Title: A Love for All Seasons
Rating: T (PG-13) – for implied sexy times and potty mouths. Not premium channel swearing, only network TV.
Disclaimer: Though I write stories based on the novels and characters of Jane Austen, this work belongs to ME and no one else. Unless given express permission, no one besides myself has the right to distribute or profit from my intellectual property. All rights reserved.
Setting: Modern AU
PSA: I hope that you and yours are safe and healthy during the COVID-19 crisis. Take precautions for yourself and others and please don't hoard any goods that your family doesn't need; we're all in this together, even while we remain physically apart.

Summary: In the fall they get off to a rocky start. In the winter they learn to understand each other better. By the time the weather grows hot, so do their feelings...Collection of connected, holiday themed OneShots featuring the evolution of Darcy and Lizzy's relationship. Modern AU.


"Mr Darcy walked off; and Elizabeth remained with no very cordial feelings towards him. She told the story however with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous."

Pride and Prejudice, Vol I, Ch 3


Labor Day
Not Working for Me

MONDAY
SEPTEMBER 7, 2020

It's a truth universally acknowledged that rich guys, while occasionally in need of wives, are usually giant douchenozzles.

Hi, I'm Lizzy Bennet and you're in my head. Or something. Are you a hallucination? Brain tumor? No? Well, good. I'd like to think I'm not crazy and/or dying. We'll call you a convenient figment of my imagination. Whatever you are, I'm going to tell you all about why William Darcy the Third is king of all the wealthy douchenozzles.

It all began on Labor Day...no, wait, rewind. It all began back in January when my favorite (and only) older sister Jenn met Chad Bingley at the grand opening of a hoity-toity supermarket chain, months before anyone (in the US, at least) had ever heard of COVID-19 and the world was sent into lock down. Back then, it was perfectly acceptable for people to go about their usual business without face masks – shopping, eating out and the like – and even gather in groups larger than their immediate family circles, just in case you've forgotten how it used to be (I know I practically have).

In any event, I wasn't particularly interested in exploring the newly opened Pemberley Market over in Lambton, but Jenn tagged along with Mom to see the shiny new store and that's where she met the company VP, Charles "Chad" Bingley, and they hit it off. Leave it to Jenn to pick up not only some random dude at a grocery store, but also a wealthy, successful executive. Mom couldn't possibly have been more pleased when Chad had asked for Jenn's number and, knowing her, she immediately started planning their future wedding right then and there. In Mom's defense, Chad really did seem smitten with Jenn and they proved her matchmaking senses right by going on to date exclusively for the next nine months.

I gotta say, as far as Jenn's boyfriends go, I really like Chad, despite his stupid preppy name. Jenn has a tendency to think the best of everyone, even when they don't deserve it, and this life mission to focus on only the positives, while sweet, has been poorly reflected in her past dating life. First, there was Jon Willoughby who dumped her for someone "better" – read here: Flush with Daddy's Money – without even having the decency to spell it out to her face. He just took this other chick to prom and let Jenn figure it out for herself. I may or may not have kicked him in the testicles for that…

In college, Jenn did marginally better, but not much. That boyfriend (who's damned lucky I never met him in person) snuck around behind Jenn's back with every floozy in the zip code. Jenn only found out when one of them came looking for him at her dorm and threatened bodily harm if she didn't stay away from him. After that, Jenn became a bit more gun shy about dating and, thankfully, more selective.

But back to Chad. Unless he does something insanely stupid like run out on her without looking back, I'm cool with Jenn keeping him around. Jenn always thinks that her boyfriends are nice, but Chad is the first one who actually is. It's so obvious that he thinks my sister is an angel sent from heaven and that he is unworthy to so much as bask in her presence. It sounds a little creepy and cultish, but it's actually pretty cute; his eyes get all big and he falls all over himself to be gentlemanly. You know, holding open doors, pulling out chairs...I think it would drive me insane, personally, but it works for Jenn and, as I said, it's cute. The biggest thing is that he treats her the way my amazing big sis deserves to be treated. So long as Chad keeps it up, I won't have to feng shui any of his organs for him.

