Chapter Text
The morning was young. Daybreak beyond the brocade curtains fought intently to illuminate its naked subjects.
The belongings around them were frilly, novelties and curios from places afar, books that had no doubt been collected for aesthetic purposes rather than enrichment. There were clothes, so many clothes, and tens of shoes. The vanity kept a set of gleaming jewelry boxes and lacework doilies. The artwork, however, was what she had gotten most familiar with. Namely, the landscape of the Welsh countryside above the bed and the gilt portrait of the Queen across from it on the other side of the room.
Eloise's intimate study of these two works couldn't be helped.
Whenever she lay on her belly to part Cressida’s legs, it was the landscape her eyes sometimes flitted up to, and when she was the recipient of Cressida’s timid affections—though it happened that way less—she found herself eye-level with Her Majesty. The latter, in particular, tended to dampen the mood but what Her Majesty's visage had to understand was this: neither of them wanted to stop.
“How did—where did you learn to…”
Eloise rolled her eyes good naturedly. “The books you so relentlessly tease me for having my nose in.”
“That is what you are reading about?”
“As of late,” Eloise smirked. She could still taste Cressida on the back of her teeth. “Surely you are not feigning disapproval?”
“Such literature is unbecoming.”
Eloise closed her eyes and sighed. “She says after we’ve just—”
“Let’s talk about something else," Cressida cut her off, voice rising an octave in panic.
“How long are you expecting me to dance—no, parry —around this? For God’s sake, this must be the tenth time we've done this now." Eloise rolled from her back onto her stomach, drinking in the disheveled sight of Cressida Cowper. "I know your bed like my own.”
Cressida's scowl turned lethal. How she got all of her features, one by one, to pinch that way, Eloise didn't know. Of course, given the present nudity, some of the effect was lost.
“You know I hate discussing it.” Cressida sniffed primly. “It’s vulgar.”
“Well you certainly don’t hate doing it,” Eloise groused, clutching a swath of cerise linens to her chest and sitting upright. “You know, I do find myself wishing you would speak less. ”
Now Cressida sat upright as well, only she made no attempt to cover herself. The space between her breasts glistened with sweat, and the shock pink of her nipples against her porcelain skin made Eloise clench her jaw.
“Oh? For earlier I thought I did hear you say—”
Eloise pointed at her, cheeks aflame, a silent command to stop.
“'Oh, Cress—'”
“Cressida,” Eloise warned fruitlessly.
“'—the sound of you—'”
“I beg of you, don’t—”
“'—is maddening.'”
“Yes, exactly.” Eloise huffed, out of the bed now and reaching for her slip. She padded over to the vanity in search of a comb. “You uphold the claim even now, if only for entirely different reasons.”
A pretty sort of confusion graced Cressida’s features then. “Are you leaving?”
“Well I cannot stay, can I?”
Cressida's small bright eyes blinked up at her. “You might stay for tea,” she said, not quite sulking but nearly there.
"The tea that has long grown cold in your parlor?" Eloise scoffed a laugh. "That tea?"
In perfect sync, they cast a glance at the towering double doors that separated Cressida's bedroom from the parlor. The doors did not lock well. Cressida had been clear about that from the beginning, on the very first night she asked Eloise to kiss her and—God help her—Eloise had agreed. What had become of the arrangement since that first impulsive kiss was something different entirely.
Though that is what Eloise had wanted, hadn't she? A chance to make experience the recklessness that the good, sensible people around her had all succumbed to since their great romances. A chance to live it for herself, guard against it, before the season when the stakes became inevitably higher and she was expected to marry the person who made her feel unmoored and irrational.
Eloise was not frigid or uninterested as some might have guessed, merely skeptical. She simply couldn't understand the astounding lack of heed her siblings paid anything that was not sex or a promise thereof. One by one, she had lost over half of them now to something mysterious and, if the love bites were to be trusted, carnal: Daphne to the Duke, Anthony to Kate, and most recently Penelope to Colin. Each of them with a whirlwind romance of their own and which had seemed to render once working minds sex-crazed mush.
Even Francesca, subdued and eternally poised, had begun to behave strangely now that she was married. Living with her in the Kilmartin's Highland estate for the last year had given Eloise infinitely more proximity to the problem but no real answers. No true insight into the delirium that awaited her once she found her own love match.
All Eloise had wanted was to understand the passion that poisoned her siblings. Learn it. Then best it.
It had been her investigative spirit, her unconquerable need to know, that saw her pitching forward to press her lips against Cressida's that very first night. And on the nights since then, it was journalism that drew her to the Cowper estate, journalism that carried her past those double doors which did not quite lock correctly, journalism that moved her to undress Cressida and be undressed in return.
