Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Colin Bridgerton is on a sweaty bus schlepping his sweaty ass out to Machu Picchu with a lot of other sweaty tourists when the message comes through.

Eloise Bridgerton: Fair warning, Penelope is probably going to be calling you at some point today to tell you that she and Debling called off their engagement and broke up... Although entirely fair of her, she’s been a little nutty about it. So, I highly recommend keeping most of your thoughts to yourself and just letting her rant.

He blinks down at his phone for several seconds and reads and rereads the middle part of his sister’s text several times. Penelope called off her engagement? She broke up with Debling? After two years of dating and then doing incredibly long distance for fourteen months while he went to bloody Antarctica on a research trip? Didn’t he just get back like a few days ago or something? What the actual fuck is happening?

Colin tries typing a response to El’s message asking for more details, but it never goes through. It turns green for a moment before later appearing with a little red error message. He even switches over to WhatsApp futilely, but that’s no use either. He’s in the middle of the Peruvian jungle with absolutely no signal. He’s just going to have to periodically try responding every once in a while on the journey to see if he’s in a pocket with phone service at some point.

His mind races for the rest of the ride to the ruins wondering what could have happened to finally spur Penelope to dump the world’s most boring man. It’s no great secret that Colin isn't fond of Alfred Debling—not today and certainly not the day he met him three plus years ago at the Bridgerton Christmas bash his mother throws every year. He’s an oddly quiet man, but when he does communicate he speaks in a disarming sort of way that always made Colin feel unsettled around him. He’s also quite academic and bookish, having no real interest in art or sport or music or fashion or pop culture at all.

He never understood the two of them together frankly. He thought Pen would be better off with someone a little less reserved and trending towards introversion. She seems to blossom in the chaos and inherent extroversion that most of the Bridgertons embody, himself typically included. But he'd come to terms with never understanding what quality Debling possessed keeping Pen's attention and apparent affection.

Once they arrive at Machu Picchu itself, there is the faintest hint of a signal and unsurprisingly he gets a notification for a missed call and a voicemail from the one and only Penelope Anne Featherington.

Colin’s tempted to just call her back right away without listening to her message first, but he decides it’s better to know what specifically she’s said when he notices it’s a minute and a half long.

Hey, it’s me. I’m realizing now, though, that you’re in Peru and probably somewhere without a signal today. Anyway, I assume the Bridgerton family gossip train is cruising down the tracks and you already know, but… Debling and I broke up. Or rather, he broke up with me. Isn’t that rich? I waited around for over a year while he cavorted with icebergs and bloody penguins, and he comes back home and breaks up with me?

Colin inhales then as Penelope simultaneously seems to take a deep breath for the first time since she started talking.

Sorry. I know I sound scorned and bitter, but… I don’t know. I’m moving out tomorrow, and have spent all day today on the phone with wedding vendors cancelling a million and one services that I no longer require. I think scorned and bitter are probably pretty legitimate feelings for me right now… Men just suck, you know? They fucking suck—excluding you. Most of the time. Anyway, don’t worry about calling me back if you’re like tucked away in the rainforest or something. I’m alright. Even if I sound like a nutter, I’m fine. I swear. Send me pictures, though. I could use some of your pretty nature shots this week. Talk to you soon. Bye.

He rubs his face the moment her voicemail ends. He feels both simultaneously annoyed and grateful that he’s not in London right now. On the one hand, he’d really like to be in town to track down Debling and punch him square in his know-it-all fucking face. On the other hand, he’s glad to avoid the inevitable assault charge that act would earn him.

Colin cannot believe that it was Debling who broke up with Pen. Where does this guy get off? Proposing to a woman he’s been dating for two years a week before he leaves for Antarctica? Going to bloody Antarctica for over a year? And then coming home and dumping that woman who faithfully waited for him and planned their wedding all by herself all that time?

He knew Alfie Debling was a bore, but he never thought he was capable of such disrespect and frankly cruelty. Colin assumed Penelope felt somewhat the same way—that she viewed him as a safe choice. Someone who wasn’t going to hurt her or make her life more difficult. Someone like her father who gambled away her family’s money, spent more hours drunk than sober, and treated her mother and sisters and her like garbage.

But apparently they were both wrong about Debling, and now Pen is in London dealing with the fallout. She moved into his place shortly before their engagement, a big old Georgian house in Mayfair that had been in his family for centuries. It's not unlike Colin’s own family’s big old Georgian house in Mayfair too. Now that he’s back and now that they’re broken up, it sounds like she has to move out of the place she’s spent the last fourteen months taking care of and making a home for them in. She’s losing not only her relationship, the person she thought she was going to spend her life with, but also the space that she’d planned on spending her life in too.

Colin swallows and shakes his head to try and clear it for a minute. He’s going to try and call her back, hoping that the shoddy signal holds up long enough for them to have at least a short conversation.

“Hey,” he hears her greet once the call somehow manages to go through a few seconds later.

“Hi. Hey. I’m sorry. I just got your message. I’m at Machu Picchu.”

“I figured,” Pen says with a tight laugh. “All good. Everything’s grand here anyway.”

He rubs his chin and sighs. “Pen… I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she says in a hollow voice before the phone cuts out. It picks back up a few moments later while she’s in the midst of saying something else. “—care so much if I didn’t have to move on top of it all.”

“Sorry, the connection is a little shoddy but I think I got most of that. Are you okay? Is there anything I can do to help?”

She snorts. “From Peru?”

“Well, I’m only here for another two days and then I’m back to New York. I could come to London instead if that would be helpful.”

“No,” she starts before the phone breaks up again. “—don’t—El—even Hyacinth—I’m fine.”

Colin winces in frustration, looking up to the sky and praying for the connection to stabilize a bit. This is an important call, and he really doesn’t want to have to end it prematurely. Realistically, he wouldn’t be able to talk until he’s back in an actual town or city, which won’t be for about six more hours at a minimum. By that point, it will be the middle of the night in London and she’ll be fast asleep.

“I just… I don’t know how I got here, you know? It makes no—getting married—distant the last few months, but I thought that was just—then I saw him when I picked him up at the airport and I just knew—I don’t know—did wrong…”

“Pen,” he interrupts. “I’m really sorry but you’re breaking up. I have terrible service out here.”

“Colin?”

“Pen?”

He hears something that sounds like her sniffling and sighing before she mutters a curse word. “Fuck.”

It's then that the line goes dead entirely. Colin groans in frustration and considers hurling his phone into the jungle in front of him for a moment, but thankfully he stops himself from doing that.

He tries to send a text to apologize for the dropped call, but that won’t go through either. As he shoves his phone in his pocket and forces himself up off the bench and to go check out some ruins he’d previously been very excited to visit, he can’t help but note the ache in his stomach that’s seemed to settle in. He knows it’s been brought about by the last few things he think he heard from her—that she was wondering what she did wrong and a sniffle to indicate that potentially she was crying over it.

Colin doesn’t get a chance to properly talk to Penelope on the phone until he’s back in New York after Peru. She never answered the day after Machu Picchu, and then he was flying most of the day after. It seems, though, in that time she’s gone from shocked, bitter, and sad to some other emotion he can’t quite pin down entirely but feels distinctly un-Pen-like to him.

“Wait, so you’re not looking at flats this weekend with El after all?” he asks in confusion while they’re on the phone together. His sister’s been texting with him a bit to keep him updated on how Pen’s been doing, and she mentioned earlier that she had lined up a few flats for her to look at this weekend. Apparently, though, that’s no longer the case based on her having informed him that she’s busy this weekend with something else.

“No. My stuff’s in storage for now, but I’ll just deal with it when I get back.”

Colin’s brow furrows. “Get back? Get back from where?”

“Ibiza.”

“Since when are you going to Ibiza?”

“Since my fiancée dumped me just months before our wedding and I haven’t had a proper fun holiday since I was 21 years old and on Daphne’s hen trip there.”

He lets out a sigh and rubs his forehead. “El’s going with you?”

“No, I’m going alone.”

That has his posture straightening a bit. “Pen, I don’t know if—”

“I didn’t ask your opinion,” she snaps. “I’m going. I don’t need your blessing.”

“Of course you don’t,” Colin acknowledges carefully. “I’m just wondering if a solo trip to a party locale is really the best course of action right now. You should bring El with you.”

Pen huffs. “El can’t really travel right now with the term having just started. But again, I’m not asking for your input on this, Colin. I’m going to Ibiza for a week, and I’m going to drink and dance and have some bloody fun like any other 27-year-old red-blooded woman, alright?”

The conversation peters off from there, and they hang up a minute or so later so she can pack. She’s apparently staying at his sister’s place tonight but then catching a plane to Ibiza in the morning.

Colin decides that if Penelope is being impulsive and taking a last minute trip, then maybe it’s time he reminds her about his own impulsive, chaotic tendencies too. That is exactly how, after 10 hours in the air and a layover so short he had to sprint through the airport to catch his connecting flight, he finds himself standing in the pickup area of the Ibiza airport and waiting for a familiar face to cross his path.

He texted her last night that he arranged for a car to pick her up at the airport and to look for someone holding a sign with her name. She told him it wasn’t at all necessary, but dropped her protests when he said it was to apologize for giving her a hard time about going in the first place.

“Colin?” Pen asks in complete confusion as she approaches where he’s leaned against a pillar and waiting for her. “What are you doing here?”

He gives her a little smile. “I told you I’d arrange transportation, didn’t I?”

He moves forward then before she can respond and gives her a hug. She’s apparently still a bit in shock because she doesn’t exactly embrace him all that warmly once she’s in his arms.

“Are you staying?” Pen asks carefully, her brow arched almost in a way that reminds her of Portia (which of course he’d never say out loud!). “The whole time?”

He nods. “That was the plan. I had a bit of a lull with the stuff in New York, so I figured I’d keep you company.”

“And you didn’t think you should tell me first?”

Colin swallows and shrugs his shoulders. “There wasn’t a whole lot of time. I made a snap decision—just like you.”

“Right.”

Things are a little frosty as they venture from the airport to the resort she’d picked out. After making it clear she only booked a room with one bed, Colin explains that he’s just going to get his own room once they get there. It’s not the height of the busy season, and he’s certain that he’ll be able to get his own.

That logic, however, turns out to be flawed. Apparently, they’re doing construction on one whole wing of the resort, and therefore rooms are scarce at the moment. There’s nothing available today, tomorrow, or the day after. Come Monday, though, he should be able to get in somewhere.

