Six hours is plenty of time to pick a dress.
Because it has to be a dress, obviously. It's taken her the first two out of six hours to rule out the possibility of a slim, tasteful pantsuit, because she has many of these and is secretly more at home in trousers than she is in skirts, but of course it's the skirts that are expected of her.
And she does so hate to disappoint.
Of the dresses she owns, and this is not an inconsiderable number, she's narrowed it down to the black ones. The little black ones, specifically. Not the littlest of the little black ones, because most of these aren't actually tasteful enough for a lady (capital L or otherwise), but the medium to large little black ones. So that's only about a dozen that need to be gone through, sorted out, ordered by preference, and then tried on for good measure.
"Six hours is plenty of time to pick a dress," Penelope tells Sherbet, as she steps out of the fourth out of twelve options, and throws it onto the maybe pile. "It's just that it does need to be the perfect dress, Bertie, and I have entirely too many perfect dresses to choose from."
Sherbet is in his usual place in her dressing room, ensconced on a chaise lounge sized appropriately for a dog of his stature. His opinions are less important than he thinks they are, but she'll solicit them anyway. She's moved on from any of the dresses that require discernment of colours, anyway. As she takes a moment to crouch down and rub at his ears, he gives her an exasperated little huff, and then a begrudging lick of her wrist. This is just a reminder that she hasn't picked out a perfume for tonight, either. Eau de Pug is not an option.
Penelope sighs to herself and selects the fifth out of a dozen dresses.
Her dressing room is a study in elegant opulence. It had been a bedroom, once upon a time, but it's been thoroughly retrofitted. Closets line the walls, with doors of cut glass mirrors. There's a window with a settee pushed beneath it, hidden by tasteful lace curtains. At the opposite end of the room her vanity is haloed by lights she can adjust in brightness and temperature, depending on where she's going and what the light will be like when she gets there. The center of the room is dominated by a glass case, housing all manner of accessories. The room is all neutral ivory, silver and glass. A crystalline chandelier hangs overhead. Soft music plays from omnipresent speakers. She has a second cup of tea waiting on her vanity, a bowl of strawberries, a plate of shortbread. It's half past ten in the morning. She means to leave the manor at half past three, to be in Paris by seven.
And she needs the perfect dress.
"Do you know, Bertie, it's just dreadfully unfair," Penelope says aloud, as she attempts to wriggle her hips past the bodice of the next dress on the roster. This dress is not the perfect dress, because it seems rather more snug about her hips than she remembers. She gives up before she even has it all the way on, and lets it fall back to the floor and steps out of it as she laments, "All these years he's spent, being so absolutely infatuated with me. And I've only had…three weeks? Scarcely three weeks. I've scarcely had three weeks to try and catch him up. It's not fair, Sherbet."
It was one thing to know Gordon liked her. It's been quite another to find out that she likes him right back, because it turns out that there's quite a lot to like.
Not that she hadn't known that, of course. Of course, Penelope's always liked Gordon, it's very difficult not to like Gordon. But it's another thing entirely to like Gordon. Because now she's discovering all manner of things to like about him, beyond the obvious. Beyond the broad shoulders and brown eyes, the blond hair and the sunshine smile, there's a depth to him that she'd always been aware of, but hadn't ever really thought about.
She's always liked that he's funny, but now she likes that he can make her laugh. She's always liked his kindness, but now she likes how deliberately he goes out of his way to be kind to her. She'd even liked his perpetual flirting, but she likes it even better now that she's permitted to flirt back with no compunction. And she likes to talk to him, but she especially likes to talk to him at the end of a long day, or in the early hours of the morning before a long day gets started. Or in the middle of some tedious social engagement, or whenever, really, at whatever times of day the ongoing mismatch of their timezones happens to align. It's half past ten in the morning in England. This means that it's coming up on midnight on Tracy Island, and the end of Gordon's day. Usually they've managed to talk to each other by now.
