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It was a boring question, the kind Penelope had answered a hundred times before.
The interviewer was an older woman with grey hair that curled at the ends and wrinkles around her mouth that held stories.
"Where did you draw inspiration for this love story? It feels very raw. Almost too much so,” she asked.
It seemed like an asinine question from someone with such experience, and Penelope sighed, exhaustion from a long day of endless interviews settling in. It was a boring question that deserved a boring answer, and she knew, even in that moment, she should give a boring answer, but for once, the truth was easier than the lie.
"Everyone has their unrequited love story, yeah? My best friend, she had a brother. Well, she had four brothers, but there was one in particular. He was like the sun… and I—I was constantly pulled into his orbit."
A throwaway line in a throwaway interview that nobody was meant to read.
Years prior, Penelope applied for the program on a lark, not really believing she could get in. She was newly twenty, in her second year of university, and even though things were good—classes were going well, she was doing well—being too close to home, to Portia, to the life she had and the life she could not escape was suffocating. The exchange program in Amsterdam offered a semester abroad to study creative writing. A chance to breathe. A chance to become someone other than the invisible Featherington sister.
Eloise had encouraged it and was not at all surprised when she got in. The semester became a year. She transferred, finished her degree in a city where no one knew her name or her mother or the weight of all the ways she had failed to be enough. Amsterdam was beautiful and strange and absolutely nothing like London. Penelope loved it immediately. She loved the canals and the bicycles and the narrow houses that leaned against each other like old friends. She loved the anonymity of it, how it left her to reinvent herself without anyone noticing or caring.
She graduated. Then stayed for a while, working at a small publishing house, and writing in the evenings. When a job opportunity came up in Paris, she took it. Another city, another version of herself.
Paris suited her in ways she had not expected. She found a flat in the 11th arrondissement, small but bright, with windows that overlooked a courtyard where someone always seemed to be playing guitar. She worked at a literary agency, then left to write full-time when her first book sold, building a life piece by piece that was entirely her own. She kept in touch with the people who mattered. Eloise, always. Long emails that turned into voice notes that turned into FaceTime calls at odd hours. Francesca, when she surfaced, which was rarely but always welcome. Violet, who sent care packages and always remembered her birthday.
They came to see her. That was the thing. Paris was only a two-hour train ride from London, and the Bridgertons treated her flat like a waypoint. Eloise came most often, crashing on her sofa for long weekends filled with wine and wandering and conversations that stretched until dawn. Violet came twice a year, always with a suitcase full of things Penelope did not need but was grateful for anyway. Francesca appeared occasionally, unannounced, needing quiet. Even Kate and Anthony stopped by once, on their way somewhere else. Benedict and Sophie came for a long weekend and spent most of it in museums while Penelope wrote.
Her trips back to London were rare at first. A Christmas here, a wedding there. She told herself it was easier this way, that Paris was central, that it made more sense for people to come to her. These were true enough. But the real truth was simpler: every time she went back, she felt herself shrinking. Becoming smaller. Becoming the girl she used to be instead of the woman she had fought to become.
So the trips grew less frequent. And then they stopped altogether.
A decade passed. Then more.
Penelope did not notice it happening, not really. Time moved differently when you were building something. One year bled into the next, marked by book deadlines and flat moves and the slow accumulation of a life. She meant to go back. She always meant to go back. But there was always a reason not to, and the reasons were easier than the alternative.
And then Philippa had a baby.
Portia's first grandchild. The only grandchild, as her mother reminded her in every email, every voicemail, every thinly veiled comment relayed through Prudence. Penelope had avoided the baby shower with a well-timed deadline. She had avoided the birth with a convenient case of food poisoning. But the christening was unavoidable. Portia had made that abundantly clear.
So Penelope booked a flight. Packed a bag. Told herself she could survive a weekend.
And she does. She grins and bears it and white-knuckles it through every dig from her mother, every painful interaction with family asking her when her turn will be, every question from her sisters as to why she never comes home anymore. The only highlight of the weekend is a brunch with Violet and El prior to the christening, catching up over mimosas before her reckoning with the life she left behind that gave her the strength to survive the weekend in its entirety.
It is meant to be a quick forty-eight hours, Penelope strategically planning her flights in and out to allow no more than forty-eight hours on English soil. She holds the baby when required and makes appropriate sounds of admiration. She deflects questions about her personal life with practised ease. She does not allow herself to become angry when her mother makes another comment about grandchildren, or lack thereof—you are thirty-four, Penelope Anne, the clock is ticking—within earshot of several relatives.
She is making her excuses, coat already on, when Albion appears at her elbow with a small wooden board. She squints at it, makes out his hand-engraved initials right under the knife.
"Penelope, you have got to try this before you go. I've been ageing it in the cellar for months." He holds up a wedge that is pale and crumbly, his face bright with the enthusiasm of a man who is obsessed with his hobby. "Goat's milk. Rosemary rind. I think I've finally cracked it."
Philippa's husband is a kind man, genuinely kind, and under any other circumstances, Penelope would have been happy to indulge him. But she can feel her mother's eyes on her from across the room, can feel the weight of the afternoon pressing down on her chest, and she cannot stay in this house for one more minute.
"Next time," she says, and she means it to sound like a promise. "I have a flight to catch."
She is in the taxi before she allows herself to breathe.
The notification comes through from her assistant as they make their way back to her hotel so she can collect her bag. Flight cancelled. Mechanical issue. Next available: tomorrow evening.
Penelope stares at her phone. Twenty-four more hours. She can’t do it. She cannot go back to that house, cannot face another round of her mother's observations, cannot sit through dinner pretending that everything is fine. She could rebook the hotel, lock herself in the room, order room service, answer emails and pretend she is not in London at all.
The cab slows in traffic. Outside the window, the city scrolls past. Grey and familiar and nothing like home.
"Actually," she hears herself say, "can you let me out here?"
The driver glances at her in the mirror. "Here?"
"Here is fine."
She pays, collects her purse, and steps onto the pavement. She does not know where she is, exactly. Somewhere between the airport and the centre. Somewhere that is not the Featherington house and not her hotel room and not the life she had built an ocean away.
She walks and it feels good to move, to let the city decide where she ends up. She wanders through streets she half-remembers, past shops that have changed and pubs that have not, until her feet begin to ache and her stomach rumbles, reminding her that she has barely eaten all day.
The restaurant she stumbles upon is small and warm, tucked between a bookshop and an antique dealer. Wisteria is the name, and fittingly, vines of it drape over the doorway and crawl along the brick. It is the kind of place that appears, on the surface, to not try too hard, but the harder one looks it is easy to see the care and attention to detail that have gone into every piece. The cardstock of the menu, the etchings on the glasses, the carvings on the tables. Penelope gets a table by the window and orders pasta and a glass of wine and feels, for the first time since landing, like she can settle.
The routine is familiar, and she thrives on the familiarity, so she answers emails. She texts Eloise: Flight cancelled. Stuck until tomorrow. Don't tell anyone. She texts her assistant to rebook her flight. She orders a second glass of wine. She amends her hotel room on her phone as she shovels the most decadent pasta she has ever tasted into her mouth. The wine is expensive and bright, a merlot that probably stains her teeth, but she does not care. Time passes, an hour, then two, and the restaurant fills up around her.
She is not happy, exactly. But she is not unhappy either. She is simply here, existing, taking up space in a city that once felt like a cage and now feels like nothing at all.
Her phone is in one hand, her wine in the other, a half-smile around the rim of her glass when she hears it.
"Pen?"
And there he is, Colin Bridgerton. Standing three feet away, with a bottle of wine tucked under his arm and that familiar grin stretching across his perfect mouth.
(He texted her a week or so after the article nobody was supposed to read went live.
Please, please, please tell me it wasn't Ben.
Penelope stared at her phone for a full minute. Her heart pounding in her throat, and allowed herself to type back before she lost her nerve.
Of course not.
His reply came fast.
Oh thank god.
Then, a moment later:
It was Anthony, wasn't it?
She laughed out loud, alone in her flat, as she typed, You've figured me out. It's the frowning. I find it irresistible
I KNEW IT. The man has never smiled in his life, and yet women keep falling for him. It's honestly insulting to the rest of us.
And just like that, they were talking. He was funny and warm and self-deprecating, and she remembered why she had loved him in the first place.
Loved. Past tense. She was careful about that, even in her own head.
They did not acknowledge that it was him. Not directly. The joke gave them both cover. They talked about her book, about London, about his restaurant. He mentioned it in passing, something about finally putting down roots, about opening a place in Soho. They talked about Eloise and his mother and everything except the thing that was sitting underneath all of it.
It went on for a few days. Messages that made her smile. The occasional photo. Him at the restaurant, flour on his cheek. A truly terrible attempt at latte art. She sent him pictures of her neighbourhood, her desk, the canal outside her window.
It was not flirting, exactly. But it was not nothing, either.
And then he sent a message that made her stomach drop.
I think about that last summer a lot.
She saw it. She stared at it for what felt like hours.
She did not know what to say. So she said nothing. And kept saying nothing for days and weeks after until it was a notification lost in hundreds, and by the time she found it again, too much time had passed for reaching back out to not be awkward, so she simply let the silence linger and grow until it was insurmountable.)
She has not seen him in years.
That is her first thought. The second is that he looks good in a way that feels unfair. Time has sharpened him, carved away whatever softness remained from his twenties. His hair is shorter than she remembers but still falls across his forehead in the same careless way. There is stubble along his jaw and faint lines at the corners of his eyes that were not there before.
He looks like Colin. He looks like a stranger.
"Pen," he says again, and the nickname lands somewhere in the centre of her chest. "What are you doing here?"
She finds her voice. It comes out steadier than she expects. "Eating pasta. Drinking wine." She gestures at her table, at the evidence of her evening. "What are you doing here?"
