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“You might be the nicest guy I’ve ever dated.”
Dan falters on his drink. The murmur of their surroundings fading away in favor of the lapse in his exhale, the sound of the fabric of his clothes rubbing against each other. Blair imagines that this moment is a time that exists outside of time and a space that exists outside of space. A conversation that’s beyond their reality, isolated from the flow of their daily life. They won’t learn anything from this.
“That’s… really depressing,” he says, making a face that’s more astounded than concerned.
“Well.”
“I wish I was kinder to you then,” he says, hesitating. But Blair knows he means it, even if he doesn’t want to. The me too, dies in her mouth.
“I wish you were crueler,” she says instead. Evil to the end so then I can hate you forever.
He stares at her like he’s thinking about it, like she said that last part out loud (out of space, out of time). The perpetual debates in his head propel him like an electric current, his raison d’ etre. Like everything is worth to debate, like it would change anything now. She’s watched him like this forever, floundering around what’s the right thing to do as he’s watched her, too, floundering around what it is that truly makes her happy.
“Nothing’s forever.” He’s looking at the ring on her finger.
She doesn’t believe him. She sees in his eyes that terrifying love that threatens to haunt her for the rest of her life.
They have sex because these days, it’s the only truthful language they speak with one another. Only interspaced by those drunken moments of vulnerability that they bury in the morning, anger too well-defined in the sobering sunlight. There’s not enough space for reflection, because they don’t learn anything from this.
Dan maneuvers furiously, letting anger leak into his actions. That means fucking Blair until she sees stars, making her come in ways that will leave her forever unsatisfied in her marital bed. That’s what anger means to him: forcing her to take from him, to look at his desire directly in the eye and deny him tenderness. To dare her to break his heart over and over again.
If she was a better person, she’d give him the same grace he’d given her all those years ago, to redirect his blows from himself, to find something to nurture. But these days she only knows how to make him angrier.
That’s what she does, she thinks. The same to Chuck—except Chuck can’t be bothered to pretend the rage is because of her and her alone, even though she takes the brunt of it. So what she has is divided attention from her husband and Dan’s anger that looks to be hers forever.
--
When Serena reaches out for him, touching him with a trembling hand, that feeling doesn’t go away—that vague hunch that he might never be able to forgive that video, for the role she played in destroying his relationship with Blair, the manner she did it in. But he’s never learned to pin the blame squarely on a single head, and he can only recount the number of unforgivable things he’s done. If misery loves company, guilt is a black hole.
They get back together because she catches him on another down swing in his life and he feels himself heavy baggage, but she calls it keeping her grounded. That’s important for Serena, it’s what draws the line between her and her father—the van der Woodsens’ many silent heartbreaks.
They get back together because there’s a tone in her voice, rid of that vindictiveness and manipulation, when she says, “I need you to be mine, right now.”
It’s that tone of earnestness that always makes him look up, and when he does, he finds that it’s only the two of them left in the city, everyone else off to honeymoons or networking or gallivanting or school. They don’t really have the energy to do anything except settle back into each other, scrambling for something familiar. She’s the only person left who is interested in his story.
They get back together because guilt is a black hole and they’re both full of sorrys that nobody wants to hear. He’s a cynic, when he wants to be, and it’s easier to see the world bleak. But sometimes, when she holds his hand so tight under the table during brunch, Lily’s hollow eyes gazing at them, he feels like he could do something about it.
And mostly, with some sick irony of Grecian proportions, they get back together because they’re family.
Maybe that’s why he’s still able to smile the way he does at those glittering parties, in the way he does when he sees things that are amusing and farcical and unnecessary. He’s able to play Serena’s man again. And when he catches Blair’s gaze from across the room—when that anger strikes him like a loose stone hitting a windshield on the freeway, cracks forming but you can’t slow down—he doesn’t let go of Serena’s hand even if it burns all the same.
If he splits the weight of their sins between the three of them, he doesn’t know who wins the draw. But Blair is unmoving at the other corner of the room and Serena is the one who insists on keeping him by her side.
