime she pines for what she’d once had like sleepovers with Eloise or lying in the grass counting stars or summer trips to Aubrey Hall, she remembers the event in stark detail and it’s enough to jolt her back to reality.

But Colin is a little different. He’s always been a little different. When compared to the rest of the Bridgerton siblings, he’s certainly a matching part of the set, but she’s long considered him the softest one personality wise. Kind, compassionate, loyal and sweet. The kind of boy who would scoop up spiders with his bare hands so Daphne wouldn’t squash them under her designer shoe, who would give his youngest siblings piggy-back rides even if it meant lying awake all night with a back ache, who would always staunchly defend Penelope against anyone who might make fun of her. Cressida, or the boys in his own year, or even her own mother.

The first time he’d really broken her heart was when she’d overheard him tell his mates he wasn’t interested in dating her. She’s a sweet girl, a family friend, that’s all. She’d been fourteen, desperately imagining the feeling of his lips on hers at night and while she hadn’t been so delusional that she thought it was imminently possible he was going to kiss her, hearing him say it out loud had been a tough pill to swallow.

He broke her heart again at seventeen when she’d introduced him to her cousin who stayed with the Featheringtons for that summer and he’d spent the next six weeks snogging her in his garden.

But more often than those big cracks came the small fissures of everyday life with him. He was affectionate and touchy with everyone, which is why she knew every time he grabbed her hand or hugged her or even dropped a kiss to the top of her head wasn’t because she was particularly special to him. It was only because she was in his orbit. Every time he texted her from a new country or sent her a three minute long voice memo describing a delicious meal or beautiful hotel room or amazing boat ride wasn’t because he was in love with her, but was because she was one of the few people who listened to his excited ramblings without taking the piss out of him.

The one time he had kissed her, he’d been extremely drunk after Benedict’s wedding and she’d been the soberest left standing, so had volunteered to get him into the cab and he’d kissed her on the street tasting of whiskey and swaying on his feet.

The next day, he’d texted her to apologize for his inappropriate behavior.

Not long after that, the event happened.

She’d dropped her phone four months ago and watched in horror as it bounced down the wooden stairs from the flat to the shop, no case strong enough to save her from the shattered screen. When she’d replaced it, she’d asked for a new number. Her contact info had transferred to the new one, and she texted her sisters the new number, but no one else. Who else was there? She was still estranged from her mother by choice and Mrs. Cameron had a landline and an email address.

She’d looked at the Bridgertons all in a row in her contact list: Anthony, Benedict, Colin, Daphne, Eloise, Francesca, Gregory, Hyacinth, Kate, Sophie, Violet. She realized then that she was no longer blocked, but an unknown number to them. She could reach out. She could even re-block Colin from the new number, but what would be the point? He didn’t have it.

No, this was better. A clean break from both sides.

She loves this city, she loves this little book shop. These days, she is even coming to terms with the place The London Whistler has in her life. She’d offered to let Prudence and Phillipa buy out her shares and run the whole thing on their own a while back, once the shop was more stable, but they’d declined, happy enough with their salaries and not having the responsibility of making the whole thing work. She uses the same company that maintains the gossip site to maintain the book shop site as well, now, and they built a much better online store. A lot of days, her online sales far exceed what she makes in house.

Now she’s seven minutes late.

She takes the steps as quietly as she is able. Toward the bottom, she hears Mrs. Cameron laugh. Not a dry chuckle which is what Penelope manages to wring out of her on her best days, but a high-pitched titter. Something she might describe as almost flirty.

She pokes her head around the side and can see Mrs. Cameron still at the till and across the counter, Colin Bridgerton leaning on one elbow, charming the support hose right off her in the way that only he can.

“Fuck,” she whispers to herself.

She has two choices, it seems. Face the music or abandon her whole life a second time and do another runner. Maybe if she burns the shop down, she can use the insurance money to start over. How hard can it be to make a place composed mostly of old paper and dry wood look like an accidental burning? She could just light a candle and ‘forget’ about it. She could—

“She’s not usually late, I’ll just call up and see what’s taking her… Oh!” Mrs. Cameron startles at the sight of Penelope, loitering on the last dim step. “There you are.”

“Sorry,” Penelope says, lamely, with no explanation. “I… Sorry.”

“There’s a young man here to see you,” she says. “I must be off. You know how Dennis gets when his lunch is late.”

“Sorry,” Penelope says again, meekly. She clears her throat and steps around the corner. Mrs. Cameron is putting on her sweater, shouldering her purse, and clocking out on the computer. Penelope is looking at her feet, unable to meet the dark blue eyes she knows are staring at her.

“Bye, dear. See you tomorrow!” The bell over the door jingles as Mrs. Cameron exits and then, silence.

Penelope looks up to find Colin standing in her book shop, his hands in the pockets of his old, familiar leather jacket.

“Hi, Pen,” he says.

Anger would have been kinder, she thinks. His familiar greeting, like they saw each other last week, cuts like a knife. No one calls her Pen anymore. No one else ever had.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

He shrugs. “I was in the neighborhood.” His lips twitch, like he’s trying not to smile. “This is a nice little place.”

“Thank you,” she says carefully, moving to the computer behind the counter. She clocks in and out too, not that it really reflects the hours she actually works, but for accounting purposes, it’s best to have a paper trail. The counter between them feels like extra protection. He is a customer, this is her shop, and this interaction is liminal, never to be repeated.

What she really wants to know is how he found her. She’s too afraid to ask.

“How long have you been open now?”

Oh, small talk. Wonderful.

“Shop has been here since 1973,” she says. “Can I help you find any particular title?”

His face flickers here, the first uncertainty she’s spotted on him and only sees it because once upon a time she’d known him so well.

“I confess I’m mostly a kindle guy these days,” he says. “Carrying around a bunch of books isn’t conducive to lots of travel.”

She can’t stand this. She feels like she’s going to bleed out onto the lovingly restored wooden floors if she keeps having to do this.

“Does your sister know you’re here?” she asks. She doesn’t bother to specify which sister.

“No,” he says.

She waits for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t.

“Why are you here, Colin?”

He looks over his shoulder at the closet set of shelves to where they’re standing. It’s all local stuff. Local authors, books about the city, famous novels set in Scotland. She still sells more copies of Macbeth than anything else and he reaches out and touches the cover of the play.

“Do you think maybe we could, um, sit down somewhere and talk?” he asks. “Maybe eat something?”

“I’m working,” she says, gesturing to the room around them.

“Right, no, I know that,” he says. “I mean after. Dinner, or something.”

She pictures them, suddenly, sitting at a booth at the Sawyers Arms, the local pub the Bridgertons all favored. She’d cried that night, explaining about the phone conversation with her mother and how badly it had gone.

“You don’t need her in your life,” he’d said so earnestly. “She doesn’t deserve you.”

“She’s my mum,” Penelope had wept. “Can I just cut off my family?”

“We’re your family now,” he’d said, so confidently.

It works both ways, it turns out. You can cut off your family. They can cut you off too.

He looks so earnest again, standing in her shop.

“I don’t know,” she says.

The bell above the door jingles and a couple walks in with a little girl around five, who makes a bee line for the corner filled with children’s books.

“Welcome,” she calls, her voice sounding watery and weird.

“Cheers,” the man says, turning to look at a rack of postcards near the front.

“Pen,” Colin says again, like he’s begging.

“Sure, fine,” she relents. “We close at seven.”

He grins, a thousand watts that hit her right in her solar plexus. “Okay. Good. Cool. I’ll come back. See you at seven?”

She nods, confused and achinging and terrified.

***

It’s simultaneously the longest and shortest work day of her life. She abandons the plan of redoing the window because that takes a certain amount of creativity and her absolutely crushing anxiety doesn’t allow her creative juices to particularly flow. Instead, she works on the online orders, boxing them up and printing out labels. Sometimes, if it’s a few, the postman will take them with him on his regular route, but there’s about fifteen parcels today so she’ll have to find time to go to the post office tomorrow.

The afternoon is busy. They’re at the start of their summer tourist season. Summer and autumn are her best times, though she gets a nice end of year boost around Christmas because the Christmas markets bring so many people to the city.

Around four, Saanvi comes over with a chai for her, which is so lovely.

“It’s unusual not to see you,” she asks, handing it over. Penelope goes to open the till to pay her, but Saanvi waves it off.

“Thanks,” she murmurs, taking a sip. The spicy brew always hits just right. “Just one of those days.”

“Nothing to do with that man asking after you this morning?” Saanvi asks lightly. Saanvi is in her mid-forties, and has a teenage son who works next door sometimes. The boy’s father is long out of the picture, from what Penelope can deduce, though they’re not the kind of friends who have deep talks like that. It’s casual. So how is she supposed to explain Colin to the woman now?

“An old friend,” she says. “From many lives ago.”

Saanvi gives her a long look like she can see all of Penelope’s twenty-seven years laid out in front of her and she’s not buying it.

“He seemed keen to talk to you. Asked about the shop, about you.”

“I’m sorry he disturbed you,” Penelope offers diplomatically.

“No disturbance,” Saanvi says. “I wouldn’t have told him where you were, but he already knew.” She shrugs.

“Thanks for the tea,” Penelope murmurs, her discomfort trumping her manners.

Saanvi grins, knowing she hit a nerve. “See you tomorrow, yeah?”

Penelope nods.

Around six-thirty, Penelope is dusting and gets that prickle on the back of her neck like she’s being watched. She glances out the window and sees him across the street, loitering in front of the art gallery, peering at the large painting in the window. The street also contains a curry restaurant and that’s where she predicts he will take her. He loves curry. She eats there often herself, though she never can handle the spice level that any Bridgerton could stomach.

There are people in the shop, however, and so she sets the duster down to ring out the last few people. Someone buys one of the many blank journals she keeps stocked along with a used copy of Anne of Green Gables. The shop is now a mix of used and new books, though the new stuff is all best sellers and the used stuff beloved classics. It’s been working so far, worth the investment anyway.

The last customer buys an Edinburgh travel guide and one of the beaded bracelets she displays on the counter, and that’s that. She walks to the front to turn over the sign from open to closed. As she does it, she can see him jog across the street toward her shop. She could leave him standing on the street waiting for her, but there’s a bit to do before she can leave and it’s starting to rain. She can see the drops on his jacket.

She lets him in.

“Spring, eh?” he says of the cloudy sky.

“I need to close the till,” she says softly, locking the door behind him. It’s strange to be alone with him again, something they used to do semi-regularly. Movie nights at the apartment when Eloise was working late. Lunch dates when he was in town. Sharing a car to brunch at his mother’s house on a Sunday morning.

God, he even smells the same. A scent she doesn’t realize she is missing until she smells it again and it hits her hard. Earthy and spicy and deep. This is a mistake.

“I like this place,” he says while she runs the report from the register. The drawer pops open and she pulls the money out. Generally, she takes the whole thing to count upstairs, wary of doing it where people on the street can see, but it’s weird with him here so she just lays it out on the counter, counting swiftly, matching the total on the receipt and shoving it all in the cashbox.

The safe is upstairs.

“I’m just gonna run up and put this away,” she says. What she should have done is tell him to wait where he was, because as she starts to climb the stairs, he follows her. That’s Colin, she thinks. Never a door that he thinks he can’t waltz through.

She hesitates at the top of the stairs, looking at her flat with new eyes. The living room has become mostly storage for her online sales. Boxes of books are stacked along the far wall, waiting for her to add them to the website, something she mostly does in the middle of the night when she can’t sleep. The small kitchen has dishes in the sink and all the furniture is the same saggy stuff she’d inherited from Hamish.

She thinks of the beautiful velvet green sofa in the apartment she shared with Eloise fleetingly.

But then again, what does she have to prove to someone from a family who’d so easily left her behind? She flips on a switch and several rows of fairy lights come on, filling the space with a warm glow. She couldn’t fix the lack of natural light, so she leaned into it feeling cozy instead.

“You live here,” he comments, sounding surprised. “Above the shop.”

“Yeah,” she says. The safe is under the sink and she shoves the cashbox in there without spinning the dial to lock it. When she goes to the post office tomorrow, she’ll take the deposit to the bank. “It came with the shop.”

“That’s really cool,” he says. “So I was thinking maybe just the curry shop down the way?”

She has to suppress a smile at his predictability. “Sure. Just let me… I’ll change.”

“You look great,” he says.

She holds up the loose tail of her shirt to show him the paint. “I can do better than this.”

She’d purged a lot of her clothes, actually. A lot of the couture dresses her mother had purchased for her were some shade of yellow or orange, often the wrong size. Things that were expensive and well-made but that she hated and kept out of obligation. All of those went to the charity shop. Anything too small went as well. Anything that wasn’t warm enough for this city went. She’s left with a much more practical wardrobe of slacks, denim, shirts, and jumpers. But there’s nothing particularly fancy or dressy. She sighs, kicking the bedroom door closed behind her and unbuttoning her shirt. She puts on a plain white t-shirt instead and then over that, a striped jumper.

She never bothers with makeup anymore. Colin hasn’t come so she can impress him, no doubt. This visit has to be about closure and nothing more. What else could he want from her?

When she emerges from the bedroom, he’s standing at the window that looks down into the little alley behind the shop.

“You kept your car,” he says.

She’d bought the car somewhat on a whim, used, when they were going to go to Aubrey one year but Violet had gone on ahead and no one could find the keys to the car the siblings all shared for emergency moves and big shopping trips and vacations to the country. Violet had accidentally taken the fob with her, it turned out. Penelope had decided that having a vehicle on deck would be useful, and it had been.

She’s glad to have it now, for post office runs and grocery shops.

“Yeah,” she says.

“I didn’t rent one,” he muses. “We could go somewhere else, then, if you wanted?”

She shakes her head. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, I mean like a different restaurant. Farther out. If you wanted.”

“If I want? If you want, you mean,” she says. “You clearly have something else in mind.”

“I had a reservation for tonight at Heron,” he admits. “In case you didn't want to see me.”

“But I’m a whole other additional person.”

“I always make reservations for two. I’m going to order enough food for two people either way, so…” He trails off. “We don’t have to.”

“No, it’s just. That place is too expensive for me.” Embarrassing to say, really. She is making money, but between the costs of running the site, paying her sisters, and the cost of constantly improving the bookstore, she’s not exactly flush lately.

“Pen, come on,” he says with a light chuckle. “I’m gonna buy you dinner.”

She wants to argue. She wants to demand that they just have the conversation and skip dinner and he can be on his merry way. But this is Colin and no forward progress will be made if his stomach isn’t full. She shouldn’t accept any Bridgerton charity, either, but it’s absurd to pay five-star prices on her own.

“Fine,” she says, grabbing her purse. “Let’s go.”

It’s a Wednesday, but still, there’s a small crowd outside of the restaurant when they arrive. She has to search a bit for parking. The drive has been mostly silent, like they’re both bottling it up for the meal.

“There,” he says, pointing to a spot on the street.

“That will require a level of parallel parking skill that I do not currently possess,” she says.

“I can do it,” he promises.

“I’m not switching seats now, Colin.”

“No, I can talk you through it.” He sounds so confident.

“Fine,” she says, slowing and flicking on her indicator.

“Stop and turn your wheel,” he says. “Good, good… now crank it.”

“I’m gonna hit—”

“You’re not,” he promises. “Trust me. Keep going… Okay, now straighten out. Pull forward a little. Yeah, perfect. You did it!”

“Yep,” she agrees, annoyed that he’d been right at all. Annoyed that she’s not really dressed posh enough for a restaurant like this. Annoyed that they’re together and he’s being so nice even though he’s about to tear her a new one. Still, there’s nothing he can say to her that’s any crueler than what she tells herself. She did use her close friendship with the Bridgertons and their high society connections to generate content for her blog. She did agree with them that it was terrible while hiding the fact that she was the author. She is still, to this day, profiting off the website.

What more is there to say?

He holds open the door for her, passing the people waiting on the street and then gives his name to the host.

“Mr. Bridgerton!” she says. “Of course. We’ve been expecting you. Right this way.”

She’d forgotten, somewhat, what life in the Bridgerton light was like. No waiting, the best of everything, prices never discussed. Colin pulls out her chair for her first and she gives him a hard look. “I’m good, thanks.”

To his credit, he backs off, seating himself. The host goes over some specials, leaves them with a menu and says their server will be right over.

“I know you’ve likely been studying the menu for months, so feel free to order me whatever,” Penelope says, setting her menu lightly on the corner of the table. She doesn’t want to inadvertently order something insanely expensive, so at least she can leave that ball in his court.

He grins, and it’s so handsomely resplendent that she nearly flinches. No one person should be so attractive, so well-off, and so kind.

Well, he’d previously been kind to her. And he’d certainly been polite and surprisingly warm to her so far, but she considers that nothing more than good behavior in public places.

“I can do that,” he says easily enough and when the server appears, he orders the wine, the appetizers, and the entrees in one fell swoop.

And now, she can no longer stand the tension. She’s in a place she doesn’t belong, about to eat a meal she can’t afford, with a person she’s no longer friends with. It’s death by a thousand cuts and she wants it to be over already.

“Do you think we ought to get down to brass tacks, then?” she asks.

His brow wrinkles as he frowns. “How do you mean?”

“You obviously sought me out because you had something to say. I suggest we just get on with it.” She unrolls her silverware and places the napkin in her lap before looking up at him.

His mouth is open with surprise. “All right,” he says.

“I mean, obviously you have questions, so just ask them,” she says, before she loses her nerve.

“I really just have one,” he says, leaning forward. “Why did you leave, Pen? Why did you cut me out of your life?”

Now it’s her jaw that falls, now it’s her world that spins, now it’s her that has question after question after question.

Chapter Text

And I hate to say it
But your sister was right
I'm nothing but a problem
Leave you crying overnight

Your Sister Was Right - Wilber Soot

*

The wine comes first, with Colin’s question hanging in the air between them.

“What?” she says.

“It’s a sauvignon blanc,” the server says, thinking that Penelope is speaking to him.

“Thanks,” Colin says. He sips it hurriedly and says, “Fine.”

The server nods his head in a little bow and removes himself.

“I don’t understand,” Penelope says, her trembling hands returning with a roar. She grips the edge of the table, the weave of the white tablecloth imprinting into her fingertips.

“You just left,” he says. “And for the life of me, I can’t figure out what we did wrong. What I did wrong.”

“No,” Penelope says. “That’s not… I…”

She might be sick, actually. She stands up, jolting the table slightly and drawing attention from nearby diners. Their server rushes over at her obvious distress and she says, “Toilet?”

“At the back,” he says, gesturing across the dining room toward a hallway. She hurries, her hand over her mouth, bile rising up her throat. But when she gets into the single room, the wave of nausea wanes and she instead leans against the counter, head hanging over the sink. Simultaneously she’s so confused and also, oddly somewhat certain of what has happened. She’s known Eloise Bridgerton for most of her life, and often was her only confidant. Eloise was too brusk and bossy to make a lot of friends, and Penelope shy and socially awkward, so the two of them clocked a lot of solo time.

Eloise learns about The London Whistler and flies off the handle. This is the event. She throws Penelope out and severs their friendship. While Penelope has done the crime and is now doing her time, even she thinks that Eloise overreacted. It’s a conclusion it’s taken her a long while to reach, but with time and consideration, it’s what she believes. To not only end their association but unilaterally cut Penelope off from her entire family is a cruelness Penelope once thought Eloise incapable of. Yet, it happened.

But with Penelope gone, and her rage receding, Eloise began to realize that her family would not shun Penelope so completely. So she tells them that it was Penelope who decided to sever the friendship. Penelope lacks enough information to fill in the details, of course, but if she were a betting woman, she’d guess Eloise cast her out and then told her family Penelope had wanted to leave.

Penelope looks up at her reflection and finds her face pale and sweaty. She reaches for a paper towel, wets it, and pats it against her face. It all starts to fade into the background. Penelope remembers this feeling from the early days of after the event. When her feelings got too big, too complicated, too unwieldy, this would happen. Her brain would trip a circuit and turn off her ability to feel any emotions at all.

Now her reflection looks like just another twenty something staring back at her. Pale blue eyes, curly red hair lopped off into a bob to make the mornings easier. Her eyes look glassy. It’s Penelope, but instead of from inside her own head, she’s looking at herself from down a long hallway. She can face Colin like this. Buzzing and detached.

She unlocks the door and steps back into the restaurant. Everyone watches her make her way back to the table and sit down.

“Are you well, Pen?” Colin asks, with obvious concern.

“Sorry,” she says. “Yes.”

There’s appetizers between them. She can’t remember what he ordered. Something with scallops. Another thing with a tender cut of beef. One mouthful of each on each plate, growing cold between them.

She gestures to the plates. “Don’t let me ruin the meal.”

He looks at her like she’s grown a second head and she feels like that’s not an impossible conclusion to this otherwise baffling and impossible day.

“Go on. Eat.”

So he reaches for the beef thing and pops it into his mouth.

“Colin, your sister kicked me out of our apartment and told me we were no longer friends.”

She says it so plainly. She’s rolled the event over and over in her mind for so long that any frill has worn off. All that’s left are the simple facts.

“What?” he says with his mouth full.

“We got in a horrible fight,” Penelope says. “And then we… broke up, I guess.” She shrugs one shoulder and reaches for the scallop thing but then decides better of it and takes the wine instead. It’s a bit dry for her, but drinkable.

“Why would she do that?” he asks.

The buzzing in her brain gets a little louder. A warning, perhaps? Usually when she feels like this, she has to lie in a dark room and wait for it to pass. Sleep usually reboots her emotions. She’s never pushed through it like this before.

“I think because she wanted nothing to do with me,” Penelope says. “I assume she told you about The Whistler?”

“The gossip blog?” Colin asks. “Yes. She said you were selling them information about us and other families.” He frowns. “Actually, that part never made a lot of sense to me. It’s so unlike you. That always felt like an outlandish lie Eloise made up to make her look better.”

“Christ,” Penelope mutters. Eloise, so principled, so diabolical, so surgical in her methods of revenge. It’s so like her for her to tell a version of the story that suits her needs at the time. Now Penelope must do what she’d feared most for so long: tell Colin the truth about The Whistler. The one thing she thought she managed to avoid.

She rubs her face hard. “Have the other one. I don’t want it.” She gestures to the appetizer.

He eats it.

“I won’t blame you if this dinner gets a lot shorter,” she says. She’s just going to say it plainly like before. She will ignore the wasps ricocheting around her brain, the pins and needles feeling in her finger tips, the way all her limbs and her head feel suddenly so sluggish. “I didn’t sell to The Whistler. I was The Whistler.” She scoffs. “Fuck, I am The Whistler still.”

“Huh? You’re a gossip blog? What does that mean?”

“It means I invented it. I created it. I built the site, I wrote the content. Everything terrible or scandalous or embarrassing that was on there came from me.” She crosses her arms and leans back in the chair. Now, surely she’ll get the tongue lashing she deserves. He can get it out of his system and she can have her closure.

His face is a picture of confusion; she can see him sorting through it in his brain. The server comes back to take the empty appetizer plates, but says nothing, finally sensing that perhaps this dinner is not going well. Colin is a high profile diner for them, no doubt. His food review instagram has a great following.

“That blog is kind of old, right?”

“What?”

“You would have had to have started it when you were a teenager,” he says. “You created a popular website and turned it into a business when you were seventeen?”

Why is every question out of his mouth more baffling than the last? She thought her anxious brain had churned out every possible scenario, but he’s so far off script. She looks for their server and spots him having a worried conference with someone in an expensive suit. When they make eye contact, he hurries over.

“Could I have a cocktail, please?” she asks, trying to sound calm and kind. “Vodka something. Martini, gimlet, mule. I truly do not care.” She gives him a forced smile.

“Yes, right away,” he says. “Your entrées will be out shortly.”

Colin is shifting uncomfortably now, lost.

“Yeah,” she says, finally. “I guess I did start a blog when I was seventeen and then watched it snowball out of my control for the next ten years.”

“It’s a little impressive, you have to admit. I always wondered how you were making it work on your string of part-time jobs. I know your family wasn’t…” He stopped.

“Rich,” she offers. “No.”

And here comes the food. The server is trailed by the bartender, holding her one cocktail on a tray. The server announces the meals: fish and lamb.

The bartender sets down her drink and says, “This evening I’ve prepared for you a—”

“Great, lovely, thanks,” she says. The bartender looks mildly offended but excuses himself. Pen has ended up with the fish which is fine, because she doesn’t like lamb. Colin knows that, no doubt. The drink is something citrusy, but extremely strong and the big mouthful she swallows burns all the way down. She clings to the pain like a lifeline. Pain is good and familiar. Pain is what she deserves.

