Chapter Text
And I'm just getting color back into my face
I'm just mad as hell cause I loved this place
For so long, London
Had a good run
So Long, London - Taylor Swift
*
It’s five minutes past the time she’s supposed to relieve Mrs. Cameron and she knows she can’t hide upstairs anymore. She’d skipped the coffee when she realized her whole body was shaking enough that she couldn't hold her hands steady and now, over an hour later, her heart still flutters like a trapped bird in her chest.
She can’t honestly decide what will feel worse: Colin seeing her again or him being close enough to look at but never even getting the chance to say hello. Anytime she pines for what she’d once had like sleepovers with Eloise or lying in the grass counting stars or summer trips to Aubrey Hall, she remembers the event in stark detail and it’s enough to jolt her back to reality.
But Colin is a little different. He’s always been a little different. When compared to the rest of the Bridgerton siblings, he’s certainly a matching part of the set, but she’s long considered him the softest one personality wise. Kind, compassionate, loyal and sweet. The kind of boy who would scoop up spiders with his bare hands so Daphne wouldn’t squash them under her designer shoe, who would give his youngest siblings piggy-back rides even if it meant lying awake all night with a back ache, who would always staunchly defend Penelope against anyone who might make fun of her. Cressida, or the boys in his own year, or even her own mother.
The first time he’d really broken her heart was when she’d overheard him tell his mates he wasn’t interested in dating her. She’s a sweet girl, a family friend, that’s all. She’d been fourteen, desperately imagining the feeling of his lips on hers at night and while she hadn’t been so delusional that she thought it was imminently possible he was going to kiss her, hearing him say it out loud had been a tough pill to swallow.
He broke her heart again at seventeen when she’d introduced him to her cousin who stayed with the Featheringtons for that summer and he’d spent the next six weeks snogging her in his garden.
But more often than those big cracks came the small fissures of everyday life with him. He was affectionate and touchy with everyone, which is why she knew every time he grabbed her hand or hugged her or even dropped a kiss to the top of her head wasn’t because she was particularly special to him. It was only because she was in his orbit. Every time he texted her from a new country or sent her a three minute long voice memo describing a delicious meal or beautiful hotel room or amazing boat ride wasn’t because he was in love with her, but was because she was one of the few people who listened to his excited ramblings without taking the piss out of him.
The one time he had kissed her, he’d been extremely drunk after Benedict’s wedding and she’d been the soberest left standing, so had volunteered to get him into the cab and he’d kissed her on the street tasting of whiskey and swaying on his feet.
The next day, he’d texted her to apologize for his inappropriate behavior.
Not long after that, the event happened.
She’d dropped her phone four months ago and watched in horror as it bounced down the wooden stairs from the flat to the shop, no case strong enough to save her from the shattered screen. When she’d replaced it, she’d asked for a new number. Her contact info had transferred to the new one, and she texted her sisters the new number, but no one else. Who else was there? She was still estranged from her mother by choice and Mrs. Cameron had a landline and an email address.
She’d looked at the Bridgertons all in a row in her contact list: Anthony, Benedict, Colin, Daphne, Eloise, Francesca, Gregory, Hyacinth, Kate, Sophie, Violet. She realized then that she was no longer blocked, but an unknown number to them. She could reach out. She could even re-block Colin from the new number, but what would be the point? He didn’t have it.
No, this was better. A clean break from both sides.
She loves this city, she loves this little book shop. These days, she is even coming to terms with the place The London Whistler has in her life. She’d offered to let Prudence and Phillipa buy out her shares and run the whole thing on their own a while back, once the shop was more stable, but they’d declined, happy enough with their salaries and not having the responsibility of making the whole thing work. She uses the same company that maintains the gossip site to maintain the book shop site as well, now, and they built a much better online store. A lot of days, her online sales far exceed what she makes in house.
Now she’s seven minutes late.
She takes the steps as quietly as she is able. Toward the bottom, she hears Mrs. Cameron laugh. Not a dry chuckle which is what Penelope manages to wring out of her on her best days, but a high-pitched titter. Something she might describe as almost flirty.
She pokes her head around the side and can see Mrs. Cameron still at the till and across the counter, Colin Bridgerton leaning on one elbow, charming the support hose right off her in the way that only he can.
“Fuck,” she whispers to herself.
She has two choices, it seems. Face the music or abandon her whole life a second time and do another runner. Maybe if she burns the shop down, she can use the insurance money to start over. How hard can it be to make a place composed mostly of old paper and dry wood look like an accidental burning? She could just light a candle and ‘forget’ about it. She could—
“She’s not usually late, I’ll just call up and see what’s taking her… Oh!” Mrs. Cameron startles at the sight of Penelope, loitering on the last dim step. “There you are.”