Colin laughs. It is a short, surprised sound, and the tension in her gut loosens at the familiarity of it.
"I own it."
Penelope blinks. Looks around the restaurant properly for the first time. The careful details she had noticed earlier take on new meaning. The specific weight and texture of the menus. The warmth of the lighting. The fact that everything feels considered without feeling fussy. Even the bloody name.
The grin is slow as it curls around her lips. "You own it," she repeats quite dumbly.
"For about two years now." He is still holding the bottle of wine, she notices. Still standing there like he has not yet decided what to do with himself. He rocks back and forth on his heels for a beat, his free hand dangling at his side, fingers tapping. "I mentioned it once. A while back."
She remembers. I am putting down roots. Got a place in Soho, he had texted her during those few weeks that still, even now, feel like a dream. Of course, she remembers. But she is not ready to acknowledge that, so she just nods. She nods, and Colin merely looks at her for a long moment, his expression difficult to read. It feels, for a long and torturous moment, like he is seeing right through her. Then, suddenly, his posture shifts as if a decision has been made.
He gestures to the empty chair across from her. "May I?"
There is an excuse about needing to leave, about an early flight right there on the tip of her tongue. She should say it, she knows, because she has spent a decade building a life that does not include him and the intention was grounded in self-preservation because self-preservation is necessary in order to survive Colin Bridgerton.
"Yes," she says instead.
He slides into the chair across from her and sets the bottle on the table between them. It is a red, she notices. The same one she has been drinking.
"Were you bringing that to someone?"
"Restocking it." He glances at the bottle, then at her glass. "But this seems better."
Before she can protest, he is flagging down a server, asking for another glass, topping up her wine without asking if she wants more. It is presumptuous in a way that should irritate her.
"So," he says, settling back in his chair. He leans back fully, hooking an ankle over the opposite knee. It is startling to be reminded of just how much space he takes up. "You're in London."
Penelope nods. "I'm in London."
"For how long?"
"I was supposed to fly back tonight. I was in town for Pip’s baby’s christening—”
“—Ah, yes, I heard she had a baby. Is it cute?”
“Yes she is.”
“Must have gotten your genes, then,” he grins, tipping his wine glass towards her. The words are cool and confident and so easily dropped between them, but she catches the brief look of surprise that flickers across his features as soon as they are uttered aloud.
“My flight was cancelled. I started wandering and got hungry.”
"And you ended up here." He shakes his head slowly, wonder filling his expression. "Of all the restaurants in London."
She shrugs, avoiding eye contact for a beat. "It had good reviews."
"Did it?"
"Very good reviews. I'm discerning."
Colin grins. It transforms his face, makes him look younger, makes the tips of her ears burn.
"Well," he says. "I'm glad we meet your standards."
They fall into conversation more easily than she expects. He disappears when he is summoned every fifteen minutes or so, helping run food, or deal with a customer, or expedite orders when the rush reaches full height. In-between, though, he is across from her, refilling her wine, sneaking glances towards her like he is not quite sure she is real. He asks about the christening, winces sympathetically when she describes her mother's commentary on grandchildren. She is mid-sentence, when his gaze drops to her plate, to the remnants of cacio e pepe she has been too distracted to finish, and his expression shifts into one of professional scrutiny.
"Good?"
"Incredible, actually."
"You've barely eaten half of it."
"I got sidetracked by the wine."
He shakes his head in mock disapproval and disappears before she can protest. When he returns a few minutes later he is carrying a small plate, white porcelain, on which sits a single arancini split open to reveal its molten center.
"I've been working on these for weeks," he says, sliding the plate toward her. "Tell me what you think. Be brutal."
Penelope picks it up and bites into it and the sound she makes is entirely involuntary. The outside is shatteringly crisp. Inside, the rice is creamy and sharp with parmesan, the center liquid and hot.
"Well?" Colin asks, watching her chew with an intensity that borders on clinical.
"Devastating."
"Devastating how?"
"Devastating in that I want six more and would pay an unreasonable amount of money for them."
His face breaks open. There is pride in it, but also relief, and the relief surprises her.
"So tell me about this place," she says, because she wants to know and because it is safer than the silence that will fill the space if she does not. "How long have you been in Soho?"
"Almost two years in this location. Before that I was running a pop-up out of a mate's place in Peckham. Before that I was staging in Lyon for six months, which nearly killed me. Before that—" He stops and grins. "How far back do you want me to go?"
"Lyon," Penelope says. "Start there."
He tells her. The kitchen in Lyon where the head chef threw a saucepan at him on his second day. The flat he shared with two other apprentices, one of whom snored so loudly that Colin slept with his head under the pillow for six months. The morning he burned an entire batch of croissants because he was reading an article about fermentation science and lost track of time. He tells her about the night the restaurant got its first mention as Michelin-adjacent and the entire kitchen staff went out and got so drunk that no one showed up the next morning and the sous chef had to cook the lunch service alone.
Penelope listens. She finishes the arancini and licks oil from her thumb and listens, and it strikes her how different he sounds when he talks about this. The Colin she knew at twenty-one spoke about travel the way people speak about escape, all restless energy and forward momentum. Leaving was the point. The destinations were practically incidental. Now, he talks about the weight of dough under his hands, the specific temperature at which butter breaks. He talks about a regular customer, an elderly woman named June who comes in every Thursday and orders the same thing and leaves a handwritten note on her napkin each time. He keeps them. All of them, in a drawer in the office.
"She told me last week the panna cotta was transcendent," he says. "She underlined transcendent twice."
"That's very sweet."
"She also told me I need a haircut."
Penelope tilts her head and looks at him properly, his hair falling across his forehead. "She's not wrong."
"Rude."
"Honest. There's a difference."
His mouth twitches. He runs his hand through his hair, a gesture so automatic she doubts he is aware he does it. The server materialises to check on them, and Colin waves her off without looking away from Penelope.
"What about you?" he asks. "What does your life look like on a Tuesday?"
"On a Tuesday."
"Specifically, a Tuesday. I want to picture it."
She considers this. Nobody has asked her to describe her life in such specific, mundane terms before. Interviewers want the arc, the narrative, the tidy summary. Colin wants a Tuesday.
"I wake up around seven. My upstairs neighbour plays the guitar badly at half past, so even if I wanted to sleep in, I cannot. I make coffee in a Moka pot that I have had for six years and is probably slowly poisoning me. I write until noon, sometimes later if it is going well, less if it is not. There is a café on Rue Oberkampf where I eat lunch most days. The woman behind the counter is named Sylvie, and she has very strong opinions about my coffee order."
"What's your coffee order?"
"Café crème. Which is apparently an abomination after eleven in the morning."
"Is it?"
"Sylvie seems to think so. She tells me every time. I order it anyway."
Colin grins. "Good."
"After lunch, I usually walk for a while,” she stops, suddenly flustered as he listens so intently to her every word. “Christ, Colin, this is so boring, are you sure you want to hear all this?”
“Yes, I want to know everything you’ve been up to these last years, Pen,” he says quietly, gaze meeting and holding hers with an intensity that has her drawing in an inhale quickly.
“Alright,” she stutters, then stops, then resumes: “After lunch, I… er… walk along the canal, or through Belleville, or wherever. Then I come home and try to write more, and usually fail, and then I answer emails and pretend that counts as being productive."
"That's not a bad Tuesday."
"No," she agrees. "It is not."
She does not tell him about the evenings. About the quiet that settles over her flat when the guitar player stops and the courtyard empties, and she is left alone with her own thoughts. About the quality of silence in a city where she knows people but belongs to no one. She does not tell him that her Tuesdays are full and satisfying and sometimes, without warning, unbearably lonely.
A burst of noise from the kitchen breaks the moment. A clatter of pans, a muffled curse, someone laughing. Colin's head turns instinctively, and Penelope watches him assess the situation from across the room, the brief calculation before he decides it does not require his attention. A harried-looking woman, his manager, Penelope surmises, holds her hand up without looking at him and disappears through the door. Colin settles at the sight of her.
"You're good at this," she says.
"At what?"
"At being in charge. You seem comfortable."
He looks embarrassed, his thumb tracing the base of his wine glass.
"Took a while. First few months, I was a disaster. Ask anyone who worked here opening week. I had a full anxiety attack in the walk-in fridge on the second night."
"What happened?"
"Eighty covers and the pasta machine broke. I had to hand-roll everything. My hands were shaking so badly that Ben had to drive me home."
Penelope can picture it clearly. Benedict leaning against the counter, waiting, the kind of steady presence that never asks questions but always shows up.
"I asked him not to tell anyone." Colin shrugs. "I didn't want anyone to know I was struggling. Especially not—"
He stops. Picks up his wine. Takes a long sip.
Penelope waits. He does not finish the sentence, and she does not push, because she recognises the shape of what he has left unsaid. Instead, she reaches for her own glass and asks him what the most ridiculous thing a customer has ever said to him is.
Colin exhales, and the tension in his jaw loosens. "A man once told me my risotto was an insult to his dead grandmother."
"Was it?"
"It was the best risotto I've ever made. To this day I stand by it. His grandmother would have loved it."
"You never met his grandmother."
"I didn't need to. That risotto was objectively perfect."
Penelope laughs, a real laugh that she feels in her chest, and Colin watches her with an expression she files away to examine later, when she is alone and can afford to be honest with herself about what it did to her.
Around them the restaurant hums. Plates arrive and are cleared. The kitchen noise rises and falls in waves. Colin excuses himself twice to handle things she can not see from her seat, and each time he returns he slides back into the chair across from her and picks up exactly where they left off, as though the interruption never happened.
It reminds her of how they used to talk at Aubrey Hall, back when the others would scatter and the two of them would linger. Back when she could sit beside him for hours and never once feel the need to be anywhere else.
