Chapter Text
“Professor Bridgerton?”
Colin looks up from his laptop.
He is greeted by the sight of a redheaded young woman standing in his office doorway, clutching her laptop to her chest nervously, big blue eyes peering at him through a pair of green-framed glasses.
Usually he finds it irritating when students interrupt his work, but he has been wrestling with his lesson plan for the better part of two hours, and he is ready to throw his laptop out the window.
“How can I help?” he asks, and gives her an unusually warm smile (unusual for him, anyway), grateful for the distraction.
She blushes and looks down, and he notices how very pretty she is. For the most part he tries very hard not to look too closely at his female students (it is hardly befitting a forty-year-old man to be ogling eighteen-year-olds), but she is altogether too striking to help himself. She wears her fiery red hair in two long plaits, wild curls framing her angelically pretty face. She is short and pleasingly plump, her body filling out the little checked dress she wears over a white shirt. He tries not to let his gaze linger on her breasts or her shapely legs, focusing instead on her face. Look at her eyes, you monster.
“I - I’m your new TA. Penelope.” She steps into the room, holding her hand out to him.
His teaching assistant. A PhD student. So not eighteen then - she must be at least in her mid-twenties, although she looks younger.
He stands and almost knocks over his chair doing so, taking her little hand in his. He feels momentarily fascinated by how his fingers engulf hers, before he pulls himself together enough to say something.
“Penelope. Of course. I completely forgot you were starting today. I’ll be your PhD supervisor too, of course. Colin Bridgerton,” he says, then winces. Of course she knows that. He wishes, for once, he could interact with another human being in a way that even approximated normal.
Her mouth pulls into a little pout, as if she is trying to hide a smile, and he tries not to focus on how full and plush and pink her lips are. “Nice to meet you,” she says, and withdraws her hand from his. Colin is filled with the bizarre urge to hold onto it, and not let her go.
There is an awkward silence.
“You came at a good time,” he says, just for something to say. “I’m driving myself up the wall trying to update my lesson plans for the term. It’s good to be distracted.”
“Do you - do you want me to take a look at them?” she says, hesitantly.
Colin frowns. “Are you sure? You just started. I’m sure you want to get settled.”
She shakes her head, and the stray curls around her face bounce prettily. “I might as well make myself useful.”
Her eyes scan the tiny chaotically-full room, until she sees the other chair, buried in a mound of journals. It is supposed to be used for when his students come in for office hours, but Colin has found that making them stand makes them leave more quickly. Penelope puts down her laptop and tote bag, and then quickly shifts the stack onto the floor. She drags the chair to the desk, opposite him, and without asking, spins his laptop around to face her.
It takes her thirty minutes to fix what he has been labouring with for two hours.
Anyone else and Colin would be irritated, but he finds somehow that with Penelope, he cannot be.
________
In the week before lessons officially start, Penelope tries to reorganise Professor Bridgerton’s office.
Colin, he’d said, in his nice, warm voice, the first time she had called him Professor Bridgerton. Please.
It doesn’t come naturally, calling a teacher by their first name. She has to keep telling herself they are technically peers, but even at twenty-five she still feels like a school-girl at times. Twice she called him “Professor Colin” by accident and she would have been embarrassed except it made him laugh, and she finds that she really likes hearing his rich, throaty chuckle.
It does not help that he is so handsome - thick dark hair, peppered with grey throughout. A pleasing amount of scruff covering his jaw, a sensitive mouth and remarkably blue eyes, surrounded by crow’s feet that crinkle up when he laughs (like when she calls him Professor Colin, for example). Plus he is really tall, and pleasingly broad, and Penelope cannot help how her body reacts to him.
He told her she didn’t need her to tidy up his office, but she realised quickly there wasn’t much else to do before the students started, and she likes feeling useful. And it is rather satisfying sorting through his books and journals and archives - it is sort of like she is crawling around in Colin’s brain, and she finds she rather likes it here.