Pen is more than a little displeased by this turn of events. He offers to pay for them both to stay in a different resort, the nicer one down the road maybe, but she steadfastly refuses. This is her holiday, she reminds him briskly. He’s chosen to tag along on it, but he’s not going to dictate what she does. He can share the bed for three days with her or he can go to the more posh resort down the road, but she’s staying right here.

Colin’s a bit taken aback by the forcefulness of her response. She’s not normally so stubborn and is much more likely to play the accommodating, go with the flow role in her friendships and familial relationships too. Perhaps this is an example of the Post-Breakup Penelope El warned him to keep an eye out for.

Ultimately, though, he can’t really blame her, even if it does make more sense to him to just let him pay for the new resort with openings so they can both have a room and don’t have to share a bed. She is completely correct in that this is her holiday as well. She has every right to do with her time what she wants.

Luckily, the bed is a king sized one, so even if they have to share, it should still be very comfortable for them. It’s odd, though. Colin hasn’t shared the bed to sleep for more than a couple of hours in a long time. He’s on his phone scrolling and trying to remember the last woman he properly slept in the same bed with when Pen emerges from the bathroom she’s been shuddered inside for the last twenty minutes.

“Woah,” he says reflexively once he sees her. And frankly, that’s the only word going through his head too. Pen’s seemingly done a complete 180 degree shift in her wardrobe and is standing there in front of him in the tightest, shortest article of clothing he’s ever seen her in.

Colin rubs the back of his neck for a minute as she stands in front of the full length mirror and spins around a bit to examine her dress from all angles.

“Where are you headed to dressed up like that?”

“Like what?” she retorts, sitting on the chair by the window and starting to strap herself into a pair of massively tall heels.

He shrugs. “I dunno. Like you’re about to go clubbing.”

“I am on holiday if you recall.” She pauses with one shoe on and arches an eyebrow at him. “Or did you think I was planning on staying put in the room and wearing my sweats the whole time? Did you think this was a sad, jilted bride holiday?”

Colin blinks for a second and forces himself not to stare at the expanse of her pale, smooth legs and the way her small foot inside her shoe is arched at the severe angle the heel creates.

“No, not that. I dunno what I thought, I suppose.”

“Well, it’s not a sad, jilted bride holiday,” Pen retorts as she returns her gaze to her other shoe and affixes it to her foot. “I came here to get drunk, have sex, and have fun.”

Colin, who’d just risen from the edge of the bed and started heading towards his suitcase to put on an outfit that made more sense with her own, quite literally stumbles at that second item in her trip itinerary.

“Have sex?”

She hums as she touches up her lipstick or lip gloss or lip stain or whatever the hell it is in the mirror.

“Who are you having sex with?” he inquires, wondering then if she knew someone here in Ibiza and the locale for this trip wasn’t quite as random as he assumed.

“I don’t know yet,” Pen explains with a roll of her eyes. “I have to go out and meet him, don’t I?”

“Right.”

He doesn’t mean for his voice to sound so tight, but he can’t help it. He was prepared to keep Pen company on her solo holiday post-broken engagement. He was prepared to join her on excursions, to go to dinner with her and ensure she doesn’t have to spend her meals alone. He was not prepared, however, to be a witness to some sort of rebound sex marathon that he’s starting to suspect was the main impetus for this trip. He’s not prepared for that at all.

“I’ve spent the last fourteen months in my house, celibate, and dutifully waiting for my fiancée to come back from the bloody South Pole,” she chirps, correctly guessing his mind is still lingering on that particular detail of this trip. “I deserve to get laid, Colin, and I am begging you not to make me feel badly about it. It’s the first time in my life I’m doing something like this, and if you’re going to be here, I need you to be supportive.”

Colin watches her through the reflection of the mirror she’s still facing. It’s tiny, almost imperceptible even, but he catches the way her eyes are slightly wider and full of some kind of hesitant, pained emotion that wasn’t there a moment earlier. As much as she’s professing to be fine—that all she wants to do is move on and get over him and have fun, Penelope is still dealing with a broken heart and likely to some degree a broken spirit too. Even if it makes him a little uncomfortable, he knows what he needs to do to make her feel whole again and remind her how truly wonderful she actually is.

“I’m supportive,” he insists, extracting from his bag a white short-sleeve textured shirt that’ll hopefully work for whatever Pen has in mind for tonight. “I’m always going to be supportive of you. That’s why I’m here, you know.”

She twists around then and tilts her head to the side. “Even when my goal is to shag someone?”

“Even then,” he answers with a sigh as he pulls his t-shirt over his head and replaces it with the nicer if not slightly wrinkled shirt. It seems like she’s intent on leaving right this very minute, though, and he won’t delay her by pulling out the ironing board.

“It’s going to be weird, don’t you think?” Pen suggests as he’s switching out his comfortable trainers for a more fashionable pair. “This is uncharted territory for us.”

She’s not wrong. They’ve been friends—very good friends even—for a long time. They’ve seen each other through a whole host of life changes and milestones. First boyfriends and girlfriends. Graduations. Parties. Dances. She’d even gone and gotten engaged to someone. And they were friends through it all despite the fact that they’ve never really spent a lot of time discussing love and partners and sex. It’s sort of in a similar vein to how he’s approached his relationships with his sisters, but that doesn’t feel right either when it comes to Pen. There’s something really comforting in her not being related to him specifically—that she’s intertwined in his life, that she knows all these things about him and his history and his faults and his personality but she chooses to stay on the inside anyway. His sisters are stuck with him for life. Penelope technically isn’t, even if he hopes desperately she's around for the long haul.

“It’s fine,” Colin insists. “I can be a good wingman. I introduced Kate and Anthony if you recall.”

Pen laughs lightly at that as she grabs her purse and starts to head towards the door. “I was there. They’d been eye fucking each other from across the room for an hour, but sure. You brought them together.”

“Yeah and then by the end of the night, they were fucking with more than just their eyes. So, my track record is pretty good in this department.”

She stops in the open doorway, being short enough even in her high heels to stand entirely underneath his outstretched arm holding it open. “You promise it won’t be weird for you? We don’t have to go out together if its' going to be weird.”

Colin swallows and nods once, fighting like crazy to stop himself from letting his gaze dip lower than her chin and ogle her tits and the absurd view he has from up this high. “I promise, Pen. We don’t have to make it weird.”

Unfortunately, it is just inherently weird and also seemingly impossible for her to flirt and drum up interest from a member of the opposite sex with him at her side. They spend the entirety of that night and the next one too at a few different cocktail lounges and night clubs. Penelope has him sit at a different section at the bar for a while, but it’s so very odd just watching her sip on her drink and vaguely survey the patrons and occasionally get chatted up.

On the third night, he’s on the far side of the bar half participating in a conversation with the two recent university grads on holiday and half watching Pen across the way. She’s in the midst of her own chat with a few blokes who approached her from a different section of the bar several minutes ago. They’re a little on the burly side, probably British or Irish if I he had to guess based on their attire and general demeanor. He doesn’t immediately like the look of them, the way that one in particular seems to be crowding her seat a bit and forcing her to slide further and further back and nearly off her stool.

However, Colin’s trusting her to handle it if they’re making her uncomfortable. She’s a grown woman, and he’s seen her put a handsy jerk in his place on more than one occasion over the years. Tonight, though, he doesn’t mind keeping an eye on her just in case she could use a little assistance.

Pen surprises him at one point by turning around and looking across the bar directly at him. He straightens when he realizes she’s making eye contact in what almost certainly feels like a silent plea for him to intervene. The two young women beside him who he’d been conversing with gasp slightly once he’s up on his feet and immediately crossing the crowded bar area to get to Penelope instead.

“I said I’m not interested,” he hears her saying as she tries to twist her body to face in the opposite direction and keep her thighs away from the man sitting on the stool next to her. “That’s a polite way of saying fuck off, yeah?”

Colin reaches her then and plants a solid hand on her shoulder from behind. “Everything alright?”

“Oy, who’s this tosser?” one of the men cracks from the group now rising to their feet. “’S that your boyfriend?”

“Just leave us alone, alright?” Penelope. “Enjoy the rest of your night somewhere other than right here.”

“What’s going on?” he interjects, trying to be brought up to speed while his eyes flit over the men forming a small circle in front of them. He’s still got his hand on her shoulder and he gives it a little rub. “These guys bothering you?”

Pen opens her mouth to respond but one of the annoyances lets out a bark of laughter. “You were right, Eddie. That is her boyfriend, and I bet they’re into that… What’s it called again when you like watching another bloke fuck your lady?”

“Cuckholding,” the one called Eddie supplies. “It’s called cuckholding.”

Colin glares at the group of guffawing men and realizes from the sound of their voices and the proximity now that they’re all quite drunk and clearly looking for trouble.

“Keep it moving, lads,” he says firmly, gesturing away from the corner of the bar they’re tucked into. “If she said she doesn’t want to talk to you, then it’s time to leave, yeah?”

He’s channeling Benedict as best he can at the moment. He has this uncanny ability of diffusing fights and keeping Colin or Anthony from getting into trouble in situations like this. He’s not sure it’s working, though. He doesn’t possess the same sort of deflecting and disarming brand of charm that his older brother does.

“It's a free country,” Eddie chimes back in with. “Not sure why we have to leave just because you and your chubby little bird—”

Colin’s heard quite enough then. There’s no need for Eddie nor any of his mates to get another word in. He grabs him by the collar of his stupid cheap shirt and shoves him up against the wall of this stupid grimy club.

“Are you deaf or just fucking stupid? If I said it’s time to go, it’s time to fucking go, you little ugly prick.”

He’s got about ten inches and thirty pounds on Eddie, but a few of his mates have a bit more of a rugby build. Colin’s still not overly concerned about it, though. It wouldn’t be the first scrap in his life that he was outnumbered, and growing up with two older brothers taught him how to hold his own when his back’s against the wall.

In the end, it never comes to blows between them. The bouncers intervene and promptly kick all of them out. Eddie and crew make their way down the street and in the direction of a few other clubs before the staff send Penelope and Colin outside too.

“Sorry,” he mutters once they’re back out on the sidewalk and alone once more. “I didn’t mean to get us thrown out of the place.”

Pen sighs and rubs her forehead. “It’s fine.”

“Also, they were fucking losers, Pen. Don’t think one more second about—”

“I’m not,” she cuts in, starting down the sidewalk quickly all of a sudden and causing him to lurch forward to catch up with her.