It is a dangerous feeling to rediscover. She knows this. Catalogues the danger and sits with it anyway, because the wine is good and Colin is across from her, telling her about the time he accidentally set the specials board on fire, and she is not ready for this to be over. Not yet.
He shifts in his seat, clears his throat, fills the silence between them in a way he never had to back then. "Can I get you anything else? On the house. The tiramisu is exceptional, if I say so myself."
"You made it?"
"I made everything. Well, not tonight. But the recipes are mine. Or at least, partially mine. I worked with Chef to develop them."
There is pride in his voice, quiet but unmistakable. She remembers Colin at twenty-three, restless and searching, never staying anywhere long enough to build anything. This Colin is different.
"Tiramisu sounds perfect," she says.
He disappears into the kitchen and returns a few minutes later with two plates and two forks. The tiramisu is, as promised, exceptional. Rich and light at the same time, the coffee bitter against the sweetness of the cream.
"This is obscene," Penelope says around a mouthful. "Genuinely obscene."
His cheeks flush. "Thank you. I think."
"It's a compliment."
That characteristic grin spreads across his mouth. "I'll take it."
They eat in comfortable silence for a moment. Around them, the restaurant has long been empty, staff clearing tables with quiet efficiency. Penelope is aware of how late it must be, how long they have been sitting here, but she cannot bring herself to check the time.
"How's the book going?" Colin asks. "The second one?"
"Slowly. My editor has the patience of a saint, but I have a feeling that is gonna run out soon."
"I read the first one."
She looks up sharply to find him watching her carefully, gauging her reaction.
"You did?"
"I did. It was good, Pen. Really good."
"Thank you." She does not know what else to say. The thought of Colin reading her words, sitting somewhere with her book in his hands, feels strangely intimate.
"I recognised some things," he says, and his voice is lighter now, teasing. "The main character's best friend. Very familiar."
Penelope relaxes slightly. This is safer ground.
"Eloise has threatened to sue me for defamation at least four times."
"Only four? She's mellowing in her old age."
"Don't let her hear you say that."
Colin smiles, but there is a strain to it. A shift in the air between them. He turns his wine glass slowly on the table, watching the liquid move.
"You know," he says, "I wasn't sure you'd want to talk to me. When I saw you sitting here."
"Why wouldn't I?"
He looks up at her. His expression is careful, measured.
"You never answered my text."
Penelope feels her chest tighten, the tension spreading up into her throat. She swallows around it.
I think about that last summer a lot.
"I know," she says quietly. "I'm sorry."
Colin shrugs, but the gesture is too casual, too practised.
"It's fine. I just wondered."
"Colin…"
"Really, Pen.” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “It's fine. I shouldn't have brought it up."
But he did bring it up, and now it sits between them, the shape of everything they are not saying. She wants to explain. She wants to tell him that she did not know how to answer, that his words had begun to crack open exactly what she spent years sealing shut. She wants to tell him that she thinks about that summer too, that she has never stopped thinking about it, that some nights she lies awake and wonders what would have happened if he had not pulled away. If she had been brave enough to simply ask for what she wanted.
She says none of this. Instead, she reaches for her wine and takes a long sip, letting the silence stretch. Colin watches her for a moment longer. Then he seems to make a decision, setting down his glass and leaning back in his chair.
"So," he says, and his voice is lighter now, the tension deliberately dispersed. "What are your plans for the rest of the evening? Sitting alone in a hotel room? Trash reality television?"
"That was the general idea, yes."
He shakes his head in mock disappointment. "I can't allow it."
"You can't allow it?"
"As a Londoner and a gentleman, I have a duty to show you a better time than that."
Penelope raises an eyebrow. "What did you have in mind?"
"Eloise, B en, and Sophie are at a pub about ten minutes from here. I was going to meet them." He pauses. "You could come. If you wanted to, of course."
The invitation hangs in the air. Penelope thinks about her hotel room, the anonymous quiet of it, the long night ahead. She thinks about Ben and Soph, whom she has not seen in person since Paris nearly a year ago. She thinks about how easy it would be to say no, to retreat, to go back to the life she has built on the other side of the Channel. She thinks about Colin, sitting across from her, offering her something she is not sure she should allow herself to take.
"Come on. It'll be a surprise." Colin says encouragingly. "They will lose their minds. It'll be fantastic."
Penelope hesitates. The smart thing would be to say no. The smart thing would be to go back to her hotel, get a few hours of sleep, fly home in the morning. The smart thing would be to leave this evening as a strange, lovely coincidence and nothing more.
She has spent her whole life doing the smart thing.
"Okay," she says. "Let's go."
(It started as most crushes do—instantly and without remorse, digging into her skin and bones and her psyche before she could stop it. She met Colin Bridgerton when she was sixteen. He was handsome and funny and kind, and there was also a genuineness about him, about how he made her feel seen and heard in even their briefest of interactions. He was twenty-one and finishing university, and so far out of her reach that wanting him felt safe. A fantasy. Something to hold in the dark.
But the summer she turned eighteen, everything changed.
Colin had just quit a job he hated, a position at a consultancy firm that Anthony had arranged, the kind of respectable career that Bridgertons were supposed to want. He had lasted fourteen months before the restlessness became unbearable. Penelope remembers the exact way he looked that first week at Aubrey Hall: Hollowed out, ashamed in a way she recognised because she felt it too, though for vastly different reasons.
She was going to Cambridge in the autumn. She and Eloise both, though Eloise had a family legacy to lean on and Penelope had only the scholarship she had clawed her way toward. The weight of it sat heavy on her shoulders. All those years of being told she was not enough, and now she had to prove that she was. The fear of failing felt ever-present, lodged right behind her ribs.
They found each other that week, in the margins of the Bridgerton chaos. Penelope does not remember how it started. A conversation, maybe, while the others played pall mall on the lawn. A walk through the gardens when the house grew too loud. Colin had a way of seeking her out, settling beside her like it was the most natural thing in the world. She did not know what to make of it. Did not allow herself to wonder.
He talked to her about the job. About how it felt to sit at a desk for ten hours a day doing work that meant nothing to him. About the look on Anthony's face when he said he was quitting. He talked about wanting to travel, to see the world, to figure out who he was supposed to be. His voice cracked on the word failure and Penelope understood. She understood completely.
She told him about the scholarship. About her mother's voice in her head, cataloguing all the ways she would inevitably disappoint. About the terror of wanting something so badly and knowing that wanting was not the same as deserving. She had never said these things aloud to anyone. Not even Eloise, who loved her but did not always understand the burdensome weight of being a Featherington.
Colin listened. He did not try to fix it or dismiss it. He just listened, and when she finished, he said, You're going to be brilliant, Pen. I know it.
She believed him. For a moment, she actually believed him.
The days took on a rhythm. They spent hours together, talking and not talking. She read while he sketched ideas for trips he wanted to take. They walked the grounds in the early mornings when everyone else was still asleep. There was an ease between them that she had never experienced before. A sense of being fully seen without having to perform.
Penelope, even at eighteen, was not foolish enough to believe that week was something it was not. She knew it was just a pause, a pocket of time that existed outside of real life. She told herself not to want more than that, even while she very desperately wanted more than that.
The bonfire on their last night was a Bridgerton tradition; the whole family gathered around the flames, passing bottles of wine and beer and telling stories. Penelope sat beside Colin on a blanket, close enough that their shoulders touched. The fire painted everything in shades of gold and amber and she could taste the hops on her lips, the bitterness of cheap beer that someone had smuggled from the village.
At some point, the others drifted away. Benedict and Daphne first, then Anthony, then the younger ones chased off to bed. Eloise lingered, gave Penelope a look she could not decipher, and then she was gone too.
They were alone.
The fire had burned down to embers. Colin was looking at her in a way that made her breath catch. She did not know what her face was doing, only that she could not make herself look away.
"Pen," he said, and her name in his mouth sounded different. Softer. Like a question.
He leaned in. She could feel the warmth of him, could smell smoke and beer and something underneath that was just Colin. Her heart was pounding so hard she was certain he could hear it. This was it. This was the moment she had imagined a hundred times, a thousand times, in the quiet of her bedroom where no one could see her wanting.
His mouth was so close to hers. She could feel his breath.
And then he stopped. Pulled back. Cleared his throat. Looked away, toward the dying fire.
"It's late," he mumbled. "We should probably head in."
All she could do was nod, unable to trust her own voice. He stood, fumbled with reaching out for her, then thought better of it. She stood too, and they walked together back to the house in silence. At the stairs, he said goodnight the same way he said it to everyone. The same way he had said it every night that week, as if nothing had changed.
She went to her room. She did not cry until she was in the bathroom with the tap running so Eloise would not hear.
He left two days later. Off to Greece, or Portugal, or somewhere else she could not follow. He hugged her goodbye the way he hugged everyone, and she smiled and wished him safe travels and told herself it did not mean anything.)
I think about that last summer a lot, he had said.
And she had wondered, and still wonders, if he means the same summer she does. The bonfire, the almost. She wonders, and then she stops wondering, because the answer terrifies her either way.
They stroll together down the pavement, Colin guiding her and Penelope following. The pub is called The Fox and Fiddle, and it is exactly the kind of place Penelope would have expected Eloise to love. Warm and a little shabby, with mismatched furniture and candles stuffed into old wine bottles, the walls covered in framed prints and faded theatre posters. It smells like beer and woodsmoke and a fry-up from the kitchen.
Colin holds the door for her, and she steps inside.
She spots them immediately. Eloise is mid-sentence, gesturing with a glass of red wine, while Benedict laughs and Sophie shakes her head. They are tucked into a corner booth, empty glasses accumulating on the table between them.
Benedict sees her first. His face breaks into a grin so wide and genuine that it stuns her, and he is on his feet before she takes another step, shouting her name and pulling her into a hug that lifts her slightly off the ground.
