Archive of Our Own

“Colin,” she sighs and attempts to disentangle the leg of her joggers from a stray nail on her windowsill. “Mate, you know I love you, but it’s bloody three in the morning.”

Swearing at the new tear in her most comfortable item of clothing, Kate refuses to cry at the beginning of their inevitable demise.

“Listen, I promise in three years you’ll understand,” she lectures, looking up from her trouser leg.

Instead of Colin, Anthony Bridgerton stands, sloped, leaning against the fire escape rail, a beer dangling from his fingers in a manner that looks practiced but is probably natural in that way only unfairly handsome men can achieve. Careless and easy.

“You’re not Colin.”

“I’m not,” Anthony agrees, hardly sparing her a glance. “Indeed, many find that to be my most appealing attribute.”

The fact that he has many obviously appealing attributes has never been lost on Kate, but she’ll be damned before she fans the flames of his misguided machismo. 

Kate leans her hip on the railing, crossing her arms, “I’m surprised you’ve graced us with your presence.”

The appearance of Anthony is not quite so rare as she would like to make it out to be, but seldom enough that she’s surprised to find him outside her window; a spectre of solitude and haught; the pinnings and trappings of a man used to getting what he wants, who he wants, drifting into a party, whispering into the ears of tittering with women, and leaving. 

Only, now, the soft wind sweeping up through the buildings is ruffling him, dislodging a confidence he carries, a weariness resting under his eyes and in the lines of his jaw.

“Too good for the lowly masses, my lord?” She gestures to the party transpiring without him.

He scoffs and raises an eyebrow at her, “Now, Katherine. Can’t I merely be enjoying a bit of fresh air and quiet?”

Her full name stutters her heart briefly, the familiarity and light disdain. Chucking her chin at his hand, she indicates his drink, “That Peroni says otherwise.”

He seems genuinely befuddled for a second, glancing down at the beer in his loose grasp. It’s the sort of faltering pause that she’s been experiencing with him more and more recently - as if she’s taken a step he hasn’t, knocking him akilter, exposing for a fleeting second whatever it is he hides under his anger. 

It’s unsettling; exhilarating.

“What’s wrong with my beer?” 

“Nothing,” she pushes down at the unease, rearranging her feet. ”Just tells me everything I need to know, is all.”

“Of course it does,” his face is cloudy as he looks off into the middle distance, “you obviously know everything about me.”

Being on the defensive with anyone, let alone Anthony, isn’t something Kate is accustomed to - and it’s not a sensation she particularly likes. They’ve always been equals in their rivalry, well-matched in their antagonism. 

“I’ve lived next door to Colin for ages,” she snaps, “I believe you and I have had enough run-ins for me to form a solid opinion.”

“Ah,” he gives a harsh sigh. It hits strangely. “That does make you an expert on me, then.”

Kate bristles, “I believe I’ve seen you with enough of your flavors of the week to know how picky you can be.”

The gnawing that slowly eats at her every time he arrives at his brother’s door with a wide-eyed, modelesque woman on his arm infuriates her. She has the sense that each woman fancies herself as the one to reform Anthony; to be the last in his endless string of flings and conquests and dates and affection. It sparks an angry ember in Kate that she struggles to tamp down. It’s an ember she tries not to pay much mind, shoves under foot and into darkness, where eventually, she is sure, it will fade and go out.

He exhales loudly through his nose and fixes her with a steady look, “Truly exemplary journalism, a very thorough examination of my character.”

It’s different to their usual barbs - as though he’s missed his target - or maybe she has. His voice sits at the bottom of her stomach and she recrosses her arms to ward against this new brand of ire and disappointment he’s leveled against her. As though he expected better, as though he wanted better.

“Apologies,” she attempts, to save face, to exorcise his words, “I’ll be sure to verify my sources next time, if you ever bring the same girl to a party twice.”

Even as she throws it further in his face, she doesn’t know why she can’t stop. Then, she has always found that when she is in beyond her head, she does have a tendency to dig a bit deeper. It’s only that she’s never been so frustrated with herself for doubling down as she is now, when she can practically see the places he’s holding himself together.

“Charming,” his face is closed-off as he stands up. “And I’d be sure to consult your partners as well, if such a population existed.”

Kate’s shocked at the tears that ache suddenly at the back of her throat. She can’t blame him for such a brutal and efficient shot. It’s well placed, but worse, it’s true. It’s not a secret that she’s perennially single, never the object of anyone’s attention, let alone affection; second in all things, an afterthought to most, a passing, polite consideration to many. Sharp and plain and hard to hold.

He must see the stricken look she's trying so damned hard to hide because for a flash she thinks she sees regret on his face. It’s unbearable. 

“Kate-” he steps closer.

“Anthony?” 

Anthony goes still.

“There you are!” A stunning woman with beachy waves and a fashionable beauty mark on her cheek sticks her head out of the window. “I’m ready to go, come on. Let’s leave.”’

He won’t meet Kate’s eyes, but she has a feeling her raised eyebrows are high enough he can feel them.

“Well, as much as I’ve enjoyed our bants , Lord Bridgerton,” she gives a sardonic curtsy, “I must retire.”

As she climbs back into bed and the low thump of a bass continues to vibrate her floor, she realizes she forgot to have him tell Colin it was well past a decent hour. 

Bugger.

--

Colin’s apartment is bigger than hers, but, she’d argue, not big enough to accommodate the amount of people currently crammed shoulder to shoulder yelling over a remix of a Dua Lipa single.

Not for the first time, he’s convinced her to join the fray when she’d been perfectly happy with her box of wine and cult documentary, only slightly wallowing in the wake of a failed Hinge date the night before.

She absently shoves down the hem of her dress riding up her thigh and wonders if the ill-advised Topshop purchase is punishment for the fleeting moment of confidence she had felt while trying it on. Truly, she doesn’t mind being a relative wallflower - it’s simply a chronic condition she accounts for in her overall life balance. For instance, if she’s going to be the awkward thirty-year-old wearing a skintight cocktail dress at a house party, she needs to compensate with more booze. 

She takes a healthy gulp at her drink.

Then, she’s also never been one to shy away from a party. In fact, she’s fairly certain she can make conversation with nearly anyone thrust in front of her. The current exception being Nigel Berbrooke, who has already attempted to enthrall her with discourse on diet vodka tonics and the four hours he spent figuring out what was wrong with his Ford Fiesta only to realize that he’d neglected to check the petrol levels again.

She is achingly average, and it is a realm she is happy to inhabit. Eddie, her beloved sister, would disagree - but would be a very biased, if kind, judge.

Anthony, she can’t help but notice, is across the room, in a position she has become accustomed to seeing him in: drink in hand, speaking with his mouth close to a woman’s ear. She can hardly fault him his natural charm or good looks, but she can and will happily judge him on the fact that this is a very different woman than Beachy Waves, Beauty Mark from only a few weeks previous. And Beach Waves was different from the woman at the party before, and her the party before that.

He’s entirely predictable. 

Yet, despite it all, she can’t help the disappointment that swoops from the back of her throat to deep in her stomach. 

“Kate!” Colin’s booming voice cuts through the rumbling bass. When he reaches her, he clasps her shoulder and squeezes kindly. “I am so glad you decided to come!”

“Well, I was going to hear it either way,” she shrugs, “might as well get the free alcohol.”

“Too right,” he laughs. “How’d the date with uh - Richard? - Mr. Hinge go last night?”

He’s been a good neighbor and friend to her for several years, and despite his own commitment issues and blatant refusal to - outwardly - acknowledge whatever is between him and Penelope Featherington, he did seem to have at least a passing interest in her dating life.

“Ah, there will be no repeat,” Kate coughs and soothes her throat with a deep, deep drink, “Lied about his height. But mostly, he’s a Tory.”

Colin gives an exaggerated cringe, and grabs the drink of a passing friend, handing it off to her, so that she has a beverage in each hand, “My condolences,” he cheers both of her beverages with his own, “And good riddance.” 

“As it were,” he continues casually, which Colin Bridgerton never is, “Anthony has been asking after you all evening.”

“Ah, obviously,” Kate finishes her first drink, then briefly eyes the one in her other hand, before determining, no questions where Colin is concerned is usually best, and takes a long pull. “Clearly neither of us has had enough self-loathing for one evening.”

Colin laughs loudly, “Kate, how not everyone adores you, I do not know.”

She looks at her thumb, where the edges of her nail are rough and chewed. She has the temptation to bite it further, but instead sends Colin an acerbic look. “I am an acquired taste.”

Colin seems prepared to counter her rebuttal, when a young woman who is not Penelope, but clearly has intentions toward his person, pulls him by the elbow to the middle of the room to dance.

She stands alone again, trying not to feel awkward and out of place, but even more, hoping not to be unnoticed, ignored completely. 

It’s not what she wants to be doing at a party where she wants to feel beautiful in a green dress and overpriced heels, where she wants to forget that her date the night before had frowned at her when she’d walked into the pub, dark skin and dark hair and dark lipstick, sharp wit and sharp humor, sharp edges.

When she looks up, her gaze gets tangled in Anthony laughing, grinning widely at the woman next to him, lithe and blonde and stunning.

And it’s too much, really, the heat of the room, the building volume of voices and music and happy shouts -

Kate makes for Colin’s bedroom for fresh air - or more likely - to crawl through his window and make her escape - apologies tomorrow for her sudden departure.

Dodging a couple in a passionate embrace next to the closed bedroom door, she slips through and takes a deep inhale when she slams it behind her. The room is still and dimly lit. Dark walls, one bedside lamp scattering shadows across ornate rugs overlapping the wood floor.

Her breaths are starting to catch back up with her when the knob on the door gives a startling rattle and she can hear the urgent murmuring of whoever is trying to enter.

There’s no explanation for the swift and instinctual reaction she has - to hide. She looks at the open, overflowing closet, then at the too low bed, and finally the sparse IKEA desk with its meager spindle legs.

“Fuck,” she panics, making an immediate bee line for the window, hurtling herself toward the fire escape. Her foot catches on the ledge just as the door opens roughly and she throws herself against the building, out of view.

On the opposite side of Colin’s window from her own apartment. “Fuck.”

“Siena, please,” she doesn’t have to see Anthony to know it’s him. His voice has been a source of constant frustration and more recently - she hits the back of her head hard against the brick wall - stupidly pleasurable nightmares. Nightmares in which Anthony brushes his fingers against the backs of her knees and moves his nose against the crease of her thigh and thrusts his tongue squarely - 

“You know I can’t-” he sighs into the phone he’s holding.