“Does it still get a lot of traffic? The site?” Colin asks.

“I don’t want to talk about the bloody site!” she hisses. “Colin, I’m begging you. Please tell me. You keep dodging this question. Why are you here?”

He leans back in his seat. “I mean, why do you think? I had doubts about what happened and… and I missed you. And I wanted to find you.”

This isn’t right. She takes another sip of her drink, feeling it all the way down where it settles hotly in her stomach. She shakes her head, setting the drink down.

“You all blocked me, Colin,” she says, the buzzing fading. Unfortunately, the thing that is taking over is panic. “You all went right along with Eloise and cut me out and it’s fine, I’m fine now. I moved on. I changed my life. I’m here now. I’m fine.”

His brow wrinkles. “No, you blocked me! I tried to get through to you a hundred times and nothing would send. And then something did go through and I thought finally! But it was someone else and you’d changed your number and you’d deleted your socials and you were just gone.”

She winces. She had blocked Colin, of course. That part was true.

“Eloise had the whole family block me,” she says. “But I did block you. I was afraid of what you would think or say.” She finishes the drink and sets the glass down carefully. “I’m actually not very hungry.”

Their food is untouched and cold. The man in the expensive suit seems like he’s on the verge of coming over.

“Pen, I think we just need to sort out what actually happened because it’s becoming crystal clear that you have your story and I have mine and they aren’t the same.”

“No, but the ending is the same, isn’t it?” she asks. “I think I’m going to leave.”

“No, don’t go, come on.”

“You can find your own way back to wherever you’re staying, yeah? That’s what you do?” She stands, trying not to jostle everything this time. “Finish your meal. You’re freaking the staff out.”

“Please stay,” he begs. “Please.”

“I can’t,” she assures him. It’s a short walk to the door and outside it’s pissing rain. By the time she gets back to the car, she’s damp and crying. She sits behind the wheel and grips it hard, knowing that she shouldn’t toss back the world’s strongest cocktail and then immediately drive home in the rain. So she sits with the car off, crying and sniffling.

Fucking Bridgertons. At least she’d had this city and this book shop and this tiny little life untouched by them. Now Colin is everywhere. In her shop, in her car, in the cafe next door, standing in her little flat. Everything is tainted, no matter where she looks now she’ll see the ghost of him even after he’s long gone.

She can see him now, jogging across the street toward her. No, wait. That’s him. That’s real.

He knocks on her window and she turns on the car enough that she can roll it down.

“Let me drive,” he says. His leather jacket doesn’t have a hood and he’s getting properly soaked now, too.

“No.”

“Come on, I had like three sips of wine. Let me drive you home, Penelope.”

Her full name from his mouth makes her wince.

“What about your dinner?”

“I paid the bill. It’s fine.”

He’s not going to leave her alone. She’d have to drive away and leave him standing in the street to escape him. She unlocks the car and slides over the center console awkwardly to get into the passenger’s seat. He has to move the seat back before he can get inside.

Everything is wet and humid and he sits for a moment, taking stock. He doesn’t start the engine, but says dejectedly, “You’re crying.” He’s staring at the lights on the dashboard.

“Bit of a weird day for me, actually,” she says.

This breaks him and he laughs and she can’t help but chuckle, too.

“Fucking hell,” he says, his voice going high the way it does when he laughs. “I would never cut you out of my life.”

She nods, and wipes her face and nose with her sleeve. “I would never have done it to you.” She rolls her eyes. “Willingly, I mean.”

“Okay,” he says. “Sod the rest. Let’s start there.”

She nods.

***

He drops her off and she doesn’t invite him up. She feels wrung out, hollow, all jumbled up inside. She needs to sleep it off.

“Can I see you tomorrow?”

She hesitates. “I have errands in the morning and then the shop in the afternoon.”

“I’ll come with you,” he says. “Whatever you need to do.”

She nods. “Okay. Nine?”

He’s parked her car for her and now tucks his hand into his pockets. It’s still raining and his cool guy leather jacket lacks a hood. Even if he’s staying close to where she is, he’ll be drenched by the time he gets halfway down the alley.

“Wait,” she says, reaching into the back seat. Her umbrella is on the floor and she pulls it out through the window and offers it to him. He looks like he’s going to refuse it for a second but then takes it. For a moment, they’re both holding it until she lets go.

“Thank you,” he says.

Upstairs, she shucks off her rain jacket, her jumper, her shoes and jeans. And then, because she’s mostly naked anyway, she turns on the shower. It takes a few minutes to heat up and so she pours some cereal into a bowl, some milk and then carries it into the bathroom with her. She didn’t really eat dinner, after all. The fancy food was too reminiscent of her old life. Private chefs, the best cut of any meat, catering fit for the queen. It’s not who she is anymore. She strips the rest of her clothing off, takes her cereal bowl into the shower and eats it while the warm and then hot water pounds down onto her back. The bathroom is small, the fixtures old, and the water slow to heat but when it does get hot, it lasts a good while.

Maybe eating sugary cereal in the shower after the world’s most failed dinner is a new low, but choosing which low of the last two years is the lowest accomplishes nothing. Cereal gone, she sets the bowl on the side of the tub and washes her hair, then her face, then her body.

Lying in bed, wrapped in her towel, she takes stock of what she knows that she hadn’t known before. Colin did not want Penelope out of his life. Eloise had, somewhere along the way, lied about the event to her family. She’d lied about Penelope’s involvement with the gossip blog, lied about the way that she’d left, and most likely had lied about details yet to be uncovered.

She reaches for her phone, opens her text messages, and looks again at the thread between her and Eloise.

Have a good life.

What’s crazy is, scrolling up slightly shows Eloise asking when she was getting home, probably so they could have their fight, and above that was Penelope asking if Eloise wanted fish and chips for dinner and Eloise had replied yes pls!! followed by a row of blue hearts. It had fallen apart so quickly. That’s the part that haunts her the most. How quickly it had all dissolved.

And now Colin, hanging around, hunting her down. Making her sit across the table so they can both stare into one another’s heartbroken faces. What is it all for?

***

Colin is there to help her load parcels into the boot in the morning.

“I can drive again,” he offers. His hair is damp, his face freshly shaved and she can see him at every age simultaneously. Thirty-one and twenty-three and sixteen and twelve. All nestled inside each other like Russian dolls.

“Alright,” she agrees. “Bank, then post office.”

He comes in with her to the bank, though it’s not necessary. Stands in line with her silently as she makes her deposit. Opens her car door for her and then shuts it once she’s inside.

He’d always done this, so it doesn’t mean anything. For his sisters, for his mother, for Penelope. He’s just being polite.

At a traffic light, he says, “How do you feel about me telling my mum that I found you?”

“Please don’t,” she blurts.

He compresses his lips like he wants to say something else, but merely nods. She doesn’t have to tell him how to get to the post office, like she hadn’t had to direct him to the bank. He prides himself on city navigation, studying maps, planning out his days well in advance.

“How did you find me?” she asks, finally. Obviously she’d slipped up somewhere along the way. And then a terrifying thought occurs to her. “Did you speak to my sisters?”

He winces. “Well, I tried. Prudence never called me back. Phillipa said she wasn't supposed to say.”

“Pip didn’t break?” Penelope asks, surprised. “Good for her.”

“I know things are unstable in your family. I didn’t want to make it worse.”

She could tell him that actually, her sisters are the most stable relationship she has, outside of Saanvi and Mrs. Cameron, but there’s not time to get into all of that.

“So then what did you do?”

“I hired a private investigator,” he says.

“You what?”

“I had a feeling you were going to be weird about that,” he says.

“You don’t think that’s an egregious violation of my privacy?” she demands.

He catches his bottom lip between his teeth and worries at it for a few seconds. “Maybe.”

“But you were fine with that.”

“I felt the benefits outweighed the drawbacks,” he says. “The fact that he found you, that I found you, and that you’re talking to me? Already blew all my expectations out of the water.”

“So you came to Edinburgh just to see me?”

“Yes,” he says. “I mean. I did make some restaurant reservations so I could write the trip off, but of course I came for you.”

She rolls her eyes. “Fucking Bridgertons.”

He grins.

“At least tell me how the PI found me,” she says. “So I can know where to tighten up security.”

He makes a weird face and then says, “It was your Spotify account.”

She gapes at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I know. It’s not something I would have thought of either. But you didn’t delete that when you deleted everything else. You have a playlist you use for the book shop and you named it Rare Bird Books. Once he found that, he could find the bill of sale under your name…” Colin trails off. “I suppose it’s harder to really disappear than it seems.”

She pushes her hair back away from her face. He’s pulled into the car park for the post office and now they’re just sitting there, listening to the engine tick.

“To be fair, I never expected anyone to look.”

He makes a pained expression. “I waited too long. I should have… I waited too long to start.”

She shrugs. “It’s fine.” Part of her wishes he’d never shown up, part of her knows her heart will break fresh when he leaves.

“While it has negatively impacted me personally,” he says. “I do think it’s very cool that you picked up your life, went somewhere new, and started over. You bought a book shop and turned it around. That’s very cool. Objectively cool.”

“Thanks,” she says. “What do you say we get these people their books?”

He nods and helps her carry the parcels in.

***

After the errands, he doesn’t leave. He follows her into the shop, makes small talk again with Mrs. Cameron.

“Tell Dennis I said hi,” he says, as she leaves.

Penelope rolls her eyes.

“How long are you in town for?” she asks pointedly, when he finally realizes there’s not really any place for him to stand where he doesn’t look strange. Not a customer, not an employee. Always haunting her.

He shrugs. “How long will you have me?”

She scoffs. “Colin, be serious.”

“I am serious.”

“I know you’re scheduled out months in advance.”

“Nothing that can’t be changed,” he says. “I always pay for the extra insurance for that very reason.”

“I’ll admit there’s probably more for us to talk about, but you can’t just… I’m not worth wrecking things over.”

“I’ve missed two years of your life. A few days isn’t going to cut it.” He does seem awfully determined.

“Fine,” she says. “Come back at close, I guess.”

“You’ll be here?” he asks. “You promise?”

“I live here,” she says. “But I can’t work with you lurking all day.”

He puts his hands up. “Fair enough. I’ll see you later.”

When he’s gone, she moves to hook up her phone to the speaker and open Spotify and then thinks better of it. Maybe for today, just silence.

***

She calls Pip during the last hour.

“Hey,” she answers. “Did you see The Whistler got another mention in The Daily Mail?”

“No, that’s great,” Penelope says. “That’s not why I’m calling. I’m calling because Colin Bridgerton is here.”

Phillipa makes a high pitched sound of distress. “I didn’t tell him!”

“I know you didn’t,” she says. “I was just calling to say thanks.”

“Oh. Well, but he found you anyway,” Phillipa says.

“Yeah.”

“He was really… he begged. He got all teary about it, you know.”

“Did he?” Penelope asks. “You could have warned me he was looking, at least.”

“You’re so weird about that family. I figured it was best to let the dogs sleep, or whatever.”

Penelope chuckles. “As they say.”

“Anyway, look at The Daily Mail. Prudence is crowing about it because it was her article.”

“I will. Thanks, Pip.” She won’t. She doesn’t care about the blog anymore. She does her edits, pays her sisters, tries largely not to think about it after that.

“Talk soon?” Phillipa asks.

“Er, sure. Talk soon.” She hangs ups and glances at the clock, the street, the clock, the street.

After everything that’s happened. After all the growing she’d had to do over the last two years, somehow she’s back to square one: waiting for Colin to darken her door.

Chapter Text

I fled to the city with so much discounted
Ah, but I'm flying like a bird to you now
Back to the hedgerows where bodies are mounted
Ah, but I'm flying like a bird to you now

Shrike - Hozier

*

Colin arrives with a box and on top of the box, a plastic bag from the curry shop. She unlocks the door to let him in at ten after seven.

First she takes the food, which does not look stable, and then allows him to enter before locking the door again.

“I figured maybe eating in was a better idea,” he offers lightly, like they both don’t know that dinner was a disaster.

“Thanks,” she says. “What’s in the box?”

“You.”

“Huh?”

“It’s my Penelope box,” he says, as if that clarifies anything. The food is heavy and hot, so she leads them upstairs, turning on the lights to the flat. She’d tidied up a little bit. The sink is empty now, and she’d cleared off the table for them to be able to sit at. She gets dishes down and pours them glasses of water while he unpacks the food bag. His box stays on the couch. They’ll get to that, she supposes. She likes curry too much to want to start the fight or discussion or whatever is to come before she eats.

“How are you finding the city?” she asks. She’s more interested in learning how he’s filling the time he spends away from her. She knows he’s been here before. With each passing year, it gets harder and harder to find a place he hasn’t been.

“Beautiful, as always,” he says. “I’ve been doing a lot of walking.”

“Better weather today,” she comments. While she loves a rainy day in the book shop, her foot traffic is always better on sunny days. “Have you gone anywhere else lately that you really liked?” she asks. She hasn’t kept up on his socials. She’d deleted the finsta, deciding the lurking wasn’t healthy for her and then just ended up doing all her stalking through the book shop account. She doesn’t look in on them often anymore, though. Never Colin or Eloise. Mostly just Daphne, sometimes. She misses the children.

“I went to Calgary last year,” he says. “Really beautiful.”

The food is good, as always. It’s warm and spicy and fragrant. She’s been so nervous lately that she’s been skipping meals and now she finds she’s starving. Then out of nowhere he says, “Frannie got married.”

“Francesca got married?” Part of her wants to hear about everything she’s missed, but with that comes with the stark reminder that she’s missed it, has missed many things, and will continue to miss them and that’s painful. It knocks the wind out of her a bit and she has to breathe through the sharp pain in her ribs for a few seconds. “That’s wonderful.”

“He’s a great guy,” Colin says and that seems genuine enough. “Really suits her. Quiet and thoughtful. Mum wasn’t sure about it at the start because they weren’t like, shagging in the coat closet or screaming at one another in the garden but…” He pushes his food around his plate. “I don’t think you need over the top passionate displays to love someone.” He looks over at the couch and she turns to follow his gaze, but the only thing over there is that box.

“Congratulations to them both, then,” she says.

“They live in Glasgow, you know,” he says. “Not far.”

Just over an hour by car. She’d made that drive once to pick a display stand up at the Ikea because the one in Edinburgh didn’t have it in stock. She’d not run into a Bridgerton, luckily, but now that’s a new thing to worry about. They couldn’t even let her have Scotland.

“No,” she agrees. “Not far.”

After dinner, he says, “Can I use your toilet?” When he comes back out, he’s holding the bowl and spoon she’d left on the edge of the tub. She’s already doing the washing up and she takes it, embarrassed, grateful he doesn’t ask for an explanation.

When she’s done, wiping her hands on a tea towel, he’s cleared books off the low coffee table and has opened his box of Penelope. The table is too low for the couch and the couch isn’t that comfortable, saggy in some spots and weirdly firm in others. She does think about replacing it often, but the logistics of getting the old one out and putting the new one in always overwhelms her. The back staircase is so narrow, but she doesn’t want to carry furniture through her book shop. So she does nothing, just one more thing that paralyzes her. If it’s not for work, if it’s just for her, she can’t seem to do it.

“After you left, I tried to piece together what happened,” he says, pulling a folder out of the box. “The falling out, your letter, where you might hide.”

“You read my letter?” she asks, sitting on the edge of the sofa. She almost can’t remember exactly what was in it—she’d been quite distraught, but she knows it was a lot of apologizing.

“Eloise asked us all to block you, that’s true,” he says. “She said she had a surprise for you. That you’d been promoted at work? Which I thought was strange, since I knew you’d recently quit that job but I figured maybe they’d offered you a better role to get you to stay.”

She shakes her head. “I made enough from The Whistler that I didn’t have to keep that job anymore.”

“So for two weeks, we all went quiet and then came over to the apartment for the party,” he says.

“That seems like a lot, even for Eloise,” Penelope says, finally sinking down onto the couch opposite from him. Eloise has never been a very adept event planner. She wasn’t bad with details, she just didn’t care about parties and had Violet and Daphne to plan every major event of her life.

“When we got there, it became quite evident that something was wrong,” Colin admits.

“All my stuff was gone.”

“That and the place was… Eloise was…” He hesitates. “It’s an explanation, not an excuse. It’s important to me that you understand that.”

Horror creeps in. Penelope knows that phrase. That’s Violet’s wording, her gentle reminder over and over again that one has to be accountable for one’s own behavior. Bile creeps up her throat again and she coughs, trying to force it back down. She can’t force the realization out of her own brain, though.

“Oh my God,” she says. “She was manic, wasn’t she?”

It’s easy to forget about Eloise’s diagnosis because even as teenagers, it had been so well controlled. She took her medicine at the same time every day, she had regular therapy. There had been an episode, once, Penelope remembers, during the summer when the Bridgertons were away, but Penelope never saw it up close.

Colin runs his hands through his hair, disheveling the perfect locks. “I think you caught the very beginning of it. It got worse. By the time we realized what was happening, you were gone, you’d deleted everything. We didn’t realize it at the time, but she got into our phones that day and messed with your contact info. It took us a while to realize that everyone had a different number for you and none of them were right. She had to go into hospital. It took time to… sort it all out. Piece everything back together.” He shook his head. “Plus your letter had been so clear.”

“My letter… Wait, she got into your phones?”

“Auggie helped her! The little shit!”

“Auggie?”

“We’re all just used to handing our phones off for him to play with,” Colin says. “We broke that habit right quick.”

“What letter?” she asks. “The letter I left for Eloise?”

“Yeah, I have it,” he says, opening the folder and flipping through pages. “Here.”

He hands it to her. It’s a picture of a letter and at first it does look familiar but as she starts to glance over it, she can see fragments of what she’d written that night, but a bunch of things she doesn’t recognize. It’s disorienting, because it’s all in her handwriting but she certainly never wrote I never want any of you to contact me again. Please delete my number. Please get out of my life.

There are certain letters circled with a red pen.

“I didn’t write this,” she says.

“I know.” He leans a little closer and points. “Look at these letters. They’re all identical.”

“So?”

“So when you write, things look similar but not identical. She made a font, Pen. She uploaded your real letter, made a font out of your handwriting and re-wrote it.”

Pen slams the paper down on the table and stands up, pacing nervously between the window and the door. The flat is small so it’s only a few steps in both directions.

“You know what the real shitty thing is?” she asks. “I should have stayed. I’m the shit friend. I should have realized what was happening.”

“No.”

“Did she stop taking her medicine?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I know she’s back on it now. I know she says she doesn’t really remember a lot about it.”

“She gets to create this like, elaborate cover up and then just can say she doesn’t remember it and move on with her life?” Pen says. “Fuck her!”

She starts to cry. Embarrassing, really, but completely involuntary. Before she even consciously realizes it, her eyes are flooded and spilling over. Colin about falls on his face trying to climb over the back of the couch to get to her. Suddenly he’s there, his arms tightly around her. He’s been noticeably respectful about her space, about her desire to be distant since his arrival. He’s not asked for a hug, or even a handshake. But now, he hugs her fiercely, tightly, tucking her whole body against him. Her head slots under his chin, his arms envelop her.

And she wants to be strong and she wants to not find any comfort in the embrace, but god it feels good to be held. Nobody touches her anymore. She sleeps alone; she has only acquaintances in a foreign city; she’s an island unto herself and that’s by design.

But she didn’t think she’d feel the lack of contact quite so keenly. She thought the numbness would last forever.

She clutches him back, a sob coming from somewhere deep inside, painful as it fights its way out but far more detrimental to hold in.

He holds her until she lets go first, her weeping slowly to sniffles and whimpers. She pulls back only because she’s afraid she’s going to get her snot all over his shirt. She grabs a paper towel from the roll and holds it to her face. It’s scratchy, but effective.

“You don’t have to forgive her,” Colin says. “I haven’t.”

“What?”

“Eloise,” he says. “It’s fine if you let her go forever.”

She doesn’t quite know what to make of that. The idea of facing Eloise again is unsettling. She’s not ready for that and doesn’t know if she can forgive her. On the other hand, Eloise has an illness and it’s the illness that was driving her to lash out. Can Penelope really hold that against her?

Still, Violet raised her children to be responsible for themselves. To exercise, to take their medicine, to let people know if and when they need help. If Eloise stopped taking her meds, she’d have known it was against her doctor's orders. If she’d felt herself slipping into a mania or depression, it was her responsibility to ask for help.

“She’s your sister,” Penelope says.

“She fucked up,” he replies. “Badly.”

“People fuck up, Colin.”

“Okay, well, I’m just saying I didn’t come here with the expectation that you’d forgive her.”

“What expectation did you come with?” she asks. “Because while it’s good to know that the way that she acted has an explanation, the truth remains that I did do the thing she accused me of. I am the person that disappointed her, that lied to her, that betrayed her. I disappointed her so severely that maybe that’s what sent her into mania.”

He frowns. “I’m not sure it works that way.”

“And you and I are what now? Friends again? We just slip back into what we had before? And what was that exactly? You drop into town every few months and crash on our couch? Why are you here?”

“Because I can’t stop thinking about you!” he says, tossing his hands up in the air. “Because even years later, I keep reaching for my phone to send you things. Because you’re my oldest and best friend. Because we never even talked about what happened at Benedict’s wedding!”

The last sentence lands with a thud between them.

“I…” She stops. “You were drunk, we can forget about it.”

“I literally can’t forget about it, Pen,” he groans, his eyes squeezed shut. “I screwed it up so badly.”

“You apologized, it’s fine.”

“Please stop saying things are fine when they obviously aren’t fine.”

She frowns.

“I apologized because I was drunk, not because I kissed you.”

“Oh.”

“You deserved better than that. We deserved a better start than that.”

She scoffs. “Start?”

“Come on, you and I both know we’ve been circling this thing for years and I felt like we were finally there!”

She shakes her head, more tears slipping down her face. “You mean the thing where you went off and did what you wanted and just expected me to wait around for you?”

He does look a little guilty at that, wounded and defensive. She latches onto it.

“The thing where you were always touching my hair, holding me, flirting with me and having all of that lead absolutely nowhere?”

“I—”

“The thing where you dated my cousin for an entire summer? Did you consider that part of the circling?”

And it’s a shit metaphor in her opinion. It makes her think of water going down a drain. Of vultures flying overhead, waiting to pick clean a carcass.

“No,” he says. “Obviously not.”

“Imagine how I must have felt when you finally kissed me and then texted the next morning to apologize for the mistake,” she says cooly.

“Imagine how I felt when I kissed you and you fell off the planet!” he says back.

“Oh, fuck off,” she hisses. “I knew from the moment I saw you that this was a mistake. I should have sent you packing immediately. Maybe we’re both better off without each other, have you ever thought of that?”

“Better off?” he yells. “Better off? Look at the state of you! You’re exhausted, you’re so severely depressed that it’s a literal miracle that you’ve accomplished so much. You ignore your sisters, you have no friends or social life. This is better?”

“Oh, I’m sorry that after a lifetime of trying to live up to Bridgerton perfection, I’ve finally let you down,” she snaps back. It’s like Mr. Darcy trying to propose while describing everything he hates about her; it’s like he wants this idea of who she is in his mind and it’s nothing like reality. “I actually think you should leave.”

He looks like she’s slapped him.

“Okay,” he says. “Maybe some space is a good thing. Maybe I can come back tomorrow and we can try again.”

“No,” she says. “I think you should leave Edinburgh.”

***

The days are so long. It’s nearly nine o’clock and the sun is still taking its sweet time sinking down past the horizon. Mrs. Cameron doesn’t work on Friday or Saturday, so it’s the hardest stretch for Penelope until Monday, when they’re closed and she does little more than sleep or buy food. Colin’s words stung because he’s right. She is barely functional and deeply sad and makes it all work with grit and determination alone. She needs another employee so that she doesn’t completely spiral into madness, but she’s not sure she can afford it.

She thinks of Hamish, in his eighties, puttering around day after day, struggling to climb the stairs and thinks, No, I can do this. I know I can.

She looks out the back window.

He’s still down there, sitting on the hood of her car. She wonders if she could set off the alarm with her fob and scare him off it.

He’ll sit out there all night, like a lost dog.

“Fuck,” she says to herself.

He’d bought enough curry to last her three days, so she packs it all away and puts it in the refrigerator.

He’s still down there.

