Work Text:
Penelope had known she was bisexual since she was a teenager. Somewhere around her fourteenth birthday she’d felt that visceral attraction to another girl—a stranger, really, who she’d bump into on occasion at the public library when she was checking out books on psychology—and it was a slippery slope from there.
The endless searches on google, the comments logged on anonymous forums. She’d got the impression that bisexual women had a tendency to figure things out later, happy enough to go along with dating the boys they were told they were meant to. But once Penelope knew, she knew, and she wasn’t going backwards.
She’d had a half dozen crushes on unattainable people, which seemed par for the course for a socially awkward, academically precocious teenager. Celebrities, that barista, Genevieve, at the coffee shop that she couldn’t speak right in front of. And her best friend’s older brother.
As it were, she’d had the biggest crush on Colin since forever. Since as long as she knew him, she thought. They were kids, really, barely old enough to know what crushes were, but she’d known she loved him.
Then again, it had always felt like something unfortunate. He was off-limits, in more ways than one. Older, importantly: at least until they’d both graduated high school and suddenly they were spending a lot of time together and the three years between them faded into nothing. El’s older brother: a veritable minefield of social cohesion to navigate if she could ever bring herself to go there.
But the kicker, the bit that really put the nail in the coffin on any of her hopes that Colin Bridgerton would ever be a reasonable prospect, that he could ever like her back, was the fact that Colin Bridgerton had been confident in his own asexuality since his first week of university. One conversation with guys his age talking about their attraction to women and he’d connected the dots, realised he’d never felt that way about anyone and probably never would, and that was that.
He didn’t shout it from the rooftops or anything, but him and Pen were friends, or at least close enough that they texted from time to time. And she was out and proud, so it was only natural he would tell her, when he had that itchy urge to tell someone.
And well, that conversation had been enough to ensure he would forever stay in the “not available” bucket. So her love for him was set aside, thrown to the back of her mind as far as she could and only brought out on birthdays or Christmas or late at night when she was too drunk to remember she was supposed to keep it locked away.
So how did she end up here, at the age of twenty-three, sitting on her bed working on her master's thesis with Colin Bridgerton on the floor planning his next three month round-the-world trip? How could she hear through the rush of blood in her ears as he asks, all innocent, “Pen, what does it feel like when you’re attracted to someone?”
What the fuck did he mean by that?
Colin was usually so direct, straight to the point. He wasn’t one to obfuscate, but this feels like obfuscation, like there’s something he’s trying to come at sideways, lest it spook her or maybe even himself. It puts her on edge, laced with confusion, and she furrows her brow as she leans a little closer to him, landing her feet on the floor.
“Why?” she asks cautiously, as if the question might explode in her face.
He’s got his legs crossed, laptop balanced precariously on his knee, and he’s looking up at her like he’s looking for something, for some solution to the world’s problems. Or maybe just an answer to his question. “It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.”
Thinking about. Thinking about like he didn’t in-depth google the whole attraction spectrum in enough detail that he could define the different types and all the different little subidentities tied up in there if she asked. Thinking about. As if it plagued him.
“You’ve read the literature,” she says instead, which isn’t really an answer, but she hopes that’ll do. How is she supposed to describe attraction to him without opening up the Pandora’s Box that is her massive fucking attraction to him?
Colin shakes his head a little, dismissive. “I want to hear it from you, Pen.”
Right. Well. Well, fuck.
Okay.
“I guess—” she tries, and then stalls out. Swallows, frowns. He leans a little closer, seeming to sense her attempt is genuine, and wraps a hand around the soft swell of her bare calf. Well, that’s definitely part of it, sets it all off, sparks and flames and want want want.
She swallows again, tries to get her thoughts together.
“I guess, it’s kind of like in my body?” High rising inflection, she can’t help it. “A fuzzy feeling, or fizzy, like sprite. In my chest and my tummy and the tips of my fingers, like when you’ve managed to cut off your circulation by leaning on your arm the wrong way.”
Colin’s gaze travels over her body, taking in the different parts as she speaks them aloud, and that gaze sends its own trails of shivery sensation through her.