"What are you doing here? I thought you'd be halfway to Paris by now."
"Flight got cancelled," she says into his shoulder. He smells like paint and beer. He smells exactly as she remembers. "I'm stuck until tomorrow. I was hungry and happened upon Colin’s restaurant."
Benedict releases her and holds her at arm's length, looking at her properly. "Well, that's the best news I've heard all week." He glances over her shoulder at Colin, then back at her."And you just happened to wander into Colin's restaurant?"
"It had good reviews," Penelope says, feeling her cheeks warm.
"Incredible reviews," Colin adds from behind her. "She's very discerning."
Benedict's grin sharpens, but he does not push. He just shakes his head and gestures toward the booth.
"Get in here. Sit. Drink."
Sophie is next, sliding out of the booth to embrace her. The hug is softer than Benedict's but no less warm.
"It's so good to see you," Sophie says, and she means it. Penelope can hear it in her voice, can feel it in the way Sophie squeezes her hands before letting go. "It's been too long."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Just sit down and tell us everything."
Eloise has not moved from her spot in the booth. She is watching Penelope with an expression that is difficult to read—one caught between amusement and curiosity, and the characteristic sharpness that Eloise reserves for moments when she is collecting information.
"So," Eloise says slowly. "Your flight gets cancelled, and instead of texting me back, you end up at my brother's restaurant."
Penelope bites the inside of her cheek. "I didn't know it was his restaurant, to be fair."
Eloise’s mouth presses into that familiar, thin line. "Didn't you?"
"El."
"I'm just saying. It's quite a coincidence."
"It is a coincidence," Penelope says firmly, sliding into the booth. Colin slides in beside her, close enough that his thigh presses against hers. She moves away. He shifts closer. "The universe has a sense of humor."
"The universe," Eloise deadpans, clearly unconvinced. She then clicks her teeth in that peculiar and displeased way of hers, but ultimately moves on, reaching across the table to squeeze Penelope's hand. "I'm glad you're here. Even if it took a mechanical failure to make it happen."
A glass of wine appears in front of Penelope. She does not remember anyone ordering it, but that is how it has always been with the Bridgertons. Things just appear. Space is made. She is absorbed into the fold without anyone making a production of it.
The conversation picks up around her, easy and overlapping. Benedict is telling a story about a commission gone wrong—a client who wanted a portrait of their cat in Renaissance armour—and Sophie keeps interjecting with corrections. Eloise argues with Colin about anything and everything, their voices rising and falling in the familiar rhythm of siblings who have been bickering their entire lives.
Penelope listens. She laughs. She drinks her wine and lets the noise wash over her.
Colin's arm stretches along the back of the booth behind her. His fingers brush her shoulder, light and absent, like he is not even aware he is doing it, before falling to his side. She is aware. She is aware of every point of contact between them.
But more than that, she is aware of how easy this is. How natural. She has spent the last decade building a life in Paris, and it is a good life. She has friends there, colleagues, a community of writers and artists who gather for dinner parties and gallery openings and long afternoons in cafés. She has people who care about her.
But it has never felt like this.
She has never been able to replicate this feeling—the sense of being absorbed, of belonging without having to earn it. Her friends in Paris are wonderful, but there is always a small part of her that is performing, that is aware of the impression she is making, that is working to deserve their affection. In the beginning, Penelope told herself this was necessary, that the distance was the only way to become who she needed to be. And maybe that was true, for a while. Maybe she needed to leave in order to grow.
But she did not need to stay gone. She did not need to keep these people at arm's length, rationing their presence in her life like it was finite.
She chose that.
"You alright?" Colin's voice is low, meant only for her.
She looks at him. His face is close to hers, his expression soft with concern.
"Yeah," she says. "All good."
She is not sure if it is true. But she wants it to be.
The night continues. More drinks arrive. Benedict tells another story, this one involving Anthony and a disastrous attempt at home improvement that ended with a flooded bathroom and a very angry Kate. Eloise recounts the latest drama at her job with the relish she reserves for workplace incompetence. Sophie talks about the gallery she has been working with, the show she is curating, and the artist whose work she cannot stop thinking about.
Penelope offers her own stories in return—her editor's increasingly creative deadline reminders, the pigeon that has taken up residence on her windowsill, the disaster of her last attempt at French bureaucracy. They laugh with her, not at her. They ask follow-up questions. They care.
At some point, she realises she has stopped keeping track of time. She does not know how long they have been here. She does not care. She catches Eloise watching them at one point, her expression thoughtful. But when their eyes meet, Eloise just raises her glass slightly, a small toast, and looks away.
Sophie is the first to break the spell. "We should head out," she says, stifling a yawn. "Early morning tomorrow. The gallery opens at nine."
Benedict nods, reaching for his jacket. "She's not wrong. And if I don't get at least five hours, I'm useless."
"You're useless anyway," Colin chides.
"Rude."
“But also true,” Eloise chimes in.
They shuffle out of the booth, gathering coats and bags. Penelope stands too, expecting the evening to be over, expecting to make her way back to her hotel and her empty room and her flight tomorrow.
But then Sophie pulls her into a hug with a soft whispered goodbye, then Benedict does the same. "Don't be a stranger," he says, and his voice is serious in a way that surprises her. "I mean it, Pen. Paris isn't that far."
"I know," she says quietly. "I won't."
"You've said that before."
"I mean it this time."
He searches her face for a moment, then nods. Whatever he finds there seems to satisfy him, or he realises she feels properly chastised, which was likely the point.
Eloise hugs Penelope tightly, holding on longer than usual. "I'm glad your flight got cancelled," she murmurs into Penelope's hair.
"Me too," Penelope says, and she is surprised to find she means it.
Eloise pulls back, her hands still on Penelope's shoulders. She looks at her for a long moment.
"Text me," she says finally. "Tomorrow. Or tonight, if—" She glances at Colin, then back at Penelope. "Just text me."
"I will."
And then they are gone, the three of them disappearing into the night, and Penelope is alone with Colin in a booth that suddenly feels much smaller. Colin has not moved away from her. His thigh is still pressed against hers. His arm is still stretched along the back of the booth.
"Another round?" he asks.
"Yes," she says without thinking.
He flags down the server and orders two more glasses of wine. The pub has thinned out around them, the music lower, the lighting dim. It feels like they are the only two people left in the world, and she allows herself a moment to simply watch him, to take it all in. There is an ease about him that surprises her because he always presented himself with it before, but even then, even when they were basically still children, she knew it was fake.
“You seem content, Colin,” she tells him. “It suits.”
"I suppose I am." He smiles, but it is smaller than before. "It took a while. Figuring out what I actually wanted, I mean. I spent a lot of years running."
"You were travelling."
"I was running," he corrects gently. "There's a difference. I just didn't figure that out until I stopped."
She nods. She understands this better than she wants to admit.
"The food, though. That always made sense to me," he continues. "Feeding people. Taking care of them." He turns his wine glass on the table, watching the liquid tilt. "I'm good at that part."
She nods again, knowing this to be true. She has always seen that about him, always seen him, and she very much enjoys knowing that he is able to see himself now, after all these years, and not be ashamed or afraid or run from what he sees. He goes quiet, and she does too, and the silence between them is comfortable, but there is also a tension underneath it now. A current running just below the surface. She watches and catalogues out of habit and sees the tick in his jaw, the war carrying out in his head.
Colin clears his throat. "Mum mentioned a while back that you were engaged."
Penelope's stomach tightens. "I was," she says carefully. "It didn't work out."
"What happened?"
She could deflect. She could give him the easy answer, the one she has given everyone else. It just wasn't right. We wanted different things. The polite lies that smooth over the truth.
But Colin is looking at her with such openness, such genuine curiosity, that she finds she cannot do it.
"I called it off," she says. "Three months before the wedding."
His eyebrows rise slightly, but he does not interrupt.
"He was a good person. Kind. Steady. He loved me, and I loved him, but—" She stops. Takes a breath. "I woke up one morning and realised I was settling. Not for someone bad, but for someone who wasn't..." She trails off, averts her gaze, painfully aware that the end of that sentence is too dangerous to speak aloud.
Still, Colin presses on: "Wasn't what?"
She looks at him. His face is very close to hers. She can see the flecks of gold in his eyes, the faint scar on his chin.
"I don't know," she mumbles, eyes trained on that scar for a beat too long, before meeting his once more.. "I just knew it wasn't enough."
Colin holds her gaze for a long moment. Then he nods slowly and looks down at his glass.
"I'm sorry," he says. "That must have been hard."
"It was,” she nods. “But it would have been harder to marry him."
"Yeah." He is quiet for a moment. "I think you were brave. To end it. Most people wouldn't."
"Most people would say I was stupid. Throwing away something good because of some feeling I couldn't even articulate."
Colin shakes his head. "Those people are wrong,” he says, and the certainty in his voice catches her off guard. She looks at him, and he is looking back at her with an intensity that makes her breath catch.
He smiles, but it falters at the edges. His thumb runs along the rim of his glass and she watches him, watches the movement, and waits, because she can feel that he is working toward something, can see it in the way his shoulders have drawn up slightly, the way his jaw keeps tightening and then releasing.
All these years, she still remembers everything about him.
"Pen."
"Yeah?"
He turns toward her then, fully, his knee bumping hers under the table, and he does not correct it. Leans forward a bit more as he opens his mouth, closes it, and then laughs at himself, a short exhale through his nose that carries no humour.
"I'm trying to—" He stops. Shakes his head. "I had this whole thing I was going to say."
Amusement curls her mouth. "A whole thing,” she repeats.
"A very eloquent, well-rehearsed thing. I've been composing it in my head all evening, actually. Since the restaurant. Maybe longer."
Penelope's heart starts beating so hard she can feel it in her fingertips. She wraps them around the stem of her glass to keep them still. Squares her shoulders. Straightens her spine.