Colin’s quiet for a few moments as they just walk, Penelope seemingly intent on speed walking as fast as she can in her high heels. It doesn’t make much of a difference to him, though. Her legs are so much shorter than his that he’s essentially just walking in his normal gait with her stomping in a rush down the sidewalk like this.

She’s professed not to be thinking about what those tossers said about her before Colin started getting physical with them, and he really hopes that’s true. He can’t shake the feeling, though, that there’s something bothering her if it’s not that. Her face is set in a hard line, and the distinctly frustrated aura emanating from her is pretty hard to ignore.

“Pen, I’m sorry. I—”

“Don’t apologize again,” she interjects harshly before taking a breath and letting her face soften again. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I looked to you for help and you helped. I’m just sorry I probably got in your way of talking to those girls at the other end of the bar.”

Colin snorts. “I don’t care. I wasn’t all that interested in chatting them up to be honest.”

“Why not?”

“They were a little boring,” he says with a sigh. “Even considering the fact they were clearly on coke.”

Pen surprises him by coming to a dead stop on the sidewalk at that and looking up at him. She doesn’t say anything, her blue eyes flitting quickly over his face as the wheels in her mind are definitely spinning and working up some grand idea.

“What?” Colin prompts impatiently after he has to guide them to the side to let a group of people pass by them. “What’s that face for?”

“Maybe I should try that,” she says cautiously, her brow furrowing and her teeth running briefly over her bottom lip.

“Try what?”

He watches those big, sky blue eyes of hers roll dramatically. “Drugs…”

For the second time in the last minute or so, Colin lets out a snort in response. He waits for her to laugh, to inform him that she was joking of course, and carry forward on wherever her high heels are taking them tonight. None of that comes in the moments that follow his responding noise, however. Instead, she’s just looking up at him with a serious, set expression and maybe even a hint of annoyance too.

“Oh Pen…” he says through a groan as he rubs his face. “C’mon. Be serious.”

“I am!” she says shrilly before throwing up her hands. “I’ve never done anything like that before, and I came here to live a little. I’m 27 years old and the most illicit substance I’ve ever had was a hit from your brother’s joint when I was 17 and it made me throw up. Well, that might have been all the vodka cokes I’d had before that, but still…”

It’s his turn to roll his eyes at her then. Colin shakes his head once and grabs her by the hand to get her moving back down the sidewalk and in the direction of another bar or their hotel at least. Anywhere but standing still and talking about her trying drugs for the first time.

Pen seems surprised by him taking ahold of her hand and moving them along for a moment. At least, he assumes it’s surprise that keeps her from resisting initially and letting him lead her away. Eventually, though, she wakes up and carries forward in her argument while she does still allow him to hold her hand.

“Isn’t that what people on holiday in Ibiza do? Party? Get high? Have fun?” she says exasperatedly. “Why can’t I fall into that category too?”

“Because it’s not you, Pen,” he answers tightly in response, his eyes flitting down to her face to see her immediately frown. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be anyway. Trust me. You’re not missing anything.”

That has her wrenching her hand away finally and once again coming to a complete stop on the sidewalk. “So it’s okay for you to try all that stuff but not me? How is that fair?”

“I’m not saying it’s fair or not fair,” Colin retorts, running his newly freed hand through his hair. “I’m just saying it’s unnecessary. I don’t think you’d enjoy it.”

“You don’t know what I’d enjoy!” she shouts at him, her cheeks going red and her breathing speeding up. “Stop trying to handle me, Colin, and just let me fucking be!”

Doesn’t she see how stupid this all is? This is so unlike her to even go down this path in her mind, let alone so illogically refuse to hear out his informed, measured opinion on the matter. Where is rational, responsible Penelope? And who is this petulant, destructive little monster that’s invaded her body and mind of late?

“I didn’t ask you to come on this trip and babysit me, you know,” she continues a beat later. “You just showed up here at the airport and sort of forced my hand if you recall.”

“Oh,” Colin says sarcastically then. “So what? You’d like me to leave? So you can fend off packs of handsy Neanderthals on your quest to get laid all by yourself?”

Further anger or maybe even hurt flashes through her eyes, and she shakes her head once at him. “That’s not fair and you know it.”

“C’mon, Pen,” he says desperately, trying to take her hand again in a more gentle manner this time. “Let’s just drop the pretense and talk about what’s really bothering you, why you’re… acting out all of a sudden.”

“Acting out?” she challenges loudly. “Acting out? What? Like I’m thirteen? Fuck off!”

“Well,” he continues with a shrug. “If the shoe fits…”

Penelope lets out a frustrated little scream then and quite literally stomps her foot. Colin is itching to point out to her that move is in fact done something that he observed each of his four sisters (well, maybe not Franny) do on multiple occasions at the age of thirteen.

“You’re a fucking ass, you know that? I’m obviously struggling with some stuff, but you’re not my father or my brother and you don’t get to talk down to me or tell me what to do to fix it. You’re supposed to be my friend, Colin. That’s all!”

He lets out a groan and decides it’s time to backtrack a bit and apologize. He knows he didn’t navigate this discussion very well, but his intentions were good and he wasn’t trying to belittle her or act like a father or brother figure either.

“Pen—”

“No,” she yells as she turns and starts walking away from him. “Don’t ‘Pen’ me. Just… leave me alone for a little bit. Don’t come back to the room for a while. I need some space from you.”

Colin lets out yet another groan, but he does in fact stay put in place. As much as he doesn’t like the idea of letting her walk back to the resort alone, he thinks she’s right about some space being appropriate at the moment. They’re getting nowhere in this conversation, and he’s probably better off having some time to think about a better approach to handling an admittedly struggling Penelope than fighting with her about doing drugs on a street corner in the nightlife district.

He walks back to the resort slowly, giving her plenty of time to get there ahead of him even with her heels and shorter legs accounted for. Even when he arrives back at the hotel, he stops off at the outdoor bar and has a drink by himself.

Colin’s mind wanders while he nurses his scotch, and he wonders just what it is that Penelope’s keeping bottled up inside. He understands that it’s difficult getting out of a long-term relationship—that it’s probably especially difficult when she was in the middle of planning a wedding not so long ago. It’s just truly baffling to him still, though, that Alfie fucking Debling is inspiring this spinout that his best friend seems to be in the midst of. The blandest, blondest man in all of London in his opinion. Sure, maybe she’s embarrassed about him leaving her and calling off the engagement. But can’t she see through at least some of those troubling emotions to find that she has to be better off avoiding committing her life to that wanker?

Colin wonders if that’s part of what’s going on with her and inspiring the trip to Ibiza and all her distinctly non-Penelope behaviors of late. Maybe this is a response to having settled for something so boring and plain and safe. Maybe she’s looking for a little excitement, a little danger to give herself a little jolt. Maybe a reminder that she’s dynamic and fun and free is just what she needs to come back to herself more completely. Maybe the “spinout” as he’d been thinking about it earlier is actually necessary in this case.

He sighs to himself as he scopes out the bartender working down at the other end of the bar. It’s been a long time since he leveraged this particular skill set in his travel bag of skills, but it’s time to brush off the cobwebs and channel his inner party kid of his early 20s again.

“Can I come in now?”

Colin’s just opened the door to their hotel room, but he’s lingering in the landing until he hears Pen say it’s okay.

“Yeah.”

He lets out a sigh of relief before he crosses the threshold and steps around the corner to be able to view the rest of the living space. Once he does so, he finds Pen in bed and in her pajamas with a book open on her lap. It’s a more familiar sight than when he’d seen her last—done up in a tight black dress and with heaps of black makeup obscuring her soft, blue eyes.

“How you doing?” he asks lightly as he kicks off his shoes and deposits his wallet and key on the top of the dresser. “Still mad at me?”

Pen gives him a little glare in response, and Colin quickly raises his hands in defeat.

“Sorry, that was dickish. I know I was being an arse. It’s okay if you’re still mad at me.”

“I’m not,” she huffs after a momentary pause. “It’s impossible to be mad at you for more than five minutes, I think.”

He smiles in relief at that and shakes his head once. “Well, that’s good. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to share a bed with someone I’m beefing with.”

“Where did you go?” she asks as he’s digging through his suitcase for a clean shirt to wear to bed.

“Just down to the hotel bar for a bit. Had a scotch or two and thought about my actions tonight. I had a plan to come up here and be a little more genuinely apologetic, you know, but there’s just something about you that makes me want to be cheeky—especially when you’re wrinkling your nose and pouting like you are right this second.”

“I’m not pouting,” she bemoans, closing her book and setting it aside. “I just desperately need you to stop acting like I’m a child, Colin. I’m a grown woman. I deserve your respect even if you don’t agree with or approve of the choices I’m making.”

Colin runs a hand through his hair and nods. “I know. You’re right. I do respect you, Pen. I think I respect you more than just about anyone else out there…”

He trails off for a second before digging in his other pocket for the only item he hadn’t thrown on the dresser earlier. He takes a second to look at it before tossing it onto the bed in her lap. “Which is why I’m making this gesture of good will and demonstrating my respect of your decisions.”

Pen’s brow furrows as she lifts up the little baggie with powder in it up and in front of her face. It seems to take her a second to register what she’s seeing before she gasps and lets it fall out of her fingers in shock.

“Is this cocaine?”

Colin chuckles and shakes his head. “Not quite. It’s molly. Or at least I hope it is. The bartender I bought it off seemed like a pretty upstanding bloke, I guess.”

She hums in understanding then as she picks up the baggy she’d dropped and turns it over a few times in careful examination.

“If you want,” he continues once she’s looking up at him again with an open, curious expression. “We can try it tomorrow before we go out. Maybe it will be the kind of fun you’re looking for.”

“You don’t have to do it with me,” Pen says slowly as she places the baggy atop her book safely on the nightstand. “I don’t want you to feel forced into anything you don’t want to do.”

“It’s fine,” Colin retorts with a shrug. “I’ve done it before, and frankly being the sober one isn’t all that appealing. I’d rather be high as a kite and euphoric right there alongside you.”

“Euphoric?” she echoes, blinking at him innocently. “Is that really how it feels?”

He shrugs a second time. “It’s different for different people, I think. But from what I can recall, I felt pretty fucking light last time I did this.”

“Which was?”

“About seven years ago.”

Pen lets out a laugh. “Well, thanks for making a return to form for me. You’re a very accommodating guy, you know.”

“Earlier tonight I was an ass and now I’m accommodating…” he muses smugly. “See? The drugs are already working.”

He hears her tinkling laughter a second time before her expression grows a little more serious. “Thank you, Colin. I… Just thank you.”

