Chapter Text
“Penelope!”
Hearing her name made him whirl around, eager to catch sight of her for the first time.
It had been months.
Had she changed? Had he? He wasn’t certain what he hoped for, only that he had missed her with a raw aching.
Her sunny hair was partially hidden under a colorful scarf she was using for a headband, and she was wearing a loose white dress designed to keep her cool in the heat.
Eloise rushed over to her, crushing her in a hug and divesting her of her luggage, promptly passing it off to Colin as though he was a bellhop.
As he rearranged the bags, her eyes shyly flicked over to him, and he extended a cautious smile. Like a short burst of light, she returned it, brief, but to his relief, genuine.
“I can’t believe you’re here!” Eloise squealed, looping arms with her best friend and leading the way to Colin’s rented Jeep before he could properly say hello.
(He really wished he could say “I’m sorry.”)
He trudged behind, juggling the suitcase and Eloise’s purse, but as he walked he indulged. Following them, he could watch Penelope’s hips sway as she walked and admire the delicate slopes of her profile as she laughed with Eloise.
As he drove them back on the bumpy road, over low mountains and then beginning to catch glimpses of the ocean, he contented himself with letting in the changing notes of her voice. She and Eloise were speaking eagerly about the flight and their plans for the month and he felt calmer just being near her again. Colin parked at the resort and ensured all was settled before he pulled her attention toward him.
“Penelope?”
“Yes?” she asked, turning toward him with just that slight hesitation on her face that made his stomach squirm.
“I hope your writing goes well,” he stuttered. “Penelope.”
He knew he sounded ridiculous, and she was probably wondering what had happened to him since his book came out that made him lose all capacity for intelligent thought. But it had been ages, and in the long stretches of time without her, he had missed speaking her name aloud. It tasted good in his mouth, and he savored every syllable, lingering and caressing each one, comforting himself with the familiarity of it.
She scrunched up her face adorably, just a hint of concern there, but she only thanked him before Eloise stole her away again to find their room.
Salty air and the sounds of the waves provided a backdrop for Colin’s thoughts the next morning as he tried to write. He was sitting at his favorite table, his white coffee mug the perfect contrast against the teal table– if he still had the stomach to document it and post it, that is. His publisher would love it as a promotion for the book but how could he love anything that had brought Penelope so much humiliation? He needed to write his morning pages, but instead he sat and mused that the ocean’s blue mirrored Penelope’s eyes in the pastel morning light.
As if in a dream, there she was, walking up the beach in a seafoam green cossie, her loose white shirt unbuttoned and floating in the breeze, a netted bag hanging from her shoulder. She stopped short when she saw him, but he beckoned her over with a crooked smile. She pulled at him like the tide, he had always known that, but maybe he was that for her too, because she came to him almost against her own volition.
“It’s beautiful,” she said softly, when the empty greetings were out of the way and Colin had coaxed the proprietor into bringing Penelope a silver pot of coffee, along with the milk and brown sugar cubes she liked. “I can see why you came here to write.”
His writing.
He had never felt ashamed before, talking to her about it. Shy, yes. Eager for her approval, of course. She was the writer he admired most, so it was natural really. Nothing was capable of setting him in flight like Penelope’s words of praise, especially when they wrote and edited side by side.
But now he had the urge to cover his notebook, to burn it, to pretend he had never written a word in his life. For so many nights alone, thinking about his choices, he had wished he hadn’t.
He couldn’t take them back, so he offered her some old, familiar ones.
“Write with me? Penelope?”
He tried not to let any of the wild fear cresting inside escape through his tone or his eyes or the tense set of his body. He tried to wait in the stillness like he would accept her answer with grace, no matter what it was. Because he would. He and Penelope had always tried to be a soft space for one another, and even if he had temporarily forgotten how important that was, he remembered now.
Penelope bit her lip but then she pulled out a battered A3 and pen from the pouch in her bag and set to work. His hand twitched toward her unoccupied one, the urge to brush his thumb over the back of it compelling, but not enough to put her in that uncomfortable position.
It had been her idea to write longhand, saying it would allow him to be free. Now it was a habit he couldn’t break, like her.
They wrote in silence, his mind finally settling to its task with her beside him. They wrote until the sun was high in the sky and Playa Langosta had come alive with crowds.
Colin paused every so often to refill her cup and, once, he forgot himself and brushed aside a ginger strand of hair that the breeze whipped across her face. She flinched away, but she didn’t leave, accepting his apologetic look with a nod. He collected each moment of her forgiveness like so many tiny grains of hope, but he wished he knew what she was thinking.
She eventually rose and stretched, and he sprang out of his seat like some gentleman from a bygone era.
“Come back tomorrow?” he asked, trying to seem casual as he hastily offered to walk her the few hundred paces up the beach to the resort where she was staying with El. It was too posh for his taste, but the nightlife was more to his sister’s liking than the quieter B&B where he was staying.
Penelope shrugged. “We’ll see. Eloise was up early arguing with Phil again about coming home so I had to get out of the room.”