How does this all wind back to my topic sentence? Quite simple, really; if there were no Chad, I likely never would have met his snotty friend Darcy. Jenn, as all good girlfriends are wont to do, invited Chad over to our vastly diminished Labor Day BBQ and Chad determined it an excellent opportunity to introduce his sister and best friend/boss to us. Bully for the Bennets.

Of course, William Darcy the Third – simply "Will" to his friends and family, neither of which category I qualify for so I'll just keep calling him "Darcy" to save myself the effort of using his full title – and Carrie Bingley are better by reputation than in person. Chad had talked them up so much prior to introducing us that I had expected two much friendlier people, only to have my hopes dashed by the reality of them.

Darcy, according to Carrie, who would not shut the eff up about him, is apparently a trust fund baby who used his parents' hard earned money to set himself up in a business of his own. Admirable enough, I guess, but I refuse to spend quite as much as he's asking for on groceries. Thanks for your contribution to society, Darcy, but I'll stick to Food Lion. Unless I need fancy cheese (curse you, Food Lion, for being a little too budget friendly).

Unlike Carrie, who sets off my pod people alarms, I could actually stand and stare at Darcy all day. So long as he doesn't talk. God, but he's good looking. He's tall, for starters, which has always appealed to me. Maybe because I top out at 5'5" and instinctively want in my partner that which I cannot have in myself. Whatever, I would have climbed him like a tree if he hadn't...ahem, we'll get to that bit in a minute. Aside from being tall – seriously, y'all, he's at least 6'3" – he's got a full head of wavy dark hair with no widow's peak or bald spot that I noticed (admittedly, he would have had to bend down for me to discover the latter, but it sure looked like it was all there from down below) and he's clearly very well manscaped. Smoothly shaven (sorry, I detest hipster beards), no thick rug of chest hair peeking out the top of his shirt, smells nice. Well put together. Point is, Darcy, despite being a douchenozzle, is as tall, dark and handsome as they come. It's only his attitude that sucks.

When he arrived at our little backyard soiree, Chad's sister clinging possessively to his arm and sneering at everything, he stood there on the lawn looking like a particularly uncomfortable lawn ornament. Just staring at everything, not speaking to anyone and resisting all attempts to be friendly to everyone who approached – besides Chad. As I stood there – admittedly gawping at him with a little drool on my chin – I felt the spell of his sexiness slowly drifting away as his haughty (yes, haughty) demeanor erased practically all of his allure. Sorry, but a good sense of humor and basic manners are more attractive to me than broad shoulders (did I mention the broad shoulders? Cuz, yeah, he's obviously on a rowing team, or something) and a jaunty Superman curl. Hard pass.

As conflicted as my initial impression of Darcy was, Carrie is comparatively simple to explain – she's a stone-cold bitch and a half. She's pretty in a waifish, blonde, Stepford Wives kind of way, I guess, but her perfectly put together appearance and painfully fake expressions remind me strongly of an android approximation of humanity – the mechanical margarine to our fleshy butter. A little too shiny in an uncanny valley sort of way. And her infatuation with Darcy smacks of bad sci-fi trope so much that I want to shout at him "Danger, Will Darcy, danger!" At least, I would if he had shown even a smidgen of human politeness himself. That bitch is totally going to make him her human slave when Skynet rises against us and I'm gonna laugh at him when it happens. Then get to work on inventing a time machine and saving the world.

All extended metaphors and movie references aside, I wanted to smack Carrie's fillings out every time she unleashed a snarky comment. Maybe being manufactured elevated her expectations of the world, but nothing met her standards, everything was to be disdained. Our simple fare of burgers, steaks and hot dogs weren't approved for whatever fad diet she was on and she complained about the smoke from the grill. The mosquitoes apparently loved her perfume, so we were "infested." And the farm itself achieved no better compliment than "quaint."

