Chapter Text
"You're an ass, you know that? I saw you leering at the waitress. You were checking out her tits. Don't lie."
Penelope freezes with the door to her flat half opened and her keys dangling in the lock. She was expecting to come home to the place being empty. Marina and Colin were supposed to be out on a date. It's not even 9:00, though.
"Jesus Christ, you're mental. I swear to God that I wasn't checking out anyone's tits! I honestly don't know where you're getting this."
Penelope closes her eyes and sighs. What must she have done in a past life to warrant this sort of torment? Surely, it can't be anything from this lifetime. She's always following the rules, making smart, safe choices, and acting with others' feelings and needs in mind. It's part of how she's ended up in this torturous set of circumstances with her cousin, who she barely knew before this summer, suddenly appearing in London and also suddenly sweeping Colin (Penelope's longtime friend, equally longtime crush, and temporary flatmate) off his feet and into a whirlwind romance. Although, judging by the conversation playing out in the other room, this romance isn't sounding particularly romantic at the moment.
Marina snaps at him again, spewing something about how it's nothing new—that he's always checking out girl with big boobs in front of her.
"It's like you're shoving it in my face that I'm flat as a pancake, and it's so bloody mean!"
Colin groans into what sounds like his hands. "Marina, you know I think you're gorgeous and I promise you—I absolutely promise you—that I'm never checking out other girls. You have to stop it with this shit."
This isn't the first time in their short relationship that Marina has accused Colin's eyes of straying or being dissatisfied with her in some physical sense. She overheard a similar argument play out last week, and Colin also brought it up the other night when Penelope and he were home alone just the two of them. She doesn't like make a habit of talking to either of them about the other in the relationship, but she went along with it that night. He'd been genuinely upset over Marina's accusations. In part, it was because he adamantly professed them to be blatantly untrue. However, there was also the matter of him feeling so guilty that he might have done something (even if he couldn't understand what it was) to hurt her feelings and make her feel badly.
"It's not on you, Colin," Penelope told him kindly from the other end of the sofa. "It's her own self-consciousness coming into play. They're her own issues, and it's not anything you're doing, I'm sure."
He frowned at that and shook his head once. "I guess. I dunno. She just doesn't seem very self-conscious in any other regard. She's always given me the impression that she's rather confident in fact."
It was a very good point actually and left Penelope a little stumped. Marina, though she admittedly is still getting to properly know and understand the young woman, typically carries herself with an ease that only comes from someone who is very much at peace with who they are and what they look like. As she should be too, Penelope thinks. Marina is objectively pretty and fit. Maybe she's not the most well-endowed in the chest region, no, but there is plenty to admire about her physically. She's fairly certain that's exactly what drew Colin to her in the first place. As a fellow fit, pretty person himself, they made sense together and fell into what seemed at first to be a relatively carefree, fun romantic entanglement.
In the days that followed that conversation with Colin, though, Penelope couldn't help but think about the contradiction he pointed out about Marina's behavior and this sudden swing towards acting so insecure about other women. It nestled into her brain as something important, as something that didn't quite sit right but for a reason. It felt like a piece was missing from the puzzle.
Penelope's always been good at parsing out complicated interpersonal dynamics and untangling secrets. She's been a wallflower, an observer of romantic relationships and drama more than she's participated in them, but it's led her to develop pretty solid instincts when it comes to matters like this one. She does come up eventually with a possible explanation, and unfortunately, Colin wouldn't much like it if she ever told him about it.
Penelope suspects that, although Marina is the one lobbing accusations of thoughts or glances of an adulterous nature, it's actually her cousin who is the one straying in that relationship. She's not poking at Colin for looking at other women and harboring desires for something more because it's a pattern she's actually observed. Rather, Marina may be cheating on Colin and either trying to deflect and portray their dynamic as somehow the opposite or somehow trying to convince herself that he's as bad as she is and rationalize the behavior.
"I'm not doing this tonight," Marina says haughtily and interrupting Penelope's doorway musings. "If you're going to gaslight me—"
"I'm not gaslighting you! It's not—"
"Oh my god!" she shouts in exasperation. "You know what? I'm not doing this tonight. I'm leaving."
