One last prompt, apologies, but Sophie tending to Benedict. Nothing much aside from foodplay (and since Erikista mentioned this a while back, licking or kissing his scar. Whatever you wish, just make sure the wound gets some affection)
Aside from that. Do whatever you want
Strawberries & Cream
{ The one where Mrs. Crabtree's strawberry jam is not used for its intended purproses. }
TAGS: Newlyweds, Scar Worship, My Cottage, Foodplay, Strawberries and Cream, Breakfast in Bed, Canon Compliant, Post-Season 4, Remembering How They Met (The Second Time), Emotional Intimacy, Kissing the Wound, Soft Smut, Body Worship, Banter, Playful, Explicit
The cream was sweating in its dish.
Mrs. Crabtree had brought the breakfast tray an hour ago, knocking twice and retreating with the studied discretion of a woman who had opinions about newlyweds and the discipline to keep them private. Two trays now sat across the rumpled bed: toast, butter, a pot of strong tea, a jar of Mrs. Crabtree's strawberry preserves, a bowl of strawberries from the garden still cool from the morning dew, and a small porcelain dish of chilled cream that had long since surrendered to the warmth of the bedroom.
Benedict had his tray balanced across his thighs, his back against the headboard, his shirt absent entirely. He was reading a letter from Eloise aloud with the particular relish of a man who enjoyed being insulted by his sister.
"She says," he announced, holding the paper at arm's length, "'I find it deeply suspect that you married a woman of vastly superior intellect and then immediately retreated to the countryside where no one can witness her gradually realising her error.'"
"Eloise is perceptive," Sophie said, dipping a strawberry into the cream.
"Eloise is insufferable. There is a meaningful distinction." He folded the letter, tucked it beneath his pillow, and reached across the gap between their trays to steal the strawberry from Sophie's hand. Bit into it. Cream caught at the corner of his mouth, and he made no effort to address it.
Two weeks married. The fact still landed strangely in Sophie's chest, like a step that turned out to be level ground.
"Give me another," he said.
"You have your own dish."
"Yours are better."
"They are from the same garden, Benedict."
"They taste better from your hand. It is documented." He smiled at her with cream still on his chin, and Sophie leaned across and wiped it with her thumb. He caught her wrist before she could pull back, brought her thumb to his mouth, and licked it clean.
Sophie's breath shifted half a register.
"You have jam as well," he observed, still holding her wrist. His eyes dropped to her index finger, where a smear of preserves had dried. "Allow me."
His mouth closed around her finger with the focused attention of a man who had found something worth being thorough about. Sophie's pulse kicked up beneath his grip on her wrist. He moved to the next finger, slower, his tongue working the jam from the pad with deliberate care.
"That is my hand, not breakfast," Sophie said. Her voice came out less steady than she had planned.
"The two are not mutually exclusive this morning." He kissed the inside of her wrist, directly over the pulse point, and Sophie pulled her hand back before her composure deteriorated further.
"Move the trays," she said.
Benedict's eyebrows rose. He moved the trays.
Sophie shifted across the bed towards him, and Benedict tipped his head back against the headboard with the easy willingness of a man who understood an instruction when delivered with sufficient clarity. She settled against his side, her hand coming to rest flat on his chest, and let her fingers travel down.
The scar sat just above his right hip. A ridge of raised tissue, paler than the surrounding skin, roughly six inches long, the edges slightly irregular where the glass had torn rather than cut cleanly. A year healed and still visible. Still legible, if you knew the language.
Benedict's stomach muscles contracted beneath her fingertip.
He had told her he was fine. That night after she was dismissed by Phillp Cavender, when she had caught the wince as he drove the carriage, the careful way he held his right side, the sharp intake of breath he had tried to swallow. I am fine, Miss Baek. A minor scrape. It is nothing. The rain had come down in sheets, and they had detoured to this cottage, and Sophie had believed him because she had wanted to believe him, because the alternative was frightening in ways she could not afford.
She had found out at two in the morning. The sounds through the wall: thrashing, moaning, the particular wet rasp of a man whose fever had climbed past the point where silence was possible. She had pushed open his door and found him delirious and burning, his naked torso soaked through with sweat, the wound on his flank raw and inflamed and streaked with the red lines of spreading infection. One night of neglect. One night of I am fine whilst poison crept through his blood.
She had stood beside his bed and cleaned it. Pressed compresses to his burning side whilst he thrashed and swore and, once, gripped her hand so hard she lost feeling in her fingers.
That was the night they had met. Not the masquerade. Not the Lady in Silver and the restless second son on a moonlit terrace. That had been a fantasy, a single evening suspended outside the mechanics of real life. The true beginning was here, in this cottage, with Benedict delirious and Sophie terrified and neither of them possessing anything to hide behind.
"Does it still hurt?" she asked.
"No. Not since you saved my life."
Sophie bent and pressed her mouth to the raised edge, just above his hip. The skin was warm, slightly rougher than the surrounding flesh. She felt him inhale, the expansion of his ribs beneath her cheek.
She kissed along the length of it. Slowly. Six inches of healed damage. Benedict's hand came to the back of her head, fingers threading into her loose hair.
"Sophie."
She reached for the dish of cream on the breakfast tray. Dipped her finger and drew a cool white line along the scar. Benedict sucked in a breath through his teeth, the chill a sharp contrast against warm skin.
"That is—"
She bent and licked the cream from the ridge of healed tissue with a single flat stroke, and whatever Benedict had been about to say dissolved into a low, unguarded sound.
"Hold still." She applied more cream, filling the shallow hollow beside his hip bone, and followed it with her tongue. Slow, deliberate strokes. The cream was sweet against the salt of his skin. Benedict's hips shifted beneath her.
"You are going to ruin me with dairy," he said, his voice rough. "That is a profoundly undignified way to go."
"You should have thought of that before you told me you were fine whilst bleeding internally."
"I was not bleeding internally. I was bleeding externally. All over my favourite shirt."
"You were dying."
"I was not dying. I was fevered. There is a spectrum."
Sophie took a strawberry from the bowl, dragged it through the jam, and placed it against his scar. Bit into it. The juice ran in thin red rivulets down his skin, mixing with the residue of cream, and she chased each one with her mouth. Tongue tracing through sweetness and salt and the particular warmth of Benedict's body. He groaned, and the sound was stripped of all clever deflection.
"You are—" His hand tightened in her hair. "Christ, Sophie. You are using breakfast as a weapon."
"I am tending to your wound."
"My wound is healed."
"Then consider this ongoing care." She pressed another strawberry to the scar, bit into it, licked the juice clean. Benedict's cock was hard against her thigh now, pressing through the thin fabric of his drawers, and his breathing had gone shallow and uneven.
"Come up here." His hands found her arms and pulled her upward, and then his mouth was on hers, tasting cream and strawberries and himself, and Sophie settled onto his lap with her thighs bracketing his hips against the headboard. His hands went to her chemise. Over her head. His mouth found her breast, and Sophie's fingers curled against the wood behind him.
She rocked against him through the fabric still separating them, and Benedict made a sound against her skin that she filed away for permanent reference.
"That night," she said, breathless. "When I cleaned your wound. You grabbed my hand."
"I was delirious."
"You said 'stay.'"
"Did I?" His thumb found her nipple. Circled.
"You said 'stay' and you would not release my hand and I stayed until morning." She rocked harder, and the friction was good but not sufficient, and Benedict's teeth grazed her collarbone.
"I remember your hands," he said against her throat. "I remembered the way your hands felt on my skin when you cleaned the wound. Cool and steady and very competent. And I thought: I want those hands on me when I am not dying."
"I thought you said you were not dying."
He laughed, and the vibration of it ran through her body, and she reached between them and freed him from his drawers. Benedict hissed when her fingers wrapped around him, his hips pressing upward into her grip.
"Sophie. If you—"
"Hush." She stroked him slowly, learning the rhythm he wanted, watching his face lose its composure by careful degrees. His head dropped back against the headboard. His jaw went slack. She moved her thumb across the head of his cock and his whole body jerked.
"Inside," he managed. "Please. I need—"
She guided him. Sank down slowly, her hands on his shoulders, the angle steep and deep with the headboard bracing his back. Both of them went still when the geometry resolved.
"Move," he said. "God, please move."
She moved. Benedict's hands gripped her hips, his mouth at her throat. Sophie braced against his shoulders and rode him with the urgency of a woman who had spent a year learning this man's body in increments: first as a wound to tend, then as a landscape to memorise, now as a territory she possessed entirely and intended to inhabit.