"And now?"
His gaze drops from her eyes to her mouth, then flicks back up again. "And now you're sitting here, and I can't remember a single word of it."
He looks at her, and the expression on his face is one she has not seen before. His composure has come apart at the seams, and what is left underneath is raw and open and entirely without defence. He swallows, and she watches the movement in his throat.
"That summer," he starts, then stops again. His hand comes up to rub the back of his neck, and he stares at the table between them as he reaches for the right words, careful with her now in a way that he never used to be before. “Why didn’t you answer my text?”
The question lands softly, and Penelope feels her spine stiffen further, feels herself bracing, preparing.
"That was a long time ago," she half whispers.
"A year.”
"Right. A year." She hears herself and doesn't like it—the dismissiveness, the deflection. But she can't seem to stop. "We hadn't talked properly in ages before that. I didn't think—"
"You didn't think it mattered?"
The question is quiet, not accusatory, but rather genuinely curious, like he's trying to understand, and fuck, isn’t that what she always loved the most about him? How he would give his time and patience to anyone and everyone? How good he was? How understanding?
"I didn't think you'd notice," she says, finally, but the words come out all wrong. Colin's expression flickers—hurt, briefly, then carefully blank.
"Right," he says, drawing out the word in a way that reminds her of Eloise. "Because I'm Colin. I’m oblivious. I don’t take anything seriously."
"That's not what I—"
"—It's fine, Pen." He reaches for his drink, takes a sip, sets it down. His voice is pleasant now. Neutral. The voice he probably uses with difficult customers, she thinks, and the thought makes her stomach turn. "Forget I mentioned it. Again."
"No." The word comes out sharper than she intends. She puts her own glass down harder than necessary, and the wine sloshes against the sides. "You brought it up. You don't get to bring it up and then tell me to forget it."
"I'm giving you an out."
"I don't want an out." She can feel her pulse in her throat now, can feel the conversation spiralling somewhere she always meant to avoid, but seems unavoidable now with him before her and their past between them. "I want to know why you're bringing this up now, tonight, after—" She gestures vaguely at the restaurant, at the evening, at whatever this is. "Why does it matter, Colin?"
Her question is met with a silence that stretches, Colin staring at her as his jaw works, as he calculates and recalculates a decision, and she knows before he speaks that she is not going to like what comes next.
"Because I meant it," he says, voice low. "I meant what I said in that text. And you read it, and you said nothing, and I spent the past year wondering if I'd imagined the whole thing. Every conversation that felt like it meant something. Every moment I thought we had." He pauses. "I thought maybe I'd made it all up in my head."
The words hit her just below her ribs, and the deflection is there, right on the tip of her tongue, always ready and carefully parsed, but he is looking at her, and she is looking at him, and the lie feels wrong.
"You didn't make it up," she says quietly.
"Then why didn't you answer?"
There it is. The question she has been avoiding for a year. The question she avoided by letting the silence grow until it became insurmountable, by telling herself that too much time had passed, by convincing herself that not answering was the same as answering.
She could tell him she was busy. She could tell him she didn't see the message until it was too late. She could give him any number of excuses that would smooth this over, that would let them both pretend this conversation never happened.
She looks at him—at the careful way he's holding himself, at the tension in his shoulders, at how he's bracing for her to lie—and she finds she can't do it.
"Because I was terrified," she tells him honestly, and the admission scrapes against her throat on the way out. "Because you said you thought about that summer, and I have never stopped thinking about that summer, and I didn't know what to do with that, Colin, so I did nothing." She swallows. "And then it was too late. And then I convinced myself it was easier to just... let it go."
His mouth presses into a thin line. "Easier for who?"
"For me." The honesty tastes bitter. "It was easier for me."
Colin absorbs this. His expression doesn't change, but there is a shift behind his eyes as he continues, "You know what would have been easier for me? Anything. Any response at all. Even 'I don't feel the same way.' Even 'Please don't text me again.' That would have been something, Pen. That would have been an answer I could understand."
Contrition licks at her nerves. "I know."
"Instead, I got nothing,” he says, an edge to it she barely recognises. ”And I sat with that nothing for months, wondering what I'd done wrong, wondering if I'd misread everything, wondering if you just… thought I wasn't worth responding to."
The words settle into her, quiet and heavy, filling spaces she didn't know were hollow. There are explanations she could offer—that she was protecting herself, that the silence was never about his worth, that her fear wore his face but was always, always her own—but explanations are not the same as undoing. She knows what she did. She is only now learning what it cost, and hates that the cost was him.
"I'm sorry.” She says, even though the words feel inadequate. "I was a coward. I should have answered. I should have said something, anything, and I didn't, and that was—" She stops. Starts again. "That was cruel. Even if I didn't mean it to be."
Colin looks at her for a long moment. She searches his face for anything to hold onto—anger she could meet, softness she could lean into—and finds neither. His expression is still and strange and entirely his own, and she realises, with a lurch, that she does not know what he looks like when he is deciding whether to forgive someone. She has never had to learn.
"Yeah," he says finally, sighing a bit. "It really was, Pen."
It hurts. She wanted him to soften it, to tell her she's being too hard on herself, to smooth it over the way he smoothed over everything else tonight. The Colin she knew all those years would have. He would have rushed to fill the silence, would have made a joke or changed the subject or found some way to make them both comfortable again. This Colin does not. He just sits there, letting the truth of it settle between them, and she thinks that this is what growing up looks like: not learning new things about a person, but learning that the old things have shifted beneath you without permission.
"I don't know how to fix it—”
"I'm not asking you to fix it." He picks up his wine glass again, turning it slowly on the table. "I just wanted to understand. And now I do."
The silence stretches, uncomfortable and heavy with everything that has been said and everything that hasn't, with a year of silence and over a decade of wanting and the weight of finally being honest with someone you have spent your whole life lying to, even if the lies were only ever to yourself.
Penelope doesn't know what to say. She doesn't know how to bridge the distance that has opened up between them, doesn't know if it can be bridged, doesn't know if she has any right to try.
"For what it's worth," she says quietly, "I think about it too. That summer. I— I never stopped."
Colin's hand stills on the wine glass.
"The bonfire," she continues, because she has already said too much, and she might as well say all of it. "That night…I have replayed that night so many times, Colin. Wondering what would have happened if you hadn't pulled away. Wondering what would have happened if I'd been brave enough to just... ask for what I wanted."
He is looking at her the way he looked at her across the bonfire, all those years ago. Only now there is no pulling away in it. No retreat. He swallows. Leans forward, closer to her. "Why didn't you?" he asks.
"Because I was eighteen. And you were… you. And I didn't think—" She stops. Takes a breath. "I didn't think I was allowed to want things like that. People like you. I thought wanting was the same as asking for disappointment."
"People like me?”
"You know what I mean."
"I really don't."
She makes a frustrated sound. "Colin. You were—you are—" She gestures at him, at all of him, as if that explains anything. "And I was just Eloise's friend. The awkward one. The one who didn't know how to talk to people and hid in corners at parties and—"
"That's not how I saw you."
The words stop her cold.
"That's never been how I saw you," he says. "Not once. Not ever."
She doesn't know what to say to that. She has spent so long believing a particular story about herself, about them, about what was and wasn't possible. The idea that the story might have been wrong—that she might have been wrong—is too large to fit inside this moment. He is still leaning in, still so close she can smell his cologne and the hint of sweat from the evening, and when he exhales, the sound drags on with all he has carried for so long. His hand drops to the table, close to hers but not touching. His fingers spread against the wood.
"I wished I had kissed you," he says quietly, the words curling around a brief chuckle of disbelief.
Her gaze snaps to his face. His hand on the table, his fingers close enough to touch. At the stubble along his jaw and the way his hair falls across his forehead and the faint lines around his eyes that were not there when she was eighteen and in love with him and too young to understand what that meant.
She looks at him, and she is tired.
He has grey at his temples, flecks amongst the brown, and she hates that she does not know how long he has worn such a reminder of passing time.
"Then do it," she says thickly, her voice is steady and certain in a way that surprises them both. "Kiss me now."
For a moment, he does not move. He simply looks at her, his lips parted, and she can see him searching her face for permission he already has. She does not look away. Does not take it back. Holds his gaze. Holds the moment while he decides, and when he does, he reaches up and cups her face in his hands, and the first touch of skin against skin catches her aflame, makes her shiver. His palm is warm against her cheek, his thumb brushing the corner of her mouth. He leans in slowly, giving her every chance to change her mind.
She does not change her mind.
Her breath catches, and for a moment she doesn't know what to do with her hands, where to put them, how to hold the very thing she's wanted for so long without breaking it. She answers by leaning into him, her hand coming up to grip the front of his shirt, pulling him closer. The kiss deepens, his other hand sliding into her hair, tilting her head back, and she gasps against his mouth. He tastes like red wine and warmth and she thinks, distantly, that this is what has always been missing.
They break apart slowly, foreheads resting together. She can feel his breath against her lips, uneven and quick.
"Pen," he mumbles, barely above a whisper, and she can hear everything he could not say earlier pressed into those three letters.
She kisses him again. And again. Tongues tangling and moans swallowed, and her half in his lap in the corner of the booth without even noticing. They are asked to leave not long after. The server is polite about it, apologetic even, but the message is clear: the pub is closing, and they need to go. Colin laughs against her mouth and pulls back, his hand still warm on the side of her neck.
"We're being kicked out," he says.
She giggles and barely recognises the sound. "So it seems."
He settles the tab. She watches him fish for his wallet with clumsy hands, watches the bartender give him a look that is equal parts amused and knowing. Colin does not notice. Or if he does, he does not care. And, quite honestly, neither does she.
