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“Honestly, if you don't quiet your head and sit down, I’m sending you to bed. Like a child.” Nell leans forward and snatches the tin of biscuits from where it threatens to tumble from Polly’s hand, long since forgotten. “And no more of these.”
Polly startles out of her thoughts and looks up at Nell, sitting two stools down, cleaning glasses.
“Right, sorry.” She brushes away a cluster of crumbs from the corner of her mouth absentmindedly, nearly missing her stool as she bends to squint at a frayed map.
It’s well past midnight, and bar is littered with notes on scraps, drafts of articles, sketches, timelines, and papers from the past five weeks. There’s something fishy happening up north, something that leaves Roxy’s ears ringing some nights and has the cows run dry. Nell’s had two run-ins on the road in as many days, neither of which fought fair, and is having ugly dreams she could live without. Something’s wrong, again, and they’ve been trying, desperately, to figure out what before it comes calling.
Polly’s skirt no more than brushes the seat before she stands back up. She drifts to a note scrawled by one of her writers only yesterday, after news from a delivery boy.
“It’s only, just, I can’t quite seem to figure out why…” She drifts back out of focus, back into the distracted murmuring that overtakes her nearly every time there’s a quill in her hand.
Nell watches her for a moment, then sets her rag down with a sigh, wiping her hands off on her pants. Rolling her eyes, nearly all affection, she rounds the bar.
Polly doesn’t notice Nell’s approach, nor the low call of her name in fair warning. She doesn’t notice until she’s been turned around, pressed back against the wood, and kissed quite soundly.
It is usually something Polly initiates, touch like that. Not often, but she’s a bit excitable and from time to time it lands her in Nell’s arms.
It’s never really been something Nell has sought for herself. She doesn’t feel the pull for it like others seem to, knocking themselves over silly for it.
But it is nice, from time to time, in the rare circumstance where it feels alright. And it always feels alright with Polly, though God help her, she doesn’t know why.
Grounding, a kiss is. Not altogether different than taking a gut punch in the moment before the power surge. It makes her feel her body, reminds her she has one, and it is fallible and occasionally falling.
It’s nice.
Nell kisses Polly until her own heart eases out of its steady rhythm, until the adrenaline threatens to catch up to her, until Polly’s hands are grasping at clothing and the base of Nell’s neck, not at timelines and hypotheses.
No matter how her sisters tease, this isn't a thing, not like they mean it anyhow. They want romance. Every time she comes home, they want a story to whisper over, they want her to blush.
And she does blush, in the moment before she snaps at them to leave her be, before they careen off in whispers and giggles. But the blush is only because it’s odd and stressful, this, to feel like she’d have to explain herself, to explain why they’re so very wrong. She doesn’t have the words to defend herself against them. So she blushes.
She forced herself feel that way once, to read her discomfort as excitement and nerves. To blush and not fight back about it. But that’s all done now, and it didn’t end pretty, did it? There's been too much shit between then and now to tell herself lies anymore. She just doesn't the energy to spare.
So no, this isn't a thing, not like they’re hoping, but it is an understanding of sorts.
It came as a surprise to Nell, grown slowly over late nights in this tavern or the news office, clumsy meals spread out over theories and debate, slow walks home after dark.
It happened also in the early mornings at the table beside Roxy, making slow work through the letters Polly neatly prints on the page. Polly, undeterred by her frequent fits of frustration, saying nothing when she storms out because they’re just squiggles in ink, and returns five minutes later, feeling like a sorry fool.
And mile by mile on horseback down the long road between the newspaper and the tavern, when business or news or lonesomeness draws one to the other, it grew.
Too many moments to count, and still, it came as a surprise.
When she wasn't looking, it became a lean. Someone to count on, someone to whom she is, somehow, never indebted to.
It isn't a confidence she is particularly comfortable harboring, but there it is all the same.
Nell steps back and straightens the neckline of Polly's dress, which has somehow strayed.
"There,” she says, trying to ease past the lingering shortness of her breath, “that's the quietest I've seen you in hours. All sorted? Can we be at peace for a bit?"
Polly, lips parted in gentle bewilderment, starts to nod. But then, quick as always, her eyes clear and she gets that look. The look she gets before she does something a little reckless, a little brave.