He doesn’t say it—instead just gives her a friendly, dismissive wave—but as Colin makes his way to the bathroom, he thinks that his response might have been that he’d do anything for Penelope Featherington. That chatting up the bartender he correctly profiled as having a side hustle and dropping some money on a little molly is nothing compared to the lengths he’d go to make her happy, to help her feel whole again. She’s his best friend. His only constant outside of his family in his life that never involves sitting still and hanging on to anything or anyone for too long. She’s worth quite a lot to him, and he just hopes he has the means to keep her close for many more years to come.

Chapter Text

“We’re doing this?” Colin asks from beside Pen on the bed. “You’re sure?”

She shrugs and nods. “Yes, I'm sure about me doing it at least.”

He lets out a sigh. He’d been hoping over the course of the day that she might have changed her mind about this. They spent the earlier portion by the pool where she peppered him with questions about what it was like in the past when he’d done molly—how he felt, who he was with, whether he got sick, why he stopped doing it at some point, etc. He didn’t try outright discouraging her from doing this again, but he did try to convey a general anti-drug message more subtly through his responses. Either he’d been too subtle or Penelope is too determined, because here she is nodding and prompting them forward all the same.

They’ve just gotten back from a decent dinner at the resort and are about ready to head out to one of the clubs for another night on the town. Normally, he’s done this type of party drug in the bathroom or even just by popping a pill someone gave him on the dance floor. Today, though, he’s trying to be a bit more responsible than that, and he wants to make sure they take it and don’t have any immediate adverse side effects or find out there’s something other than powdered MDMA in this little baggy he bought from the bartender last night. It feels safer to discover any of those possibilities from their hotel room instead of out in public at a nightclub.

“Alright then,” Colin finally responds with a sigh. “Let’s get this show on the road, I suppose. Pass me your book, will you?”

Pen frowns in confusion but reaches for the book on her nightstand all the same. He places it atop the bed and proceeds to go about carefully emptying about half the powder in the baggy along the front cover.

“Colin!” she chastises immediately. “That’s from Alfie’s library. I have to give it back!”

He gives her an incredulous look as he pulls his room key out of his wallet. “Honestly, that only makes it more appropriate to snort drugs off of in my opinion.”

She pauses for a moment, her head tilted to the side while he arranges the powder in a perfectly neat little line. “Actually, that’s a good point.”

Colin chuckles as he lifts the book up and holds it up in her direction. “You ready then?”

He watches as her blue eyes get wide for a moment and she blinks down at the sight in front of her. She doesn’t make a move to lean in and inhale the powder into her nose like he explained she’d have to, though. Instead, she looks back up at him with her lip between her teeth and looking rather bashful.

“Will you go first?”

He lets out a soft groan. “If you’re changing your mind, that’s more than okay, Pen. But I don’t want to go first and be off my ass on molly once you do.”

“I’m not changing my mind,” she retorts firmly, her brow forming into a tight line on her forehead. “I just want to see you do it so I can copy you. I’ve never done this before and you have.”

Colin sighs and rubs his chin before passing her the book to hold carefully. She balances it evenly, her hands not seeming to shake in a way that both concerns him and impresses him at the same time. Shouldn’t she actually be more nervous than this?

He clears his mind then and leans forward, adopting a position he hasn’t held in several years and lining him his right nostril with the edge of the powdered line. In one swift, smooth movement, Colin moves to the left and inhales deeply as he goes.

The immediate shock and burn he feels in response has him coughing lightly and rubbing at his nose furiously. He’d never really been a huge fan of snorting anything, and it appears time has helped him forget just how uncomfortable it actually is.

Pen’s got a hand on his shoulder while he breathes in and out and waits for his mind and his vision to clear. “Oh God, are you okay?”

Colin swallows and swipes his hand back over his nose to clear any remnants of the powder he’d just inhaled. “I’m okay. It’s just… a lot at first. I can tell this is going to hit me fast.”

She’s blinking at him owlishly and nodding slowly, her eyes darting over his face and seemingly cataloguing his every move. “Are you sure you’re okay? That’s definitely molly? Not like… poison?”

He laughs out at that. “It’s molly, alright. I think I’d already be dead if it were poison.”

Colin places the book back on the bed and grabs ahold of what’s left of the baggy too. He proceeds to dump out some more powder atop it, but he hopes she doesn’t notice he’s not exactly emptying the bag out either.

“Hey,” she says indignantly when he tries to covertly shove the baggy in his pocket. “That’s not half.”

“Well, you’re a lot smaller than me and this shit is going to be strong,” he retorts. “Just trust me. I’ll bring the rest with me if you want.”

She seems mollified by this to some degree and shuffles closer to him on the bed now that he’s lined her portion up in a neat row too. With one more heavy look between them, Colin watches as sweet, smart, lovely Penelope Featherington leans down, presses her button nose to the book from her ex-fiancee’s library, and inhales a line of MDMA off it like a goddamn pro.

“Oh my God!” she exclaims as she rears her head back and pants. “That’s… fuck!”

He opens his mouth to ask her if she’s alright, but instead a laugh bubbles out of him. He realizes then that it’s already hitting him, that familiar blindingly happy lightness is already starting to blanket over him and remove any and all anxiety or concern from his mind.

“Woah,” Pen murmurs a few seconds later while she’s looking at him again and wiping her nose delicately with a tissue from the nightstand. “I feel funny.”

“Funny good?” he asks, his face splitting into a grin despite himself.

She nods once slowly. “I think so.”

Colin decides they might as well start heading to the club now since the drugs are clearly settling into their systems and it doesn’t seem like either one of them is on the brink of passing out or dying. They’re pretty quiet as they head out of the room and through the resort to the exit. He steals a few glances over at her, though, and finds that each time he does so, she’s looking around at the area they’ve traversed several times over by now with a look of bemused wonder on her face like she’s seeing it for the first time.

Once they’re on the crowded sidewalk heading into the nightlife district a few minutes later, Colin has the overwhelming urge to keep her close to him. He takes ahold of her hand—so soft, pale, and manicured perfectly with her small, almond shaped pink nails—and they spend the rest of the while walking hand-in-hand to the club.

Colin’s doing his best to stay focused and to keep his head on straight, but it’s really hard when he feels as high as he does. He probably should have started with a little bit of the molly instead of just going ahead and snorting half in one fell swoop. He’s out of practice, though, and thought he had the same tolerance for mind-altering substances that he did when he was 23.

“I think I might float off into space if you let go of my hand,” Pen muses with a goofy smile as they’re moving through the entrance of the club.

He lets out an earnest laugh. “Well, I won’t let go then. I’ll keep you tethered.”

That earns him an even wider smile then, a grin he’d call it, from the pretty redhead at his side. “Me too.”

Soon, they’re inside the heart of the nightclub and everything feels loud and fast and heavy and intoxicating. They’ve been here before, but tonight it all feels amplified in an almost overwhelming way. It’s a good kind of overwhelming, though—the kind that makes him feel like they might get lost in it all, but that they’ll come out the other side feeling better for it. Like they’re about to go on some strange, powerful, happy journey. And Colin doesn’t mind that—so long as Penelope keeps her word and doesn’t let go of his hand.

He'd previously asserted that they shouldn’t drink while they were high, but that was Sober Colin talking. This version of him is a lot more lax with the rules, and he finds himself dragging Penelope up to the bar and ordering a scotch and a gin and tonic for her. They both drain them fast, and thankfully he has enough clarity to remember that MDMA makes him really, really thirsty. He’ll try to keep that in mind for the rest of the night, and ensure they mix in a few waters to keep from getting entirely cross-faded.

“Holy shit,” Pen calls out from beside him where they’re both leaned against the bar and looking out at the dance floor. “This is awesome.”

“Yeah?”

She looks up at him with a hazy sparkle in her eyes. “Uh huh.”

“Maybe I created a monster,” he jokes, his smile so big and bright that it almost hurts on his face. “Maybe this was a bad idea.”

“I think it might have been the best idea I’ve ever had,” Pen retorts, giving his hand a squeeze. “I think I could climb Kilimanjaro on this stuff.”

In the next half hour or so, they try to get the lay of the land and settle into the feeling of being high. They do manage to make some friends, though, in a pair of young women on holiday and in a similarly euphoric state as them. He wonders if they too made friends with the bartender at their resort and snorted some powder or took a few pills before heading to the club. Either way, they have a riot of a conversation with them, even if he finds he can’t recall just seconds later what was all that funny about any of it.

“We’re going to dance!” the blonde one whose name he simply cannot retain calls out brightly. “You two should come with!”

Pen looks up at him with a smile on her face before her gaze drops back to the bar and she purses her lips. “We’ll see you out there! I want one more shot.”

Their new friends skip away then, and Colin observes passively as his best friend proceeds to order three shots. He looks around him on either side and then frowns in confusion at her.

“Why three?”

“You’re taking two,” she directs, pushing that many in his direction. “I’m a lightweight and I don’t want to be drunker than you.”

He can’t seem to come up with an argument for that logic in this state, so he simply shrugs and drains both of them back to back.

As Penelope leads him by the hand to the dance floor, she looks back at him at one point with a serene sort of smile on her face. He blinks at her and feels his stomach swoop headily with anticipation—of what? He isn’t entirely sure. He just feels so loose and pliable and ready for whatever is going to happen next. None of it could be bad, could it? He’s too happy and this moment is too perfect for anything bad to happen.

The music is thrumming intensely, and for a long time, dancing together is endlessly funny. Pen and he are moving around each other, still connected by his palm against hers and their fingers intertwined, and just laughing and laughing in complete and utter delight.

Dancing is so fun, he thinks about a million times. Why doesn’t he do this all the time? He should quit taking pictures and social media entirely and devote all his energy to dancing. Maybe Pen would do the same and they could spend the rest of their days just like this. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

For a while, there’s a group of people, including their two friends from the bar, that they’re somewhat interacting with while they dance. Occasionally, in the blur of it all, someone tries to pull one of them away from each other to dance with them instead, but he never comes close to letting her hand go and he notes that she tries to let him go either. There’s pretty women flitting about this dance floor, and yet, he doesn’t want to look at anyone but Penelope tonight. He’s obsessed with the easy grin on her face, the way her eyes close sometimes while she’s twirling about and swaying, and the contented, playful curve of her lips. He’s seen snippets of this kind of carefree joy from her over the years for sure, but he’s never seen her so entirely consumed by it either. The only word he has to describe it is beautiful—utterly, utterly beautiful.

“What?”