Outside, the air is cool and sharp after the warmth of the pub. Penelope feels it on her flushed skin, on her lips, still swollen from the pressure of his mouth. The street is quiet. A few cabs drift past. Somewhere nearby, music spills from an open window, faint and tinny. They begin to walk, perfectly in tandem. She does not ask where they are going and he does not offer an explanation. Their shoulders bump and their fingers brush between them, not quite holding hands, not quite not. Colin is quiet beside her, and she can feel the energy radiating off of him, restless and barely contained.
"I'm just around the corner," he says after a few minutes. "If you—"
"Okay," she says.
He glances at her. She meets his gaze and holds it. The streetlight catches the flecks of gold in his eyes and the flush still visible on his cheeks.
"Okay," he repeats, and the relief in his voice is so plain that it makes her chuckle.
His flat is near the restaurant, within walking distance. She had not expected that, though it makes sense once she sees it. A narrow staircase at the side of the building, a door with a sticky lock that he fights with for a moment before it gives. He holds it open for her, and she steps inside.
It is smaller than she imagined. One large room that serves as both living space and kitchen, separated by a long wooden counter. There are bookshelves crammed beyond capacity, paperbacks stacked horizontally on top of vertically shelved ones. A worn leather sofa. A record player on a low table, vinyl sleeves leaning against the wall beside it. The kitchen is the most organised part of the space, copper-bottom pans hanging from a rack above the stove, knives in a magnetic strip, a sourdough starter in a glass jar on the counter with masking tape that reads MARTHA in black marker.
Her eyes linger on the bookshelves, out of old habit. She recognises some of the spines; travel writing, mostly, but also poetry, and a few novels she recommended to Eloise years ago that must have migrated. She wonders if he knows they came from her. She wonders how many evenings he has spent on that sofa with one of those books, in this room she has never seen, living a life she chose not to be part of.
It smells like him. Like herbs and warm bread and the woody cologne she caught earlier at the restaurant.
"It's not much," Colin says from behind her.
She turns to face him. He hasn't moved from the door, and he looks so, so good.
"I leave tomorrow," she says.
"I know,” he nods. “Do you want to go?”
The words sit between them. She watches him watching her, his hand still on the handle, and she understands—he's giving her an out. One last chance to call this what it could so easily be: a strange and lovely coincidence, a single night, a door she can close behind her without looking back.
"I don't want to go," she tells him.
His exhale is unsteady. "I don’t want you to go either.”
She closes the distance between them in two strides, teeth clanging with his as she kisses him. And kisses him. She pulls apart briefly, just for a moment, because if she doesn’t break the tension, it will break her.
"You named your sourdough starter, Col.”
His laugh is immediate and warm and settles right between her thighs. "Martha is a valued member of the team."
She laughs too, and then his mouth is on hers again.
The kiss is different from the pub. It’s Harder, hungrier, his hands pulling her against him with an urgency that sends heat flooding through her belly and lower, lower, lower. She can feel all of him pressed against her, his chest, his hips, the hard line of him through his jeans, and her body responds before her brain can catch up, her hips grinding forward against his of their own accord. Her back meets the kitchen counter, and his hands tighten on her hips, lifting her onto it in one smooth motion. The surface is cold through the thin fabric of her dress, and she hisses, but then he steps between her knees, and she stops caring about anything other than the pressure of him exactly where she needs it.
"Hi," he says against her mouth, grinning.
"Hi."
"You're in my kitchen."
"I am in your kitchen."
She thinks, absurdly, of Martha the sourdough starter sitting three feet away in his glass jar, and has to bite her lip to keep from laughing. Colin notices. Of course, he notices.
Colin turns his head to look at the jar, then back at her, his expression mock-serious. "Martha is a professional. She would never."
His thumb strokes the bare skin above her knee where her dress has ridden up. The touch is light and deliberate, and the effect is immediate: arousal blooms low in her belly, warm and liquid, soaking through her before she can temper it. She presses her thighs together around his hips and watches his eyes darken at the movement. "I'm going to need you to stop talking about my sourdough starter while I'm trying to seduce you."
"You're trying to seduce me?"
"I'm trying." He kisses her jaw, her neck, the spot below her ear. "Mixed results so far."
She pulls him closer by his collar and kisses him properly, deep and slow, and the laugh she had been suppressing dissolves entirely when his hands find the zipper at the back of her dress. He pauses there, his fingers resting against the nape of her neck.
"Pen."
"Yeah."
"Tell me if you want me to stop."
She leans back far enough to look at him. His face is open, flushed, his pupils blown wide. He means it. He will stop if she asks, will pour her a glass of water and call her a cab and never make her feel an ounce of shame for it. She knows this about him. Has always known it.
"I don’t want you to stop," she breathes.
He exhales. His fingers close around the zipper, and he pulls it down slowly, so slowly she can feel every tooth give way, feel the fabric loosen and sag, feel the cool air reach her skin inch by inch. His knuckles trace the line of her spine as he goes, and she shivers so hard she has to grip the edge of the counter to steady herself. He eases the dress over her head and tosses it somewhere behind him without looking, and then his gaze drops to her body, to the black bra and the bare skin of her stomach, her chest rises and falls with each breath, and he goes completely still.
He stares. There is no other word for it. He stands between her parted knees and stares at her like she is the most remarkable thing he has ever seen, and under anyone else's gaze, she would shrink from it. Would cross her arms, make a joke, deflect.
She thinks about doing exactly that. The instinct is there, muscle memory from years of making herself smaller, but she does stand there and feels his attention fuel the arousal so deftly in her belly that it startles her.
"Jesus, Pen," he breathes.
"That good or that bad?"
"That I've been thinking about this for longer than I should probably admit."
She reaches for his shirt and pulls it over his head, and then it is her turn. He is broader than she expected, solid through the chest and shoulders, his arms defined from hours spent in the kitchen. There is a faded burn scar on the inside of his forearm, pink and puckered against his skin.
"Caramel," he says, watching her trace it with her thumb. "Last Christmas. Don't ask."
"I'm absolutely going to ask. Later."
"I was trying to make a croquembouche for Mum. It went badly."
She laughs, startled, and leans forward to press her mouth to the scar. She feels him go still under her lips. When she lifts her head, his expression has changed. The playfulness is gone. What is left is raw and intent and focused entirely on her.
He lifts her off the counter. Her legs wrap around his waist, and she can feel him hard against her through his jeans, the friction of it pressed right where she is aching and swollen and desperate. He carries her through the flat, kissing her as he walks, and she rolls her hips against him involuntarily with every step, chasing the pressure. He bumps into the doorframe with his shoulder.
His bedroom is dark. He sets her on the bed and reaches past her to turn on the lamp on the nightstand, flooding the room with warm, low light. She starts to move back on the mattress but his hand catches her hip.
"Stay there," he says. "Right there. On the edge."
His voice has dropped, lower and rougher than she has heard it all night. The sound of it sends a pulse of heat through her that makes her press her thighs together. Colin notices. His eyes track the movement, and the corner of his mouth lifts.
He kneels in front of her.
The sight of him on his knees, looking up at her, his hands sliding up the outside of her thighs, short-circuits her brain. She has imagined this. She has imagined this so many times, alone in her flat in Paris with her hand between her legs and his name caught behind her teeth. The reality is so much worse than the fantasy because the fantasy never included the way her thighs are shaking already, or the way she can feel herself soaking through her knickers, or the way his breath ghosts over her skin and makes her cunt clench around nothing. Worse, because she has no idea what to do with her hands or her face or the sound that wants to escape her throat.
He hooks his fingers under the waistband of her knickers and tugs. She lifts her hips to help, and he pulls them down her legs and drops them to the floor. His hands return to her thighs, his thumbs pressing into the soft skin of her inner legs, spreading her open, and the exposure of it, the cool air against wet, oversensitive skin, his eyes fixed between her legs with an expression close to reverence, makes her stomach flip. She is soaked. She knows he can see it, can probably feel it on the skin of her inner thighs where his thumbs are pressing, and the knowledge should embarrass her, but instead it sends another wave of heat rolling through her.
"God," he says quietly, basically to himself. "Look at you."
Penelope's face burns. Her hands grip the edge of the mattress, and Colin must feel the shift in tension, the distance she starts to put between them without even thinking. His hand slides up to her stomach, his palm warm and steady against her skin.
"Stay with me," he says.
She forces her fingers to unclench. Forces herself to stay exactly where she is. He bends his head and presses a kiss to the inside of her knee. Then higher. Then higher still, his mouth dragging hot and open against the tender skin of her inner thigh, his teeth grazing, his tongue tracing the crease where her thigh meets hip, and she can feel herself dripping now, can feel the ache pulsing in time with her heartbeat, her hips tilting toward his mouth without her permission because her body has stopped consulting her brain entirely.
When his mouth finally reaches her, the sound that comes out of her is graceless and loud, and she claps a hand over her own face in embarrassment.
Colin pulls back just far enough to speak. "Don't," he says. "I want to hear you."
"I sounded like a dying seal."
"You sounded like a woman who's enjoying herself." He grins up at her. "Which is frankly the highest compliment you could pay to my technique."
"Your ego is—" She loses the rest of the sentence because he has put his mouth back on her, and the world narrows to the point of contact, to the slow, deliberate stroke of his tongue.
Her brain stutters and stops, stops thinking about what she looks like or sounds like or whether she should be quieter. Her hips roll against his mouth, grinding into the pressure, and her hand finds the back of his head and holds him there. She can hear herself panting his name, and she does not care. Every nerve in her body has converged to where his mouth is on her, where his tongue is fucking her, and she is aware of nothing else.
Colin eats her out like he has all the time in the world. Like there is nowhere else he would rather be than on his knees in his bedroom with his face between her legs. Every time she gets close, he pulls back, presses a kiss to her thigh, lets her come down just enough before starting again.