And so she'd like it if he'd call her, but she's not sure she should expect him to. It's his twenty-fifth birthday, after all, and he's probably spent the day with his family, or however much of his family could be spared from saving whatever parts of the world needed saving. She hopes that he's had a good day. She hopes that her birthday gift to him was well-received, and that she hasn't given offense. She'd hope that it fits, but she knows that it does, because that's not the sort of mistake she makes. He might already be asleep, because he's going to have to leave at some wretchedly early hour in order to fly back along the curve of the Earth, stretching out the length of the fourteenth of February, so that they can spend it together.
He probably shouldn't see her before tonight, anyway. In order to land the full impact of the perfect dress (which is not five, six, or seven, and especially isn't eight, which makes its way past her hips, but seems to find her bust an insurmountable obstacle), it's probably best if Gordon doesn't see her before she meets him on the runway of a private airport, just past sundown, just outside the City of Light.
Her ninth dress lands on the maybe pile, and she gives number three another shot, before dismissing it out of hand. Sherbet toddles off his little settee and goes to whine plaintively at the door, plainly exhausted by his ladyship's quest for the appropriate couture.
"Off with you, then, little traitor," Penelope mutters, as she cross the room and holds open the door. "I suppose you'll just have to see it in the tabloids."
Sherbet departs and Penelope sighs rather tragically. She wraps herself up in her white satin dressing gown, adjourns to her vanity and her cup of tea. She seats herself on the plush velvet cushion, closes her eyes, and takes a meditative sip of lightly sweetened Earl Grey. Then another. And eventually her teacup returns to the saucer and Penelope gets to her feet, suddenly inspired. Her steps across her dressing room are light and quick, and she slips out the door.
The manor sprawls, that much is true, but it never feels quite so big or quite so empty as it seems to on a weekday morning. February isn't much for sunshine in dour, dreary old England, and so as Penelope makes her way to a certain fateful back stairwell, she's a little disappointed to find the place is rather drab in the grey English daylight. As Penelope descends the stairs, by the light of mid-morning, the wood paneled walls seem stodgy instead of warm and secure. There's the unmistakable sheen of tarnish about the suit of armor that stands in the corner, and the velveteen settee tucked away beneath the staircase itself seems as though it's been tucked away in such a place because it's grown rather dingy and worn, and started to show its age in a rather unbecoming fashion.
The hem of Penelope's dressing gown trails along the parquet floor beneath her feet. There are two doors into the stairwell, one leading into a corridor connecting to the ballroom, and the other leading further into the manor, back towards what used to be the servants quarters. Creighton-Ward Manor is big enough that she hasn't had occasion to be back here again since—well. Penelope crosses to the settee and sits herself down, remembering the way her gown had rustled softly when she'd sat here the last time.
She closes her eyes to shut out the sunlight. She reclines back against the velvet curve of the divan, and casts her mind back to that night. She remembers how she'd wanted to be alone, right up until the moment Gordon had shown up, and then she'd been glad he was there. Not for any reason she could name, but it had been unmistakable, the way she'd felt when she'd first seen him. It's this feeling that she's trying to summon up—that fluttery warm sensation that she'd imagined was just the wine.
But then he'd sat beside her, and then they'd talked. And then he'd fallen silent and she'd realized just exactly what he was trying to tell her. And then she'd kissed him. And then he'd kissed her. And then—
And then.
Something had come unbound then, whatever exactly it was that existed between them. It had gone from a question to an answer, become something real and apprehensible, something the both of them could feel. His hand at the small of her back, her fingers twisted in the front of his shirt, and the way he'd held her, kissed her and kept kissing her, like there was nothing else in the world he could possibly have wanted. It's more than possible that that was precisely the case. It's down to the amount of wine she'd had that she doesn't remember it better, but without the wine to loosen her inhibitions, Penelope privately doubts it would have happened at all, and what a tragedy that would be. If it hadn't happened, then she wouldn't be here, caught up in the memory of him, for lack of anything better, because tonight can't come soon enough.