Oh, right, the farm. Back in the mid-'90s, my parents bought themselves some acreage in Meryton, South Carolina and built themselves a farm that they dubbed "Longbourn Acres." It had been something of a pet project of my dad's, whose former hippie ideals prompted him to live with self sufficiency on a patch of land to call his own, and eventually morphed by necessity into one of those places which provide family fun to the locals. You know the type of place I mean, right? The ones with U-Pick strawberries in the spring, pumpkins in the fall and Christmas tree lots around the holidays? Right, like that.

It turned out that setting up in Meryton had been a good idea because of its close proximity to Charlotte, North Carolina – largest city in the state, even bigger than the capital – and all the disposable income therein. Charlotte, you see, is a big banking center (second to New York City, apparently) and so lots of rich people live there. On top of the bankers, they can boast a couple of big hospital systems, which means doctors, and the usual rabble of lawyers, entrepreneurs, and so on who cling to these bigger businesses.

I'm winding back to the point, promise. While Chad falls distinctly into the category of "New Money," having made his own fortune via his career with Pemberley Markets, Darcy is decidedly "Old Money" and acts like it. That is, he's a snooty, rude, condescending, insulting sonovabitch who clearly feels he's better than everyone else. I'm frankly amazed that he deigned to follow Chad to someplace as so pedestrian as Meryton but, lucky me, he decided to slum it for Labor Day. Yippee.

And it wasn't like my day was going particularly well before I was introduced to his (unfairly sexy) highness, what with Mom's constant complaining about how our annual Labor Day "ho down" – which, to be fair, was a great source of revenue from the farm and a way to draw in new business – had to be cancelled because of corona virus restrictions, transforming what was essentially a small festival into a family only event. Normally, we have games, hayrides, activities for the kids, open up the petting zoo, set up a souvenir stand full of crafts and delicacies created on site and the entire thing is catered by the Lucases, who run Lucas Lodge (a southern-styled gift shop and restaurant; think Cracker Barrel). This year it would be pretty stupid to invite hundreds of strangers and their germs onto our front lawn, so…yeah, Mom wasn't (and isn't) pleased.

Dad – Tom to you, probably – took it all more in stride than Mom did, but I can tell that all his smiles and shared social media memes are just hiding the very real concern he has over the situation. If our corn maze and pumpkin patch don't do significantly better than the U-Pick strawberries, we might be in some real trouble. The bank (specifically, Bill Collins, the slimy little toad) is already sniffing around after a few late payments on the mortgage and...well, I refuse to even go there. Nope, not gonna. We'll work hard, kill it with pumpkins and Christmas trees and save the farm. We have to.

But anyway, my mom, Barb, has been chaffing against wearing her mask and social distancing these past couple of months, no doubt as a reaction to the increasingly dire financial situation Longbourn has been facing due to a largely wasted U-Pick strawberry season. She had been amongst the first wave of hoarders last March when the quarantine originally came down on us, but fear for the future now has Mom fighting to get life back to normal, the way it once was when no one had ever heard of COVID-19.

I understand her point of view – the farm wasn't exactly solvent when the crisis hit; I'd been working with Dad since graduating college to make improvements which could yield better profits – but with the surge of cases across the state there really wasn't much choice. Already South Carolinians had made the situation so much worse by opening up businesses too soon in May, causing the virus to spread. But Mom isn't the type of person to be easily reasoned with and so it was a daily struggle to keep her in line with the restrictions; preventing her from complaining about them was all but impossible and we've all been forced to live with them for weeks. At least now she'll wear her mask everywhere, even coordinates them with her different outfits, since being refused service at Lucas Lodge by her bestie, Mimi Lucas. God bless city ordinances.

