Chapter Text
Two things can be true at once.
She hates Phillip Crane with her whole heart.
And he is, categorically, empirically, humiliatingly, the best sex she has ever had.
These facts exist in direct opposition to each other and Eloise Bridgerton has decided that the only reasonable response is to never think about either of them again. She will take this secret to her grave. She will be buried with it. The headstone will read: Here lies Eloise. She did not sleep with Phillip Crane. Definitely not.
The problem with this plan is that she is currently lying next to Phillip Crane. Naked.
His arm is draped across her chest with the casual, territorial confidence of a man who has done this a thousand times, and she is staring at the hotel ceiling like it might open up and offer her an escape route if she asks it nicely enough.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit.
The fog is lifting — slower than she'd like, faster than she can handle — and with it comes the evidence. The bridesmaid dress pooled on the floor like it gave up. Her underwear draped over the arm of the couch, which is frankly not a location she can explain. His clothes distributed across the flat-screen television in a pattern that suggests they were removed with significant urgency.
Two shattered champagne bottles near the foot of the bed.
Vigorous, her traitorous brain supplies. That was vigorous.
She presses her palms flat against her eyes and forces herself to think. Colin's wedding. The open bar. That particular shade of champagne that goes down like sparkling water and kicks like a horse. And Phillip, because apparently the universe has a sense of humor, seated directly across from her at the reception dinner looking — she hates this, she hates this so much — good. Quietly, unfairly, annoyingly good in his groomsman suit.
He'd always been good-looking in that specific, maddening way of men who don't know it. Nerdy-handsome. The kind of face you had to argue yourself out of noticing. She'd been arguing since she was fifteen.
She'd known him since she was ten. Ten years old. He was Colin's best friend, her dining room table's sixth chair, the person who taught her how to beat the final level of three different video games and never once made her feel like she should be grateful. The ninth, unofficial, honorary Bridgerton. He is not supposed to be here, in this hotel room, in this state, with his stupid arm across her chest like he belongs there.
How.
Why.
How.
The door bell is what saves her.
Or destroys her. Jury's still out.
Eloise extricates herself from Phillip's arm with the surgical precision of someone defusing a bomb — he shifts, exhales, doesn't wake — and casts around for something to put on her body. Her dress is on the floor. His shirt is on the chair.
She grabs the shirt.
It smells like him and cedar and something she refuses to name, and she puts it on anyway because she doesn't have options. She crosses the room and squints through the peephole.
Penelope. Of course it's Penelope.
Eloise takes a breath. She takes another one. She opens the door as far as the chain allows, which is just enough to show her face and not the crime scene behind her.
"Good morning!" Her voice comes out three notes too bright.
Penelope, who has known her for fifteen years and is apparently the world's most observant person on the worst possible morning, says: "Hey. You ready for brunch?"
The wedding brunch. Last item on the three-page itinerary she'd complained about for weeks. She'd completely forgotten.
"Yes, absolutely, give me fifteen minutes." Totally normal. Very casual. "Just woke up, I'll meet you downstairs."
Penelope's eyes do a slow, specific, terrible descent.
"You're wearing a groomsman's shirt."
Eloise looks down.
She looks back up.
"It's mine," she says. "I own menswear."
"That one has the wedding colors on the collar." Penelope reaches through the gap before Eloise can stop her and flips the collar over with two fingers. "See? The monogram. CP."
A beat.
Then Penelope gasps — a full, delighted, devastating sound — and Eloise watches her best friend's face go through approximately eleven emotions in four seconds, landing finally on the one that Eloise most feared: joy.
"Eloise Bridgerton."
"Don't."
"You didn't."
"I'm asking you not to finish that sentence."
Penelope's eyes are sparkling. She is glowing. She looks like someone just handed her a gift she'd been waiting years to unwrap.
"Who?" she demands, and the word comes out like a weapon.
"No one." Eloise pulls the door closer. "And even if I had slept with someone — which I'm not confirming — I would not be telling you about it at eight in the morning in a hotel hallway."
"It's nine-thirty."
"Goodbye, Penelope."
"Okay, okay." Penelope holds up both hands in surrender, but her eyes are doing the thing — that rapid, cataloguing thing she does when she's working something out. Eloise can practically hear the gears. "I'm just thinking — three of the five groomsmen were your brothers, so we can rule those out on the grounds of basic human decency—"
"Stop."