It's been lovely to talk to him. Really it has, it's been a part of her day she hadn't known was missing. She's privy to more information than most of the world about International Rescue's movements around it, and it hasn't been terribly hard to keep tabs on Gordon. Best of all, she likes to call him at the end of his day, and listen to him ramble about wherever the world has taken him, whatever he's had to do. All that casual, apparently effortless heroism. Whatever she's doing, she'll find an excuse to stop, and she'll creep off to some private corner of wherever she is, and just listen to him, appropriately rapt with attention. Frequently he talks himself to sleep during the course of these calls, because saving the world is a tiresome business, and Penelope is always secretly delighted at the thought that hers is the last voice he hears, whether he knows it or not, a softly whispered "good night" and the gentle click of her compact as she closes it tight.
But after nearly a month, just talking isn't quite enough any longer. When she needs to return to the place beneath the stairs to lose herself in the memory of kissing him, when she wakes up in the morning to a bed that's big and bare and empty, when her heart aches quietly at the thought of being held again, touched and caressed and cherished—it's been too long. Tonight will be a beginning, more than anything else, but it will also be the end of the weeks they've spent apart, and Penelope's all afire with impatience.
Impatience is the ladylike word for it, anyway.
And as she opens her eyes and breathes a soft sigh of something that can only be longing, she also comes to a decision about the perfect dress.
Back upstairs to her dressing room, decisively, past the dozen scattered dresses that she'd thought were options, and to the closet that contains the thirteenth, the one she hadn't considered because thirteen is an unlucky sort of number, and she can't abide bad luck on a night like tonight, when she so wants everything to be perfect. She shrugs out of her dressing gown, lets this cascade to the floor at her feet. She pauses for a thoughtful moment, thinking about Paris. Then she deftly undoes the clasp of her bra, slips out of it and drops it into the heap of satin.
The thirteenth dress is black. It's also so plain it could be mistaken for severe, a sheath of inky darkness. There's some stretch to the fabric, a little bit of give, but otherwise it clings tight to her curves. The skirt of it is narrow and straight, nothing flirty about a hemline that covers her bare knees. The bateau neckline is high, and bares her throat, her collarbone, but nothing further. The bodice is fitted (in a way that makes her acutely conscious of her bra, lying on the floor), but the sleeves are long, covering her wrists. Looking at herself in the mirror, for a moment she doubts her choice—but turning, looking over her shoulder; immediately she changes her mind.
Her perfect dress is backless, a deep v that plummets to the base of her spine, the bare skin of her back framed by those long black sleeves. The skirt, so modest from the front, is slit along the seam, high enough that her thighs peak out between the pleat when she moves, turning slowly to get a proper look at herself. Her hands go to her hair, in a loose chignon at the nape of her neck as she gets ready, and she undoes the bobby pin that holds it all together, untwists the tumble of her freshly washed curls. Her hair falls loose over her shoulders, and it becomes immediately apparent that she won't be wearing it up tonight. There's something just too pretty and feminine about the way she looks with it down. The dress is perfect, but only because its severity allows her to be soft by contrast. The austerity of the front belies the generosity of the back, and as Penelope completes another slow revolution in the mirror, she smiles to herself.
Before she can start in on her choice of shoes, there's a soft knock on the door. Penelope immediately kicks the soft folds of her dressing gown over top of her discarded brassiere, and turns away from the trio of floor length mirrors with which she'd been engaged. "Come in," she calls, and seats herself primly at her vanity once again. She needs to choose a purse and and whatever jewelery will best suit her severe black dress, something simple. She needs to make some essential decisions about her makeup. Obviously it will be crucial to draw a great deal of attention to her lips.
Parker steps into the room and Penelope feels herself straighten up, involuntarily. Seated, with her back to the door, there's a slightly creep of embarrassment up the curve of her spine, because from behind there's utterly no ambiguity about the intentions with which one wears a dress like this. Watching his reflection in the mirror as he enters the room at her back, Parker's as much a contrast in her bright and elegant dressing room as she is in her stark black dress. He's in a pair of dark corduroy trousers, an old cableknit sweater in thick ivory wool, beneath his trusty leather jacket. He wears his usual leather driving gloves. By the faint whiff of old petrol and engine oil that he brings with him, he's just up from the garages.