He groans painfully. “Siena. I know what you want, but I -”

She hears the creak of the bed, pictures him throwing himself against the messy tumble of linen. Maybe his hand is against his eyes.

“Please,” his voice sounds exhausted, “I do care about you, and I want you to be happy -“ Kate is nearly tempted to think he means it, that this is, perhaps, a conversation that is more personal than she has the right to listen to and - 

Then, well, it happens in such a rapid chain of reactions, she can barely account for it. 

She quickly calculates her means of egress, supposes she could tactfully slide down the wall, slink under the window, and crawl to her own flat in safety. But she shifts slightly and her stiletto gets caught in the grate of the fire escape and she is suddenly, catastrophically noisily, sprawled prostrate.

He’s at the window before she can even reroute away from her present position where she has been condemned to shame, powerless beneath Colin’s window.

“What the hell are you doing?” He looks beyond agitated - crazed. Kate can’t do more than take in the way his hair is tousled in a near manic state, waves and slight curls tangling in on each other.         

She recovers, pushes herself up with as much dignity as her outfit will allow, “What the hell am I doing? You’re the one taking a booty call at your brother’s house!”

His mouth drops in offense, “I was not.”

“Of course you weren’t.”

“You’re the one hiding outside his window!”

She aggressively shakes her foot to unstick it from where it has become very stuck between the metal slats, “Does it look like I’m hiding?” 

“I didn’t say you were achieving your goal,” he bites, but offers her his hand through the window, as if he can’t help but be a gentleman. Probably proper Bridgerton breeding too deeply ingrained for even spite to dislodge.

His hand is pleasantly rough and warm and she wants to keep holding it. She imagines that warmth seeping through her palm, past her wrist and up into her arm, over her elbow and shoulders, warming the rest of her golden and honeyed. 

She drops it with a slight manic shake of her own.

“So sorry to disrupt you and Siena, m’lord,” she bites out the words as a tourniquet, slowing the spread of him through her system. He’s not the sort of person for her to let in, certainly not one to romanticise. 

“Kate,” he exhales, bitter and jagged, “Can you please just, let me be for a fucking second?”

It’s angrier and more pointed than she is expecting and she throws her hands up in surrender. “Really, Anthony, I wasn’t trying to spy,” she gestures vaguely behind her, “I’m just going to go.”

There’s a frantic current radiating from him that is bright and dangerous. It freezes her in her place, and she can only watch as his hands bury and unbury themselves in his hair, as his body heaves in an aggravated breath that he holds and holds.

A voice inside her tells her that if she attempts to say anything right now, it may strike a flame that neither can extinguish, so she steps back so slowly, so lightly, as not to trigger a spark.

“Kate, wait,” he groans.

She doesn’t try to stop the way his hands curl around the edges of her face, the places that he disturbs the world around her, shifts her whole equilibrium. She’s angry at him, but she can’t control how her fingers fold over his wrists, holding him tighter to her so that his thumbs roughly brush the apples of her cheeks  - his mouth open against hers, teeth clashing only a second before her upper lip is between his own. 

There’s no way to account for it, but she feels like she’s being devoured from the inside out, his gasping kisses burning at her as she drinks deeper and deeper, lungs stinging. He pulls back only a fraction to run the tip of his tongue from the corner of her open mouth along her jaw, tasting the heat practically submilating off of her as he nips hard at the soft place just beneath her ear.

“Anthony,” she can hardly form the sounds to make his name.

“Kate, god. Kate.”

Kate pulls him tighter by the short curls at the back of his neck, pressing closer when his hand moves lower down her back - and lower still. She can’t consume enough of that feeling, the one that is all heat, his nose digging into her cheek and his tongue against the roof of her mouth. 

When she hits the edge of the bed, she gives into the gravitational certitude of their tumbling together onto the bouncing surface, as if this entire interlude with her and Anthony is an inevitable law of physics.

The momentum of him against her, heavy and eager over her, forces an equal reaction of tug that has him sighing an exquisite sound into her mouth. She hooks her leg high on his hip, and he pushes her farther into the mattress, desperately hard against her.

Her dress catches in the bedspread, the emerald satin ruched up by the boyish comforter scratchy under her thighs. Anthony’s hand slides up her ass, under whatever cheeky-cut sale-abomination knickers she’d thrown on without a second thought that evening.

“Why-” she gasps.

“Don’t - don’t ruin this,” he pleads, sucking at the place where her neck and collarbone curve together, slope gently, moving further down, licking at the skin along the neckline of her dress.

“Anthony-”

“You’re daft,” he breathes, or she thinks he does, as she trails her fingertips under the waistline of his trousers, lightly over the straining muscles at the small of his back, feeling him tense as she moves around to his stomach.

“Excuse me?” she pushes her hand further down his front, now trapped between denim and a pair of soft cotton pants.

He ruts against her open palm and she groans with him. “You’re bloody intolerable,” he drops an urgent kiss to the space between her breasts, then another at the side of her mouth, “But I can’t stop.”

“Can’t stop what?” Again, she moves her hand to his back, slipping easily under the back of his pants, feeling his ass as he sighs an anguished noise in her ear. She pushes him harder against her as he leans his forehead to hers.

There’s a sudden crazed honesty in his eyes, pupils blown out from alcohol or lust or - “Fucking thinking about you.”

“So just stop thinking,” she suggests seeking his heat against her own in dizzying movements.

He agrees with this sentiment, if the absolutely filthy kiss he gives is any indication. Her hands have again, in an unconscious move, wound themselves in his hair with the fervency of a person who knows that this will never happen again.

Because even as he rasps about how good she tastes with her bottom lip between his own, how good and right and perfect feels, she knows that this isn’t something she’s even allowed to want - let alone manifest into a repeat experience. 

And fuck it feels good.

His teeth, then his lovely, lovely fingers pull down the neckline of her dress, and she gasps when his tongue swipes flat at her nipple, before sucking it into his mouth, nipping at it with the barest edges of his teeth.

“Yes,” she agrees as he consumes her, “yes, Anthony.”

Her dress is caught at her middle, cinched at either end, his mouth wet and insistent at the underside of her breasts, the dip between, his hand moving over the fabric of her knickers - 

A loud thump shakes the door, and Anthony all but throws himself from her, running his hands frantically through his already mussed hair.

“Occupied,” he hollers, a muffled apology shouted back at them through the door, then only the dull, pounding drone of the music in the room beyond.

An immediate chill overtakes her and it quickly occurs to her that she’s as good as naked on her neighbor’s bed. She pulls up - and down - her dress clumsily, angrily, as she stands. Her entire being feels shaky, shaken. 

“I have to go,” she doesn’t want to look at him, but refuses to be the weaker of the two in this situation.

“Kate,” he starts, beyond frustrated, she can tell, his voice raw at its edges. “Maybe we should talk about this.”

She turns to him, secures a blithe, unbothered look. She is deeply bothered and her heart is beating and hurting so hard it feels impossible.

“Sure, Anthony,” sarcasm has ever been her finest armor. “Let’s discuss how we almost fucked on Colin’s bed. Splendid.”

He sucks in a quick breath, “Come on, Kate.”

“Fine,” low in her chest she can feel the cottony ache of tears, because she knows the answer, she already knows. “Why did you kiss me?”

His stupid handsome face is momentarily stunned when, she thinks, bitterly, it shouldn’t be. 

“Because,” the crease in his brow gets deeper and he clenches his jaw, “because I wanted to.”

He blinks, lifts his eyebrows, “Because I could.”

Kate sucks her lips in and bites down, nods decisively, “I loathe you.”

Anthony doesn’t say another word as she climbs out of the window, bloody dress riding up the whole time.

--

It’s Saturday evening and Kate finds herself in a familiar position: sprawled on a worn quilt on her fire escape, nipping at a gin and tonic, listlessly scratching outlines of people and buildings and flowers in her sketchbook. 

This particular weekend, Edwina has joined her lethargic sphere, thrown comfortably about Kate’s window seat, draped half in and half out of the flat. The soft flick of Edwina’s page turns are punctuated on occasion by a stray observation or grumbling about the author’s inability to reason beyond a Kantian perspective on aesthetics. In fact, the length and depth of the sigh she is currently exhaling tells Kate a rant is eminent, when a loud, enthusiastic knock sounds next to her. 

Colin’s window.

A moment later, Colin’s foppish mop pops out to address both women.

“Your presence,” he sniffles nobly, “is respectfully requested this evening.”

Kate stops drawing, “Oh? And what is the occasion, good sir?”

“Some of my siblings have decided to pay their favorite brother a visit, and we require at least two more players.”

Kate sits up and crosses her legs, taking a dainty sip from her drink. “But if your siblings are at Benedict’s, what are we to do here?”

“Ha,” but Colin gives a rather delighted smirk, “Come on. I won’t take no for an answer.”

Siblings meant more Bridgertons, which in turn meant there were exactly one in seven odds that Anthony would be amongst the brood. Anthony, who she has not talked to since she had her hand down his trousers and his mouth on her chest. “Col, I’m not sure-”

“Oh yes! That would be fun!” Edwina is already kicking up from her perch, throwing her book aside. 

Colin’s grin goes brighter, “Wonderful!  You have ten minutes to get yourselves together,” and he disappears.

Roughly fifteen minutes later, Kate is lifting Colin’s window from the outside, pushing her palms against the glass. 

“Colin?” she calls through the opening, looking at his still bedroom. No answer. “OY! COL.”

“Come on, then!” she hears a shout from elsewhere in his flat, “We’re waiting!”

Indeed, when Edwina and Kate climb over the precipice and tentatively walk out of the bedroom, a small gaggle is waiting for them - Anthony included, Kate notes with a disconcerting lack of disappointment.

Anthony is standing with a can of beer grasped in his hand, crossed arms pulling his shirt over his shoulders and biceps. He’s talking to an attractive man - who she’s almost certain is not a Bridgerton - next to him.

“Kate! Eddie! So pleased you could join on such short notice,” Colin’s charm is infectious, and Kate can feel herself relaxing at his natural hostmanship. “Shall I introduce you before we split into teams?”

Eddie agrees happily, immediately hugging a beautiful woman with an elegant countenance and willowy frame similar to Edwina’s own.

“Daphne, my sister,” Colin explains, of the beautiful woman, “and her husband, Simon - my brother-in-law - also not coincidentally Anthony’s best mate.”

Kate shakes Daphne’s then Simon’s outstretched hands, returning their kind smiles. Hugs have never come quite naturally to her.