His fingers join his mouth, two of them sliding inside her with a slow curl, and her whole body jerks land flails. He does it again, and again, relentless as he presses forward and up into a spot so precise it can only be instinct, and the sound she makes is wrecked and desperate and completely beyond her control. She can feel herself clenching around his fingers, can feel how wet she is by the ease of it, and the part of her that used to care about dignity has left her.
"Colin, fuck—"
He hums against her in response, and the vibration is what undoes her. The orgasm doesn't build so much as detonate and obliterate. Her thighs clamp around his head, and her back arches off the mattress, and she is making sounds she cannot temper or even swallow. Her hand fists in his hair and pulls, hard, and she feels his groan vibrate against her, and it extends the wave, drags it out, keeps her cresting until she is shaking apart under his mouth with his name falling out of her brokenly.
Still, he does not let up. His mouth stays on her, gentler now but relentless, working her through it until she is shaking and gasping and tugging at his hair to pull him away because it is too much.
He sits back on his heels and looks up at her. His mouth is wet, his eyes dark, and he is grinning with a smugness that makes her want to throw something at him.
"Good?" he asks.
"You know it was."
"I want to hear you say it."
"It was adequate, Colin. A solid B-plus effort. Your grandmother would be proud."
He laughs, bright and startled, his forehead dropping to her knee. "Don't bring my grandmother into this."
"You asked for feedback."
He stands, and she reaches for his belt, her fingers still unsteady. She fumbles with the buckle, then fumbles again, and Colin's hand closes over hers.
"Let me," he says, and there is an edge in his voice that makes her look up. His cheeks are flushed, his breathing uneven. He is nervous, she realises. He is nervous about her seeing him.
The realisation is so unexpected that it takes her a moment to process. Colin Bridgerton. Nervous. About being looked at by her. She sits back and watches as he undoes his belt, his jeans, steps out of them with the kind of awkward fumbling that happens when someone is trying to look casual and failing. His boxers follow, and she lets herself look.
He is hard and thick, and she can feel her pulse in her throat at the sight of him. But what she notices most is how he's holding himself—shoulders slightly hunched, jaw tight, like he's bracing for her reaction. Like he's waiting for her to find him lacking. She doesn't know how to tell him that she has imagined this exact moment more times than she can count.
So instead, she reaches for him. Wraps her hand around him and feels him pulse against her palm, hot and hard and heavy, and the sound he makes—a sharp hiss through clenched teeth, his hips jerking forward into her grip—sends a rush of wetness between her own thighs. She strokes him slowly and watches his face come apart, watches his jaw go slack, and his eyes fall shut, and the power of her being the one to do this to him is overwhelming.
"Pen," he grits out. "If you keep doing that, I'm not going to last."
"Is that a problem?"
"I have plans."
"Plans," she repeats, stroking him slowly, watching his face. His jaw has gone slack. His eyes are closed. His breathing has turned ragged. "What kind of plans?"
"Plans that involve—" He stops. Swallows. Opens his eyes. The look he gives her is dark and focused and makes her stomach clench. "Plans that involve being inside you when I come."
She should have a witty response to this. She does not have a witty response to this. She has no thoughts at all, actually, except yes and please and now.
"Okay," she says. "Yes. Do that."
He reaches behind her and unclasps her bra with one hand, pulls it off her shoulders and tosses it aside. His hands cup her breasts, and he bends to kiss the skin between them, his thumbs dragging across her nipples until she arches into his palms.
"Lie back," he says.
She does. He follows her onto the bed, his body covering hers, his weight settling between her legs. The contact of skin against skin, his chest pressed to hers, his hips against her hips, is so immediate and so complete that she has to close her eyes against the intensity of it.
He kisses her, and she can taste herself on his tongue. His cock presses against her, sliding through the wetness between her legs without entering, and the friction against her clit makes her moan into his mouth.
"Colin. Please."
"Please, what?"
"You know what."
"I want you to say it."
She opens her eyes. He is looking down at her with an expression she cannot quite read. Intent, yes. Wanting, yes. But underneath that, wonder. Like he cannot quite believe this is happening. Like he has been waiting for this for as long as she has.
"Please fuck me," she says, and the words feel foreign in her mouth, bold in a way she has never been.
She watches his expression fracture, and then he is moving, reaching between them and lines himself up and pushes inside her slowly, and she forgets how to breathe. The stretch of him is overwhelming, a slow, relentless pressure that fills her so completely she can feel her own pulse around him. Her mouth falls open. Her nails bite into his shoulders. He feeds himself into her inch by inch, and she can feel every one of them, can feel her body opening for him, adjusting, wanting more even as it borders on too much. When he is fully seated inside her, he stills. Neither of them moves. She can feel him everywhere, the weight of him above her, the heat of him inside her, the slight involuntary twitch of his cock that makes her clench around him and draws a broken sound from his throat. He presses his forehead to hers and breathes, and she can feel his arms trembling with the effort of holding himself still, of letting her body decide when it is ready.
"Jesus Christ," he breathes. "You feel incredible."
She rolls her hips against him in response, and his control slips. He starts to move. Slow at first, long, deep strokes that she feels in the base of her spine, in the backs of her knees, in places she did not know could ache. His hand grips her hip, tilting her up to meet him, and the shift in angle has him hitting a spot inside her that whites out her vision. She stops thinking. She stops cataloguing and observing and filing things away for later examination, and she just feels the drag of him inside her, the obscene sounds of their bodies meeting. His breathing has gone ragged against her neck.
"There," she gasps. "Right there, don't stop."
He does not stop, and he somehow shifts his weight to one arm, his hand sliding between them. His thumb finds her clit, and her whole body locks, a full-body clench that makes him swear against her neck. He circles her in tight, firm strokes timed perfectly to the snap of his hips, and the orgasm builds with a speed that frightens her. A deep, pulling heat that starts where they are joined and radiates outward through her thighs and belly and chest until her entire body is a single drawn wire waiting to break.
His pace quickens and his grip on her hip tightens hard enough to bruise, and she wants it, wants the reminder, wants to press her fingers to the marks tomorrow in her flat in Paris and know this was real.
"Fuck, Pen, you feel—" he starts, and doesn't finish, his voice cracking into a groan. "You have no idea how long I've—" He breaks off again. Buries his face in her neck.
She can feel his words dissolving, his composure shredding, and the knowledge that she is doing this to him—that she is the reason Colin Bridgerton cannot finish a sentence—is almost as devastating as the feeling of him inside her.
"I can feel you getting close.” His words ghost against her neck. "Come on, Pen. I want to feel you."
She does not think she has a choice. The wire snaps. The orgasm tears through her, deeper and more violent than the first, and she comes with a cry she cannot contain, her back bowing off the mattress, her nails raking down his shoulders hard enough to draw blood. She can feel herself pulsing around him, can feel every aftershock clenching and releasing, and the sensation is so intense her vision goes dark at the edges.
"Fuck, Pen, I'm—"
"Yes," she pants. "Come inside me."
Colin buries his face in her neck and comes with a sound that she feels in her chest. It is broken and wounded. She can feel him spilling inside her, the hot pulse of it, and she wraps her legs tighter around him and holds him there, holds him through every shudder, because she has waited half her life for this and she is not letting go of a single second of it.
They stay like that for a long time. His weight on top of her, heavy and warm. His face pressed to her neck, his breath hot and slowing against her skin. She runs her fingers through his damp hair and stares at the ceiling and thinks: so this is what was missing.
This undeniable intimacy of being known, of having someone look at you and see not the version you perform for the world but the version you hide from it. An hour ago, she told him she was a coward. She admitted she had been cruel. She showed him the worst of herself, the parts she has spent a decade running from, and he had kissed her anyway.
He had seen all of it. And he had wanted her anyway.
When he finally lifts his head, his expression is stunned.
"Hi," he says.
She laughs softly. "Hi."
He kisses her, slow and tender. Then he pulls out of her carefully and rolls onto his back beside her, one arm slung over his face.
"Give me ten minutes," he says.
"For what?"
He lifts his arm and looks at her sideways. The grin is lazy and satisfied.
"To do that again."
Penelope stares at the ceiling of his bedroom and breathes, tension ebbing from her in waves. Between them, Colin’s hand finds hers. Their fingers lace together on the rumpled sheets.
She does not think about Paris. Does not think about her flight or her flat or the life waiting on the other side of the Channel. For once, she is exactly where she is, and it is enough.
He keeps his promise. It takes less than ten minutes.
The second time is slower. He pulls her on top of him and lets her set the pace, his hands loose on her hips, his eyes never leaving her face. She braces her palms on his chest and rolls her hips in a rhythm that makes them both groan. The angle is deeper like this, the friction sharper, and she watches his face as she moves, watches his jaw clench and his eyes go half-lidded, and his fingers tighten on her skin. There is nowhere to hide like this. No way to bury her face in his neck or close her eyes against the intensity of it. He is looking at her, and she is looking at him, and for the first time in her life, she does not want to look away.
"You're so fucking beautiful," he says, and his voice cracks on the last word.
She leans down and kisses him to keep from having to respond, because the way he is looking at her is too much, too open, and she is not ready to name what it does to her.
His hand slides between them, and his thumb finds her clit again. She gasps against his mouth and grinds down harder, chasing the sensation, and when she comes this time, it is quieter, a slow rolling wave that builds and crests and leaves her trembling in his arms. He follows soon after, his hands gripping her thighs, her name falling out of his mouth like a prayer.
After, she collapses against his chest, and he wraps his arms around her and pulls the duvet over them both. His hand traces idle patterns on her back, circles and lines and shapes she cannot identify.
"Stay," he murmurs into her hair.
"I'm not going anywhere," she says, and means it in the smallest possible way. Tonight. She means tonight.
They sleep.