He’d left his weird banker box with her name scrawled on the side. She peers into it. The forged letter still sits on top, but the rest of the folder is the investigator’s report. She flips through it.

Penelope Anne Featherington, 25, 26, 27. April 8, 1997

The report lists her family members (mother - estranged), her previous jobs, background on The London Whistler, information about her dead father. The man was thorough. There were screengrabs of her social media from the Wayback Machine. A picture of her and Colin on his twenty-ninth birthday, grinning and drunk in the Sawyers Arms.

Under the report is every letter, every birthday card, every scrap of paper she’d ever written to him.

“Fuck,” she says again. And then flies down the back stairs, throwing open the door and surprising him. When he looks up, his face is wet. He’s been crying too.

“Pen?” he says. There’s a note of hope in his voice that she finds stupidly irresistible.

“Come back tomorrow,” she says. “If you want.”

He sighs, his relief palpable, his hands over his heart. “Thank you.”

***

Hope is infinite, hope is a spark of light in the darkness, hope is the thing with feathers. Whatever it is, she can feel it now floating inside of her. Persistent, dangerous, and buoyant. In bed, the frame inherited from Hamish but the mattress replaced, she can so easily imagine reaching her hand to the other side and encountering warm skin. Muscle and sinew, stubble and dark blue eyes.

It’s dangerous. She’s wanted Colin for so long, for so much of her life that mostly it’s like background noise. Like the buzzing of fluorescent lights: annoying but easy enough to tune out. It was especially easy when he was off on one of his trips and nothing more than a preferred notification on her phone. Harder, of course, when he was in town drinking at a party or stealing bacon off her plate at brunch or asking her if she wanted to go for a walk in the park, to the cinema, or for coffee.

She’d been sweet on him and maybe, perhaps in retrospect, he’d been a little sweet on her, too. But not in any way that counted. He never held her hand as they walked down the street. She was never his plus one to Bridgerton events, always Eloise’s. He never made a move on her, except for that single time on the street.

This Colin is different, even she can see that. But she knows she can’t trust him. At least not yet. He can be as mad at Eloise as he wants, but when push comes to shove, family is everything to Colin and she can’t imagine a scenario where he chooses Penelope over his own flesh and blood. It’s not something she’d ever ask him to do.

So the hope blooms in her chest, holding hands with the dread because she doesn’t see how this ends. She only knows it does.

***

Penelope teaches Colin how to use the till and lets him man the counter so at least she can pull the display out of the window. Once she gets everything down and cleared off, and she’s seen him successfully ring at least three people through, she feels confident enough to go next door and get them some tea.

She’d been doubtful of his abilities to work the till, pointing out that he’d never had an actual job.

“I have a job right now,” he muttered, clearly offended.

“I mean a real job. In an office, in a shop, or in a restaurant,” she said. “The demeaning kind.”

And of course, what could he have said to that? But he’s smart and charming and ringing up a sale is not complicated, so she heads next door.

“So you are alive,” Saanvi says when she comes in. She’s one to talk. She works the same long hours that Penelope does, starting much earlier in the morning.

“Oh, technically,” Penelope says. “Two chai lattes, and two of those ham and cheese toasties if you still have them.”

She swipes Penelope’s credit card and says, “He’s still here?”

Penelope just scowls.

“He’s cute, you know. Very polite and charming.”

“It’s complicated,” Penelope says.

“All the good things are,” Saanvi agrees. “I’ll get your order.”

It is so helpful to have a second set of hands on the weekend, she must admit. She sends him upstairs to take his break and eat and then they swap places. While she’s upstairs, an order comes and she returns to see a pile of boxes partially blocking the staircase. She sort of has to climb over them to get past.

“I signed for them,” he says. “Seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Thanks,” she says. “I ordered a bunch of new romance titles. If you want to start opening them, maybe I can use them for the display.”

“You got it, boss,” he says. The shop is empty. They’re in the lull between the morning rush and the after lunch crowd. He opens the first box and then says, “I’m thinking of renting a flat.”

She freezes. “Where?”

“Here,” he says. “Obviously.”

“Why is that obvious?”

“Because I keep telling you I’m here and I’m not going anywhere but it doesn’t seem to be sinking in. And also because I can’t keep living in hotel rooms.”

“What about your other trips?” she asks.

“I already canceled everything,” he says. “And before you flip out on me, it’s about more than just you, Pen. I’m tired. I’m not twenty-two anymore. I need to slow down.”

“I see.”

“We have a lot to figure out,” he says. “I know that. But I’m certain I want to be your friend and I’m certain I want to see you every day and I’m certain I need to be here.”

She considers him, his open face and tired eyes. This must be hard for him too. She’s been so in her own head about things. He must feel torn in half too.

“Well,” she says. “I could use the help, honestly. The pay is shit.”

“Pay?” he asks. “You want me to work here?”

She shrugs. “If you’re going to be hanging around anyway.”

He nods, puffs out his chest a little. “Okay. What is the pay?”

“Fourteen pounds an hour.”

“Damn,” he says. “That is shit.”

“Take it or leave it, Bridgerton!”

He grins. “I’ll take it,” he says and extends his hand.

She shakes it firmly. Hope blooms and blooms and blooms.

Chapter Text

Baby, how I'd be grieving
If you wanted to leave me all alone now
By myself, I don't want nobody else
The world leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, girl
You're the only one that I want

Coming Home - Leon Bridges

*

Rich people don’t rent flats like regular people. Penelope has spent most of her life caught between the working class and the fabulously wealthy. The Bridgertons made their wealth long ago in real estate and keep it with investments. Anthony is the head of one of the top financial firms in the United Kingdom and has always given her the advice that she should never let her money sit. She should always be investing in something: land, property, companies, or stocks.

She never managed to explain to him that she didn’t let her money sit because she was spending it on bills and rent and school. At thirteen, when the Featheringtons were drowning in gambling debt, at twenty when her father died, and now. Even with the success of the blog, that money largely went to keeping her family afloat. Then it went to keep her afloat as she hopped from vacation rental to vacation rental and now it goes into the book shop. She’s acutely aware that she’s astronomically luckier than most people. That her proximity to money has saved her in a way that most people never get to benefit from. It’s given her a good education and resources and a safety net.

But she’s never had money in excess and mostly her housing had been subsidized by her friendship with the Bridgertons. She lived with Eloise and certainly was never asked to pay her actual fair share.

There’s no way Colin Bridgerton will go out and tour one-bedroom flats, with empty echoing floors or dirty carpets. No, for wealthy people, the line between vacation rental and luxury flat is really only time. Six months instead of two weeks in a fully furnished seven room flat on a high floor with stunning views.

Colin does not ask her to help him choose and does not invite her over once he takes several hours to clear out of his hotel. He does meet her for dinner after, freshly showered and wearing an outfit she’s already seen once before. That’s why what he says next doesn’t surprise her.

“I think I might go back to London for a day or two,” he says.

“Hmm.” She has unwrapped the paper from the chippy only to find his battered sausage. He takes it, sliding the other bundle over to her.

“I don’t think it should be more than one night,” he says.

“Sure.” What is she going to say to him, that he can never go home again? That she can’t function without him? He’s been her employee for two weeks—not so long that she doesn’t remember how to do it alone. No, likely the most disappointed will be Mrs. Cameron. She’s still opening her regular days, but now Colin is sometimes the midday relief and Penelope closes up. It’s given her some breathing room. She’d gone out one day and bought some new clothes. Two summery dresses and a pair of brown sandals. She’d even stopped in Boots and bought a tube of mascara and an eyeliner and some blush. Not the full face she’d used to slather on when her spots were bad, but the basics.

She tries not to think about why.

“I don’t have to go,” he says now. “I can put it off.”

“You can go home, Colin, that’s not something you need my permission for.” She reaches across him for the sack with the chips. Once they go cold, it’s not worth it.

“I know but I want you to know it’s a visit, nothing more.”

“Got it,” she says. “Would you like to borrow my car?”

He blinks at her. “Really?”

She shrugs, getting up to get them a couple beers. He’d come over the other day with two sacks of groceries and a case of Guinness and had announced it was more for his own benefit than hers. He takes the can before she can open it.

“Hey!”

“You don’t do it right,” he chides. He cracks them both partially and then sets them aside. “Anyway, I was going to take the train.”

“Suit yourself,” she says. “I just figured you were going to get your stuff. Since you live here now.” Her tone is teasing.

“Well, yeah.”

“Don’t you think a car would be easier than lugging suitcases onto the train?”

“Don’t you think my mother might notice if I roll up in your car?” he counters.

“I just assumed you’d told her by now,” Penelope says. “Have you not?”

“You told me not to!”

“You really still haven’t?”

He shakes his head.

“What does she think you’re doing here?” Penelope asks. She’s grateful that he’d respected her request, but now it feels like he’s either lying about her or lying for her and neither feels great.

“I don’t think she thinks that much about where I am, to be honest,” he says, cutting into his sausage finally.

“I think she probably thinks about you more than you think,” Penelope says, softly. “If you’re going to be settling here for a while, you should tell her why.”

“Are you certain?” he asks.

Penelope nods. “Tell her I’m doing okay, would you? Tell her… Tell her thank you for everything and that I’m sorry.”

Colin looks at her with concern. “You could tell her that yourself, you know? She’d love to talk to you.”

Penelope shakes her head. “Maybe someday, okay?”

***

It’s odd when he’s gone. She’d been casual about him leaving and had really felt that way at the time, but now that he’s not bringing her lattes in the morning or sitting at her little table in the evenings, she can see just how starkly lonely her life was before he came to town.

But one thing is different. He has her phone number again. She wakes up to a text.

good morning x

And it is a good morning, actually. With Mrs. Cameron to mind the shop, Penelope puts on an old t-shirt and her overalls and sets to washing the front window and then decorating it herself. She will hire her window artist for the Christmas season, but she’s a little too pricey for every time Penelope has to update her window. She’d watched her pretty carefully the last couple times and had decided that she could probably do some of it herself. Not to the same level of artistry or detail, but she’s not looking to recreate The Creation of Adam or anything, just something eye catching and fun.

She’d purchased window paint markers, hoping it would be easier than jars of paint and brushes and it is. She lays down her lettering first in white, then the color, then the outline in a deep purple. It’s not quite as tidy or professional, but it is cute. She adds some flowers around the edges and then, while it dries, arrangest the table inside with all of the latest romance novels that have come in with bright, happy covers.

When it’s done, she snaps a picture and sends it to Colin.

Summer of love??? he texts back. i ‘LOVE’ it!

It’s such a stupid joke, but it makes her laugh and she gives it a heart for effort.

But when the shop is closed and the sun is setting and her arms are aching from reaching up high to paint all morning, her doubt settles back in like a low fog. Who is he spending his time with, exactly? Just his mum? Is he seeing all his siblings? Is he seeing Eloise? Colin is shielding her from Eloise, she knows. From the full story there. Not what she’d done, but what happened after and what, exactly, she’s doing now.

Penelope can’t torture herself with thoughts of Eloise anymore. She’s gotten to a place where she isn’t thinking about the event every day, or at least she had before Colin had reappeared in her life, and she doesn’t want to go back to that.

There’s one last Guinness in her refrigerator and she opens it fully, impatiently, only to find that Colin is right. It does taste better if she lets it rest.

***

Prudence calls and says, “You took out my joke where I said Molly-Mae Hague looks like if Barbie had a baby with Donald Trump.”

“That wasn’t a joke, it was just mean,” Penelope says.

“Her latest spray tan was literally orange!”

“Okay, but… cutting remarks only work if they’re funny,” Penelope says for the thousandth time. “Mean is just mean.”

“Jesus, you’re such a baby,” Prudence says.

“You know, if you buy me out, you could just say whatever you wanted,” Penelope reminds her. “Have full control.”

“And full responsibility,” Prudence mutters.

“And full profit,” Penelope adds.

Prudence does pause to consider this. “You know, the people from G/O Media reached out again.”

“Do you want me to talk to them?” Penelope asks. “If the offer is lucrative, we might consider it.”

“And watch them run into the ground for the next three years before they shutter it completely?” Prudence asks hotly. “We’ve built this thing together! I don’t want to watch it die.”

Penelope doesn’t correct her. She might have built The Whistler up from scratch but she can’t argue that the only reason it’s still successful is the work her sisters put into it.

“We could negotiate staffing in the deal,” Penelope says.

“I don’t… I’m not sure.”

“Okay, well think about it.”

“I will. It’s just hard with the baby coming, we don’t know how much time—”

“You’re pregnant?” Penelope cuts in, surprised.

“Not me, Pip,” Prudence says. “She didn’t tell you?”

“No,” Penelope says. “I just talked to her a few weeks ago.”

“Sorry,” Prudence says curtly.

Penelope tries not to feel hurt. Though her relationship is closer with her sisters than it’s ever been before, that’s mostly because of business and not the tight Featherington family bond. It is what it is. Maybe Phillipa will speak to her soon. Maybe not.

“Maybe we’ll schedule a Zoom call and lay out some priorities before the end of the month,” Penelope says. Prudence hurriedly agrees, simply to get out of the call faster, Penelope thinks. It’s not like Penelope doesn’t have ideas. They did a merch drop once, over a year ago, of sweatshirts that were quite popular. They could do that again, expand it. Pip runs the newsletter and Prudence stays on top of the instagram, and Penelope edits everything but doesn’t do any of the actual posting any longer. Everyone is supposed to chip in with the inbox, but Penelope has been falling short there, she’ll be the first to admit. Her first priority is the book shop and then the rest of her time goes, now, to Colin Bridgerton.

Her friend.

But there are certainly ways to go. Accepting investments, starting an app, more merch, more collaborations with brands. There was a time that all she dreamed about was growing The Whistler to the point where she could be a media mogul and run an empire, but that dream feels hollow to her now, and too much work. She wants her little shop, her little flat, her narrow lane. She wants Mrs. Cameron in the mornings and Saanvi next door and now, against all better judgment, she wants Colin, too. Colin in the morning, Colin unpacking boxes of books with his sleeves tight around his biceps, Colin eating dinner under a glowing strand of warm fairy lights.

It’s like she’s been in hibernation for a long time. It’s like her body put all her energy into keeping her brain right side up so she could survive and everything else fell away: her obsession with her own body, her need to constantly look her very best, to be the funniest, the cleverest, the most cherished among her friends.

And then she was just Penelope, stripped down to the skin and bone.

She sees Colin look at her when he thinks she’s not looking. She sees him tracking her with his eyes. All the things she’d wished so desperately for from ages fourteen to twenty-three are somehow now happening. By twenty-four, she’d fully and completely resigned herself to the friendship being platonic. He’d had countless opportunities to seek more. She’d left him open invitations, sat close to him, sent him selfies asking his opinion on this outfit or that lipstick shade and he’d always responded with some variation of “You always look nice.”

And then, at twenty-five, he’d drunkenly kissed her on the street and promptly disappeared to Asia. And she’d disappeared inside herself.

He texts her when he leaves London. Just a picture of her car, the poor thing filled to the brim with his things. The sight fills her with a rush of joy she thought herself incapable of. He can say he’s staying until he’s blue in the face, but his actions are winning her over. Renting an apartment, bringing his things, accepting the part-time job he doesn’t need just to spend time with her.

He’d posted on @colinabroad for the first time in weeks, ranting and raving about how good Heron had been, despite the absolutely wretched time they’d had there. There’d been hundreds of comments asking where he’d been and where he was going next and he’d replied only to the first one saying, sticking around Scotland for a while. She’d screencapped it like a love sick teen.

But it’s one thing to yearn for him, her libido slowly coming out of hibernation. It’s another thing to actually, really, truly consider dating Colin.

A Bridgerton. After everything? A Bridgerton?

Really, Penelope? she thinks to herself.

***

Based on the time that Colin texted her about leaving London, she suspects it will be after eight before he makes it back to Edinburgh. Then he will need to go to his new flat and empty out her car, so she doesn’t bank on seeing him at all before the morning.

She closes up the shop, counts the money, sticks it into the safe and considers her options. She could order something, but she’s not that hungry, so she settles for toasting some bread and covering it with peanut butter. She still doesn’t have a television and honestly doesn’t have a lot of time to watch anything. But when she does find herself in a lonely pocket of time such as this, she turns on her laptop and puts on a film.

Tonight she chooses Sense and Sensibility, a film she’s seen so many times that she doesn’t have to pay attention to it to know what’s happening. She can eat her toast and then scroll on her phone, or do her dishes or fold her laundry. There’s an absolutely ancient washer in the bathroom under the counter where a more practical person might have provided storage. She washes a load of laundry and then when the machine stops chugging, hangs her clothes on the drying rack next to her bed. There’s no great space for a drying rack in this small flat, but the bedroom is the place she’s least likely to trip over it.

Colonel Brandon is bringing Marianne hot house flowers when Penelope hears a honk down in the alley and looks out the window to see Colin Bridgerton standing next to her car. She waves him up and he climbs the stairs. She opens the door and watches him take the last few steps.

“I didn’t expect to see you tonight,” she says. “You didn’t have to bring the car back tonight.”

He’s got a strange expression, brooding and moody and instead of responding, he steps into her space and opens his arms to hug her. She freezes, but he takes it as permission because his arms go around her while she stands there, hands down by her side, too surprised to react. The only time they’ve really touched is when she was crying.

“You okay?” she says into his shirt. His grip is tight.

He makes a rumbly sort of sound that she feels more than hears and then relaxes slightly, stepping back. It’s not the end, though, because his hands come up and anchor themselves on either side of her face and she gasps, surprised at the contact, surprised at the intensity of his gaze as he leans over her and says, “I really missed you.”

“I see that,” she says. His hands are warm and her body reacts by raising her temperature, speeding up her heart, and making every nerve ending come alive. “You were barely gone.”

“It felt like forever,” he says, and then he lets her go, stepping back so he can yawn.

“You could have kept the car,” she says again lamely. “Where is your new place, anyway?”

“It’s only about a mile from here, I can walk,” he says.

“Let me make you some tea or something before you go,” she says, moving to fill the kettle. He doesn’t argue, sitting on the sofa. This whole time, the film has been playing on her computer and he stares at it.

“I know that I’m probably supposed to be keen on Kate Winslet, but I always preferred the Emma Thompson character,” he says.

“You like this?” she asks.

“Frannie loved this one,” he says.

“I like Elinor, too,” Penelope says. “What do you know of my heart?” She quotes the line softly, mostly to herself. The kettle clicks off and jolts her out of the reverie and when she looks up, Colin is looking at her over the back of the couch. “Come pick your tea bag.”

“Builders is fine,” he assures her. She hands him the mug and sits next to him and he sets the tea on the table to cool and then drapes his arm over her shoulder. “This okay?”

“Sure,” she says, settling against him. On the screen, Marianne is just at the beginning of her heartbreak, feverishly writing letters that will never receive a reply.

By the time she marries Colonel Brandon, Colin is out like a light.

Penelope considers letting him sleep all night on her couch, but the idea is stressful and she instead wakes him while the credits roll.

“Want me to drive you home?” she offers.

He rubs his face. “No. I’ll be alright.”

In bed, she thinks about his hands on her face until she falls asleep.

***

When Penelope takes over for Colin, oftentimes he’ll simply go up to her flat to do his own work on his personal accounts. He says he has restaurant reviews backlogged to last him a while and he’s been snapping beautiful photographs of Edinburgh and posting those as well. One even got reshared to the city’s official Instagram account.

He’s up in her flat when a man comes into the shop, stops and looks around for a long time before removing his cap and clutching it forlornly in his hands. He’s at least in his sixties, obviously working class.

“Can I help you, sir?” she offers when he seems at a loss.

“Aye,” he says. “I’m Callum Macphereson.” He clears his throat. “Hamish’s nephew.”

“Oh,” she says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you!”

“You as well, miss,” he says.

“I know it’s a bit different than how he left it,” she says. “But…” There’s something in the man’s expression that shuts her up. A reluctance, a sorrow.

“I hate to have to tell ya, miss, but Hamish died two days ago.”

“What?” she asks. It comes out too loud, surprise wrenching the word from her. She’d meant to keep in touch better. She’d meant to go visit him in his new home and bring him pictures of her update. She’d meant… she’d meant to…

Her distress must have been loud enough to alert Colin because his footsteps are pouding down the steps. “Pen?”

“I’m sorry,” Callum says again.

“No,” Penelope says, swallowing. “No. I’m the one who should be offering my condolences, Mr. Macphereson.” Colin moves to stand behind her, his hand on her shoulder.

“Thank you,” he says. “Uh, this is awkward but he left this for you.” Callum reaches into his coat and pulls out an envelope. Penelope stares at it and so it’s Colin who reaches out to accept it. “There’s a service on Friday in Avonbridge if you and your fella would like to attend.”

Penelope nods. “Yeah. I would.”

“At the Parish church at eleven,” he says. He looks around again. “I told Hamish to sell this shop five years ago, maybe. He said he was waiting for the right person. A rare bird for his rare bird.” He smiles. “Glad he found you.”

“Thank you,” she whispers.

“See you then,” Callum says and lets himself out.

“You okay?” Colin asks.

“The man I bought the shop from,” she says.

“I figured.”

She feels kind of buzzy again, on the verge of either crying or checking out for a while.

“Do you want to open this?” he asks.

She nods, taking it and walking back to the other side of the counter. She always feels a little safer behind there. She opens the envelope and finds not a handwritten missive, but a letter regarding the estate. She skims it and then reads it again.

“What?” he asks.

“He left me something,” she says. “Well, to the shop.”

“What did he give you?” Colin asks.

“Twenty-five thousand pounds,” she says.

“Whoa!” Colin says. “That’s amazing.”

“It says it’s to start a section on the shop for LGBT books. The solicitor says, Mr. Macphereson’s instructions were to curate in his death what he was too scared to curate in life.”

“He was gay,” Colin says softly.

“I guess so,” Penelope says.

“Hey, I’m really sorry. I wish I’d gotten to meet him. I’ll mind the shop if you want to go to the service.” It’s his regular shift anyway but she shakes her head.

“We’ll close. We can both go. I’d like you to go with me.”

Colin reaches out, touches her shoulder and then lets his hand slide down her arm until he has her hand. He holds it gently, squeezing it. She squeezes his back.

Chapter Text

Someday, my body will be just a body
And a big white light before me lets me know these days will end
But I got today and the only plan I've made
Is to love like I might never get to love someone again

Body - Briston Maroney

*

Penelope doesn’t own a black dress nice enough for a funeral. She could order one online, but she’s worried it won’t arrive in time, so she braves Leith street to go to Zara and finds a black, but lightweight shirt dress with enough length and sleeves to be suitable for both the season and the event. She has an old pair of black loafers that will work. No one is going to care about her shoes.

She also spends some time putting together a post for the store’s website and instagram, partially to give people notice that they’ll be closed on Friday and partially to honor Hamish who’d opened this store and kept it afloat for years. Who’d lived above his flat, never married, never had children. She hoped he wasn’t always lonely and that he’d felt love.

Colin offers to listen to her talk through her feelings, and the hard look she gives him shuts him right up. Even in the best of times, the Featherington girls weren’t raised to talk about their feelings. Feelings were a weakness; feelings were to be exploited. Penelope doesn’t believe that to be good, but it has left her as an internal processor and the concept of openly discussing her emotional state with anyone, let alone Colin, makes her want to throw herself out of a second story window.

The post does well. She posts pictures of the shop when it opened that she’d found when she’d bought the place. She posts a picture of the two shelves of queer books she keeps in stock and says the collection will be expanding thanks to the generosity of the store’s previous owner, Hamish Macphereson, may he rest in peace. And she does something she’s never done before. She has Colin snap her photo, standing in front of the shop, and posts a picture of herself. She’s been hiding away this whole time, nursing her wounds, but with Colin here, she realizes that she has nothing to be scared of, anymore.

Several local accounts share it and it gets posted to some local queer groups. The comments get flooded with requests of where people can send donations, so she directs people to some local LGBTQ+ youth organizations, Stonewall Scotland, and Scottish Trans.

By the time Friday rolls around, logistically it makes more sense for Penelope to pick up Colin at his place, so he sends her the address. She expects a high-rise, a huge building, old and picturesque. Something fit for a king or a Bridgerton, but actually, the flat is on the ground level and seems kind of modest. She texts him when he arrives and watches him come out in a suit, his tie hanging around his neck and she groans.

He’s stupidly handsome.

She’d put a little effort into herself. Flicking on her winged eyeliner was like riding a bicycle, all muscle memory from so many years of doing it and between that and her darkened lashes, and black dress, her light blue eyes do pop. He gets in the car and then when he sees her, stutters for a moment before managing, “You look nice.”

