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Pen drapes herself over Colin’s every thought, sure as sunlight, and yet is somehow more abundant when the veil between sleeping and waking is thin. Each night, a new memory, another moment of connection he’d failed to understand at the time blistering over the surface of his fever-catch recollection of their kiss.
A kiss has never rendered Colin dumb before, yet here he is, humbled before the power of Penelope’s. He imagines the phenomenon is akin to opening a bottle of precious, long-kept Bordeaux in a moment of foolhardy impulsivity only to be met by the sweetest intoxication. From that moment onward, the tongue would water for even a suggestion of that which tasted so tantalizing.
He raises his hand to his mouth, pads of his fingers skimming his lower lip.
How had he ever been so adamant about his relationship with Penelope existing firmly within the boundaries of friendship as to announce it in a crowd? He feels very far away from that surety now, that arrogance.
As his eyes flutter closed, his fingernails dug into the plush of his lip, he finds the memory of their dance that night whirling through his mind’s eye. Had he not vowed to care for her, always? At the time, he’d certainly meant it in the same spirit as his caring for his sisters no matter their proximity or station, but had his self-understanding been in line with the feeling rooted in his chest? He rather thinks it wasn’t.
Not that he’s presently any closer to identifying the cataclysmic bloom rampantly taking over his being like buttercup dominating a countryside. Though his every thought becomes entangled with the feeling, he’s no wiser as to its name and he dreads asking even his journal for clarification.
Agitated, he rolls to face the window, sheets twisting around his torso.
The crystalline blue of the moonlight filtering into the room puts him in mind of Penelope’s eyes, and he experiences a lift in his stomach very like the one he gets from meeting those eyes across a ballroom. Following the urgency of it, he frees himself from bed and draws the curtains back, strains to see the facade of the house across the way.
He’s not caught sight of her since their kiss, is in fact putting forth the effort not to seek. He wants it too fervently, and he fears he’ll conduct himself against better social graces as a result.
But, oh, does he want. Wants to test his memory of her cheek’s inviting softness beneath the pads of his fingers. Wants to bask in her smile, close enough to absorb all its warmth for himself alone. Wants…
The curtain flutters back into place. At a loss, he casts his eye to where his journal rests atop his work table.
Surely, this is the sort of madness that drives a man to poetry.
Shaking his head at himself, he locates his matchbook and lights the waning candle he’d employed to keep him company the night before, as well, before unwinding the thread that binds his journal closed. He runs his fingers up the flap keeping his place, caressing open the pages, and takes up a quill.
Pen, he writes, though without intention to pass this letter along, I fear if I asked what has occupied your mind these past days, you would be truthful with me as ever.
He considers that sentence a moment, adds, Can it be that you are not consumed with our kiss, as I am?
Again, he pauses, this time scrubbing at his chin with a clammy palm. If he does so roughly enough, will the desire wailing within him be smothered down to a whimper?
If you were to respond in the affirmative, I
He blinks, feather quivering in his hand.
would be at an enormous loss, for it would be like learning a great and perilous river has carved its way between us, leaving me stranded in my company alone. I much prefer yours—perhaps more than I understand—and this lack of understanding can only force our respective banks further apart.
With an exhale, he skims the page. Then, sheepishly, he dips into the inkwell and continues. Excuse the belabored metaphor. All my thoughts chase themselves in circles lately.
He taps the nib of his quill against that last period once, twice—darkening the spot. You only found my writing palatable because my thoughts had nothing to latch onto but the page. How might you feel differently seeing the muddled effects of my thoughts having latched themselves to you?
In the hopeful recesses of my heart, I imagine you are flattered. He swallows, throat thick. Then again, the starkness of reality so often banishes my hopes to search in vain for a place to rest.
I suppose what I am saying is this: I am uncertain of myself, Pen, a feeling I ought to be paradoxically comfortable wearing. Yet the difference this time seems to be that I am also uncertain of you. You, my most reliable place of rest.
A wry laugh escapes him when he’s struck by the irony of naming Penelope his rest in a writing exercise he’d only taken up in desperation, kept from sleep by thoughts of her.
He sets down the quill and sweeps his eyes around the room. Feels them grow heavy in response to the oppressive solitude piled in every corner.
He does not move, however, until the candle burns itself out, bathing him once more in blue.