His hand slid between them. Found her. Worked her with the attention he gave everything worth understanding, and Sophie's rhythm stuttered, then broke.
"I love you," he said against her neck. The words came out flat and unperformed. Three syllables stripped of all the usual architecture. "In this cottage with a fever and your hands on me. I loved you then. Before I had the sense to call it anything."
Sophie's throat constricted. She pressed her forehead to his and moved faster, and Benedict met her from below, and the headboard knocked once against the wall.
She came with his name between her teeth. Benedict followed, his hands pulling her down hard, his face buried against her shoulder, the sound vibrating through her collarbone.
They sat in the aftermath, breathing unevenly. Sophie's cheek rested against his damp temple. The cream dish had overturned at some point, a slow white pool spreading across the breakfast tray. Strawberries had scattered across the sheets. Morning light still fell warm and gold across the floorboards.
Sophie pressed her mouth to the scar one final time. A light, closed-lip kiss against healed skin.
Benedict's hand covered hers where it rested over the mark.
"Mrs. Crabtree," Sophie said, surveying the devastation, "is going to have questions about the strawberries and cream consumption."
"We shall tell her it was medicinal." Benedict lifted her hand and kissed the strawberry stain on her palm. "We shall tell her my wife has devised a revolutionary diet and we require double the usual supply."
"You are ridiculous."
"You married me."
"I did." Sophie settled against his chest, his heartbeat slowing beneath her ear, the ridge of his scar warm against her hip. "I did marry you."
Benedict's arms tightened around her. The cream continued its slow migration across the tray. And Sophie, sticky with jam and cream and the particular contentment of a woman whose hands had learned a man first through his wounds, pressed closer and let the morning stretch on.
“They picked their way in silence up a steep and gloomy path of darkness. There remained but little more to climb till they would touch earth's surface, when in fear he might again lose her, and anxious for another look at her, he turned his eyes so he could gaze upon her.” [Bk X:1-85 Orpheus and Eurydice, Metamorphoses]
BENOPHIE + Orpheus & Eurydice pt. 2
Happy Benophie Day! Today, June 5th, holds a special place in the hearts of Benophie fans - it's the anniversary of the day Sophie and Benedict first met at that fateful masquerade ball in 1815. So, while this is technically also my first one-shot in the Benophie Week series (June 12th-19th), it feels right to share it with you now, on this day that means so much to their story.
This is a series of eight interconnected one-shots celebrating the timeless love of Benedict Bridgerton and Sophie Baek. Each story stands alone, a glimpse into a different era, a different life, but they are all tied together by the red string of fate that binds these two souls across time and space.
The Art of Loving
Wade a little deeper into a world where soulmates find each other again and again, no matter the century or the circumstances. This series of eight interconnected one-shots reimagines Benedict and Sophie's story across different historical settings, each a unique exploration of the societal expectations, class differences, and their own fears and desires. Through ballrooms and battlefields, studios and stairwells, Benedict and Sophie fight for their love, proving that some connections are simply meant to be.
“Another important feature of the motif is the couple’s abstract conjoined form and the faces that shade into each other. This is Munch’s way of underlining that the couple are as one, and the picture is a beautiful expression of belongingness and togetherness between man and woman.”
“It is quite something to spend your entire life feeling like you are somehow out of place, and then to meet someone who understands you before you even say a word. Someone whose singular qualities match your own. Whose kindness makes you feel warm. Who can read your mind from across a whole room.”
Working on Benophie Week fics + Chapter 7 of Fluency of the Unspoken probably until Benophie Week is done.
My inbox is still open for requests though. Just keep in mind that it may take me a while to get to them. Thank you to for reading!
A little teaser for Day One...
"I was not fleeing. I was standing."
"You were standing with considerable hostility. I admired it from across the room." He extended his hand. "Dance with me."
"No."
"That was magnificent. Do it again."
"No."
"Extraordinary." He grinned. The grin rearranged his entire face; it was asymmetric, boyish, and entirely too pleased with itself. "I am Benedict, incidentally. Benedict Bridgerton. Second son. No title, no particular responsibilities, and absolutely no sense of when I am unwelcome. May I have your name?"
"You may not."
"A mystery." He placed one hand over his heart. The gesture was theatrical and, against all her principles, charming. "Then I shall simply have to earn it. Shall we?" He nodded toward the dance floor where a waltz was forming.
"I cannot dance," Sophie said.
"Neither can half the people in this room. They simply move with conviction and let the orchestra do the work."
"I genuinely cannot—"
"Then I will lead," he said, "and you will tolerate me, and between the two of us we shall produce something that at least resembles a waltz from a sufficient distance."
Your docs are AMAZING and so so so hot! May I request one with penetration pretty please??
Ok, so I have to admit I wrote this one-shot before I figured it would apply to this request.
Fig Leaf
{ The one where they have to squeeze into the back of a cab, Sophie feels something grow underneath her, and Benedict thinks of European fiscal policy while trying not to get a boner. }
TAGS: Modern AU, Size Difference, Accidental Lap Sitting, Benedict Bridgerton's Thighs, Ted Lasso Characters (only in name), House Party, Female Gaze, Greek Statues, Friends to FWB, Fucking Poolside, Confirming BDE Rumours
The taxi had four seats and five passengers, and Hazel solved it by shoving Sophie sideways into Benedict Bridgerton's lap like a woman parallel-parking a human being.
"Perfect. Everyone fits." Hazel slammed the door. The cab lurched into traffic and Sophie's arse slid down the slope of Benedict's thighs and settled into the cradle of his hips with a specificity that sent every nerve in her body into open revolt.
His thighs were a problem. Hard under her, quadriceps tensed to take her weight, broad enough that her hips sat between them like a boat in a dock. His arm came around her waist out of necessity, fingers resting on her hip, light, careful, radiating heat through the thin cotton of her skirt.
"Apologies," he said, quiet, close to her ear. "The spatial geometry of the backseat is—"
"It's fine."
"—not ideal."
She glanced at the GPS on the dash. "It's twelve minutes, Benedict. I'll survive."
She would not survive. The coroner's report would list cause of death as thighs, proximity, cumulative.
Roy was already complaining to Keeley about Jamie's set, something about whether the bongos constituted a noise violation or a war crime, and Alfie was laughing and the cab radio played Sabrina Carpenter at tinny volume and none of it registered because Sophie's entire perceptual field had narrowed to the six inches of contact between her body and Benedict's.
The cab jolted over a speed bump. Her hips rocked backward and pressed flush against his groin, and the topography beneath her mapped itself against her arse with a clarity that short-circuited her higher brain functions.
Oh.
Not hard. Not yet. But there. The length of him, tucked left along his thigh, thick enough through layers of fabric to register as a distinct, undeniable presence. She adjusted her weight, a micro-shift, tilting her hips to redistribute the pressure, and the motion was practical and also, functionally, a grind.
He grew. Under her. A thickening that tracked in real time against the curve of her, the ridge of him pressing harder into the seam of her underwear through fabric, and Benedict's breath caught against her nape, a sharp controlled inhale that raised every fine hair on her skin.
His fingers pressed into her hip. The tension running through his body was electric, every muscle locked, his jaw close enough that the clenching of it was audible.
"I'm sorry." Barely a murmur. His lips grazed her hair as the words formed. "I can't—just don't—if you could stay still. Please."
She stayed still. She sat on Benedict Bridgerton's erection for twelve minutes and stared at the back of the headrest and thought about nothing else.
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
The pool glowed turquoise in the dark garden. Jamie's music thumped behind the French doors, muffled and distant, and the sun lounger at the far end sat in deep shadow where the jasmine grew thick over the fence. The air smelled of chlorine and warm stone and night-blooming something she couldn't name.
Benedict was on the lounger. Alone. Jacket off, sleeves rolled, one arm behind his head, staring at the water with the fixed concentration of a man working very hard at not thinking about something specific.
Sophie crossed the warm paving stones in bare feet. His head turned when she was three feet away, and the expression on his face in the pool's reflected light was unguarded and briefly, transparently hungry before he rearranged it.
"You're hiding," she said.
"Recuperating. Jamie's set has entered its experimental phase. The sanity required extensive preservation."
"You've been out here since we arrived."
"Extensive preservation," he repeated.
She sat on the edge of the lounger. His legs shifted, one knee bending, opening a space beside his hip that was both an invitation and a careful maintenance of distance. Two buttons of his shirt were open, the collar pulling wide, the hollow at the base of his throat shadowed in blue pool-light.
"About the cab," she said.
"We don't need to—"
"I think we do."