“Thanks,” she says.

They’re quiet for the start of the drive. Colin’s attempts at managing her emotional state have not gone well so he’s waiting her out, she thinks. Letting her begin any and all conversations. The shop has been busy, he’s been settling in, so they haven’t had a ton of alone time together where one or both of them wasn’t exhausted.

But now, she finally says, “How was your mum?”

He glances over at her, his eyes wide. “Oh. Good. Thanks.”

Penelope bites at her lip, wondering how much she actually wants to know. “Did you get to see anyone else in your family?”

“I saw pretty much everyone, save for Frannie. We had a family dinner.”

“Cool.”

“I talked to mum about you but not… not the whole family, if you’re wondering,” he offers.

“Okay,” she says.

He reaches his hand out tentatively, pats her knee. She tosses him a soft smile to know that she’s fine and the drive continues.

***

A few days later, the solicitor comes by the shop with the check from the estate.

“You aren’t obligated by law to honor Mr. Macphereson’s wishes,” he reminds her. “But the family hopes you will.”

“I definitely will,” Penelope promises. She’s already started shopping for a larger array of queer titles, building her cart. She’d really just been waiting for the funds to arrive before purchasing.

After the man leaves, Penelope puts the check in the safe for deposit later and then comes back down to the shop. She checks her phone, making sure nothing came in while she’d popped up. It’s connected to the speaker, but the first thing she sees is an instagram notification.

@francescabridge liked your post

For some reason, it makes her very, very nervous. Her heart pounds and she can hear the roar of her own blood in her ears.

***

Colin brings over dinner and a carton of ice cream in a paper sack. He shows up with meals fairly often, sometimes unannounced. She’d been having a dinner of a handful of almonds and Nutella by the spoonful but she happily puts that all away to see what he’s brought.

She’s been waffling about whether or not to tell him about Francesca, and just as they’re sitting down to tuck into dinner, she says, “Francesca saw the post about Hamish.”

Colin freezes, looking at his plate sadly and sets his fork down. “Yeah, I know.”

“So you told her about the shop.”

“No,” he says. “Pen, you’ve been crystal fucking clear about how you feel about me talking to you about my family. I’m not going to do that unless you give me permission.”

She nods. “Thanks. Did… Do you think your mum told her?”

“No,” he says. “She would not do that.”

Penelope nods, feeling slightly scolded, but she needed to ask.

Colin sighs and says, “Frannie saw it organically.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure exactly. She saw a re-post or something. She called me about it.”

Penelope takes a bite of food which seems to give Colin permission to eat because he starts shoveling it in.

“Um,” she says. “Are you comfortable telling me more about your conversation?”

“I’ll tell you anything,” he says. “You only have to ask.”

She nods. “Okay. Why did she call you when she found me?”

“I’d been looking for you for a while. Everyone knew that. I just haven’t told them I found you. She offered to come scope out the shop for me and I told her that wasn’t necessary.”

Penelope dabs her face with her napkin. She’s not really crying, just brimming over, a bit. Talking about the family makes her weepy. She’s not sure that will ever go away.

“She wants to see you,” Colin says. “I had to make her promise she wouldn’t show up here unannounced.”

“Why would she want to see me? Why would any of you?”

“Because what happened to you wasn’t real! What happened to all of us wasn’t… I’m sorry it took us all so long to sort out the truth, but no one wanted to lose you.”

“Except Eloise,” she says.

He tilts his head, a concession. “Yeah.”

She clears her throat. “Real or not, it happened and I feel very…” Brittle. Wary. Scared.

“Traumatized,” he says, which feels like a huge word. Bigger than a single person can reasonably manage on their own.

She just lifts one shoulder.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” he reminds her. “Please just know that I’m here for you and when you’re ready—”

“Yeah. I got it.”

She’s short with him, tired and feeling exposed, like a raw nerve. Posting her own picture had been a mistake. Even though the post overall has made this the best week of sales she’s ever had, she’s not sure her own face needed to be a part of it. All of this could have been avoided.

After dinner, when Colin starts making his excuses to leave, she says, “Actually, will you stay for a while?”

It’s not his fault she doesn’t know how to deal with what’s happening. He’s been honest, patient, and kind. She likes herself better when he’s with her.

“Yeah,” he says happily. “Of course.”

They sit on her sofa because it’s the only place to sit. She could set up her laptop and give them something to watch, but she kind of just wants to sit next to him. When he touches her, everything in her head gets quieter. She wonders how much of her he would need to touch for the self-doubt and anxiety to recede all together.

He seems happy enough to sit against her and she angles her body a little so she can lean into him. He lifts his arm and wraps it around her and she lets her cheek rest on his chest. She extends her hand and he takes it, weaving their fingers together and holding it tightly. His scent invades her, calming her down and riling her up in equal measure. He lets go of her hand so he can slip it under her knee and ease her leg up over his, allowing her to tuck into him completely.

And then he holds her.

How did he know this was what she needed? This full body contact, this pressure, this level of care. Maybe he needs it too. He dips his chin and buries his nose in the top of her head. Feeling brave, she lets her hand on his chest slide down a little to rest on his stomach. What she really wants to do is slip her hand underneath it and feel his warm skin, and she’s resisting until he places a kiss on her hair. Her fingers slip under his hem and he inhales, his breath ragged. His skin is hot to the touch.

“Pen,” he groans.

She yanks her hand out. “Sorry.”

“No, put it back,” he says. “Please.”

She complies, pressing her hand flat and then dragging her fingertips through the hair she can feel around his belly button. His chest is rising and falling more rapidly now and when she glances up at him, his eyes are closed tight. He almost looks as if he’s in pain, but she knows better. A little higher, she can feel where his chest hair really begins. He lets his head fall back and his Adam's apple bobs as he swallows. Without thinking much, she tilts her head up and presses her lips to the side of his neck. Just a soft peck before pulling back again.

“Again,” he whispers, eyes still shut. She smirks but complies, pressing another gentle kiss slightly higher up. “Jaw,” he orders.

Twist my arm, she thinks, pressing her lips to the chiseled, stubbled angle of his jaw. He squirms a bit, repositioning himself. “Cheek.”

“Bossy,” she murmurs, straining to reach his cheek.

“Chin,” he says next. That’s more complicated logistically. She shifts, which causes him to loosen his iron grip on her. She has to change her angle, get more to the front of him rather than from the side. So she adjusts, sliding onto his lap. His eyes snap open and his hands go to her waist, holding her steady.

“All right, Bridgerton?” she asks.

“Never fucking better, actually,” he replies. “Chin, Featherington. Now.”

She leans in, presses her mouth to his chin, lingering a little longer and when she pulls back, she hesitates, staring at his lips. She knows he’s not going to order her to kiss him there. He’s definitely not going to kiss her first. He’s made it clear he’s working on her timeline, he’s earning back her trust, he’s being a stable pillar for her to lean against as needed.

But he’s apparently not above begging because she can see his lips form the word please even if she barely hears it. Maybe it’s not a good idea, but he’s irresistible. That pouty bottom lip, his fingers digging into her body, his eyes pleading.

She leans in, just brushing her bottom lip against his. Then she pulls back and he chuckles, somewhere between a laugh and a groan. She shifts a little and his hands hold her in place.

“Don’t,” he says. “You can’t… Please don’t squirm.”

She raises an eyebrow, amused. “You hiding something down there?”

“I won’t be hiding it well if you keep moving,” he murmurs.

She feels her cheeks warm up. She can’t stop staring at his mouth. And then she really thinks about it. What is she waiting for, exactly? She has the person she’s always wanted, warm and willing beneath her. He’s proven to her over the last several weeks that he’s committed to being in her life. Sure, he was careless with her feelings previously, but people grow and they mature. And if things go sideways and he shatters her heart into a thousand pieces, at least she’s been there before. She knows she can survive the pain. She knows what it’s like to lose the people she loves the most.

It’s like time stops now. His mouth, his breath, the small distance between them. She sees the tip of his tongue dart out to run along the inside of his top lip and that’s what breaks her. She sighs, leaning in and pressing her mouth to his. A real kiss.

Colin’s arms snake around her, pulling her into him and locking her into place. They kiss gently, exploring one another, getting the hang of things. She holds his face in her hands, guiding him gently, her bottom lip between his and then changing it up, so she can catch his bottom lip between her teeth, which makes him exhale forcefully, his hand sliding up her back.

He’s waiting for her, she realizes. Forcing himself into this holding pattern until she decides she’s ready to deepen the kiss. She pulls back.

“Okay?”

She nods. “I just wanted to look at you.”

He reaches out and tucks a piece of her hair behind her ear. Her hair is long enough that she can successfully clip most of it back, but the front pieces curl up too much and are too short. They fall forward. It’s such an intimate gesture. His eyes are so dark, pupils wide in the low light. She moves a little to lean forward and catch his lips and he growls, his hips surging beneath her. He’s hard, she can feel it now.

“Sorry,” he mutters, like the animal inside of him had broken through his restraint without permission.

“S’okay.” She leans forward, kisses him again and this time, when it feels right, she slips her tongue forward. He growls again, his tongue meeting hers enthusiastically, hot and spicy, dominant and demanding. She turns to liquid immediately. Her whole body lights up like a firework, arousal bursting through her body, hitting all her erogenous zones at once and she whimpers, his mouth absorbing the sound.

She’s never been kissed quite like this before. Is this what it’s supposed to feel like? When you’re attracted to the person, when you like them, when they want you back? She moves again, rotating so she can straddle him instead, and it’s amazing, their bodies pressed together, his hands in her hair. He finds the clip, pulls it off and tosses it toward the coffee table and she laughs into his mouth.

“Shut it,” he says.

It’s just so joyful, actually. She feels such overwhelming joy and hope and lust and love. All the emotions she thought had gotten torched out of her, all roaring back to life. Kissing him while smiling is the pinnacle of happiness and she can feel him smile back and then they’re just both happy, both giddy, both amazed at their good fortune after a long stretch of grief.

But she’s not ready to sleep with him yet. She’s not ready to rush into things. Telling someone you’re going to stick around for a while is not the same thing as committing to a life. Penelope is committed to this city now. She’s committed to her business and this country and the life she’s made. Nothing inside of her wants to return to London. Right now, she wouldn’t even go back for a visit, let alone move back there. And she also doesn’t want to travel around for most of the year. She wants this life and she wants Colin in it, but that has to be a choice he makes for himself. A few weeks in Scotland to him is the same as any trip. She needs to know he can stick it out for longer. That he can put down roots.

So she eases back on the kissing, slowing things down until they pull apart.

“You have the most beautiful lips I’ve ever seen,” he says softly.

“Back at you, Bridgerton,” she says.

He grins, leans in and kisses the tip of her nose.

***

She wears one of her new dresses and wears a little eyeliner and goes next door to get drinks from Saanvi and when she sees Penelope she bursts out into delighted laughter.

“What?” Penelope asks, worried she has something on her face or that her dress is tucked into her pants or something.

“I just…” Saanvi shakes her head. “You’re very beautiful when you’re happy.”

Penelope rolls her eyes, embarrassed, but smiles. “Thanks.”

“I have some happy news too, would you like to hear?” Saanvi asks, already ringing up two masala chais for Penelope.

“Of course,” Penelope says, swiping her card.

“We may not have to close or sell,” Saanvi says. “Someone expressed interest in investing, but keeping me on to run the place. That way my parents can retire, but I can stay.”

“That’s amazing! Is that something you want? Would you want to stay even if you don’t have full ownership?”

“I think it’s a happy compromise,” she says. Penelope moves down the counter so they can continue chatting. “I like the shop, I like the schedule, but we’re very stuck where we are. Not enough income to make good changes, but business can be steady enough that we don’t want to reduce hours.”

“Yeah, but I can’t imagine letting someone else come in and start calling the shots in my business,” she says. “That would drive me nuts.”

“You certainly have to build a relationship with the person. Build up mutual trust and respect,” Saanvi agrees.

“It’s not a company? Who is it?”

Saanvi slides the two teas over. “Oh, a man. He’s tall, handsome. Brown hair, blue eyes. Big, big, embarrassing crush on the woman who works next door.”

Penelope frowns. “Colin?”

“Mmmhmm,” Saanvi says. “He hasn’t talked to you about it?”

“No.”

“I asked him why also and he said he was interested in making more investments in his community,” she says with a shrug. “Who am I to turn down a rich man’s money?”

Penelope carries the tea back to her shop. Colin is helping a customer, so she sets his cup down by the till and waits for him, perching on the stool. She’s early for her shift and he’ll stay over after his so they can spend a little time together. Then, he might disappear for a few hours or simply go upstairs and wait for her.

“Cheers,” he says, when he notices what she’d brought for him.

“Saanvi was quite happy,” Penelope says. “Would you know anything about that?”

His poker face is terrible, honestly. He tries to hold his expression neutrally, but everything twitches.

“Okay, fine,” he says. “We’ve been in discussions.”

“Uh huh.”

“Anthony is always telling me to invest! I’ve looked at her numbers and they aren’t bad. Even Anthony said they weren’t bad. And really, how many local places like that are left, especially coffee and tea. It’s all Costa and Starbucks.”

“You are allowed to do whatever you want with your money,” she says. “It’s not like I don’t think Saanvi is a worthy cause.”

“You aren’t mad? I was going to tell you when we had a more concrete decision.”

“I’m not mad,” she promises. “Just surprised. Did Anthony wonder why you wanted to buy a random coffee shop in Scotland?”

“We didn’t talk about it,” Colin says, his face twitching.

Penelope decides to let it go. “I’m just glad you want to put down some roots here,” she says.

“I do,” he says. “I’m planted. I’m basically Scottish now.”

***

In a way, they skip a lot of the things about dating someone new that are more unpleasant. Learning someone’s habits, their flaws, their peculiarities that turn out to rub the wrong way in a way that is unignorable. They move around her little flat in harmony, the shorthand of a long, long friendship catapulting them to comfort. He’s always been touchy feely and she’s always been a bit of a flirt when it comes to him, at least. So in that, they fall back into their comfortable roles.

The kissing is new, obviously. But neither of them are new to kissing or romance or having partners like if they’d tried to do this at sixteen or even twenty-two. They’re both mature adults now, both miraculously on the same page at the same time. He brings food and greets her at the door with a peck on the lips. She kisses him when he leaves for the night, standing a few steps down so their heights are matched and no one has to stoop or crane.

But after she learns about the cafe, she finds him even more attractive. She almost wishes he hadn’t come down to help her close up, because now he’s fussing with that one light bulb in the corner that keeps flickering.

“Let me just get the ladder from the closet and see if I can’t get it to—”

“Leave it,” she says, impatient.

“It will just take a minute.”

“I’m begging you,” she says. “Leave it and come upstairs with me.”

Understanding dawns across his face. “Yep. Right. Let’s go.” And then he moves so fast that he’s basically at her heels going up the stairs. For the last few steps, he’s got his hand on her bum and then when they finally get up into the flat, he grabs her, spins her around, and lifts her onto the kitchen counter. His mouth is hot and she spreads her legs to make room for him which feels especially charged while she has a dress on, because the fabric rides up her thighs. He wastes absolutely no time sliding his hands up his legs and resting them above her knees.

She pulls back and says, “Um.”

“You okay?” he asks.

“Yeah, I just was wondering something.”

“What? Anything, Pen.”

“I was thinking maybe you might want to sleep here tonight?” She’s not sure why she’s so shy saying it, but she feels a bit vulnerable. He’s perfectly happy to work on her timeline, she knows but moving them forward on that timeline is still a leap of faith. Maybe now is the time he reveals he’s been kidding all along and he never wants to see her again, but for real this time.

“Absolutely,” he breathes, kissing her again. “Wrap your legs around me.”

She does it but says, “Why?”

“Because it’s bedtime right now,” he says. She laughs, shrieks as he lifts her and heads toward the short hall to her bedroom.

“It’s eight thirty!” she says.

“Don’t care,” he murmurs, quite intent on his destination indeed.

Chapter Text

You can tell all your friends
That I just cut and run when it got too tough
That I just cut and run when I had enough
And it’s just like me to walk away so early

Cut and Run - Jill Andrews

*

Colin’s never been in her bedroom. They come to this realization at the same time when he accidentally crashes into her clothes drying rack and basically tosses her onto the bed so they both don’t go toppling down on it. She lands with an unattractive grunt, though his aim was good and he flails for a minute, his arms pinwheeling as he tries to keep his balance.

Then they both burst into laughter.

The lights in her room are controlled by the switch at the door. She gets up to turn them on and there’s a single strand of fairy lights and a larger lamp in the corner that she’d picked up second hand. She liked the pattern on the shade and how it reflects onto the dark walls.

Colin surveys the damage. Most of the things on the rack were undergarments. Pants and bras and a few t-shirts. He picks up the rack and she leans over, plucking up her things and trying not to feel embarrassed.

“You were going to see them anyway,” she reasons and he snorts. There’s a small chest of drawers, and she shoves everything into one of them and jams it closed. Colin, wisely, collapses the rack and leans it against the wall.

“Nice room,” he says.

“Shut up.”

He grins. The room is small, the window smaller and narrow and barely lets any waning summer light in. The bed is a double and would be a chore for both of them to sleep in, but right now, Penelope isn’t thinking about sleep.

“Tell me to stop at any point, okay?” he says.

She nods.

The kissing resumes and she’s glad for it. They make out standing next to her bed and then his fingers are at the back of her dress, feeling around for a zipper that doesn’t exist. The material is stretchy enough to go up and over her head but probably not stretchy enough for the top to go down over her hips. He finally breaks the kiss and says, “Uh?”

“Over my head.”

He thinks about it and then instead takes off his own shirt, revealing a chest she’d seen from time to time over the years during summer events, but not recently enough, it seems because he’s quite solid and muscled now.

She takes his cue and pulls off her own dress. This part makes her nervous, she must admit. She’s seen any number of Bridgertons in states of undress and they always look like they’re about to run onto a page of a magazine. Daphne was in a few catalogs when she was in her early twenties, until she’d married a literal Duke and started pumping out babies. Penelope is never going to look like a Bridgerton. She’ll never be rail thin, she’ll always have curves, a belly that sags, and dimpled thighs. Owning the book shop has been one of the more physical jobs she’s had and it has made her a little leaner and stronger, but hasn’t changed her weight or size much.

Still, Colin looks at her like she’s Christmas morning, yanking her to him so they can resume kissing, skin to skin. His hands explore her back, her bare arms, and her sides before coming up again and flicking open the back of her bra. She takes a deep breath and lets it fall.

His eyes travel over her and then with a surprisingly commanding voice, the same one he’d used to tell her where to kiss him, he says, “Lie down.”

“Yep,” she says, scrambling to do so. She has to crawl onto the bed and situate herself and by the time she does so, his jeans have gone and all that remains are his tented shorts. There are rumors about those Bridgerton boys and what they pack and from what she can see, the rumors appear to be true.

And then something terrible occurs to her. “Colin,” she says.

“What?” He’s kneeling on the bed now, taking her in.

“I don’t have a condom.” They’ve been heading down this path but she’d been ready far sooner than anticipated. He smiles, lowering himself down next to her.

“I have some,” he says. “Good to be prepared for any situation, I say.”

She narrows her eyes at him, though she’s secretly glad.

“With you, I meant,” he murmurs, leaning down to kiss her. His hands move everywhere now. He cups her breasts reverently, pinching her nipples which causes her to surge up into him. He’s so close, she can feel him everywhere. His chest against her, his legs tangled with hers, his fingers in her hair, on her back, sliding between her legs. He cups her over her pants and she gasps, the sensation overwhelming. She hasn’t had sex in something like three… three and a half years? And every time she’s ever had sex, there was always at least a small part of her brain that was thinking about Colin. Not very fair to her partners at the time, perhaps, but the honest truth. And now her partner is Colin and he’s so hard against her.

“Take them off,” she says. “Yours too.”

She’s been too passive, maybe, swept along by his enthusiasm. She’s been letting him take his fill but now, as they scramble out of their last scraps of clothing, it all is becoming so real. Her lifelong fantasy, her most guarded secret, her pie in the sky is currently naked in her bed.

“Holy shit,” she says, when she sees him.

He smiles, clearly chuffed.

“May I?” she asks.

“So polite,” he murmurs, grabbing her hand and guiding it to his cock. She wraps her fingers around him and strokes him once, and he groans, pressing his forehead against hers. She kisses him, feeling powerful and sexy and so, so horny. Colin Bridgerton, completely at her mercy. He’s so hard, so warm, thrusting lightly back against her hand. She gets distracted and he gets the jump on her. His fingers are back between her thighs but this time with no barrier and he strokes her and she gasps into his mouth. He finds her wet and willing.

He catches her bottom lip with his mouth as he pushes the first finger inside of her.

She’s been holding back, she realizes now. Her body tense, her movements uncertain, but now she decides that there’s nothing to gain from that. She wants pleasure, she wants orgasms, she wants his mouth all over her body, she wants to lick him head to toe. She moans, loudly, and grabs the back of his neck so she can hold his head steady and still thrust her hips against him. She kisses him hard, their tongues swiping against one another long and hard and hot.

And it feels good, but one finger of penetration isn’t enough to get her off so she says, “A decade of foreplay is enough, don’t you think?”

“No,” he murmurs, his thumb finding her clitoris. That shuts her up quite effectively. Well, rather, words fail her but she knows she’s whimpering, chasing the pleasure. He’s so gentle when he needs to be, so commanding when he shoves her thighs apart when she closes her legs too much or leaning down to nip at her collar bone, or his mouth hot on her nipple. “So wet,” he whispers into her ear, hotly. “This all for me?”

How to tell him that every orgasm she’s ever had has only been for him? From the first time she’d touched herself at thirteen, to the first time she’d had sex at nineteen with some boy she’d met at the pub who had brown hair and blue eyes and in the dark of her room, she convinced herself she could play pretend just enough. To the first vibrator she’d bought, thinking about him on some beach in Greece, tan and sunning himself, thinking about her too.

She nods, frantically, and grips his wrist when he gets it just exactly right. “There,” she pants. “Don’t stop.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, gorgeous,” he says, and dips his head to kiss her neck, sucking lightly on her sweaty skin there. But he does stop, only briefly, to ease another finger into her and she doesn’t begrudge him because it’s been a long time and his cock is big and even two fingers is a stretch that burns so good. And then, instead of his thumb, he slides down and kisses her clit with his hot mouth and she gasps, shocked, though she doesn’t know why.

She’s pictured this a thousand and three times too.

His goal is the orgasm. She figures that out quickly when his tongue goes hard against her clit, working it forcefully, pumping in and out of her a little faster now and she’s got her heel on his back and her back is arching off the mattress and she’s worried that as good as this feels, as high as she’s climbing, she won’t actually be able to get off because sometimes it’s just difficult to achieve with a new partner, but then he does something that rips a literal scream out of her and she is coming, like driving a car fast into a brick wall. Fuck it’s good, fuck it’s burning her alive. Her hips are in the air, she can’t breathe, her whole body is shaking and she doesn’t want it to stop but she can’t stay here forever, can she? Broken and writhing at the gates of heaven?

He eases the pressure, she starts to float back down. His fingers come out, his kisses are damp against the inside of her thighs. When she can finally control her own face again, she looks down at him, his chin resting on her belly, the part of her that makes her want to scream with rage when she looks at herself naked in a mirror, but now, it’s the perfect rest for him.

“Yeah?” he asks, like she didn’t just literally transcend space and time for a second.

“Condom,” is all she says. “Now.”

He chuckles, the smug bastard. She watches him pick up his t-shirt and wipe his face with it before rummaging through the pocket of his jeans and pulling out two foiled squares. He rips one off and tosses the other onto the tiny table she uses as a nightstand, big enough to hold her phone and a glass of water and not much else.

He rips the square and pumps himself a few times before rolling the condom on.

“You still good?” he asks, crawling over her.

She nods. “I’m good if I’m with you.” Because of course, the fantasy has already been achieved. The sex will be good, the sex that they have will be important, but the real dream was him in her life, holding her hand and fixing dinner with her and opening doors for her and she already has all of that.

She spreads her legs, he rubs the head of his cock against her, coating it with her arousal. “I’m gonna go slow.”

She can’t even crack a joke about it because he is big and it does burn a little going in. She has to work to breathe through it. He gives her some shallow thrusts, getting her used to the feeling and then pushes in more. She gasps, but this time it’s good. She feels so full and she knows this is the last barrier between them, the last layer of intimacy to peel back and the fact that it’s happening finally leaves her euphoric.