“It’s like I can feel everything, sense every little vibration in the room. Pure sensation, reaching out like a metre away from my body. Like I could perceive you, all of you, from over here.” She does not say that it helps that it’s him. That it helps that she’s so fucking attracted to him that now that she’s let herself exist in it, even for this little moment, she wants to crawl entirely out of her skin.
“And if I fall too far into it,” she continues, “I feel like I lose half my brain cells.” Her thesis is sitting untouched on the laptop beside her. She’d been plodding through the first paragraph of her discussion for hours, getting absolutely nowhere. Point proven.
His thumb skates up her leg a little higher, pushing at the hem of her maxi skirt. She shudders beneath his touch and Penelope hopes against all hope he doesn’t feel it.
“And you experience this often, right?”
Is it her imagination or is his soft voice a little strained?
She goes for lighthearted nonchalance. “Often enough. Not with everyone. It can be a real inconvenience sometimes.” Like now. Mesmerised and tantalised and halfway to ridiculously turned on by her very much off-limits best friend.
“Huh,” he says, and his eyebrows furrow again. She can sense his thoughts are running a mile a minute, working through what she’s said, but his eyes fix only on the curve of her leg beneath his palm.
“Colin, why do you want to know?” she asks. It seems like the only thing she can do right now.
At that, his head tips up, looking at her fully, eye to eye. She feels utterly trapped; he has caught her, somehow, and she can’t get free.
“I think I’ve maybe felt that before,” he whispers like a confession. Like she’s his priest, forgive me father.
“But—” She goes to contradict him, but the words don’t come.
“Not often,” he accepts. “So rarely. It didn’t feel—” He bites his lip, tries again. There’s a hush in the room and Penelope feels like if she looked away from him, all would be ruined. “It’s not what I thought it would be at all.”
Pen’s nose scrunches up and she offers him a curious look. “What did you think it would be?”
It takes Colin a long moment to consider, chewing on his bottom lip. “I think I thought it was much more about desire. About the wanting for things. And I hadn’t ever wanted, so I felt sure it mustn’t have been attraction.”
Hadn’t ever wanted? What the fuck does that mean? Is he saying—?
Is he saying that he’s wanted, now? That he’s wanted someone, strongly enough that it’s made him question his own asexuality? The ideal of it makes her insides shrivel a little bit, but he’s still staring up at her with that sweet open expression, entirely devoid of pretence now, and she tries not to let the little bit of her heart breaking cloud her face.
It hurts, though, that all this time she’s been right here, so fucking attracted to him—wanting him—that she sometimes feels as if she might keel over with it and here he is experiencing attraction for the first time after all these years. She just wishes it could have been her.
“Colin, I—” she begins, but he’s cutting her off, shifting closer until he’s practically kneeling between her thighs.
“Pen.” His breath catches, his hands coming to rest on the outside of her knees. There’s something vulnerable in his expression, tortured even and then he’s confessing. “I think I’m demisexual.”
Okay. Well. Um. She’s not sure what she’d been expecting really, but the way he says it, all at once, like he’s been rehearsing, surprises her.
“What—” she tries, “what does that mean to you?”
Colin sucks in a deep breath, digs his fingers a little deeper into her thighs. “It means, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced sexual attraction like this before. I don’t know if I ever will again. But it’s here, and it’s intoxicating and it’s eating me up inside a little bit. I think maybe it’s been part of me for a while, but I didn’t know what it was, didn’t know what to do with it. But I’ve been wanting, longing for weeks now and—”
Like this, he’d said. Like this, with his body between her thighs and his fingers dimpling her flesh and his mouth less than a foot from hers. Like this.
“Fuck, Pen, I want you so badly,” he says, and whatever is left of her rears into burning, vicious flames.
She tips forward into the chasm between them, the inevitable gravity of their kiss. She couldn’t hesitate now, even if she tried, not with his words ringing in her ears, and the desperate crash of their mouths together seems to be all the permission Colin needs to give in, to let free whatever longing is flooding his body. His palms slide up her thighs, capture her waist and he’s kissing her, kissing her, kissing her.