For a moment their eyes meet in the mirror and there's something curiously wistful about his expression, the threat of rain on an already clouded day. It's gone in the same moment that she sees it, and though she can see that her own features have remained perfectly, carefully neutral, she still feels the tug at her heartstrings at the sight of her dear old friend. But the moment passes and she smiles a sweet, winsome smile, and greets him with her usual warmth, "Parker."
"M'lady," he answers, and his fingertips go to his brow, doffing a cap that isn't there. "There'll be an Aston Martin waiting for you h'on the ground in Paris. I'll 'ave you in London for your flight at 'alf past five."
"Splendid," Penelope answers, and turns away from her mirror, still smiling as she faces him directly. "Thank you."
There's a moment's pause. "'Appy Valentine's Day, your ladyship," Parker says, and there's a thinly veiled criticism in his tone. "Who's up and died?"
Penelope's answering laugh is silvery, and only slightly false. "No one," she answers primly, rising from her seat and smoothing her hands over the front of her dress. "It's only that it's Paris. Whenever I find myself in Paris, opinions always seem to play rather sharply over whatever I've chosen to wear. I'm attempting to keep it simple. Classic. Elegant. No room for criticism."
She's turned to face him, but she still sees his gaze flit past her, to the mirror at her back, the bare column of her spine, the slit at the back of her dress. Speaking of criticism, it's not Parker's place to criticize, and both of them know it. Both of them are also acutely aware of just who exactly she'll be meeting in Paris, the birthday/Valentine's day date that will mark a titanic shift in their current reality.
So Parker might not be able to help himself.
The silence stretches out a second or two longer than is strictly comfortable, teasing at awkwardness before Parker finally speaks. "I should 'ate to think if you giving the wrong h'impression, m'lady," he says at last, and his sigh is melancholy, rather than disapproving. "Would hate for someone to get the wrong idea."
Parker's general attitude towards her suitors, few and far between though these have been, has always been one of quietly distant menace. He's never extended beyond his boundaries, never done anything to overtly discourage anyone who might want to take her ladyship to dinner, or out for drinks, or dancing. But he's always held the attitude that anyone who would court her should need to surmount a fairly substantial barrier to entry, and his glowering discouragement is a necessary component of the process.
That won't work anymore. Gordon's known Parker for as long as he's known Penelope, and though the pair of them have always had a moderately tense relationship, there's nothing like actual animosity there. Penelope knows Parker well enough to suspect that there's a sort of backwards affection built into the way he treats Gordon, and that there's a certain respect buried in his attitude. After all, it's very difficult not to like Gordon. And he's always given as good as he gets.
In her bare feet, Penelope is only five feet, three inches tall. In his youth, Parker was a strapping six feet, though he's lost a couple inches since then. Looking at him, Penelope has the realization that he's probably right around Gordon's height, though she's never felt as small next to Parker as she feels next to Gordon. When she reaches up to fondly pat his cheek, she doesn't feel any smaller than she usually does. There's really nothing to be said about the impression she fully intends to make, so she doesn't say anything about that. Instead her voice is light, airily casual as she says, "Do look after Bertie this evening, please, Parker. I do hate to think of him, all alone while I'm off gallivanting about in Paris."
"We'd be 'appy to come along, your ladyship," Parker offers. "We'll wait h'in the car."
Penelope sighs and turns away from her driver, busies herself at the case in the center of the room. She'll need a handbag. Tasteful, understated jewelry. The perfect perfume. A way to explain to her dear old friend that he needn't waste his time trying to discourage her. "Parker, you hate Paris."
"And you hate Valentine's Day, m'lady."
He's not wrong about that. And yet— "I'm not going to Paris for Valentine's Day, Parker," she tells him gently.
This earns a genuine and unadulterated harrumph, as Parker folds his arms across his chest. Penelope opens a drawer and withdraws a gold toned compact, with cloisonné roses enameled delicately on the top and nothing inside but a pair of silvered mirrors. She pops this open and begins a minute examination of her eyebrows, as though to convey just how tedious this conversation is growing. "If you start celebrating every birthday in that family, m'lady—"
This is just willful, wishful ignorance of what's actually going on here, and Penelope won't have it. "Parker. Please, don't be obtuse."