Penelope barely has a chance to process what Marina's just said before she hears her stomping down the hallway. She takes her keys out of the door but doesn't have a chance to close it by the time Marina is in the living room looking directly at her.
Shaking her head once and grabbing her purse from where she'd left it on the counter, she passes by Penelope in the doorway. "He's being a prick tonight, so I have to go. You and I are overdue for some cousin time, though, aren't we? Maybe later this week?"
Penelope nods once. "Yeah, maybe. I picked up a few extra shifts at the cafe, though."
"Well, maybe I'll pop in when it's slow for a free coffee and a chat." Marina gives her a wink before she pats her on the shoulder and disappears into the hall heading out of the building entirely.
Penelope sighs to herself as she lets the front door to their flat finally shut behind her. She sincerely hopes Marina doesn't pop by the cafe like that. She likes to take advantage of the off times to get a bit of her course reading done. Plus, she doesn't particularly enjoy whipping up free drinks either. Her manager is pretty laid back about a free cup of tea or coffee for a friend here or there, but Marina usually goes for the complicated ones with whipped cream and toppings and syrups. Penelope just ends up quietly paying for it from her own pocket once she leaves.
Putting the potential cafe visit looming in the future out of her mind, she makes quick and quiet work of toeing off her trainers by the door and hanging up her coat. Colin's apparently just keeping to his room, which is fine by her. She doesn't want to acknowledge the argument she just overheard him have with her cousin. She walks down the hallway quietly with the intention of heading straight into her room and to give her flatmate some privacy. Her feet freeze once she reaches his wide-open doorway, however, and at the state she finds him in.
Colin's leaning against the dresser by his tall window wedged open a few inches, his head tipped back, eyes closed, and clearly upset. In fact, he's got a cigarette balanced between his fingers that looks as if he'd just lit it, which sends a tinge of disappointment coursing through her and only intensifies the resentment she's feeling towards her cousin. He quit smoking a several months ago after picking up the habit at uni. After he moved in to El's old room in her flat, he spent weeks and weeks chewing Nicorette gum like a madman, biting his fingernails to bits, and being irritable as all hell. But he did successfully kick it eventually. And once he did and she told him she was proud of him, his face spread into this shy, yet exceedingly pleased kind of smile that she'd never seen from him before and that is now consequently burned into her brain.
Colin lifts his hand with the cigarette to his lips at the same that his eyes open, his head turns, and he first notices Penelope standing there watching him.
"Fuck," he mutters before looking away from her and to the window. "I'm sorry."
She isn't sure what he's apologizing for really—for smoking or fighting with Marina or maybe both. Regardless, it breaks a little part of her to see him looking so dejected and sad. There's a light missing from him, a weight pulling him down and making him seem smaller. It's not fair, though. He's so inherently good. He doesn't deserve to feel like this. He doesn't deserve to be treated like this. He deserves—
Penelope can't help but blink in surprise even at just the meandering path of her own thoughts, at the idea that just popped into her head about what exactly she thinks Colin Bridgerton deserves at this moment and what exactly she'd like to do to make him feel better. It's ridiculous, right? She shouldn't… She couldn't… But what if she did?
Colin takes another puff of his cigarette and glances over to her. "I know you hate it. Just this once, okay? I won't do it in here again."
He's not wrong. She does hate smoking. It reminds her too much of her emotionally distant father—of how that once constant and familiar scent of tobacco over time steadily faded from the furniture and the rugs and the drapes until he was away so long that she couldn't smell smoke anywhere in their family home at all. She isn't thinking about Archie or cigarettes right now, though. She's thinking about breaking the rules. She's thinking about acting without worrying over all the consequences for once in her bloody life. She's thinking about being bad, about doing something bad, just so that she can feel good.
Once she finally stops thinking altogether, Penelope drops her tote in the hallway, and it hits the floor with a dull thud. She watches Colin's brow furrow as he looks down at the bag and back up at her face while she crosses the room.
Some of Penelope's friends, Edwina chief amongst them, are very into astrology and horoscopes and whatnot, but she's never been particularly interested nor particularly open-minded about it either. That's mainly because, though, in one of her earliest times learning about the qualities of her star sign, Phillipa read from a magazine and listed off several traits that she very much does not embody in the slightest. By far the most ridiculous amongst them, however, was the tendency to be impulsive and impatient.