Still, even if everything had been sparkly rainbows and unicorns leading up to The Insult, I would have been supremely pissed by what I'd overheard Darcy saying to Chad. To set the scene, I wasn't trying to eavesdrop on a private conversation, I was just going about the business of setting up for the barbecue. I'd wandered into the backyard lugging a case of water bottles and stumbled across the pair of them talking about me, not even bothering to lower their voices as if it was below their (well, Darcy's) notice if they were overheard. They were sitting in a pair of faded, splintering Adirondack chairs on the patio, their backs to the open sliding glass door which led into the kitchen and nursing a couple of imported beers (their contribution to the day) while they gossiped about me behind my back like a couple of housewives.

"C'mon, Will," so needled my sister's boyfriend, apparently unaware that I was right behind them, "Lizzy's great. Just talk to her and you'll see."

Darcy – who I had yet to officially meet, by the way, other than a quick and apathetic "hi" followed by some bumbling gibberish from me at his arrival – replied in a clipped tone, "The one in the overalls with the crazy hair?"

"Um...yes?"

For the record, my hair is only "crazy" when it's humid out. Which is, okay, pretty often during the summer. Shut up. It's thick, it's curly and all I can ever really do with it is pull it back and hope it stays contained within its rubber band. By this point in the day, after much back and forth between the kitchen and backyard with various food items and equipment for the "party," it was more down than up and, admittedly, a bit frizzy. Still, screw him; not everyone was lucky enough to remain perfectly coiffed in the middle of a southern summer. And not all of us can keep their hair so short and trimmed; girls have very different options than guys, let's face it.

As for the overalls, I live and work on a farm, jerkface. Stereotypes aside, they're a perfectly acceptable type of outerwear when doing things like tromping around in the mud, mucking out the barn and fixing tractors. All three of which I'd done that morning, hence the overalls. And maybe the hair.

"C'mon, Chad, she couldn't be more of a redneck with a pair of braids and a piece of hay between her teeth. You really thought I'd be into someone like her?"

After some very generous (and entirely untrue) defense of my hair from Chad, – he didn't touch on the overalls, I'd noticed – he'd further prodded, "You're always so picky! There's nothing wrong with Lizzy; she's funny, she's cute and I'm betting she'd give you a good time if you give her a chance."

"Easy for you to say; you got the hot sister."

Well.

"Jenn is the most beautiful woman I've ever laid eyes on, it's true," and Chad said this in the sort of sappy way that would have made me a bit nauseous had he not been speaking of my sister, who deserves all the glowing praise, "but there's not a thing wrong with Lizzy. And she's not a redneck."

A derisive snort was Darcy's response to that. I admittedly could only see the back of his head, but I imagined it accompanied by a sneering lip curl. "She's okay – as in, it doesn't hurt my eyes to look at her – but nothing especially tempting there. Stop wasting your time; it's not gonna happen, Chad."

It seemed that we'd at least agree on something; William Darcy the Third was the absolute last man in this COVID-19 infected world that I wanted to go out with. I would be forever happy to social distance from him.

"I'm about done with my beer," Chad held his beer bottle aloft to show that he had, maybe, a swig left. "Want another drink while I'm up?"

Unwilling to let such an opportune segue pass me by – and, really, my load was growing pretty heavy anyway – I let the case of water bottles slip from my fingers to the concrete patio and scared the bejezus out of Chad and his douchey friend. You should have seen them jump; it was as if I'd set off fireworks under their chairs the way they yelped and scurried away into the grass. Hilarious. Better yet, Darcy spilled the rest of his beer all down his front, ruining what must have been an expensive name brand look. When they turned around to see me standing there, fists on my hips and arms all akimbo, they looked satisfyingly shocked. And maybe a little guilty.

"Lizzy! You scared us." By this point, Chad was laughing (kinda nervously) at the little stunt I'd pulled, but Darcy looked pissed. Muaha!