"Not quite yet, I'm afraid. Still so many theories I might need to discuss. It might take hours yet."
Nell lets out a huff of amusement. She knows a hustle when she sees one, and she respects it.
There's still a starry look in Polly's eyes sometimes that worries Nell. It’s a look she’ll never match, no matter how much Roxy tells her to give it time.
Because, she doesn’t do starry-eyed. She doesn’t ever fall like that, even if she wanted to.
It’s a little sad, sometimes, to think of it. What she might miss, being the way she is.
Nell made one painfully awkward attempt at addressing the gap between her and Polly, with every intention of ending this (whatever this is). She sat her down at a table in the corner of the tavern when her sisters were too busy to snoop, and she tried.
About four minutes into her halting ramblings as she searched for words to explain this amorphous part of her, words she'd sworn she had yesterday, Polly laid a hand on hers and put her out of her misery. Nell was gently and firmly informed that Polly is an adult and knows her own mind. Her heart isn't Nell's to protect.
(But it is though, more and more. Nell’s days seem to be just a collection of hearts to defend now).
"This isn't a waiting game, Polly, I need you to understand. I won't change, can't, not like that."
Polly looked at her and squeezed her hand, so tender that Nell had to look away for moment. "Good. I wouldn't want you to."
It was all a little too much. She needed to go lift something concrete and heavy, to bring herself back down, immediately, please.
She cleared her throat and stood. "Well, good. That's settled."
She made it about four steps before she had to pause, to turn back over her shoulder.
"I wouldn't want you to change either." It comes out gruff, but she means it.
It's a bit of a relief, to have failed, to walk away still attached. A massive wave, really, of relief.
So, yeah, she doesn’t do starry-eyed. And it is a little sad sometimes, late a night, when she thinks a bit too hard.
But it feels much less sad when she’s walking beside Polly after talking until dawn, making Polly laugh until she snorts ale out of her nose, arguing and carrying on like they’d grown up together.
It doesn’t really feel sad at all, when Polly falls asleep on Nell’s shoulder at the bar, or when Nell spends the night with her forehead pressed to Polly’s back, when she’s stayed too late in London to ride home.
It doesn’t feel sad at all.
“Not quite yet, eh?”
She smiles wryly, as Polly straightens up to meet her eyes, valiantly trying to cover her nerves. It’s sweet, really, when she asks for what she wants, when she trusts it’s alright to ask, when she trusts she’ll get the truth.
It’s sweet, really, to be trusted like that.
Nell lets one hand ease down heavy to Polly's hip, where she'll feel it, undulled by the corset. "You're something else, you know that?"
She presses another kiss to Polly's mouth, giving in with her bodyweight, letting it deepen and linger until they’re both ragged.
“Something else,” she mutters again, drifting down to Polly’s neck, nosing up under the jaw as Polly sucks in a shaky breath, winding fingers into Nell’s hair and cradling them together.
"Hold this," Nell says into the skin below Polly’s ear, before biting gently on the lobe.
Polly shudders, swimming upstream through her haze to pull herself back into functioning cognition. "Huh?"
Nell pulls back, all mischief now, and hands her the layers of skirt she has been subtly collecting in a fist. Polly takes them with a slightly disbelieving, "oh."
In that moment, Nell’s particularly thankful she is who she is, thankful she can enjoy this with her wits about her, can watch the way Polly’s eyes go wide as Nell drops to her knees.
She might be a little rusty, but the army taught her more than guns and horses.
This isn’t a romance the traveling players will tell. The two of them won’t make into the story books. They’ll barely make it into the rumors and the gossip.
But the story books were always a bit shortsighted, weren’t they? The rumors and the gossip, always missing the best bits.
It won’t be much to anyone looking in from out there, but this is something alright. Something that fits into the life Nell’s carving for herself here. Something her heart can stretch to accommodate, without losing its shape.
It’s nice, really. It’s nice.
She falls asleep sometime later, sprawled in her bed, head on Polly’s lap. Polly strokes her hair and flips idly through her notes, murmuring to herself about maps and omens and bad dreams, of which Nell has none.