She wakes once in the dark to find him curled around her, his arm heavy across her waist, his breath warm and even against the back of her neck. Through the window, she can see the orange glow of the streetlights and hear the distant sound of a siren fading. The flat is quiet. Martha the sourdough starter sits on the counter in the other room, alive and rising in the dark.
She closes her eyes and sleeps again, and when she opens them once more, morning light streams through the thin curtains. It is pale and grey and unmistakably London. She is surprised at how much she enjoys the familiarity.
Penelope wakes alone in bed. The sheets beside her are still warm. She can hear sounds from the kitchen. A kettle. The clink of mugs. The low hum of someone who thinks they are being quiet and is not. She smiles and lies there for a long moment, cataloguing the evidence of the night. The pleasant ache in her thighs. The tenderness between her legs. The faint bruise on her collarbone that she discovers when she presses her fingers to the spot where his mouth spent considerable time. Her dress is somewhere in the kitchen. Her bra is hanging from the bedroom doorknob.
She finds his shirt on the floor and pulls it on. It is too big, soft cotton that smells like him, and it falls to the middle of her thighs.
Colin is at the stove when she pads barefoot into the kitchen. He is wearing pyjama bottoms and nothing else, his hair a disaster, a wooden spoon in his hand. He turns when he hears her, and the smile that spreads across his face is slow and wide and entirely unselfconscious.
"Morning," he says. His eyes track down her body and back up again. "That's my shirt."
"It was on the floor. I assumed it was up for grabs."
"I'm not complaining." He gestures with the spoon. "Eggs?"
"Please."
She hoists herself onto the counter and accepts the mug of coffee he slides toward her. It is good coffee, strong and dark, and she wraps both hands around it and watches him cook.
The kitchen is bright with morning. Outside the window, London is waking up—delivery trucks, a dog barking, someone shouting in the street below. Inside, Colin cracks eggs one-handed and tears basil from a plant on the windowsill, and neither of them mentions the night before. Neither of them mentions the pub, or the things they said, or what any of it means.
It sits between them anyway. She can feel it in the careful way he moves around her, in the half-second pause before he speaks, in the way his eyes keep finding hers and then sliding away. They have crossed a line. They both know it. And neither of them knows what to do with that knowledge in the unforgiving light of morning.
"You don't have to go to all this trouble," she says, because silence is harder than words.
"It's eggs and toast, Pen. If I can't manage that, I should probably close the restaurant."
"Fair point."
He moves around the kitchen the way he moves around the restaurant, with an ease and economy that comes from doing the same thing a thousand times. He pulls a loaf of bread from the breadbin and slices it thick, laying the pieces in a hot pan with butter. The smell fills the small space—bread and butter and herbs—and she thinks about how strange it is to be here. In his kitchen. In his shirt. Watching him make her breakfast like it's the most natural thing in the world.
Like this is a life she could have. If she were brave enough to take it.
He plates the food and sets it on the counter beside her, then leans against the opposite side with his own plate. They eat facing each other across the narrow kitchen, their bare feet nearly touching on the tile floor.
The eggs are perfect. She tells him so and he shrugs like it is nothing, but his cheeks colour slightly and she files this away with all the other things she has learned about him in the last twelve hours. That he blushes when his food is praised. That he sleeps on his left side. That the sounds he makes when he comes are low and broken and startlingly vulnerable.
"What time is your flight?" he asks.
The question lands between them, heavier than it should be.
"Six," she says.
He nods. Takes a sip of coffee. His expression does not change, but she can see the effort it takes to keep it steady.
"That's not for a while," he says.
"No. It's not."
"So there's no rush."
"No rush," she smiles.
The relief that crosses his face is brief, but she catches it. He hides it behind his coffee mug, and she lets him, because she understands the abject fear of being left by someone you have just let close enough to hurt you.
They eat. They drink their coffee. He tells her about Martha’s temperamental feeding schedule, and she tells him about the pigeon that has colonised her windowsill in Paris, which she has named François despite not knowing its gender. He laughs at that, a full laugh that fills the small kitchen.
"François," he repeats, shaking his head.
"He has a very French energy. Judgmental. Unimpressed."
"Sounds like my neighbour. Camille."
"Camille and François would likely get along, actually."
Colin grins and reaches across the counter to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. His fingers linger on her jaw for a moment. The touch is so gentle and so easy that it hurts.
She watches his face shift. Watches him open his mouth, close it, open it again. His thumb traces her cheekbone.
"Pen—"
"Don't." The word comes out soft. "Not yet. I can't—"
She doesn't finish the sentence. She doesn't know how to explain that she needs time, that she needs distance, that if he says something real right now she will either shatter or stay and she's not sure which terrifies her more. That she has spent her whole life running from exactly this kind of moment, and she doesn't know how to stop.
But Colin nods. His hand drops from her face, and he doesn't push, doesn't press, doesn't make her explain.
"Okay," he says quietly. "Okay."
The morning stretches. He showers while she answers emails on her phone, sitting cross-legged on his sofa in his shirt, her hair piled on top of her head. She stares at the same email for ten minutes without reading it. Her mind is somewhere else—in the pub, in his bed, in the way he'd said her name like it meant something. In the question he'd tried to ask and the way she'd stopped him.
She doesn't know what she would have said if he'd finished. She doesn't know what she wants him to say. She only knows that she's not ready to hear it—not here, not now, not when she's about to get on a plane and fly back to a life that suddenly feels very far away.
When he emerges, dressed and damp-haired, he finds her dress and hands it to her, neatly folded.
"I ironed it," he says. "Well, I steamed it. Over the kettle. Same principle."
"You steamed my dress."
"It was wrinkled."
She takes the dress and goes to change in the bathroom. When she catches sight of herself in the mirror, she looks different. She finds she quite likes it.
He calls her a car. She knows he does it because he does not want to say goodbye on the street, leaving the moment to be diluted by traffic and strangers. She knows because she would do the same.
They stand in his kitchen, the same kitchen where twelve hours ago he lifted her onto the counter and kissed her until she couldn't think. The morning light is brighter now, coming in fully through the windows. He is leaning against the counter with his arms crossed, and she is standing near the door with her bag over her shoulder, and the distance between them is very small and very large at the same time.
"So," he says.
"So."
He uncrosses his arms. Runs a hand through his still-damp hair.
"When are you back?" he asks, and the question is careful, deliberately light, as if the answer does not matter to him enormously.
"I don't know," she says, and it is the truth. "I don't have any plans to come back."
He nods. He takes this in and nods and his jaw tightens for just a moment before he smooths it away.
"Okay," he says. "Well. You know where I am."
It is so restrained, so careful, so unlike the man who kissed her with such urgency just hours ago. She can see what it costs him, the effort of keeping his voice even, of not asking for more than she is ready to give. He is giving her the space she asked for. He is letting her go without making her feel guilty for leaving.
She crosses the distance between them and kisses him. It is brief and firm, and she pours everything she cannot say into it—I'm sorry and thank you, and I don't know what this is, but I don't want it to end. His hands come up to frame her face, and he holds her there for a moment after she pulls back, his thumbs brushing her cheekbones.
"Thank you," she says. "For dinner. And the arancini. And everything else."
He smiles. It is a real smile, if a little sad at the edges.
"Anytime, Pen."
The car arrives. She hears it on the street below, and he walks her to the door, carries her bag down the narrow stairs, opens the car door for her. She gets in. He closes it. Through the window, she sees him lift a hand. She lifts hers back.
The flight is uneventful. She sleeps through most of it, her head against the window, and when she lands at Charles de Gaulle the evening sun is low and golden over the tarmac.
Her flat is exactly as she left it. The moka pot on the stove. The manuscript pages stacked on her desk. The guitar player is at it again in the courtyard below, working through what sounds like a very ambitious attempt at Fleetwood Mac.
She unpacks. She showers. She makes coffee even though it is too late for coffee and Sylvie would be appalled. She sits on her sofa with the mug in her hands and listens to the sounds of her life in Paris reassembling around her.
It is a good life. It is a real life. She built it with her own hands, and it belongs to her and her alone.
But as she sits there, in the flat she chose, in the city she loves, she finds herself thinking not about what she has here but about what she left behind this morning. A flat above a restaurant in Soho. A man who named his sourdough starter Martha and steamed her dress over a kettle and looked at her like she was the answer to a question he had been carrying around for a decade.
She thinks about Benedict saying don't be a stranger and meaning it. About Eloise raising her glass in a small, silent toast. About how the Bridgertons made space for her without being asked, as if the space had always been there, waiting.
She picks up her phone.
For a long moment, she just looks at it. The screen is dark, and her reflection stares back, faintly visible in the glass. She thinks about the last time she held her phone like this, staring at a message she was too afraid to answer. The silence that grew and grew until it became the thing itself, until crossing it felt impossible.
She is not eighteen anymore. She is not the girl who cried in the bathroom with the tap running. She is a woman who built a life in a foreign city and wrote a book and called off a wedding and, last night, told a man she has loved for half her life to kiss her.
She can do this. This is the easy part.
She opens a new message. Types his name.
I think I need to come back to London soon. There's an arancini I can't stop thinking about.
She stares at it. Adds a line.
And I'd like to meet Martha properly.
She hits send before she can talk herself out of it.
Her phone sits silent on the cushion beside her. The guitar player in the courtyard switches to a slower melody. Outside her window, the Paris evening deepens, the sky turning a shade of violet that she has never been able to adequately describe in any of her books.
Her phone buzzes.
Colin's reply is immediate.
Martha would be honoured. She’s very particular about who she meets, but I've told her a lot about you.
Then, a moment later:
The arancini will be waiting.
Then:
So will I.
Penelope stares at the screen and feels the smile spread across her face, slow and wide and impossible to contain. She presses the phone to her chest and breathes.
The guitar player in the courtyard finishes his song. In the silence that follows, just for a moment, she can hear her own heartbeat.
She starts typing.