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Dazed, too dazed to summon up the requisite blush or angry words, she simply looked at him with a wide-eyed expression, frozen though there was something like a soft roaring sound in her ears.

There was not a single good explanation for what she did then. In fact, many of the explanations were the direct opposite of good. One being he annoyed her a little. Actually, he annoyed her quite a lot and Penelope felt it could very well be mutual. Two being she hadn't done a lot of this before, and certainly not in recent history. Third, of course, being she was more or less trapped in a tight, confining space with The Intruder, whose last name only she'd vaguely recalled Phineas McLaggen barking, though she could not remember anything more about a Spinnet than her brother occasionally sulking or smirking about some antics performed by him. Four being the way he was currently staring at her, making her all too aware of how tight and confining a space this truly was.

It could be chalked up to remaining adrenaline in her system, from that dizzyingly anxious episode, gone straight to her head and demanding to be spent. It was also, maybe more than likely, the fact that for the first time in a long time (too long a time), she felt bizarrely engaged, alive, like there was blood actually pumping through her veins and her pulse was thrumming. Penelope wanted to grab it, hold on to it, make it stay just a little bit longer. Didn't that allow for some reckless, unthinking, and potentially unwise behavior?

Of course it didn't.

Still breathing just a bit too heavily for a closet snog that hadn't actually happened, she took just a few hesitant steps toward him as if approaching a deer that might be spooked away—a direct reversal of their roles—and stood on the tips of her toes, placing her hands on his shoulders as she pressed her lips fully, and perhaps a bit forcefully, to his.