Chapter Text
It's raining hard when Colin parks the hire car at the house. Coming down in sheets, fat raindrops on pine-needles that make the world smell green when he gets out of the car, his jacket held in a tent over his head (he left the umbrellas inside the house when he left for the airport earlier, too full of jittery, buzzing energy to quite think straight).
House is probably not the right word for it. Eighteenth century hunting lodge buried in the forest in the hills outside Honfleur, Normandy, might be more accurate. He felt kind of embarrassed when they came up the drive and Penelope's eyes had turned into saucers as she took the place in, her breathing quiet in the hushed cocoon of the car. Growing up a Bridgerton you kind of get spoiled by ancestral beauty — it's easy to forget it isn't normal to have a family chateau in France and a villa in Italy and one in St Maartens and oh, the former palace his eldest brother Anthony bought his wife in Goa as a wedding present.
The car journey was a little… awkward. In a nice way, he thinks — his cheeks are still warm from all the looks he'd snuck at her during the ride, and the forest-wet air is kind of nice against his skin. He shivers. He supposes the awkwardness is to be expected — that's what this week is for, after all.
He hurries to open her door before she can, and holds his jacket like a tarp over the car. "We'll have to make a run for it," he tells her. She blinks up at him with those wide, blue eyes of hers, and for a moment he sort of falls. Not actually, of course, but, like, internally. Like his heart is some sort of newborn foal taking its first steps — stumbles, trips. He should be used to it by now, the falling, because it has happened pretty frequently over the past months since he realised he was in love with her.
He wondered if it would go away after he told her but evidently it hasn't. It kind of makes him want to lay on the ground, or maybe let her step on him or — something. Utterly ridiculous — he's thirty-two, a grown man with a job and everything. Not a newborn foal. He swallows and tries to gather himself up as he stands there, his T-shirt getting properly slick in the rain as he looks down at her. She's beautiful, isn't she? Always has been, with her hair and her skin and the pink flush on her cheeks; the delicate pout of her lips. He was fucking blind to not see it sooner.
He wants this to work so badly.
"Colin?" she asks uncertainly, when he still does not move. "Shall we…?"
"Yeah, um —" he stutters, his body juddering to life like a faulty engine. "Yeah. Get under my jacket and we'll run. I'll come back for your bag once you're in the warm and dry."
She puts her arm around his waist as they hurry to the front door, and her fingers winding into his T-shirt feels so nice that he's amazed the rain doesn't hiss as it makes contact with his skin.
She slips away from him once they're inside and he wants to whine — but he's pleased to see her cheeks are pink too and she won't quite meet his gaze, which is… he doesn't want her uncomfortable, but it would be much, much worse if she wasn't at least a little affected by the proximity. Encouraging, he thinks, that he can make her blush.
"Get warm by the fire," he says, pulling the jacket back over his head (pointless — he is thoroughly soaked). "I'll go grab your stuff."
But when he gets back inside she's still standing in the foyer open-mouthed, gazing at the tiles and the walls and the ceiling. Colin dumps her suitcase and steps closer to her, chafing his palms up and down her arms to warm her up (again, pointless — she's wearing a wool coat and he's not going to warm her up like this but still, he wanted to touch her. Wants to look after her).
"C'mon, Pen. You need to get warm. You can gawp once you're dry."
"It's a castle," she says faintly, as Colin leads her into the main living room. "I didn't know it was a castle."
"Technically a chateau," Colin says bashfully, putting her in front of the fire and helping her slip out of her coat. She is docile and pliant, so absorbed by the beauty of the place that she lets him take care of everything, even run his fingers through her curls to shake the rain away. This makes him feel so good he sort of wants to explode — he has to sit on his hands when he joins her on the sofa so he doesn't punch the air or grab her face and kiss her or something equally embarrassing.
"Chateau is French for castle."
"Pedant," he says. He leans back on the antique sofa, while she perches on the edge of the seat near the crackle of the fireplace, her hands outstretched towards its warmth. He'd prefer to be looking at her face, but at least he can gaze at her properly like this without her realising what a creep he is.
The rain hammers on the window panes and on the gravel outside with a kind of forceful splosh. As though the clouds really want them to know its raining.
"It's going to be raining off and on all week," he says apologetically. "I should have suggested, like, Mexico or somewhere."
