Chapter Text
The thing about Santorini at midnight was that it made you feel like you'd earned something, even if all you'd done was book the flights.
Colin Bridgerton stood at the edge of the rooftop club with a drink in each hand — one his, one he'd picked up off a random table because someone had left it and it seemed wasteful — and looked out at the caldera glittering black and silver below and thought: yes. Just that. Just yes.
The music was loud enough to feel in his chest. The air was warm in the way Greek summer air was warm, which was different from London warm or Italian warm — drier, older somehow, like the heat had been sitting in the white stone for three thousand years and had simply never left. He'd tried to explain this in a post last week and gotten fourteen thousand likes and a comment from a travel magazine asking if he wanted to contribute a column. He'd think about it later. Right now there were shots.
"Bridgerton." Callum appeared at his elbow, already slightly unfocused around the eyes, which for Callum meant the night was going extremely well. "Sophia was asking for you."
"Was she."
"For approximately forty minutes."
"Well then she has excellent patience." Colin handed him one of the drinks. "Here. You look like you need this more than I do."
Mark, the groom, was wearing a sash made from a napkin and a marker and looked genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy in the way of a man who was getting married in two weeks and had successfully stopped thinking about it for the evening. Colin was fond of Mark. He was fonder of this — three days in Santorini, a catamaran yesterday, the good taverna the night before, and now a rooftop in Oia that had been written up in every travel publication he'd ever read. Worth every word.
Shots were passed around. Someone counted down in Greek. The table erupted and Mark kissed the paper sash and Colin was laughing, and the night had that quality of being completely, effortlessly inside itself.
He was, by any metric, having the time of his life.
Sophia found him twenty minutes later. She was Greek-Australian, a friend of the bride's who'd been folded into the bachelor party the way Santorini nights folded people together, and she had dark hair and a very good laugh and absolutely no interest in what he did for work, which he found incredibly refreshing. She said the shot Nikolaos kept producing tasted like furniture polish. She was right. He bought her a drink in apology.
"Dance with me," she said, which was not really a question, and Colin, who was three drinks and two shots in and in Santorini at midnight and twenty-nine years old and why would he say no, said yes.
The dance floor was crowded and warm and the music was the kind that didn't require any particular skill, just movement, just being in it, and Sophia was fun in the easy uncomplicated way of someone you'd never see again after this week and both of you knew it and that was fine, that was actually perfect. At some point she kissed him, or he kissed her, the distinction felt academic, and it was good in the simple way that things were good when the night was going well and the caldera was glittering below and nothing was required of you except to be exactly where you were.
He was mid-song, her hand on his chest, grinning at something she'd said, when Callum grabbed his arm.
"Bar run," Callum said. "Come on."
Colin pointed at the bar, which was — two steps down. Right there. He went.
His foot landed wrong.
That was genuinely all that happened. A slight tilt, a correction his body attempted and did not complete, and then the floor came up with no warning whatsoever and he was on it, staring up at the lights, the music still going, Callum somewhere above him saying something that was lost in the bass.
Then the pain arrived.
It was coming from his ankle with a very specific, very insistent quality that his brain, even several drinks deep, immediately knew was not good. Not a twisted ankle. Not the kind you walked off. Something that had strong opinions about his immediate future.
"Mate." Callum's face appeared. "Are you—"
"I'm fine," Colin said, which was what you said, and then they tried to help him up and he revised that assessment entirely and sat back down on the step and breathed through it while Callum said something to someone and someone said something back and the music kept going and Sophia appeared in his peripheral vision, saw the situation, and mouthed oh no with genuine sympathy before Mark appeared and crouched down next to him.
"How bad?" Mark said.
"Bad," Colin said. "I think."
Mark looked at the ankle. His expression said yes, bad. "I'll stay with you until the ambulance—"
"Absolutely not," Colin said. It came out more firmly than he intended. "It's your bachelor party. Go back to the table."