Colin turns to his older brother, giving an obnoxiously knowing look, “And Anthony, of course.”

Anthony’s curt nod makes a lock of his thick hair drop across his brow, and she can’t do anything but meet his greeting with a sardonic raise of her eyebrows, “M’lord,” knowing she is pushing the envelope, bowing her head.

For a moment, he seems to relish in her defiance, a gleam in his eye and a slight twitch as the muscles in his arms tense. “Katherine,” he bites out.

Colin delightedly claps his hands. “Pall Mall!” he declares. “Rules are simple!”

“They are not,” Simon, who is now standing away from the Bridgerton siblings, whispers out of the side of his mouth to Edwina and Kate.

Resting on his kitchen table, Colin points to a collection of mismatched drinkware. “The goal is to be the first to make all wickets. That is, be the first to get your ball into each cup.”

He indicates to an adjacent bowl brimming with ping pong balls. All assembled, non-Bridgertons aside, nod solemnly. The immediate kinship she feels to Simon is shocking as he sighs deeply.

“As you know,” Colin continues, “all players will have one minute to choose their mallet.”

Daphne clears her throat.

“Ah yes,” Colin amends, “Please remember that per the Christmas Clause of 2017, no glass objects are permitted as mallets.”

Kate is genuinely baffled, “Mallet?”

“The object that you will use to hit your ball into the wickets,” Anthony adds tersely. 

“Oh, well,” Kate can feel her eyes rolling into the back of her head, “obviously.”

Anthony inhales, “I-”

“Each turn,” Colin continues as if the interlude between her and Anthony hasn’t happened, holding aloft an abused deck of playing cards, “will begin with the player drawing their card and either immediately acting on the instruction the card provides, or making an attempt on their current wicket with the help - or hindrance - provided in the card drawn.”

While Kate can’t help but be jealous that her sister was more sociable than she was in uni - certainly, of the two of them, Eddie is better prepared for unnecessarily convoluted drinking games - she feels something fierce and belligerent kindle in her chest.

As she looks at Anthony’s intense glare of concentration she makes a solemn, instinctual vow: she is going to crush him.

“Now, don’t forget that when you finish your drink you must call out Tree Root,” Colin ticks off, “And everyone must jump over said root. Last to jump must take a shot.”

Kate realizes she hasn’t fully been paying attention, stuck between unlikely vengeance and being distracted by the clench of Anthony’s jaw as the rules were laid out by an impatient Colin and exceedingly, terrifyingly calm Daphne.

“Okay,” Colin claps his hands together loudly, “Now that we all understand the rules and acknowledge that there are no rules, is everyone ready to select their mallet?”

Everyone nods intensely, with the exception of a sweetly baffled Edwina, and Kate, who has admittedly paid little to no attention.

“Ready,” the whole crowd tenses, and Kate watches as even Edwina seems to crouch slightly. “Set,” Simon, Kate amends, seems not entirely sold, standing calmly with his hands deep in his pockets. “GO!”

It’s nothing short of madness, a squall of adults scrambling helter skelter around Colin’s flat.

Anthony, Colin, and Daphne seem to have settled on their mallets remarkably quickly - a wide, flat wooden spoon, wok spatula, and cutting board, respectively.

Kate follows Edwina and Simon into the kitchen but stops when she notices a small, metal serving tray on a side table and picks it up, weighing it in her hand. Simon grabs a saucepan, Edwina, a wide but hefty candlestick.

“Teams!” Colin can’t seem to contain himself as the set-up unfolds, and Kate feels the competitive piece of herself - always a strong and steady beat - shift into high gear, enjoying the infectious energy the Bridgertons are feeding into and off of. Lunacy. Lovely lunacy.

“I’m with Daph and Kate,” he points at each of them. “Anthony, Simon, and Edwina, you’re together.”

Anthony seems about to argue, but stops mid protest at his brother’s pointed brow and nods shortly instead. 

Colin bows in agreement, and gestures grandly to the mad assortment of cups and glasses on his coffee table. “The placing of the wickets!” he declares.

“I still don’t understand what we’re supposed to be doing,” Edwina whispers to her, as again, all Bridgertons tense in anticipation.

“Each team is allowed to place two times as many wickets as there are players in the game,” Colin quickly explains to her and Edwina, thriving on a deranged ringleader energy. “Be careful in your placement - you will also have to score on these wickets!”

Kate shrugs at her sister, but is already casing the space for potentially challenging wicket locations. Even Simon seems attuned, his eyes sliding about the room in smooth motions.

“And,” Colin looks at his phone, “Go!”

The scramble is immediate. She only somewhat regretfully leaves Edwina behind in the chaos.

All involved parties grab hastily at the cups, some sort of strategy is being deployed if the quick assessment of each container is any indication.

Simon, a wide wine goblet in each hand, turns to Edwina mercifully, “Just grab two cups and put them somewhere.”

Kate makes her selection with little thought for vessel, and more thought on speed and beating Anthony to the best locations for wicket placement. As far as she’s concerned, winning the game is less about completing the course and more about demolishing Anthony when and where possible.

She secures an inexplicable Nando’s takeaway cup at the top of the fridge, trying not to be distracted by Anthony who is clutching his wickets to his chest with a gaze that is clearly assessing every possibility - measuring angles and accounting for all levels of skill and intoxication.

In hardly any time, the room is cluttered with all manner of chalices.

“Age before beauty,” Colin crows at the assembled teams, then turns to Anthony, “Octogenarians first, brother!”

Anthony shoots him a reproachful glare, “You’ll find that Simon is, in fact, the eldest here.”

“In number only,” Colin concedes. “Simon - shall you do us the honor of choosing the first wicket?”

Simon gamely points to a mug - rather proudly declaring its origin as the Icelandic Phallological Museum - perched on the corner of the fireplace mantle, “That one.”

“Excellent. Excellent choice,” Colin nods happily, “Game drinks for all!”

Quickly, a round of beers is distributed to all players, commencing the Pall Mall.

Play proceeds fairly calmly, as dictated by age, after that. Simon, then Anthony, then Colin and so on and so on drawing cards. Each card, Kate notices, has a different messy script scrawled across it with an instruction - a purely custom Bridgerton deck, it would seem.

Simon draws a five of clubs, which has the word UPHILL written in bold, black marker, and he groans, moving his saucepan to his left hand.

“He must approach this wicket with his non-dominant hand, until he scores,” Colin murmurs to the hushed crowd with all the quiet pleasure of a golf commentator.

Simon misses his first attempt and takes a deep gulp from his drink. (A subclause, Colin informs her and Edwina, is that all sips must be substantial. “Anyone who has not finished their beer after four misses,” Colin speaks in a loud whisper, to the obvious annoyance of Anthony, “must immediately finish what remains of their drink and is penalized an additional stroke - that is another hefty drink from their newly bestowed beer. Nursing, as it were, is strictly prohibited.”)

Anthony, next, pulls a fairly benign card, penalized with an extra sip, and makes the shot easily, spoon making sharp, even contact with the ping pong ball, sinking it into the mug with a smug grin, taking an arrogant swig from his beer.

Colin, also, has no issues, and sinks the shot. Even Kate manages to land her first ball immediately, a short arm pump and holler directed toward mostly just Anthony, who glowers.

“Beginners luck,” he grumbles.

Several wickets down, and they’re all on their third and fourth and fifth beers.

Both Edwina and Daphne have failed to jump at various Tree Roots, and have been forced to take shots, greatly hindering their overall game play. Even Simon seems primed not to fall victim to any traps. Colin himself has drawn the Eight of Hearts - sweetly swooping letters spelling out “The Red Ball, All is Lost” - and has had to go back two wickets, putting him perennially behind. 

The room is filled with the kinetic laughter of a late, fuzzy night and a good drinking game, and Kate is feeling the lovely stir of alcohol, the kind softness in her cheeks, the heat in her veins that makes wearing her sweatshirt too much. When she shucks off the heavy layer of clothing, she inadvertently makes eye contact with Anthony and feels the desire to either pull on a winter coat or take her remaining tank top off entirely. Bare or completely covered, there isn’t an in between with him.

She pushes her hair over one shoulder, sticky hot, and draws a card from the deck.

It’s the Ace of Spades and there are no words written on it, only a crudely drawn, angular croquet mallet, stark and black. 

It is, she must admit, rather ominous.

“Um,” Kate looks at it, then holds it aloft, “I got this one?”

Anthony, who has been frozen for the past minute, unable to shift his gaze from her, angrily exhales, “Bloody hell, she’s got the Mallet of Death.”

Colin nearly bursts in joy, “Kate!”

“Yes!” she responds in false, mirrored excitement.

“You’ve got the Mallet of Death!” he shouts and takes an unnecessary swig from his drink, “I knew you were bound to be a Bridgerton.”

Kate is not sure how to process that statement, so she just holds the card closer to his face, “Yes, well, tell me what I’ve won.”

“You get five tries on each wicket for the rest of the game,” Anthony sullenly informs her, “no repercussions.”

Colin claps Anthony soundly on the back, and he stumbles forward slightly in a grumpy, aggravated shuffle, “Anthony always draws that card! Says it’s fate! Hah!”

And now Kate is the one who has not only nearly fucked Anthony on his brother’s bed, but is the one who has, apparently, interfered with his destiny.

She couldn’t be more pleased.

With the aid of the Mallet of Death, she easily clears her next wicket, closing in on Anthony, who, two wickets ahead of Simon, has overtaken most of the group.

Simon makes a gentle attempt with his saucepan on what is certainly an antique Queen Elizabeth coronation teacup and misses, taking a sportsmanly gulp from his beer.

“Anthony,” Colin, many drinks in, is rosy cheeked and all the more antagonistic for it, “if you will.”

Anthony frowns obligingly at his brother, but all Kate can pay attention to is the way his whole body tenses as he reaches for the deck of cards on the table.

His hands are really quite, well, nice, she thinks with so many drinks in her system.

They were certainly nice on her thighs, grasping at her waist while his mouth - 

“Fuck,” he swears and holds up the Joker, drawn amidst some sort of body of water. A pond, maybe, a plant sprouting happily amidst ripples of black marker.

Daphne and Colin give rowdy cheers.

“What,” Edwina, who has quietly and delicately sipped at her beverage all night to no one’s criticism, asks, “does the Joker mean?”

Daphne is already moving to Colin’s bar cart, “It means In the Lake.”

“Oh,” agrees Edwina, with no understanding.

