Chapter Text
Her bones were weary.
Thunder growled.
She should have driven to the music building, but the sunlight and faint breeze fooled her. She could have practiced until her fingers burned, then gone straight home to pour herself a finger of gin in an apartment too large for one person. She would finish reading for one of her classes, take a scalding shower, then pretend to sleep for five hours before it started anew.
It was only now, faced with the reality of walking home, that she would most likely be caught in the rain. She stood at the crosswalk, though she knew not what she was waiting for. The longer she took, the more her walk would be drenched.
“Could you please move?”
“Hm? Oh,” Cressida mumbled, stepping aside as students flowed through. With the change in hour, a period of classes ended, signaling the release of many students at once. Cressida was subsumed by the crowd and utterly apart from it.
She looked up expectantly, lengthening her stride. She may just beat it after all; she promptly walked into someone.
“Of course,” Cressida heard Penelope Featherington mutter at her side.
“Sorry,” Cressida said on reflex, then added, “Though you could have moved around me.”
Penelope was a complication who orbited but seldom touched her these days. Their mothers were friends and thus she and Penelope—and Penelope’s delightful older sisters—were often thrown together. Prudence and Philippa were thick as thieves, minding their own business as they practiced their music and gossiped about boys. Penelope, however, was the quiet one, the watchful one. Cressida more than once found Penelope staring at her; it made her feel seen in a way that was discomforting.
Cressida misunderstood the phrase cruel to be kind; she was just cruel.
It was never one grand situation in which Cressida was—as her father often told her—a bitch, but it was a death by small cuts. Disparaging looks, veiled slights, even once spilling her drink on Penelope when she was clearly enamored with Colin Bridgerton’s attention. The pain did not bring any pleasure, but it made her feel something, which she found was better than the hollowness of feeling nothing at all.
Needless to say, Cressida did not have friends.
“You could have moved around me,” Penelope snipped. The thunder rumbled again; they as one both looked to the sky. “Did you drive?”
“No. Did you?” Cressida asked.
Penelope nodded, then hesitated. With a put-upon sigh, she dug into her bag and pulled out an umbrella.
Cressida did not take it. “What am I supposed to do with that?”
Penelope closed her eyes a moment, then carefully mimed. “You open it, then you use it as such to block the rain.”
“I am aware what an umbrella is,” Cressida muttered, then snatched it from her hand before Penelope changed her mind. “Why are you lending this to me?”
“Because when we were younger, you used to hate getting your hair wet,” Penelope said, which Cressida thought was surprisingly thoughtful. “And then you would caterwaul until—”
“Yes, yes, thank you for the umbrella, you can go now,” Cressida snapped, holding the umbrella to her chest protectively.
Pen! came out from the distance.
Cressida and Penelope both turned to see Colin Bridgerton, his frame tall, his expression bright even in the distance, waving at them from a parked car.
Waving at a blushing Penelope specifically.
“Ah,” Cressida murmured. “I didn’t realize you finally started dating.”
Penelope whipped her head to look at her. “We are not dating,” she hissed as if Colin could possibly overhear. “We’re just friends.”
“Sure,” Cressida said. “You’re clearly still in love with him, but sure.”
“Cressida, of all people, I don’t need this from you,” she said tiredly. “He needed a ride because apparently it’s inconceivable for people to carry umbrellas with them considering the forecast.”
“But you didn’t offer me a ride,” Cressida noted, though she wasn’t sure she would have taken her up on it.
“That’s because we aren’t friends,” Penelope said easily, which stung but was expected.
“And yet I have your umbrella.”
“It’s a pity umbrella,” Penelope replied.
Cressida rolled her eyes, but she held the umbrella tighter to her still. “Goodbye, Penelope.”
Penelope huffed, walking past her, then stopping to turn around. “Are you going to the grad mixer tonight?”
“At the bar? No,” Cressida said.
“You should come,” Penelope offered. “I’ll want my umbrella back, you can bring it with you.”
“Goodbye, Penelope,” Cressida groused.
A moment later, Cressida flicked the umbrella open as it started to rain.
The bar was loud and bright and raucous.
Cressida hated it.
Currently, she was standing in a crowded room, an umbrella tucked in her bag, with no notion of where to go. She did a careful scan to see if she could find Penelope, but to no avail. She considered making her way into the thick of it, but that, too, was untenable. Trusting that Penelope would find her if she truly wanted her umbrella back, Cressida went to the one lone seat at the bar.
“Gin and tonic,” she quietly requested. The bartender nodded, already turning to the next patron. She picked at her nails, then clenched and unclenched her hands to stop herself. Her mother had always been quick to take a ruler to the back of her hand when she caught Cressida in the act. It is unsightly, her mother would say, seeing blood on your fingers when you play. That habit had not quite left her.