"—which leaves Will." A pause. A brightening. "Or Phillip."
Eloise keeps her face very still. This is a skill she has been cultivating for twenty-six years and it has never been more important than right now.
"Oh my God." Penelope's hand flies to her mouth. "It's Will. Hi, Will!" She calls this last part past Eloise's shoulder into the room, cheerful and loud, and Eloise's soul briefly exits her body.
"There is no one—"
"Was it good?" Penelope stage-whispers. "I feel like Will is a generous lover. He has very kind eyes."
Eloise becomes aware, distantly, of the throbbing ache that has been living at the base of her spine since she woke up — the particular, undeniable, humiliating evidence of a night that was emphatically not decent. The kind of ache that would, under any other circumstances, prompt a person to smile privately into their coffee and feel very good about their life choices.
These are not other circumstances.
"It was fine," she says. "Decent."
Penelope's face cycles through skepticism and settles on delight anyway, because she is a woman who takes what she can get. "I love this for you." She squeezes Eloise's hand through the gap. "Okay. Get dressed. Your mother will actually combust if you're late to the brunch."
"I know."
"She's already texted the group chat twice."
"I know."
"One of them was just a clock emoji. Very ominous."
"Penelope."
"Going!" She points one finger at Eloise's face. "But we are talking about this later. In detail."
"We absolutely are not."
Penelope's smile says: we absolutely are. And then she's gone, disappearing down the corridor in her silk wrap dress, and Eloise closes the door and puts her back against it.
The room is quiet.
Behind her — eight, maybe ten feet behind her, separated by air and one very thin layer of willpower — Phillip Crane is asleep in her hotel bed. His shirt is on her body. His fingerprints are, metaphorically, all over her like a crime scene.
Will, she thinks. She thinks it's Will.
She could let her keep thinking that. That's a perfectly viable option. Will will never confirm or deny it because Will doesn't know it happened. Penelope will gossip about it exactly once, decide it's not interesting enough to pursue, and move on. Nobody will ever know.
This plan requires her to get dressed, go downstairs, and look at Phillip Crane across a brunch table like she doesn't know things about him that she very specifically now knows.
She stares at the ceiling.
She considers staying exactly where she is forever.
From the bed, there's a quiet sound — a shift of sheets, an exhale — and then Phillip's voice, rough with sleep, lands directly in the center of her chest:
"So I was decent, huh?"
Eloise closes her eyes.
Shit.
She takes a moment — one single, fortifying moment — to consider her options. She could pretend she didn't hear him. She could climb out the window. She could simply cease to exist, which feels like the most appealing option and also the least logistically feasible.
Instead, she drags her feet toward the bed.
He is sitting up against the headboard, sheet pooled at his waist, hair doing something annoyingly effortless, looking like a person who has never experienced a single moment of social mortification in his entire life. He is watching her cross the room with that expression she's always hated — patient, amused, like he has all the time in the world and he knows exactly how this ends.
He is also shirtless.
She is wearing his shirt.
The math of this situation is not lost on her.
"This—" She points between them. Back and forth. Back and forth. "Never happened."
"What never happened?"
"Last night."
"Hm." He tilts his head. His mouth does something that isn't quite a smile and is somehow worse than one. Then he reaches out and hooks a finger into the hem of the shirt — her shirt, his shirt, the shirt that is currently the only barrier between her and a series of very bad decisions — and pulls. Just enough. Just until she is standing at the edge of the mattress, knee to knee with him, close enough to smell cedar and warm skin and the specific, treacherous scent that her brain has apparently already filed under things that make your knees do that.
"Last night," she says, and she is very proud of how steady her voice is considering that his hands — his big, careful, unfairly competent hands — are now moving up her spine with the slow patience of a man who is not in any hurry whatsoever, "was a lapse of judgment."
"Was it?"
He says it quietly. Like a question he already knows the answer to.
And then she is on her back.
She is not entirely sure how that happened. One moment she is standing, mounting a very reasonable argument, and the next Phillip Crane is above her, one forearm braced beside her head, blue eyes moving over her face with an attention that makes her feel like a paragraph he's reading very carefully. His gaze drops to her mouth.
She gulps.
"Yes," she says, to the ceiling, to the universe, to whatever small remaining part of herself is still in charge. "We were drunk. It doesn't count."