Much of her life had been truth-seeking in pursuit of knowledge (books) or justice (unmasking Lady Whistledown), why not also for the simple fact of experience? To inoculate herself?
So this, here, with Cressida, it was about scientific discovery for Eloise. And for Cressida, she had told Eloise at the very beginning, it was solely about exercising the last freedom she would ever have over her own body. Cressida wanted to experience real pleasure before inevitably being turned over to a man who considered sex a feelingless duty of heir-making. She wanted to take and be taken by someone she knew wouldn't hurt her. Someone she knew couldn't hurt her, given mutually assured destruction and all that. (This hadn't bothered Eloise. If anything, she respected Cressida's need to hedge her bets.)
It was not a perfect deal. In fact it was impulsive, ruinous for their reputations if uncovered, and largely needless. Alas, it was the deal they made.
Looking at Cressida now, lovely in the warded-off light of day, while being asked to stay for tea after they'd spend the entire night and some of their morning tasting one another and muffling their cries, Eloise doubted that their terms could have ever truly been so black and white.
Cressida wet her lips. "If you leave so suddenly, mama will think we've had a falling out."
"I've been here since yesterday, Cressida. Do you not think your mother knows how a pyjama party works?"
"Of course." Cressida's stony face brooked a smile. "Go then. I suppose I will see you on your next visit to England."
Eloise let out a huff that slackened her shoulders. "You know that I do not return to Scotland until the end of the month. We shall see each other plenty before then." Then, thinking of the umpteen social events Violet Bridgerton would try to squeeze in before she left again, Eloise grimaced.
Cressida crossed her arms over her narrow torso. Eloise could feel her small bright eyes burning a hole into her back and she combed her hair in the garish mirror above the vanity. "I will not be treated like a pest."
"Then do not behave as one," Eloisa said flatly, casting an exasperated look over her shoulder.
The answering silence was like a salve. It was the only thing that could quiet the strange feelings that had begun to blossom in Eloise's chest whenever she saw Cressida, or the lightness she felt whenever they touched. Something was wrong, clearly. In her pursuit of discovery, Eloise had stumbled upon something she was not looking for and did not know what to do with. Something that made her feel saccharine and splayed for all to see.
Worst of all, Cressida did not appear to be affected by the same sensation or even aware that she had conjured it in Eloise. To be alone in feeling such a way, at the hands of Cressida Cowper no less, was, well, mortifying.
Still, Eloise could not stop.
She could not stop this.
Though they clashed endlessly, their coupling was remarkable. It was as if, fueled by Cressida's stinging haughtiness and Eloise's fiery contempt, they touched mirrors in one another.
In the beginning, the pinned their inability to stop on each other: if you had not worn that dress; if you had simply averted your eyes from mine; if you had not held my arm so tenderly on the promenade, stroking it as we passed around the bend when you knew that we would not be seen.
Now they didn't even bother with ruses. Their zeal was mutual, and went therefore diplomatically unmentioned.
Unclothed and uninhibited, they were an outstanding pair. Theirs was a perfect give and take, wax and wane. They did not want for attraction to each other nor did their inexperience seem to hinder things. What they did not know how to do they learned together through trial and error, which should have been frightening, should have been embarrassing, but was not. Cressida had not turned her nose up the first time, when Eloise’s hands trembled so violently she could not touch Cressida without seeming to shake her; and Eloise had not lost an ounce of patience the second time, when Cressida could not seem to muster the courage to finally push inside of her.
“You won’t be honest anymore,” Cressida had panted against her mouth, fingers slipping up and down over Eloise’s slit.
“It’s of no consequence,” Eloise had choked out, trying not to rush her. “Virginity is a construct, my hymen will merely—oh, Cressida.”
But for all the brilliant cohesion they enjoyed during, they still had not mastered this: the art of peacefully departing. For as soon as they were done, Cressida would turn to Eloise with that soft, unyielding look and Eloise would feel her stomach knot and her mood sour. Perhaps that was why it was preferable when Cressida ruined things, say, by feigning purity immediately after complimenting Eloise's cunnilingus.
At least, Eloise could reason on days like this, the contempt she directed at Cressida came from a place of genuine dislike.
"I meant only to prevent suspicion," Cressida now spat. "Do not act as though I am keeping you against your will."
Eloise ignored her, raking the ivory comb through her hair. Behind her, she could hear Cressida rising from the bed to get dressed. Using the mirror, Eloise snuck a glimpse of her naked form—perfect—as she stepped into the silk chemise like a proper lady. The comb stilled in her hand as she watched Cressida shake her hair out, sending golden wheat rivers down her back.