“It means,” Colin says, also eyeing his own beverage selection, “we all have half a minute to create the worst alcoholic-”

“Non-poisonous,” Daphne absently, vehemently, supplies.

“Non-poisonous concoction,” Colin agrees, distractedly. “We’ll take all ill-conceived drinks at the end of the time provided and put them together with a few cups of water - to make it interesting - in a lake, as it were, on the table. Anthony will have to hit a ping pong ball into the Lake of Cups and drink the contents of whichever cup it lands in.” 

Not needing to be repeated, Kate takes this to heart and pours hearty, healthy amounts of both gin and tequila - as well as Campari, creme de menthe, and chartreuse for good measure - into a wide-mouthed jam jar she had quickly found amongst the leftover wicket selection. 

It isn’t that she’s paid meticulously close attention to what Anthony has been doing this entire evening, absolutely not, but she has noticed that each hit with his wooden spoon has tended to favor a left trajectory. And so she places her lake-worthy beverage to the left side of said lake.

She also can’t help but notice the way he pushes his hair back from his forehead, and purses his lips in concentration as he assesses the landscape, landmines nestled amongst harmless oases of water.

Kate has never wished for someone to succeed and suffer so much at once.

The moment that his spoon makes contact with the ping pong ball, Kate can see it veer left and left and left - it’s exhilarating . 

Daphne and Colin seem to notice the same, because the second the ball hits the surface of Kate’s drink in a truly cinematic plunk they scream and throw their arms around her in a messy group hug.

“WE WON,” Daphne hollers, pumping her fist, sending a slight shower of beer across the room.

Anthony grabs the cup aggressively, “You did not win.”

But as he stares reproachfully into the glass, it feels as though they had.

“Please, Anthony,” Kate can’t help herself, “ please give me any notes. I’ve not studied mixology.”

The look he pins her with is patently angry, but it feels much more like a promise and she shivers.

He downs the drink in one, long, torturous gulp, his eyes never straying from hers.

“Fuck,” he says, eyes flinching in pain.

It is unanimous in that second that Kate has bested them all.

Despite the game continuing, playing out with a few very interesting obstacles - the Mud Puddle , the Unsticky Wicket - it is declared in favor of Kate and she can feel the rising warmth in her chest. 

While the teams congratulate each other and drink several more celebratory beverages, Kate once again finds herself in the orbit of Anthony.

The way she is happy and the way she wants to tease Anthony as he sips what - she thinks - is whiskey out of a floral teacup, meet and burst out of her in a gently stumbling giggle.

“Are you here to concede victory, my lord?” She curtsies neatly.

“You know I was ahead of you the whole time, yes?” he asks with a confident lilt and imperious raised brow.

“I’m sure,” she pulls up the strap of her top which has dropped down her shoulder, replying regally, “I have no idea what you mean.”

His eyes follow the path of the strap, and he cocks his head to the side, “You didn’t have to humor Colin, you know.”

“Huh?” It may be the influence of the gin and beer’s dangerous combination, but his bottom lip is lovely and full. 

“With this,” he says, gesturing vaguely, eyes focused only on her, “this Bridgerton insanity.”

“I can be agreeable,” she tells him, instead of telling him that she has loved this, that she wants to be a part of this always, that she feels at home here, with them.

“Oh yes,” his smile wrinkles the corners of his eyes, “yes, that drink you created certainly says agreeable .”

She pushes her tongue between her teeth, notices the way his eyes narrow, go dark, “I can be much less agreeable, you’ll find.”

He steps closer and she feels the pulse echo loudly in her wrists, wishes he would kiss her there, it’s horrible, “I would very much like to see-”

“Oy!” Colin shouts to the room, and while her heart hasn’t slowed it’s shuddering gait, whatever was about to happen - or not happen - is broken. “Late night curry anyone?” 

---

It’s a goddamn heatwave and she can’t remember a time she’s ever been hotter. 

Surely there was such a moment, but her mind is shockingly consumed by Anthony Bridgerton. Rogue and rake and man who very recently had his tongue down her throat.

Kate can’t say why she hasn’t told Edwina about her brief, inexplicable, totally predictable incident with Anthony. Her neighbor’s brother. On said neighbor’s bed. During aforementioned neighbor’s party.

She can’t say, in that, she is positive that Anthony has no real interest in her, and therefore any further examination on the matter is a wasted, and frankly painful, endeavor. 

Not to mention her beautiful, sweet sister glimmers with hope and genuine excitement any time Kate shows the bare minimum of interest in a person in even the dimmest romantic light. If she didn’t love her so much, Kate would find it insulting.

As it is, Kate has - to this point in her life - borne any insecurities of her lesser charms and lack of beauty with as much grace as a well timed bottle of wine and a hearty cry will allow. And really, one can hardly blame Eddie for how gorgeous she is - let alone Eddie herself.

But Kate does find herself turning over her time with Anthony, wishing she’d hadn’t said what she’d said or wishing he’d said something different. 

Wishing she wasn’t so clearly someone he did not want.

She hasn’t forgotten his sharp and accurate comment in regards to her barren love life. It’s not a fact about herself she dwells on, if she can help it, because mostly she can’t help it. She can’t change her pointed chin or unruly hair, how gangly she is in comparison with Edwina’s classically proportioned dips and curves. 

And the coarse fragments of her personality that she could smooth into something demure and palatable are the pieces of herself she holds most dear; the timeworn corners that are a sign of her endurance and strength.

Kate would never want to be anyone but herself. She just wished, on occasion, that who she was was desirable.

“But you love me, right?” she lolls her head to gaze over at the small mound of fur stretched out across the room.

Newton is breathing open-mouthed and loud on the tile floor of her kitchen to stay cool, and the air is so still and uncharacteristically humid it feels suffocating. Clad only in cut-off denim shorts and a cropped tank, she feels like a sticky assortment of limbs.

She considers making herself a mojito, imagines the condensation of the ice dropping down the side of the highball and pressing it to her forehead.

“Newton,” she calls weakly, he doesn’t look up, “Newton, can you please make me a mojito.” 

His tail wags with as much vigor as he is presently capable of, which is not much, at this, but only shoves his hanging tongue to the other side of his open mouth.

“I can’t believe you don’t even pay rent,” she grumbles, shoving up, off the couch, and padding into the kitchen, bending tiredly to scratch Newton behind his ears. He’s cute for a freeloader.

Pulling the rum down from a high shelf, she peeks into her fridge, grabs the soda water, but sees no mint.

“Ughhhh,” she throws her head back. “Why is life so hard?”

Newton does not answer this either, but does roll onto his back.

It’s not as though she’s completely sunk, it’s a matter of willing herself to her small outdoor garden of herbs - the one she’d planted earlier in the summer and declared herself an urban farmer.

Humming lazily to herself, she slinks into her bedroom and through the already open window. 

No breeze meets her as she surveys her miniature garden. She really needs to be better about watering her poor plants, the heat certainly not helping. 

Plucking a few healthy looking mint leaves, Kate notices that the tulips Mary had gifted her only a few weeks before are blooming full and orange.

She doesn’t even pause before crouching down to push her face into the center of the flowers, disturbing, as it were, a bee happily nestled in the pistil of one of the blooms.

It buzzes angrily around her for a moment before landing directly on her chest and promptly stinging her.

“Shit,” Kate swats uselessly at the creature that drops away, and looks down at the angry welt that is already forming. “Just wonderful.”

Moving quickly, she tramples back into her flat and throws open her freezer, pulling out not one, but two empty ice cube trays. When did she become such a lazy asshole? 

“Damn it.”

Briefly, she considers letting it be or hopping into an extremely cold shower, but then conjures the image of Colin’s large refrigerator, with it’s convenient ice machine that is always chugging happily along during his myriad parties.

Returning to the fire escape - rather warily - she knocks frantically at Colin’s window.

“Colin!” she looks down at the epicenter of the sting and presses lightly to try to alleviate the ache; it hurts immeasurably more and she knocks harder. “Colin!”

The sash flies open. 

“Kate?” It’s Anthony. Of course it’s Anthony.

“Do you, fuck,” she tries not to touch the swelling on her chest again as it pulses in pain, “do you have ice?”

“What happened?” He’s immediately on alert, grabbing her hand and lifting her into Colin’s bedroom easily. Even with the aching injury, she notices how his biceps flex as he handles her with ease.

“Stung by a damned bee,” she points at the obvious contusion.

He pales, going completely still. She doesn’t even see his chest rise and fall. She hasn’t had time to consider what his reaction to her sudden invasion at the hand - or stinger - of a bee might be, but if she had it certainly would not have been this. The absolute petrified inertia.

“Anthony?” she asks softly, cautiously.

This seems to elicit movement, and he shakes his head and backs clumsily from the room. “Don’t move!” he hollers over his shoulder as he sprints from her.

She nearly forgets the shooting pain in her bewilderment. She can hardly reconcile whoever this Anthony is with the stoic, collected Anthony she knows. He returns before she can come back to herself, with a flannel full of ice and without even a pause, he pulls her shirt up and over her head in one motion. 

“Anthony!” She’s completely bare to him - no bra under her tank, too hot for any additional layers of clothing while lounging in her overheated flat on her own - and she hurriedly crosses her arms to cover herself.

It does occur to her that he’s seen this all before, his mouth having been intimately acquainted with that entire terrain already, but it shocks her nonetheless.

The ice is cold on her chest just above her heart, which is thundering, but all she can feel are the pads of his fingers holding the cloth to her. 

“Are you-” he seems devastated as he gulps, but continues determinedly, evidently oblivious to how little she is currently wearing, “are you allergic?”

She shakes her head because her throat is tight at his obvious fear for her, “No.”

“I-” he lifts the compression for only a moment to study the wound, pressing it back down with a tender intensity, “I don’t think we have any epinephrine here.”

“Anthony,” she wants to touch him but can’t find it in herself to just move. “I’m fine. It only hurts a bit.”

“If we were at my flat,” he doesn’t seem to have heard her, listened to her, “I have an EpiPen. It’d be, you’d be-”

“Anthony,” she says louder, finally able to remove one of her arms from its place protecting whatever false modesty stands between them so that she can rest her hand against his where it’s holding the ice to her. “I’m okay. I promise. I’m absolutely fine.”

An instinct in her makes her squeeze his hand. She fights the urge to bend her head down and press her lips to his knuckles. 

He looks up, startled, as though he is only now registering where he is and who he is with. 

“Kate,” he immediately drops his hand and steps away from her, ice cubes thumping on the rug in a dull clamor. 