"Are you completely sober now?"
His hands find the top button of the shirt. Then the second. The third. The fabric falls open slowly, deliberately, like he has all the time in the world and intends to use every second of it, and the cool air hits her skin and she absolutely does not think about the way his expression shifts — that slight, unguarded thing that moves across his face when he looks at her, like she is something he has been trying not to look at directly for a very long time.
She exhales. "Not really."
His hand slides to the small of her back, palm flat and warm against her spine, and pulls — slow and deliberate — until there is no space left between them.
"Then," Phillip says, quiet and certain and devastatingly calm, "let's make a couple more lapses."
The room still smells faintly of citrus cleaner and last night, that particular combination that clings to skin and sheets and the back of the throat, and Eloise has approximately three seconds of rational thought remaining before his mouth finds her throat and takes them from her one by one.
His teeth graze the curve of her neck — just enough, exactly enough — and the sharp pleasure of it melts into something warmer as he moves lower, unhurried, like he has a specific destination in mind and no interest in rushing the journey. She arches into him without meaning to. Her body has apparently decided to stop consulting her.
His tongue circles her nipple, once, twice, and then he sucks — deliberate, devastating — and the noise she makes is not dignified. Her fingers twist in the sheets, the fabric straining under her grip. She can feel him smiling against her skin, the absolute bastard, and she would be furious about it if his hands weren't sliding down her sides at precisely that moment, palming the curve of her waist, her hips, her ass, with a possessiveness that short-circuits every coherent thought she has left.
She drags him up by the hair.
Their mouths crash together and she bites his lower lip, hard enough to make a point, and the groan it pulls out of him goes straight through her like a current — low and warm and pooling heavy between her thighs. His weight presses her deeper into the mattress, the heat of him insistent against her stomach, and any remaining argument she is planning to make dissolves completely.
Her hand slips between them. His breath hitches.
She guides him to her and for one suspended, electric moment they both go still — the anticipation of it almost unbearable, the air between them thick with eleven years of pretending this wasn't inevitable.
Then he moves, and the sound she makes is half his name and half something that doesn't have words.
His hips snap forward, burying himself deeper, and Eloise digs her nails into his shoulders and locks her legs around his waist and there is nothing gentle about any of this — no hesitation, no pretense, just the raw and reckless truth of two people who spent far too long lying to themselves and have apparently decided to make up for lost time all at once.
Decent, she thinks, with the small fraction of her brain still capable of forming sentences.
She told Penelope decent.
Phillip's mouth finds her throat again and the thought dissolves entirely.
Afterward, she lies with her cheek against his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow, staring at the fish scale ceiling tile she has now memorized completely.
The brunch is in fifteen minutes.
She is going to be so late.
"Still a lapse of judgment?" Phillip asks. His voice is rough. His hand is moving in slow, absentminded circles at the base of her spine, like he doesn't even realize he's doing it.
Eloise considers this seriously.
"Yes," she says.
A pause.
"A recurring one," she adds.
She can feel him smile against the top of her head. She decides not to acknowledge it.
She gives Phillip a ten minute head start.
It is a reasonable plan. A good plan. He goes down first, takes his seat at the brunch table, makes normal conversation with normal people about normal things. She follows ten minutes later, slides into her chair, accepts the coffee that she desperately needs, and no one connects the dots. Simple. Clean. Completely deniable.
She uses the ten minutes to shower, locate her actual clothes, and have a brief but intense staring contest with her reflection in the bathroom mirror. The reflection does not offer any useful advice.
Her phone buzzes as she steps into the elevator.
Penelope 🌸
Pen: Colin told me something interesting! Apparently Will left right after the reception due to a family emergency 🚨
Pen: So it's PHILLIP!! 😱😱😱 OMG OMG OMG! You and Phillip?? WHAT?! I never woulda guessed 🤯🤯🤯
Pen: Don't be slick missy 😏👀 I KNOW you told him to go down first...
Pen: Your mom kept asking me where you at? 😬😬😬
Pen: Eloise!!!!! 😤 You and Phillip!! Has it been going on long?? Tell me EVERYTHING!! Consider it my wedding present 🎁 you OWE me this!!
Eloise stares at her phone for a long moment.
She has never, in her entire life, been able to keep a secret from Penelope Featherington Bridgerton now.