She learns quickly that his fussy and terse exterior hides a surprising amount of sweetness - he just does not suffer fools gladly, and once he realises Penelope is not a fool, he is a perfect sweetheart.
They settle into a nice routine - Penelope always arrives early, but Colin always brings her a coffee. They spend their days in comfortable silence, Penelope sorting through mountains of books whilst Colin makes plans for the upcoming term. Sometimes (and those are her best days) he will ask for her help with a lesson plan, and she is rewarded with one of his pleased nods.
Penelope meets her friend Edwina for lunch at the British Library on the Friday before classes start. Edwina is one of the only other young women on the PhD programme, and they had bonded instantly. They sit in the chilly courtyard with their packed lunches, discussing their first weeks.
“Professor Friedrich is gorgeous,” Edwina says with a conspiratorial giggle. “He literally looks like a Disney prince.”
Penelope wrinkles up her nose. Professor Friedrich is definitely conventionally attractive, but there is something too perfect and smooth about his features. “He looks like a Ken doll,” she grumbles, and Edwina laughs.
“What about Professor Bridgerton?” Edwina asks. “I’m sorry you got stuck with that grump - Friedrich says he can be a real arse.”
Penelope blushes, feeling oddly defensive. “He’s not so bad, actually. He’s been rather nice to me.”
She feels Edwina’s eyes on her, and she blushes harder.
“You have a crush on him, don’t you?” Edwina asks.
Penelope ducks her head, wishing her hair was not woven into two plaits and she could instead hide behind it. “Shut up, Edwina,” she says hotly, her eyes darting around to make sure no-one has heard. “I do not.”
Edwina pokes her ribs - Penelope wriggles and bats her away.
“Do you think he’s interested in you?” Edwina asks, blinking her giant doe eyes at her.
“No,” Penelope hisses, ignoring the memory of how she had caught him staring at the little cycling shorts she wore under her dress the other day. She had tugged down her hem, her skin flushing, and his eyes had immediately darted away. “And I’m not interested in him.” She starts to feel a fluttery panic in her chest. “I’m not interested in him,” she repeats. “If it got back to him -”
“I’m sure he’d be flattered,” Edwina says. “What man wouldn’t want a pretty girl to fancy him?”
Penelope looks down at her lunchbox, her face beet-red. She doesn’t have an answer for that, only that she is sure Colin Bridgerton does not think she is pretty.
_______
After a few weeks of working with her, Colin’s growing fascination with Penelope’s hair is starting to become something of a… problem.
Not a big problem. More of a nuisance, really. Because every morning he wakes up with a little frisson of excitement to see how she might be wearing it that day. On the tube to the campus, he tries to guess what it will look like - French braids? An artfully messy bun piled onto her head with hairpins? Or two school-girl bunches, like she wore the other week (at which point it had actually started to feel like something of a bigger problem, because his mouth had run dry and he had barely been able to look at her all day).
It’s not just the hair. She has been a revelation, if he is honest. The students respond to her better than they ever have him, and classes he would once dread now feel almost… joyful (he supposes it is her closeness in age to the students that helps her relate to them, but he suspects it is more than that. It’s just… her).
Today, Penelope’s hair is up, braided into a sort of crown that encircles her head. She looks like a mediaeval princess, or a nymph, and she has all these lovely wispy curls loose around her face. He imagines winding one around his finger and tugging on it, just to watch it spring back into place.
They are sitting in the study room adjacent to his office, both of them writing. He is working on an upcoming article, and she her thesis. The room was meant to be for the MA and PhD students to use, but the chaos of Colin’s office has started to spill out into it, and he has successfully scared away the students at this point, so no-one really bothers them here.
“How do you make it… stay like that?” he asks, breaking the comfortable silence, and gesturing to his head with his finger.