From where they stand, in three points, he can triangulate a novel in the making. He wonders how to bring this all to a satisfying conclusion.
“I just thought it would be me forever,” Serena says. She always comes back to him, and it’s always been easy because he’s never meant to stray too far. He’s been vaguely aware of this selfishness of hers, but he’s used to wiping memories, giving clean slates. Because can it really be called greed when the world has always been so eager to hand her things? He looks at her and everything is still Serena, the one he's known, she’s golden as always.
Except now there’s a video he can’t quite forgive.
“Nothing’s forever.”
But they marry because suddenly, they’re their parents.
(Whatever combination of those four, he isn’t quite sure: of marrying someone you don’t love, leaving again and again, being too different, being too similar, of never quite making it to the end.)
--
Blair can’t help but fuck Serena’s husband. It’s not interesting, the way she and Dan have crawled their way back to each other. It’s inevitable, it’s gravity. And if she lets herself, she would ponder how she’s used that logic for all the men that she’s ever loved in her life. Like they’re comets orbiting her center.
Except she isn’t the sun, she’s just a rock in space with not enough atmosphere to burn up a single meteor.
They crash into her every time, pockmarked scars dotting her surface. Everlasting craters on the moon of her heart.
--
Sometimes Dan feels like he and Serena are co-conspirators, somehow, discarded limbs of Blair Waldorf. They can only reminisce about the time they thought they were vital to her being, those times where there was no one else.
“Where did you learn to be so vindictive?” Serena asks, looking at those angry chapters about his friends he didn’t quite have the heart to send (evil to the end so I can hate you forever).
He watches as she reads herself, coming off the worst. Sometimes he regrets it, that the man who was the center of his ire has already died on the page before, Charlie Trout’s story closed on that old book before he even got to scream about the worst parts of him.
And since no one wants to say it out loud, everyone else must carry that burden.
He thinks of that video he can’t quite forgive.
“From the same person you did.”
Serena sags a bit, purses her lips.
“I don’t like that,” she says quietly.
When did Serena get so good at taking his blows?
But he doesn’t hide much from her anymore. Some things are unfair to say out loud, but it doesn’t mean they’re untrue.
It gets easier though, they laugh. They laugh and it feels like they’re sixteen again and in love, and he sees her as the only real thing left in the Upper East Side because the two of them are a mystery he’s privy to, instead of being on the outskirts of.
This is romance, still. He’s still a romantic.
Serena breathes easy in their marriage, against all odds, against the accusations of marrying too soon, just a year after her best friend. Against assumptions of Dan Humphrey putting her on an unforgiving pedestal with full intentions of chaining that golden dove. It’s easy.
That means photos of Serena’s weekends in Saint-Tropez, in the arms of a guy that tans better than Dan ever could, are pasted all over Gossip Girl. (The site stronger than ever, now an app.)
Everyone messages him screenshots of the page, a range of question marks and emojis flashing on his screen. He doesn’t reply to any of them except Blair’s non-question. The only word in her text: Dan.
He shrugs then realizes no one’s around to see him in their empty brownstone in Brooklyn.
That’s my wife.
Him and Serena are co-conspirators, but the conspiracy is that there is one anyway, that there’s a reason they need to lick each other’s wounds.
There are things Dan thinks he can’t forgive but what else is there to do the past couple of years but to better understand Serena. Something about seeing the worst in people and the inherent intimacy in that. He doesn’t arrive to that conclusion lightly—he loathes to think that anything Chuck and Blair say about each other makes sense.
What he means is that he’s come to understand that he’s a line that Blair crossed, in that ridiculous, warped logic she has—something that Serena also shares. He realizes that Blair’s never stopped seeing him as Serena’s.
And he fights against it, futilely, against the notion of people belonging to people, against that high school image of him—as if that’s their destiny. But what is that struggle in the face of the mythos of Serena and Blair. They formed such a tangled web of unspoken rules and spoken lies and betrayals and a love ingrained so deep in their bones that it’s like they were cursed from birth. Or more than that: that they have, lifetimes ago, signed each other’s names off so the devil can tether their hearts forever.