Colin blinks at Pen in surprise and realizes that he’s leaned down and apparently spoken something directly to her that he can’t quite recall.

“What?” he echoes dumbly when he still comes up short after trying to remember it for a few more moments.

She laughs at that generously and shakes her head. “Come on, let’s get another drink. I’m parched.”

He nods eagerly and again allows her to lead him by the hand away from the dance floor and back over to the bar they came from earlier. He has no sense of time, though. That could have been ten minutes ago or two hours. It’s all gotten a little too hazy.

Colin has the clarity of mind to insist upon two waters with the two shots that Pen orders too. He forces her to drain her cup after she drains her shot glass, and he follows suit a beat later.

“I have to use the toilet!” she yells over the din of the music from the dancefloor, which prompts them both to march off in the direction of the lavatories on the other side of the building.

Once they’re in that hall and standing in front of two doors—one marked “mujeres” and one marked “hombres”—Colin comes to the realization that they’ve encountered their first problem of the night.

He lifts up her hand, the one still tightly wrapped around his own, and stares at it. “Oh.”

Pen hums in agreement and he shifts his gaze and finds her frowning. “I guess we have to let go now…”

“I don’t want to, but… yeah. I guess so.”

He watches her quirk her lips to the side and think for a moment. He wonders if she feels the same way he does—if she’s thinking too that they’ve been holding hands for so long tonight that it feels a little scary to let go. It’s scary even if it’s just for a few minutes to go use the restroom.

“Come right back here,” she says after a beat, her fingers flexing and finally releasing his hand. “Just wait for me right here.”

Colin reluctantly allows her hand free from his own and nods. “Okay.”

Once he’s slipped into the men’s toilet, he tries to go about quickly relieving himself and washing his hands. It’s crowded in there, though, and the fluorescent lights inside are irritating his eyes. It’s a relief to step out into the dark, more open hallway a few moments later, and he lets out an exhale as he backs up against the wall Pen indicated he should wait for her by.

The minutes tick by slowly, but soon enough he is reunited with his redhead and her hand slips back into his again.

“You waited for me,” Pen says with a hint of awe and bemusement even. “I was afraid you’d leave me all alone.”

Colin shakes his head quickly and squeezes her hand. “Never.”

There’s a charged moment between them, and he can’t figure out what exactly is going on. Penelope’s smiling, but she also still looks a little wonderstruck. He decides the best course of action is to get her back out to the dance floor. Everything makes sense on the dance floor.

Once they’re back in the mass of people, swirling lights, and loud music bouncing off the walls, Pen keeps on holding his hand. This time, though, she seems intent on keeping him even closer than that. Sometimes she’s got both his hands in hers. Sometimes she’s touching his chest. Sometimes she’s turned to face him and pulling his arms around her neck. It feels a little like she’s clinging to him—like every time he tries to move away to try and spin her around or even just to get a little air, she’s tugging him close again. It’s the oddest thing, though. Even though it’s hot and he’s sweaty and there’s already people bumping into him from every direction, he likes the way it feels when Pen is touching him and holding him tight. He likes it a lot.

At one point, she spins around and backs up against him, her hands unsurprisingly pulling his forearms around her waist. She’s in very tall heels, but still the height difference between them is rather substantial. He has to lower himself a bit to be able to plant his palms on her hips in the way she seems to want him to, but he makes it work. It feels too divine having her pressed up so firmly against him to complain about having to stoop over a bit.

Colin vaguely registers as his focus goes in and out that this is novel. He’s never held onto Penelope like this. He’s never squeezed her hips. He’s never felt her soft, generous ass against his front. He’s never felt a single part of her body touching his crotch, even over the clothes. He’s never once gotten to handle so much of her like this, and he’s finding it all rather mind boggling.

The aroma of her lavender shampoo. The thrumming music. The colorful flashing lights. The hem of her bubble gum pink dress riding up slightly as she moves against him. It’s all too much and yet at the same time not nearly enough either.

When Pen twists a bit in his arms and tilts her chin up to his face, Colin’s heart is pounding frantically in his chest. He wonders if she could read his thoughts or if maybe they aligned with her own, because the look in her eyes feels eerily familiar. If he had a mirror, he’s pretty sure he could confirm it matches his expression right now too.

“Pen?” he all but shouts over the din surrounding them.

He doesn’t know what he’s expecting her to say in response. Hell, he doesn’t even know what question he’s implying with the intonation at the end of her name like that. But the words that leave her lips—the action that she all but demands of him—is certainly not within the realm of expectation at all.

“Kiss me.”

Colin spends exactly one second staring down at her in shock before his body goes into autopilot and complies. He lifts a hand from one of her sides to hold onto her jaw, leans the rest of himself down and into her, and presses his lips hard against hers.

Sparks—no, fireworks go off in his brain and his belly then. Kissing Penelope is so inherently right that it makes him want to shout. It’s the most satisfying, perfect sensation, and he knows instantly that she’s a drug more powerful than one he’s ever dabbled in before. Molly, mushrooms, cocaine, weed… He’d been there and done that with all of them. He doesn’t miss them even a little bit honestly. But this, kissing his best friend, is a drug he’s sure he's never going to be able to quit.

Thankfully, Pen doesn’t seem to be interested in quitting him either. He gets to take hit after hit of her lips against his, of her tongue tangling with his own, of her sweet little gasps sliding down his throat.

Somehow, Colin registers at one point that they’re not on the center of the dance floor anymore. Instead, he’s pressed Pen up against a wall on the outskirts of the space and they’re sloppily snogging each other silly.

“Colin…” she says through a panting breath, the normally icy blue of her eyes gone and entirely swallowed up by her pupils. “Oh my God…”

He groans then, his own chest rising and falling and trying to take in as much air as he can. He feels like he’s going to explode—like he’s going to die if he can’t touch her and kiss her and smother himself in her mouth and her hair and her body.

It’s only then that he realizes where his hands are. Both of Colin’s palms are up under the hem of her dress and pressing into her ass, and it feels like fucking heaven. Pen’s tits get a lot of attention because they’re… well, they’re a bloody triumph of course. But her ass is not to be overlooked. He’s got fistfuls of it right now and it’s soft and bouncy and oh so grabbable.

“God,” he starts, swallowing roughly as he’s still panting a bit. “Your fucking ass, Penelope…”

He can’t form a sentence. He can’t give voice to the compliments floating through his mind right now. But hopefully she gets it. Hopefully him palming her like this, rubbing and digging his fingertips into her—hopefully that’s clear enough.

Colin goes to dive back into kiss her when he feels a rough tug on his arm and turns blearily to the side. It effectively removes one hand from up under the back of Pen’s dress but he’s still got one hand holding onto a cheek for dear life.

“Enough,” the bouncer who’d grabbed him says glaring at him as he swats at that other arm too. “Go home.”

“Sorry,” Penelope squeaks in front of him, a giggle leaving her lips as she does so. “We’re sorry!”

The man rolls his eyes and walks away then, clearly spotting some other more pressing matter across the bar judging by the speed at which he leaves them. Once he’s gone, Colin turns back to face Pen, who is brushing her hair back from her face. At some point in all their kissing, it seems like he may have gotten a hand into it. Her previously tamed curls are now a bit of a riot around her face. He likes it better this way. It’s closer to the raw, unfiltered version of her that he's known all his life—closer to the girl she was at the core before her family and her circumstances tamed her and turned her more inward.

“Should we?” she asks, her eyes blinking at him as she runs her thumb along her kiss-swollen lower lip.

He can’t think properly when she’s doing that. All it makes him want to do is push her right back against the wall and see if he can make it even more swollen instead. “Huh?”

Pen drops her chin and laughs. “Should we get out of here?”

“Oh,” Colin replies dopily before nodding. “Yeah, yeah we definitely should.”

Just as they entered, the pair of them depart the nightclub hand in hand. Only this time when they pass through the doors, they’re stepping out of the bubble of darkness and noise and flashes and into something closer resembling real life. He wonders for a split second if this will all stop making sense then—if kissing her, if touching her, if wanting to burrow himself inside her and never ever leave, will start to feel abnormal again.

The cool night air hits him, and Colin pauses walking for a moment to get his bearings. He finds that exiting the club and breathing in his first lungful of oxygen unmarred by the scent of alcohol or sweat or even cigarette smoke does in fact have a clearing effect on his mind. His eyes sweep over his best friend, who is standing next to him and smoothing down one side of her skirt that was still apparently bunched up from the way he’d been essentially groping her in the club. And he can see her better—he sees Penelope. He sees the young woman he’s known all his life basically. The girl who wore yellow ruffled dresses against her will. The teenager who grew out her bangs and grew into herself so beautifully. The young writer who ace’d uni and who got published before most twenty-somethings are done putting together their resumes. The young woman who tried to make all the right choices and play by the rules only for it all to blow up in her face. It’s Penelope Featherington. She’s who he was kissing and holding and lusting after. And she’s still the person he has all those feelings about too.

Pen looks up from her dress to find him staring directly at her, and she holds his gaze for a charged moment before dipping her head and laughing. The sound of it—high and melodic and something like home—draws forth his own laughter.

“C’mon Casanova,” she teases, tugging him by their still connected hands down the sidewalk in the direction heading towards their resort. “Let’s get out of here.”

It takes ages to make it back to their hotel room. Penelope and Colin keep having to stop every several yards to kiss and giggle and even purchase some pastries from a street vendor that they snack on as they go too. They arrive eventually, though, and he’s delighted to find she doesn’t seem interested in anything but snogging him against the door for the first several minutes on end.

“Jesus,” she mutters against his lips once her hand snakes its way in between their bodies and she palms at his bulge. “You feel big.”

Colin laughs and is surprised—both at her words and the feeling of her rubbing him gently over his pants. “Thank you, I think.”

“Are you going to fuck me tonight?” Pen asks with a wide eyed look on her pretty, lipstick-smudged face.

He swallows and tilts his head to the side. “If you want me to, yeah.”

She lets out a little sigh at that and brings his face back to hers. “I haven’t been properly fucked in so long, Colin. I’m afraid I won’t even remember how it goes.”

As much as the molly keeps him in a perpetual state of dopey bliss, he’s still struck by the sadness of that statement. This young woman is incredible—beautiful, smart, kind, funny, resourceful, and understanding. Someone should have been taking care of her. It isn’t right that she’s been untouched for so long. It isn’t right at all.

“Colin?”

He’s been staring at her in a daze, he realizes then, and he promptly clears his throat. “I’m going to make you feel good, Pen. Don’t worry.”

