Chapter Text
It starts when champagne is a splurge and all she can afford is cheap sparkling wine, from nowhere near the Champagne region of France, but that doesn’t stop her from calling it so. After all, the spirit of Champagne Friday—as she dubs it in her mind—is celebration, letting loose, grabbing life by both hands and shaking it for every ounce of happiness it’s worth.
It starts when she can afford her own flat. Well, a shared flat with Eloise. It’s a rental, of course. And the size of a shoebox.
But it’s hers.
(Theirs.)
The idea comes to her as she walks a few blocks from the Tube station home from work. She is just so happy to have a place of their own to tuck into for the night after a long day—at the end of a long week—at work. Friday alone might be enough of a reason to celebrate, but it’s the thought of the place she’s returning to that prompts her to dash into the corner store and buy something celebratory, something to maybe create a ritual, make it memorable. Then it’s just a half-block further and she’s home.
The front door has one of those old-fashioned keys and Penelope loves the character of it, feeling like, from the first impression, this place has a history, lives lived within its walls, stories to tell. She wiggles the key in the lock until she hears the satisfying click, pushing the door open and shuffling through with her work bag and her bounty from the corner store. She kicks off her heels, stretching her toes in relief at their liberation, tucks her work bag under the little entryway bench—it’s Friday, no need to look at anything in there until Monday morning—and moves through the flat to put her purchase in the refrigerator, pushing last night’s Thai takeout boxes off to the right and tucking it in between her carton of orange juice and Eloise’s kombucha.
This flat has the perfect little kitchen for baking butter biscuits, once you get a handle on the finicky oven knobs. She knows because she baked some last weekend, as a reward to herself for unpacking and organizing the kitchen. (If she made a double batch so she could bring a plate to Colin to thank him for helping them move in, well—Eloise wasn’t going to do it.) There’s no dishwasher but at least the sink has a window overlooking a garden the size of a postage stamp. There’s something about being able to see the sky and a bit of grass while she scrubs that lets her breathe more easily.
There is a cosy sitting room with a built-in bookshelf that has already been lovingly curated with her beloved romance novels and Eloise’s dog-eared tomes on women’s history, a few treasures Colin brought back from his travels for them, and a framed picture of Penelope and the Bridger Bunch at Kate and Anthony’s wedding reception.
Penelope stops to admire the photo. She’s nestled between Eloise and Francesca, with Colin behind them, his hand on the small of Penelope’s back. (Not that you can see that in the photo, but Penelope would never forget it, the imprint of his large fingers burning through her clothes for days after. And every time she glimpses the photo.)
She steps down the very short hall, passing the bathroom as she goes, which has charming little pink and black tiles, hailing from the 1950s, probably. Eloise had grimaced at the color, but the plumbing was updated and a high-pressure shower head went a long way toward winning Eloise over.
A few paces further and she reaches the sanctuary of her room and finally sheds her pencil skirt and blouse, retiring into something more comfy. This place has two bedrooms, so she has her very own space for the first time in years. As much as she loves Eloise and is excited to share this place with her, the privacy is a luxury she doesn’t take for granted.
A space to decorate in calming blues and seafoam greens, now that she has left behind her mother’s oppressively yellow taste. Aloneness for writing without having to angle her laptop away from curious eyes. (Penelope is honing her own romance writing skills and nothing quells her smutty creativity more than her loud, opinionated feminist bestie opining on the horrors of heteronormative literature. Not that Penelope is opposed to queer love—she has a sapphic romance draft in her files that she is quite pleased with, but hearing Eloise spout off about anything tends to kill horny writing vibes.) As for horny, having her own room is good for that, too. A closed door for… well, if she ever found a guy to swipe right on who could hurdle the low bar of charming small talk lasting past the first round of drinks…
Speaking of drinks, back to the celebration at hand.
“El!” she calls out through the flat after she’s finished changing, “I’ve got bubbly!” She moves back to the kitchen and retrieves the bottle from the fridge.
Eloise emerges from her own room, face glued to her phone where she has no doubt been texting her on-again-off-again boyfriend Phillip, but helpless against her Pavlovian response to the offer of free booze.
Eloise’s thumbs fly over the screen, her lips quirking up as she types.
Definitely on again.
“Hellooo. Earth to Eloise?” Penelope waggles the bottle of sparkling wine between Eloise’s face and her precious portal to Phil.
“What’s this, then?” Eloise finally clicks her phone screen to sleep and sets it face down on the countertop.
“Well!” Penelope begins, gesturing around them, “It’s our first official Friday in our flat, and I think it calls for celebration. It could even be a thing… any time either of us has something to celebrate, we can have a little toast—Champagne Friday! A promotion at work, or… just a milestone in life. It doesn’t have to be purely about capitalistic success,” she hastens to add, forestalling the inevitable lecture as Eloise opens her mouth. “Just whenever either of us really sucks the marrow out of life! Or… something more plant-based. We’ll toast. The two of us. Do you want to?” She feels herself almost holding her breath in anticipation, wanting Eloise’s approval of and company in this little idea she already loves so much.
“‘Course I want to.” Eloise smiles at her, giving her hand an accompanying squeeze, and it fills Penelope with warmth, starting this new ritual with her closest friend. It feels like another embarkation into adulthood: graduated (with honors, naturally), gainfully employed, found a place to live, and now—building their own traditions. They are really making their way in the world. “Here, let’s use these,” Eloise says as she pulls two juice tumblers from the cupboard. “And someday when we can afford real champagne flutes, we’ll toast to that.”