“It’s good,” she reassures him.

He releases a breath, relieved, and sinks the rest of the way in.

“I won’t… I can’t last long,” he moans, pulling out and pushing in again.

“You don’t have to,” she says, her hands in his hair. “I’ve got you.” She kisses what she can reach of him: his bicep mostly. “We get to do everything we’ve ever dreamed of,” she reminds him. “We have all the time in the world.”

His moan is ragged, she hikes her legs up and around him and feels like a powerful queen as he ruts into her, faster and faster until he makes a mangled cry, stiffening. She clenches down on him hard, wanting to give him every drop of pleasure he’d given her. He doesn’t pull out right away, just collapses on top of her and she wraps every limb around him, holding him tightly.

When he lifts his head, he’s got tears in his eyes and he says, “Can I say it? Please let me say it.”

She watches a tear slip down his cheek and she nods. “Go on then, Bridgerton.”

“I love you,” he says, kissing her. It’s sloppy and wet and desperate. “I love you, I love you. Fuck, I’m so in love with you, Pen.”

It’s nice to be wrong, actually, because there was one more layer of intimacy after all and it’s just like Colin Bridgerton to smash through them all at once, her heart cradled in his hands.

She nods and she’s crying now too. “Are you sure?” Because two years ago, she’d blocked him knowing he’d never forgive her for her sins. And his family was the only source of love she received and suddenly it was gone and she was adrift, alone, drowning.

The question breaks his heart and he sobs, pushing his face into her neck. She’s never seen him quite this raw and exposed, except for maybe when his dad died. She holds him while he shakes. When he can manage it, he says, “I’m sure.”

She rubs his back. “I’ve always been in love with you, you know. You never have to doubt that.”

The skin of his back glows golden in the light of her bedroom, in her little flat, in this perfect, beautiful city that belongs only to them and their love.

***

A man comes into her shop, his accent Scottish, his voice soft and comforting like listening to a familiar song on the radio. He says he’s looking for something for his wife and he and Penelope get to chatting. His wife is a musician and they’re in town because she’s playing a recital at the summer solstice concert in the esplanade of the castle.

Penelope admits to him that her shop keeps her busy and she hasn’t explored a lot of the cultural scene of the city, past some museums and local restaurants. She shows the man the stationary supplies, the new collection of literary themed candles she’s started selling from a local candlemaker. Her semi-viral post about Hamish had swamped her with not just applications for people wanting to work at the store, but local craftspeople who wondered if she’d host their range of products. So now she has candles, and some jewelry, and a few pieces of pottery, mostly mugs.

The man lifts a candle, the Emily Bronte one, and gives it a sniff. “Oh, that’s lovely,” he says.

The bell rings and Colin comes in, back from the post office, and he’s holding a bouquet of pink roses. He smiles when he sees her, presenting her the bouquet with a flourish before spotting the customer.

His face changes swiftly, overcome with anger and it makes her step back, roses against her chest.

“What are you doing here?” Colin says. “I told her no.”

“What?” Penelope asks.

“She doesn’t know I’m here,” the man says. “I swear, Colin.”

“What?” Penelope says again, louder this time.

“He’s Frannie’s husband,” Colin says.

She feels stupid then, standing there holding her flowers. She’d been nice to him; he’d been spying.

“Oh,” she says, softly.

“She’s been so sad about the whole situation,” the man says. “I simply wanted to tell her that you were both doing alright.”

“You shouldn’t have done it this way,” Colin says.

“What way then?” he asks. “You won’t tell anyone anything. You bite everyone’s head off when she gets mentioned.”

“She decides,” Colin says, pointing at Penelope. “Not the family. It’s all up to her.”

The man nods. “Of course, you’re correct. My apologies.” He glances at Penelope who sets her flowers down and comes back over to where they’re standing.

She extends her hand and he takes it, shaking it firmly. “I’m Penelope Featherington.”

“John Stirling,” he says. “A pleasure to meet you formally.”

Colin rolls his eyes, still angry and annoyed.

“It’s okay,” she murmurs to him.

“May I at least purchase the candle before I fuck right off?” John asks this, smirking, eyes on Colin.

“I’m gonna beat the shit out of you,” Colin declares, though they all know he’s not going to do anything of the sort.

“You can buy the candle,” Penelope says. “In fact, I insist.” She rings him up. He pays cash and she drops his change into his hand.

“You could attend the concert,” he offers. “We can comp your tickets.”

“Um,” Penelope says. “When is it?”

“Really?” Colin asks.

“Tomorrow. Show starts at eight, but she’ll go on around nine.” He smiles at her. “She would be so happy to see you, you know.”

Penelope shakes her head, her eyes brimming the way they do when any Bridgerton is mentioned. She wonders when it will stop. “No promises,” she says.

He nods. “I understand,” he says. When he passes Colin, he extends his hand and Colin glares at it before accepting it and then pulling him in for a hug. “We miss you,” John says.

“I know,” Colin says.

***

Penelope sits astride him, her hands on his chest. He’s in the center of her bed but with his arms outstretched, his fingers would hang off either side. He’s been sleeping here a lot and it’s not that comfortable when they’re just trying to sleep, but it’s not so uncomfortable that they’ve stopped doing it. He’s suggested very lightly that she could come home with him and it’s made her clam up both times for reasons unbeknownst to either of them. Perhaps it’s just change that she fears now, after enduring so much. She’s not keen on the idea of being so far from the shop. She also fears that if she goes into his flat, she’ll see all his things in a suitcase and realize that even if he’s not planning to, leaving would be easy and swift.

He’s not going anywhere right now, panting underneath her. She’s been setting this languorous pace, happy enough with the connection that she doesn’t need to ramp up the pleasure so far that it will force things to end, but she can see the desperation on him now. His fingers gripping her thighs, the throbbing vein in his temple. She takes his hand and guides his thumb to her clitoris with a smirk and speeds her hips up, rocking against him and within a minute, his eyes close and his mouth opens with a soundless shout as he comes.

She pushes his hand away, more than content without him wringing a third orgasm out of her this evening. He’s intense about foreplay, actually, or maybe she’s just slept with lazy, selfish men up until now.

He holds the base of the condom and she rolls off of him squished against the wall but grateful because her thighs are slicked with her own arousal and sweat from sitting against him for so long.

“I should get an air conditioner,” she says. “And a bigger bed.”

He makes a strange face; she only just catches it as he goes to dispose of the condom in the bathroom bin. When he comes back in, he pulls on his shorts.

“What?” she says.

“Nothing.”

“No, not nothing,” she says. “What are you thinking?”

“I was thinking that we could begin to think about whether or not we wanted to someday think about a bigger place,” he says. “I want to stress that I mean in the future. The nebulous, undefined future.”

And she does have to fight against shutting down at the sound of his words. She’d bought this shop and flat with forever in mind. She’d hide away here forever, hiding in the pages of books and never putting her face on the internet again, forgotten and changed. But he’s not wrong in implying that this small flat isn’t ideal for two people.

She worries at the hem of the sheet draped across her lap and then clears her throat and nods. “If—”

“I swear to God, if you say if I’m still around…”

“I was going to say, if that’s what you want,” she says, rolling her eyes.

“You’d need to want it too,” he says, sitting on the edge of the bed.

She nods.

“What if we have a bunch of little ginger babies, you know?” he says, reaching out to touch the bottom of her chin and lift her face to look at him. “They’ll need rooms and toys.”

“Some people who grow up with a bunch of siblings decide they don’t want a bunch of kids,” she points out.

“I’m not one of those,” he reassures her. “But if you don’t want babies, that’s fine too.”

She smiles, her heart melting. She’s in no place to decide right now, but if she wants babies, only Colin Bridgerton as the father would do. “Okay.”

“Speaking of siblings,” he says. “Did you decide about the concert?”

She shakes her head. “I’m still thinking about it.”

“Okay,” he says. “John emailed me the tickets, so either way, we’re good.”

“There is something else I wanted to talk about though.” His eyes go comically wide.

“You want to initiate a feelings talk?”

“Shut it,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I don’t know how to move forward on my own so I guess I just need some advice.”

“Go on,” he says.

She takes a deep breath and then says, “I’d like to sell The London Whistler. But, I don’t really know how to go about it or what it’s worth.”

“Oh,” he says. “I think that’s pretty straightforward. I can ask Anthony to run some numbers and get a sense of what it’s actually worth, and then you could hire a talent management firm to help broker the sale. They’d do the heavy lifting of fielding offers and handling negotiations, contracts, that sort of thing.”

“Totally simple, how could I have not seen that!” She’s being sarcastic, but mostly toward herself and not him. She’s achieved a lot in her twenty-seven years, but will never have the business know-how of the Bridgertons, who’d all gone to school for it and have successfully run an empire for centuries.

“You might have to share some data with me to send to Anthony, if that’s all right.”

“I mean they all already know it’s me, right?” she says, her chest feeling tight.

“Actually, no,” he reminds her. “We all thought you were selling stories. Eloise didn’t tell us it was all you.”

She frowns. “Right. Weird.”

He shrugs, his hand rubbing her arm. “She wasn’t in her right mind.”

Is she now? The question pops uninvited into her mind. She swallows it down, not ready to hear the answer.

“Anyway, there are a myriad of talent companies out there, but you know who the best and most ruthless person to do this is, right?”

Penelope winces. “No.”

“Yes,” he says. “It’s Cressida.”

“Ugh.”

“If you want to sell it fast and for a lot, she’s the one,” he says. “Want me to call her?”

Cressida made an art form out of making fun of Penelope as a child. Violet always told Penelope that it was because Cressida was jealous of her, and that had seemed ludicrous at the time, though now as an adult, she can see that Cressida was jealous of Penelope’s association with the Bridgerton family and not of Penelope herself.

He senses her hesitation. “I’ll tell her that the owner is interested in selling, that’s it. She doesn’t have to know it’s you right away, okay?”

Penelope nods. She can’t keep living her life trying to run both businesses and her sisters will have to be happy with a payout. Phillipa will have a baby soon, so she’ll have less time than ever to devote to the blog and Prudence doesn’t even need the job, she just likes it.

“Okay,” Penelope says.

“Want me to hold you for a bit?” he offers. It’s one of the things that helps calm her anxiety, they’ve discovered. She nods and he lies next to her so she can put her head on his chest. She can hear the steady, strong beat of his heart and she lets it lull her back to equilibrium.

Chapter Text

There's a lot of things I don't understand
But so many people lie
It's the hurt I hide that fuels the fire inside me
Will I always feel this way?

Empty - Ray LaMontagne

*

Colin wants to go to the concert, Penelope can tell and it’s his desire that tips the scales into her saying yes. They’ve been living in this bubble of just the two of them for a while now and she knows it can’t last forever as much as she’d like it to. His family is important to him and she’s important to him and it’s unfair to expect him to keep the two separate forever.

And, if she—gun to her head—had to choose a single Bridgerton to see again, Francesca isn’t a bad choice. She’s reasonable and not prone to huge emotional displays. Still, when they get to the city center, the castle looming directly above them, Penelope’s stomach roils and her neck feels hot and they have to pause so she can sit on a bench with her head between her knees.

“I’m fine,” she keeps saying to her own feet. “I’m fine, I just need a second.”

Colin leaves her there to dart across the street into a shop to buy an overpriced but cold bottle of water for her and after drinking some of it, she does feel a little better. There are people around, but mostly heading away from the castle. The summer solstice festivities have been happening all day and the concert is the last thing, full of classical music and not local indie bands. Most of the crowd headed up are older.

Colin helps her stand and she nods. “I’m fine.” She has another sip of water to prove it.

She actually doesn’t like being the dramatic girlfriend. Her and Colin’s relationship has always been playful and full of more laughter than tears. The fact that she’s still, after all this time, still a pale imitation of herself is frustrating. She’d hoped getting to a really good place with Colin would somehow clean up the rest of the mess magically. But here she is, being weird and weepy on a public street because she’s about to see his sister that she wasn’t particularly close to in the first place.

Which is an unkind thought. She genuinely loves Francesca who is only a couple years younger and on paper might have been a much less calamitous friendship to have than the one she’d had with Eloise, but school years dictated so much about childhood friends. Eloise was in her year and that was that.

“I feel guilty that I missed her wedding,” Penelope says. “I mean, I know I wasn’t invited but…”

“You would have been.” Colin seems certain about this. She doesn't know in the exact way he means: if things had been different or if he’d found her sooner or if she hadn’t changed her number, but whichever it is, she knows he would have moved heaven and earth to make it happen.

There are rows and rows of chairs set up in the esplanade. The stage is a platform on risers with a piano and a few seats for other musicians. They’d decided to come for the start of the concert. Penelope thought that walking in late just to see Francesca would be more conspicuous and she’s happy to listen to an hour and a half of music. She feels bad sometimes. Colin is a social man, always traveling to new places and meeting new people. He’d used to love a pub trivia night. She’s been holding him hostage with take out and nights in.

The crowd gets bottlenecked to a single entry point. Someone scans the barcode on Colin’s phone and then directs them up the center aisle. Colin studies the tickets and then says, “We’re actually pretty close to the front, I think.”

The third row center, actually. She feels like she could toss the cap of her water bottle and hit the piano. No backing out now, she supposes. She takes her seat and Colin wanders off to where they’re selling drinks at a small concession stand. While he’s gone, John appears, walking toward her. She stands.

“Miss Featherington,” he says. “I’m extremely glad you could make it.”

“Thank you for the tickets,” she says. “We didn’t expect them to be so… close.”

“Classical musicians often get comp tickets in lieu of a living wage,” he says and it takes her a minute to realize he’s joking because his tone is so measured and smooth. She smiles politely. “At any rate, we’re seated together.”

“Colin is getting us some drinks,” she explains.

“While he’s gone, I’ve been instructed by my wife to find out something.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. He scrolls for a minute and says, “Ah yes. She says she wants to know what ‘the deal’ is with the two of you.”

Penelope snorts with laughter, only because she can hear Francesca say it so clearly. “What does she think is our ‘deal’?”

“You mean what do I know about it, having only recently joined her family and having never met you before yesterday?” he asks.

She nods.

“To the best of my understanding, you’ve always been close and when you left the scene he went, oh. How do I put it? Flat out insane?” He winces then. “I don’t think my mother-in-law actually likes that word. Suffice it to say, he did not take it well.”

“Ah,” Penelope says. “We were close for a long time, that’s true.”

“And now?”

“We’re closer,” she admits. “He’s been helping me through some stuff. Congratulations on your wedding, of course. I didn’t get a chance to say that earlier.”

“Thank you,” he replies. “I never thought I’d ever marry, actually. Wasn’t that interested in it until I met her.”

“She’s remarkable,” Penelope agrees. “But then again, all of them are.” She can see Colin coming back toward her. When he realizes who is sitting with her, he picks up his pace and then is a little out of breath by the time he arrives. He hands her a plastic cup of white wine.

“Thanks,” she says.

“John,” Colin greets. “Didn’t realize we were sitting together.”

“Indeed we are,” John says. Colin sits on the end, John on her opposite side. She sips her wine. He leans over a little right before the music starts. “Be not afraid, Penelope. When I messaged her that you were here, she was both excited and relieved.”

He’s an odd duck, this John Stirling, but strangely comforting as well. She trusts him, for whatever reason. His kind face, his personality from somewhere else in time.

The concert is nice, beautiful even and as the sun sets slowly, the castle lights glow brighter and brighter. When Francesca comes to the stage and takes a seat at the piano, Colin holds her hand.

***

After the concert ends, John instructs them to wait in a certain area, just behind the stage.

“We can say hello and then leave if you want,” Colin says.

“No,” Penelope says. “We should go for a drink or something.” This must please him because he leans down and kisses her. Not even just a peck but a real kiss, soft and simmering. When they break apart, Penelope is embarrassed to see Francesca a few meters away, looking at them with her hand over her heart. A classic Bridgerton mannerism to be certain.

Penelope immediately gets weepy. It just hits her so hard, she’s not sure why. She sobs, turning to hide her face in his chest.

“No, no, no, I’m sorry,” Francesca squeaks, rushing toward them.

“It’s fine,” Colin says, rubbing her back. “She literally can’t help it.”

“Sorry,” Penelope says, muffled. “God, I’m a mess.”

“You’re my mess,” he whispers. She tries to pull herself together, wipes her face and then turns to look at Francesca. “It really is nice to see you,” she manages before she starts crying again. “I’m just really sorry about—”

“Hey now,” Francesca says. “None of that.” She hugs Penelope softly and Penelope clutches at her, shaking.

“We’re working on it,” Colin says to his sister, like she can’t hear them.

Francesca holds her until Penelope is the one to pull back. Francesca touches her hair and says, “I’ve really missed you.”

Penelope nods. It’s all she’s capable of.

“Now, John’s response was incredibly unclear so I must know, are you two shagging yet or what?”

“I swear to god,” Colin says but Penelope just laughs, and she’s grateful for it because it breaks the tension.

“Yeah,” she says.

“Well thank god for that,” Francesca says. “About bloody time.”

***

The Stirlings have a car with them, having driven in from Glasgow, so Colin directs them all to a pub that’s not so central and therefore a little quieter. Penelope is certain there are loads of places he’s been dying to try and makes a mental note to start suggesting that they go out more often. He’s been pouring all his energy into her but he deserves some love and energy in return.

He takes them to Cumberland, which is not that far from her shop. It looks unassuming from the outside, but when they go inside, Colin chats briefly to a staff person who then leads them through the building and out to a beautiful garden filled with round tables. Of course, knowing Colin, he’d probably booked it on his phone during the concert.

The garden is lovely, covered with hanging greenery and warm lights and John buys the first round, beers for everyone and then they all decide to order dinner, as well. Penelope was too nervous to eat much before, but it seems with time, the involuntary weeping has worn off and she feels more herself. The round tables are picnic style and they each have their own bench to sit on. The table could seat eight if everyone got quite cozy, but as it is, they are too far apart for Colin to comfortably touch Penelope and he keeps reaching over to pat her hand.

“I’m okay,” she keeps saying. Francesca just beams.

“Tell me about the wedding,” Penelope says, once they have drinks.

Francesca glances at her brother and he gives a little nod. Clearly there’s been a conversation about approved topics. Penelope ought to roll her eyes and be offended, except that it’s sweet and she loves him.

“It was small,” Francesca says. “We had it at Aubrey. Just the families.”

“What’s your family like?” Penelope asks John.

“Small,” he acknowledges. “My mother and my cousin attended.”

“And what is it that you do?” she asks. “We have not even gotten that far, yet.”

“I am a lawyer,” he says. “And I inherited a title from my father, so I also sit in the House of Lords.”

“Ah,” Penelope says. “The peerage.”

“Indeed,” he agrees. “An obligation, not a joy.”

“I used to complain about being born third, but after seeing what Anthony goes through, I’ve fully changed my tune,” Colin says.

Penelope raises her hand to him and says, “Third born.” Colin high fives her.

Toward the end of the dinner, Francesca clears her throat and says, “Mum’s birthday is in August.”

Colin glares at her. “We know.”

“I just mean to say, dear brother, that she’s planning to come to Glasgow to spend it with us.”

“Fran—”

“And I would love it if you two came to see us too!” Francesca hurries through the sentence and then winces as if Colin will strike her.

“Oh,” Penelope says.

“We don’t have to do that,” Colin says to her.

“I know that,” Penelope says. “It’s two months away, can we get back to you?” She doesn’t want to turn down Francesca flat and this has been a nice evening, when all is said and done. But it also feels like the Bridgertons are closing in on her now. Maybe she should have moved to Kentucky after all.

***

Penelope hosts her first author visit in the book shop. A local author, a queer woman, is doing a UK tour of her latest book and wants to know if Rare Bird will host her Edinburgh visit. Penelope agrees, using some of Hamish’s money to pay her, and her instagram account is up to over seven thousand followers, so the turnout is great.

It’s around that time that Cressida gets back to Colin that she’s extremely interested in representing the real Shady Lady and Anthony comes back and says they should sell for no less than four million pounds.

“Four… four million?” Penelope says over her mug of tea.

“He said they looked at daily site traffic, followers across all the socials, ad revenue… It was a thorough report. I emailed it to you,” Colin says.

“Yes, but four!” Imagine not having to worry about money every month. She has a wretched thought that with that kind of money, she might be worthy of the Bridgerton in her bed, but the moment the thought enters her mind, she sneers at it and kicks it under the bed of her mind. That’s Portia talking, not Penelope, surely.

“The cafe also looks like it’s going to go through,” Colin says. “I’ll need to spend some time over there with Saanvi to get the hang of everything, so you might want to start seriously thinking about hiring more help.”

“Just because The Whistler is worth something, doesn’t mean anyone wants to buy it.”

“You get offers,” Colin says. “That’s what you said.”

“Yeah, occasionally, but… Four?”

“I actually think Cressida will get you more,” he says. “But now that we have numbers, we’re going to have to meet with her.”

She shakes her head, nervous now. “I can’t go back to London.”

“I know,” Colin says soothingly. “We can do a video call.” He clears his throat. “You might think about roping one of your sisters in though. If you do sell it for a lot of money, I’m sure the media is going to be interested. You’ll have to decide who the face of the site really is.”

“We can’t put Pip in front of a reporter,” Penelope says. “Who knows what she’d say?”

“Agreed,” Colin says with a grin. “Sweet girl but…”

“Dumb.”

“Yeah.”

She thinks about Prudence, who’d undoubtedly eat the attention right up but she can’t stomach her sister taking credit for everything. Yes, she’s done a lot of the work for the last couple years but Penelope did it on her own for eight years and she sees the comments now, sometimes, that the quality has gone down.

“No,” she says. “It has to be me.”

Colin leans in and kisses her. “That’s what I think, too.” He strokes her face and says, “Have you thought anymore about finding a therapist?”

Colin’s been softly mentioning it for a while now. Every time she involuntarily bursts into tears, every time she has a panic attack at the thought of opening herself up to anyone besides Colin.

“The NHS waitlist is so long,” she hedges.

“So let’s find you a private one,” he says, rubbing her arm.

“I’ll think about it,” she promises. It’s what she always says to buy herself a little time, but she really does think about things, carrying them around her pocket while she goes about her daily life. Right now her pocket is full of Violet Bridgerton and Cressida Cowper and so there’s not room for therapy or what her family will say if she goes public about being the creator of The London Whistler.

She has a drawer full of applications from people who want to work for her, so when Colin goes next door to talk to Saanvi, Penelope looks through them and chooses two people to call. What does she know about interviewing and hiring? Mrs. Cameron had basically hired herself, coming in and announcing that Penelope looked like she really needed help and could she work in the mornings? She’d hired Colin because it seemed unethical for him to work for free.

But there’s not much to do other than to call and meet them, so she sets up two interviews for a few days later and ends up hiring a woman called Maggie who is a literature student at the University and can work most evenings, which would free Penelope up from being tied to the till all the time. Maggie has long dark hair and thick glasses and is incredibly knowledgeable about seemingly everything.

When Penelope introduces her to Colin she squints at him and says, “The travel dude?”

Which makes him laugh. “I used to be.”

Penelope frowns, not quite knowing how to feel about that.

***

What tips the scales this time? It’s the fact that she’s on the third day of her period and he’s perfectly willing to fuck her anyway. She’s through the worst of it, but not the weird period horniness that sometimes happens and he just shrugs and says, “Condom will take the brunt of it,” and lays down a towel.

She should marry him, she thinks. She should have as many of his babies as he wants. He’s literally the love of her life, her soul mate, her best friend.

He chuckles when she says all of this, except for the marriage bit because she knows he’d show up with a ring tomorrow. “I think some of that is your hormones talking, but thanks gorgeous.”

She gets on her hands and knees over the towel and he enters her from behind, slowly because she’s always so tender around her period. He won’t grip her breasts hard, won’t tweak her nipples but that’s okay because just being full of him is enough to soothe the insatiable need she’d been feeling. She sighs with relief as he thrusts, touching her own clit until she comes.

“Good?” he asks, his voice strained.

“Yeah,” she sighs happily. “Go for it.”

He grabs her hips hard, thrusting until he groans, emptying himself and then drapes himself over her back. He kisses the back of her neck. Then he pulls out, disappearing down the hall to clean up. He comes back with a wet, warm flannel and cleans her up, though it wasn’t that messy in the end.