Her breath hitches in response and she nods eagerly a beat later. “Thank you.”

Colin wants to make a joke about not thanking him yet—that he hasn’t actually managed to get her off yet. But he doesn’t get the chance to. Pen is back to kissing him hungrily and guiding them backwards towards their shared bed in the middle of the room.

It turns out that he doesn’t have much to worry about when it comes to his ability to tease an orgasm out of Penelope. Save for her knickers which he tugged down her legs and tossed behind him somewhere, she’s still in all her clothes when he touches her cunt and has her coming on his fingers for the very first time. It almost happens so fast that he feels like he’s missed it—like he was so carefully paying attention to what he was doing with his thumb at her clit and his digits stroking and curling inside her sopping wet pussy—that he was barely aware she was that close to coming before it was happening all at once.

“Oh fuck,” she whispers, her hand clutching his shoulder and her eyes heavily lidded. “That… Fuck, Colin.”

“Good?”

Pen lets out an actual whimper at that and nods. “S-so good…”

Now that the thing he was most worried about is off the table (not being able to make her come), he devotes himself a little more enthusiastically and frankly messily to making her do it a few more times. Their clothes steadily fall by the wayside as they kiss and slide their hands across every inch of newly exposed skin right up to the point that Colin undoes her bra and her breasts lightly bounce on her chest for having been freed.

“Good God, Pen…” he mutters, swiping a hand across his lips. “Your tits are… They’re… fuck.”

“Eloquent as ever,” she quips as she brings his hand that had been hovering over her chest awkwardly and plants it atop her right breast.

Colin can’t help the groan that leaves him immediately in response to feeling her tit in his hand for the first time. She’s perfect—utterly, utterly perfect. He didn’t know a boob could feel this good and (not to brag) but he’s touched more than a few over his thirty years on this Earth. She’s soft and full and warm, and just like with kissing her, he knows he’s never going to be able to go back to the state of existence he was in before fondling his best friend’s breasts for the first time.

Pen seems to sort of lose her cool too as he continues rubbing and stroking her tits, his free hand having quickly lifted to hold onto her other side too.

“You know how pretty your tits are, don’t you?” Colin says while he circles her peach-colored nipples delicately and marvels at how they stiffen and start to stand up. “I hope you’ve been told that a thousand times.”

He hears her swallow and let out a quiet breath. “I… They’re okay.”

“Pen,” he groans, managing to lift his gaze from her miraculous boobs to her face instead. “They’re better than okay. Say they’re beautiful. Say ‘my tits are beautiful, Colin.’”

He doesn’t know if he actually expects her to comply with his instruction. It’s a little over the top of him, he knows. But breasts like this would make any man a little insane, he thinks. And besides, he’s on drugs to boot.

“My… my tits are beautiful, Colin,” Pen surprises him a few moments later by whispering, her tongue running along her lower lip before she pulls it in between her teeth. “And I really like how you’re touching me.”

He lets out a heady groan at that last bit, his fingers sinking into her supple skin a little more now. This woman is a wonder, he decides, and she simply must come again on his fingers if only so he can take the time to simultaneously worship her breasts with his mouth.

Colin nibbles and licks and sucks at Pen’s tender nipples for several minutes then as he gets his fingers working back between her legs too. She whimpers and gasps and rolls her hips against him in response as he steadily helps build her up to her second orgasm of the night so far, a tally he is very much happy to be adding to.

“Pl-please, Colin,” she moans, her legs falling open a little wider and making it so he has completely unbridled access to her cunt. “I… So close…”

He releases her right tit with a loud little pop. As much as he’s loving getting to pay so much attention to her breasts, he’d really like to see her face when she’s in the final throes of pleasure. He missed it with the last orgasm that snuck up on both of them.

“That’s it,” he rasps, nodding down and her and watching her eyes open slightly to look back at him. “That’s it, Pen. Come for me. Wanna feel your pussy flutter again…”

“Ah!” she calls out a second later when he curls his fingers inside her and seems to rub against her g-spot nicely. “F-fuck…”

Penelope jolts in his arms as she gasps through that second release of the night, her legs vibrating and clamping shut clumsily around his hand as she rides her wave of pleasure. He finds he’s quite glad he took a break from her tits to look at her properly. The expression on her face—the far away, overcome sort of bliss—makes his stomach do flips and also makes him feel about ten feet tall with the knowledge that it’s him making her feel and look like this right now.

Colin stills his hand once it’s clear she’s done coming and the noises she’d been letting out turn into something more whiny and sensitive. He doesn’t remove it from between her legs entirely, though, instead stroking her puffy lower lips that are coated in her arousal. They’re even more swollen than when they’d gotten started, and he’s really delighting in being able to feel just how much her cunt’s already been affected by what they’ve done tonight.

He knows he said he would fuck her, but Colin also suspects Pen needs a moment to come down and rest before they go for the main attraction. The first orgasm felt fast—like a precursor of something more heavy to come. This one, though, seemed deeper in a sense. She looks a little lost in the aftermath of it, with her eyes still shut tight and her breathing choppy.

Penelope surprises him, however, just a few moments later when she opens her eyes. There’s a look that passes between them, and it’s full of heat and longing and desperation. She makes it very clear even without words that she’s not done with him right now—that she wants more from him, all of him even.

Colin is more than happy to oblige, especially considering his cock is throbbing in the confines of his boxer briefs he’d kept on so far in all this. She helps him with removing those, though, her fingers latching onto either side of his waistband and tugging them down steadily.

When his length bobs out as his underwear gets shimmied down his thighs, he wishes he could have captured the expression on her face with a camera. Her lips part, her jaw drops, and her eyes go comically wide. It reminds him funnily enough of a cartoon character face, but soon she lets out a little giggle and looks back up at his own face.

“What?” he asks with his brow furrowed. “What’s so funny about my dick?”

Pen just bites her lip and shrugs. “Only that I was right. It’s big.”

Colin drops his chin and chuckles. “Oh. Thanks, I guess.”

“Say it,” she presses, her hands drifting along his narrow hips a few times. “Say ‘I have a big cock, Penelope.’”

He swallows and feels his stomach flip at the role reversal over what he’d had her say earlier. It’s a lot harder than he gave her credit for to go along with it and say something like that. It honestly takes him a few attempts at opening and closing his mouth while she gazes up at him with a pretty little smirk spread across her pink lips before he gets it out.

“I have a big cock, Penelope,” he echoes before pausing a moment to add more just like she had. “And I’m going to use it to fuck you now if you still want me to…”

She blinks at him in surprise before nodding and slithering down the bed to lie more flat on her back. “I want you to.”

Colin shifts above her and even pulls her legs a bit further apart to make room for himself then. She’s like putty in his hands, completely allowing him to press open her thighs and bending her knees however he wants to arrange her. It sends a fresh wave of pleasure-soaked disbelief coursing through him in response.

Once he takes ahold of his aching cock and gives himself a preparatory stroke, he pauses from efforts to line himself up at her center as a flash of responsibility comes into focus for perhaps the first time tonight besides insisting they stay semi-hydrated at the club earlier.

“Condom?”

Pen looks at him in confusion for a second, her eyes darting between his face where it seems she feels like she’s supposed to be looking right now and his lower body where it seems like she honestly wants to be looking instead.

“S’fine,” she says after a second and gives his hips a little tug. “Please, Colin. I want you now…”

He relents then. He’d offered and given her the chance to have him dig one out of his toiletry bag and put it on. That’s as much responsibility he can muster at the moment.

When he sinks inside her finally—first his tip notching at her entrance and spreading her open for him and later his length steadily dragging through her folds—they let out a pair of matching gasps in response to the feeling.

“Oh God,” she mutters brokenly as her hands grip his hips for dear life. “Shit… Fuck.”

“You good?” he croaks once he’s fully seated, his head dropping to her shoulder for a moment for a place to rest and so he can try to steady himself. She feels fan-fucking-tastic right now—so tight, so hot, so unbearably wet—and all he wants to do is fuck her like a jackhammer and be totally, entirely selfish for a minute.

He won’t be selfish, though. Because yes, this may be an absolutely absurd scenario he’s found himself in. And yes, she may feel like heaven incarnate wrapped around his dick and pulsing lightly like this. But this is Penelope. This is his best friend, and a woman who deserves someone treating her like the treasure that she truly is. He’s not going to be selfish when it comes to her.

“Yes, yeah,” she urges him, her arms wrapping around his back and pressing against him. “Please move, baby…”

Baby.

The word short circuits his brain a bit, and Colin gives her a clumsily thrust motivated entirely by his basest instinct and not at all by that overwhelmed brain of his. He gathers himself, though, and lifts up his head so he can watch her face properly instead.

From there, he proceeds to give her what she asked for. He moves his hips back and then forward again, slowly, deeply, and powerfully. He watches her as she takes him inside her over and over again, one leg lifting up off the bed and wrapping around his waist eventually. It all feels so supremely good that it’s a miracle he hasn’t come yet. He wonders if he has the alcohol and the drugs to thank for that—for dulling his senses a bit. Then again, though, nothing about this feels dulled in any manner. He feels electric, like a live wire, like he’s actually experiencing this for the first time. He feels like everything and anything is possible in this moment.

Colin senses Pen moving beneath him eventually and realizes she’s wiggling to make room for her hand between them. He watches distractedly as her lovely manicured fingers make quick work of rubbing circles around her already well-attended to clit, and he also lets out a throaty groan when he feels the evidence of that movement around his cock as her cunt tenses around him.

“Fuck, Pen,” he mutters, moving his own hand to grip the outside of her thigh tightly. “I’m… I’m not gonna last…”

“Wait,” she urges him desperately, her back arched slightly and her eyes hazily locked on his face. “Just wait for me…”

He nods and takes as deep a breath he can manage in this state. Colin focuses on the steady rhythm of his hips thrusting against her and his cock dragging in and out of her folds. He can do this, he tells himself as he closes his eyes for a beat. He can wait. She asked him to wait and he’ll be able to do it for her.

Finally, Colin feels the now familiar sensation of Pen’s body tensing and her pussy quivering around him. His eyes fly open just in time to see her lips part, her head go back, and a silent scream leave her as her third orgasm of the night overtakes her. It’s gorgeous—the feeling of her walls tightening and pulsing around his driving length. So gorgeous, in fact, that it sends him headfirst into his own orgasm, a surprised sort of gasp leaving his mouth as all that pressure and tension he’d been carrying releases in an instant.

