Chapter Text
Dr. Milton's nicknack shelf seems uglier than she remembers.
It’s all Penelope can think about when she’s sitting on his couch that Thursday, her usual time, apparently left open in case she’d decided to come back before the set appointment. It irks her, a little bit, that he expected her to be back prior to the deadline they set, like he expected her to fail. She almost backs out of the appointment because of it, but she's spent the entire week held together by tape and glue.
She tells Dr. Milton as much.
She’s gone to work, and pushed through the day, trying to smile and laugh with the girls, and ignore the concerned looks Marinas sent her way. She gets home, and drops everything in the doorway, and curls on the couch until whatever she’s ordered shows up at her door, and sends half assed texts to Colin and Eloise about how she’s fine just busy(easier with Eloise, she loves the girl, sister of her heart and whatever, but she’s not always good with the emotions. Colin however she’s beating off with a stick, she's basically promised him her entire weekend to reassure him).
Penelope's been in such a haze, she doesn’t even remember what she did Saturday after brunch or Sunday, or what Daphne brought on for dinner on Tuesday(hell the only reason she remembers its Daphne is because it's never Daphne). She’s not even really showered, her hair’s limp and losing its curl(her dry shampoo is apparently not very good), and she's been just taking a wet rag and doing the bare minimum so she doesn’t disgust herself.
It’s only just barely saved from being humiliating because she has been almost entirely alone.
“And that’s a good thing?”
“Whats a good thing?”
“Being alone,” Dr. Milton is looking at her and scribbling something on his pad, “Do you think that's a good thing for you at this moment?”
“Well it’s better than if someone was there to witness how disgusting I’m becoming.”
“Even Alfred?”
She snorts,
“Especially Alfred.”
It slips out before she can really stop it but it’s not untrue. In the five years they’ve been together, she has never shown Alfred this side of her, the closest she’d got was the fainting thing after the miscarriage and her dad.
“Most people would want their spouses,” he’s not looking at her now, focused on whatever he’s writing, “Is there a reason you don’t?”
A memory flashes in her head of her mother fixing her ruined makeup before her dad got home after receiving the call that grammy was going into hospice care. Another of her father cleaning blood off his face and telling Penelope she absolutely, under no circumstances is she to tell her mother what she’s seen.
A third of Alfred leaving her hospital room.
“I’m not fond of being viewed as pathetic is all. I’d hate it even more coming from my husband.”
“And you think Alfred would think you’re pathetic?”
“Who wouldn’t?” annoyingly her voice wobbles, "Sophie's got happy news and I’m throwing a fit about it. It’s pathetic, it's the definition of pathetic.”
“You know, you’re very hard on yourself.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re extremely hard on yourself Penelope,” he’s looking at her again, the somewhat fatherly look that goes along with the fatherly tone she hates, “You’re sitting here calling yourself pathetic, and describing your feelings a fit, but this is all very normal.”
“How is this normal-”
“You went through two very intense traumas. You lost a child, and then lost your father, whom from what you’ve told me you had a very…complicated relationship with. And now someone you know, someone you spend a lot of time with, is having a baby. It’s normal for you to have some strong reactions to that.”
“It’s been eight months,” she looks back at the nicknack shelf, that god ugly shelf and when did he get a donkey, “It's long enough, time heals all wounds or whatever. I should be able to handle this and not become some….”
“You haven’t coped,” he says when she fails to find the words, says it like it's a fact, and god, if only he knew how much she coped, he’d be shocked “Time has passed, but a part of you is still very much in your trauma. You can’t be happy for your friend because you’re still raw.”
“Then what do you suppose I do? How do I stop being in it?”
“You have to talk about it, the baby, and your father, you can’t keep it locked inside.”
“Talk about it? I talk about it all the time, people are constantly-”
“Do you talk about it or do you talk about it?”
“What? You’re not-”
“When you talk about losing the baby with me, you’re vague,” she looks at the floor, because his words are making her stomach roll, “I know you lost the baby very late, but not when, I don’t know if you had a name picked, or even the baby's gender. All I know is that it affected you so much that you stopped taking care of yourself and ended up in hospital because of it. You’re more open about your father but still guarded. You don’t give details you give… glimpses, at least to me. Am I wrong to assume you’re doing the same in your personal life?”
She barely registers the clicking of her jaw, because having it laid out in front of her like this is irritating. He’s picking her apart, and she’s been so careful with what she gives him that she feels he shouldn’t be able to.