She twists to look at him, a shy sort of smile on her face. "No. This is perfect." She shrugs and wrinkles up her nose. "And I couldn't afford Mexico, anyway. I don't think Ryanair flies to Cancun."
You don't need to worry about that, he wants to say. Not anymore. I take care of all of that now.
Probably a bit intense for what is, essentially, their first date, he supposes. "No," he says instead, his voice faint. "I don't suppose they do."
She settles back on the sofa beside him. She smells like flowers and smoke, that heady, maddening perfume that he bought a little bottle of so he could take with him on his travels over the past six months (she can never, ever know about that — too humiliating). He almost moans to smell it on her wet skin, to have her shoulder-to-shoulder with him on this stupid, fussy settee. Did no-one ever want to be comfortable in the eighteenth century? Surely they had the technology for a soft sofa.
"We'll have to actually do some writing, then, if it's raining." She gives him a hesitant smile. "Isn't that why we came here?"
"Y-es," he says slowly, frowning. He had said that, hadn't he? A writer's retreat, he said in that dark, frozen garden, his mouth so close to hers that he could taste her next words, taste his own saliva on her lips. Just me and you. "But — but no. Not just that, Pen."
Her cheeks flood pink again (God, it's nice making her blush) and she turns her face towards the fire, her teeth buttoning her lower lip. "No," she says softly. "Not just that."
Penelope always feels weird when she gets off planes. She thinks it's the same as leaving the cinema, or your house the day after a hangover. Stepping into the world as new and raw and hopeful as a newborn, so fundamentally transformed that even light feels sore on your fresh skin.
It doesn't help, really, that she now finds herself in a fairytale fucking castle in the middle of a stormy forest with the boy she's loved since she was ten years old. She blinks into the fireplace, her palms on her damp jeans while Colin's soaked form is pressed next to her. He's saying something about shall we get pizza for dinner because it's too late for a food shop and is that alright, Pen? She just nods.
He told her to come to France, and she did. He said, I'm going to be in Paris next week for work. Meet me at the house in France, and we can work out what all of … this is. Then he'd smiled, and brushed his lips so carefully against hers (their second ever kiss, and almost as nice as the first). A writer's retreat, like we always talked about. Just me and you. Shut the world out, you know?
And because the words before those had been I love you, Penelope Featherington, she had nodded and said, yeah, yeah, France. Just me and you. And then they had had their third kiss (which Penelope ranked somewhere between the first and second because this time he kind of brushed her boob over her jumper). She watches him talk about pizza and she wonders if she'll be allowed a fourth, actually.
That was a week ago, in his mum's garden at his little sister Fran's birthday party (which also happened to be Valentine's Day — ten year old Penelope would be having an absolute field day at this fact. Twenty-seven year old Penelope barely survived it, honestly). He had asked her not to tell Eloise where she was going, which was both difficult and troubling. Difficult because Eloise is the nosiest girl in the world and troubling because Penelope had a kind of sick, black feeling that Colin maybe wanted to keep them a secret — keep her a secret — until he'd worked out his feelings. That maybe the I love you was more experimental than real; that he was trying the taste of it in his mouth before committing to the whole bottle, so to speak.
Colin stops in his pizza talk. "This is… this is weird, isn't it?"
"It is?" Penelope says, because she knows why she feels weird but she desperately needs to hear him say why he thinks it is.
He scrunches up his nose prettily (will she get to kiss him there, too? On his little doll's nose?). "Isn't it?"
Penelope looks back at her palms. Her entire left side is wet, plastered against his soaked chest. The fire is doing fuck-all to dry them off like this, but she doesn't really care.
"I have to say something but I think it's going to make it even weirder," Colin says, his words coming out all in a rush, his chest turning practically concave as the air escapes him. "But ever since I told you I love you all I've been thinking about is when I'll get to say it again."
"Oh!" Penelope sinks into the sofa a little more deeply, something warm blossoming in her stomach. "Oh."
"Can I say it again?" he asks, twisting his body around so he can look at her.
"Uh." She sucks her lower lip into her mouth to keep from beaming. She nods and Colin looks as if he might slide off the settee with relief. Hesitantly he curls one arm around her shoulders and shifts himself closer. "Sorry I'm so wet," he grimaces.