“That’s the spirit,” Penelope agrees, smiling back at her.
When the bubbly is popped and poured and the pair have settled into their vintage green velvet loveseat with a giant bowl of buttery popcorn between them, Eloise demands to hear Penelope’s toast. “If we’re doing this, we’re doing it properly, Featherington. Go on, then.”
“Alright, alright… give me a sec.” Penelope clears her throat and turns to face her friend with all the gravitas the moment deserves. “On the sacred occasion of this first official Champagne Friday… let us raise our glasses—”
“Tumblers!” Eloise heckles.
“Oh, shut it.” She laughs, shoving a pillow at her friend. “Let us raise our… bubbly… and toast to the start of something new, to the sweetest little flat on Norcott Road, to…” She thinks of what it means to her to be in this space, away from her overbearing mother and her snide sisters, a place of respite, a place to make their own, and she feels emotion bubble up from her chest into her throat. “…to independence.” She finishes the last word on a whisper.
“You’re so soft.”
Eloise’s loving tease is just the release valve she needs to quell the rising tide of tears. “Somebody has to be,” she retorts.
“To our place,” Eloise says, lifting her glass. “Ghastly pink loo and all. Cheers!”
Penelope clinks her glass against Eloise’s and raises it to her lips.
The liquid is fruity on her tongue—overly green apple, perhaps, but the bubbles are light and frothy and feel like a proper celebration.
“This really is a nice little flat,” Eloise observes, taking in the space. They had moved in the previous Friday and spent the weekend unpacking and arranging, decorating, then re-arranging. The silver lining of a shoebox place is it didn’t take too long to fill.
“It was nice of Colin to help us move the heavy furniture,” Penelope remarks, running her hand over the mossy fabric covering the arm of the loveseat. She can’t seem to keep his name from her lips, even as she tries to keep her comments breezy and unaffected.
“Yes, well, brothers are occasionally good for something, I suppose.” Eloise allows. “It was nice of you to bring him those biscuits.”
Ah, not so breezy then.
This is the danger of living with your best friend, who happens to be overly brilliant and excessively nosy: Penelope is constantly running the risk of being perceived. And the last thing Penelope wants Eloise—or anyone—to perceive is that she has loved Colin Bridgerton with her whole heart from the moment she met him.
Of course, Eloise knew that Penelope had had a little (massive) crush on him when they were girls, but Penelope has drastically downplayed her feelings in recent years, attempting to put as much emotional distance between herself and Colin as he puts physical distance between himself and London. As a travel influencer, that is quite a lot lately.
It had been a happy coincidence that he was in town for a bit while they needed his muscles last weekend. And oh how Penelope needed his muscles… The ripple of his back muscles beneath his white cotton shirt as he maneuvered their loveseat. His biceps filling out his shirt sleeves as he hoisted their coffee table. The way his forearms were practically flaunted in her face as he carried her boxes of novels. Could there be anything sexier than Colin’s forearms flexing under the weight of her beloved books?
She squirms in her seat at the memory.
And of course he is Colin, so he was unnaturally good-natured when any normal human would have been a bit put-out over being made to heft all the weighty possessions of his little sister and her best friend up three flights of stairs in London’s muggiest June yet. But, no, Colin had been affable as ever, adorably enthusiastic about their new place, cracking jokes about crashing on their little loveseat (that his six-foot frame could never dream of fully stretching out on), and being generally perfect, really.
He is perfect.
And her heart will never let go of him.
But since he has never seen her as anything other than a friend, it is best to avoid complete mortification and let Eloise think otherwise. She clears her throat, returning to the topic at hand.
“Well, somebody had to try out our oven. If you tried to bake them, we might be toasting from a pile of ash.”
“Ha, ha. You sure it wasn’t more than that?” Eloise pries, glossing over the slight to her (lack of) kitchen skills in favor of peering into Penelope’s innermost feelings. “I thought you put all that behind you...”
“I did!” Penelope chirps. “As I said: to new starts.” She lifts her glass toward Eloise and then swallows a sip, but the now-warm liquid tastes as tart as the lie on her tongue.
“Oh, this was way better cold,” she grimaces.
“When it could properly numb our taste buds?”
Penelope giggles. “Something like that.”
“Maybe next time we toast, we can spring for something that costs a full tenner,” Eloise teases.
“Maybe next time, you can buy.”
——
Later that night when she is ensconced in her blue floral sheets, she is scrolling insta when Penelope is struck with the rare urge to share.
She hits the icon to make a new post and then her thumb scrolls through her camera roll, assessing the pictures taken when they moved in: the little sparrow that had watched their comings and goings from the kitchen windowsill; the surreptitious action shot she’d taken of Colin as he carried one of her boxes up the stairs; and the photo of her and Eloise that Colin had taken of the two of them on their front stoop when they were done, sweaty and grimy but arms thrown around one another and faces lit with pride.
She flicks back to the most recent shot—a quick snap of the two tumblers of sparkling wine before they had toasted—and selects it, typing out a quick caption: Starting something new. 🏡👯♀️ #champagnefridays
She hits publish before she can overthink it and then admires the little square commemorating this new tradition.
As she gazes at it, the little red heart illuminates in the upper right of her screen and she toggles over to see a notification for one new comment.
Already?
It’s from Colin: 🥂
Her heart skips a beat at the sight, proving her attempts at emotional distance to be as futile as she knew they would be. He must have happened to have been scrolling insta when her post popped into the feed. She loves that he took the time to comment; it’s almost as if he partook in a virtual cheers with her.
The little emoji fills her with bubbles in a way cheap wine never could.