"Colin—"
"Mark. Genuinely. Go." He looked at Callum. "Both of you. I'm fine. I've got my phone."
They hovered for another few minutes, the way people hovered when they were guilty about leaving, and Colin was patient about it because it wasn't their fault and they should go, they absolutely should go, this was not their problem to sit with. He had his phone. He had the bar staff, who had produced the chair without being asked and were being very kind about the whole thing. He waved them off.
The ambulance took twenty minutes.
He spent them alone on the chair, his leg elevated, texting back the group chat with one hand while the party continued in the background — music, laughter, the distant sound of Mark doing something that earned a cheer from the table. Good. Fine. They should be doing exactly that.
The alcohol was metabolizing and what was replacing it was something he'd rather not examine too closely.
The hospital was small and clean and extremely quiet.
They gave him something for the pain that made the strip lighting very bright and the ceiling extremely interesting. Fracture, the doctor explained in careful English. Surgery in the morning when the orthopedic surgeon arrived. Tonight: manage, stabilize, rest.
Surgery. He turned the word over.
He was twenty-nine years old and had never had surgery. He picked up his phone.
His mother first — but it was one forty-seven in the morning, and calling his mother meant Violet Bridgerton, which meant love and warmth and approximately forty-five minutes of escalating logistics that he did not have the bandwidth for right now. He called Anthony.
Four rings. Then: "Colin." Rough. Awake now. "What's wrong."
Anthony never answered a late-night call with hello. Colin had always appreciated this.
"I've broken my ankle," Colin said. "I'm in hospital in Santorini. They want to do surgery tomorrow and I—" He stopped. "I don't want to do this alone, Ant."
A pause. The gear-change. "Kate is—"
"Thirty-seven weeks. I know. I'm not asking you."
"Benedict's in New York."
"Crap, that's right."
"Daphne has the baby—"
"I know, I held her three weeks ago, not asking Daphne to get on a plane with a 2 month old and 2 year old at home." She'd been very soft and very pink and extremely serious about everything. The baby, not Daphne. "What about Eloise?"
"Scotland. She went up for Francesca. It's been hard."
Colin absorbed this. "Okay," he said. "Right."
"Gregory has finals. Hyacinth's still in sixth form. Mom isn't going to leave Hyacinth with me and Kate about to have a baby." A pause. "Colin. I'm sorry."
"Don't—"
"I can have the jet there tomorrow afternoon, the minute they clear you to fly. I promise."
"I know." Anthony's promises were essentially legally binding. "Thank you."
"It's an ankle. You're going to be completely fine."
"I know that too."
"Ask the nurse if you can eat something."
This — the pivot to actionable logistics, the complete inability to sit in a feeling for longer than thirty seconds — was so deeply, specifically Anthony that Colin felt something loosen slightly in his chest. "Yeah," he said. "All right."
"Phone me when you're out. I don't care what time."
"Tell Kate—" He stopped. Kate was about to have a baby. Kate did not need to hear about his ankle. "Tell her nothing. Tell her after."
"Obviously."
He hung up.
The ward went on around him. Soft footsteps, something wheeled past, low voices in Greek. His ankle was stabilized. In the morning a surgeon would arrive and it would all be sorted and it would be fine and he absolutely knew it would be fine.
He thought about the rooftop. The caldera glittering below. Sophia laughing at something he'd said, her hand warm on his chest. Mark in his paper sash, kissing it. The whole night when it was still whole — still moving, still easy, still not requiring a single thing from him except to be in it.
He was twenty-nine years old. He had been to sixty-three countries. He had a million people who wanted to watch him do it. And right now he was lying in a hospital in Greece at two in the morning, waiting for surgery on an ankle he'd broken falling down two steps, and every single person he loved was somewhere else tonight.
It was, objectively, a lot.
Colin Bridgerton turned his face toward the curtain and was, in the quiet of a small Greek hospital, thoroughly and completely alone.