It’s breathless and effervescent and every place he touches feels alive with sensation: her knees against his sides, his long fingers finding the gaps between her skirt and her top, his lips firm and bruising yet somehow also so fucking soft.
“Colin—” she gasps, as he finds the corner of her mouth, her jaw, her throat. “Colin, are you sure—”
“I’m so sure, Pen, I promise I—” His words are muffled with the way he can’t seem to separate his lips from her skin, but the meaning is clear regardless. “I’ve never wanted something—someone—so much.”
Penelope feels like she’s melting. She’s like putty beneath his eager hands, his wanton mouth, all she can do is bury her fingers in his hair and cling to him. If he is full of endless longing, then what does that make her? The man she’s pined after for as long as she’s known what pining was, forever unattainable, suddenly moaning deep as she tugs on his curls, as he sucks a bruise onto her pulse point.
He kisses like the world is ending and it’s the best damn kiss she’s ever had in her life, and she thought she’d had plenty of fantastic kisses.
Colin’s fingertips are clutching at the bare skin of her waist, pushing her top up higher. She feels shivery and hot all at once and if he said the word she would strip naked right then and there, she thinks, let him have her, all of her. Give herself over to him.
God, what is she saying? She’s never been like this with anyone else. She’s never wanted someone to claim her before. And maybe that’s part of it, actually. Because she knows Colin never would. He’d never try to limit her, or hold her back. She’s her own person, always, just as he is his.
But she can give him something, can’t she?
“What do you want, Colin?” she gasps as his mouth trails down to the exposed edge of her cleavage. “Please, tell me.” Before I overstep; before I want too much. “Is this—does this need to be just kissing, or can I—?”
Colin breaks away with a gasp, rocking back onto his heels, and he’s watching her so very carefully, as if trying to read every thought inside her mind. Fuck, she thinks, I’m not the rate limiting factor here. Tell me, Colin, please. She doesn’t mind the answer, would never berate him for it, she just needs to know.
“I’d very much like to do more than kissing,” he says finally, and his eyes are dark like ash, like a lake under a cloudless sky. “So much more.”
And so she pulls him in again, dragging him in by the hair for a series of needy, whimpering kisses. Okay, she thinks. Okay.
Except this is where things get sticky for her. He’s inexperienced—new to all of this, really—and she desperately wants to give him a good experience, so there’s no chance he might change his mind. (She knows this isn’t how it works, not really; sexuality isn’t a switch that can be flipped by the quality of the sex you’re having. But the anxiety is there, persisting regardless.) She wants to make him feel good, but she also wants to feel good and she knows there’s no faster way to disappointment for either of them than her struggle to come. She wouldn’t be able to lie to him if he asked.
And really the problem is that her track record with cis men and orgasms is abysmal. The sapphic sexual partners she’s had have almost all managed to play her like a fiddle, known exactly how to wind her up and drive her crazy and have her coming on command. But the cis men? God, that’s like drawing blood from a stone.
She’s developed a bit of a routine for it all, actually, to ensure she gets what she wants out of it. Put on a bit of a show, have them waiting and tease them while she touches herself to completion. And then only once she’s satisfied does she let a man fuck her. A no-fault strategy.
So maybe that’s the way to go with Colin. With the way he’s looking at her as he gulps down breaths between kisses, even now with both of them still fully clothed, he would surely love the show. And then they’d both have a good time and maybe next time or the time after she could bring up trying something else. At least she might get a time after that way.
Boldly—there’s no room for hesitation—Penelope covers his hands at her waist with hers, pushes up to prompt him. “Take this off.” Her voice is low, rumbly, and she watches as his pupils dilate at the simple idea of it. “Yours too.”
Colin rushes to comply, lifting her top over her head and tossing it somewhere in the vague direction of her hamper, and then his T-shirt next. His mouth is hanging open, practically drooling as he stares at the swell of her tits, her hard nipples pressing against the lace of her bra. She can tell he wants to touch but is holding himself back for some goddamn reason, so she grabs his hands again and brings them to her chest, letting him feel.