He exhaled through his nose, slow, controlled. "Sophie, I'm genuinely sorry. It was a physiological response to proximity and pressure and the specific logistics of—you were sitting on my—I didn't intend—"
"Benedict."
"Yes."
"Stop apologising."
"I'm trying. The apology appears to be falling out of my mouth of its own accord. If I stop, there is a high likelihood that I may confess something deeply embarrassing."
She leaned in. Slowly. His body went rigid, every tendon visible in his forearms, his hand gripping the aluminium frame.
"What if I don't want you to apologise," she said. Close enough that her breath reached his mouth. "What if the cab wasn't a problem I wanted solved."
The sound he made was quiet and wrecked. His hand found her jaw, thumb along her cheekbone, and he held her there, an inch away, stripped of every languid charming defence she'd ever seen him deploy.
"I have been sitting on this lounger thinking about literally nothing except the way you moved on my lap," he said. "I've considered European fiscal policy. The migratory patterns of Arctic terns. I'm at the terns, Sophie."
She kissed him. His mouth opened and the sound against her tongue was low and starving, and his hand tightened in her hair and pulled her onto the lounger, onto him, straddling his hips. The aluminium frame creaked. She ground down against the hardness pressing through his trousers and his head dropped back with a groan that carried across the dark garden.
"Here," she said. "No one can see the lounger from the doors."
His breath fractured. "Sophie—"
"Here."
She slid off him, stood, and held out her hand. He took it and stood, and the pool-light hit him full-on, and Sophie's brain stalled.
She'd clocked him before, obviously. In the cab, at dinners, through the accumulated evidence of knowing him for two years. But Benedict Bridgerton standing in nothing but an open-collared shirt and trousers at the edge of a lit pool, caught in blue-white light with his hair loose and his sleeves rolled and his jaw still carrying the last hour's tension, looked like something that belonged behind velvet rope in a museum. The proportion of him: broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, the length of the legs, the way the pool-light carved his forearms into something a sculptor would have wept over. Like those Greek marbles that lined the British Museum's long gallery, the ones with the impossible geometry of real bodies somehow rendered in stone, Discobolus, the Belvedere Torso, all that disciplined idealism.
Except the marbles had been conveniently edited by time and the Vatican and a general curatorial squeamishness about what men actually looked like. Benedict had not been edited. The shape of him through his trousers, even now, even just standing there, was sufficiently apparent that Sophie understood with new and comprehensive clarity why certain classical sculptures existed only in fragments, and why the Vatican Museums kept a locked cabinet of fig leaves.
"You're staring," he said.
"I'm appraising."
"There's a distinction?"
"Ask a museum." She stepped back into him, her hands finding his belt, and his breath went sharp and shallow and he let her work.
She got his trousers open. Pushed her hand inside his boxers and wrapped her fingers around him and the reality of it stopped her breath.
Thick. Her fingers couldn't close. The shaft was heavy in her grip, hot, the skin velvet-smooth sliding over rigid hardness beneath, the foreskin retracting from the broad head as she stroked upward. Long enough that her hand travelled a distance that made her thighs clench. She pulled him free of the fabric and the weight of his cock in her palm, the heft, the way it stood from his body with a slight upward curve, flushed dark, a bead of pre-cum welling from the slit—she exhaled and licked her lips and his gaze dropped to her mouth and his hips twitched forward into her fist.
"You're—" She swallowed. Stroked again, root to tip, watching the foreskin glide over the head. "The rumours were underselling you."
"There are rumours?"
"Keeley mentioned something at Roy's birthday. Chain of custody irrelevant."
"The chain of custody is—oh, fuck—"
She dropped to her knees on the warm paving stone and licked a stripe up the underside and his sentence dissolved into a groan bitten off against his own forearm. She tongued the frenulum, worked along the thick vein, felt his thigh muscles jump under her hands where she braced. Took the head into her mouth and hollowed, and his hand found the back of her skull, not guiding, just holding, trembling.
"Your mouth." Rough. Cracked open. "Sophie. God. Your mouth is—"
She took more. Her jaw ached with the stretch, the girth of him pressing against her cheeks, and she hollowed and sucked and worked the base with her hand where her mouth couldn't reach, and the sound he produced was continuous, a low fractured litany of her name and profanity.
She worked him until his breathing was completely dismantled, then pulled off, stood, kissed him with the taste of him still on her tongue. His groan into her mouth was ruined. His hands shoved her skirt up, hooked her knickers down her thighs, and the night air hit wet skin and she gasped.
He pulled her back onto the lounger, straddling his hips again, the aluminium frame groaning, and she reached between them and positioned him, the blunt head pressing against her, and they both went very still in the turquoise dark.
"Slow," she breathed. "We have to go slow."
"I know." His arms shook. "Tell me."
He pressed in. The stretch was acute, a white-hot expansion, her body yielding around the width of him in increments, and she hissed and gripped his shoulders. He stopped. Waited. Buried an inch, his restraint visible in every locked muscle.
"More," she whispered.
Another inch. Another. The deep ache sharpened into pleasure as she opened around him, and he fed himself into her with agonising patience until his hips met hers and they were flush and she was full and the sound she made against his neck was raw and formless.
"Jesus Christ." His voice was wrecked. "How are you—"
"Move. Please."
He thrust, slow. Long withdrawal, deep return. The drag of him inside her pulled the air from her lungs. The rhythm built, her nails scoring his shoulders, her knees pressed to his hips on the narrow lounger, the aluminium creaking with each stroke. He flipped her back, pressed her down against the cushion, her legs bent at the knees, and drove deeper, and the sound she made was uncontrolled and he pressed his palm to her mouth, both of them listening for the French doors.
Nothing. Just bass. Just bongos.
Laid on her back, her legs now over his shoulders, folded, and the new angle drove him even deeper and the cry she made was uncontrolled and loud and the pressure of his palm against her lips while he fucked into her was indecent and grounding and she moaned against his fingers.
"Quiet." Rough. Half-laughing. "There are at least sixty people inside."
She bit his palm. His hips snapped forward, reflexive, and they both gasped. He braced on both arms and drove into her with a rhythm that built in force, the pool-light throwing moving water across the fence above them, and his thumb found her clit and circled.
The pressure coiled, tightened. She grabbed his wrist.
"Come for me." Low, against her knee, his mouth pressing the word into her skin. "I've been thinking about this since the cab—"
She broke. Her whole body clenched around him, her back arching off the lounger, her fist in the back of his shirt. He followed immediately, burying deep, hips locked, the hot pulse of him inside her as his breath tore loose against her throat.
The lounger stopped creaking. The pool filter hummed. Sophie's legs slid from his shoulders, boneless, and he collapsed half beside her, half on top of her, his face in the cushion near her ear, his cock softening inside her, their bodies slick and tangled. Both of them breathing in the dark.
After a long moment: "The staring earlier."
"Appraising."
"You were going to say something."
"I was thinking about the Belvedere Torso." She felt his chest move under her cheek. "The Vatican keeps a cabinet of fig leaves, you know. For modesty. For the statues."
A long pause.
"Ah. Classical censorship."
"Right." She yawned, her hand resting flat on his stomach. "Just realised they'd need a fiddle leaf fig for you. Like, a healthy one. Maybe two."
He laughed, low and genuine, and pulled her closer against his side. "Duly noted."
The pool went on glowing its turquoise while the party carried on fifteen metres away, and the jasmine thickened in the dark, and Sophie decided Keeley and Hazel were getting a full debrief whether they wanted one or not.
{ The one where Sophie Baek discovers the Bridgerton family's photo album collection. And sweet, sweet Benedict decides to do something about it. }
TAGS: Bridgerton Family, Undocumented Childhood, Sophie Needs Love, Benedict Bridgerton Can't Help But Notice Her, Photography as Love Language, Of Course it's a Leica, Regent's Park in Spring, Angst that Turns to Fluff, Soft Benophie
The album smelled like old paper and someone else's entire life.
Sophie had pulled it from the shelf without thinking, the way you reach for a bannister in the dark, just something to hold. Benedict had gone to the kitchen twenty minutes ago to make tea and been ambushed by a phone call from Colin about a restaurant booking that had, from the muffled cadence bleeding through the walls, escalated into a full-scale diplomatic incident involving a sommelier.
The sitting room was the problem. Every surface was the problem.
The Bridgertons had colonised every horizontal plane. Silver frames on the credenza, gilt frames climbing the wall above the writing desk, a whole shelf of matching leather albums with years stamped in gold leaf: 1998, 1999, 2000, marching forward with the quiet confidence of people who assumed there would always be another year worth binding.