"Yeah, I don't know about that," Prudence had said after letting out a bark of laughter and leaning over Phillipa's shoulder to read. "We might have to ask Mum if you were born early or something. You seem more like a Taurus to me—dependable, practical, etc... I'm pretty sure you've never done a spontaneous thing in your life."
"Pen?" Colin asks in the here and now, once she's standing in front of him and with his eyebrows raised. "You OK?"
She doesn't answer him, instead reaching towards him and carefully plucking the cigarette from between his fingers and dropping it into the half full glass of water behind her on his desk.
Tonight, years and years after that conversation with Prudence, Penelope is finally proving her sister wrong. She's embodying that Aries characteristic that's potentially been lying dormant within her all her life. She's finally just fucking going for it.
"What are you—"
Colin cuts himself off with an inhale at the exact moment Penelope sinks down to the floor on her knees. The wood is hard beneath them, but she doesn't care. She can endure a little discomfort for this, for the opportunity to give Colin a little pleasure that he so desperately deserves, for the opportunity to selfishly claim a little piece of him for herself.
Penelope doesn't pause to explain herself or otherwise seek permission. If he wants to stop her, he can, but she's not slowing down or second guessing herself until he does so. Now that she's here on her knees for him, there's no stopping for Penelope Featherington. She's going to see this through so help her God.
She makes quick, efficient work of his belt and the button and zipper of his jeans. Only once she takes ahold of the waistband of his white boxer shorts does she chance a glance up at his face.
His eyes are blown wide and his lips are parted in abject shock, an expression that oddly sends a thrill coursing through her. Charming, cool, comfortable Colin Bridgerton never looks like this. He never looks so thoroughly gobsmacked, and she certainly never thought he'd ever look like this in response to her.
Penelope redirects her attention to his lower half, her fingers hooking deftly into his waistband and shimmying down his underwear until they're low enough for his cock and his balls to be in her eyeline. She has the tiniest, most temporary moment of self doubt then at the sight of him exposed like this. He's soft, and yet somehow he's still longer and thicker than what she was prepared for, than what her measly two former sexual partners had prepared her for to be certain.
"F-fucking hell," she hears Colin mutter above her. "Pen, what are you—"
She realizes gave him the chance to probably gather his thoughts a bit in that moment of pause while she ogled his manhood and worried about her abilities to follow through on everything she's started. She doesn't want him gathered, though. She wants him to go back to being so thoroughly stunned at the events playing out before him.
So, Penelope takes ahold of his flaccid cock with her right hand. She does it gently and while her eyes flick upwards to gaze into his own, and to her extreme satisfaction, she finds him twitching and filling out in response already.
"I…" Colin trails off, a hand running through his hair. "I don't know what's happening right now."
She keeps looking at his face, at his handsome, handsome face that's twisted into a rather complicated expression right now. The good thing for Penelope, though, is that she's spent so much of her life looking at this face of his and cataloguing all of the different expressions it can shift into and what they mean. She can piece this one together easily and instantaneously despite some of the contradicting emotions at play. She knows with a certainty that this particular expression is a mixture of confusion and sustained shock, yes, but there's also a steady underpinning of arousal, of something intrigued, something interested, and maybe even something a little bit eager too.
Penelope strokes him languidly and lets her tongue sneak between her lips to wet them ever so lightly. The move draws a quiet gasp from him, or maybe he makes the sound because of the way she's handling him and quickly inspiring his rather impressive erection. Either way, she feels a tingle in the base of her spine at having played any part in eliciting of a response like that from him.
"Just relax," she tells him channeling a strange, confident version of herself she's not very familiar with. "Lean back and relax, okay?"
Colin gulps and gapes at her a moment longer before he nods once and almost clumsily. "Uh… Okay."
When she repositions herself a bit on her knees and leans forward to press a kiss to his tip, Penelope wonders if actually she should be embarrassed instead of feeling as self-assured as she does. It's embarrassing to kneel like this for him and be so eager to touch him and make him feel good, isn't it? It's embarrassing to want him as badly as she does and for as long as she's wanted him and for him to still be so completely shocked that she's here and doing this right now.