Once he’s finished and he’s come deep inside her, Colin extracts himself as carefully as he can manage in this state and slips from between her legs. She makes a little wince and lets out a little whine once he’s left her, and his eyes drop from her otherwise blissed-out face and her heaving chest to her cunt instead.

It’s wild, he notes to himself as he tries to catch his breath from beside her, that he’s looking at Penelope Featherington’s cunt. He’s watching his cum leak from that deep place inside her and mix with her own arousal to sluice down her inner thigh. He’s watching her hole flutter and pulse around air, almost giving him the impression it should be filled instead. He resists the temptation to press two of his fingers back there and give her something to fill her up. It’s almost certainly too much for her right now, but he’d really, really like to all the same.

Everything about this night has been wild, Colin continues to muse when he manages to drag his attention away from his best friend’s cunt and instead looks at her face again. They’ve kissed, they’ve touched, they’ve seen each other naked, and now they’ve had sex too. Great sex. Fantastic sex. Sex that he wasn’t sure was achievable before tonight. And yet, it all feels so simple. Of course this has all been great because it’s Penelope. She’s… Penelope. He doesn’t have words to describe what she means to him or a proper term to define her presence and her role in his life. He never has. But this—this deeper, more intimate, sexual component being added to their relationship just feels inherently right and easy. It’s good. This thing between them is very, very good, and it makes him feel very, very happy too.

Even through all these post-coital endorphins firing in his brain and the effects of the molly still very much present in his system, Colin vaguely knows, though, that tomorrow probably won’t feel so simple and easy. It feels distant in a way—like a reality that he knows exists but one that is so far from the plane he’s on at the moment that it also feels untouchable and unintelligible too.

Tomorrow, he tells himself as he rolls into Pen, turns her face to his, and leans in for a kiss. That’s all for tomorrow. Tonight is for this—kissing and touching and soaking up as much as he possibly can from his best friend. Tomorrow is for the rest of it.

Chapter Text

The first thing that Colin Bridgerton registers upon waking up is that his mouth is as dry as the Sahara desert. It’s a comparison he feels comfortable making considering he’s trekked some of it on the back of a camel before.

The second thing he registers is that his head is pounding fiercely. It feels like he got hit with a sledgehammer, and he finds his hand automatically lifting to press against it in a useless attempt to quell the throbbing.

And the third thing he registers comes to him as he sits up to begin searching for water and paracetamol—when he sees that he’s naked as the day he was born in the bed he’s been sharing with his best friend.

The events of the night before come rolling back in hazy waves. The drugs. The club. The drinking. The hand holding. The dancing. The kissing. The touching. The fucking. It all flashes like scenes from a movie inside his head, which again is really aching something fierce at the moment.

“Fuck,” he mutters as he rubs his face and looks to the side to find Pen out of bed.

Before he can even have a chance to properly crash out over what happened and where she might have gone, she is rounding the corner, seemingly coming from the bathroom and standing a few feet away from him.

“Oh,” she says quietly before clearing her throat. “Hey.”

Colin sniffs slightly and nods. “Morning…”

He takes a second to look her over, and sadly he has to say that she too looks a little worse for the wear. Pen’s got dark circles under her eyes, and her hair is tossed up in a messy bun atop her head. He also gets the impression from some smudgy blackness around her lashes that she might have just washed off her makeup from last night in the bathroom only moments ago too.

“You okay?” he asks, rubbing the back of his neck and reaching for the half empty water bottle on the bedside table. As he does so, though, the sheet slips slightly and he all but squawks once he realizes he’s about an inch away from exposing his dick before he rights it.

Pen sighs and plops down on the bed next to him. “I feel like death.”

He doesn’t answer her right away because he’s swallowing down mouthful after mouthful of room temperature water, which also makes him wonder if she’s had a chance to rehydrate this morning either. Colin wordlessly passes her the bottle, and she accepts it gratefully before swallowing down a few sips of her own.

“The come down can be rough,” he reminds her. “But some of this is just us being hungover too. We shouldn’t have drank so much…”

She lets out a little snort and makes a show of looking at his bare chest. “Right.”

Colin feels anxiety bubbling up in his stomach and it’s really a particularly terrible combination of factors at the moment. He takes a second to scan her face, which is turned down now as she fiddles with the hem of her robe.

He really wishes he had a little more private time this morning to reflect on everything that happened and figure out what the fuck to do next. What is he supposed to say to her now about last night? He’s afraid to ask how she’s feeling about it when he’s barely had a chance to decide how he himself is feeling about it either. Luckily, she distracts him with a somewhat related question of her own.

“Hey,” she starts quietly before looking over at him again. “I know this is fucking weird, but I have to ask you… Do you remember if you came inside me last night?”

Colin coughs in shock as he feels his cheeks brighten. He did not think this is the topic they would be starting with, but he supposes it’s easy enough to answer.

“Uh, yeah. Definitely the first time. The second time is a little more… fuzzy.”

He watches Pen wince and bite her lip. “Fuck.”

He stares back at her in concern, his brow arched and his head tilted in a silent question.

“I’m not on anything,” she explains awkwardly. “So that’s… not great.”

Colin’s eyes go wide in understanding, and he curses himself for being irresponsible on so many levels last night. “Oh shit. I’m sorry…”

“It’s okay,” she answers with a shake of her head. “I should see about getting the morning after pill, though. I’ve done the math and I might be… Well, I should just get it.”

Colin nods quickly. “I’ll go with you.”

He gets up then, awkwardly clutching the sheet and shielding her from his nakedness, and gets dressed and brushes his teeth. Pen looks on her phone while he does so for the nearest pharmacy and confirms that they do in fact carry emergency contraceptive. Walking there feels like too much of a struggle this morning, so Colin also calls a car for them instead. When he looks next to him about halfway there to find Pen’s lips sealed tight and her face looking a little paler than usual, he wonders if walking might have been safer.

Luckily, she makes it the entire journey and is up and out of the Uber before he can even blink. By the time he’s closing the door and looking across the road to see where she ended up, Pen is bent over in front of some bushes behind a restaurant and clearly getting sick.

Colin feels awful for her as he jogs over in that direction. She’s got her palm against the wall of the building for stability as she heaves over and over again into the greenery and the dirt. All he can do is hold her hair hanging loose around her face back and awkwardly pat her shoulder, but he does it all the same.

“Fuck,” she curses once she rights herself and swipes the back of her hand across her face.

“I’m sorry,” he offers, that awkward hand on her shoulder tightening slightly before he lets her go. “Do you feel any better, though?”

Pen gives him a dark look then before she slides her sunglasses back onto her face. “Honestly? No.”

He decides then that he’s going to go into the pharmacy for the emergency contraceptive, and carefully guides her over to a bench in the shade a dozen yards away or so.

Ten minutes later, he’s walking out with a brown paper bag and sees her with her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands as she looks down at the ground. He can’t help but wonder if she’d gotten sick again while he was inside or is perhaps in the process of being sick again right now.

In the end, she turns out not to be throwing up again, but it's worse than that. Penelope is apparently fighting back tears from behind her oversized black sunglasses.

“Here,” he offers, sitting down quickly beside her and pulling out a cold water and a cold sports drink for her to choose from. “Have one of these and I’m sure you’ll start to feel better.”

“What am I doing, Colin?” she mutters darkly, ignoring his attempt to pass her a drink and continuing to stare down at the cobblestones beneath their feet. “How did I get here?”

“I…” he trails off, rubbing his neck awkwardly. “It’s okay, Pen. Just have some water, okay? You’re dehydrated.”

“Like how is this my life?” she barrels forward, though, lifting her head finally and swiping at her teary cheeks beneath her sunglasses. “Single? Chatting up assholes in Spanish nightclubs? Doing molly? Fucking one of my best friends? Feeling so entirely desperate for a chance at a little intimacy—a human fucking connection even? None of this is me. None of this is supposed to be my life.”

Colin doesn’t love the fact that sleeping with him is one of the things in that list of characteristics and actions that she’s clearly unhappy with, but there’s no time to dwell on that right now.

“Pen,” he tries to intercede again, all but shoving the water in her hand. “You’re on the come down. I told you it might feel dark the next day. Don’t fixate on any of this shit. You just need to take care of yourself today, take it easy, and I promise tomorrow or even later this afternoon will be better.”

She scoffs at him and leans back against the bench, holding the water in her lap but still not making any move to consume any of it. “I’m a fucking mess, Colin. Look at me. You’re telling me this is going to be all better tomorrow?”

“You’re not a mess,” he protests through a sigh. “You’re going through a breakup. It’s normal.”

Pen looks away from him then and flips up her sunglasses so she can wipe at her eyes more freely. “Even before that, though… I was still a mess, I think. I was just more put together and better at hiding it.”

“What do you mean?”

She takes a second to look at him, her pretty blue eyes full of so much heartache that it makes him feel like he might need to go be sick in the bushes now instead.

“I was so lonely,” she whispers, wiping the back of her nose with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “I was so unbelievably lonely for all those months at home waiting for him.”

Colin resists the urge to grit his teeth. Alfred Fucking Debling better hope he doesn’t run into him any time soon because he’s not sure he’ll be able to resist the urge to punch him square in the nose.

“But I just kept telling myself it was going to be worth it when he came back,” she continues emotionally, her voice going up an octave with her clearly trying to hold back the urge to properly cry. “I wouldn’t be lonely anymore and then I’d be getting married in a few months. And sure, yeah, maybe he’d have to go away other times for his work, but hopefully by then I’d be pregnant and we’d have a baby.”

Colin’s eyes go wide at that. He had no idea that Pen was planning on trying for a baby so soon with Debling. It’s not as if she’s a child bride, but she’s still young. She’s only 27. Then again, Daphne was pregnant with her second by the time she was 27 and Mum had him, Anthony, and Ben by then too. It’s just that Colin had barely come to terms with the fact that they were getting married in the first place, let alone that there might be children someday. Children with sandy blonde hair and Penelope’s eyes perhaps. It’s an image that just doesn’t sit right with him.

“I’d have a baby,” she repeats in a watery voice. “And a family and I wouldn’t be so lonely anymore. But now…” She pauses and swallows and looks to him again. “Now look at me. I’m buying the fucking morning after pill. Instead of getting married and trying to have a baby with my husband, I’m fucking my best friend and actively trying to prevent having one. And I’m still so fucking lonely.”

It's at that point that she fully breaks down, leaning forward again and burying her face in her hands to sob right there on the bench in the middle of downtown. Colin immediately puts the bag of items from the store to the side, scoots up close to her, and gathers her into his arms. She doesn’t resist him even a little bit, just letting him pull her against his chest, weaving his fingers through her hair on the back of her head, and hugging her tight.