She'd opened 2003. No reason. The pages had that thick, cotton-rag weight that meant someone had paid for archival printing, because of course they had, because the Bridgertons preserved things, that was the whole operation, the preservation of legacy and lineage and proof that you had been here, that you had been someone's, that someone had pointed a camera at you and thought: yes. Keep this.
Benedict at thirteen, all elbows and an oversized Radiohead shirt, grinning at the camera with paint on his jaw. Anthony beside him, already wearing the expression of a boy who'd been told he was in charge and believed it. A cluster of smaller children on an absurdly manicured lawn: Daphne in a sundress, Colin mid-run, Eloise scowling. Francesca slightly apart, reading. Gregory as a toddler, fist of grass. Hyacinth in someone's arms, chocolate on her forehead.
And at the centre, always at the centre, Violet. Younger. Laughing, caught mid-turn, hair loose, a hand reaching for something outside the frame. The kind of photograph that only exists because someone loved the person in it enough to catch the unguarded moment.
Sophie turned pages. Christmas, real candles on the branches because the Bridgertons were the kind of family who risked fire for aesthetic commitment, matching pyjamas, Benedict in the back row making a face. A handwritten caption in blue ink: The Absolute State of Us, 25th Dec. Violet's handwriting, probably.
She closed the album. Put it back, spine aligned, and sat with her hands flat on her thighs and the particular stillness she defaulted to when something large was happening behind her ribs.
She owned four photographs from before the age of eighteen.
One was a school portrait from Year Three, generic blue backdrop, her hair in plaits someone at the group home had done too tight. She'd had to be told to smile, twice, and the photographer had said think of something nice and she'd thought about chips for dinner and that had been enough.
One was a blurred Polaroid of her mother holding her: a woman in a doorway, dark hair, a face Sophie had studied so many times the image had gone soft at the edges from handling. No date. No inscription. Just the faint chemical smell of a photograph that had spent fifteen years in a shoebox before a social worker handed it over in a manila envelope.
The other two were photocopied ID headshots from care placements, which technically counted and technically didn't.
Four. Against this shelf of twenty-three albums and forty-odd frames. Against a family that had documented every Christmas, every holiday, every gap-toothed school portrait and unremarkable Tuesday afternoon on the lawn, all of it bound and shelved and kept because that was what you did when a child was yours. You proved they had been there. You gave them evidence of having existed.
Her throat ached. She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth and breathed through it.
"I told him the corkage fee was a colonial imposition and he should be ashamed," Benedict reported, coming through the door with two mugs, teabag string trailing from one. "Colin, not the sommelier. The sommelier was blameless." He set her mug down, Earl Grey, milk, no sugar, correct, and dropped onto the sofa beside her. His eyes went to the shelf. Then to her face.
She arranged her expression into something neutral. She was good at this.
"Which one did you look at."
"2003."
"Ah. The Radiohead shirt year. Truly a low point. I think Mum burned it eventually. The shirt, not the year. Although she'd have burned the year if she could; Anthony put a golf ball through the conservatory and lied about it for six months."
Sophie didn't answer. Benedict was quiet for a beat. He picked up his mug and didn't drink.
"Sophie."
"Mm."
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong." Clean, level, and practised.
He set the mug down and turned toward her, one knee drawn up, and his face had lost the languid, amused quality it usually carried like a garment. Underneath was the other Benedict, the one who actually looked, who looked too much, who sometimes saw things she hadn't offered and held them with an infuriating gentleness she couldn't defend against.
"You've got the face. The one you use when someone's being difficult and you've decided to manage them."
"I don't have a management face."
"You have several. This one means something's hurt you and you've filed it." A pause. "Talk to me."
She picked up her tea. Too hot. She held it anyway, the ceramic scalding her palms, because the burn gave her something specific to be inside.
"There are twenty-three albums on that shelf." She kept her voice flat, reportorial, the way she delivered difficult information at work. "I have four photographs from before I was eighteen. Total. One of them's a photocopy." A breath. "It's fine. It's just. A lot of evidence. On your shelf. That's all."
He didn't say anything for a long time. Long enough that the tea cooled to a temperature her hands could tolerate. Long enough that the traffic outside thickened and thinned and thickened again. Then he reached over, took the mug from her, set it down, and laced his fingers through hers. His hand was warm and paint-stained at the cuticles and he held on with a pressure that said: I am not going to make this into a speech.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay."
She leaned into his shoulder because it was there, because he let her, because he had the uncommon talent of not turning proximity into a project.
Thursday. Regent's Park. Late April, clouds pulling back from a pale sun like a curtain being opened by someone who resented the daylight. The cherry trees along the Broad Walk were doing the thing they did every year, petals coming down in the breeze and catching on coat sleeves and landing in coffee cups.
Sophie was eating a pain au chocolat from the kiosk near the boating lake, the chocolate gone soft in the weak sun and getting on her fingers, and she was annoyed about it in the low-grade, pleasurable way of a person who had nowhere specific to be.
"You've got chocolate on your chin," Benedict said.
"I'm aware."
"Very Dickensian. Street urchin chic."
"If you compare me to a street urchin one more time, I will push you into the lake and I will not feel bad about it."
"You'd feel a little bad."
"I'd feel the amount of bad that is precisely regulated to make me seem compassionate without actually preventing me from doing it again."
He stopped on the path, right where the cherry trees made a tunnel of pale pink above the gravel, and pulled something from his bag. Black body, silver dials, a lens that caught the light with the quiet authority of good glass. The red dot on the front. Leica.
"What are you doing."
"Stand there."
"Benedict—"
The shutter clicked. A sound like a knuckle cracking, precise and mechanical and oddly intimate. "There. You're scowling. Perfect. Very you."
"I wasn't ready."
"The best ones are when you're not ready. The performance drops and the face arrives." He advanced the film. Manual. Shooting film, because Benedict Bridgerton would rather spend forty minutes in a darkroom than press a button on his phone, because difficulty was a love language for him. "Then walk. I'll follow."
She walked. He followed half a step behind, clicking at intervals she couldn't predict, which meant she stopped bracing for them after the fourth or fifth. He caught her laughing at a dog that stole a child's sandwich. He caught her wiping the chocolate off her chin with the back of her hand. He caught her looking up at the canopy of blossoms with her eyes half shut, which she only knew because she heard the shutter and turned, and his face behind the camera had gone quiet and focused the way it went when he was sketching, the attention total.
"Why are you doing this," she said. Not sharp. Genuinely asking.
He lowered the camera. The Leica hung against his chest and he looked at her with the full, undefended directness that always cost him something. She could see the cost.
"Because you should have proof," he said. Simply. No metaphor. No deflection. The plainest sentence she'd heard him speak in seven months.
Her chest seized. She looked at the gravel, at her own shoes, at the petal that had landed on the toe of her left trainer like a pale comma. Her eyes stung. She blinked it back with the ruthlessness of someone who had been blinking things back since she was small enough to fit in a social worker's waiting-room chair.
"Come here," she said, and her voice had dropped into the low register, the private one. She took the camera from him, turned, and held it at arm's length, facing them both. "Show me how to—"
"The focus ring. There. Twist until—"
"I know what a focus ring is, I'm not a child."
"You're holding it like a sandwich."
"One more comment and the Leica goes in the lake."
"That camera is a collectors' ed—"
"Lake, Benedict."
She twisted the ring until the viewfinder went sharp. Pressed the shutter. The click sounded like a small, definitive answer to a question she hadn't worked out how to ask. His arm tightened around her shoulder. A petal landed on the lens.
She handed the camera back, and he wound the film forward without checking the frame. He trusted it. He trusted her. A word she kept circling without landing on, because landing on it would mean the ground was solid and she still tested every surface before she put her weight down.
They walked. The blossoms kept falling. Benedict reached over and picked a petal from her hair, examined it with the grave attention of a man appraising a brushstroke, and put it in his shirt pocket.
"Evidence," he said.
Sophie stole the last bite of the pain au chocolat. The petal was already browning at the edges, already impermanent, already the kind of thing that only survives if someone decides it matters enough to keep.
Chapter 6: Love Will Tear Us Apart - Fluency of the Unspoken
"The garden survived two catastrophes and became something else. I'm not letting this become another unfinished thing."
The lie has a name now. It's Benedict Bridgerton. He stands in the wreckage of six weeks of deception and tries to explain himself in a language she'll accept. He doesn't have one. He deploys the family machine anyway.
Thought I'd be able to post Chapter 6 of Fluency of the Unspoken, but I'm heading out tonight. So have these chosen excerpts from the chapter. A little teaser, if you will.