Colin didn’t say more but he suspected she would be back if that was the deciding factor. Eloise was running from a proposal and a life, and he suspected that was what prompted her to visit him rather than stay with Benedict. Colin was the family expert on self-destruction lately, so she knew he wouldn’t judge.
He didn’t see Penelope the next morning so he supposed that Eloise and Phil had reached a tentative peace. He drank his coffee, he wrote his morning pages, he looked out at the sea. He checked his watch, wondering when he could join his sister and her friend at their resort pool without looking completely desperate, or worse, oblivious of the damage he had caused.
Eventually, the fire in his belly that had burned since the publication of his book grew too hot to ignore, and he wandered down the coast in search of Penelope and a friendship he didn’t deserve. It was strange to observe her without her awareness, laying on a plush cushion in a secluded cabana. A book in one hand and a bright yellow drink in the other that made him smile. To him, Penelope was purity itself, unassuming, peaceful, the sunshine he took for granted.
“Can I join you?”
It took her a moment to emerge and Colin smiled. It was always so endearing the way she lost herself when she read. She blinked up at him until he came into focus, the tropical heat forming a haze around them.
“Eloise was held up again but you’re welcome to have a drink with me.”
After Colin flagged down a waiter and was in possession of his own fruity concoction, complete with dried pineapple on top, he tried to think of a way to break the silence. In the end though, what could he say? Small talk felt weak in the face of such a distance. And anything honest or real would lead to – well, he wasn’t sure, and that was the problem. It might have been better if she exploded on him as soon as she knew.
He never expected to dread the day his first book was published. He knew she had preordered it, insisting on supporting his work that way even though he had promised to give her a copy. She sent him a picture of the package on her doorstep, then one of her grinning widely for the camera while holding it. Her pride in him was palpable and that made his betrayal that much worse. Maybe she wouldn’t notice, maybe she would skim that chapter. It was a lie, he knew, for who took more care to know him than Penelope? So he waited, in a generic hotel room, silently calculating Penelope’s typical reading speed, accounting for her tendency to annotate books she particularly loved.
And he knew she would love most of it, because she loved him. Always had, giving him her heart freely. As friends, with no expectation that they would ever be more.
Finally, at 3 a.m. her time, she texted.
Your book was beautifully written
Gracious, but simple, with none of her typical flair or joy, and that made it so much worse.
i’m sorry, Pen
He hadn’t been able to resist saying what had been bubbling in his throat since the moment he had agreed to this betrayal. He knew it would come to this, and yet he had ignored every better impulse, every tender feeling and memory of her that screamed at him to stop. To tell his editor that he wanted to rewrite the chapter about Penelope, to erase every pompous, self-protective musing about love and friendship and attraction.
There was a long period where he saw the three dots appear in their thread and then disappear. Then a series of texts. He read the words so many times they formed a grotesque sort of poem in his mind.
i didn’t ask you to love me
not like that
i wish you could have loved me as a friend though
He couldn’t sleep after that, of course he couldn’t, for who knew what he would dream of? He tossed and turned, he paced, he stared at a stain on the ceiling and wondered who had put it there and if they had wished desperately to remove it. Finally, as the pale light of dawn came in through the cheap plastic blinds, he sent one final message.
i really am sorry
And now, months later, he was beside her and he still had nothing eloquent to say. Not even anything adequate, anything to give the faintest glimmer that he remembered the moment he had broken them.
It left him uneasy, but he still wrote. He had his contract after all, built on the rubble of his friendship and the accolades that had come from writing the unforgivable. And astonishingly, as the week went on, Penelope’s red hair would sometimes appear at a distance, indistinguishable from the warm glow of the sunrise. He asked for coffee service for two every day, out of hope or maybe just delusion that she would still want a place in his life.
“Write with me?” he would ask, and sometimes she would say yes and sit down. He lived for those times, even if they didn’t speak. He marveled at her grace, the way she accepted him despite everything. The waves of sadness were there for both of them, he could tell. Once he slid his notebook toward her, hoping to ask for feedback on a sentence he was struggling with, and she flinched away. It was understandable that she didn’t want his writing anymore. That she didn’t want him .
“That was too intimate,” he said in an embarrassed undertone. “Forgive me.”
She paused, biting her lip in that thoughtful way of hers. “I think I’d like more coffee,” she murmured, and Colin swallowed his hopes that she would grant him absolution. His hands were shaking as he reached for the pot to fill her cup, so of course he spilled it everywhere, dripping brown splotches over both of their notebooks.
“Fuck! I’m so sorry.” It seemed that his relationship with Penelope was defined by one mistake after another. “We can clean these off in my casita.”
She rose silently and followed him back through the winding stone paths of Sueño del Mar. Whitewashed buildings with red-tiled roofs surrounded a placid pool in the center of the grounds, and he could see her enjoying the beauty even as she shook her notebook to keep the pages from sticking together.