She is frozen watching him come back into himself from wherever his panic had transported him.  

The rapid flutter of his eyelashes feels tidal, ceaseless as it pulls at the bottom of her stomach, rises in the back of her throat. 

She makes a small movement toward him.

His body tenses and he shakes his head, bending down to pick up her top, and thrusting it to her while turning away. “I’m so sorry, Kate.”

Looking at her shirt in her fingers, her insides twist. Gently, she plucks it from his grasp and he withdraws his arm.

Kate stretches her tank back over her hand, nearly forgetting in the moment, the radiating pain of the sting. 

She clears her throat.

Anthony’s face when he turns to her again is ashen and blank. While Kate can see that he’s regained a semblance of control, it’s at a taxing cost. He’s trying to be hollow while collapsing in.

He draws a long, agonizing breath. “I’m sorry for how I acted, Kate.” His gaze is pleading, “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

It feels as if this precipice they’re at, this fragile place they’re balancing is slowly tilting or degrading or - fuck, she doesn’t know. All she is sure of is that Anthony is hurting and it hurts her.

And it is the only reason she can justify moving toward him and wrapping him in a tight hug, cheek pressed to his shoulder.

“Thank you,” she mouths against him, hoping it rings through and fills out his hollowness.

His arms wrap around her slowly, loosely and he exhales for what seems an eternity.

“Just don’t let it happen again,” he grumbles into her neck.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

--

The next evening, she raps the corner of a six pack against the window and waits, looking out over the night, a calm warmth sheltering London in that way only an early summer day can.

Anthony, who she has since learned is house sitting for Colin while he’s in Greece, opens the window, settling on his elbow and propping his chin in his hand. 

Roguish, her brain supplies, unhelpfully. 

“You know,” he draws, “there’s a perfectly serviceable door.”

He’s in a white tee and the gently waving curtains frame him like some kind of Capra film, half smirk and all. Kate ignores the quick jab in her stomach when she imagines Colin at the window instead. 

This isn’t Anthony’s window.

“Now where’s the whimsy in that?” She jerks her head. “Come on, m’lord, perfect night for a pint. I owe you one after that daring rescue earlier.”

“Bloody don’t call me that,” he whines, but he’s already hefting himself over the sill.

She collapses into a crossed-leg seat, back against the building, waiting for him while he takes an assessing gaze over the panoramic. Finally some wind has picked up, light licks that toss his hair softly.

“So, some Peronis, then shall we?” he asks, settling down on the grate of the escape, leaning against the brick between the windows next to her, stretching his legs out in front with a lazy cross at the ankles. The jeans he’s wearing are cuffed slightly at the bottom and he’s barefoot; it’s endearing and she hadn’t expected it to be. 

“No, you twat,” she reaches for a bottle, grabbing it and thrusting it to him, dancing it jauntily in offering, “It’s Lads’ Night. Only Carlsbergs for us.”

Anthony groans, but accepts the proffered beverage and pops the cap off with the ring he always seems to wear, holding out his hand to do the same for her lager, “You’re the worst, you know that.”

It feels strangely like he’s told her she’s beautiful.

“And proud of it,” she accepts her bottle back from him and clanks the necks of their beers. “Cheers, mate.”

He nods solemnly, “Lads, lads, lads,” before taking a deep sip.

It is shockingly easy to spend an evening with Anthony Bridgerton.

She finds there’s little time to dwell on the obstacles that usually clutter her mind when she’s with most people. There are fewer moments that require her to calculate the exact amount of time taken between question and answer, the degree of enthusiasm or bitterness weighted on each opinion in order to appear commanding or smart or nice or funny or - 

There’s more time to be in each other’s space.

Maybe she’s had more to drink than she realizes.

But she feels, well, comfortable. Happy, even.

“You punched Simon?” she is laughing so hard, the wheezing hurts her lungs.

He’s nearly crying in laughter himself, sheepish but incapable of telling the story without employing its full comedic effect, “Kate, I tried to throw him through a table.”

She can’t keep upright and her cheek cascades joyfully against his shoulder. “Anthony! You can’t throw your friends through tables!”

His head rests against the top of hers in faux defeat, “Well, it would have been nice if you had been there to tell me that at the time.”

“Talk about toxic masculinity,” Kate mouths again his collarbone, unclear when she had gotten here, but both unwilling to question it and unwilling to pull away, “I hope Simon destroyed you.”

Anthony moves his nose against her forehead, “Oh, it was wildly idiotic and sophomoric. Daphne has never - and will, honestly, rightfully never - let us live it down.”

She watches him idly fiddle with the label at the neck of his bottle. “Did Simon get his own?”

His body shakes up and down and she stays leaning against him, enjoying being part of his past, his joy, “He did marry my sister.”

“Well,” Kate licks her lips, “that’s hardly an evening of scores, considering Daphne is her own person and seems very happy.”

The vibration of his chest as he hums moves her softly, “She is,” he is smiling, dopey and sweet. She can hear and not see it. “Happy, that is. I’m glad.”

Kate wants to soak in his contentment, but decides that antagonism is still the realm they exist most easily in, “You’re such a sap.”

He laughs so wonderfully loudly, “Fuck you.”

She looks out at the gathering clouds in the distance and shrugs, “Well, I’m sorry that your misplaced male pride and internalized misogyny led you to nearly crushing your dearest friend’s face.”

“He did break my nose,” Anthony finally concedes.

She kicks her bare foot against his shin, “You deserved it, asshole.”

“Hey,” he cries, “I thought we’d come to a truce. Lads, and all that.”

“Sure we have. Doesn’t mean you wouldn’t deeply benefit from both karma and therapy,” she polishes off her beer, fishing for another, automatically handing it to Anthony to remove the cap.

A staticky bolt of heat lightning feathers out in those far clouds she’d just been eyeing, and she punches down at the quelling anxiety starting in her lungs. It’s easier to do than usual - the booze or the company, she can’t say, but she has her suspicions, and that triggers a different type of anxiety all together.

“I love storms,” he breathes softly, looking at the same space in the sky, “Makes me feel more focused or invigorated. Something. I don’t know. Grounded.”

She hates being perceived as weak, but hates the idea of being dishonest - dishonest with Anthony - more. “I hate them,” her voice catches on her rough whisper.

He turns to look at her. It’s not a hard look at all, warm and empathetic, even with the surprise in his voice, “Really?”

“Yeah,” she attempts to shrug it off, “Always have.”

Kate is certain he is going to reach for her hand, is certain she wants him to, but he only taps the pinky toe of his foot to her own deliberately, “Why?”

“No idea, honestly,” she bites her lip, pretends not to contemplate how their feet are dark and light against one another. “When I was younger it was worse. Now, well, now, I guess it’s still pretty bad, but it’s easier to weather the proverbial and literal storm by myself.” 

Mary and Edwina don’t need to worry about her any more than they already do, she doesn’t add. Because then she’ll have to tell him that they worry she’s lonely, that she’s too hard on herself, that she’s too concerned with taking care of everyone else and not concerned enough about taking care of herself.

“Besides, I haven’t had to sleep in my mum’s room for at least five years,” it’s a joke, but he doesn’t seem to find it as funny as she meant for it to be because he doesn’t even smile. “I’m kidding, Anthony.”

His eyes are intense, so lonely, “You know you are allowed to be afraid of things, Kate.”

She has to look away, to quell the tidal hope rising, “Yes, thank you for giving me permission to have feelings, my lord.”

He huffs, “Don’t fecking call me that, and that’s not what I meant.”

“I know,” she admits softly.

The city murmur stays suspended between them, not quiet but rushing in and out like an ocean. 

“I think,” he declares, standing quickly and unsteadily, “the hour of tequila is upon us, bruv.”

The following descent into hard spirits is steep and potentially perilous, but Kate is settled in a mental space where whatever this is with Anthony is where she wants to be at this exact moment. 

Ultimately, it means she chokes back warm tequila straight from the bottle, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, thrusting it back toward Anthony.

“I cannot,” she cringes past the lingering heat in her throat, “wait to meet Hyacinth. I can tell she’s my people.”

Anthony drags his own hand - broad and excruciatingly elegant - across his lips. “You’re both an absolute menace to society and should be closely monitored by the UN, so it makes perfect sense you would say that.”

Kate cackles, then descends into a story about her own sixth form misadventures, wanting only to hear the smirk in his voice, the pleased warmth of each laugh that’s startled out of him.

“It is,” Anthony slurs many ill-advised, considerable pulls of tequila later, “a very good color.” He squints profoundly, holding the bottle up against the city lights. 

She has the stray, absurd thought that he’s very beautiful this way. The kind edges of the streetlamp-saturated evening filtering him softly. The crease that usually digs deep at the perch of his nose is a slight shadow, just a suggestion of the anxiety that she knows eats at him. His hair, too, has lost any semblance of structure, waves gentle and chaotic across his forehead, making her fingers itch.

He’s less whole than he pretends to be, those same night lights shining through the seams and fissures that he ignores or hides. Both, probably. 

“You’re such an idiot,” she snorts, lulling her head against the side of the building to look at him in a way she knows doesn’t tell him he deserves to be unbroken but wishes it did. “The bottle is green.”

His shoulders jump in a stilted giggle that he turns into a shrug, “Still a good color.” A horn honks loudly and a drunk woman barks an unintelligible shout as she slams a cab door below. Anthony hasn’t looked up from the liquid sloshing clumsily in the very green bottle. 

“You know,” he tilts his head, eyes following a drop of tequila that has escaped down the glass, “you were wearing green that night at the party.”

Kate doesn’t need to ask which party, the distinct and scalding image of a green dress caught in Anthony’s fingers, high around her waist, his hot breath at her collar, pushing the green neckline lower, lower still.

She clears her throat, and focuses her attention on picking the label of an empty beer bottle strewn beside her. “You were, um, you seemed pretty concerned about that bee earlier.”

Immediately he looks small and she wants to see him in all ways but she wishes she hadn’t asked him to be this version of himself now, not on Fake Lads’ Night when he’s laughed so loud he’s wheezed and told her he’s frightened of his littlest sister and complimented her on her stupid fucking Topshop clearance dress.

“I was,” he confirms. His jaw shifts, and he swigs the dregs remaining in the bottle. He looks at its emptiness for a second, comes to an apparent conclusion and shuffles to his feet. “It’s late - “

“Anthony, please - “

He won’t look at her for only a moment, but when he does it hurts more.

She can’t move, feels oddly stricken by the dismissal she reads there.