You and me both, she almost says.
"It's okay. Just — say it."
He grins and his hand cups her arm. She feels burning, like a thirteen year old getting their hand held in a Macdonalds for the first time. She doesn't know where to look, because he's so big and warm and also smells so nice so she just sort of lolls against him, her body sinking deeper into the couch and her cheeks burning pink.
"Penelope," he says softly, and his voice is full of purpose and heat, his face dipped so he can catch her eyes. "I love you."
Her eyes flutter shut and she lets her head tip back against his arm. "Yeah." Her voice sounds strange, high and sweet. "Yeah. Again."
He chuckles. "Only if you say it back," he coaxes, and she feels his fingers on her cheek, knuckles brushing soft over her skin.
"You know how I feel about you." (He does, and has for a while — no small source of humiliation for her).
"Still. I like to hear it."
She swallows, and turns her face towards his. When she opens her eyes she is two inches away from his mouth. "Colin," she whispers, such sweetness flooding through her like rain. "I love you."
He moans, and Penelope gets her fourth kiss.
Penelope Featherington loves him.
It's not the first time he's heard her say it — don't think about that now, moron he tells himself as he gets back in the hire car. The rain hasn't slowed, and winding down the forest road in the dark with rain sheeting the windscreen faster than his wipers can shove it off isn't exactly pleasant. He's pleased that he suggested Penelope stay back and get settled, even though the thought of being apart from her now feels wrong. A tugging feeling in his belly, like he's forgotten something crucial. Kind of like accidentally leaving your phone or keys or wallet behind but much, much worse. More like he's left his spleen or one of his kidneys back at the house. An organ who's absence won't kill him but… things feel harder. He turns out on the main road, which at least has proper street lights and the feeling sharpens. Yeah. Harder.
The guy at the pizza place is abominably rude (because of course — Colin thinks his French is pretty good but they always know he's English and treat him accordingly). He doesn't care, sits in the half-empty restaurant and thinks about Penelope. About their kiss on the sofa, and how… soft she was. He didn't know it was possible for a person to be so soft, actually. Her cheek under his hand and the pillow of her lips and just … her. How she had melted and lolled against him, her body slack for the kissing. He's never seen her like that before, eyes hazy and cheeks petal-pink, and he wonders if this is what it'll be like now, every day. Something new, again and again.
He liked how demanding she was, even in her softness. Again, she said. Made him feel sort… slick. Like oil on water, like he might slither to the floor, cartoonishly boneless. And yet also it made him want to kind of trap her, pin her to the sofa with the cage of his body to keep her safe and make her tell him, over and over, just what he could do for her. Another new thing, actually, because Penelope isn't typically demanding, or impetuous. She's not a pushover (not anymore, anyway, though she used to follow Eloise around like a little lamb when they were kids) — she has a kind of inner steel, this unshakeable sense of herself that he admires deeply, but it's very internal. There's a mountain inside of her, he thinks, unmoving and beautiful and great — but the mountain does not generally demand the clouds kiss its peak, or that the sun shines on its easterly side. It feels sort of miraculous, then, to hear the mountain speak.
He thinks about what she is doing now. Is she warming up properly by the fire, drying out her jumper that he (he feels guilty) got all wet from plastering himself all over her (he couldn't help but want to shift closer, always — greedy, greedy). Or has she found her bedroom, unpacking all of her pretty dresses and (God) underwear, taking her toothbrush out and her make-up and jewellery and making herself at home? Or maybe she's the kind who lives out of her suitcase when she's away from home, like Colin does, as though he's unwilling to put down roots even as fine and spindly as a jacket in a wardrobe. He hopes it's the former.