His thumbs graze her nipples and a gasp falls unbidden from her throat. Fuck, he’s so tender about it, so careful, but he’s not hesitant either, once his hands are there. Like she gives him permission, and then the idea of half-assing it never even occurs to him. Broad strokes of his thumbs that she feels like ripples through her belly, her core.
Fumbling, she reaches behind herself for the clasp, rushing to get the damn thing off and his hands on her properly—
“Pen, let me,” he says, his low voice whisper soft, and she pauses. Deep breath. She’s managed to get the hooks undone herself, but he slides the straps from her shoulders, lets the fabric fall away as his gaze roves over every newly revealed inch of her. Has a man ever looked at her like this before? “Fuck,” he breathes, and it’s like a benediction.
His large hands find the curves of her tits again, fingertips digging in, and together they watch as her flesh spills over his grip. Her breath’s coming too ragged now, but Colin’s gasping too, and then his thumb flicks again over the hot, hard skin of her nipple and she lets out a pitiful moan. “Colin.”
“God, you’re so beautiful. You’re so fucking beautiful, Pen.”
His words send a ripple of pleasure through her, and with the compounded touch of his fingers, she knows she’s far too turned on to function. Her underwear must be soaked, and all they’ve done is kiss really. Fuck fuck fuck she’s too impatient for this, she needs to get them off. She needs to touch herself now and get some kind of relief before she combusts into flames.
Penelope wriggles on the bed, pushing her skirt up her hips, and drags at the elastic of her underwear. They don’t even match the bra, they’re just the comfiest undies she’d pulled out of her dresser drawer that morning. She hadn’t thought she’d be doing this, let alone with her best friend.
But his gaze is still hungry, eyeing up the soaked patch of cotton between her legs. “Take them off,” she says, and resists the urge to add a please. Somehow her voice comes out even, landing in the area of seduction she was going for. He doesn’t need to be asked nicely, he obeys without question, hooking the fabric with his index fingers to drag them slowly down her legs as she lifts her ass off the bed for him.
He watches her, eyes wide, and she thinks if he could stop himself from blinking he probably would. This is good, this is exactly where she wants him. A captive audience, ready for her show. A show she desperately needs to start now now now.
But first—
She holds out two fingers between them, in front of his mouth. The first two fingers of her right hand, and the implication should be obvious, she thinks, but it takes Colin a moment to cotton on. “Open up,” she says, and then the light of recognition is flashing in his eyes and his mouth falls open faster than she could ever have imagined, like there’s nothing he wants more than her fingers on his tongue.
And so she feeds them to him, lets him lick and suck, slow and syrupy. It’s too slow, probably, and each time he swallows it sends another jolt of pleasure straight to her cunt, but she’s somehow just as captivated as he is. He looks divine, her fingers in his mouth, his lips puckered around them, and she moans, long and low, to show her appreciation.
Colin’s eyes flutter shut, lost in it, and when she finally decides she’s done enough waiting, that her fingers are slick enough with his saliva, she pulls free with a lewd pop. The noise that chases out of his mouth after them is close to a whimper.
And that whimper only escalates as she spreads her thighs a little wider and drags her slick fingers along the length of her folds, catching on her clit. A gasp pulls from her throat unbidden, and she presses a little harder, a little firmer.
She knows this dance, knows exactly how to touch herself to drive up her pleasure, and it’s particularly intoxicating right now, with Colin’s eyes on her and his hands on her knees. The sensation of being watched—observed—makes everything feel more somehow, and she leans into it, chases it.
Penelope flicks at her swollen clit, fast and tight. There’s tension in her thighs, in her core muscles, the kind of tension she can use to her advantage to intensify everything. She rocks her hips up into her own touch, not quite enough to gain clearance from the edge of the bed but enough to feel the movement, to rock with it.
She’s humming with pleasure, it’s fizzing in her veins, and she’s close, she thinks. It won’t take long, just a little further, and she bites her lip to stop herself from crying out. Colin’s hands are on her thighs, travelling from knee to hip and back down and then he’s digging his nails in tight, the sting blooming hypnotic across her skin.