In his first year of marriage, Dan writes a children's horror story about two little girls who attempt to sacrifice the entire neighborhood so they would never grow old and remain best friends forever. He publishes it under a pseudonym. It’s his work that Serena loves the most.
Serena and Dan know what it feels to be in love with each other, they’ve sealed that pact in gold wedding bands. They also know what it feels like to be in love with Blair, to be the most important person in her life. They know what it’s like to watch her take all that love and pour it into Chuck Bass.
You’re the love of my life, Dan. Just because it’s not a lie doesn’t make it true.
How can either of us know the loves of our lives are until we’re old?
But he’s come to understand that Serena has always known, from the age of nine.
--
It’s not an affair, Blair reasons, when it only happens a few times a year. She tries to pretend the dates don’t hover around those anniversaries—W, her first marriage, and now, Rome.
That’s when it began, a year after she decisively followed Chuck Bass in his never-ending quest to catch his father—or kill his father— and all his specters. A year after she turned away from Brooklyn forever.
She found him in a hotel bar drowning his sorrows as smooth jazz played from an unidentifiable corner of the room. She half-expected him to say of all the gin joints... but instead, he made a comment about her being a year late. She pretended not to hear it.
It wasn’t a coincidence. Gossip Girl’s Spotted map remained to be the devil’s hand that she couldn't stop grasping.
“I can’t… be around Serena tonight,” he said as if it was an explanation. Maybe it was but she couldn’t understand him anymore, not like before. She didn’t understand how he can sound so tragic when she had seen them together just a few weeks ago, smiling faces like how she used to gaze them across the courtyard, definitively back in each other’s arms.
A part of her believed that they’d all be miserable together because that was the destiny of all those who came before them. Because while they’ve reached the ending their seventeen-year-old selves wanted, they’ve had to give up so many parts of their being to get there. There’s a reason why fairytales ended at the kiss.
But Serena once again gets to be the happiest girl in the Upper East Side and it’s the guy from Brooklyn gave her those secrets.
How could you be happy when it was so tragic?
Then looking at him at the bar, how can you be sad when she was laughing?
He looked up at her, that first night, eyes like ink pots but so obvious in what they want. Blair felt a bit sick to her stomach. The answer was obvious-- he always did wear his heart around his neck.
When she kissed him, he felt hot and tender, warm alcohol on his lips. He didn’t hesitate to return it, to reach for her hair, to caress her face, his thumb sliding over her cheekbones. He was always like this, like there was nothing else he wanted to do, he breathed her in like he’d been starving for oxygen the whole year. There was a slight tremor in his grip and Blair focused on it like it meant something. It meant everything. It meant nothing.
“Chuck,” he said when she pulled away, an imperceptible tone. She didn’t quite understand him anymore.
A beat.
“I can’t… be around him tonight,” she echoed his words.
They didn’t understand each other anymore—a vile, bewildering year passing between them where they’ve taken their resentments for each other and magnified them into hate until it could hurt the other more than themselves. They acted like nothing changed from high school. They acted like they were the worst thing to happen to each other. Maybe it was true. Blair knew she was the worst thing to happen to him.
But on that night, Dan looked at her like he was seeing the moon for the first time in his life, so she kissed him again. Kissed him in front of an uninterested crowd of semi-alcoholics obsessed with their own infidelity.
It wasn’t interesting, the way they’ve crawled back to each other.
The first time was tender and frantic, like his body hadn’t caught up to what his brain had decided Blair became. He fucked her like she was the person she was last year—when she would kiss him over breakfast and dash a loving, red pen on every piece of writing he offered her. His thumb grazed her clit as he pushed her leg open, her knee lifting to his rib, pressed against the wall and uncomfortable in the otherwise oversized restroom of the hotel bar.
She melted into him anyway.
He didn’t seem angry, that first time. Just in love. Ravenous like he had been the night they painted the town red with their drunken selves, high on that newly discovered pleasure.