This thought makes him feel depressed, so he thinks instead about Penelope on the bed. He set up two separate rooms for them — next door to each other, but separate — because he was worried — he didn't want to assume —
The bedroom he chose for her has a big antique framed wooden bed and everything is peach and white in that French pattern with all the stuff — ladies and trees and lambs and things (he spends five minutes trying to remember the name — toile de jouy). He chose it because the colours reminded him of her skin, peaches-and-cream, and he imagines her now spread out on the pillows of the bed he chose, her hair fanned out in its pretty, fluffy waves. Has she taken off her damp jeans and jumper, he wonders? Maybe she's just in her T-shirt and underwear — maybe just her T-shirt —
It's amazing how absorbing the thought is, because half an hour passes without him really noticing (except the low ache in his groin from the thought of her in just a T-shirt, wondering if the curls on her pussy match the ones on her head — he is a pervert, probably) — he might never be bored again, actually. He takes the pizzas from the rude manager, leaves much too large of a tip (he thinks what Pen would say — scold him, maybe, for being ostentatious, or would she be pleased with his generosity?) and gets back in the car with the two pizza boxes steaming up the windows on the seat beside him.
When he gets back to the house she's curled up in front of the fire. Just where he left her. He feels a little put out that she hasn't changed or gotten herself more comfortable, her hands folded in her lap. She looks like a painting like this, her hair frizzed up around her face like a halo from the moisture, the light of the fire and the lamps (he spent what felt like half an hour turning them all on — his mother is apparently allergic to overhead lighting, and so he has spent half his life fumbling around the necks of vintage lamps just so he can fucking see anything) bathing her gold.
She is so still. He wonders if this is why he finds her so magnetic. He feels like he has spent his entire life in motion — like an ocean churned up or wind in the pine trees. Too poetic, perhaps — maybe more like a neurotic rodent running for its life, a prey animal being stalked. Running and running and running from — what, exactly? He thinks his heart beats faster than other people's, his nervous system set to flee in a way that others are not.
"Did you find your room?" he asks, sliding onto the sofa with the pizza boxes. "Shall we eat in here, or —"
"Here is good," she says. "And I didn't want to snoop around without you."
"You can snoop," he says, placing one of the boxes on her lap. "Snoop away." God, he wants her to ferret around. Rifle through everything in his life with those little fingers of hers.
They split the pizzas in half and share it— one margarita and one with reblochon and ham and potatoes (France) on it. This is what they do when they eat together — get one normal thing and one insane thing and share them so they get to try something new and still have something good to eat in case it's gross. This pizza is, actually, kind of gross, but they eat it all anyway.
"Colin," she says hesitantly once they've finished (and Colin has put the boxes in the kitchen so they don't have to look at them), one hand on her potato-and-reblochon filled belly. "Why am I here?"
"Oh." Dismay falls through him fast. "Oh. You don't — I thought you said —"
"No, I mean," she says quickly, and then reaches across the sofa to take his hand. "I know why I'm here. I just… you said we needed to figure it out, just me and you, but I want to know what that means, exactly."
Colin nods, twisting on the sofa to look at her better. Her hand is so neat and warm in his (if a little oily from the pizza grease — he doesn't mind). "Right," he says, still nodding like a demented dashboard dog. "Right. Yeah. Explain."
"Yes," she says, firmly. "Explain."
Penelope likes things to be clear. Black-and-white. Like a chessboard — all the pieces lined up, their moves proscribed. He thinks it's why she started that gossip blog at school. She always said it's because she's nosy but he thinks it's more a deep-seated need to understand, to unpick and catalogue human behaviour, use her words like a scalpel to perform autopsies on scandal. An anatomist's notebook, that thing.
It's why he worried about telling her how he felt. He is her best friend (or her other best friend's big brother — or her unrequited crush), which means he has certain moves on the chessboard. He was worried that maybe Penelope wouldn't permit him this diagonal, the looping zig-zag of loving her. (It wasn't the only reason he was worried, of course. She had just broken up with that guy, and Colin was worried he had missed his chance, that her feelings were… elsewhere, now).
She squeezes his fingers, her eyes large and soft. He is so, so glad he was wrong about that one (something new, again and again).
"I just… we have a lot of history," he says, his mouth suddenly dry (fucking stupid French salty potato pizza). "And I kept thinking about, like, coming to your flat to pick you up for dates or trying to sleep over and Eloise being there, or my mum asking inappropriate questions at Sunday dinner, or your mum being—" he almost says a cunt, then sees her face and cuts himself off — he's learned that it's okay for Penelope to say bad things about her mum but she does not like it when he does. He shifts on the sofa, and covers her hand with his. "I want this to be real, Pen." His voice is embarrassingly hoarse. "I want us to have space to work out how we fit together. And I don't think we can do that with both our families breathing down our necks."