“Pen,” he says, and it comes out on a gasp. “Can I?”
Can he? Can he? Can he what?
She looks down at him, her fingers slowing. At the pleasure-soft glow of his face, his slightly pouty lower lip. At the desperate tension in his shoulders and the way he can’t stop glancing at the slick wet of her cunt, even while he’s trying to look her in the eye, to implore her.
“Please.”
Oh, he wants to touch her. He wants to touch her and explore her and it’s going to ruin all her plans but fuck—Fuck, how could she deny him anything?
She nods frantically and Colin doesn’t hesitate, simply slides his fingertips up the inside of her thigh until his fingers replace hers, a little slower and softer, more curious. It’s like he’s desperate to know the feel of her, this place where she’s so silky-soft and warm. He finds her clit easily and that perfect spot that’s just adjacent to it where it feels just right—he must have been studying her, and god what a thrill that is. It sparks like static electricity up her spine, and then back down like warm caramel as he reaches a pace not too far from hers, flicking and pressing.
“Like that?” he asks, and he’s genuinely curious. He wants to know, he wants to learn.
“A little firmer,” she murmurs and then she’s gasping as he obeys, instant and intense. It feels so good, so fucking good, and she wonders if she could just exist here, locked in the pleasure of Colin Bridgerton’s fingers, slick with her arousal and strumming just to the left of her clit, just as she likes it. “Fuck,” she whines and where another man might take that as encouragement to go harder, or faster, he just keeps the steady pace that’s working and lets her moan and gasp and grind into his hand.
He’s whining too, little eager gasps of pleasure. All he’s doing is kneeling at her feet, praying at the altar of her pleasure, but he’s getting off on it. He’s soaking up every little noise she makes and he seems to be drifting closer, magnetic. His mouth falls open and that’s when Pen realises—
He wants to taste her.
“Yes,” she gasps, and he hasn’t even asked the question yet, but she’s going to give him the answer he wants. Of course she fucking is. “Yeah, Colin, use your mouth.”
And he doesn’t hesitate, not even for a moment. He just slips his fingers back down to her thighs, using them as leverage to get her a little closer to the edge of the bed—to his mouth—and licks hot and broad up the length of her cunt.
“Tell me what you like,” he mumbles against her skin. “Licks? Sucks?” And she wants all of it, more of it and she tells him so.
“Both. Everything.” He alternates, long strokes and strong sucks and quick fast little flicks of his tongue against that same perfect spot on her clit, and it’s then that she cries out, unable to control it. It feels perfect, toe-curling, the kind of sensation that with each successive fast flick builds stronger and stronger.
And Colin seems to sense it too, seems to sense his doing something right because he keeps on going, just like that. Perfect little tiny flicks of her tongue, and she’s tipping her head back, barely supported by her own elbows as she rocks up into his mouth. She’s not chasing sensation, though, not urging him towards something he can’t quite find. No, each little rock is entirely involuntary, and she could not stop them if she tried.
He hums against her skin, his breath ticklish against the skin of her mound and she almost wants to laugh with how good it all feels. When has it ever felt like this?
But she couldn’t laugh—can’t laugh—because her lungs are dedicated only to hauling in air, to hyperventilating with the build of her pleasure. She buries her fingers in his hair once more, the curls finding a home between her fingers, and when she tugs lightly, pressing him closer, he groans. And yet still he doesn’t let up that perfect fucking pace.
“Yes,” she gasps, and she’s not even sure she meant to say it but it falls from her lips regardless. “Yes, Colin, just like that, I—”
And just as it is when she’s getting herself off, when she’s making herself come, she tips over the edge without any sense of control. It is like one moment she’s there, on the precipice, the cliff face holding her safe and steady and so fucking full of pleasure. The next she is plummeting, freefall as her elbows buckle and her toes curl and her thighs shake and shake and shake.
She’s coming apart at the seams and Colin just keeps on flicking away at her clit through the whole thing, never letting up as she comes against his mouth.