“Am I allowed to say I really dislike you right now?”
“You’re allowed to say whatever you want in this room.”
“Well then I really really dislike you right now Dr. Milton.”
-
At the end of the session, after he finally gets her to spill a bit, Dr. Milton gives her homework. It's simple and easy, and doable. That's what he tells her.
“Tell someone you trust things about the baby. The gender, or why you chose certain things about the nursery, anything. Just talk about the baby.”
It doesn’t really feel doable to Penelope.
She wonders how exactly she’s supposed to talk about it, how does someone tell another person about something that they maybe, probably, should have talked about much earlier?
She does attempt too at work the next day though, which is maybe the worst place she could have done it. Marina had come into her office asking something about an already edited manuscript that may have gotten sent to her by mistake, and Penelope stopped her.
“Can I talk to you about something personal?”
Marina had said yes, and then Penelope had proceeded to struggle to find a single word for almost fifteen minutes before the other woman had placed a hand on hers and said “when you’re ready, find me, okay?” and left, presumably to go do her job.
And now, she’s sitting in the nursery again, which really doesn’t help with the whole feeling like the most pathetic person in the world. It feels simple in here, safe, with the greens and browns, and the half painted butterfly mural on the wall. She thinks if she was a baby she would have been really pleased to live in a nursery like this, she thinks it’s a shame it never got finished.
She’s considering skipping dinner tonight, curling up on the carpet and sleeping in here again, when she hears a faint knocking, followed by her phone lighting up.
Colin, she’d forgotten he was coming over.
For a brief moment she thinks she’s going to do what she does to her mother-in-law and just wait for him to leave, but when the knocking becomes louder, she worries if she doesn’t let him in he’ll break the door open. So she pulls herself up, and makes her way to the door where the knocking is getting more and more insistent.
“You knock very loud, did you know that,” she says as she opens the door,“I heard you from the bedroom.”
“Well you weren’t answering your phone, and I was worried!” he doesn’t sound worried, sounds very peppy actually, “What if you’d fallen out a window while watering plants, or slipped while getting out of the shower or choked on a hard boiled egg or-”
“You have such creative ways you think I’m going to hurt myself,” as he walks in she notices his arms are empty of any bags , “I never water the plants, I think I’ve actually managed to kill them all this time- you didn’t bring food.”
“Great observation, I did not,”he plops down on her couch like it belongs to him and pats the seat next to him, “I figured we could agree on a meal together, I’m thinking pizza, but I can be persuaded to do something else.”
They do end up doing pizza, and Penelope spends a good chunk of the night bugging him about the fact that he’s left the team.
“I’ve thought about it a lot since you told me, and I don’t believe the reason you told me,” she says pointing her crust at him accusingly, “So spill, tell me the real reason.”
“Theres nothing to tell! They were bossy and I was tired of it-”
“Eloise is bossy, a management team manages. If they’re ‘bossy’ it's because you’ve done something that needs bossing. What's the actual reason?”
“The actual reason is none of your business-”
“Aha! So there is an actual reason!”
Colin lets out an exasperated huff at that and stands up.
“Wha- where are you going?”
“To the toilet! Why are you so intent on interrogating me tonight-”
“I’m not interrogating you! I’m just curious about what made you leave the life you’ve lived for over a decade!”
He snorts at that.
“I’ve got to pee, and when I come back there will be no more interrogating me!”
“There will not be because that's not what’s happening!”
He laughs and disappears down the hallway, and all she can think is how nice this is. Five years of near total silence, and some uncomfortable moments, and yet tonight they feel like… them. How they’d been before Alfred, and it’s so nice, because it’s also left her feeling much better than she has in so long. It’s nice to be laughing and talking about something other than her and the mess that is her life (and it helps that he hasn’t mentioned the kiss, she thinks that would ruin the mood).
She waits for a while, finishes her pizza, and finds a new movie when she realizes he’s been gone for a while. She pushes any thoughts about it away because, well if he's taking a bit in the bathroom, that's not her business. So instead, she starts cleaning up, grabbing plates and glasses to take to the kitchen, and when she passes the hallway to do so, she catches Colin out of the corner of her eye peering into the nursery.
She barely manages to put down what she’s holding before snapping at him.
“What are you doing?”
Colin jumps at her voice, and has the good sense to look guilty when he looks at her.