She still hops in the shower, rinsing off and then putting on a pair of pants so she can have something to stick the pad to. He’s so handsome, naked on her bed, half asleep.

“Do you still love me?” she asks, admiring him.

“More than anything in the world. Do you still love me?” he retorts.

“Yeah,” she says and crawls next to him. “Colin?”

“Pen?”

“Let’s go see your mum.”

He kisses her cheek, sloppy and happy and warm.

***

It’s not a very long drive to Glasgow but Colin still has to pull over once to let Penelope throw open the door so she can be sick on the shoulder of the road. She’s so nervous that it’s twisting her up inside. She’s far more nervous to see Violet than she would be to see even her own mother, arguably a much colder, meaner woman.

But Penelope cares about Violet and all the maternal love she’d poured into Penelope over the years and how had Penelope repaid that? By writing about her family on a website? Penelope is deplorable, unforgivable, and Eloise was right, actually, to banish Penelope. She retches again, only bile coming up. She spits and then wipes her mouth.

She sits up, her head resting against the headrest, eyes closed as she breathes. She feels hot and sweaty all over.

“We can still turn back,” Colin reminds her, his voice so neutral that she can’t make heads or tails about how he really feels which is also contributing to her nerves.

“You’re allowed to be annoyed with me,” Penelope reminds him.

“I’m not annoyed,” he says. It sounds flat to her.

“Well you ought to be. I mean I know I’m a dynamite in the sack, but is the sex worth all of this?” She’s trying to lighten the mood. When she looks at him, finally, his face only shows surprise. “That was a joke.”

“You’re worth it to me,” is all he says.

Certain she’s not going to be sick again, she shuts the door. “Okay.”

“Okay, turn back?”

“No, keep going,” she says. “I can do it.”

But the closer they get, the higher her nerves climb until she’s positively trembling in her seat by the time they pull up in front of the huge house. It’s one of those old homes that sit on a large parcel of green land and she stares at it in awe.

“Frannie lives here?”

“She says it’s quite drafty,” he says. “She spends most of her time managing repairs and keeping her piano in tune is a nightmare.”

“Hmm,” she says.

“Let’s just sit here for a minute,” Colin says, as if Penelope were rushing inside instead of holding the strap of her seatbelt like a lifeline. “She’s not cross with you, you know.”

“I’m cross with me,” Penelope says. “I owe her an apology.”

“I’m sure she feels the same about you,” he reminds her. “No one is innocent in this situation and no one is completely at fault. Life is complicated.”

“I don’t need the speech,” she says. “Thank you though.”

He rubs her shoulder and says, “You know they’re all watching us from the window, right?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I see them.” She clears her throat and takes a deep breath. “She didn’t bring anyone with her?”

“Nope. No other siblings. Just mum, Frannie, and John.”

“Okay,” she says, rubbing her sweaty palms on her jeans. “Okay, okay, okay, okay.”

“Pen,” Colin says softly.

“I’m good, I’m fine,” she says, unbuckling herself. “I can do this.” She opens her door. As soon as she steps foot outside the car, the door to the house opens and Violet comes out, hurrying down the steps toward them. Penelope freezes, breathing hard, but she’s certain Violet is coming out to greet her son. So when Violet, in fact, throws her arms around Penelope, sobbing loudly, it’s very surprising indeed.

Chapter Text

Sea and the rock below
Cocked to the undertow
Bones, blood, and teeth erode
With every crashing node

Roslyn - Bon Iver & St. Vincent

*

“Mum!” Colin says, finally loud enough that it breaks through to Violet who steps back, her usually perfect makeup now in shambles. She’s not just misting up or demurely allowing a single tear to slide over her lovely cheekbone, no she’s absolutely sobbing.

Penelope is too shocked to have the reaction she usually has, which is also sobbing. She expected Violet to be polite or even maybe a little excited but this? This full on meltdown?

“My beautiful girl,” she says, her cold hands hard on Penelope’s cheeks. Then she dissolves into tears again.

“Can I get a little help?” Colin calls to his sister.

Francesca comes over to hold her mother. “I moved to Bath for six months once and when I came home she asked if I wanted tea.” Francesca is dry, but still smiling at Penelope.

“You okay, gorgeous?” Colin asks.

“Uh,” she says, not entirely sure. “Yeah?”

“Are we to be invited inside or what?” Colin demands, steering her toward the door.

“Yes, yes, come along,” Francesca says. “There’s tea. Which is what I thought we would be offering Penelope after her long absence, based on historical precedent.”

Just outside the door, Colin gives Penelope a look. “You aren’t crying.”

“I think she shocked it out of me, honestly,” Penelope says softly. He shrugs and gives her ass a tap as they head inside.

The main entrance hall is big, but like many old houses, the rooms are smaller. They’re led to a parlor of some sort. There’s a fire going, even though it’s late August, and she’s glad because all the stone makes it chilly. Fall is already creeping in. She could see the leaves in the trees starting to turn as they drove and her phone says it’s only 18 degrees.

“John is at work,” Francesca offers. “He’ll be home for dinner. Mum just popped to the loo to pull herself together. Don’t you guys have bags? You’re spending the night, aren’t you?”

“We were going to see how it goes,” Colin says.

“Sorry about her, Penelope,” Francesca says. “It’s been hard at home for her ever since—”

Colin claps, startling them both and says, “I’m starving, what do we have?”

And instead of Francesca tearing her rude brother a new one, which is what he deserves, she looks contrite and says, “Right. Yeah. Help yourselves.”

Penelope still sends him a hard look, which he pretends not to see and fixes her the perfect cup of tea. When Violet comes back in, she’s fixed her face somewhat, but her eyes are red. Colin has placed Penelope at the end of the couch and sat right next to her, so Violet takes the chair nearest and gives her a watery smile.

“Um,” Penelope says, not sure where to start. “How’ve you been?”

Colin snorts back laughter and she’d elbow him except she’s holding a cup of hot tea on a saucer and she doesn’t want to slosh it all over her lap but what the fuck else is she supposed to say?

Violet just smiles and nods. “Good. I’m very happy the two of you are here.”

“It’s nice to have Frannie so close to us,” Penelope agrees.

Violet's eyebrows raise. “Yes! Edinburgh, is that right?”

“Yes,” Penelope says, knowing full well Violet already knows everything that Francesca knows.

“And what made you decide to move there?”

“I was traveling around,” Penelope says. “I was going to go up to Aberdeen—”

“I didn’t know that,” Colin says.

“Why Aberdeen?” Francesca asks.

“Um, it seemed far… enough.” Penelope clears her throat. “But I liked Edinburgh and then I bought a book shop. And now I live there.” She drinks her tea, which is still too hot and scalds on the way down.

“A book shop!” Violet says. “How charming.”

“It is charming,” Colin says. “She’s done really great things with it.”

“With his help,” Penelope says. “I’m about to lose my best employee, I fear.”

Violet’s eyebrows shoot up at that. “Oh?”

“I’m not leaving,” Colin says firmly. “I just invested in the business next door.”

“A cafe,” she says softly. “Sorry, was I not supposed to…?”

“It’s alright,” he says, smiling at her. “Not full ownership, but a controlling share. Anthony ran the numbers.”

“And are the two of you living together?” Violet asks pointedly.

“Yes,” Colin says.

“No,” Penelope says at the same time and then blushes. “Well, sort of. Not technically. My flat is really small.”

“We’re talking about it,” Colin says, his hand on her knee.

“Yeah,” she agrees.

Violet looks at Colin’s hand on her leg and beams.

***

Something is becoming alarmingly clear. No one will talk to her about Eloise. It makes sense, of course, as Eloise is the source of the wound, both the knife and the gash left behind, but the way they’re not discussing her is conspicuous. This happened after the concert too; both Colin and Francesca discussed every sibling except for Eloise and it’s happening again, with Violet who keeps accidentally stumbling up to the brink of her fifth born and then changing the subject abruptly. Or Colin will step in, speaking loudly over his mother. The Bridgerton siblings talk over one another all the time, as part of their shorthand, but they don’t usually do it to Violet.

In fact, Penelope has to get Violet alone, which is impossible until Francesca suggests they take a walk around the grounds while it’s not raining. Francesca runs upstairs to get a jacket suitable for her mother to borrow and Colin jogs to the car to get his pullover and her coat which leaves her and Violet finally alone in the front hall.

“I need to apologize to you,” Penelope says without preamble. They won’t have a lot of time, but she feels the weight of what she’s done sitting on her chest. “I took your family for granted and I… I never meant to hurt any of you, I hope you know that. And I regret everything about how it ended and I know nobody wants to talk about it but I’m beginning to think I have to. I have to talk about it. I’m so sorry, Violet. I’m so sorry I let you down.”

Oh god, Violet’s chin is wobbling again. Colin is going to find them like this and shout again.

“You did no such thing,” Violet reassures her. “If anything, it was—”

Colin bounds up the steps and says, “Got them!”

Violet hugs her again, quickly, which Penelope thinks is a little bit weird until she hears her whispers, “She stopped taking her lithium. It’s not your fault.” Then she lets go and steps back.

Colin helps her into her coat. Then he holds her hand and outside the go with Violet and Francesca not far behind them.

The grounds are beautiful, but Penelope has a hard time taking them in. The Bridgertons keep trying to absolve Penelope of Eloise’s sins which leaves her apologizing for her own over and over again. It’s unsatisfying and achieves nothing. She wants to shake them all one by one and say look at this terrible thing I did. Look at how I used you. Look at how I used people like you. Look at how mean I was, how catty, how easily I said things that ruined lives.

Not every word was bad. She’d called out serial cheaters, abusers, drug users who ended up going into rehab. She said hundreds of nice things about the Bridgertons, but that’s splitting hairs because she profited financially off not only the things she’d written about them but the knowledge she’d gained from being in their inner circle. And while not all of them know the depth of her treachery, some of them do. Colin knows. Eloise knows. And now, Anthony knows and he hasn’t reached out to her at all, opting to communicate to Colin alone.

Colin’s hand is warm in hers as they stroll past the apple orchard, close enough to hear Francesca when she spouts some fact about the estate but not so close that the two women can hear everything Colin and Penelope say to one another.

“We could move to the country,” he says.

“And have to commute?”

“Twenty minutes is hardly a commute.”

“It is when your commute is a staircase,” she mutters.

“Pen, regardless of how small the flat is for the two of us, your shop is outgrowing the space. You’re going to need upstairs for office space. For a break room. Imagine how much easier inventory would be if you had some place to store it that we didn’t have to live around.”

She knows that’s true, too. There is a toilet downstairs, just at the bottom of the staircase for employees to use, and the occasional customer in a dire emergency, but it’s half the size of a closet, holding only the toilet and a tiny sink. Fine for just her and even Mrs. Cameron and Colin could always use the one upstairs but now it’s Maggie, too, and likely one additional employee once Colin starts the renovations next door that he has planned. New floors, new furniture, new paint.

“How long do you have on your lease?”

“Month to month,” he says.

“What are you two whispering about back there?” Violet calls lightly when they get to the front of the greenhouse. Francesca has never had much of a green thumb, opting out of activities that might get her hands dirty, but the estate has gardeners to tend to all this land and the green house is impressively large and bursting with plants.

“Work,” Colin says. “Sorry.” When the other two go inside, Penelope moves to follow and he tugs her hand to hold her back. “If you aren’t ready to move in together, that’s okay, you know?”

“It’s not that,” she says. She’s been ready for him since she was a teenager. If she could figure out how to crawl inside of his skin, she’d do it. “I want to.”

“Then what is it?”

She stopped taking her lithium… She stopped taking her lithium… It’s not your fault… She stopped taking her lithium… her lithium.

Penelope shakes her head. “It’s nothing,” she promises.

***

Maybe it’s because Bridgertons outnumber her three to one, but she finds herself dwelling on those last days with Eloise, something she tries never to do anymore. Things had been normal, sort of, other than Eloise being stressed out at work. She’d gone to law school at Anthony’s behest. She was the most like him in personality, tenacious and exacting which are great attributes for lawyers and he’d thought he’d simply fold her into the company, slot her into his legal team but then she’d taken a job at another firm for better pay.

He was hurt that she would even consider an offer over working for the family business. She countered by telling him to match the salary if he wanted her so badly and he wouldn’t and so off she went out on her own. Perhaps the family business would have been more understanding, in retrospect because her firm demanded long hours and heavy caseloads to match that high salary.

And meanwhile, Penelope largely worked from home, sitting in her bedroom on her laptop. She kept her part time jobs longer than she really needed to because Eloise already was asking questions like, “Barista pays well enough?” and “Do you want me to buy dinner? You said you had a slow tip night.” She was a waitress, a barista, worked retail, even spent a couple months working reception at a dentist’s office thinking it would give her time to manage the site during slow times, but it hadn’t and so she’d quit.

As busy and distracted as Eloise was, she could see Penelope was home more than she wasn’t. She could figure out wages and hours and deduce what Penelope must be bringing in every month. She knew the Featherington family was not well off and her mother hadn’t supported her in a long time. All that was simple math, so how was Penelope affording to live?

Penelope can see now why a mystery like that might plague a person like Eloise. She liked answers and reasons and could and would stop at nothing until she knew everything there was to know about something. All that, in retrospect, makes sense.

But why, why had she stopped taking her lithium?

When John gets home, they eat dinner, talking about nothing, talking around everything and then John offers to show her the library, which boasts a collection that is quite old and neglected.

“Most of this is of little use to me,” he says, looking up at the tall shelves. “I think some of it is valuable, but I’d rather have more shelf space.”

Penelope nods. She can see newer books down on the lower shelves. Legal texts, popular non-fiction, novels. But higher up, it’s all leather bound and gold embossing.

“I know you often sell rare books on your website, through the shop?” he says, his question leading.

“Well,” she hedges. “The shop’s stock was quite old when I bought it. Nothing interesting for the everyday person who was coming to browse, but more so to collectors online.”

“How would you feel about selling some of my rare books? For a commission, of course,” he says.

“You’d want to break up the collection?” she asks.

“With the ongoing roof problems, leaks, and general contractors traipsing through the place, I can’t guarantee that they’re not already rotting up there. If selling them preserves them, then yes.”

She glances up and around again. “If you can sort them and get them to me, I can sell them,” she says. “If someone wants to buy them, that is.”

He smiles and nods. “Wonderful. Wonderful. We’ll sort it out soon, hmm?”

She’s happy to help him and get her hands on this wonderful collection, but she also knows she’s sealed her own fate. This amount of books will fill her little flat to the brim. She’ll have no choice but to move out. She gives him a sideways glance, studying him. He doesn’t seem particularly manipulative and Colin was never the most scheming of his siblings, so she can’t be certain the two of them are in cahoots, but with this family? It’s hard to know.

***

Then it’s late, so they decide to spend the night rather than drive home in the dark. There’s a guest room made up for them already, across the hall from where Violet is sleeping. Colin brings in their little bag from the car, all their things mixed together.

The mattress is larger than hers and feels like a real luxury, but still, he slides up against her, tucking his hand against her stomach, then inching it higher like she’s not going to notice getting felt up. She doesn’t want to test his sister’s hospitality by fucking in her bed and she certainly doesn't want to do that with his mother across the hall.

His hand cups her breast and this is not so unusual. Sometimes he just likes to hold it, like a toddler might clutch a stuffed animal for comfort. Colin is a boob man, through and through which is lucky because she’s got tits to spare. She remembers the last outing she took with the Bridgerton girls before the event. They called themselves the WAGs even though Eloise went too and Penelope wasn’t a wife or a girlfriend, just embarrassingly in love with someone she thought would never reciprocate it. Kate had suggested changing it to WAP once Sophie got married because it would stand for Wives and Penelope and she’d put her foot down about that for more than one reason.

But they’d been shopping for a dress for Penelope to wear to Benedict and Sophie’s wedding and she’d found something nice, though was standing in the fitting room, trying to work out what bra would possibly work with it.

“Strapless,” Eloise said.

Penelope snorted at the thought.

“Just tape them up,” Kate suggested and Penelope explained that the amount of tape she’d need would constitute a corset. Honestly, a corset was the most reasonable idea, if not the most comfortable.

“Go braless,” Sophie called through the curtain. It was at that point that she’d thrown open the curtain to show the three women, whose boobs combined didn’t make up one of Penelope’s tits, what she looked like braless in the dress and Eloise snorted.

“It would make a statement, at least,” she said.

She didn’t buy the dress, in the end, opting for something more practical.

Now she’s thankful that Colin likes them so much and doesn’t begrudge him copping a feel. Except now, he’s rolling her nipple between his fingers, his head on her shoulder and his eyes closed. Like he’s fast asleep, all except for his hand.

“I know what you’re doing,” she says. The lamp isn’t even off and she’s been scrolling through her phone.

He fakes a snore and gives her nipple a pinch. It sends a little shock of pleasure through her and she has to stifle a sigh. She’ll just ignore him. He’ll probably fall asleep.

He kneads her breast and then reaches for the far one, repeating his actions. Holding, rolling, tweaking, and kneading.

Then he stops and she thinks he’s fallen asleep until his hand slides down to her stomach. That’s fine, she thinks. He’s warm and it’s chilly and she doesn’t mind this.

A little lower, until he’s toying with the tie on her pajama bottoms. She looks at him and his eyes are still closed but he hears the movement of her head against the pillowcase and now the corner of his mouth is twitching.

“Colin,” she says warningly.

He unties the strings. Her nipples are aching now and she wants to shift her hips but she doesn’t want to encourage him.

“You said we have all the time to do whatever we want with each other,” he murmurs, his dark blue eyes popping open to look up at her.

“I didn’t mean here,” she says, though she makes no move to stop him when he slips his fingers under her waistband.

“I just want to check something,” he says, like that’s a reason or an explanation. His fingers breach her knickers and then move through her pubic hair and then she gasps. “See? You are wet!”

“Of course I’m wet,” she says, without any real ire now that his finger is ghosting across her clit. “You just played with my boobs for ten minutes.” Half the time she’s wet just because he looks at her a certain way or she catches a whiff of him right out of the shower or she wakes up to his morning erection against her back. It takes very, very little for him to turn her on. He’s never once touched her between her thighs and not encountered a flood.

“I’m just going to make you feel good,” he murmurs into her shoulder. “You don’t even have to get naked.” He starts rubbing her a little more firmly and she swallows a moan. “It’s not sex if we aren’t even naked.”

She spreads her thighs, having thoroughly lost the fight already. Her clothes constrict her but it does give him slightly more room to navigate and he wanders lower, stroking her and getting his finger nice and lubricated before returning to task. She tosses her phone farther down the bed, forgotten. He’s listening hard, waiting for her breath to hitch and when it does, he focuses on that movement, over and over again.

“I love when you’re like this,” he murmurs. “I love to make you come.”

She’s trying to be quiet but he’s not making it easy. His words are as arousing as the finger he has against her clit and she turns, trying to kiss him but the angle isn’t right and he’s watching her tits under her shirt and not her face. She does him a solid by pulling up the fabric until her breasts are exposed and he chuckles into the side of one before nipping at the soft skin there.

Something he does hits right. “Yes,” she whispers. “That. More of that.”

“Oh, gorgeous,” he says softly. “You’re gonna feel so good.”

Like he has to convince her to have an orgasm. Like he isn’t currently sending her spiraling. Like she doesn’t already feel the pull behind her clit that heralds what’s to occur.

“Fuck, Pen,” he says. “You’re going to do it, aren’t you? You’re so close.”

“So close,” she pants.

He puts her nipple back in his mouth, rolling it with his teeth and she’s coming, a low whine escaping as her insides constrict and her pussy contracts and he just keeps rubbing her and when she thinks it will end, she’s hit with another wave that makes her hips jolt up and it’s so deep, she feels not just the flutter of pleasure but like pleasure is a hammer, grounding her bones to dust and she has to grip his wrist in an effort to stop him but he doesn’t stop, he just keeps working her aching clit with the wide pad of his finger and she’s absolutely writhing now, her fingers scratching at the sheets, her eyes closed, seeing nothing but bursts of light.

It’s her jerky movements that knock his finger off of her clit and she gasps, desperate for oxygen like his finger on her clit and his hands around her throat were the same damn thing.

“Fuck, fuck,” he says, suddenly on his knees, his hand on his cock and he’s jerking himself off and he comes, his spend landing in thick white ropes across her exposed tits. She looks down at them with surprise.

He’s looking at them too, his hand still fisting the base of his cock, which is dripping now, and bright red.

“Can I take a picture?” he asks.

“No,” she replies, dragging her finger through it, circling her nipple, and then sticking her finger in her mouth to taste him.

He groans, his mouth falling open and his cock twitching visibly. “Jesus Christ, you’re so hot.”

Colin’s not a religious man but can be persuaded, apparently, for the right reasons.

***

In the morning, while Colin sleeps in, Pen wanders down to the kitchen and stops just outside the door when she hears Eloise’s name.

“It’s finding an antidepressant she can tolerate,” Violet is saying. “The lithium manages the mania well but there are some days she just can’t get out of bed.”

“What about the therapy?” Francesca says. “I thought that was working.”

“She goes three times a week,” Violet says. “But the doctor says it’s chemical. That this is simply the age when the disorder tends to manifest itself fully.”

“I’ll come visit again,” Francesca says. “Would that help, do you think? Maybe we could go somewhere together.”

“Maybe,” Violet says. “Kate and Anthony are watching over her this weekend but I just feel so guilty.”

“Mum, you need a break,” Francesca says. “You can’t blame yourself, you know this. You’re doing everything you can to help her.”

“She asked about Penelope again the other day and I just don’t know what to say about it,” Violet says, her voice sounding watery. “Her therapist thinks that maybe seeing her might help Eloise but how the hell am I supposed to ask that of Penelope?”

“I dunno,” Francesca says. “Colin barely lets us near her as is.”

There’s the sound of movement behind her and Colin is there, padding down the stairs in his socks, his hair tousled. “Hey, where did you go?” he asks and then realizes that Penelope’s eyes are huge and glassy and she’s got her hands together, pressing into her chest to calm her anxiety and she’s breathing too fast and all she can feel is the buzzing wasps, battering her brain into a foggy, distant silence.

Chapter Text

Hey Dorothea
Do you ever stop and think about me?
When we were younger
Down in the park
Honey, making a lark of the misery

Dorothea - Taylor Swift

*

Penelope hears everything as if underwater. Colin sounds slow, like he’s slurring. She’s quite hot, actually, sweating and uncomfortable and realizes she’s clutching a hot water bottle from origins unknown. She sets it aside. She’s sitting on a couch in a room she’s never been in before. Colin’s voice is slowly coming back into focus, and she can almost understand him.

There are others, too.

Colin is shouting, pacing, his volume rising and falling.

And then it all snaps back into focus.

“—to the hospital, because honestly I don’t think any of us know what we’re actually dealing with!”

“Hospital?” Penelope asks.

“Penelope,” Violet says softly, throwing her arm in front of Colin’s chest to stop him from rushing over to her. “Can you hear us?”

“Of course I can hear you, you’re right there,” she replies.

“That’s good news.” Violet lowers her arm and Colin crouches in front of her. He looks stressed and worried and his eyes are red and the lines by his mouth deep.

“How do you feel?” he asks. “Are you okay?”

“I…” She stops to think about it, to take stock of her body. “I really need to pee.”

Francesca laughs and then covers her mouth.

“Okay, up we go,” Colin says, hefting her to her feet. The closet toilet is a powder room and it’s not at all big, so it’s quite strange when he tries to follow her in.

“I can pee on my own,” she says. They don’t have that kind of relationship yet. She’s not sure she ever wants the open door bathroom kind of relationship, actually. Some things need to be kept mysterious. She uses the toilet and then washes her hands and when she opens the door, Colin is right there, waiting and anxious. “What is going on with you?”

“What’s going on with you?” he asks, but it’s gentle and soft and he brushes her hair back.

“What do you mean?”

“You went totally catatonic,” he whispers, kissing her forehead.

“What?”

“You wouldn’t say anything for, like, forty-five minutes.” Colin hugs her hard and she hugs him back, more because he just seems so freaked out. “Has this ever happened before?”

“Um,” she says. “No. Maybe? I’m not actually sure.” She knows at the worst times, when she was saddest in the months right after the event that the days would bleed into nights and she’d sit up and be disoriented but she thought that was just what depression was like.

“Gorgeous, we’re going to get you some help. Today,” he says.

“I’m fine,” she says, feeling particularly not fine. She feels scared. She feels resistant to talking to a stranger about her problems. Portia thinks therapy is the greatest swindle of all time. “What happened before I…” She trails off. “No, I remember.”