So didn’t know if this was the right place to suggest. But three prompts. You have full control over them. I’m easy
1. Orgasm denial. I’d like it when Sophie is pregnant. Your choice on whom is denying whom.
2. A sillier one, but voyeur Newton. Ever since that one episode in season 3, it’s lived in my brain
3. Your take on a Benophie carriage scene. The filthier, the better
Thank you for sending these prompts over. I had lots of fun writing these over the last several days. You can find 1 & 2 over here.
Now, for my take on #3 😈
The Smell of Summer
{ Trapped in a rocking carriage during a violent summer storm, Benedict is soaked, stubborn, and completely at Sophie's mercy. }
TAGS: Carriage Sex, Enclosed Space, Summer Storm, Married Benophie, Arguing as Foreplay, She Told Him So, Banter, Oral Sex, Fingering, Handjob, Sophie on Top, Praise, Breast Play, Multiple Orgasms, Penetration, Passionate, Filthy, Slutty Spouses, Sassy Sophie, Smug Sophie, Charming Benedict, Down Bad Benedict, Benedict Likes It A Little Rough
Benedict was drenched to his collar before the door had fully closed behind him.
Sophie sat with her hands folded in her lap. She had been sitting in precisely this attitude for the ten minutes since the rain began, long enough to feel the first cold fingers of self-righteousness curl pleasantly around her satisfaction. She had told him. Three hours ago, in the courtyard at Guildford, she had looked at the yellow weight of the sky above the treeline and said, with the measured clarity of a woman who had spent her childhood reading weather before it happened: it will storm before we reach home. Benedict had looked at the same sky, declared it a perfectly fine afternoon, and climbed onto the box with the cheerfulness of a man confusing his aesthetic preferences for meteorological fact.
The heavens had opened forty minutes into their return, with the vindictive timing of a well-aimed riposte.
Rain hammered the carriage roof in a sustained, indifferent roar. Benedict's coat had gone black with water, his hair flattened to his forehead, his cravat a collapsed thing plastered to his throat. He shook water from his hands onto the floor, dragged the door shut, and looked at her.
Sophie looked back.
"The horses will be fine," he said, before she could say anything else.
"I was not going to ask about the horses."
"You had the face."
"I have no face."
"You have an extremely specific face when you are about to point out that you were correct about something." Benedict peeled one glove off, then the other, dropping them onto the seat beside him. A small river ran steadily from his collar down the open neck of his shirt. "And you were correct. I shall say it plainly so we can dispense with the ceremony: you told me so."
"Thank you." Sophie reached forward and began working the buttons of his saturated coat. "Now take this off before you give yourself a catarrh and I am forced to nurse you through June, which would be tedious for both of us."
"You would find it deeply tedious," Benedict agreed. He made no move to assist with the buttons. "You are not a patient nurse."
"I am an excellent nurse. I simply decline to be sympathetic to self-inflicted ailments." The top button came free, then the second. His coat was so waterlogged it had developed an entirely new structure. "You drove in an August storm without a greatcoat because you decided the sky looked fine. This is a consequence of artistic temperament overriding basic empirical observation."
"The sky looked fine at half past two."
"It looked yellow and heavy and smelled of rain."
"It smelled of summer."
"Benedict." She freed the final button and pushed the coat from his shoulders, pulling it from his arms with some effort. It hit the carriage floor with a wet, conclusive slap. His cravat followed. "Summer is not a smell."
"It absolutely is. You simply lack the—" His gaze dropped to her hands, which had moved to the hem of his shirt. He stopped talking.
"You are soaked through," Sophie said, without inflection.
"I am."
"Your shirt is transparent."
A pause. Rain on the roof, rain on the blind-covered windows, rain turning the world outside to grey illegibility. The carriage had contracted to a very small space, warm and close, smelling of wet wool and cedar and the intimacy of two people in confinement.
"Is it," Benedict said.
Sophie pulled the shirt over his head.
The wet linen hit the floor beside his coat, and Sophie sat back with the unhurried composure of a woman who had not just rendered her husband bare to the waist in a stationary carriage on a Surrey road. He was warm in the enclosed air despite the rain, his skin faintly flushed, the lean geometry of his chest and shoulders lit by the grey light filtering through the window blind.
"Your turn," he said.
"I am not wet."
"Sophie." His voice had shed layers of social registers. "Take off your pelisse."
"I do not see why—"
"Because I am going to take off everything else, and you will want it out of the way."
She took off her pelisse.
Benedict drew the second window blind, sealing them in entirely. In the abrupt dimness he reached for her, unhooking the top of her gown at the back with the practiced attention of a man who had stopped being in any hurry at all. Sophie turned on the narrow seat to give him access and felt each loosened button as a separate thing. His mouth found the back of her neck in the gap of opening fabric, then moved lower, pressing against each knob of her spine as it was revealed.
"You are getting me wet," she said.
"I know." His lips grazed the top of her shoulder blade. "I am doing it on purpose."
"Your hair is dripping on my—"
"Sophie." He turned her back to face him, his hands cupping her face with his palms still cool from the rain, his thumbs finding the line of her jaw. He looked at her in the grey-lit dimness with an attention so specific and unguarded that her prepared remark about wet hair dissolved entirely. "Hush."
He kissed her, and the argument ceased to be interesting.
She worked his belt whilst he got her stays loose, both of them navigating the architecture of undressing in a rocking carriage with the fluency of three months' marriage and the improvisation that desire demanded when space was finite. Sophie shifted onto his lap, her skirts spreading across his thighs, and Benedict's hands slid beneath the fabric to the bare skin above her stockings.
"Christ." Low, against her mouth. "You are warm."
"You are cold." Her palm pressed flat to his chest; his heart knocked steadily against it. "You are also remarkably confident for a man sitting in a carriage in a ditch."
"We are not in a ditch."
"You stopped on a verge."
"A perfectly adequate verge." His fingers moved higher, finding her without any remaining fabric between them, and Sophie's carefully maintained control slipped its moorings. "You are already—"
"Do not."
"I find I am very much going to." His thumb circled her clitoris with the patient, methodical attention he brought to anything he found genuinely worth understanding, and Sophie's hand, still on his chest, curled inward against his sternum. "You are so wet, Sophie. I have done nothing of particular note yet and you are already—"
"Benedict."
"Thoroughly, comprehensively—"
"If you finish that sentence I shall get out of this carriage."
"You will not." Two fingers pressed inside her, and Sophie bit down on his shoulder hard enough to leave a mark, and Benedict groaned. His free hand gripped her hip and held. "There. That is—yes. Take what you need. Use my hand."
She did. The carriage rocked slightly with the motion. Rain redoubled on the roof as though weather possessed an audience's instinct for timing. Sophie came with her face in the crook of his neck, his name compressed between her teeth to something too small and too private to be overheard.
Benedict stroked her through the last tremors, his breath ragged, his cock hard and insistent against her hip. When she went still he withdrew his hand and put his fingers in his mouth with the attention of a man making a considered study.
Sophie watched him. Something in her chest tightened with want.
"I want your mouth," she said.
He was already moving: shifting her sideways onto the seat, managing the geometry of the confined space with the creativity of a man accustomed to working within limitations. He pushed her skirts to her waist and put his mouth on her without ceremony, and Sophie's hand went into his rain-damp hair and gripped.
He was not methodical now. He was urgent and precise, his tongue working her in the rhythm she had taught him she craved, two fingers curved inside her at the angle that made her thighs shake. Her heel pressed into the seat cushion beside his shoulder. Every sound she made came back at her from the close carriage walls, intimate and inescapable, a feedback of her own undoing.
"Benedict. I am—"
He worked harder, and she was.
She was still trembling when he climbed back over her, his forearm braced against the seat, his face flushed and his mouth dark. Sophie reached between them, found him hard and already losing patience, and stroked. He exhaled through his teeth, his forehead dropping to her collarbone.
"Sophie." Ragged. "You are going to—I cannot—"
"You feel—I love touching you like this."
His jaw locked. He let her work him until his hips moved against her grip and the sounds he made against her skin were past managing.
"Come here." Stripped down to two syllables, his voice. "Please."
She guided him, and Benedict pressed inside slowly, both of them adjusting position until the geometry resolved: Sophie straddling his lap, her knees on the seat either side of his thighs, his hands gripping her hips to manage the angle.
The fullness was complete and immediate.
Neither of them moved for a moment. Benedict's chest expanded against hers with a long, deliberate breath. Outside, the storm hammered on in its own indifferent rhythm.
"I am entirely yours," Sophie said. It came out quieter than she had planned.