~*~*~
Though their marital bed is still as the night around them, Colin is summoned suddenly out of sleep, sensing Penelope’s wakefulness the same way one can taste an impending summer rainstorm. It colors the air.
“Can it be,” he asks without opening his eyes, “that I have failed you this evening?”
“Colin!” She starts, the smack of her palm meeting her chest resonating in the darkness. “I thought you’d gone to sleep.”
“I thought we both had gone,” he says, casting around blindly until his hand grazes her skin, “spent and satisfied.”
“Forgive me,” she says into his hair as he tucks his face against the coolness of her shoulder. “I do not mean to give the impression that I am unsatisfied.”
He makes a noise of acknowledgement. “What impression do you aim to give?”
“None in particular,” she says, sounding rather more like she’s speaking to herself than him. “As I say, I thought you to be sleeping.”
The air continues to buzz with her perturbation.
“You are upset,” he whispers, tracing interlocking shapes over the expanse of her stomach.
The sheets rustle as she shakes her head. “This is happiness as I have never known.”
“As your tone so clearly conveys.”
“Colin,” she says, his name an admonishment, “of course I am happy here.”
He waits.
“I am so happy, in fact,” she continues obligingly, “that I have trouble believing this is any more than a daydream into which I have wandered too deep.”
He considers that, her heart thudding steadily under her skin and lending a meter to his thoughts.
“Warn me if ever you think of waking,” he says eventually, “so that I might convince you to stay.”
“See—” she shifts herself to face him “—you make such declarations, and I am forced to the conclusion that my imagination is feeding you lines ripped from the pages of my romances. Mama was right; reading has poisoned my brain irrevocably.”
He laughs, as she’d meant him to, and catches a strand of her hair between his thumb and fingers. “Surely you do not find my own happiness here that implausible as to be fiction. I am with my Pen, after all.”
“I have wanted you too long,” she says, “and gotten my way too infrequently in life for this to be real.”
His brow furrows. “Left you wanting, have I?”
“I never imagine myself with the proper words, however…frustration beyond compare!”
“Penelope,” he says, mockingly scandalized and rolls over her, pinning her to the spot, “how long have you harbored feelings for me outside the bounds friendship?”
She squints theatrically into the ether of reflection, making him grin. “How long ago was the devilishly yellow head covering and the muck?”
He blinks. “The very beginning? But you never said…”
“I should think not!”
He falls back into place beside her, breath leaving him with a puff, and stares, dumbfounded, into the darkness above them. “I understood myself to be going mad after our kiss.”
“You see then,” she says. “This union defies established law and reason and most assuredly exists only in delusion.”
“I feared you would never consider us as anything beyond what we had always been,” he says, shaking his head, “when kissing you had forever altered the shape of my heart. I feared I would live with that imbalance between us for the rest of my days.”
“Colin—”
“Yet here I am to find you always felt more. How did you…? The weight alone—! I cannot imagine bearing it in silence.”
“Silence,” she says, taking up his hand and kissing each knuckle to punctuate her words, “takes many different shapes.”
“Meaning?”
“I did not suffer but willingly,” she says simply. “Besides, I had my outlets of expression.”
He twists his neck to view her through the shadows, voice arch when he asks, “Meaning?”
“The page is a dutiful listener,” she says, “don’t you think?”
He digests this confession that she, too, has distilled her feelings through the quill. An awe that he’s only ever felt seeing the world open before him crests in his chest.
Squeezing her fingers in his, he once again shifts as close to her as matter allows, seeking out her temple with his lips.
“Our love cannot possibly be delusion,” he says, “when it is so clearly the natural state of things.”
Her sigh, though peaceful, manages to suggest doubt.
“Penelope.”
She turns, her cheek catching against his stubble. “Colin.”
“I am here. You may sleep or dream or lie awake every night. I shall remain here throughout.”
She kisses him, and it is like that first kiss all over again: asking nothing of him but the tenderness he’s always carried in overabundance. He can pour it into her and finally feel right, settled.
He only wishes to provide her the same comfort.
“Thank you,” she says, petting her thumb through the bristly hair framing his ear. “I have done nothing to earn such a gift, but I shall accept it just the same.”
He could argue her deservedness, but words are not likely to make the difference this night. Instead, he fastens his arms around her and tucks her to his chest.
She is asleep within minutes and, as promised, he follows dutifully after, keen to meet her in a dream that, while sweet, shall pale in comparison to reality.