She had not always been the carefully curated doll her mother dressed and paraded around to her contemporaries. Cressida had gone to a private girls’ university where there were no soirées but parties, where one did not delicately sip at wine but chugged some alcoholic monstrosity that barely had a name. In the beginning, a wide-eyed Cressida thought this could be the world she had been waiting for, a grand departure from all that she had ever known. She partied, she drank, and even managed high marks so her parents would not suspect.
Until someone told on her to their parents.
Cressida Cowper taking shots of gin with boys from across the lake.
It had been made clear in no uncertain terms that Cressida would never enter that scene again. She had been given two options: continue at school as a perfectly exemplary student or quit school early to enter society and marry an aged acquaintance of her father’s. She never thought to question it.
Cressida was too scared to take a single sip for the next three years.
Cressida had no particular love for Aubrey Hall except that it was deep in the countryside where neither her parents nor high society much in general could be found. She lived in the apartment her parents rented for her, attended the school whose tuition her parents paid, and left a voicemail for her mother every Sunday; her mother seldom responded.
She tried to thread being someone and no one at the same time. She had a past she sought to put behind her and parents she wished to avoid. She was in the second year of a two-year program, after which she would most likely be pulled back into the maw, a husband found for her. Her degree in truth meant little, for it was to make her pedigree notable enough to make her a more desirable prospect. Her only saving grace was a trust fund no one else could touch once she turned twenty-five.
But those were eventualities.
“Thank you,” she said when the glass was plinked down in front of her. The bar was sticky; she ran her fingers over condensation to rub it off before taking a small sip of a watered-down drink. The man next to her pushed away from the bar, his shirt brushing her arm. She vaguely took account of her surroundings; the faint music from a crackly speaker, the blonde stranger hunched one seat over, the thrum of the crowd at her back. Perhaps it was the kind of night where she would down her drink and go back to an empty apartment entirely too cold and sterile to settle in.
“That kind of day?”
She jolted, looking up, then realizing it was the blonde man to her left that had spoken. “Pardon?”
He made a vague gesture, his red plaid flannel stretching across his shoulder. “I can hear you sighing from over here.”
She thought he was making fun of her, though his blue eyes seemed earnest; she didn’t trust him. “Then stop listening,” she said, finally taking a sip.
But he laughed, holding up a placating hand. “Sorry,” was all he said, turning back to his beer and what she now noticed was a book.
Despite her best efforts, she was acutely aware of his presence, unassuming as it was. It was disconcerting to her, on occasion, how she could be so physically close to others and yet feel entirely alone. Tonight was one such night where the loneliness was almost unbearable.
A little embarrassed by her earlier abruptness, she sighed and asked, “What are you reading?”
He blinked at her as if uncertain she was addressing him. Holding up the book with a bird on its cover, he said, “Sibley.”
She frowned. “How would I possibly know what that means.”
“It’s a field guide,” he said. When she continued to stare at him blankly, he said, “Birds.”
“You’re a birder,” she said slowly. She supposed there were enough birds in the country to be of interest if one was so inclined. She did not think she would come to a crowded bar to read.
“Yes, and not exactly,” he agreed as if that clarified anything.
“Not exactly,” she muttered.
He hesitated, then said, “I study ornithology.”
He looked at her expectantly. She frowned, looking back. “OK, so you’re a knowledgeable birder.”
His shoulders relaxed at that; she belatedly realized he had tensed. “Sure, that works.” After a sip of beer, he asked, “I assume you’re also a student?”
She needed to leave, she neither wanted nor needed to share her life story with this stranger who talked to birds. She needed to—she needed—
“Piano performance. And French,” she tacked on.
He politely nodded. “Sounds complicated.”
She huffed a surprised laugh. “On occasion.”
“I have no musical inclination,” he said easily, resting an elbow on the bar. “Two left-feet, poor pitch—”
A woman pressed in between them, ordering a round of beers. When she stepped away, Cressida found the man’s seat was empty.
“Oh,” she said to herself, oddly deflated.
“Do you love it?”
She spun around, squeaking when she found the blonde man leaning against the bar on her other side. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Playing the piano,” he said as if they were never interrupted.
“On occasion,” she said again a touch more carefully. Love and piano were a complicated tangle. Not wanting to linger, she said, “Do you love your birds?”
He laughed easily. “My birds. Yes, I suppose I would say that, though they aren’t mine, they’re just a life’s passion.”
“Just,” she said. She shook her head. “I’m not sure I understand the concept of life’s passion. How—” It hit her that she was encroaching too deeply with a stranger. “Well, lucky for you that you found it so young.”
“I am,” he said quietly. “Is there something you—”
“There you are, hiding in plain sight,” said Penelope from her other side. “I’m surprised you—oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
The man shook his head congenially. “No worries.”
Cressida sighed, fishing the umbrella from her bag. “There’s a chance I’ll need to borrow it again.”
“Then plan better next time and we won’t have to do this,” Penelope murmured, but it was not quite unkind. “Did you make it home fine?”