He pulled her down and thrust up, and the carriage seat complained briefly, and coherent conversation became an irrelevance.
Sophie moved on him with her hands on his shoulders, finding the pace that worked in the cramped space, the angle that sent pressure radiating outward from every point of contact. Benedict's hands on her hips were firm, controlling the depth without controlling the motion, giving her the leverage and taking what he needed from the result. His mouth found her breast, his teeth grazing through the thin chemise, and Sophie's rhythm stuttered.
"You feel—" He thrust deeper, and her breath punched out of her. His voice was rough, half-gone. "Every time. Every damnable time I think I am accustomed to it and then—"
"Don't stop." Her nails pressed into his shoulder. "Benedict, do not stop."
He reached between them, his thumb finding her clitoris again, maintaining firm, steady pressure whilst she moved above him, and the double sensation compounded into something that left no room for language. Sophie came with a helpless, undignified sound she made no effort to moderate, her whole body clenching, and felt Benedict follow her: his hands pulling her down hard onto him, his face pressed into her throat, her name in his mouth as he spent.
The silence settled like sediment.
Benedict's weight leaned into her, careful and warm. Sophie's fingers stayed in his hair. The carriage smelled comprehensively of them now, overlaid on rain and wet wool and leather upholstery.
Outside, the storm began its withdrawal. The hammering thinned to pattering, then to the intermittent percussion of branches releasing accumulated water.
Benedict lifted his head.
"The sky," he said, with the solemn conviction of a man reconstructing his position, "was entirely fine at half past two."
Sophie pressed her mouth against his temple. "It smelled of rain at half past two. I said so at half past two. Then you were on the box demonstrating your complete indifference to meteorological reality."
"I was demonstrating optimism."
"You were demonstrating stubbornness."
"They are frequently indistinguishable." He reached up and tucked her hair back from her face, and his expression in the clearing grey light was so unguarded and unhurried and entirely happy that Sophie's chest contracted around something she did not have a tidy word for. "In my defence, I submit the past forty minutes as evidence that some decisions rewarded by poor weather are worth making."
Sophie stepped carefully off his lap, restored her skirts to approximate order, and reached for the window blind with the limited dignity available to her. The road outside was a streaming brown river. The horses stood in the clearing rain with the philosophical composure of animals who had made their peace with human management.
"We should reach home before dark," she said, "if you go now."
Benedict retrieved his sodden shirt from the floor, examined it with calm objectivity, and put it on.
He climbed back onto the box through the open door, immediately wet through again, gathered the reins, and glanced back at her with rain running freely from his hair and an expression of entirely unrepentant satisfaction.
"Next time," he said, "I shall listen to you about the weather."
He would not. They both knew he would not. Sophie pulled the door closed and settled back against the squab and let the gentle sway of the carriage carry her home.
{ A ruthless game of Pall Mall. A conversation about motherhood. An intimately slow undress. Sophie and Benedict's weekend in the country is perfectly romantic until the most formidable member of the household decides to supervise their nighttime activities. }
TAGS: Aubrey Hall, Family Visit, Baby Fever, Domestic Fluff, Trying to Conceive / TTC, Married Life, Breeding Kink, Interrupted Sexy Times, Mild Smut / Fade to Black, Newlyweds, Anthony and Benedict Banter, Kate and Sophie Bonding, Newton the Corgi, Voyeuristic Corgi, Pall Mall, Summer, Slow Undress, A View of Benedict's Posterior, Cuddling
Neddy grabbed Sophie's finger and refused to release it.
The sixteen-month-old had been sitting in the grass for the better part of an hour, systematically destroying a daisy, and had apparently decided that Sophie's hand was a necessary addition to his operations. He was warm and solid against her side, his dark hair damp at the temples from the heat, his doe-like eyes were all Kate, but his brow furrowed in the precise expression Anthony wore when reviewing estate accounts. The resemblance was frankly alarming.
"He does that to everyone," Kate said, stretched out on the blanket beside them with her boots off and her hair escaping its pins. "It is how he asserts dominion over a person. You are his now."
"I do not mind." Sophie watched Neddy transfer his attention from the daisy to her wedding ring, turning it on her finger with great interest. Something in her chest went very still.
From the lawn, a crack of wood announced that Benedict had struck his pall mall ball directly into Anthony's path. The argument that followed was immediate and technically sophisticated.
"That is not remotely within the bounds of—"
"The bounds are entirely subjective, Anthony. You yourself said so last summer."
"I said nothing of the sort."
"You implied it. Strongly. With your eyebrows."
"I did not imply anything with my eyebrows."
"You have very expressive eyebrows. It is not my fault you cannot control them."
Kate did not turn towards the sound. "Third time this afternoon."
"He has been baiting him since breakfast," Sophie said. "Something about the drainage survey. I confess I lost the thread of it."
"Anthony lets him." Kate's mouth curved. "He pretends otherwise, but he is enjoying himself enormously. He gets this particular expression when he is genuinely vexed, and it is nothing like what he is wearing now. Right now he is performing vexation for the pleasure of the argument."
As though to confirm this thesis, Anthony's voice carried across the lawn: "If you strike my ball out of position one more time, Benedict, I will have you removed from the property."
"You would not dare. Sophie would never forgive you."
A pause. Then, with enormous reluctance: "Sophie is the only reason you are welcome here at all."
"I knew it," Benedict said cheerfully. "I married into favour. It was my most strategically sound decision."
Newton, who had spent the previous quarter-hour executing a campaign of gradual infiltration towards the pall mall pitch with the focused patience of a general awaiting optimal conditions, chose this precise moment to seize Benedict's abandoned mallet and trot away with it at considerable speed. Both brothers stopped. Newton glanced back once, corgi haunches working magnificently, and disappeared into the rose hedge with the mallet held aloft like a trophy of war.
"Newton!" Anthony's voice carried across the lawn.
From within the hedge, silence.
Benedict doubled over. The laughter that came out of him was entirely undignified, the sort that bent him at the waist, and Sophie felt it expand in her own chest like warm light. Neddy looked up from her wedding ring at the sound, mouth opening in delighted imitation, wholly ignorant of the cause.
Anthony stood in the ruins of the pall mall pitch with his hands on his hips, staring at the rose hedge with the resigned authority of a man who had long since understood that certain battles existed beyond the scope of viscountly power. Then, with immense dignity: "Good dog."
"He has come around," Kate said quietly to Sophie.
"Has he?"
"A year ago he would have had an entire speech prepared. Now he just concedes." Kate looked at her son, at Sophie's hand in his. "Neddy did that. Softened something in him I did not think would yield." She paused. "It will do the same for Benedict, when you have yours. Not that Benedict needs much softening."
Sophie kept her eyes on Neddy. "We have been trying," she said, and did not add the rest: that she had been tracking her cycle in the margins of her household accounts book with a precision that would have impressed a naval cartographer, counting backwards and forwards, calculating. Three months of marriage and nothing yet, which was entirely unremarkable, which she understood with complete rational clarity, which did not stop her from knowing exactly where she stood in the current month and returning to the thought with the regularity of a clock.
"It will happen," Kate said. No softening of the statement, no consolatory cushioning. Simply a fact delivered with the unflinching confidence of a woman who had learned to distinguish between what was possible and what was merely delayed.
Neddy pulled Sophie's ring finger to his mouth and teethed on it thoughtfully.
--- --- ---
The guest room windows were still open to catch the last of the evening air. Sophie sat at the dressing table unpinning her hair when Benedict came in, jacket already discarded, his cravat loose. He stopped behind her, his reflection appearing in the glass over her shoulder. He looked at her the way he looked at something he was about to draw. Like he was committing the specific quality of the light to memory.
"You were remarkable with him today," he said.
"He is not a difficult child to be with." Sophie set down a pin. "He looks more like Kate, but his temperament is very much like Anthony."
"God help him." A pause. "And God help whoever is unfortunate enough to govern his first estate." Benedict's hands came to her shoulders, gathering her hair and setting it to one side with careful deliberation. His thumb moved against the back of her neck. "I mean it, though. Watching you with Neddy. You knew when he needed to be picked up before he made a sound. You knew when he was done being held."
"I watched Kate."
"Kate was watching you." He pressed his mouth to the curve of her neck, just below her ear. "Sophie."
She turned on the stool, and he was right there, close enough that she had to tilt her head back. His expression had shed whatever careful social architecture he maintained in company. Just Benedict. His ocean eyes in the candlelight.
"You would be a natural," he said. "The fierce, devoted kind of mother who makes everything slightly inconvenient for anyone foolish enough to underestimate her child."
Sophie's throat worked. "You have thought about this."