“I’m sorry,” he says as she marches over to him, “The door was open, and I thought it was maybe an office or something, and I was going to close it, but then I realized it wasn’t and-”
Penelope wedges herself between him and the doorway, slamming the door.
“I’m really sorry Pen, I didn’t mean to upset you,” from his voice she can tell he means it, but she can’t focus on it much with her heart pounding in her ears, “I just- I saw it, and I guess my curiosity took over and- well, it doesn’t matter, I’m sorry.”
She nods, but doesn’t move, and Colin stays still too, rubbing his fingers together and biting his lip as he watches her, waiting to see what she does.
She thinks of her homework and decides now's maybe the best time, the best opportunity to do it.
Biting her cheek, she opens the door.
“Come on, the carpets comfortable.”
“Pen you don’t have to-”
“My therapist says,” she swallows, tries to ignore the part of her screaming to flee, “My therapist says I need to talk about it, and I guess now's as good as ever.”
Penelope grabs his arm, flicks on the light and takes him to the carpet, all but actually pulling him down as she sits.
For while they sit in silence, when she looks at Colin he’s very sheepishly looking around.
“I was making the mural you know,” she says, and she can almost hear him look at her with how quick he turns his head, “Ben offered, but I wanted to do it, prove that I was capable of doing everything myself. Though I’ve never painted a day in my life so I bought all these stencils and-”
Colin puts a hand on her arm.
“Pen take a breath.”
“I just- I-” she smooths her (gross, still unwashed) hair down and sighs, “I’m supposed to talk about it, and if I don’t do it now I’ll never do it.”
“Alright, just-” he pauses, puffs his cheeks and asks, “Why did you go with green?”
For a minute she’s confused, wondering why he’d ask that when she realizes that he’s trying to help.
“I picked it because I like green. I chose it before I’d even confirmed I was pregnant, decided I didn’t want to do traditional colors, because I think it’s silly, deciding a color’s for one gender,” he’s nodding and she tries very hard to ignore the bubbling in her stomach, “Plus if it was boy and I was going that route it’d just be too much blue in my life.”
“Too much blue? What?”
“Your family’s fucking obsessed with the color, and I see it so much, so to add my childs room to the blue? Horrible, wasn’t risking it.”
“Cmon,” he says, nudging her arm, “It’s not that much blue, is it?”
“It is, it really really is.”
Colin laughs, and asks another question, about the mural this time, and they go like that for a while, and it isn’t awful. It’s almost nice talking about the choices she made, god knows she didn’t really discuss it with Alfred, more doing whatever she wanted and updating him later. Why light brown furniture, why butterflies for the mural Colin asks and she can respond with because dark brown was too harsh and white was stupid, and butterflies are beautiful, shouldn't babies see beautiful things everyday . It’s nice to be able to do something as simple as this.
“Did you ever find out the gender?” he asks after he runs out of nursery related questions, and it causes her to freeze up, “You don’t have to answer- I’m sorry if that’s too far-”
“I-its not, I just,” she takes a deep breath, “I didn’t tell anyone, you know? I didn’t want my mother bothering me about names, or people trying to foist their kids old stuff at me, and Alfred wanted it to be a surprise, so I just- and then I lost the baby, so it was easier to just keep it vague so no one would be-”
“Pen you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. We can-”
And despite Colin giving her the out, allowing her to avoid like she so loves, she cut him off.
“My baby was a girl,” it kind of knocks the breath out of her to say it, “I was having a girl, and I never got to tell anyone.”
It’s so odd to say it, she’d been having a girl, her daughter, and then she just… wasn’t.
Colin grabs her hand and squeezes and they lapse back into silence, until she surprises herself with a yawn.
“God what time is it?
“Almost three.”
“In the morning? Disgusting. I need to go to bed.”
He gets up and helps her stand, and now the exhaustion hits her tenfold
“I suppose that's my cue to leave.”
And maybe she should let him, because she likely needs to take a moment alone to collect herself because she’s too tired now to really feel much of anything. But also she really really doesn’t want to wake up alone again, because she always wakes up alone.
“You don’t have to, you can stay the night,”she says after another yawn and for good measure, she puts on her biggest eyes and adds, “I’d really like it if you stayed the night.”
And, maybe because of the big eyes, or because its nearly three in the morning and he’s likely just as exhausted as her, he does.