He wasn’t angry then. He took her to the loft and they fucked like she would leave Chuck tomorrow.
But then tomorrow came and she didn’t leave her husband. It felt like one more thing he would never forgive her for.
--
He spins Serena around the dance floor, and she falls into his arms. She laughs because his vastly improved dance skills still aren’t enough for a graceful catch. Lily smiles at them easily, relieved in whatever meaning she’s imposed on their union. As if those wedding bands absolved her from something, as if it absolved her from herself.
Hers is not the only pair of eyes on them. Dan never gets used to it, basking in that golden glow.
He’s acutely aware that everyone has seen those pictures of Serena in Buenos Aires, arm-in-arm with something bright and blond and has never set foot in New York.
He spins Serena again.
Sometimes, he feels split into two—sliced through by a beautiful piano wire—and he can’t ever get his parts right. They function separately and that’s his secret to keep. His bitterness doesn’t quite taint his love, and his love doesn’t quite abate the bitterness. Serena doesn’t really know how to deal with that, but she doesn’t resent the two people that he is.
That means he can’t be angry at Serena. And he isn’t, not anymore, he just… can’t quite forgive. He thinks about that camera hidden somewhere in the room. He thinks about how they will aways have a camera on them.
He's out of places to run so he’s learned not to mind it, when he knows the spotlight is on him. Even if it’s Serena’s stage and his job is to be the lovesick fool.
(That’s exactly what he is.)
--
Blair watches Dan maneuver clumsily in the middle of the dance floor and she feels like some strange wizard switched their lives: he’s the center of everyone’s unfriendly stares, catching flecks of Serena’s gold, and she’s sticking by the wall at another event that Chuck is too busy to attend. It’s not often she plays the wallflower, it’s just that when your escort runs out on you for the nth time—there’s always a business deal to chase, a hotel to save—it gets tiring to cycle through small talk laced with mild venom.
She used to be good at this.
When she hears the peals of Serena’s laugh, she thinks of the photos on Gossip Girl, how she looked over them unblinking: the boys that Serena paraded around in warm countries while wearing her wedding ring. She feels sixteen with insecurity manifesting as bile rising in her throat. Having it all was never an option for Blair.
Instead, she’s in topsy turvy town, staring at Dan Humphrey from the sidelines, wringing her hands together, thinking, why are you with her?
Or, it just means some things never change—
If you were going to make a public show of being pathetic for the rest of your life, why isn’t it with me?
“It’s an open marriage,” Dan says, sighing deeply like he’s imagining a cigarette, hand twitching since he decided to quit. That toothy, laughing grin of his extinguished on the balcony. He looks at her like he always has, like he saves that tragic, despondent look for her. And since she’s her, always hungry for tiny morsels of control, it makes her feel possessive. There’s a part of him she has monopoly over.
(Humphrey, you are a born liar!)
“Is that what this is?” she asks. In her head she gestures between them. But in reality, she just stays still, leaning on one side against the railing, with Dan mirroring her as they face each other.
He laughs bitterly. Angry, as always. But he’s already put his jacket around her, a few minutes ago. These easy, kind gestures are second nature to him, something that exists outside his hurt. It’s so unlike her who uses every single opportunity to attack, to make things excruciating and drawn out.
His jacket is expensive and tailored, heavy and warm and she tries not to think about how much she likes it.
“No,” he says decisively. “I don’t think that’s what this is.”
“Did you tell Serena?” She asks, because even if she doesn’t understand Serena anymore, she has spent a lifetime decoding gazes of socialites, and sometimes, Serena looks at her like she knows. Dan hums, not answering her question. She has the urge to be cruel. “Then this is cheating.”
Dan shrugs. Inexplicable gestures of Brooklyn boys whose chivalrous nature outclasses all the etiquette training imbued into the likes of a van der Bilt, or an Archibald, or a Bass—these, she has no practice in deciphering.