When Cressida turned, nearly catching her staring, Eloise's eyes darted back to her own reflection. She did not look ravished, as her sisters-in-law sometimes did when they exited the library or drawing room late in the night, muttering quiet apologies under their breath. She thought, however, that she did look older. Less like a girl than in seasons prior. So did all of them: herself, Cressida, Penelope. Even Hyacinth had begun to resemble a young woman these days.
Eloise tilted her head, eyeing the redness along her collar. Cressida wouldn't have left a mark, she was always careful, gentle, but Eloise knew there was a small chance that one of these days she'd do something rash just to spite her.
"Did I hurt you?" Cressida asked, coming up behind her.
She was rubbing the mark idly. "No, of course not."
Cressida made a sound like hm as her eyes followed Eloise's fingers back and forth over the skin.
Their eyes met in the mirror.
"I cannot find my earring," Eloise said, dispelling whatever tandem thought they were having.
“Just as last time? Did we not agree that small belongings were…” Struggling, Cressida pinched the bridge of her slender nose. “A liability?”
Eloise ignored her, returning to the bed to upturn a tassel pillow.
“Perhaps you will take from this a lesson,” Cressida went on, admiring herself in the mirror as she spoke.
“Perhaps if you had not tried to eat it,” Eloise mumbled, righting the pillow and searching beneath another.
Cressida spun around. “Pardon?”
“Found it!” She said cheerfully, holding the accessory up for them both to see. It was a small pear-shaped diamond, perched snug in a dangling, silver prong.
Cressida returned to the mirror, but not before Eloise could see the relief in her face. The prospect of being found out was daunting to both of them, and equally so. Violet Bridgerton would likely never recover from the sheer shock of it all, while Cressida’s parents would have no qualms about shipping their daughter off to a foreign country in hopes that the Ton would forget she existed entirely. Apparently they had already threatened to do so if Cressida remained unmarried for much longer. Eloise was sympathetic to this plight, of course, though she was not much interested in being Cressida's confidante after their first failed attempt at friendship.
What they were doing now was confusing and chaotic without the added complexity of friendship. And given that she barely lived here anymore and had recovered her friendship with Penelope, Eloise saw even less of a reason to complicate their arrangement with tenderness. They would act as friends in public and steal away for more. That was it. Those were the terms.
Eloise chewed her lip, putting on earring and thinking distantly of the lies she would tell once she got back home. We spent the evening discussing fashion and families. I braided her hair, then she braided mine. We stole biscuits from the kitchen and got crumbs everywhere.
“I require your assistance,” Cressida said, turning so that her back was to Eloise. Rose pink corset laces pooled at her backside and around her hips.
Eloise began to tie the laces. She counted five freckles on Cressida’s back before her reverie was interrupted by an annoyed voice.
“Tighter,” Cressida was saying.
“Any tighter and I will be condemning you to death,” Eloise replied, giving a compromisingly soft tug.
“You do not need to be gentle with me.” Eloise could hear the smile in Cressida’s voice, and because imagining it stirred that uncomfortable feeling low in her stomach, she gave the laces a sharp pull. Then winced in sympathy at Cressida's choked inhale.
“I can’t imagine why you wear this contraption,” Eloise said, slotting the laces through the last of their zigzagging eyelets. “Your physique is enviable to every woman in the Ton. You are slim but not without muscle, tall even without your shoes, and your posture must be the pride of your etiquette teacher. You are the very picture of elegance. It’s inconceivable that you should wear a cage beneath your dress.”
There was color in Cressida’s cheeks as she turned around. “You do not need to be kind to me, either.”
Eloise wrinkled her brow. “Flattery was not my intention.”
Cressida laughed. “Is it ever?”
Eloise wanted to kiss her then, and if Cressida’s gaze were any indication, she wanted to be kissed too.
“Are you going to the Mondrich ball next month?” Eloise blurted.
“You’re asking me about a ball?"
She curtsied dramatically. “My mother would be proud, would she not?”
Cressida reached for the ivory comb Eloise had set down and ran it through her long hair. “So long as I have no marriage prospects, I cannot afford to miss any of the season’s events.”
“Right,” Eloise said hastily, chiding herself. “Of course.”
Cressida straightened, preening at her reflection. “Do you not think Debling and I would make a handsome couple? We are both blonde.”
“He seems more taken with birds than people. I do not think his being blonde can substitute a personality.”
Which evidently was not the right answer, because no sooner had the words left Eloise’s mouth had Cressida’s ire returned. “You would not understand. He is a man of great passion, and you are a girl taken with questionable books.”
“At least I’m—”
“Good day, Miss Bridgerton.” Cressida, moving as fast as a storm and as stiff as a mannequin, threw open her curtains. Light flooded the room, chasing away all the secret things they'd done and said only minutes before.
If Eloise struggled to read Cressida's mind sometimes, she wasn't struggling now. Cressida wanted her to leave.