Parker, duly reprimanded, relents with a huff of a sigh and a shake of his head. "But why now, m'lady?" he asks plaintively. "Why h'encourage this sort of thing? Why him?"
The note of distaste in his voice actually begins to offend her, and there's the gunfire-crisp crack of her compact, snapping sharply closed. She has to catch herself, right at the edge of a rising tide of temper, and remember that not everyone—not anyone, actually—is privy to the fact that what exists between her and Gordon is active and ongoing, mutual and wholly reciprocated.
Tonight is a foregone conclusion. There's a fiction being played out for everyone else's benefit, a gentle transition from the pair of them separately to the pair of them together. Something to mark the change, to make it official. There's been a certain appeal to being surreptitious about it all, and the part of Penelope that lives a secretive double life as IR's London Agent will always find something to enjoy about keeping a secret. But for as much as she's a natural liar, Gordon's her absolute opposite, and it's not hard to tell that he's anxious to be honest about the whole situation. So tonight, for all intents and purposes, wears the guise of a first date. Not even a first date, but a tolerantly offered birthday dinner. Presumably to make Gordon quit asking her. Not that he'd asked her, because she'd asked him. His birthday or Valentine's Day. Paris or Nice. They haven't even spent his birthday in Paris yet, and she's already thinking ahead to next year, and Valentine's Day in Nice.
Why him, indeed.
There are a lot of reasons. But Parker probably won't appreciate most of them. So she invents one, instead.
"Because he asked me," Penelope answers, lying. Or fudging the truth, at least.
Had he asked? She can't remember. She remembers the sincerity of his confession, how sad and how serious he'd seemed, telling her how he felt and expecting her to turn him down. But her memory of their conversation in the stairwell is warm and fuzzy and all blurred together, a golden haze of soft light and champagne. The parts that stand out are a suite of sensations, his hands on her body, his breath on her skin, the taste of wine in his mouth and hers. Kissing him, and the way he'd drawn a soft sound of longing out of her, involuntary, like a magician pulling silk from between her lips. The unexpected perfection of it all.
And the way it had only escalated from there.
"And because I do like him." This is an understatement, but a calculated one. She allows her to shoulders fall, her expression softening. Her voice gains a slightly wistful and entirely manufactured quality, as she goes on, "And it's not fair not to give him a chance. All this time, Parker. If I let him carry a torch any longer he'll burn to cinders. I can't have that."
Parker frowns at her. "Charity, m'lady?"
Penelope tosses her hair and gives a little shrug of her shoulders. "I prefer to call it kindness, Parker. Whatever else you think of him, you can't deny that he's always been terribly kind to me. It seems only fair to pay it back. It's his birthday, after all."
Parker's not above muttering something to himself about that, but it does seem to settle the matter, as he sighs and cedes the point. "Very well, m'lady. I s'pose it might make him less of a pest in the long term. Could I ask if you might do me a kindness, then?"
Penelope smiles gently. "Whatever you'd like, Parker."
There's the smack of leather-clad knuckles against Parker's palm. He might be joking, trying to lighten the tension. Penelope still winces, just a little bit, at the note of darkness in his voice when he says, "Tell Master Gordon that I'll h'wallop 'im if he does anything h'untoward."
She has to force a light laugh at that, and push her way past the twinge of guilt, considering just how h'untoward she hopes things might get. "I've always managed my own walloping when necessary, Parker. And it certainly won't be necessary. I promise, you've nothing to be concerned about."
"Just so, your ladyship." Parker's fingertips go to his non-existent cap again and he bobs a little nod of deference as he moves to take his leave. Penelope turns her attention back to her dresser, but not before her partner makes the comment, "Per'aps a warmer jacket than h'usual, might be appropriate m'lady." A deliberate beat, and then, "Bit nippy in Paris, this time of year."
And her dressing room door closes behind her as Penelope feels the warm flush of blood to her face.