Penelope puts down her copy of My Journey to Lhasa and looks at him. She looks a little taken aback and he is suddenly terrified that he’s crossed a boundary. Is it inappropriate to ask about a colleague’s hair? He tries to cast his mind back to the Anti-Harassment training the faculty took last year, his brain racing. He cannot remember anything about hair, but perhaps he has forgotten and in fact he’s asked something deeply offensive -
“A lot of hair pins,” she says, with a little smile, and his panic abates. “And -” she twists, showing him the little black ribbon bow at the nape of her neck - he had not noticed it - “I weave ribbons to the end of the plaits so I can tie them together.”
He tries to keep his expression neutral, though he feels unreasonably delighted by this. He almost says clever girl, but he knows that would certainly be inappropriate - and condescending, and many other things - so he simply nods. “Ingenious.”
She gives him a wry look. “Honestly, my talents are wasted in academia. I should be running hair braiding workshops instead.”
He gives a surprised laugh, and turns back to his work.
After an hour or so, Penelope stands up to stretch her legs, and goes over to the groaning, buckling bookshelf, stuffed so full of Colin’s books that he is fairly certain that one day soon it will give out and his body will be found crushed beneath them. With her back to him, he takes the opportunity to stare at her, his eyes glued to the strip of exposed skin between her crop top and the waistband of her pleated skirt. Her skin is creamy-pale, a delectable little roll of flesh that he cannot help but imagine rubbing his fingers over. When she moves, he sees a flash of black on her thighs - little cycling shorts she must be wearing for comfort or modesty (though the thoughts running through his head at the sight of them are deeply immodest).
She pulls out a book and sits back at the table, flicking through it. “Pantelleria,” she murmurs. “That’s off Sicily, right? Have you ever been?”
Colin shakes his head, feeling uncomfortably. He knows it is ridiculous - his specialism is travel writing and he’s barely left the country. “No. I’d love to, though. Have you?”
Penelope lays the book down and starts typing again. “No. I’ve hardly been anywhere, though. France, once or twice on family holidays as a kid.”
He stares at her.
“Really? Surely you took a gap year after your bachelors? Your masters?”
She wrinkles up her nose at him (she looks awfully cute when she does that - he drops his eyes to his keyboard). “God, no. I spent the last two years working in bars to save up enough to pay for this. I couldn’t afford travelling as well. It was one or the other, and this seemed more sensible, somehow.”
He stares at her, his mouth open.
“What?” she says, blinking rapidly and her cheeks flushing a little.
He clears his throat and rubs the back of his neck. “Nothing. Sorry, I - I made a similar calculation myself when I was your age.”
When I was your age. He cringes internally - he sounds ancient.
She pulls a face at him. “Sure grandpa, let’s get you to bed,” she says, her lips twitching and her eyes flashing behind her glasses.
He frowns. “Sorry?”
Her cheeks turn a deeper pink. He finds he rather likes the sight of it, even though he is fairly sure she just called him grandpa.
“Oh - it’s a meme. Sorry. Never mind,” she says. She rubs her arm awkwardly. “So, you were saying? About when you were my age?”
“Oh.” He clears his throat, feeling strangely untethered by the way he senses her mind works, darting around from thought to thought. “Well. I always wanted to travel myself, but practical concerns took precedence, in the end.”
She raises an eyebrow at him. “Surely you weren’t ever worried about money?”
Colin winces. His family’s wealth is fairly notorious, and even at forty, he still feels vaguely ashamed of it. “Well, no, but - there were certain pressures.”
He feels those big blue Bambi eyes on him. She has stopped typing now, and tips her screen down a little as if to look at him better. “What sorts of pressures?”
He shifts a little in his chair. He is not sure why her attention makes his skin feel so hot. “Familial pressure, I suppose.” Why is he telling her this? “A pressure to settle - to find some sort of purpose.”
He cannot quite read her expression. She blinks at him for a moment before asking: “And did you find it? Your purpose?”
The question annoys him for reasons he doesn’t quite understand. He puts his hand on the desk and his signet ring hits the wood harder than he meant it to. It makes a loud cracking noise that shatters the soft peace of the study room.
