#creloise fic

“D’you think he’ll be angry at me?” Cressida asked.

Eloise twisted until the pointy toes of their high heels knocked together. The large sequins on Cressida’s skirt would leave impressions in Eloise’s bare knees as she pressed against her.

“Who?”

Cressida sulked.

“My father.”

“Oh yes. Well,” Eloise reflected, patting her friend’s hand, “you did call him a pompous, uptight bastard. And you gave him the ol’ ‘fuck you’ gesture when we were on our way out.”

Cressida slumped a little in her seat, tilting her head.

“But d’you think he’ll be mad?”

“I think…” Eloise said slowly, because the thought was still forming and because she was drunk. “I think, if your father sat down with himself—”

“Mhmm.”

“—and really got to—got to know himself—”

“Mhmm.”

“—that maybe he would maybe see tha’ he is a pompous, uptight bastard,” Eloise concluded.

Cressida’s head swung loosely from side to side.

“That is never going to happen.”

“No, it doesn’ seem likely,” Eloise agreed. “Maybe if you hadn’ said it in front of all of ‘respectable society.’” Her air quotes were expansive.

“‘Respectable society’ can kiss my ‘Daisy by Marc Jacobs’-scented arse,” Cressida declared, yanking her shoes off and dropping them onto the floor of the bus.

Eloise laughed richly, leaning her head on Cressida’s shoulder. After a minute, she sighed. She could feel Cressida breathing. Turning her face just a little, Eloise inhaled. She could smell Cressida’s perfume, mixed with champagne sweetness and, gradually, the lingering scent of smoke that clung to Eloise, courtesy of the cigarette she’d smoked in the restaurant bathroom before they’d made their escape.

“You smell really nice,” Eloise observed.

“Thanks.”

The word sounded wet, so Eloise raised her head, and saw that Cressida was silently weeping. Eloise’s mouth fell open in panic. She was not good at this: emotion. She had never been a natural at comforting others, never the right-shaped shoulder to cry on. Her younger siblings had always gone to their mother for solace—failing that, to Daphne or Benedict (to be fair, so had Eloise). In this moment, with Cressida’s fat tears washing her bottom row of eyelashes of mascara, leaving them pale and clustered and vulnerable to the world, Eloise had never wanted to help so badly.

She touched Cressida’s cheek and gently shushed her, but it was obvious that Cressida was a deadly combination of too overwhelmed and too intoxicated to stop crying that easily.

“I’ve totally fucked my life,” Cressida sobbed.

And Eloise said, “No. No. No,” in various sympathetic tones, meaning each repetition with her whole heart.

“They’ll send me away!”

“They can’t. You’re not some child in boarding school, you’re at uni.”

But Cressida was shaking her head, adamant.

“They’ll send me away. They’ll make me live in Denmark. I got too good at Danish. I never should’ve declared a minor, but my father said a language would be good for—good for my business degree,” she wailed.

“You’re not going anywhere.” Eloise thought fast. “I’m going to hide you in my closet.” This thought had indeed come to her fast, but was perhaps not sound.

Cressida sniffed.

“In your closet?”

“Uh huh. I’ll protect you.”

Although her face was streaked with tears that glimmered pink and gold, Cressida smiled. She pulled Eloise’s hand onto her lap and held it.

“You sound about four years old,” she said.

Eloise smiled back and reached out to trace the shape of Cressida’s chin with her fingers.

“I dunno about that, but I think I’d melt if you called me ‘baby.’”

The bus rolled jarringly over a pothole, nearly flinging Eloise from her seat. She gripped the nearest pole and swiveled her head to look out the window. Well done, she thought to herself. Right bus after all.

“C’mon,” she said. “Le’s get off at the next one.”

She told Cressida not to forget her shoes, and they hobbled off with all the grace with which they’d made their ascent. The bus puffed hot air and pulled away. Cressida squinted at the buildings they faced from the sidewalk. Her heels dangled from her hand, her fingers hooked through the straps.

“Is this right?”

Eloise grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around to look across the street.