“Sorry,” Penelope says, lamely, with no explanation. “I… Sorry.”
“There’s a young man here to see you,” she says. “I must be off. You know how Dennis gets when his lunch is late.”
“Sorry,” Penelope says again, meekly. She clears her throat and steps around the corner. Mrs. Cameron is putting on her sweater, shouldering her purse, and clocking out on the computer. Penelope is looking at her feet, unable to meet the dark blue eyes she knows are staring at her.
“Bye, dear. See you tomorrow!” The bell over the door jingles as Mrs. Cameron exits and then, silence.
Penelope looks up to find Colin standing in her book shop, his hands in the pockets of his old, familiar leather jacket.
“Hi, Pen,” he says.
Anger would have been kinder, she thinks. His familiar greeting, like they saw each other last week, cuts like a knife. No one calls her Pen anymore. No one else ever had.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
He shrugs. “I was in the neighborhood.” His lips twitch, like he’s trying not to smile. “This is a nice little place.”
“Thank you,” she says carefully, moving to the computer behind the counter. She clocks in and out too, not that it really reflects the hours she actually works, but for accounting purposes, it’s best to have a paper trail. The counter between them feels like extra protection. He is a customer, this is her shop, and this interaction is liminal, never to be repeated.
What she really wants to know is how he found her. She’s too afraid to ask.
“How long have you been open now?”
Oh, small talk. Wonderful.
“Shop has been here since 1973,” she says. “Can I help you find any particular title?”
His face flickers here, the first uncertainty she’s spotted on him and only sees it because once upon a time she’d known him so well.
“I confess I’m mostly a kindle guy these days,” he says. “Carrying around a bunch of books isn’t conducive to lots of travel.”
She can’t stand this. She feels like she’s going to bleed out onto the lovingly restored wooden floors if she keeps having to do this.
“Does your sister know you’re here?” she asks. She doesn’t bother to specify which sister.
“No,” he says.
She waits for him to elaborate, but he doesn’t.
“Why are you here, Colin?”
He looks over his shoulder at the closet set of shelves to where they’re standing. It’s all local stuff. Local authors, books about the city, famous novels set in Scotland. She still sells more copies of Macbeth than anything else and he reaches out and touches the cover of the play.
“Do you think maybe we could, um, sit down somewhere and talk?” he asks. “Maybe eat something?”
“I’m working,” she says, gesturing to the room around them.
“Right, no, I know that,” he says. “I mean after. Dinner, or something.”
She pictures them, suddenly, sitting at a booth at the Sawyers Arms, the local pub the Bridgertons all favored. She’d cried that night, explaining about the phone conversation with her mother and how badly it had gone.
“You don’t need her in your life,” he’d said so earnestly. “She doesn’t deserve you.”
“She’s my mum,” Penelope had wept. “Can I just cut off my family?”
“We’re your family now,” he’d said, so confidently.
It works both ways, it turns out. You can cut off your family. They can cut you off too.
He looks so earnest again, standing in her shop.
“I don’t know,” she says.
The bell above the door jingles and a couple walks in with a little girl around five, who makes a bee line for the corner filled with children’s books.
“Welcome,” she calls, her voice sounding watery and weird.
“Cheers,” the man says, turning to look at a rack of postcards near the front.
“Pen,” Colin says again, like he’s begging.
“Sure, fine,” she relents. “We close at seven.”
He grins, a thousand watts that hit her right in her solar plexus. “Okay. Good. Cool. I’ll come back. See you at seven?”
She nods, confused and achinging and terrified.
***
It’s simultaneously the longest and shortest work day of her life. She abandons the plan of redoing the window because that takes a certain amount of creativity and her absolutely crushing anxiety doesn’t allow her creative juices to particularly flow. Instead, she works on the online orders, boxing them up and printing out labels. Sometimes, if it’s a few, the postman will take them with him on his regular route, but there’s about fifteen parcels today so she’ll have to find time to go to the post office tomorrow.
The afternoon is busy. They’re at the start of their summer tourist season. Summer and autumn are her best times, though she gets a nice end of year boost around Christmas because the Christmas markets bring so many people to the city.
Around four, Saanvi comes over with a chai for her, which is so lovely.
“It’s unusual not to see you,” she asks, handing it over. Penelope goes to open the till to pay her, but Saanvi waves it off.
“Thanks,” she murmurs, taking a sip. The spicy brew always hits just right. “Just one of those days.”
“Nothing to do with that man asking after you this morning?” Saanvi asks lightly. Saanvi is in her mid-forties, and has a teenage son who works next door sometimes. The boy’s father is long out of the picture, from what Penelope can deduce, though they’re not the kind of friends who have deep talks like that. It’s casual. So how is she supposed to explain Colin to the woman now?