“Thanks, Kate,” like the sign off to a form letter, “for the drinks.”

Her throat is so tight, “Anthony -”

“I’m sure we’ll run into each other again soon,” he nods, climbs back through Colin’s window, and shuts it just as firmly.

Kate doesn’t want to cry, so she buries her face in her knees and presses them into her eyes until it hurts.

--

There is a sharp breath between a lethargic summer storm and an all out tempest.

Kate is used to the foreboding unease the heavy drops bring, the way they whisper at the window fat and sweet or hard and ominous, but it has never gotten any easier.

She’s spent the afternoon staring blankly at a canvas, then an evening staring blankly at a television, and she feels emotionally void from it all. And if she’s completely square with herself, it’s been more than a few hours and more like many dreary, colorless days strung one after the other.

Newton snores from the comfort of his plush bed in the corner of her room, entirely unbothered by the brewing squall. Oh, to be an overweight Corgi, she opines briefly, before throwing herself roughly back against the fortress of pillows at the head of her bed.

She stares at the meandering cracks in her ceiling, attempting to ignore the bright white strobe of lightning and the horrible grumbling rumble of thunder, the small splinters that she has found meditative in moments like this, and counts in a long, full breath, and out another. 

There’s absolutely nothing to worry about, this can’t hurt her.

A quick wrap on the window startles her as would a crack of thunder, and she sits bolt upright.

In the eerie echo of the lightning, silhouetted, is Anthony. 

Strobes of iridescent flashes are bouncing off his cheeks, illuminating him for only gasps of moments. 

Kate scrambles from her bed, throwing up open the window, “What the hell are you doing?”

He’s soaked from the downpour, rain running off his nose, “Was really just hoping to get your opinion on post-Brexit trade strategies.”

A quick strike and crash makes him jump.

“You know,” she says and pretends not to notice the way his t-shirt clings to him in the onslaught, “I do have a door.”

He shrugs. He's shivering but is trying to hide it, “Where’s the whimsy in that?”

She hasn’t seen him in weeks, but she’s grateful for whatever this is, “Come in, you arse.”

Kate is acutely aware the moment he’s in her bedroom. Despite him dripping puddles on her floor, he seems unbothered, taking in her space with a guarded gaze.

“Well,” he hurumphs after a brief moment, “I guess this was a fucking awful idea.”

“Hmm,” Kate lifts her eyebrows, taking in his very damp and clearly very cold state.

“You didn’t have to say I told you so,” he pushes back his wet hair roughly.

She turns her palms out and up, “Don’t recall saying as much, m’lord.”

His frown is so deeply exaggerated she nearly runs her fingers along the parenthetical lines they make at the corners of his mouth, “I can hear you thinking it.”

“In that case,” she concedes, “Yes. You’re mad.”

“There it is,” he bows his head in assent.

His tracksuit bottoms are sagging under the weight of the water, and the grey tee isn’t faring any better, but she doesn’t want to send him away to change, doesn’t want to give him a chance to leave and never come back. He’s shivering and determined and she needs him here, now.

“Come on,” Kate tilts her head, telling him to follow her, “let’s get you sorted, then.”

He trails her to her bathroom like a small lost dog, where she secures a towel and the large terrycloth robe that Edwina had gifted her last Christmas. 

“Dry off, get warm,” she can’t meet his eye, already picturing him wrapped in the fluffy white warmth of the garment, “I’ll put the kettle on.”

Shuffling into her kitchen, Kate is only then aware that she’s wearing tattered sleep shorts that are far too short for a casually visiting guest and a saggy racerback tee from some concert she barely remembers attending. 

“Well,” she fills the electric kettle, pushing down aggressively on the on switch, “shit.”

“Kate?” He says her name so soft it’s almost lost amidst the continued rolls of thunder and rush of rain.

“Yes?” She asks, then turns.

Anthony Bridgerton is standing in her kitchen swathed in a fluffy white robe, his legs and feet bare. She can see the vaguest hints of hair where the fabric vees across his chest, and she has to pull in a meditative breath for entirely different reasons.

If he can read her undoubtedly inappropriate and hungry expression, he doesn’t let on. “Milk no sugar.”

“Right,” she agrees breathily, fixing their teas, in a very performative gesture.

His hip is balancing at her counter, and he looks a part of her flat, a cohesive piece amidst so many mismatched paintings and stupid knicknacks and articles of furniture.

“There you are,” she hands him his mug, her fingers touching his. “You’re not allowed to complain if it’s awful.”

His face is so placid amidst the tumult of the outside world, she wonders if he’s even aware he’s not affecting his usual austere air of utmost solemnity. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

She’s not even sure she wants tea as she takes a brief, burning sip at her own drink. She finds, in fact, she’s sure that she’s tired and she can’t afford to expend any energy pretending. 

“Anthony,” she sets down her cup, willing herself to meet his gaze, “I am not trying to be forward, but, I just - I just need to lie down, please.”

Kate wishes she could keep her voice from growing smaller and smaller, reach it before it leaves her control completely, but it’s gone before she can resolve to be impassive and collected. She looks up sheepishly.

His whole countenance is soft and undemanding and he grasps his mug in one hand and extends the other to her, “Come on, then.”

Nestled amongst the coterie of pillows, he places their drinks on her respective side tables, and moves her so that she’s fitted comfortably against him as her whole room glows sudden and blindingly light.

She shakes and inhales and grabs his hand.

“I’m here,” he mutters into her hair. “Everything will be alright.”

Heaving air into her lungs she nods desperately and buries deeper into the gentle corner of his shoulder. She only registers his soft hushing when the clamor of noise lessens and the numbness in her nose begins to abate.

“You were right that night about the bee,” he says softly, as though sensing she’s coming back to herself. 

“I was,” he swallows painfully, “really worried. My father - he was allergic to bees. He- he died from a sting when we were out at our country house, too far from help.”

“Oh, Anthony,” she absolutely aches for him suddenly and profoundly, coming to the surface amidst her own fear. “I had no idea. I wouldn’t have said anything that night if I’d known.”

She can feel him shake his head more than see it in the dim light of her bedroom. “No it’s okay. How could you have known? 

He laughs bitterly, “And I didn’t act, well, rationally, when I saw you’d been stung.”

It’s possibly the braveness that darkness allows, or the freedom of their current precarious vulnerability, but Kate can’t stop herself from curling into him, entwining her legs with his, moving her fingers to his bare chest, where the terrycloth meets itself and gaps open.

He doesn’t push her away, and in fact, brings his long fingers to her own. 

“I don’t want anything to happen to you, Kate. And the thought of seeing you - seeing you how he was in those last moments,” the rough edge of his voice rivals the jagged shape of the thunder, “I don’t - I can’t even think about that.”

Kate’s not sure if it’s a comfort to her or to him - but she presses a kiss near his heart through the stupid fucking robe he’s still wearing. “My father died when I was sixteen,” she whispers loud enough to be heard in their close cocoon. “It wasn’t sudden. Though, I’m not sure if that makes it better. He left us slowly but it still felt too fast.”

He’s silent, but he pulls her tighter.

“Sometimes,” she admits into his neck, “sometimes I think that may be worse. Too much time to mourn.”

“Kate-” he breathes, his lips having found her forehead, “you don’t have to -”

But she can’t stop. It’s a fountain that has rarely - if ever - been tapped, and she finds she wants him to know all of her. She wants to see if he can hold whatever shattered parts of her still remain and not get cut.

“I don’t even remember my mum,” it’s a confession she has only made to a handful of people, spinning moments from photographs because the shame of losing someone you don’t know - and grieving them so profoundly - has always been too acute. 

He is careful when he speaks, “I thought you went for brunch every Sunday with your mother and sister.”

She smiles into him, smiles that he knows, that he remembers some passing comment she must have made to him drunkenly at a party. “Mary is my step-mum, but she’s all I can remember as a mother. She’s the best.”

The bundled and cathartic contentment that follows has her drowsy. It’s a miracle that she is so near sleep in the midst of such a storm, but she finds herself clinging to the vestiges of Anthony that her consciousness craves.

“Tell me about your favorite place,” her demand languid and slightly slurred.

“My favorite place?” his voice is bright with delighted surprise. She wants to taste it.

“Yes. Your favorite place on earth,” she pushes her hand further under the lapel of her, now Anthony’s, robe. “It will relax me, so you are legally obliged as my Storm Therapist to tell me.”

“Storm Therapist?” he grunts, running the tips of his fingers along the back of her hand and wrist. “Is there any room for negotiation on that title?”

“Not until you start fulfilling your duties,” she shrugs, as if to say, I don’t make the rules.

He pauses, then, “My favorite place is Aubrey Hall.”

“Oh,” she sighs, even now, so tired and so wrapped up in him, unable to keep from tormenting him, “sounds posh.”

Anthony only laughs. “I suppose it is, but when I was growing up it was just where I had the most fun, where me and my brothers and sisters got to run wild. Absolutely feral children.”

He tells her about the time he fell and broke his arm and Benedict cried harder than him. He describes the tree house his father built and how he had to let Daphne in even though he had some very strong opinions on girls not being allowed, and he whispers conspiratorially about the time he and Eloise devised a scheme to hide the croquet set so that he was guaranteed to get his first choice of color during a family picnic, and on and on until she feels her eyes growing heavy with the weight of his easy words.

--

It’s not the storm that wakes her, but a vague feeling of absolute quietude. 

Everything is soft and muted, the yellow light of the city burning the steady raindrops against the glass gold.

Anthony’s arm is draped across her, snug at her waist, breath in sync with her own.

The pull to look at him is strong, but the desire to keep him pinned in this tableau is stronger, and she closes her eyes again. She places him in her consciousness the same way she does her watercolors: the warm pink peach of his skin bright against her own dark, rich skin, a mess of brown auburn strokes that crisscross his forehead, buried amidst the white and greys of her sheets, an ethereal molten warmth to it all.

His hot exhales against the back of her neck, though, those are real in a way she can’t catalogue.

He must have felt her stir, because she can feel him tense against her.

“Kate,” his voice is rough.

“Yeah,” she whispers into the room - paintings don’t shatter, but things that are real, solid do.

“Are you okay?” He shuffles slightly, closer.

“Yeah,” her heart picks up its pace, making her chest, her nose, the ends of her fingertips start to pulse. 

There’s a space just at the bottom of her ribs where his hand brushes tentatively against her, “Kate.” Then he’s still, waiting for her. 