Penelope again decides she doesn't care, though. At least, not right now. Not with Colin's cock cradled in the palm of her hand and with her lips pressing against him experimentally. Not with the faint rumble of a moan he just let out. Not with the feeling of a drop of something wet and salty gushing from him slightly and smearing against her upper lip.
She proceeds to give Colin Bridgerton a proper blow job then. Emboldened by the fact that he's terrifically hard and leaking precum, she leans in and goes for it. She works him efficiently and without hesitation, her lips dragging up and down his length, her cheeks hollowing, and her hand pumping him from the base and the part of him she can't fit in her mouth.
"H-holy shit," Penelope hears him mutter after she finds her rhythm. "What the… Oh fuck…"
She delights in the way he sounds so completely gone, but she can't bring herself to look up at his face yet. She's got her eyes closed and is focusing on keeping all of this as neat and tidy and as perfect as she can manage. She's never been exceptionally confident in her skills when it comes to oral sex and really doesn't have all that much experience in this arena either. It's more important than ever, though, that she gets it right—that she makes this good for him and at the standard of the many, many other blow jobs he's surely received in his life.
When she pulls back at one point and tongues at his tip while her hand strokes the majority of his spit-slick length, Colin lets out the loudest groan of all so far. It's almost more of a yelp or a shout even, which does in fact prompt her to open her eyes and check that the noise was a good one and that his face isn't twisted in a pained grimace or in disgust potentially.
Penelope finds that Colin is in fact grimacing when her eyes flick upwards and she surveys him, but there's nothing disgusted there. He's grimacing because it's good, because he likes it, because the head of his cock is sensitive and the way she caressed and pressed against him with her tongue was making him crazy.
"So good," he croaks, his chin dipping in some semblance of a nod. "So good, Pen…"
She fights the urge to moan right back at him, his praise settling somewhere low in her belly and maybe even between her legs too. She's pretty certain that when she eventually removes her knickers later that she's going to find them soaked through.
Penelope continues spending most of her time and attention on his sensitive tip and jerking him off with her hand otherwise. She's practically snogging with his cock, she realizes, which isn't exactly her usual approach to giving head, but Colin seems to really like it at least. She hears his hand smack back against the bookshelf he's leaning against, the contents rattling around a bit in response but thankfully remaining in place.
In no time at all really, Penelope finds everything hurdling to its inevitable conclusion. Colin starts breathing heavy and letting out a series of these insanely alluring little grunts and groans. The real tell that he's nearing his climax, however, is much more direct.
"Oh fuck," he rasps, his eyes heavily lidded and his lips permanently parted by now. "I'm gonna… Oh, I'm gonna come… Where… Tell me… where…"
Penelope shifts on her knees and readies herself for the finish then. She doesn't pull her mouth away from him to answer him aloud. Instead, she makes sure he's looking right at her when she points to her lips at the same time that she gives him a solid suck.
Colin groans and then again a few seconds later when he does in fact come. He comes between her lips and against the cradle of her tongue—spurt after spurt of his salty, pearly essence spilling and pooling in her mouth. She keeps her lips loose while he's working himself through it, and she can tell by the way his eyes are laser-focused on her that he's watching it happen.
As soon as she's satisfied that he's really finished, Penelope tightens her lips around him the tiniest bit and gives him one last gentle suck. He dribbles just the tiniest bit more for her, which is exactly what she was hoping for. He lets out a whimpery sound too that would maybe be a little pathetic if any other guy on the planet made it or if she heard it from him in any other context. Colin whimpering like this and in this moment, though, is probably the sexiest thing she's ever heard in her life, and it's certainly got her pussy throbbing.
As the figurative dust settles, Penelope realizes she hadn't thought much about what was going to happen after the blow job was done. She'd been all gung ho at the start to just go for it and do what she wanted without consideration or thought of consequence for once. All she can really focus on in her arousal-addled mind now, though, is a desperation to avoid the awkwardness. She doesn't want to talk about it. She doesn't want to be asked any questions. She doesn't want any further interaction really. She just wants to get the hell out of there and barricade herself in her room.