“An old friend,” she says. “From many lives ago.”
Saanvi gives her a long look like she can see all of Penelope’s twenty-seven years laid out in front of her and she’s not buying it.
“He seemed keen to talk to you. Asked about the shop, about you.”
“I’m sorry he disturbed you,” Penelope offers diplomatically.
“No disturbance,” Saanvi says. “I wouldn’t have told him where you were, but he already knew.” She shrugs.
“Thanks for the tea,” Penelope murmurs, her discomfort trumping her manners.
Saanvi grins, knowing she hit a nerve. “See you tomorrow, yeah?”
Penelope nods.
Around six-thirty, Penelope is dusting and gets that prickle on the back of her neck like she’s being watched. She glances out the window and sees him across the street, loitering in front of the art gallery, peering at the large painting in the window. The street also contains a curry restaurant and that’s where she predicts he will take her. He loves curry. She eats there often herself, though she never can handle the spice level that any Bridgerton could stomach.
There are people in the shop, however, and so she sets the duster down to ring out the last few people. Someone buys one of the many blank journals she keeps stocked along with a used copy of Anne of Green Gables. The shop is now a mix of used and new books, though the new stuff is all best sellers and the used stuff beloved classics. It’s been working so far, worth the investment anyway.
The last customer buys an Edinburgh travel guide and one of the beaded bracelets she displays on the counter, and that’s that. She walks to the front to turn over the sign from open to closed. As she does it, she can see him jog across the street toward her shop. She could leave him standing on the street waiting for her, but there’s a bit to do before she can leave and it’s starting to rain. She can see the drops on his jacket.
She lets him in.
“Spring, eh?” he says of the cloudy sky.
“I need to close the till,” she says softly, locking the door behind him. It’s strange to be alone with him again, something they used to do semi-regularly. Movie nights at the apartment when Eloise was working late. Lunch dates when he was in town. Sharing a car to brunch at his mother’s house on a Sunday morning.
God, he even smells the same. A scent she doesn’t realize she is missing until she smells it again and it hits her hard. Earthy and spicy and deep. This is a mistake.
“I like this place,” he says while she runs the report from the register. The drawer pops open and she pulls the money out. Generally, she takes the whole thing to count upstairs, wary of doing it where people on the street can see, but it’s weird with him here so she just lays it out on the counter, counting swiftly, matching the total on the receipt and shoving it all in the cashbox.
The safe is upstairs.
“I’m just gonna run up and put this away,” she says. What she should have done is tell him to wait where he was, because as she starts to climb the stairs, he follows her. That’s Colin, she thinks. Never a door that he thinks he can’t waltz through.
She hesitates at the top of the stairs, looking at her flat with new eyes. The living room has become mostly storage for her online sales. Boxes of books are stacked along the far wall, waiting for her to add them to the website, something she mostly does in the middle of the night when she can’t sleep. The small kitchen has dishes in the sink and all the furniture is the same saggy stuff she’d inherited from Hamish.
She thinks of the beautiful velvet green sofa in the apartment she shared with Eloise fleetingly.
But then again, what does she have to prove to someone from a family who’d so easily left her behind? She flips on a switch and several rows of fairy lights come on, filling the space with a warm glow. She couldn’t fix the lack of natural light, so she leaned into it feeling cozy instead.
“You live here,” he comments, sounding surprised. “Above the shop.”
“Yeah,” she says. The safe is under the sink and she shoves the cashbox in there without spinning the dial to lock it. When she goes to the post office tomorrow, she’ll take the deposit to the bank. “It came with the shop.”
“That’s really cool,” he says. “So I was thinking maybe just the curry shop down the way?”
She has to suppress a smile at his predictability. “Sure. Just let me… I’ll change.”
“You look great,” he says.
She holds up the loose tail of her shirt to show him the paint. “I can do better than this.”
She’d purged a lot of her clothes, actually. A lot of the couture dresses her mother had purchased for her were some shade of yellow or orange, often the wrong size. Things that were expensive and well-made but that she hated and kept out of obligation. All of those went to the charity shop. Anything too small went as well. Anything that wasn’t warm enough for this city went. She’s left with a much more practical wardrobe of slacks, denim, shirts, and jumpers. But there’s nothing particularly fancy or dressy. She sighs, kicking the bedroom door closed behind her and unbuttoning her shirt. She puts on a plain white t-shirt instead and then over that, a striped jumper.
She never bothers with makeup anymore. Colin hasn’t come so she can impress him, no doubt. This visit has to be about closure and nothing more. What else could he want from her?