Penelope starts, blinking at him in alarm, her cheeks turning a deeper pink and her teeth indenting into her full lower lip.
“Sorry,” he mutters, twisting his ring with his other forefinger and thumb. Penelope’s eyes are glued to his hands. He sees her throat bob as she swallows, her chest rising and falling fast (do not look at her fucking chest, man).
She shakes her head. “No. It’s fine. Go on.”
“Well - of course I found my purpose. This is my purpose.” He bristles a little.
She blinks at him. “Oh. Of course. I didn’t mean to suggest…” She trails off, and her hand fiddles with the bow at the nape of her neck. “I just never thought my purpose in life would be… my job, I suppose. I always imagined it as something… greater, somehow.”
“Greater how?” he asks, intrigued, his annoyance replaced by curiosity.
She looks contemplative. Her hand moves to her neck and she cups it loosely, thoughtlessly - he has noticed she does this when she feels nervous or vulnerable. He tries not to imagine how soft the skin must feel under her fingers, the warm throb of her pulse there.
“When I was a kid, I always imagined I’d be a writer,” she says, and she looks a little sheepish. “Just a fantasy, I suppose, but I imagined getting to see the world and write about it.”
“Travel writing?” he asks, feeling slightly unnerved. He had the same fantasy himself as a boy.
She tilts her head to the side. “Yes, but also… I suppose it’s silly, but I wanted to write about love. I was sort of obsessed with love stories as a kid, if I’m honest. It’s silly.”
“So you wanted to write romance novels?” he presses, his work utterly forgotten. He has this feeling like he wants to dig into the inside of her mind, sift through and pan for gold.
She shrugs, her fingers moving idly back and forth over her throat, and he wonders if the sensation comforts her. “Yes. I suppose I was just fascinated by love in general. It felt so far out of my reach, and so by writing about it I could sort of… trap it. Dissect it. Try to understand.”
“Out of your reach? How do you mean?” He knows he might be probing too far. This is perhaps beyond the purview of a strictly professional conversation, but she is so interesting that he cannot help but push. He’s not sure he’s ever met anyone like her before. It is like she said - he feels the urge to dissect her. Open her up and try to categorise what’s inside.
“Well… I don’t know. I was an odd-looking child and my parents weren’t… the best.” She tries to cover it, but he can hear years of pain in her words. Colin gets a swelling, tender feeling in his chest imagining Penelope as a child. His hands clench the edge of the table, as he is filled with the sudden urge to strangle Penelope’s parents. “Love just felt… far away.”
She takes a deep breath, and wrinkles up her nose in embarrassment, as though remembering herself. “You don’t want to hear all this,” she says quickly. “Sorry. What were we talking about again? Pantelleria?”
Colin swallows the urge to prod her further, and lets the conversation move on, until it dribbles off and they both return to their work, typing away in comfortable silence.
He feels something on his tongue, though, and after a while he cannot keep it in. “You’re an excellent writer, Penelope,” he blurts out. His cheeks heat up a little, so he keeps his eyes on his screen. “I’d happily read anything you wrote - romance or otherwise.”
She murmurs thanks, and he feels pleased to watch the blush spread over her cheeks.
_______
Giggling cuts through the general chatter in the classroom. Penelope looks up from her book, trying to work out where it’s coming from. The students are paired off, discussing this week’s reading (Chatwin’s Songlines).
The giggling comes from two of the female students. Penelope watches Colin frown, and she can almost hear his disapproving inner monologue - this subject is hardly a laughing matter - and before he can ask them, what, precisely, is so funny, she gets up and walks around the table towards them, saving everyone the embarrassment of getting called out by Professor Bridgerton for what is no doubt some harmless giggling.
Over the past few weeks she has learned to parse his expressions and moods like this. She knows he struggles to relate to the students, and gets easily annoyed by their silliness. She knows he means well, but it can come out wrong - harsh, or abrupt. She finds she has rather enjoyed being the mediator - it makes her feel useful to him.
The girls don’t see her right away, and she manages to catch a glimpse of their laptop screens, where they are obviously messaging each other.