“I did, thank you,” Cressida reluctantly admitted.
“Good,” Penelope said, then turned to the stranger. “She won’t shut up when her hair gets wet unexpectedly.”
“I’m sorry, am I interrupting your time with Colin tonight?” Cressida snapped. She made a show of looking around. “He’s usually easy to spot with how—”
“Quit it,” Penelope said lowly, her blush evident on fair cheeks.
Then Colin himself loped over, slinging a casual arm over Penelope’s shoulder. “There you are,” he said, looking down at Penelope; Penelope could not hide a soft smile. He nodded at Cressida, then noticed the umbrella still in Cressida’s hand. He looked up at the stranger smiling. “Did you know that when it rains, she—”
“Oh, fuck off,” Cressida hissed, thrusting the umbrella at Penelope.
Colin laughed loudly, then slid his arm down to take Penelope’s hand, who was very much wide-eyed, blushing anew.
“Pen, I saved you a seat,” he said, tugging her along. “You still interested in joining?”
Penelope saved just a glance back at Cressida before happily nodding at Colin, allowing herself to be led along.
The stranger tried and failed to hide a smile. “I like your friends.”
“We’re not friends,” Cressida mumbled. “Don’t encourage her.”
“Are your other friends here then?” he said, casually looking around. “Or were you waiting for them when I interrupted?”
She gave him a tight smile; it was too humiliating to admit she had no friends.
But he just nodded. “I came here by myself, too. Quite honestly,” he said, resting his weight further against the bar. “I forgot tonight was a mixer. I just had a long day at work and wanted a moment of reprieve. My mistake.”
“Birds giving you grief?” she asked, appreciating the out.
“Never,” he said. “It’s always humans.”
“That, I understand,” she said. She studied him for a moment. “What program are you in? I don’t know anything about sciences here.”
“Doctoral candidate,” he said as if that was not significant.
“Oh, you—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you by calling you just a birder,” she winced.
“I didn’t take it as such, truly,” he said, grinning. “But I shall put that on my resume. Knowledgeable birder.”
“You can only put it once you successfully defend,” she teased. “Right now, you’re a birder candidate.”
His eyes lit up. “Am I now?”
She settled against the bar, looking up at him. “How many years left?”
His smile dimmed some. “It depends.”
“I see,” she said quietly. Nothing was ever that easy. “Will you know when you know?”
He nodded. “Something like that.”
It lulled, the silence between them, but she did not feel uneasy. She wanted to study him more closely but was afraid of being intrusive. This stranger was—
“What’s your name?” she asked, embarrassed she had not asked sooner.
He hesitated.
“Is it a secret?” she said, confused.
His mouth twisted. “Is it strange to say I prefer you don’t know who I am?”
“Should I be offended?” she said.
“No! No,” he was quick to say. “It is only just—” he trailed off.
But Cressida knew more about secrets than most. She did not understand his rationale, but she understood not wanting to be known.
“Should I be a secret, too, then?” she asked. “Two nameless people in a bar?”
“You don’t have to—”
“Alright, you’re the man I met in a bar,” she said. “Who is quite serious about his birds and appreciates a quiet night. And I,” she gestured to herself, “Am the woman you met in a bar who is quite serious about the piano and hates getting her hair wet.”
“That’s not how I would describe you,” he said softly, “But if that’s what works for you.”
She wanted to know how he would describe her, but she was afraid of what he would consider a truthful answer. It tore at her, how fatigue was pulling at her limbs, but she found herself wanting to stay with him.
“I’m fading,” she admitted.
He nodded, taking a step back, “Of course—”
“If—if I gave you my number, would you text me?” she asked, picking at her nail.
His eyes widened. “Really?”
She looked away, huffing. “You can just say no, it’s not—”
“I’ll text you,” he said quietly.
She thought of giving him her phone, but that felt oddly too revealing after what they had discussed. She pulled a pen out of her bag, then motioned for his hand. Bemused, he held out his hand, which she cradled in hers. He has nice hands, she thought absently to herself, long calloused fingers, rather warm to touch. In neat script she wrote her number, then folded his fingers when she was done.
“I’ll see you around,” she said, attributing the heat of the bar to her flushed cheeks.
He just nodded, watching her.
With a quick wave of her hand, she wended her way through the crowd until she could gulp a lungful of cold evening air. She was fortunate that she lived just a few blocks from the bar—dangerous when she was in a dreary mood. She went through the motions, undressing, carefully removing her makeup, brushing out her hair. She settled in bed with a tall glass of water, meaning to aimlessly scroll for another half hour before sleep pulled too strongly. Her phone pinged, vibrating in her hand.
> Hi. This is the birder candidate from the bar
> I wish there was a better way to say that
> I’m glad I met you tonight
She stared at her phone, at his messages. It was a little formal and a little awkward and she couldn’t stop smiling.
< Hi stranger
< You never told me what your favorite bird is