So, that's exactly what Penelope does. She glances very quickly up at Colin, whose eyes are barely open but still looking down at her totally and completely dazed and dumbfounded over what just transpired. She quickly averts hers and redirects her attention to his softening yet still glistening length still right in front of her face.
Penelope makes quick work of tucking him back inside his boxers. She doesn't bother with his fly or his belt considering he's probably going to take them off to get into bed soon anyway, but she does goes ahead and pull up his jeans so they're sitting right on his hips. It's a bit strange dressing him and putting him back together like this, but she's still in acting without fully thinking mode and her hands are moving seemingly of their own volition.
She rises to her feet once Colin's more or less sorted, successfully hiding the wince she feels like making in response to her knees feeling sore and stiff from kneeling on the hardwood floor all that time.
"I…"
Penelope hears him trail off yet again, for what must be the tenth time so far tonight, but she never gives him much of a chance to find the words and finish the sentence. She's already across the room and back in his open doorway.
"Night, Colin," she offers softly and with a little smile as she bends down to pick up her tote bag and sling it over her shoulder. "Sweet dreams."
And just like that, with him still blinking and staring at her from across the room, Penelope turns down the hall and leaves him. Alone and in the quiet comfort of her cozy room, she lets out a rattling exhale with her back against the door.
Holy shit, Featherington? What did you just do?
Was that real? Did she honestly just get on her knees and perform oral sex on Colin Bridgerton completely unprompted? Did she just have his cock in her mouth and his cum on her tongue? Did she really just walk away afterwards like nothing happened?
Penelope has more questions than answers, especially when it comes to an explanation for why she just did what she did. However, she isn't really capable of entertaining any of those questions with how intensely her heart is racing and how it feels like her skin is buzzing and her spine is tingling. She runs her fingers over her lips and muses for a moment longer.
Is this what spontaneous, carefree people feel like all the time? Terrified, excited, alive?
After devolving briefly into panic, worrying that maybe Colin just needed a moment to sort himself out before he'll come stomping down the hall and demand an explanation from her, she finally moves away from the door. She never hears anything but the sound of the bathroom door closing and water running to indicate he flushes the toilet and likely washes his hands and brushes his teeth afterwards. When she hears a second door closing, she knows he's back in his bedroom and she knows that means he isn't coming to confront her after all. He's going to sleep.
Penelope almost cries out in relief. As soon as she has confirmation that there's not a confrontation looming in the immediate future, she can't think about anything other than the throbbing need between her legs and all the images and memories floating through her mind of what Colin looks like when he's hard and desperate and coming.
She all but stumbles to her bed, feeling a bit like a fawn clumsy on her legs and still getting used to motion of walking. She's singularly focused, though. She just needs to lie down, shove her bottoms down to her ankles, and touch herself until she gets to come too.
Penelope's orgasm builds and crashes swiftly. She doesn't even get her knickers off after shoving down her jeans, instead slipping her right hand inside them and immediately biting back a groan at how hot and wet and achy she already feels. All it takes is about thirty seconds of concentrated circles drawn around her clit before she's falling apart with a whimper and a gush of wetness coating her pussy and pooling on the bed.
Fucking hell, she thinks, one hand on her forehead and the other resting lazily atop her mound as she pants and stares at the ceiling. Why was that fast, frantic orgasm where she didn't even properly go through her usual routine of touching herself so fucking good?
Once the shock and the endorphins fade a bit, Penelope knows she should stay up and panic about tomorrow, about the state of the situation she's created for herself, about the consequences for Colin and Marina and her. She knows there's plenty to plan for and worry about, but she's also had a taste of a different kind of living. She's had a taste of what it's like to just act with abandon and take what you want, which as it turns out is pretty fucking exhilarating. It is also, however, exhausting at the same time.
Instead of panicking and planning and coming up with contingencies, Penelope just gets herself ready for bed. She changes into her pajamas, slips silently into the hall, and goes through her unhurried bathroom routine. She uses the toilet, brushes her teeth, brushes her hair, washes her face, and applies her nighttime moisturizer and eye cream. As she does it, though, she can't help but catch a glimpse or two of the mirror and notes the smirk on her own face that looks quite foreign on her.