When she emerges from the bedroom, he’s standing at the window that looks down into the little alley behind the shop.
“You kept your car,” he says.
She’d bought the car somewhat on a whim, used, when they were going to go to Aubrey one year but Violet had gone on ahead and no one could find the keys to the car the siblings all shared for emergency moves and big shopping trips and vacations to the country. Violet had accidentally taken the fob with her, it turned out. Penelope had decided that having a vehicle on deck would be useful, and it had been.
She’s glad to have it now, for post office runs and grocery shops.
“Yeah,” she says.
“I didn’t rent one,” he muses. “We could go somewhere else, then, if you wanted?”
She shakes her head. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, I mean like a different restaurant. Farther out. If you wanted.”
“If I want? If you want, you mean,” she says. “You clearly have something else in mind.”
“I had a reservation for tonight at Heron,” he admits. “In case you didn't want to see me.”
“But I’m a whole other additional person.”
“I always make reservations for two. I’m going to order enough food for two people either way, so…” He trails off. “We don’t have to.”
“No, it’s just. That place is too expensive for me.” Embarrassing to say, really. She is making money, but between the costs of running the site, paying her sisters, and the cost of constantly improving the bookstore, she’s not exactly flush lately.
“Pen, come on,” he says with a light chuckle. “I’m gonna buy you dinner.”
She wants to argue. She wants to demand that they just have the conversation and skip dinner and he can be on his merry way. But this is Colin and no forward progress will be made if his stomach isn’t full. She shouldn’t accept any Bridgerton charity, either, but it’s absurd to pay five-star prices on her own.
“Fine,” she says, grabbing her purse. “Let’s go.”
It’s a Wednesday, but still, there’s a small crowd outside of the restaurant when they arrive. She has to search a bit for parking. The drive has been mostly silent, like they’re both bottling it up for the meal.
“There,” he says, pointing to a spot on the street.
“That will require a level of parallel parking skill that I do not currently possess,” she says.
“I can do it,” he promises.
“I’m not switching seats now, Colin.”
“No, I can talk you through it.” He sounds so confident.
“Fine,” she says, slowing and flicking on her indicator.
“Stop and turn your wheel,” he says. “Good, good… now crank it.”
“I’m gonna hit—”
“You’re not,” he promises. “Trust me. Keep going… Okay, now straighten out. Pull forward a little. Yeah, perfect. You did it!”
“Yep,” she agrees, annoyed that he’d been right at all. Annoyed that she’s not really dressed posh enough for a restaurant like this. Annoyed that they’re together and he’s being so nice even though he’s about to tear her a new one. Still, there’s nothing he can say to her that’s any crueler than what she tells herself. She did use her close friendship with the Bridgertons and their high society connections to generate content for her blog. She did agree with them that it was terrible while hiding the fact that she was the author. She is still, to this day, profiting off the website.
What more is there to say?
He holds open the door for her, passing the people waiting on the street and then gives his name to the host.
“Mr. Bridgerton!” she says. “Of course. We’ve been expecting you. Right this way.”
She’d forgotten, somewhat, what life in the Bridgerton light was like. No waiting, the best of everything, prices never discussed. Colin pulls out her chair for her first and she gives him a hard look. “I’m good, thanks.”
To his credit, he backs off, seating himself. The host goes over some specials, leaves them with a menu and says their server will be right over.
“I know you’ve likely been studying the menu for months, so feel free to order me whatever,” Penelope says, setting her menu lightly on the corner of the table. She doesn’t want to inadvertently order something insanely expensive, so at least she can leave that ball in his court.
He grins, and it’s so handsomely resplendent that she nearly flinches. No one person should be so attractive, so well-off, and so kind.
Well, he’d previously been kind to her. And he’d certainly been polite and surprisingly warm to her so far, but she considers that nothing more than good behavior in public places.
“I can do that,” he says easily enough and when the server appears, he orders the wine, the appetizers, and the entrees in one fell swoop.
And now, she can no longer stand the tension. She’s in a place she doesn’t belong, about to eat a meal she can’t afford, with a person she’s no longer friends with. It’s death by a thousand cuts and she wants it to be over already.
“Do you think we ought to get down to brass tacks, then?” she asks.
His brow wrinkles as he frowns. “How do you mean?”
“You obviously sought me out because you had something to say. I suggest we just get on with it.” She unrolls her silverware and places the napkin in her lap before looking up at him.
His mouth is open with surprise. “All right,” he says.
“I mean, obviously you have questions, so just ask them,” she says, before she loses her nerve.
“I really just have one,” he says, leaning forward. “Why did you leave, Pen? Why did you cut me out of your life?”
Now it’s her jaw that falls, now it’s her world that spins, now it’s her that has question after question after question.