She stopped taking her lithium.

Colin huffs and lets her go. “Come on, let’s get dressed. I think we need to go home.”

“What about your mum?” Penelope murmurs. “I don’t want to ruin her weekend.”

“Pen,” he says, running his hands through his hair.

“Colin, I know you’re trying to help me and protect me and shield me and you are doing those things and I’m so grateful, but if someone doesn’t tell me what the fuck is going on with Eloise soon I’m going to lose my mind!”

She doesn’t mean to yell. She doesn’t mean for her voice to carry down the wide hallway. She certainly doesn’t mean to phrase it that way. But God, it’s going to eat her up inside, now. She’d rather hurt and know then be left to wonder.

Violet appears. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s have a chat.”

“Mum!”

“It’s okay,” Penelope promises him. “You can hold my hand. It’s okay.”

***

Penelope’s first summer trip to Aubrey was at age twelve which was a hard age for anyone, but particularly girls, and particularly chubby girls with mean mothers. The Bridgertons were so athletic, running and swimming and doing all manner of outdoor activities despite the heat and humidity. Penelope spent the first day trying to keep up and was miserable, so resigned herself to sitting on the porch reading a book.

And that became her spot, the place anyone would know to look for her and would likely successfully find her for that summer and summers to come. At fifteen, when things were particularly hard at home, Penelope was extremely grateful for her escape to the country. The siblings were all hitting balls with mallets out on the lawn in direct and unforgiving sunlight. Even if Penelope were athletic, it was too much sun for her. She’d burn to a crisp.

Violet appeared on the porch with a tray of lemonade and biscuits and joined her, handing her a cold glass.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You know of all my children, my daughters especially, everyone says Eloise is the one who looks the most like me.” It was an abrupt start to a conversation and Penelope didn’t know where to go other than to agree.

“Yes, I think that’s true.”

“Anthony is tough because life requires it of him. Benedict is a bit silly, but sweet. Colin is easily my most sensitive child. Daphne moves very easily through social gatherings and Francesca is quite her opposite. The little ones are still growing so it’s hard to know what they’re going to be like though I think Hyacinth will give everyone a run for their money.”

Penelope laughed. “I agree.”

“But of all my children, I think the one with the personality most like mine… is you.”

Penelope frowned, certain she misheard.

“Oh, I know I didn’t give birth to you,” Violet said. “But here, in my heart, where it matters the most, I count you as one of mine.”

Penelope was touched. “Thank you, Violet.”

“I know things aren’t always easy at home for you and I know that because I had a mother very much like yours. And I wanted to make sure you knew that no matter what, you can always come to me for help. Even if someday you and Eloise aren’t as close or if one of my boys ends up breaking your heart, I will be here for you. Okay?”

Penelope looked out across the grass where Eloise and Colin were arguing over two balls in the rough. She knew undoubtedly that she and Eloise would always be best friends and that Colin would always, always break her heart.

But she smiled at Violet, who was kind and soft and warm and who loved her. She nodded. “Okay.”

“My sweet girl,” Violet said, looking out at her children, her arm over Penelope’s shoulders.

***

Penelope opts for coffee to start with, feeling wrung out. Francesca gives them the room, reluctantly, shutting the door behind them once they’re all settled.

“I wish you’d come to me straight away,” Violet says.

Penelope shakes her head. “I didn’t realize what was happening. I didn’t know the signs. I didn’t realize she was manic.”

“No, love, not that.” Violet shakes her head. “I meant instead of disappearing. I wish you would have come to me. We could have sorted it all out.”

Penelope swallows. “The problem was, um. The issue was that everything Eloise said was right.”

“We don’t have to do this part, we can just talk about Eloise,” Colin reminds her.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Penelope says sadly. “I think maybe they’re all the same thing. Violet, I wasn’t selling secrets about your family to that website. I was running the website.”

Violet stares at her for a long moment, blinking once. “The gossip site?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I started it. I wrote it. I posted it. I still actually technically… well, it doesn’t matter now, anyway.”

“What’s it called again?”

“The London Whistler,” she says.

“That’s the one Anthony said was going to sell soon,” Violet says. Anthony has been effectively running the business for years, but Violet is still sharp as a tack and keeps tabs on everything.

“Yeah,” Colin says.

“I want to be rid of it,” Penelope says, swiping angrily at her cheeks. “I’m sick to death of it.”

“It’s going to go for quite a lot, I think,” Violet says, glancing at Colin.

“We’re working on a deal,” he says.

“You stand to make quite a tidy sum.”

Penelope shrugs. It all seems theoretical until the money is in hand, or bank, or whatever. “I’m so sorry for the hurt I caused your family.”

Violet and Colin are looking at one another and Violet is tapping a nail against her chin. They’re having some sort of silent conversation.

“Is… Is Eloise okay?” she asks.

“She moved back home,” Violet says. “She’s been having a tough time since that initial episode.”

“She’s wallowing,” Colin says.

“She’s not,” Violet snaps. “We’re working on finding the right balance of medications, that’s all.”

Colin clearly doesn’t agree, his jaw tense and teeth grinding.

“She lost her job and her best friend,” Violet explains. “And alienated a great deal of her family. Obviously as a result of her own actions, but when the mania ended and she finally understood what had happened…” Violet sighs. “It’s been quite some time and we’re still cleaning it all up, as you can see.”

Penelope nods. “Thank you, Violet.” She looks at Colin. “Can we go home?”

He sighs, an angry exhale and says, “Yes.”

Violet gives her a long hug when they’re all packed up and ready to hit the road. Penelope has given both Francesca and Violet her new phone number, which feels like a big step but an important one.

“He really loves you,” Violet says to her softly. “He always has.”

Maybe that’s true. Maybe he’s always loved her like she’s loved him or maybe the nature of his love changed and matured with him. It doesn’t matter now. What matters to her most is Colin and she realizes that there’s no sense in her forgiving Eloise if Colin can’t forgive her too.

***

The first therapist that returns her call is a woman named Doreen, not that much older than Penelope and also English, as it turns out. She works with a lot of trauma patients, she says, and would be happy to meet with Penelope to see if they are the right fit. She offers in office appointments and video appointments and which would Penelope prefer?

She’d prefer video, because that feels safer and more comfortable somehow, but the flat is tiny and she can hear a lot of noise rising up from the shop below. Music from Colin’s phone this time, people talking, the sound of the cash drawer popping open.

“Office, I think,” Penelope says bravely.

Colin drives her to the appointment on Monday and says he’ll wait for her. He hands her his credit card which she tries to hand right back to him but he says, “Please, love, please let me do this for you,” and he’s just so earnest that she takes it. It’s actually not that expensive, considering it’s not through the NHS.

“Tell me a bit about why you’re here,” Doreen says, when Penelope sits down.

She starts to say, My best friend and I had a fight, but that doesn’t seem like the right place to start, so then she starts to say, I stopped talking to my mother, but then what she actually settles on is, “I grew up across the street from this wealthy family.”

Doreen, unlike Colin, has an excellent poker face because she simply says, “Okay.”

It’s so difficult to explain just how entwined with the Bridgertons she became, but she tries. She explains about meeting Colin for the first time and how he’d been so kind about falling into the mud. She explains about Eloise being her best friend. She explains about summers at Aubrey Hall. She’s three sentences into explaining how in the autumn, the light in the Bridgerton drawing room is so spectacular when Doreen interrupts and says, “Do you have a family?”

“Do I what?”

“A mother, a father, any siblings?”

“Um,” Penelope says, considering how best to answer.

Doreen smiles softly. “That wasn’t meant to be a trick question.”

“No, right, sorry,” she says. “I have two sisters and a mother. My father passed away.”

“I’m sorry for your loss. What is your relationship like with your mother and sisters?”

“Wow, you really go deep fast,” Penelope says.

“So far, all you’ve done is talk about another family,” Doreen says gently. “Do you find that odd?”

Penelope decides to hire Doreen.

“How was it?” Colin asks when they’re driving home.

“I have no idea,” Penelope murmurs. “Good, I think. I feel like I talked too much and it was over really fast.”

“I don’t think you can talk too much in therapy,” he says, his hand on her leg.

“Well, either way, I was very good and brave today,” she says. “Do you want to take me out to a fancy dinner?”

His whole face lights up. “Really?”

“Yeah, I know you have some place in your back pocket you’ve just been dying to try.”

“Maybe,” he agrees, smirking.

“Colin, I really don’t thank you enough for how well you treat me. No one has ever loved me like this before,” she says.

“I have,” he says. “I have and I do and I will.” He grabs her hand so he can kiss her knuckles.

***

The video conference with Cressida makes Penelope so nervous that she gets the sticky sweats, but once Cressida gets over her annoyed sputtering at the sight of Penelope Featherington cozied up to Colin Bridgerton, she says, “G/O Media and Objective Media were in a bit of a bidding war, but G/O came out on top with the best offer of 6.5 million pounds.”

Penelope blinks, trying so hard to stay calm. Colin’s fingers gripping her thigh with excitement doesn’t help things.

“Wow,” she says, calmly. “Hang on, I just need to send a quick text.”

She sends her sisters a text that says, i’m going to sell the whistler and give you a million pounds each. you good with that?

Phillipa responds first and says holy shit! omg, i’m preggers btw.

Prudence a few seconds later says do it.

“Yep,” Penelope says. “That’s good with me. Thank you, Cressida.” Three words she never thought she’d have to utter, ever, but for six point five million pounds, they come out like honey, golden and pure.

Which means by the start of October, after the gifts to her sister and the percentage that Cressida gets and taxes, suddenly Penelope has just over two million pounds sitting in her bank account. She has money, she has the love of her life, and she has a job she loves.

What’s the catch?

She’s opening the shop on a Friday morning. Colin is next door, working the espresso bar with Saanvi’s son Rajendra on the till. Rajendra had been upset at Colin’s investment initially, feeling protective over his family business, but the relationship has warmed considerably and now they’ll go kick a football around in the alley together sometimes.

“You’d better give that man a baby,” Saanvi told her the last time it happened. “His spirit is aching to be a father.”

“We’ve only been dating for a few months!”

“He said you were childhood sweethearts.”

“Revisionist history,” Penelope sputtered. “I fancied him and he didn’t know I was alive.”

“I think he knew,” Saanvi said, sounding sage, though Penelope suspected it was just her beautiful accent.

Soon Colin will reappear with a breakfast sandwich and a chai for her, being handsome and perfect. Not a bad way to spend a Friday at all.

And appear he does, holding her breakfast and tea, looking quite filthy, actually, and grinning widely. “Gorgeous,” he says, excitement evident.

“What happened to you?”

“The refrigerated unit that holds the juices and waters and things broke, you know that big one on the wall?”

“Yeah?” she says, sipping her tea. It’s a little milk heavy so she knows he made it for her. He’s not as good as Saanvi yet but he’s getting loads better.

“Well I pulled it out to try to fix it,” he says.

“Can you fix stuff like that?”

“I always assume I can do anything until I prove to myself otherwise,” he answers and it’s such a goddamn Bridgerton attitude that she fights not to roll her eyes. “Anyway, I pulled it out and do you know what I found?”

“All of the dust bunnies in Scotland?” she asks, eyeing him.

“No. A door.” He grins.

“A door?”

“Yeah! Which means that these two shops connect!” he crows. “Isn’t that sick?”

“A door,” she says, looking over at the shared wall. It’s all bookcases. “Where?”

“Oh, I reckon it’s behind self-help over there,” he says. "We could pull it down and have a combination book shop and cafe.”

“Lose a whole book case?” She frowns.

“Okay, maybe we have to figure out a way to make up the space but think about it. You’re doubling your customers really. Anyone who walks into the cafe is way more likely to walk into the book shop and vice versa. We could run a promotion. Buy a book and get ten percent off a coffee or something.”

He’s so excited that she can’t bring him down to earth. “No, that’s very cool. Definitely something for us to think about. What did Saanvi say?”

“Er…”

“You haven’t told her yet,” Penelope deduces.

“Not exactly,” he admits. “But Rajendra thought it was super neat.”

The phone rings, not hers, but the shop phone.

“It is super neat,” she agrees, because she loves him. “Hang on.” She picks up the phone and says, “Rare Bird Books, this is Penelope, how may I help you?”

“Penelope, don’t hang up.”

Here it is: the catch. She knows this voice. She knows it better than her own or even Colin’s. There’s no mistake, no waffling at who it is.

“Please, I just want to… I just need to make amends. Please let me make amends.”

Penelope hands the phone to Colin who frowns and says, “Who is it?”

“Eloise,” she says.

***

She’s been seeing Doreen twice a week every week and it’s Doreen she calls now, leaving a voicemail that says, “I think probably it would be best if you called me back as soon as you were humanely able to, thank you so much.”

Doreen is great. Doreen doesn’t put up with her bullshit. Doreen doesn’t let herself intellectualize herself out of situations by ignoring her very real emotions. Doreen has already asked her what she might do if Eloise were to reach out and Penelope laughed and said, “That’s not going to happen.”

It’s actually super annoying how right Doreen is about a lot of things. Yes, it turns out Penelope’s trauma is real and adversely affecting her every day life. Yes, it turns out that one of Penelope’s triggers is any one of the Bridgerton family besides the one she’s dating and that is inconvenient. Very astute, Doreen.

And now she’s fucking right about Eloise and Penelope is going to have to tell her she was right for like the umpteenth time. Very, very annoying.

Colin comes halfway up the stairs and calls, “Pen?”

She can hear the fear in his voice. Her panic attacks are less, now. Doreen has given her a lot of self-calming tools. She’s better at spotting her own triggers now and she even has an anti-anxiety emergency med, which after she’d handed the phone to Colin, she’d marched right up and taken one of.

“Yeah?” she calls.

“I want to… If I come up, there’s no one to mind the… Do you want me to close?” He seems uncertain. This has shaken him too.

She comes to the top of the stairs and looks down at him. “Do you want a Xanax?”

And he laughs, relieved that she’s not sobbing and rocking in a corner somewhere, probably. “Fucking hell, right?”

“Fucking hell,” she whispers.

Chapter Text

God knows where I would be if you hadn't found me
Sitting all alone in the dark

Sick of Losing Soulmates - Dodie

*

After a lengthy phone call with Doreen who was carefully and professionally not smug about being right as usual, Penelope does what she ought to have done the first time things went pear shaped with Eloise and she calls Violet.

“Penelope!” Violet sounds both surprised and delighted. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Um, hi,” Penelope says. While her love for Violet remains steadfast and while she feels good about their relationship, she never wants to be the bearer of bad news. “This is going to sound strange, but is Eloise okay?”

“Oh,” Violet says. “Why do you ask?”

“I ask because she phoned me, actually, and she didn’t sound okay and then I panicked and gave the phone to Colin and I really couldn’t say what happened after that but I don’t imagine it went particularly well.” Penelope has turned over closing duties to Maggie who is training a new employee, Isaac, and is now safely upstairs in the flat. Colin has uncharacteristically gone home for a few hours. He said it was to sleep after his early morning shift but she thinks maybe he wanted to freak out in solitude and not derail all of Penelope’s good progress at not freaking out.

“She called you?”

“Well, she called the shop,” Penelope says. “My shop, I mean.”

“I see. Darling, may I ring you back in a bit?”

“Yeah, sure, of course,” Penelope says.

When half an hour comes and goes with no word from Violet, Penelope texts her and says, Call me tomorrow if that’s better for you.

And Violet responds. I will with a little blue heart. Not the dark blue one, but the lighter one. The Bridgerton one, she used to think of it as before things changed.

Penelope puts on her coat and her beanie and grabs her bag and drives over to Colin’s flat. She’s still never been inside of it. She’s picked him up and dropped him off a number of times, but for some reason even though he rents the place, it doesn’t feel like his. And why should it, they spend nine out of ten nights together. More, if she’s being honest. He’d simply given up on having her come over, intent on other battles.

But now she parks, now she makes her way up the little concrete path, now she rings the bell. It takes him a moment to answer the door and when he sees her, his mouth falls open.

“You look like shit, mate,” she says.

“Pen, what are you doing here?”

“Was in the neighborhood,” she says and he grabs her and pulls her against him and it takes her a moment to register that he’s crying. Colin is a crier, which is fine. Actually, she finds it wildly endearing. He is sensitive and caring and soft and there’s nothing wrong with it. She’s used to his tears. But this is different. This is grief and anger and pain.

She has to kind of nudge him back over the threshold with all her weight so she can get in far enough to kick the door closed. She holds him for so long that she starts sweating in her outer layers, but she won’t let him go. Finally he pulls back, groaning, like at least the release had helped.

“Sorry,” he mutters.

“Colin,” she says seriously. “There’s absolutely no reason to apologize. How many times have you seen me cry?”

“Hundreds,” he says, pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket to mop up with.

“Millions, probably,” she says. “I don’t want you to hide your emotions to protect me.”

“She’s just so fucking selfish,” he mutters and then looks at her. “Aren’t you hot in that?”

She rolls her eyes and pulls off her hat, shoving it in the pocket of her coat before unzipping it and slipping out of it. In the living area is a chair that she leaves her things on, and a couch that leads into a kitchen and dining area, and then a slider out to the garden. The place is nice, but kind of impersonal and full of unpacked plastic bins.

The sight of all his stuff packed and ready to go could easily send her spiraling into a panic but Doreen’s voice is still ringing in her ears. They’d been three sessions into their therapy journey together before Penelope had revealed that actually the boy she loved from across the street is now her super hot boyfriend and Doreen had squealed with delight and said, “Wicked.”

Why should Colin unpack? He’s never here and he’s not attached to this place. She ignores the bins and follows him into the bedroom where he crawls on the bed and starfishes out with exhaustion. After a moment of hesitation, she clambers up onto the bed with him. It’s a bit higher than she can comfortably manage and she kind of has to grunt and roll but then, oh.

“Fuck, this is really comfortable,” she says.

He’s so in his own head that he doesn’t even scold her for resisting the option for the last six months.

“It’s like, she’s been stewing in her own bullshit for so long,” Colin says and Penelope figures they’re back on the topic of Eloise. “And it’s all she can think about. She’s never been great about considering other people’s emotions, but this is really a new low. Which is impressive because all she ever does is dig herself bloody deeper.”

“Do we know who told her about the shop?” Penelope asks lightly, hoping no one did so intentionally. Perhaps she’d overheard someone talking about her. She and Eloise used to listen at doors all the time when they were younger, trying to suss out what her siblings were up to or the root of some family drama currently unfolding. It was partially what inspired her to start a gossip site. They’d gotten pretty good at it.

“She googled you.”

Penelope stares at him, his sad eyes, and reaches into her pocket for her phone. Googling herself is no longer part of her routine. She’d used to when she was regularly making sure no one had connected her to The Whistler, but since deleting all her social media and selling the site, it simply hadn’t occurred to her. She types her own name in and the third thing that pops up is a site highlighting queer bookshops around the UK. She’s not even on the list proper, but she remembers receiving the email asking her some questions. She’d confessed that she considered her shop queer friendly, and told them the story about Hamish, but she herself was not queer and she sold all manner of things.

Rare Bird Books is an honorable mention, but it does have the picture that Colin took of her standing in front of the shop and the little caption underneath says Owner Penelope Featherington.

“Yep,” Penelope confirms. “That would have done it.”

“Mum says she thinks she can’t move forward until she resolves things with you,” Colin says quietly.

“Hmm,” Penelope says, her hand on his chest. She drums her fingers against his sternum. “I suspect that even if I forgave her for everything, she would not magically feel better.”

“You don’t have to do that,” he says.

“I know. It’s not forgiveness she wants. It’s a time machine. It’s an undo button.”

“Probably,” Colin agrees.

“I can’t give her that.” Maybe someday Penelope can offer her the forgiveness she craves but they’ll never be friends again, not how they were. They might even get to a point where they can politely exist at the same function, but that seems like a best case scenario.

Outside the window, the trees have turned bright orange and red and yellow and the view is spectacular.

“I want to start looking for somewhere to buy,” Colin says.

“How many coffee shops do you need to own?” Penelope jokes but it’s a deflection and they both know it.

“I’m serious,” he says. “Your shop needs that space and I’m tired of living out of boxes and being uncomfortable.”

She cranes her neck to kiss his jaw. “Do you think we’re ready?”

“Yes,” he says. “Emotionally and financially. Anywhere with you is home, but Pen, can’t home be someplace with two toilets? Counter space? A walk-in closet?”

“Stop, stop, you’re turning me on!” she giggles.

“So yeah? I can start looking?”

“I know you’ve already started looking, but you can send me listings,” she agrees.

He whips out his phone and pulls one up and says, “What about this?”

“A million pounds?” she gasps.

“Don’t look at the price, look at the house,” he says.

“I know not looking at the price is like, a way of life for your kind, but unfortunately for the rest of us, the price is our first concern.” She frowns. “Colin, I know we don’t usually talk about this but… I mean, you know my financial situation but I really don’t know yours. I mean I know your family is wealthy but…” She trails off, uncertain how to ask him just how money he actually has to play around with. Especially since he essentially abandoned his career once he found her. He still posts to his instagram, but far less frequently and it’s certainly not his focus any longer.

“Ah,” he says. “Well, let’s see. I inherited a trust fund when I turned eighteen. That was around five million pounds. I own a few properties in London that generate an income every month. I have investments, stocks, and the like that Anthony manages. And now the coffee shop, though I think it might be a year or two before we’re back in the black in any meaningful way. And the socials still make a little money, though that’s slowing.”

She gaping at him as he works through his incredible wealth for her benefit.

“All in, tallying everything up? My complete worth?” he asks. “Maybe ten million?”

She sits up to stare at him, her brow furrowed.

“I know it kind of pales in comparison to Anthony but I didn’t inherit a billion dollar company so…”

“Let me see that house again,” she mutters, grabbing his phone.

“Inheriting a bunch of money is far less impressive than what you did, by the way,” he reminds her, rubbing her back as she scrolls through pictures of the property on his phone.

“Yeah, yeah,” she says.

***

Once they start seriously looking at places, Penelope realizes she does have some criteria. She wants it not to be more than five miles from their shops, she wants a garden for a little outdoor space, and she wants so much light that it feels like living on the sun.

“It’s still Edinburgh, gorgeous,” Colin says. Okay, so it’ll never be sunny every day, but she thinks not living in a cave is not a big ask.

And then they do find a place that they both love. It needs some work, but the bones are so good. Four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a big garden, sky lights in multiple rooms. The main bedroom has a fireplace and an ensuite with a bathtub that’s to die for. She has a bathtub, technically, but it’s old and stained, shallow and kind of gross and she’d never actually bathe in it.

They put in an offer and it’s accepted. It will be theirs in the beginning of January. Colin is already talking to builders to renovate things. Refinishing floors, new windows, and checking the roof to start. It feels like it’s all happening fast, but she also feels like with him, she can accomplish anything.

They’re lying in her bed looking at paint samples on his phone when she says, “Did you entrap me?”

“Sorry?” he asks.

“You show up here, all handsome. You made me fall in love with you, you became my boyfriend, and now we bought a house together? When a year ago I was like, so sad and alone? How did this happen?” she asks, teasingly.

“You’ve caught me,” he says. “I realized I couldn’t live without you, so I concocted this scheme to trap you with my love forever and ever.”

She scrolls through another page of blue paints, wondering if Colin is going to make her paint every room some shade of blue until they die.

“You know,” she says casually. “We don’t ever really talk about what it was like for you.”

“What what was like?”

“When you realized I was gone.”

His whole body tenses up, she can feel it all along her side.

“It was bad,” he says softly. She waits for him to continue but he doesn’t.

“Okay, good talk,” she says, willing to let him off the hook if that’s what he needs.

“I was really upset,” Colin says, gripping her hand. “I’ve lost other friends before, but I was like, so angry. Enraged. Blinded with rage about it and I couldn’t figure out why I was so fucking angry.”

She kisses his arm.

“I was talking to Anthony and he was like, you’ve been in love with Penelope for years and I was like what are you talking about and then the more I thought about it, the more I was like, actually I think I’ve been in love with Penelope for years.”

“Anthony said that?” Penelope asks, surprised.

“He’s got a real soft spot for you,” Colin says. “Anyway, I spent like, a year kicking around feeling sorry for myself and then I decided, fuck it, I was going to do whatever it took to find you.” He tosses his phone on the mattress. “I wasn’t very fun to be around until I found you again. I didn’t have to tell Anthony I found you, he knew right away. He told me it was like I was a different person. Day and night.”