"Sorry," I lied sarcastically, "it slipped. By the way, it's about time to crank up the grill, so maybe wrap up your conversation and go wash up. I was just about to go change myself."

And cue the awkward shuffling and downcast eyes. Even Darcy looked a little remorseful as he shoved his hands deep into his pockets and refused to look at me, a slight tinge of pink spread across the crests of his cheekbones. And what well defined cheekbones they were, too; shame he was such a prick because he was downright beautiful otherwise. So tall with strikingly gray eyes and broad shoulders…

Ahem, down Lizzy. Anyway, I grinned at them both with as much evil inflection as I could muster and twirled around to go back into the house where I was, in fact, intending to grab a shower. As I trudged up the stairs, I savored the humiliated expression on Darcy's handsome face; so satisfying.

I won't bore (or titillate) you about the details of my shower, but afterward, as I was staring at myself in the fogged up mirror and fuming about rude jackasses, I found myself struck by a sudden, rather petty inspiration. I needed to do something with my wet hair, after all, and why not play it up a bit? Just to show that I didn't care one single flying fudge nugget about what pretentious jerks like William Darcy the Third thought of me. With yet another evil grin which reflected my mischievous intent, I split my hair into two bunches and began weaving.

Oh, you should have seen the look on his face when I wandered out into the backyard again in my bare feet, the shortest shorts I owned and a strategically knotted flannel shirt. My overalls were dirty and unwearable, of course, hence the slutty hillbilly look. I'd even gone so far as to take Darcy's suggestion – or anti-suggestion, whatever – and braided my hair into pigtails, just for effect. The only thing missing was the piece of hay, but I think I made my point without it. Daisy Duke can eat her heart out.

Right after William Darcy the Third.


Author's Note: I know it's not Labor Day until Monday the 7th, but I'm going to the beach tomorrow and I never trust vacation wi-fi. Anyway, since I adore holidays, I designed this project to celebrate them. With that in mind, you can expect ONE CHAPTER PER MONTH from now until Fall 2021. I want each one to come out in the season it's intended for, so no amount of begging (if begging there be) will induce me to update faster. You'll have other things to read in the meantime, no worries.

Since I'm American, all the holidays utilized will be likewise. Including…

September/Labor Day
October/Halloween
November/Thanksgiving
December/Christmas
January/New Years
February/Valentine's Day
March/St Patrick's Day
April/Easter
May/Mother's Day
June/Father's Day
July/Fourth of July
August/Birthday (universal, but August is bereft of good holidays)
September/Mystery Surprise

Also, I'm setting this story in the present, meaning that the ongoing COVID-19 crisis will be folded into the plot (if you hadn't yet noticed). Please bear with me as the situation evolves over time. Since I can't see the future, this story is necessarily WIP (Work-in-Progress) so that I can keep it topical.

Not quite sure what I'm getting into writing this story with the narrator(s) speaking directly to the reader, but we'll call it an experiment. Could be interesting, could be entirely awful. We'll see how it goes. I'd intended to do it straight 1st person with no specific audience, but I've always kinda wondered who the hell the narrator is speaking to and so that evolved into what we have here. Blame Deadpool? Constructive criticism is welcome, but please be nice. (For the record, no, this is not a psychotic break or brain tumor situation.) Up next, we hear from William Darcy the Third.

Quick note about "Blind Date," the story I previewed at the end of "Dare to Refuse Such a Man." Unfortunately, it won't be out until sometime in October or November, rather than September as I'd originally hoped. In my early projections, I had all of August to get it written, but since then I've realized that I needed to get on preparing for my daughter's preschool lessons (we're homeschooling her because of COVID-19) and that ate up most of my free (that is, writing) time. I'm on track now, but I lost a month, so...sorry about that if you were anticipating it. It's still coming.

See y'all next month!

HAPPY LABOR DAY!

Next Update: Halloween 2020
Expected Completion Date: September 2021

MrsMarySmythe