His mind races as she cries against him. He had no idea about a lot of things apparently—not just the desire to have a baby so soon after getting married. He had no idea that she felt like that—that she was that lonely all this time. Didn’t she have Pen and Edwina and her friends from work? Didn’t she have his mum and the rest of the family too? Didn’t she have him even? How could she be that lonely, that sad, that broken and none of them saw it? That he didn’t see it at least?

Colin knows that some of the severity of this breakdown is from the molly working its way out of their system. It’s the least pleasant side of party drugs, and a massive reason why he stopped dabbling in them in the first place. But that’s certainly not the only factor at play here. Pen is genuinely heartbroken, and she’s heartbroken about a lot more than just a called off engagement and having to find a new flat. He’s coming to terms with the fact that maybe she’s been heartbroken about a lot of things for a long time.

And that realization stirs the guilt bubbling in his stomach up even further. Pen isn’t just acting a little nutty and being impulsive because she’s trying to get over Alfie Debling. She’s having apparently a much bigger crisis of self lately, and instead of properly helping her through it, Colin’s been a) giving her drugs and b) sleeping with her.

It makes him sick—absolutely fucking sick—to think that perhaps he was taking advantage of her last night. He hadn’t realized it entirely of course, but she was in a far more delicate and vulnerable state than he thought she was. She was high and drunk and already admitted to having done things that were unlike herself—things she clearly regrets. Colin wonders honestly if he’s any better than those wankers from the club the other night that were hitting on her and making her uncomfortable. Isn’t what he did even worse? Isn’t getting her high and drunk and having unprotected sex with her infinitely, infinitely worse?

Colin snaps himself out of his self-pitying internal crash out after a minute or so. It’s not the time or place for him to spill his guts and look for validation from Pen right now. She’s still sniffling in his arms and clinging to his shirt. He needs to focus on making her feel better, on getting some fluids back in her, and getting her back to the resort so she can rest and come back to herself a bit more.

“It’s alright,” he whispers finally against the top of her head as he squeezes her close. “You’re alright, Pen. I’m here with you. I’ll see you through this.”

After a while, he hears and feels Penelope take a deep breath in and out before she rights herself and swipes at her teary cheeks. She finally listens to him about drinking some water and he watches as she starts to guzzle down a generous amount from the bottle.

“Careful,” he warns quickly, his hand going to her thigh. “Don’t drink it too fast. It'll make you feel sick.”

Pen nods and stops chugging down water, instead taking a few deep breaths and settling back against the bench again. “Thanks. Did you get it? The pill?”

Colin nods too. “You should wait to take it until you’re sure you’re not going to throw up again. The pharmacist said so—at least I think he did. My Spanish isn’t the best.”

They decide to walk back to the resort even though it is a rather long journey. It feels good, though, to move a bit, and they take it nice and slow. He’s trying not to fixate on all the shit going through his head when he was hugging her and consoling her while she cried—that he took advantage of her last night and did something really, really shitty. It’s hard, though, the longer that the silent minutes stretch on and his mind can so easily be pulled in that direction.

It helps when they get to a shortcut where they have to climb over a short rock wall and walk along the beach for part of the journey and Pen accepts his hand in assistance for getting over the wall. What helps him is that she doesn’t let it go right away. Instead, she holds his hand in hers for another minute or two as they trudge through the sand. It’s hard to think himself entirely evil and depraved when she’s holding onto him so sweetly like this.

When they get back to the room, they both take turns showering and drinking some more water. Colin orders some bread and some cheese from room service and Pen tests out eating a little bit to see if it will stay down. They’re both glad to find it does, which they celebrate by taking a nap then too.

It’s funny going back to sleep in the bed next to Pen after last night and then everything that’s already happened this morning, but he’s honestly so exhausted that he drifts off fairly easily. By the time he comes to, she's out of the bed again but this time he finds her easily on the balcony with a bottle of water and her phone.

Colin eventually gets up and goes out to join her. He’s pleased to see her complexion is more normal now and that she isn’t looking quite as despondent and sick as she had been earlier in the day.

“Hey,” he greets, sitting in the chair beside her and splaying his legs out in front of him. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” she admits before pointing to the crumpled up paper bag on the table between them. “Thanks again for everything this morning. I took the pill a little while ago, just you know.”

“Oh,” he answers awkwardly. “It’s okay. I… trust you or whatever.”

Things go quiet again for a while before he hears her chair scrape against the concrete floor to indicate she’s shifting to some degree. “So.”

“So?”

“So… Are we going to talk about it now?”

Colin’s eyebrows go up in slight surprise. “Last night?”

She nods and he takes a deep breath to deliver the little speech he’d laid in bed for a while after napping and rehearsed to himself.

“Yeah, we should. I…” He pauses for a moment to let out a slow exhale. “I think I’d like to start with an apology.”

Pen’s brow furrows instantly in confusion. “For what?”

“I knew you were going through a rough time obviously after breaking things off with Debling, but… I didn’t realize you were feeling quite that badly over everything. It makes me really sad to think I potentially took advantage of you when you were in a vulnerable state, Pen, and for that—I’m definitely sorry.”

“Colin,” she breathes out. “No… It’s not… I don’t know. Just—you don’t have anything to be sorry about, okay? We made that choice together.”

He swallows and runs a hand through his hair. “You weren’t in your right mind.”

“And you were?”

She’s looking back at him with that arched eyebrow—the Portia one again. He concedes that she has a point there, but reiterates that he didn’t mean for any of it to happen and it certainly hadn’t been his intention when getting them drugs.

“I know that,” she argues with a roll of her eyes. “Trust me. I know you didn’t set out last night or any night ever with the intention of having sex with me, Colin. I don’t need to be convinced of that.”

He doesn’t really know what to say to that but he does give her a tight-lipped nod and settles back a bit more in his seat. He’s prepared to drift off into a (hopefully comfortable) silence, but she surprises him by piping up yet again.

“If I’m being honest,” Pen starts quietly. “I don’t even regret it really.”

Colin feels his eyes go wide at that. “Regret what? Sleeping with me?”

“I mean… I wish you were a condom…” She pauses then so he can laugh lightly. “But yeah. I’m… I’m glad we did it. My memory is definitely hazy, but I’m fairly certain I had a good time.”

He feels a swell of some feeling he can’t identify at her willingness to admit she doesn’t regret what transpired between them and at the implication that she enjoyed it too. It has an oddly calming, settling effect on his physical and mental state, and Colin finds himself slipping into a more casual, more playful sort of mood with her much more quickly than he would have thought possible.

“Yeah,” he finally answers with a chuckle and a shake of his head. “I’m fairly certain you did too.”

Pen wrinkles her nose at him in response, which has him laughing a second time. “Alright, as did I.”

She smiles at that and starts to toy with the end of her hair. “At least it was good. Imagine if we’re best friends and we slept together and it was horrendous? That would be way more embarrassing than this, don’t you think?”

Colin nods. “Oh yeah.”

“I think we’re good, right?” she asks after a beat, her face taking on a slightly more serious expression. “We’re going to recover from all this and land in a good place?”

“I think so. I definitely hope so at least.”

“That’s good,” Pen continues with a small smile then. “If we accidentally got high and drunk and slept together as friends and our only regret is that you didn’t wear a condom. I’d say that’s pretty good to me.”

“To be fair,” Colin feels compelled to add, smirking. “I’m fairly positive I asked about a condom and you said not to bother.”

At that, she groans and covers her blushing face. “Jesus Christ, Featherington.”

He can’t help but laugh at that again. It feels good to laugh with her again. This morning was so brutal he’d worried for a little while there that they might not be able to laugh with each other again. And considering that is favorite thing to do with her and that she might just be his favorite person to do anything with, losing her laughs would have been a real tragedy.

They spend the next few hours just lounging around the room and taking it easy. They order more room service, watch a movie, and even chat a little more about some of the stuff Pen told him this morning when she was having her breakdown on the public bench.

“I hadn’t talked to anyone about the baby stuff,” she admits as she lies back on her side of the bed and twists one of her curls between her fingers. “Not even El.”

Colin hums. “But you were serious about that? You wanted to… start trying or whatever? As soon as you got married?”

“Yeah,” she says quietly and gives him a sad look. “But a lot of it was motivated by feeling so weird and lonely, which are not good motivations for having a child I think.”

Colin sighs and shrugs. “Well, whatever the motivation, I know you would have been brilliant at it—that you will be brilliant at someday still.”

Pen’s face pulls into a bright, soft smile. “Thank you. I… Someday I’d like to, but I want it to be for the right reasons. I want it to be because I'm in love and we want to make a family together and deepen and extend all that love, you know? Like your parents.”

He’s about to answer her that he likes the sound of that too when the landline phone on the bedside table next to him starts ringing. It surprises them both and they jerk slightly in response before he chuckles and lifts up the receiver.

Colin finds it’s the front desk calling to let him know that a room has opened up and is available for him to check into if he’d still like it.

“Who is it?” Pen mouths with a furrowed brow beside him in the bed they’ve been sharing all week so far.

“Downstairs. They want to know if I want an available room.”

He watches her blink in surprise and a swirl of things he can’t quite identify cloud her expression over the course of a few seconds.

“Sir?” the man at the front desk prompts over the phone.

Colin takes another moment to look at Pen’s face. While he can’t quite tell exactly what it is she’s thinking and feeling, the tiny, quick little shake of her head that she gives him is clear enough.

“I’m all set in here,” he informs him. “We’re going to stick with the single room for now.”

They don’t acknowledge the conversation or the decision to continue sharing a room and a bed out loud, but he thinks he understands. Pen doesn’t want to be alone. She’s made that very clear over the course of the last twenty-four hours. Colin doesn’t want her to be alone either, but maybe his desire to remain right here beside her goes beyond that. Maybe it has to do with this blanketing sort of warmth and intimacy that he feels whenever he looks at her now, whenever she talks to him now, whenever she brushes her fingers against his arm or his head or his knee now. Maybe it has to do with those big, swirling feelings he’d been contending with last night when he was off his ass on molly and drunk too. Maybe it has to do with the way those feelings don’t seem to be dissipating as the effects of the drugs and the alcohol are leaving his system. He's too tired, too mentally fried from last night still to process what this all means, but Colin has a feeling that things aren't going to be so neat and simple going forward. Complicated is the word that comes to mind. Everything is probably about to get very, very complicated.