She considers this, her brow furrowing slightly. "That makes sense." Colin feels a little ripple of relief go through him. "That's why you didn't want me to tell Eloise."
"Exactly."
Penelope nods, but doesn't say anything else, frowning while she thinks. Colin finds himself leaning into her, a keening feeling in his chest. He wants to ask her what she's thinking — but then he notices her shiver and everything else gets chased out of his head.
"You're cold — I'll run you a bath," he says, getting to his feet immediately. "You're still wet."
She makes a weird little humming noise. "Um," she says, getting up too. "Okay."
There's a clawfoot tub in the middle of her bedroom.
It's properly deep, too, enough that Penelope's tits and belly are actually submerged in the water (rare for her).
She should feel relieved to be on her own, and part of her is, but she also has that dull ache in her chest, the one she always gets when Colin leaves. It sits in her dead centre, her equator and her axis, this thin line of longing that bisects her. After seventeen years of loving him she's learned how to manage it but since he said he loved her back it feels… sharper. Like he'd reached his hand into her chest and plucked the taut string.
Being with Colin feels as good as being on her own. She'd said that to him once (accidentally), and he'd just laughed and done that thing where he tucked her under his arm, kissed the top of her head with a kind of blithe, casual ownership that drove her mad. She was certain that he hadn't really understood what she was saying, how profound it was for her to feel that way — how close it was to I love you. How could he understand? Colin thrives in the company of others — they amplify him, like a candle held up to a mirror, the light bending and magnifying into a blaze. What would snuff Penelope out entirely only fuels him.
That's why it hadn't worked with Alfie, she supposes. In the two months they dated she realised that she spent a lot of the time she was with him waiting for him to go away. She never feels that way with Colin. He travels a lot for work (formerly for Vice, but since it folded he writes freelance stuff — he has enough family wealth that the insecurity of the industry isn't really a problem for him — she often seethes about that when she is at her shitty office job looking at his Instagram pictures from Indonesia or Paraguay or Namibia), and in the last couple of years they've spent hours on the phone together. Penelope will stay up way too late just listening to him breathing, clutching the phone to her cheek even when she has nothing left to say — just in case, she thinks, the string in her body thrumming and twanging. Just in case there is another story or another joke or his breath hitches in that way she likes. She cannot get enough of him, actually.
She sinks a little further into the tub, her toes playing with the tap as she thinks about what Colin said earlier about not wanting their families breathing down their necks. She had felt so pleased at first (helped by the kisses and the I love yous and the pizza), but then it had turned a little dark and sad because, well, Eloise. Eloise, who knows how Penelope feels about Colin and knows just how much those feelings have hurt her (not so much in the last few years but when she was a teenager, when all her feelings felt like unexploded grenades juggled on a tightrope). Penelope feels glad, then, that Colin had asked her not to tell Eloise — which makes her feel guilty, because she shouldn't feel glad about having secrets from her best friend, should she?
Penelope sighs, and yanks out the plug with her foot. Enough thinking time, actually. She lies in the draining bath and hopes the dark thoughts will swirl down the plughole with the water. She doesn't want to rob herself of the strange miracle of this day, this castle in the forest where — between rain and wet jumpers and potato on pizza — her dreams have, impossibly, come true. She gets up and dries herself off and slips into her T-shirt and sleep shorts. Brushes her teeth in the en-suite and puts her moisturiser on. Climbs into the massive, ridiculous princess bed and blinks around at this room that feels like being inside of a peach.
There is a knock at the door the moment she gets under the covers, and she wonders if Colin has had a cup pressed to the wall, waiting for her to be decent before he disturbs her. She smiles to herself, because he seems to have turned into some sort of Victorian gentlemen this evening, insisting on separate bedrooms and blushing vividly when she had started to unbutton her jeans to get into the bath. She finds it incredibly endearing in a kind of sappy, watery-eyed way.
She's used to feeling like that with Colin — what she isn't used to is letting him see it. She spends half her time with him biting her tongue and sucking her cheeks in and blinking fast so he doesn't see how happy she is to be around him (he slept on her sofa for a week last year and she got ulcers from biting her cheeks too hard).
But, she supposes, she's allowed to show him now, isn't she?
So she keeps smiling.
"Come in."