“That’s sweet, actually,” she says.

“The moment I saw you I felt this wave of calm come over me and I knew he was right and I knew I wasn’t ever going to lose you again,” he says. “You didn’t know that. You were as skittish as a feral cat, but—”

“Rude.”

“You feel it too, right?” Colin says. “That this is forever?”

She feels tears spring to her eyes. Guess Colin is a Bridgerton that can still make her cry after all. But these are the happiest tears she’s ever cried, easily.

“You’re the only man I’d buy a house with,” she promises him. January feels forever away. They still have December to get through, which is the busiest time for her shop. She’s already had the window artist in to paint her window and Colin helped her string up some twinkly lights so even though it’s the last week of November, everything feels merry and festive and nice. “I love you.”

“I love you,” he says. “You know, mum and Greg and Hy are spending Christmas with Francesca and John.”

“And Eloise?” she says. “No, I don’t think I want that.”

“No,” he says. “But Ant and Kate and Daphne and Simon are doing Christmas at Aubrey. They invited us. If you’re interested.”

That does tug at her heart, actually. She’d really mourned the Bridgertons and her access to Aubrey Hall, a place that held so many fond memories for her, was a hard loss to bear.

“The shop is so busy,” she says. “And Maggie wants to go home for the holidays, so we’re losing her on the 21st for two weeks.”

“Well, we have Isaac and Mrs. Cameron and we can crosstrain Rajendra. He’s shown an interest in that. We could fly Southend on Christmas morning and come back on the twenty-seventh. Just a short little trip.” He pulls up flights on his phone. “I think it would be good for us.”

“Doreen would be proud.”

“She’d be so proud.”

Penelope sighs and nods. “Fine. For Doreen.”

“For Doreen!” Colin crows and books the flights.

***

By the time Christmas actually rolls around, they’re both so exhausted from the busy season that they think briefly about canceling the trip and sleeping for two days straight instead but then Penelope says, “No, I’m sick of even looking at this building,” and they decide to go. Neither Isaac and Rajendra celebrate Christmas, so both are happy to work the whole week, especially the day after boxing day which is nice. Penelope doesn’t have to worry about the shop.

She does, however, worry about seeing all the Bridgertons she hasn’t seen yet for the first time. Benedict and Sophie are both joining as well and while Penelope is legitimately excited, she still keeps asking the same questions over and over again.

“They know I’m coming?”

“Yes.”

“They invited me specifically and not just you?”

“I don’t think they’d let me in without you,” Colin says.

“Don’t lie! I’m trying to be reassured!”

He laughs. “I’m not lying!”

“You mailed all the gifts already?”

“Yes,” he promises. “Two weeks ago.”

“And they know I’m coming?”

“Gorgeous,” he says. “It’s going to be okay.”

She nods, biting her lip raw. She’s really missed Kate and Sophie and at least now she can be an official WAG and not just Penelope, always around, attached to no one.

“Wait, they know we’re dating, right?” she asks and he laughs.

“Do you think I ever talk about anything else?” he chuckles. “I’m the luckiest man in the world and I make sure I let people know it.”

The flight is early, so early and they both sleep on the plane, exhausted. They rent a car at the airport and drive the thirty miles or so to Aubrey Hall.

“I’m nervous,” she says the closer they get. “I’m really nervous.”

“I know,” he replies, his hand warm on her thigh through her tights. “It’s okay to be.”

“What if they’re mad at me?” she asks.

“They aren’t.”

“Yeah but what if they are?”

“Then tough shit because we’re forever and ever,” he reminds her.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, okay, okay, okay.”

When they pull up, there’s already three other cars parked. It’s still early, just after nine but she can see lights on and chimneys smoking and he hasn’t even cut the engine before the door opens and it’s Daphne standing in the door holding a baby.

Belinda, who Penelope hasn’t even met yet.

“Fuck,” she says, welling up.

Colin just hands her his handkerchief wordlessly.

And then they all stream out onto the front steps, like a receiving line of Bridgertons, waiting to greet her.

“This is a lot of pressure.”

“They’re excited,” he reminds her. “They missed you.”

She nods. She opens the car door and gets out and Colin takes her hand and they walk toward the house together.

“Hi Aunty Pen,” Daphne calls. “Glad you could make it.”

She’s actually holding it together pretty well until Anthony comes down the steps and when he gets close to her, she can see his chin wobbling and then he lets out a little sob and grabs her, holding her tightly to him.

And then she’s totally swarmed, everyone hugging her and kissing her cheeks and she knows she doesn’t deserve it but she has it all the same. She has them back, like a real Christmas miracle.

“I’m here too,” Colin calls. “You know, if anyone wants a hug? No? Okay. Just let me know.”

***

Sophie catches her standing outside the closed door of the bedroom that has always belonged to Eloise and says, “I’ll tell you anything you want, you know.”

Penelope jumps, embarrassed to have been caught. “Oh,” she says. “I think that I know it all, now.”

“She’s doing better, actually,” Sophie tells her anyway. “She’s on a new medicine that seems to be working. Violet says she cooked them both breakfast the other day and even washed the dishes after.”

“Is that good?”

“Really good,” Sophie says. “She’s basically been a husk since she realized what she did to you.”

Penelope fidgets with her sleeve hem. “Yeah but she was right. I did, um, I did do the thing she accused me of.”

“Oh the gossip site? Whatever, people are always going to write about the rich and famous. At least you were funny while you did it. No offense, but the site is so bland now since you sold it.”

“I knew it would happen,” she says. “It’s what always happens when you sell off sites like that. They get neutered to appeal to a wider audience and then just kind of die slowly.”

“A shame,” Sophie says, linking her arm with Penelope’s and steering her gracefully away from the closed door. “I used to be obsessed with reading it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah! I knew about Ben first from reading your gossip before I ever met him,” she says. “Isn’t that cool?”

“So they’re not all secretly pissed at me?” she asks.

“I can’t believe I’m about to teach you something about the Bridgerton family, but one thing I’ve noticed is that if something you do is a good business move, then that kind of trumps everything else. Like, sure, no one wants their name dragged through the mud but the fact that you did it for ten years and then sold it for millions? Immediate respect.”

They walk down the stairs toward the living room where everyone else has gathered but Penelope stops them just before they go in.

“There is one thing I don’t know,” Penelope asks. “Why did she stop taking her lithium?”

Sophie gives her a sad look. “I don’t think anyone besides Eloise knows that. And maybe not even her. That’s the thing about those kinds of disorders. They sneak up on you.”

An unsatisfying answer if ever there was one.

“Can I ask you something?” Sophie asks.

“Of course!”

“Did you leave because of Eloise or was the real reason you left because Colin gave you the worst kiss of all time on my wedding day?” She raises her voice on purpose, making sure Colin hears the end of her sentence.

“Hey! Come on!” he whines. She joins him on the sofa, sitting next to him and patting his leg reassuringly. She’s not going to tell Sophie that her worst kiss from Colin was still her best kiss of all time up to that point. He’d simply be too smug to bear.

Chapter Text

So in awe, there I stood as you licked off the grain
Though I've handled the wood, I still worship the flame
Long as amber of ember glows
All the "would that I'd loved" is long ago

Would That I - Hozier

*

Honestly, they fall into marriage like they fell into love. Quietly, and without a lot of discussion or fanfare. Penelope’s been watching Grey’s Anatomy while unpacking various rooms of the house and Colin happens to be home when the post-it marriage episode comes up and she says, without really thinking about it, “That’s what we should do.”

“Get married on a post-it?” he asks, confused.

She doesn’t blame him for his confusion. It’s not like he’s proposed or anything, but to her, the moment they bought the house and declared that this relationship was forever, she started feeling like his wife.

“No, not like that but something, you know, simple and efficient and fast.” She shrugs at his eyes following her around the kitchen. “Do you want a big wedding?”

“No,” he answers, quickly enough.

“Me either.”

“Do you want a ring?” he asks, that same perplexed look on his face.

She doesn’t need a ring but that’s not really what he asked. So she thinks about it for a moment and says, “Yes, I think I’d like a ring.” She frowns. “Did I ruin this? Did you have some big surprise planned?”

He shakes his head. “No. I mean, I’ve thought about it, obviously.” He gestures to the half unpacked house around them. “I didn’t want to overwhelm you.”

“And I don’t want to be overwhelmed, so thanks. But I do want to be your wife, if you’d like to make it official.”

They ring shop together, which is honestly so nice. Penelope can understand how some women might like the surprise, the one knee confession of love and devotion, but Colin shows her every day that he loves her and is devoted to her and now she gets to pick out a ring she’ll love instead of having to wear something every day for the rest of her life that she hadn’t even had a say in.

Penelope chooses bands and a stone and the setting and because it’s custom, the jewelry shop says it will take about a month to source a stone and put the piece together and that’s fine, because once they file the paperwork that they intend to marry, there’s a month-long waiting period.

And then they get the ring and wed at the registrar’s office on a Tuesday morning, the first available appointment. He wears slacks and a button down, she wears a floral dress in green and pink. It’s May again, spring melting into summer and that feels right. One May she’s pulling open the door to the cafe next door to discover Colin Bridgerton at a small round table and the next May, she’s a Bridgerton too.

After the wedding, she goes back to the shop to work the mid-shift and Colin takes the car to the roasters where they source their beans to pick up the shipment and it’s life as usual. Maggie is the first person to notice her ring, lowering her glasses to stare at Penelope’s hand.

“Excuse me,” she says. “Did you get engaged?”

“No,” Penelope says honestly. “We got married.”

“Shut the front door! When?”

“Yesterday,” Penelope says, unable to smother a grin. “No big deal.”

Maggie’s struck momentarily silent before sputtering out, “It’s a big deal to me! Mum and Da! Finally!”

Penelope laughs. It really isn’t a big deal but it’s nice. She likes being his wife.

They make it to Christmas before Benedict says, “When are you two going to make it official?” and she pulls her long sleeves back from her hand.

“We did.”

She and Colin took the Scottish shift of Christmas this year with Fran and John. Ben and Sophie and their new baby Charlie come to Glasgow. Violet and the rest stay in England. It’s not ideal, these split holidays, but sometimes it’s just easier than sorting out what to do about Eloise.

“What? What?” Francesca says, grabbing her hand and studying the beautiful diamond. “Without me? What, and I mean this with all the love in my heart, the fuck?”

“Sorry,” Penelope says. “I didn’t want a spectacle.”

“Post-it wedding,” Sophie says wisely from the couch where she’s nursing.

Penelope points at her. “That’s exactly it.”

“I know my Penny,” Sophie says, her baby smacking hungrily at her breast. Penelope looks at the baby, feeling a ping of something. She files that away for later.

***

In fact, the one thing that has changed since they married is the sex. Penelope suggests casually in the new year that maybe they think about leaving the condoms behind. Colin, who is currently hard as a rock and pulling a condom out of their nightstand comically tosses it over his shoulder and says, “Done!”

He still makes her laugh every day.

And it’s not like she’s never felt him bare against her. Sometimes the yearning is too much and he’ll rub the head of his cock against her clit until she’s a moaning, babbling mess. Once or twice he’s even slipped inside of her, just to feel it raw, before pulling out again and choosing the condom.

But now they’re married and successful and she’s pushing thirty hard. They have a house and plenty of space. There’s a small room upstairs that they’ve both left pretty much untouched in their renovations and decorating, save for the floors, simply because she both suspects they’re saving it to be a nursery, though neither has come out and said as much.

But now, when he sinks into her, it’s different. It’s thrilling and intense and intimate and he holds eye contact the whole time, even when she tries to close her eyes or tilt her head back or to the side. He uses the hand not propping him up to nudge her cheek or her chin so her gaze falls back to his. It’s like he’s fucking her on purpose, on a new level, and she almost can’t bare it. They have a robust sex life, managing two, sometimes three times a week. And maybe that will fade with time, but every time she looks at him, she can’t help but want him. He’s beautiful and he’s in love with her and he’s hers and it’s the strongest aphrodisiac in the world.

“Are we doing it?” he asks, when his rhythm starts to get a little sloppy. “Can I come in you?”

“Yeah,” she says, gripping his biceps and thrusting back against him. “Please come in me. I want it.”

Her permission is all it takes. His breath stutters, the vein in his forehead throbs and he moans. After, he keeps her there for a while, legs together and elevated before she finally bats him away.

“I have to pee; you’re gonna give me a yeast infection,” she says, laughing. She’s never had someone actually finish in her before and it’s strange how it literally drips out of her when she’s sitting on the toilet. Strange but kind of hot.

But it doesn’t take right away. Her period comes two weeks later and the month after that and the month after that. She’s not panicking about it. She knows she’s still young but she’s also not twenty-two. Things like this take time.

And then, in the summer, her period doesn’t come. She buys a test, takes it, and it comes back positive. She thinks about trying to plan some convoluted surprise but instead, when he comes home, she just hands him the test and he grins, his hands over his heart.

That feels right, too.

***

Anthony’s fortieth birthday party is the first time in years Penelope will return to London. Colin has been back and forth a number of times, never asking Penelope to attend, but this party is a big deal and Penelope finds she’s tired of avoiding a place whose ghosts no longer haunt her.

“What should we do about El?” Colin asks.

“If Anthony wants her to come, she should come.”

It’s exhausting, the song and dance the Bridgertons do to keep them apart. It’s not fair to Eloise, who has been doing well for a while now. She’s still living at Number 5, but she’s working for Anthony now full time and has been holding the job. Violet says she’s as back to normal as she’ll ever be. So to Penelope, it seems unfair to cut her out of her own family.

“That’s what she did to you,” Colin reminds her when Penelope points this out.

“But I’m not sick,” Penelope says. “And I don’t want to deprive her out of spite.”

So they leave it up to Anthony, confirming their attendance.

Penelope is ten weeks along and the morning sickness has been brutal, but she’s not showing yet and usually by the evening, it’s not so bad. They haven’t told anyone yet, waiting for the second trimester to start.

The party is at Bridgerton House, glittery and expensive and extravagant. Kate ordered a three-tier cake that towers in the center of the room, and there’s champagne and a cocktail bar and a full catering staff who keeps trying to put a drink in her hand. Finally, she takes a flute of champagne and makes Colin down half of it so she can hold it without being disturbed.

There’s a lot of people she doesn’t know here, and the many bodies fill the ballroom, the foyer, and the dining room. She sticks pretty closely to Sophie and Daphne, filled to the brim with pregnancy questions and unable to ask them. Mostly one, which is How big were your babies again? because Colin is tall and Benedict is taller and Anthony isn’t the tallest but he’s broad and she’s worried that her tiny frame can’t actually withstand a Bridgerton baby.

But Daphne is on the petite side and all the girls are slender so maybe if she has a daughter, the baby won’t wreck her whole entire body forever.

But they both leave her to tend to those giant babies they had and Colin is off drinking with his brothers which he needs and deserves both and she wanders to see if anything looks good to eat. She hasn’t had much of an appetite and her doctor says she should be gaining weight, not losing it, but everything she eats she pukes up so she tries not to eat.

She makes a pretty immediate mistake when she walks past the raw oyster bar. Is it the smell? Is it the sight of them raw and gray and quivering in their little disgusting shells? She’s not sure, but she bolts, certain enough that she’s going to be sick. There’s a line for the bathroom, so instead she goes into the closed study door and pushes out to the terrace, gulping air to see if that helps, but actually, it just smells like cigarettes.

She thrusts her body over the railing and is sick, where it falls down below into the night, hopefully not on anyone. No, it’s dark down there, and still.

She rights herself and realizes immediately that she’s not alone.

Eloise is standing on the far side of the terrace, holding a burning cigarette as still as a statue.

Penelope wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Sorry,” Eloise says. “I didn’t think anyone would be… sorry.”

“No,” Penelope says. “It’s fine.”

They stare at one another.

“Are you okay?” Eloise asks, finally.

“Oh,” Penelope says. “Yeah. I’m just… I’m not drunk.”

She doesn’t look great, Penelope notices, but she certainly looks better than Penelope has been picturing her. She’s still very thin and her bangs are cut unevenly like she’d done them herself, but she’s wearing a black dress and other than her terrified expression, just kind of looks like Eloise.

“No,” she says faintly. “Good.”

“Um,” Penelope says. “I’ll just let you finish the cigarette.”

“You don’t have to leave,” Eloise says.

“No, I can’t be around the smoke.” She says it without thinking but Eloise is not an idiot and has always been extremely good at solving puzzles.

Immediately she says, “Oh shit, you’re pregnant,” and then drops the cigarette and stubs it out with the toe of her boot, waving her hands around like that’s going to disperse the smoke away faster somehow.

There was a time when Eloise would have most certainly been the first person she tells she’s pregnant after Colin, so it’s surreal now that it remains true.

“Yeah,” Penelope says. “No one knows, yet, though, so…”

“Mums the word,” Eloise says. “Promise. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Penelope says.

“And on the wedding,” Eloise says. “At first I was like, whoa but then the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. And the bookshop thing is really cool too. I look at your website sometimes. Anyway, you seem really good and I’m so happy about that.”

Penelope nods, feeling suddenly quite weepy. Part of her wants to throw her arms around Eloise but even though her wound is mended and scabbed and healed, the scar is still there and the damage cannot be undone.

“I’m sorry we can’t go back,” Penelope says, crossing her arms against the night air. “I wish we could be how we were, but we can’t.”

“I know,” Eloise says, and she’s crying now too. She swipes at her face, annoyed at the tears. She never did like to cry, thinking it made her weak. Penelope cried enough for the both of them.

“But I think there’s probably a way that’s different than this, don’t you?” Penelope asks. “I don’t want you hiding out in the dark just because I’m here. They were your family first.”

Eloise nods but then coughs and shifts and says, “I fucked up so badly.”

“Yeah,” Penelope says. “But not on purpose, I don’t think. And I am really sorry about that website. You were… you know. You were right about that.”

Eloise nods and says, “Thanks.”

The light to the study comes on and it’s Colin, looking for her.

“Gorgeous,” he says. “Ben said he saw you come in here, are you okay?”

She nods. “Just a little nauseous.”

“She booted, actually,” Eloise says.

Colin jumps at the sound of her voice and swivels, sticking his head through the doors. “What are you doing here?”

“It’s okay,” Penelope tells him.

“Hello to you, big brother,” Eloise says, giving him a little bow. “Come to yell at me again?”

Penelope realizes that it’s not her that’s keeping Eloise hiding away from every single family function. It’s Colin. Their relationship is still in shambles. She doesn’t know how to fix that or if it’s her place to do so but she touches his arm and says, “No,” softly and he relents, nodding at her.

“No,” he says. He turns his attention back to Penelope and says, “You wanna come back inside?”

She nods. She looks back at Eloise and says, “See you around.”

Eloise’s hands drift up and press against her chest, her heart, a very Bridgerton mannerism indeed.

“See you around,” she whispers.

***

The baby is due in the spring. Penelope sees Doreen every other week now instead of twice a week, but she still finds the sessions useful and helpful and feels better after them. She’s telling Doreen now how Violet is going to come stay with them around the birth to help in those first few grueling weeks and how grateful she is that Violet has the time to give her.

“Remember how you wanted me to have a contingency plan if Eloise reached out and I didn’t think I needed it, but I did?” Penelope asks.

“Yes.”

“We never talked about one of those for my mum,” Penelope says.

Doreen shifts which is so unusual. She literally has no tells ever so it’s strange to see her look uncomfortable.

“From everything we’ve discussed about your mother, it doesn’t seem likely that she will reach out. To me,” Doreen admits. “Has she ever tried to contact you seriously since you told her you wanted to go no contact?”

“Never,” Penelope says. “I was just thinking because of the baby… My sister Pip says she really likes my niece Meena, that’s all.” Penelope sighs. “I don’t actually want her to reach out.”

“No,” Doreen agrees. “And I would be surprised if she did.” She taps her pen against her notepad. “We can make a plan, though, if you think it would make you feel better.”

“That’s okay,” Penelope says. “I have Violet.”

Doreen nods. “You absolutely do.”

***

Thank God for the bathtub, because by month six, it’s where she’s the most comfortable. Colin comes home to find her floating as usual, her phone propped up on a chair she’s dragged into the bathroom so she can watch something while she soaks. She tries not to watch exclusively pregnancy videos, but the farther along she gets, the harder they are to resist. She wants to know everything. She wants to be as prepared as possible. She wants a plan for every conceivable scenario. Her doctor says to trust her body because it already knows what to do, but Penelope thinks a little youtube never killed anyone.

“Got the paint,” Colin says, poking his head in. “How are you feeling?”

“Your giant baby is destroying my spine,” she mutters. “Your huge, hulked out baby is consuming me from the inside.”

“You want me to rub your back?” he asks. “I don’t have to start painting right away.”

“You took the day off to paint the nursery,” she says. “You don’t have to waste it on me.”

“You’re never a waste,” he says. “Come on, let me help you up. You can lay on your special pillow and light your special candle and I’ll be so gentle.” He eases her up out of the water and wraps a towel around her.

“I hate that your stupid abs are still so defined,” she says. “Why are you so handsome and I am turning into Violet Beaureagarde!”

“You look very cute, like you’re smuggling a pumpkin under all your shirts,” he says.

It’s not easy to get onto the bed and to get situated in a comfortable manner but she finally finds a good spot and Colin spends a good fifteen minutes rubbing massage oil into her lower back until she’s sighing not from hurt but from pleasure.

His voice sounds husky when he says, “Want me to keep going?”

She shifts her hips, tilting them a little, spreading her thighs and he chuckles. “I’ll take that as a yes?”

“Yes,” she says. “Lower.”

Sex has been more complicated. Once she got out of the first trimester, her libido came back but her body has been changing so fast that it feels like every week they’re troubleshooting positions because lying on her back hurts and sitting on top of him feels humiliating and her knees works sometimes and her side worked for a while but not anymore.

His fingers slip down, between her thighs, and she sighs at the contact. She’s wet, that never changes.

“Oh,” he says, when he feels it.

“Yeah,” she chuckles. “Sorry I yelled at you about your big baby.”

“S’okay,” he says, stroking her lightly a few times before pushing a finger inside of her. She groans, her haywire hormones making everything feel cranked up to eleven. He pumps in and out of her, nudging her clit every now and again. He’s teasing her, going slow, ramping her up until even he can’t stand it anymore. “Do you think—”

“Yes,” she pants, knowing him well enough to read his mind. “Please.”

She hears him shuck his clothing and then his skin is warm on top of hers. He’s careful not to make her bear the brunt of his weight as he nudges the head of his cock against her and then slides in with a groan. She’s glad that she can’t see how they look with her face down and him crouched over her, but it doesn’t matter. He’ll do anything for her, she knows.

“You feel so fucking good,” he says. “You’re so tight like this.”

“Don’t you dare get me all riled up and then come without me,” she says, her voice sharp and he pants, slowing his thrusts to light and shallow.

“I’m trying,” he says. It has been a while for them, well over a week of her searing back pain which has thankfully abated for the immediate moment but she’s loath to change too much about how she’s lying in case that changes.

“Gimme the toy,” she says, gesturing vaguely toward the nightstand. He pulls out just long enough to yank the drawer open and pull out the small blue vibrator. He’d insisted on blue when they’d bought it, of course. She mostly uses it when he’s not around, but occasionally they use it together. Now it seems perfect. She eases it under her, against her, and turns it on to a gentle buzz, gasping at the sensation.

He wastes no time thrusting back into her, deep and hard. Between his cock and the vibrations against her clit, the orgasm seems to bloom in her throat, choking her with pleasure that travels down and out and all around her. It grips her limbs, it pulls at her hair, it skitters across her skin.

“Please,” he whimpers, so hard inside her.

The orgasm squeezes her, forcing a groan out and then she can’t control it anymore. Her hips buck, and he grips her, holding her still until he can thrust one last time and spill inside of her. She takes it happily and then whimpers, twitching against the toy trapped against her now overly sensitive clitoris. He reaches under her and grabs it, turning it off and tossing it on the bed before lying next to her on his back. She looks at him, panting.

“Look at us, making it work,” he says proudly.

She can feel the baby move and says, “Your enormous, oversized baby liked it, anyway.”

“Good,” he says, kissing her nose.

***

Colin paints the nursery a soft green, gentle and calming and serene. When he shows her, he says, “What do you think?”

She finds herself so overcome with love for him and for the color and for this house in this city and for the child inside of her that all she can really do is hold her hands to her heart and say, “I love it.”

Just like a real Bridgerton. Which, of course, she is.