Three messages jump out immediately:
prof bridgerton is so fucking hot. i want to die
agreed. daddy material fr fr
yeah right - Professor Daddy
Penelope rolls her lips between her teeth to stop herself laughing, and her eyes flick to Colin. They aren’t exactly wrong, and she cannot pretend she hasn’t had… similar thoughts.
She clears her throat, and the girls jump, immediately slamming their laptops shut. She gives them knowing smiles - they both blush - and returns to her seat at the front of the class, pausing briefly by other students to make it seem like she is checking up on all of their group work.
When she takes her seat, Colin gives her a frowny, questioning look, but she shakes her head - I’ll tell you later. He nods minutely, and she feels a funny little glow that they communicate so well without words.
He doesn’t ask about it until they are in the theatre for the next lecture. They are trying to get the laptop to connect to the projector, and Penelope is under the desk, on her hands and knees, trying to sort out the tangled mess of cables that she knows should make the connection.
“What was that all about earlier, by the way? With those two students in class?”
Penelope almost chokes herself out with a cable as she shuffles out from under the desk and sits back on her heels. Colin stands at the desk, bent over the computer, squinting at the screen.
“Glasses,” she says, and he nods, pulling the dark-framed reading glasses out of his pocket and pushing them onto his face. He always forgets he needs them and Penelope has taken to reminding him (though her motivation is not entirely unselfish - they make him somehow - impossibly - more handsome).
She looks up at him slightly breathlessly from her kneeling position on the floor, holding the HDMI cable up victoriously.
“Nice work,” he says, with a little smile, and Penelope feels that warm, bubbling feeling in her chest that she gets when he pays her a compliment.
“Oh, it was silly, really,” she says, as she stands beside him over the computer. She plugs in the laptop. “They were messaging each other. I think they have crushes on you.”
Colin stares at her. She watches him process this, his jaw fluttering as he clenches it. She tries not to smile at his discomfort - she cannot help it that she finds it charming. He is too handsome to be this unaware of the effect he has on women.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” she says. “I used to have crushes on all my teachers. It’s normal.”
For some reason, her face suddenly gets very red and she busies herself at the laptop, making sure the wire is securely connected. She becomes aware of how close he is, and she starts to feel a bit funny and hot. He smells wonderful, a rich, tobacco and leather cologne that makes her head spin.
“What - what were they saying?”
Penelope glances at him sideways. His cheeks are a little flushed, that pretty mouth of his partly open. He is still staring at her.
“Um. Well. They said you were daddy material.”
The minute it comes out of her mouth she knows she should not have said it. It is so deeply, awfully inappropriate. Her cheeks burn. She is about to apologise when Colin straightens and twists his whole body towards her.
“What does that mean?” he asks. When she does not answer, he uses his stern teacher voice, the one he uses on the students. “Penelope. Tell me.”
Why does that make her melt? She sighs, and straightens up. They are standing way too close together like this. “Um. It’s like… internet slang. It means they think you’re… hot,” she stutters. “They called you Professor Daddy.”
She really did not have to add that bit, and she wonders precisely when the neurological pathway that helps her think before she opens her big mouth was severed.
Colin’s eyes have gone strangely dark and tight as he looks at her, and his jaw pulses, his mouth in a hard line. “Hm.” The noise is strangled. Penelope feels trapped in the blue of his eyes; she imagines what it would feel like to reach her hand up and run it through his lovely thick hair. Her breathing suddenly feels shallow and laboured - and they really are far too close like this - if she took half a step forward her breasts would be pressed to his torso.
She is saved from this particularly dangerous fantasy by the first trickle of students into the lecture theatre. Colin jumps and immediately sequesters himself behind the lecture podium and Penelope sits herself behind the desk, ready to click through the Powerpoint, trying desperately to calm her breathing and ignore the pulsating heat between her legs.
After the lecture, Colin practically runs from the room.
He barely speaks to her again for two weeks.