“Oh. I know where we are,” Cressida announced. “You are protecting me.”

But Eloise felt a bit embarrassed about that, and the other thing she’d said, now that they were out in the warm evening air and the bus wasn’t lurching them along. They darted across the road. It wasn’t until they were on the other side, not a ten-minute walk from both of their houses, that she looked Cressida in the eye—and this was because Cressida grabbed her hand to stop her.

“This would all be awful without you,” she said.

Just for Eloise, there were streetlights like angels’ eyes that made Cressida’s hair glow and her dress shimmer and her eyes shine above the muck of her cried-off mascara, and the way she watched her was divinely tender and fearful, both.

Eloise kissed Cressida on the cheek; she wasn’t so tall without her shoes on, with her hair down. Eloise breathed her in, then stepped back.

Cressida wore an alarmed, animal expression, like something not used to human touch. But then she dropped her shoes—Eloise heard the clatter—and sunk her fingers into Eloise’s tangled hair. Eloise was breathing fast, but Cressida just leaned forward and pressed their foreheads together. Eloise’s eyes crossed as she watched Cressida’s close.

“Don’ go,” Cressida murmured.

“I-I’m not.”

Eloise was ashamed of the stammer, thinking she was making too much of this. She was always making too much of things, but this was worse than usual because it would hurt more. She’d thought, someplace between the restaurant and here, that it was time. She had misunderstood; Cressida was only drunk and morose, lonely and needy. Maybe she did see how Eloise needed her (it was different) and she was playing on that. She used to be that sort of mean girl. Eloise didn’t want to think her friend capable of such a personal cruelty though. She just doesn’t understand, Eloise told herself, staring at Cressida’s blurry, too-close face. She won’t feel me wrapped around her finger until I start cutting off her circulation.

“Don’ go,” she was still mumbling, shaking her head, their foreheads rubbing.

Somehow, Eloise’s heart felt heavier in pieces than it had a moment ago, whole. But she wouldn’t go. She couldn’t. Cressida meant too much to her. They were each other’s life raft in all this society bullshit and parental expectation. Anyway, she wasn’t about to leave her friend standing drunk and barefoot on the sidewalk.

Gentle, Eloise reached up to pull Cressida’s hands from her hair. Without warning, Cressida thrust her face forward and kissed Eloise on the mouth. Eloise blinked.

Now it would hurt, and this hurt would scar—when she had to maternally tuck Cressida’s hair behind her ears and say, That’s enough now, Cress. But before she could speak, Cressida said, “Baby.”

“What?” Eloise’s voice sounded choked.

And Cressida’s fingertips trailed up and down the sides of Eloise’s neck, and she traced the pendant that hung against her throat, and she pressed their faces together, and she said, “Baby,” and she kissed Eloise again.

Eloise kissed her back, sloppy and yearning, cataclysmic and sweet. Cressida wasn’t someone she could kiss and laugh about it the next day. She couldn’t enjoy these benefits and keep being just-friends. She couldn’t hook up with Cressida, have a fling with Cressida, eat Cressida out on a pristine bench in a private park after dark because her dad was the worst and she was somehow even prettier with swirls of cried-off makeup making her cheeks look like candy-coloured Italian marble. Eloise couldn’t do this and recover, but she did it. How could she not? She did it and she led Cressida through the gate of the private park with their fingers linked, and Eloise laid her back on the pristine bench and crouched to give her head while Cressida named all the constellations she could see, getting all of them wrong. Eloise did it, gambling that it wouldn’t seem ugly when they were sober. She did it, remembering the pressure of Cressida’s arms around her waist while she paid for the bus. How, how, how could she not?

And then Cressida curled into Eloise’s side and said, “You’re the only one who matters.”

And Eloise combed her fingers through that long blonde hair and said, “That isn’t true.”

And it could’ve ended there, but Cressida went to Eloise’s home because her house wasn’t one, and slept in a guest room, and, half-awake, lifted the sheet for Eloise when she turned up later on, a way to beckon her in because she was dithering in the doorway. They slept deeply.