Before she can press him, his phone vibrates in his jacket, and he reaches over to pull it out of the pocket. He lingers for a moment, and she fights the urge to lean against his arm. After a quick look on the screen, he coughs and tilts his head towards the party. She nods and watches as he turns away, parting the curtains to reveal a sliver of the gala, loud and technicolor against the cold night of the outdoors.
He doesn’t ask for his jacket back.
Blair turns away from the party. Dan’s warmth lingers on the jacket, and she catches traces of Serena’s perfume on the fabric. It makes her feel heady and melancholic. She looks out at the New York skyline, ever convoluted and familiar. She thinks this will be her home forever. Even as the night gets colder, she doesn’t move from her spot.
It’s Serena who finds her.
--
Dan thinks of that night, finding them sitting on the floor of that cold balcony, empty bottles between them. Serena looks up at him while Blair is half asleep, her head leaning against Serena’s shoulder like it’s always belonged there. He stands frozen for a second, unable to process what he’s seeing. They’re sharing his jacket, the expensive fabric stretching to cover both their shoulders, protecting them from the cold wind.
For a moment, he forgets anger and hurt and grudges. He forgets about the things he can or can’t forgive.
He releases a breath he doesn’t realize he’s holding and smiles at Serena. She smiles back, easy and tender, mouths at him, what are we doing?
It comes to him suddenly, his laugh, deep in the belly. Serena laughs, too, waking Blair up. She moves slowly, alcohol in her system. When she looks up at him, her eyes wide, Dan wonders how he can bring their story to a satisfying conclusion.
“Okay,” he says, exhaling, and helps Serena help Blair stand up. “Waldorf, let’s get you home.”
He reaches out to steady her but she swats him away, seeming to mistake his movement as an attempt to take his jacket back. She holds on to the lapel draped on her side possessively and turns her head to push her face onto Serena’s neck.
“Nobody has called me that in years,” she slurred.
“Oh, right.”
Serena, with that mysterious look in her eyes, seems to be humored by this exchange. She turns to kiss Blair at the top of her head.
“You can ride in our car, B,” she says easily, as if that nickname hasn’t lived and died and lived and died a million times in their fluctuating friendship.
It’s in the elevator when Blair admits “I don’t want to go home.”
She sounds so small when she says it, that earnest tone that always makes him look up. And when Serena tightens her embrace around Blair, Dan thinks that they both look so young. He wonders if he’s finally privy to it, to the people they were before they met him, before everything. That girlhood that’s embedded under their skin.
It could’ve been him or Serena who says it.
“Okay, stay with us.”
Blair stays the night in their guest room. She doesn’t leave the next morning.
--
Blair imagines if this was a few years ago, Chuck would know to look first in Dan Humphrey’s house.
And if things were a bit different, he’d know to check first with Serena.
But what Chuck knows is how it’s deteriorated completely, the friendship between S and B. Even staging that (second) Humphrey-van der Woodsen’s union in her home was a sort of goodbye to that friendship forever. If he didn’t bask in it, in the idea that he was the most important person in Blair’s life, the center of her universe with no other mass threatening to pull her out of orbit, he’d dig a little deeper as to why.
If he did, he’d understand that while he did the worst things he could do to Blair, she has weathered worse storms for Serena.
At home, Dan is different. As if that hurricane inside him has died down and those nights of rough, unforgiving sex in dingy bathrooms and tawdry hotel rooms was an apparition in the rain.
(It almost gave her whiplash, the first time he spoke to her without that edge on his voice, when she woke up hungover after the night on the balcony and he offered her breakfast, Serena echoing his sentiment.)
They go back to watching movies, they argue about his books, she scrunches her nose at his record collection, he scoffs at the amount of skin care she gets delivered to the house.
She’s privy to his work before they get published and he expects her to go over them as if she isn’t already swamped with trying to transition her work to a temporary remote set-up. She’s given up CEO of Waldorf Designs a few years ago but stayed to head the marketing department, being more involved in photoshoots and magazines and brand deals. To her surprise, her mother almost looked relieved when she told her, retirement obviously making her antsy in her idleness, almost neurotic.