“Really, I’m fine,” her eyes trace the path of a single raindrop and she tries not to think about how if she moved her foot back an inch, it would brush against his leg.

“Do you still hate me?” his lips form the words, a shadow on her shoulder blade.

She grips his hand. There’s an honesty to this low light with its oranges and reds. She twines her fingers in his and brushes her thumb at the curve of his own.

“I promise I won’t tell anyone, “ she slowly moves his hand so that his palm brushes her stomach, and along her ribs, “but I think you may actually be nice .”

He’s hardly breathing anymore, “Nice?”

“Anthony?” her entire body is vibrating in the stillness.

“Yeah?” she’s sure she hasn’t imagined the catch in his voice.

“Can you,” she hates how small she sounds, the way the dark corners of her room swallow her words, “will you - will you touch me?”

Anthony’s whole being seems to respond all at once, moving their joint hands up to her breast, lining his front along her back, moving his mouth at the back corner of her jaw.

“Fuck,” he murmurs, palming her roughly “yes, god yes.”

It’s that sticky, gooey sort of languor, tinged with heat and thick want. Before she’s half aware she’s done it, she’s pressed her backside firm against him, letting out a satisfied, shaky sigh at how his hardness digs into her ass.

Air gets momentarily caught in her throat when he slides his hand down her stomach and under her shorts, then knickers, to touch her. 

“Jesus,” his voice is wrecked, “you’re so wet, Kate.”

She makes a helpless noise as he moves his fingers against her, skims lightly then dips into her briefly, then longer and deeper. 

“Have you been thinking about this, Kate?” the pad of his middle finger is rough at her clit, “Have you been able to stop thinking about this since the party?”

All she can do is gasp and push herself down on his middle and ring fingers. Her want consuming and desperate.

“You’re all I can think about,” he confesses, moving his hand over and into her wetness, running his tongue along the shell of her ear.

“Please, Anthony,” she feels hunger, “please, I want - “

The rain is a muted noise compared to the cacophony of sheets and mattress springs, as she turns to face him and Anthony is shoving her bottoms down and off of her, the frantic rustle of her stupid robe he still has slung about him and then his pants getting caught in his feet, hitting her floor.

Her arm is stretched out above her, as they lay on their sides studying one another. There’s nothing remotely sterile about it, so different from studying figures in art classes. He’s present for her, flushed with want and, honestly, delicious. The tension is something she can taste as she watches his arousal move against his stomach with each openmouthed pant.

There’s a quiver moving through him as he reaches out to run his fingers at the line of her hair, pushing back slowly to entangle in her curls. He stares at the strands wrapped around his hand as though it’s a surprise even to him.

“Anthony, you,” she swallows hard, “you don’t have to-”

He looks startled, stills whatever ministrations he had planned, “Don’t have to what?”

She looks down, absently thinks that his feet are surprisingly sweet in their bareness. “You know.”

He moves forward to nip her lower lip, trace his tongue from corner to corner, “I definitely do not know.”

“Be nice about it,” she says as plainly as possible.

“What?”

“I know I’m not - I’m not Edwina,” she swallows. Just because she knows how to get what she wants doesn’t preclude some level of hurt or realism, “I’m not Siena . You don’t have to do the whole Venus pales in comparison thing. I’m a big girl.”

He looks stricken, “Kate.”

She wraps her hand around his cock, draping her leg over his thigh, and brushes him against her center. “Honestly,” she’s overly confident, a tactic that has worked well for her partners in the past.

But Anthony is frozen entirely.

Her whole body is tangled with his own unmoving form, so she grips the back of his neck, steals a starved kiss from him.

Suddenly he shifts, both of his palms cupping her face. It’s so gentle and so desperate she wants him to stop.

“Kate,” he pulls back and pleads, “Kate no.”

He kisses her again, hard, his mouth open and demanding. It’s loud and wet and if she weren’t so turned on already, she’d blush.

“You,“ he places a stray kiss on her cheek, the bridge of her nose, the space just above her lip, “you honestly don’t know how beautiful you are.”

“Anthony-”

“You’re, Kate, you’re stunning. I can’t - I can’t,” he moves his cock against her instinctively, and it makes her clench, gasp.

He holds her chin in one hand and moves the other down her shoulder, her side, her waist, hip, “Even when I thought I hated you, you were all I could think about.” He brandishes the statement with a dirty, openmouthed kiss that lasts beyond decency. 

“When we’d argue,” he pushes harder against her, the tip of him teasing her, and she can only make a deep gasp for air, “all I wanted to do was ruin you for anyone else. Wanted you to only ever want me.” 

He presses two, then three fingers into her, and it feels gorgeous . “Because I’m fucking selfish and I want every inch of your unbelievably long and perfect legs for myself.”

He moves, traces down her legs, hefting her right over his shoulder, kissing at the inside of her thigh. “You’re- you’re brilliant, of course, so bloody smart, witty, sure,” his eyes are hooded when he looks up and over her stomach at her, “but fuck, you’re gorgeous.”

“Is that clear?” he demands and she nods weakly.

“Is that,” his mouth is now at the apex of her thighs, where she’s so ready and so warm, “clear, Katherine?”

“Yes,” she sighs loudly.

He runs his tongue across her, and her toes curling nearly painfully. “I can promise,” his tongue gives a glance against her clit, but then moves deep within her, pulls slightly back, “that nothing I do to you tonight will be nice. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” her fingers have buried themselves in his scalp, where she’s been envisioning them, and all of this is more than she’d fantasized. 

“Do you?” he pushes in harder.

“Don’t,” she moans, “please don’t be nice.”

And he’s definitely, completely not nice as he works his tongue against her while she begs for more, a heady blissful thing that has her dizzy and beyond her own body. “Yes, Anthony.”

His satisfied hum moves its way from her thigh to her stomach, to her side, to her breast, and finally, his lips consume her own again.

It’s easy to get lost in the hard pulls from each other’s mouths, but she feels so frenzied so fast.

“Anthony, please,” she can feel her voice tearing itself apart, “please just make me feel.”

His eyes are pure devastation, a complete surrender to logic, “Kate, god, yes.”

And in that moment it is all movement, a delicious press, him down and her up, her legs wrapping high against him in the way they did that night at the party, but so much more intimate, so much more satisfying as he pushes into her. 

Those hands that she’s imagined doing all manner of things - fixing his hair, making tea, making her gasp - are gripping feverishly at her ass, pushing her onto him, a thick up and down. Her own hands are pressing his face into her breast, gripping aimlessly at the pillows above and beside her.

“More,” she doesn’t even know what she’s saying, “Anthony, more.”

Despite her own lack of direction, Anthony seems to read her perfectly clearly and moves within her quicker, relentlessly, at an angle that is making her tingle from the toes upward or her crown downward or - “God,” he pants, sucking a bruise under her jaw, “it’s,” his hips stutter, “it’s never been like this.”

She can hardly think as her bed shakes, so different from the fear of only hours before. Of course she’s had sex, but this, whatever this is, with Anthony’s face so concentrated above her, isn’t anything she’s felt before.

The slide of his cock in and out is sending her into dizzying circles, the slick sounds of them making her push her feet harder against the backs of his thighs. 

“I can’t -” she cries, “Anthony!”

“Kate,” he’s moving so fast now it feels agonizingly right, the heat and heavy numbness rising and rising within her as his rhythm goes off.

And when she scatters into an infinite amount of stars, he’s there, heaving against her neck as her constellations buzz and breathe back together.

--

When she wakes up, Anthony isn’t there.

And really, she’s not sure what she expected. But she guesses it should have been this. If she’s honest with herself, she wanted him there, curled and warm and ready for tea and toast. But.

Newton is panting happily in his bed on her floor, clearly having bid their unexpected guest adieu recently. 

“Traitor,” she murmurs, throwing back on the clothing Anthony had peeled off her the night before.

She momentarily considers marching to his - Colin’s - window and demanding an explanation or even an apology, but she’s always known who Anthony is, despite thinking that maybe she knew him better.

Sometimes, she reminds herself kicking the robe he’d hung clumsily over the arm of a chair onto the ground and toward the washing machine angrily, you should take people at face value.

There hadn’t been any tacit agreement that this was more than very good sex, hadn’t even been a real discussion of friendship - which she’s sure they’ve squandered at this point. Sex between eagerly consenting adults wasn’t a promise or a confession. It was simply the consequence of momentary, undeniable attraction.

Kate does find it hard, however, to extract the emotional entanglement of their whispers from their very heated encounter. She can’t help but press at the vulnerability that hurt her to show him when she spoke of her father, when she let him see how little she revered her own body. A nerve exposed, a lesson learned.

Newton is on her heels as she puts two slices of bread under the grill, filling the kettle that she and Anthony emptied the night before, a half consciousness.

The damage of so many years and so many losses isn’t an excuse, she knows, but he’s held together by such a meager thread she doesn’t know how he sustains.

And despite it all, when she cries at his rejection in her small kitchen with her dog lapping at her ankles and her toast burning, she can’t help but hurt for him, too.

---

An incessant pounding sounds at her door.

She glares at her canvas, a few auburn strokes of nothing, and throws her head back, groaning.

“Go away!” she tries, gamely. There’s a moment of silence, and then another round of loud bangs. 

“Uggggh,” she tosses her palette down, and wipes her hands angrily at the jeans she’s wearing.

“What?” she growls yanking open the door.

Anthony Bridgerton is standing, shoulders rounded and shameful, hands deep in his pockets.

“Kate,” he starts, but seems unable to finish.

Somehow, despite all that’s happened between them, despite her becoming his latest conquest - which she still hasn’t found it in herself to regret, but surely will in time - she feels the need to free him from the burden of her hanging around his shoulders, his conscience. He never promised to love her, to care for her, beyond that one moment. 

He owes her nothing.

“Anthony, it’s fine,” she reassures him. “You’re not the first emotionally unavailable guy I’ve fucked.”

“That’s not,” he tries, but can’t find any place for his sentence to go and stops. The gravity of whatever guilt is weighing on him looks heavy across his brow when he stares at his feet, blinking rapidly.

She almost feels sorry for him except her heart hurts too badly to absolve him completely.

“Really, Anthony,” Kate has, above all things, been good at being the strong one, “it’s okay.”

He looks relieved and broken and so very empty.

She doesn’t reach out to him, but it’s a near thing. The darkness under his eyes and the frantic shock of his hair are hard to look at. He’s a near apparition, but he’s done this to himself and she can’t help him if he won’t let her.