"Constantly." He drew her up from the stool, fingers working the back of her gown with unhurried attention, each button a deliberate choice. "I think about it every time you hold him. What it would look like. You." His lips followed the opening fabric down her spine. "Growing. Carrying something that is ours."
The gown pooled at her feet. Sophie turned to face him and began on his shirt buttons, her hands steady even as her pulse was not.
"I want to see your belly round with our child," Benedict said, low and direct. "I want to watch you change. Be changed by it. I want—"
Sophie kissed him to stop the sentence from undoing her entirely.
He walked her back toward the bed, unhooking her stays as they went, the two of them managing it with the competence of three months' practice. She pulled him down with her, his weight settling warm and familiar, and Benedict pressed his forehead to hers.
"Tell me what you need," he said.
"I think," Sophie managed, "you know perfectly well what I need."
"I want to hear you say it."
She pulled him down, her breath to his ear and she told him what she needed . His expression shifted into something that was not quite a smile. He reached between them, adjusting, his hand on her hip, and Sophie's fingers gripped his shoulder and—
A bark.
Single. Resonant. Carrying within it the unmistakable quality of moral reproach.
Both of them stopped breathing.
At the foot of the bed, Newton sat upright on the embroidered footstool with his ears pricked and his expression arranged into the attitude of a senior member of household staff who has discovered a significant irregularity and considers it his sworn professional obligation to document and report it.
Benedict's forehead dropped to Sophie's collarbone.
Three seconds of absolute silence.
"He was in the sitting room," Sophie said.
"Apparently he was not."
Newton made a small sound, somewhere between a whine and a deposition.
"How long has he—"
"I am not going to think about that." Benedict's shoulders had begun to shake. He pressed his face harder into the hollow of her collarbone, and Sophie could feel the suppressed laughter moving through him in waves, seismic and irrepressible. It ignited her own: a terrible, helpless giggling she attempted to smother in his hair and failed at entirely.
"Newton," Benedict said, extricating himself from Sophie and sitting up with as much dignity as the situation permitted, which was not a great deal. "I would like you to leave."
Newton tilted his head to one side.
"I am asking politely. As one gentleman to another."
Newton remained, his expression suggesting that the category of gentleman was doing considerable heavy lifting in that sentence.
"I will give you a biscuit."
Newton's ears moved. The ethical calculus had shifted.
Benedict, entirely naked, climbed off the bed and crossed to the dresser, where he located the biscuit dish he had, with no relevant forethought whatsoever, transported from dinner. He held out a piece of shortbread. Newton regarded it. Regarded Benedict. Regarded the shortbread again, with the grave deliberation of a man consulting his conscience on a matter of some philosophical weight.
Sophie, from the bed, had an exceptional view of her husband's posterior as he conducted this negotiation. It was, she thought, one of the more distinguished arguments she had ever witnessed. Benedict stood with his weight on one hip, utterly unself-conscious in his nudity, patiently extending shortbread towards a corgi who was taking his time about accepting it.
"Take the biscuit, Newton," Benedict said, with the authority of a man accustomed to being mostly reasonable in unreasonable circumstances. "I am asking very nicely. I will continue to ask nicely for approximately another thirty seconds, after which I shall become significantly less reasonable."
Newton accepted the biscuit with exquisite delicacy, as though conferring a favour. He allowed himself to be shepherded towards the sitting room, pausing once in the doorway to look back at Sophie with an expression that she could only interpret as professional solidarity.
Benedict closed the door. Tried the latch. Tested it again. Added a chair wedged beneath the handle with the thoroughness of a man who had learned from experience.
He turned back to the room.
Sophie lay in the tumbled bed with her hair loose across the pillows, her hand pressed firmly over her mouth, failing comprehensively to stop laughing. The candlelight caught the tears at the corners of her eyes.
"Not a word," Benedict said.
"I was not going to say a single word."
"You were going to say several words arranged into a sentence designed to make me feel ridiculous."
"I was going to say," Sophie said, wrestling her expression into something approaching composure and largely not achieving it, "that Newton has appointed himself the guardian of this household's moral standards, and that any child of ours will be very thoroughly supervised."
"Any child of ours will learn to bribe him with shortbread from the cradle." Benedict returned to the bed, sliding in beside her, and Sophie felt the warmth of him settle against her side. "It is a transferable skill."
He gathered her against him in the dark, and Sophie tucked herself into the familiar geography of his chest, her ear against his heartbeat. His hand moved through her hair, slow and deliberate.
"Where were we," he murmured.
"I believe," Sophie said, "you had just asked me to tell you what I needed."
"And you told me."
"I did."
His hand moved from her hair to her hip. Sophie turned towards him, and he was already there, already close, his forehead coming to rest against hers in that gesture that was so specifically his, so wholly Benedict, that it still caught in her chest every time.
"Tell me again," he said.
She did. And this time there were no interruptions: only the soft sounds of the summer night through the open window, and Benedict's mouth at her throat, and the slow, exquisite slide of him inside her at last. Sophie exhaled against his shoulder, her fingers curling into the warm skin of his back, and Benedict made a low, unguarded sound against her hair.
They moved together with the unhurried ease of people who had learned each other's particular languages, and somewhere in the sitting room, Newton settled himself on his cushion with the satisfied air of a corgi who had thoroughly executed his responsibilities for the evening.
Bridgerton The Office 4x05 // "So it becomes suddenly like a...like a workplace romance." — Luke Thompson
Benedict "I'll date her so hard she becomes my wife" Bridgerton
“Do you want me to stop dating your maid? Is that how we’re gonna get past this? Because I will.” “YES.” “Well…that is not gonna happen!” “Then why’d you even offer?” “Because I assumed that you want me to be happy!”
“Sophie and I are like Romeo and Juliet, and this society is like the dragon that kept them apart.”
Been doing a Bridgerton rewatch with the intent of recontextualizing myself for Benedict, and here's how I would summarize his experience in each season:
S1
Making friends with someone via insulting their art
Hanging out on a swing-set with Eloise and bonding over not enjoying societal norms
Going to the best party he's ever been to (gets to hang out with people who just want to do art and don't mind nudity) and then being accosted by his brother who's like, "We gotta go kill my bestie to defend our sister's honour." To which Benedict says, "What," and then Anthony's like, "If I die, you're head of the family. If I don't die, you're also head of the family. Good luck being Viscount!" And narrowly avoiding one or multiple of his siblings being shot in a duel that same morning
Seeing two men have sex and then immediately having to sleep with two women so as to not have this interaction awaken anything within him
Getting into a situationship with everyone's favourite modiste
Discovering the concept of a lavender marriage
S2
Getting dumped by his situationship in front of his family
Discovering at a bar that he, a second son, can in fact follow his dreams as an artist and applying to the Royal Academy Schools
Sharing a poem he wrote so his brother can plagiarize it for clout
Getting so anxious about his application that he shows up to a dinner party with his brother's future-in-laws high as a kite
Attending art school and immediately hooking up with the figure model on his first day
Being the Best Man in a wedding that get cancelled at the altar
Going to his mother's ball where only 4 people outside his family show up and finding out his sister's honour is under threat (notably, different sister than the last time)
Going out with his valet and seeing Anthony carry his lover Kate's unconscious body through a thunderstorm, and then popping up to her bedside to ask Anthony what's up, to which he just says, "It's all my fault," and then walks away
Quitting art school because he found out Anthony bought his spot and he'll never know if he had the merit to get in on his own outside of being a nepo baby
Hanging out on a swing-set with Eloise and bonding over feeling like misfits and imposters
S3
Asking a debutante to dance one (1) time and spending every subsequent event avoiding her gaze
Befriending a hot widow through hot air balloon feats and then immediately starting another situationship
Finding out his brother is engaged from the local gossip rag cause he was too busy philandering
Coming home periodically to bond with his new brother-in-law (as his sister is also engaged) and fight over macarons and cards with his youngest siblings
Feeling like a #boyfailure about the whole art school debacle
Being invited to a dinner party by his situationship, flirting with a man for the first time, and being invited to a threesome with her situationship shortly thereafter and then, running away as fast as he can
Taking three (3) business days to figure out he is bisexual and leaving his brother's wedding party to go sleep with man and a woman
Being so busy with sex that he misses his family being blackmailed
Breaking up with his situationship because he's too likable and husband-worthy to remain in a casual throuple
Hanging out on a swing-set with Eloise and bonding over plans for self-discovery whilst coming out to her in the vaguest way possible
Getting caught with two half-dressed women in his bachelor lodging in the morning, then hooking up with a man in the evening, before strolling into his family's masquerade ball two hours late to then meet the love of his life
Getting his sister-in-law to write an anonymous advert that he's single and ready to mingle in her gossip rag
Enlisting his sister (under mild duress) to attend like eight parties in a row with him to search for his meetcute
Finally figuring out the right house and getting Sophie fired for indirectly revealing she wore her own family heirlooms
Hanging out on a swing-set with Eloise and bonding over not being suited to marriage
Coming out of a multi-day drunken stupor to fistfight a guy for preying on women, thereby getting Sophie fired again
Trying to help Sophie back to Mayfair, and instead needing to be nursed back to health at his cottage while his fever induces him to ask her to kiss him better
Getting Sophie hired as a maid in his family home and somehow being in a love triangle with her and... herself but in a ball gown
Asking Sophie to start a situationship and then chastizing his mother for scolding him while she too, is in a situationship
Moving out of his family home bc he's so hot it messes up Sophie's workflow, before messing up her workflow more with premarital relations
Inviting Sophie to move in with him and coming out as bi to her in a single two-minute span
Causing his brother Anthony come all the way from India, and then from the countryside, in 1817, for an intervention
Being dumped because he has a great relationship with his family
Getting permission from his mummy to become estranged
Leaving his brother-in-law's wake to propose, finding out Sophie's going to America so he needs to charter a boat, finding out she's not going to America because she's been arrested, and instead crashing into a courtroom to save his lover from being charged with theft and impersonation, mummy in tow
Realizing his lover is also his meetcute so it was more of a love line
Working with his mother to blackmail his stepmother-in-law to legitimize his lover and lying to the Queen's face about it, and somehow getting away with both of those things so they can marry (slay)
{ After the kiss by the lake, Benedict and Sophie walk the long way back to My Cottage. }
TAGS: My Cottage Era, Post-lake Kiss, Mutual Pining, Walking Home, Banter, The Great Outdoors, Benophie Fluff
She could hear him not looking at her.