Eleanor spared her most of the disappointment, a mercy that Blair never imagined she’d ever be granted. But maybe it has something to do with her last visit to Paris, how Chuck only managed to stay for two nights, and she remained reticent despite Cyrus’ prodding. Maybe Eleanor’s stint in retirement smoothed out her edges.
Blair writes, yes, it’s possible for something to be too abstract, Humphrey. It becomes a cop-out in vibrant red ink on one of his more esoteric poems. These days, he makes uninteresting nonfiction and does the occasional poetry—much to his agent’s frustration, he admits. Neither of which are his best foot forward nor are they particularly reflective of him as a person. Fiction is a sore spot although he brushes it off with an explanation of a perennial writer’s block.
She doesn’t tell him that she had been following his career in an incognito browser on her work computer. That she’s waited for another thinly veiled heroine, blonde or brunette, as if knowing would help decide something for her.
She microdosed on his wit on his journalistic pursuits. But the poetry, she’s never liked—they were always too vague and depressing. If she thought about it too much, they made her feel like she’s standing on top of The Empire Hotel, overlooking the edge.
That first week the three of them do everything together, because while being adults with careers, they find themselves with too much time because Blair is the only one who’s ever held an office job.
Despite his erratic hours, Dan cooks a late breakfast and gathers them all to sit on the kitchen island where they pass around pages of a newspaper. They let him because he knows how they both like their coffees and he’s the only one who can consistently work the espresso machine. More often than not, they day drink for lunch, which he claims helps his writing and Blair says is disastrous for her work. But Serena moves between them, needing attention like a cat, and they give in to her because she’s the one refilling their drink.
For dinner, they order in on nights he doesn’t have the energy to cook, and the girls don’t feel like cleaning a kitchen they’ll mess up on the attempt.
Chuck calls Serena only once. I don’t know, Chuck, I haven’t heard from her. Have you tried Lyon?
He leaves Blair messages every day. Dan’s phone stays quiet, of course.
Dan plays a Tim Buckley record when it’s almost midnight and she gripes him being such a boy and goes on a tirade about his clichés as a brooding writer. It’s the most she’s spoken to him in a long time and Dan almost looks impressed, that lopsided grin creeping up his face. She tries to suppress that familiar flip in her stomach.
Serena just laughs and takes her by the hand. At her urging, the two of them dance languidly to the percussion of Phantasmagoria in Two.
If I give up all of my pride for you
And only love you for now
Would you hide my fears and never say
“Tomorrow I must go”
That first week, they do everything together. It feels like a honeymoon.
It becomes quiet when Serena’s not there. An errand that Blair doesn’t quite understand, the specifics of Serena’s job-of-the-month lost on her (I’m confused, S, are you working for actors or are actors working for you?) Whatever it is, she packs her bags and takes off to Remini. When she leaves in the morning, Blair pretends to still be asleep. Her door is ajar, and she hears Dan kiss Serena and bid her a long goodbye.
She listens to his footsteps moving closer to her room and she finds herself holding her breath. But he passes her door without missing a beat, walking into the study. After a brief moment of convincing herself that it isn’t disappointment that she’s feeling, she hears small ruckus , the sounds of hauling from the other room. He groans slightly, as if he’s carrying something heavy, which is followed by a careful thud of whatever it is he put on his desk. Mechanical noises follow, complicated fiddling sounds like he’s working through a steam-era machine. After a few minutes, she hears the unmistakable sound of a typewriter.
Unable to suppress rolling her eyes, she wants to storm into the study and say something snarky. But as he gets into the rhythm of typing, all the other sounds fade into the background. She relaxes onto the bed, and after a few minutes, falls asleep to his punctuated words imprinting on paper.
When she wakes up again, it’s a bit past lunch and Dan is still typing. She wonders if he’s eaten but when she walks to the kitchen, there’s a note on the table: sandwich in the fridge, tell me if you want take-out. She doesn’t cherish the idea of having to microwave her food, but with the steady sound of his typing, she has the feeling that what Dan is working on isn’t an article or a poem. She doesn’t want to disturb him.