“I’m sure we’ll run into each other again soon,” she says, trying to smile instead of cry, and pretends not to see his stricken face when she shuts the door.

--

It’s been weeks of artfully dodging Colin’s attempts to have her over for a party before she eventually caves.

In that time, Kate has carefully constructed a safe space around her that is not permeable by Anthony and his damaged heart and stiff upper British whatnot false bravado.

It’s her fault for wanting more than it was, than he could clearly give. He’d comforted her, she’d welcomed him into her bed, her body, but ultimately she was the one who’d allowed feelings to enter the equation. And she is, therefore, the only one who can pull herself from her current predicament. 

It’s shockingly normal.

The vibrating bass through the soles of her feet, the tart sweet taste of her cocktail, the stifling closeness of the gathered masses.

“Kate!” Colin hollers gleefully, and she could be back weeks and weeks ago, when she’d worn a shitty green dress in this same spot.

“Colin!” She answers with as much enthusiasm as she is able to fake.

He wraps her in a bear hug that makes her want to cry. “Where have you been? I keep trying to get you over here, but you’re never home anymore!”

It’s been easier, she’s found, to stay at Edwina’s, crunched onto her small, plush sofa, than to lie in her own bed and look out her window and hope and hope.

“Oh,” she pats his shoulder, “just busy with work and life, you know how it goes.”

“That I do,” he agrees easily, not attuned to her false cheer. “In fact, I just got back from Buenos Aires - stunning city, you have to go if you’re ever given the chance - actually,” he pauses and looks wildly around the room.

“Anthony is here somewhere,” he says offhandedly searching for his brother amongst the crowd, while Kate experiences a plummeting sense of dread and want . “Git refused to watch my flat for me this time and I had to practically beg Pen.”

“Colin, really,” Kate tries to stop him. If she can distract him now, she can slip out the window and avoid the inevitable, painful conversation that is sure to ensue. “I should head out - early morning tomorrow.”

A blatant, blatant lie.

Colin smiles, “Nonsense, he keeps asking after you. It’s damned annoying - he can talk to you himself.”

“Colin,” Kate can feel the waver in her own voice.

“Ah! There he is,” Colin waves wildly over the heads of his partygoers, “Oy! Anthony!”

The panic sets in immediately. 

Anthony appears through the crowd, drink in one hand and the other in his pocket. He looks exhausted and handsome just like she expected him to, the way he always looks - even if she wants to think he is slightly more drawn, more wan. 

He seems stunned for a moment when he realizes who he is facing. 

“Hi, Kate,” he says.

“Anthony,” she steels herself.

“Well,” Colin hits Anthony’s shoulder gleefully, Anthony grunts, “I’ve found Kate for you. Now you can ask her everything you’ve been asking me. I can hardly be accountable for her every going on.”

Kate finds herself reaching to keep Colin close, but he’s gone, eaten by the crowd before she can even move.

Anthony looks at her intently, “Listen, Kate.”

But she can hardly stand. The axis of everything moving before her feet can adjust. “I don’t want to do this Anthony,” she pleads, “Just - just let it be.”

She stumbles as she moves away from him, making a quick escape route around several drunken gaggles and rowdy huddles, and heads for Colin’s room.

“Kate please,” he chases after her, and finally, grabs her arm and spins her to face him, “please talk to me.”

“Anthony,” she sighs, feels the eyes of the crowd on them, “Now is really not the time or the place.”

He sets a grim face, “I rather think it is.”

Colin’s room is a strange mirror to that night. Lights and darkness. Rugs and linen bedspread. Thumping, thumping music. Flipped and exactly the same.

But Anthony is looking at her and when he slams the door, they’re both more than aware of the other.

Her self-preservation is emotional, now, not physical.

His shoulders move up, down. “Kate,” he starts with a false softness, sharp clumsy words, “I need to apologize.”

It’s a thunderstorm. A clash of sudden loudness and shaking - a certainty of tumult and fury. “I don’t want to hear that you’re sorry, Anthony!” 

She can hardly tamp down her sparking anger as she spits frustration at him, aching. “I don’t want to know that you wish you hadn’t done it or- or that you don’t regret that you did , but you’re sorry you made me think it was something it wasn’t.”

She feels slightly manic, throwing her hands out in front of him. “I don’t want it, Anthony!”

“Kate, please,” he steps toward her.

Stumbling over the fringe of a carpet, she backs away. Proximity hasn’t done her any favors to this point. “I’m sorry if you’re -you’re internalizing this or whatever self-sabotaging thing you’re doing that’s letting what happened between us eat away at you. But I want to let it go. ”  

Canvases and sketchbooks and staring at the ceiling from her floor and all the white places she’s filled with her thoughts, all the time she’s spent making herself strong, all the versions of herself she’s created and dismantled and reconstructed to be immoveable. She can want and want and want, but she’ll always be the same. 

And she has drawn the lines with her fingers over, retraced, redrawn, and she knows above all else, “I don’t want to be an apology, Anthony.”

“Kate,” he looks absolutely devastated, “I love you.”

The sounds from the party in the other room echo at the walls, hardly registering against the sounds tripping over his lips.

He is desperate, “and I don’t know what to do about it.”

Every molecule in her goes quiet, completely still, “What-”

“Kate,” he rakes his hands through his hair, looks desperately at her, “I’ve never wanted anything as much as I’ve wanted you."

Before she can fully comprehend what she’s done, her mouth is gasping against his. 

He hauls her fully against him and she can’t stop her hands from tugging at the hem of his shirt, shoving at the band of his trousers and pants.

She knows now. She wants and wants and wants.

Tripping over his shoes as he kicks them off with this remaining clothing, Anthony divests her of her dress - a rather sensible Primark purchase - efficiently and cascades into and with her across the bed.

“I don’t know why I left,” he unhooks her bra, kisses her breast, the other, “I was a bloody idiot.”

“Yes,” she agrees, thinking in some part of her conscious that she shouldn’t forgive him so easily, but choking on air as he rips off her knickers with one hand and immediately touches her. “You were.”

He stares down at her, and she’s only slightly startled to see that they’re both naked - though is mostly impressed with herself for stripping him so quickly. “Allow me to start to apologize,” he says, hushed, heaving.

“Start,” she mouths into his gasps, his lips moving to find hers, “is the key word here.”

Pushing him hard, she rolls them over, shoves him onto his back - he goes easily.

The dim yellow lamp light streaks across his chest and she traces her fingers over where it brushes him gently. “I wanted you to stay,” it’s hard to confess, even with him bare under her.

“I wanted to stay,” he returns, sorely earnest. His fingers run from her wrist to her elbow. “I never want to leave you.”

He winds his fingers over her shoulder and through her hair, bringing her back down to his mouth. His lips trace her own, “Please don’t ask me to leave.”

Shaking only slightly, Kate, nods, moving her hand to grasp him, pumping once, twice, relishing in his needy groans. It’s a matter of breathy seconds, slow coursing beats of electronic music reverberating and masking their gasps, as she places him at her entrance and sinks down onto him.

She curls her fingers against the firm muscles of his chest and can’t control the way her head bends forward, then falls back at the feeling of him inside her. The noise she makes borders on profane and the way his hands grip her ass to push her down impossibly further onto him says he fully concurs. 

“Fuck, Kate.”

“Mmm,” she agrees.

Her small movements over him are quickly met by his seemingly instinctual, quick presses up. It’s a vaguely ineffectual rhythm that feels bloody fantastic. 

Somehow she’s still aware of his rough palms trailing her thighs and jerkily gripping them as she finds some magical leverage in the way her knees are digging into the mattress on either side of him and gives a particularly delicious slide up and down his length.

She can feel the quiver of the muscles low in his stomach, that place she wants to bite that vees down and is-

“Shit, Anthony,” he’s moving hotly now and he’s found a place within her that’s making her toes absolutely curl. A rough hit that is rendering her arms nearly useless and making her face hum with building pleasure.

His hands are pushing and pulling now, and it’s all she can do to fall against him, clutching the sinewy strong curve of his shoulders - a place on his body she’s thought about on infinite inappropriate occasions and now, when it’s entirely appropriate to study them, all she can do is squeeze her eyes closed at the climbing feeling and drop her head, curls cascading wildly.

“Yes, Anthony,” she’s panting, gulping in breaths as he moves wetly in and out and in, picking up a frantic speed.

Looking at his face may have been a mistake, his hair a mess and sticking stupidly, attractively to his forehead from exertion. His mouth is pink and panting and she imagines him using that tongue in a manner that has her clenching hard around him. 

“Kate, fuck, Kate, I’m not-“ his heavy-lidded eyes are frantic, “you just feel-“

She nods uncontrollably, “I know, I know.”

His hand buries itself in her hair, bringing her down for a breathy kiss, dragging his lips, fighting for contact amidst hot exhales of exertion. “Please,” he begs against her open mouth, “please, Kate, I need you-“

But she’s already laying her body flush against his, and helping him roll her onto her back without losing him from inside her. 

His hands grip her hard; she knows it won’t leave marks but wishes would, imagines they do so that she can run her fingers along the tender, bruised skin as she touches herself alone the next night. He hitches her legs around his waist and pushes himself - hard - back into her, making them both sigh, low and long. 

The force of his thrusts are pressing her into the mattress and she blindly reaches to grab for something to ground her, her hand landing on a spindle of the headboard, wrapping her fingers around it as she wraps her other hand into the thick hair at the back of his head. 

“Anthony, harder,” she gasps, and he obeys immediately, rough, sticky thrusts until she can’t think. 

“Yes, yes, god yes,” she can vaguely hear the loud clatter of the headboard against the wall, the absolutely obscene grunts falling from Anthony’s kiss-swollen mouth, the sound of him moving in and out of her faster and faster, a chaotic swirl of noises until - 

She gasps and -

“Kate,” his voice hitches, catches in his throat as he comes in a gorgeous rough, uncoordinated movement. 

He collapses to the side of her, immediately drawing her to him for a sloppy kiss that is imploring and endless.

“Please say you love me,” he is exposed and himself, and he wants her so openly.

She pushes the hair from his eyes, “I love you.”

He laughs.

Laughs clear and bright and like lightning that shakes her and she joins him. She kisses him again and again. 

Kate lays heavy on his chest, seals her lips above his heart. The gentle line of sleep is tugging at her as his hand brushes up and down her spine, when a loud shout from the other room jolts them both shockingly awake.

“Oh my god,” she looks down at a tousled, bewildered Anthony Bridgerton as it dawns on her. “We just fucked in Colin’s bed.”