And—oh fuck, she’s coming again, or coming more, she’s not sure really, but when he doesn’t stop she’s falling again, a whole new layer to fall, and she feels a rush of hot wet heat between her and his mouth, a veritable gush of it and he’s groaning again, so loud it vibrates and hums through her.
Fuck, did she just—
And oh god, he’s still not letting up, not easing off at all with his wonderful, perfect mouth except it’s all quickly becoming a little too much, a little too oversensitive, and Penelope uses her grip on his hair to pull him off her.
“Fuck, Colin, I—”
And she collapses to the bed.
She is boneless. She is liquid. She is aftershocks of pleasure that spark through her limbs, leaving them shuddery like raw nerves. She’s damp wet slickness between her thighs and the flush on her chest and there are no words for the way she feels and no words even for how she thinks right now. All her brain can offer her up is sensation, and pleasure and heat.
When the blood stops rushing in her ears and she can hear herself think again, Pen pushes up onto her elbows, the better to see Colin’s face. She feels gooey and light and somehow heavy in her body at the same time, but she needs to make sure he knows.
He needs to know that that might just have been one of the best orgasms of her life. He needs to know that he can fuck her now, bury himself inside her and chase his own orgasm and she’ll give it to him so fucking nicely.
She doesn’t want to give the game away though. He doesn’t need to know how stupid fucking obsessed she is with him, or the way he might just break her heart if this does turn out to be a one-night thing. So she does the only thing she knows how and plays it cheeky, plays it light. “Come on, hot stuff, you can fuck me now.”
He looks at her a little dumbly, blinking, and that’s when she notices how soft and fuck-drunk his face looks. His pupils are blown wide, his mouth hanging open and he just keeps on looking at her.
“Colin?” she asks.
He blinks back to himself, shaking his head a little as his fingers dig into the meat of her thighs like they’re a fidget toy, a grounding presence. “Sorry, I, uh—” He glances down at his trousers then back up to her face. “Everything kind of sorted itself out.”
Oh.
Oh.
She chances a glance down too and then straight back up to the blush curling across his cheekbones and she can’t help the ridiculous little laugh that bubbles out of her mouth. “You came in your pants?”
He flushes deeper, hides his face against her knee. “I didn’t mean to, I—”
“Colin, that’s the hottest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.” And she sits up properly, the better to drag him into a filthy kiss, all tongue and teeth. When they separate again, she presses her forehead to his, breathing heavily and finally he’s laughing too, quick little giggles that come out much higher than his speaking voice. The kind of giggles she can’t get enough of.
“Next time,” he says and he’s grinning and she’s grinning too because they get a fucking next time. She thinks her heart might just leap right out of her chest at the idea.
She reluctantly stands up, her skirt bunched around her waist and she tugs it off, letting it fall to the floor. Useless now, she thinks. There’s no use for propriety between them anymore. Whatever the hell they were before the events of this afternoon has been blown right out of the water. They’ve been made anew.
“Get out of those trousers,” she tells him. “I’ll find some tissues.”
She cleans him up, batting his hand away when he tries to help. It’s the least she can do, she thinks, and when she’s done she finds herself looking up at him, now that they’re both standing for the first time in what feels like hours. It should be disconcerting, she thinks, but his eyes are still so soft, a little nervous even, and with the remnant aftershocks of her orgasm, the tingly fingertip pleasure of it, she still feels on top of the world.
“Pen?” he asks, voice rather soft as his hand finds her elbow. “Can I ask you something?”
She smiles, reassuringly she hopes. “Of course.”
“Could we—” He swallows hard. He’s fucking nervous. What could he possibly ask after all this that could make him nervous? “Could we snuggle for a bit?” He bites his lip, tries to duck his head, but the angles mean she catches all of it, the pretty red blush of his cheeks. “I’ve kind of been longing for that just as much as I’ve been longing for the sex.”
And she kind of wants to laugh again. This absurd man, standing before her, wanting her so much, so tenderly. Wanting her in all the ways she’s always wanted him and thought she couldn’t—shouldn’t.
“Yeah,” she says, and her arms wrap around his middle, hauling him closer to her until their bodies are pressed flush, her head against his chest. “Yeah, we can do that.”