It was a particular sound; the scuff of his boots on the gravel path a measured six feet behind her, the rustle of his still-damp shirt against his skin, and beneath both, a silence so carefully maintained it practically hummed. Sophie kept her eyes fixed on the path ahead. The afternoon sun was warm on the back of her neck. Her lips were swollen. She could still taste lake water and elderflower.
She turned around.
Benedict's gaze snapped to a hedgerow with the speed and precision of a man who had absolutely, categorically not been staring at the back of her neck. He studied the hedge with the intense botanical fascination of someone who had just discovered an entirely new species of shrub. The corner of his mouth was doing something he could not seem to control.
"You are following me," Sophie said.
"I am walking to My Cottage."
"You are walking to My Cottage six paces behind me."
"It is My Cottage. I am permitted to approach it from any distance I choose." He gestured magnanimously at the path. "You, however, appear to be leading a procession to which I was not invited."
"I am returning from my walk."
"Your walk to the lake where you were certainly not spying."
"I was not spying."
"Of course not. You were conducting a hydrological survey."
She turned back to the path and walked faster. His footsteps quickened to match, maintaining the precise six-foot gap. She slowed. He slowed. She sped up. He sped up. The rhythm of it was absurd, a walking minuet performed by two people pretending they were not dancing.
The tree root caught her square across the toe of her boot.
Sophie pitched forward with a graceless lurch. The ground tilted. She had time to think, very clearly, this is how I die, not from Araminta's cruelty but from a tree root in Wiltshire, and then his hand closed around her elbow and pulled.
She spun into his chest. His other arm came around her waist, steadying her, and for a lurching, breathless second she was pressed against the full length of him; the damp linen, the warmth beneath it, the steady thud of his heartbeat under her palm. His face was inches from hers. A drop of lake water slid from his hair and landed on her collarbone.
"Careful," he said, and his voice was low and slightly rough, and his arm was still around her waist, and his eyes had dropped to her mouth.
"Thank you," she managed.
Neither of them moved.
A wood pigeon erupted from a nearby oak with a clatter of wings, and they sprang apart as though the bird had fired a pistol.
Sophie smoothed her skirt. Benedict cleared his throat and examined the offending tree root with murderous intent. They resumed walking. The six-foot gap had shrunk to three.
The path narrowed where the willows thickened, and a low branch hung directly across it, heavy with late-summer leaves. Benedict reached up and caught it, holding it above his head. The gesture created an archway she would have to pass beneath, directly under the span of his arm.
She ducked under. The branch forced her close. Her shoulder brushed his chest. The scent of him filled her senses; lake water and sandalwood and linseed oil and warm, clean skin. She paused, half-bent beneath his arm, and looked up.
He was looking down at her mouth.
The world contracted to the space between them; the warmth of his body, the slow rise and fall of his breathing, the faint tremor in the arm holding the branch. His lips parted. She felt herself tilt toward him, a fraction of an inch, drawn by something that operated entirely below the level of conscious thought.
She ducked away with a breathless laugh that sounded nothing like composure.
Benedict released the branch. It snapped back into place behind them. He exhaled through his nose with the careful deliberation of a man counting to ten.
They walked on. The cottage chimney appeared above the tree line. Sophie quickened her pace, feeling the ridiculous, giddy pull of a game she could not name; three quick steps, then a deliberately languid slowing. Behind her, his rhythm matched and mirrored. Quick, quick, slow. Quick, quick, slow. A pattern emerging without either of them acknowledging it.
She bit the inside of her cheek. A giggle escaped anyway; small, traitorous, completely undignified.
Behind her, Benedict laughed. Not his usual laugh, the practised, charming one deployed for drawing rooms and dinner parties. This was startled, helpless, bright as the sun on the lake. The sound of it landed somewhere behind her sternum and stayed.
Sophie reached the garden gate first. She lifted the latch, slipped through, and crossed the garden path in quick, light steps, her boots crunching on the gravel. She made it through the cottage door, pressed her back against the entry wall, and clamped both hands over her mouth.
The smile beneath her fingers was so wide it ached. Her cheeks burned. Her pulse was doing something entirely unreasonable. She stood there in the dim hall with her eyes squeezed shut and her shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter, and she felt, for the first time in longer than she could remember, like a girl. Not a maid. Not a servant. Not a former earl's illegitimate daughter navigating the ruins of a life she had been denied. Just a girl who had been kissed by a boy near a lake and could not stop smiling about it.
"Miss Baek."
Sophie's eyes flew open.
Mrs. Crabtree stood in the main sitting room, a cleaning rag folded over one arm, her expression arranged into the configuration of a woman who had already deduced everything she needed to know from the flush on Sophie's cheeks and the grass stains on her hem. Her gaze moved from Sophie's swollen lips to her disordered hair to her hands still pressed against her mouth.
Sophie lowered her hands. "Mrs. Crabtree. I was just–"
The front door swung open behind her.
Benedict strode in with the buoyant, loose-limbed energy of a man who had recently done something magnificent and was failing spectacularly to conceal it. His damp shirt was still unbuttoned at the collar. His hair was drying in unruly waves. He was grinning.
"Sublime day in the country, is it not, Mrs. Crabtree?" he announced, breezing past Sophie with a jauntiness that would have been convincing had his ears not been bright pink. "Truly. Exceptional. The air. The light. The– the lake. Remarkable lake."
He disappeared up the stairs two at a time, whistling something tuneless and slightly manic.
Mrs. Crabtree looked at Sophie. Sophie looked at Mrs. Crabtree. The rag was folded with slow, ominous precision.
"The lake," Mrs. Crabtree repeated flatly.
"I should go and— change," Sophie said, and fled up the stairs before the housekeeper could respond, pressing her knuckles against her mouth to trap the laughter that threatened to spill out of her like water from a cracked jug.
Behind her, Mrs. Crabtree's sigh carried the full, exhausted weight of a woman who had not been paid nearly enough for any of this.
The chandeliers have been polished to a gleam, the kite laid carefully beside silk gloves and ribbons, and the final invitations sealed with wax and ribbon. At long last, the prompts for Benophie Week 2026 are ready to be revealed.
Over eight enchanting days, we invite you to step into a celebration of the hidden identities, stolen dances, lingering glances across crowded rooms, and the kind of love that transported us all. Inspired by the romance of our beloved Sophie Baek and Benedict Bridgerton, each prompt has been chosen by you, our honoured guests, to capture the magic, mystery, and devotion at the heart of their story.
So consider this your invitation to the festivities.
The ballroom awaits. The orchestra is poised to begin. The wedding march is about to begin.
We cannot wait to witness the dazzling creations that emerge once the festivities commence.