He opened the heavy wooden door of his home away from home and ushered her inside. The comfort he felt here was something he couldn’t easily describe but he ached to share it with Pen. If anyone knew some of what he had been feeling the last six months, sifting through the wreckage of what he thought he knew about himself, it must be her.
There was a small kitchen open to a cozy sitting area. A ladder led to the loft above, where he lay in the tangled sheets and dreamed of her. Her beauty, her anger and disappointment in him, but most of all, her forgiveness. Double doors opened to his private outdoor space, complete with a white hammock.
“Colin, this is – “ She seemed at a loss for words and he smiled. It was the first time he allowed himself to beam at her, the first time he didn’t feel that seeing true joy on his face would be an insult to all that he put her through. He knew he didn’t deserve to be happy, but something about seeing her in this place allowed him to be.
“Magical,” he said, completing her thought. Her eyes were sparkling and he thought his chest might collapse when she smiled back, a real Penelope smile filled with her sunshine.
Murray arrived the next day. Colin wanted to see him. Murray understood him better than most, even if Colin hadn’t told him everything. He knew Colin was feeling a lot of pressure after the success of his first book, he knew that Colin had escaped London and was doing what he always did– trying to create a world where he was enough, away from the expectations of those closest to him.
Murray and Penelope knew each other, of course they did. There were years of overlapping stays in Kent over the summer, birthday parties and family dinners on school holidays.
But he had never seen Murray look at Penelope the way he did while they lay on the beach that afternoon. And Penelope noticed, glancing away coyly when her eyes met Murray’s brown ones, allowing him to spread sun cream on her back, splashing playfully at him when they waded into the warm waters to swim.
It reminded Colin of a nightmare where he would open his mouth but no sounds could come out. He was helpless to stop what he dreaded most.
Eloise convinced them to come to the resort that evening where there would be a DJ and dancing by the pool. Well, she convinced Colin. Murray was so caught up in staring at Penelope as she arched up out of the water that he would have agreed to anything.
Colin could hear them murmuring to each other at the bar as they ordered their drinks. “Penelope,” Murray said with a flirtatious smile as he offered her the Piña Luna the bartender slid his way.
“I like the way you say my name,” Penelope replied as she took the drink, her lashes lowering prettily.
Colin’s heart plummeted. Was there a time when she felt the same way about him? When she had watched his mouth form the most personal of words and wished she could kiss him?
There were fairy lights surrounding the pool, pulsing music filling them as they danced. Penelope looked ethereal, in an emerald sundress that matched the lush plants that turned the hotel grounds into a jungle. Her head tilted back, laughing, as Murray moved with her. Then a whisper in her ear, a blush, and she was being led away by a hand that wasn’t Colin’s, down the path to the beach.
“You don’t have the right to look so wounded,” Eloise said matter-of-factly.
There was no venom in it but Colin felt a sting all the same from the truth of her words. When they returned a while later, lips swollen and hair mussed, Colin used that sting to conjure up a friendly smile for Pen and a wink for Murray. It was part of his penance, his effort to be less selfish, and he was determined never to take the coward’s way out with Penelope again.
His morning pages with Pen continued. First, while Murray slept in, sprawled out on the couch in the casita, they met at the little table by the beach. Then, after Murray left, they gradually migrated to his private space, writing on the porch as the birds chirped and the monkeys moved through the trees above them. One day Colin couldn’t resist taking a photo of Penelope laying in the hammock, writing in her notebook with her legs crossed and a pensive look on her face. She was beautiful.
“What are you doing?”
“I want to remember this,” he said earnestly. “Our writing retreat.”
“Is that what this is?” she asked with a smile.
“We always dreamed of doing one. Remember?”
Sometimes it felt like she had forgotten all of the dreams they shared. But it wasn’t right to be angry at her for it. She was only taking him at his word – that he would never love her, not in anyone’s wildest fantasies. And now, he understood. All those hours they spent together back in London, the endless coffees, the quest for a writing spot that had exactly the right vibe, the discussions of writing retreats and book tours, the utter trust in revealing their rawest lines to one another, full of their inspirations and their insecurities– it had all been planting the seeds of love. Because how could showing each other their realest selves result in anything less?
Penelope nodded, and there was a delicate wistfulness to it that she was trying not to show. “I do.”
“You’re the only person I could imagine writing with.” As soon as he said it, he knew it was yet another mistake. Penelope swallowed hard and looked at him with steel in her eyes. He had seen her fury before, but not directed at him.
“No.”
She didn’t say more than that, but her tone was so firm, so certain, that he knew he wouldn’t dare to argue or ask for more clarification. Not that he needed any. He could fill in the blanks for himself – he had lost the right to tell her she was special to him. To share what she meant to him. One chapter, sharing the most intimate history there was, his relationship with Penelope, had canceled out all the other millions of words they had spoken to each other once upon a time.
He couldn’t offer a quiver full of apologies yet again, not when they glanced off her heart so easily, never making an impact. So he simply bowed his head in acknowledgement and went to the kitchen to fetch more coffee. When he came back to the porch with a mug for each of them, she was gone.