Serena said that she could work at her table, but she takes her laptop from the room and sets it on the kitchen island. The plate with the sandwich sits in front of her as she works steadily through her emails.
It’s quiet when Serena is not there, just the sound of their fingers hitting the keyboard filling the house. But she settles into it quickly, easily. She tries not to think about how it’s the most at ease she’s felt in a long time.
The sun is setting when Dan emerges from the room and catches her stretched out on the couch with her laptop on her stomach. She looks at him for a second before turning back to the screen where she had been reading through the readmission process for Columbia.
He seems a little worse for wear, having worked for hours, but his eyes are soft on the edges, and he’s looking at her with that half-smile that has always affected her more than it should.
“You’re game for a movie, Waldorf?”
She pauses. No, it hasn’t been long since someone’s called her that.
They skip over niceties and spend an hour arguing on whether to watch Citizen Kane or Sabrina. He orders them a pizza and they settle on Rebecca.
When they reach the end of the movie, she watches as Manderly burns to the ground. Mrs. Danvers lets the fire consume her, a performance of loyalty to a deceitful ghost. She feels something well up in her chest. Inexplicably, she thinks, that could have been me.
Dan pulls her to his chest like it’s something he’s too used to doing. And she remembers that that may be true, once upon a time: leaned up against him on the couch, her legs tucked in under her. She doesn’t want to acknowledge her tears, but she presses her face against his shirt, anyway. It’s a little embarrassing, how she can’t quite pinpoint the exact reason for her crying, so she has no explanation to offer him, how they’re going to have to sit through this moment. But it doesn’t seem like he’ll ask. Not yet, anyway.
He’s warm. She thinks about Serena, probably already settled in Italy. She understands why she’s with Dan, even if her wings itch and he makes no effort keep her pinned down, to keep her his. She gets why she’d never let go of him if there was no one to take him away.
She kisses him that night, not even bothering to wipe away her tears. Guilt is a black hole and she’s always been good at dragging Dan down with her.
--
Dan makes the mistake of insisting they watch L’Avventura after a tiring day of work, something that involved more talking about his portfolio than actual writing. He wants to watch a film where nothing really happens, where he can stare at the long, droning shots and grapple with existentialism and things bigger than words on paper. In his opinion, it’s a triumph of film making: a type of storytelling that can’t really exist in any other medium, that’s more than enough reason to watch it.
Serena and Blair look at each other before agreeing that he has the hots for Monica Vitti. And, well.
He realizes midway through the movie that there’s a reason why the title has been floating around his subconscious. When the film reveals itself to be about some odd love triangle, he shifts uncomfortably, and he thinks Blair does the same. They’re both on the couch, seated one Serena apart.
Usually at this point, Serena will state loudly that she’s bored and try to get them to start some sort of drinking game. But when Dan turns to her, she looks surprisingly immersed with the film, her mind doing whatever it is that Dan’s planned to do when he suggested it.
I keep expecting these movies to be pretentious drivel, but I can’t help but be moved by the humanity of it all!
She texted that to him once when they teenagers, just started dating. Back when they were trying to impress each other.
Sometimes he forgets how clever she is.
--
Because it’s easy to slip into old habits, Blair takes up Serena’s offer to day drink and gossip in her backyard. Dan is out for the day, engaged in a meeting with his agents. In the tastefully minimalist garden, Blair wonders if it’s a book deal, although she feels a little incised that he hasn’t shown her new work, not even mentioning those typewritten pages that consumes his days.
Serena clarifies that there’s another attempt on the cinematic adaptation of Inside and Dan’s away to meet the producers.
“Is that a good idea, S?” Blair asks. “Considering you’re married now.”
Serena laughs. The sparkling wine spilling over her flute.
“It’s fine, B!” She reassures her easily, “I feel so far away from whoever it was that Dan wrote into that book.”
Blair pauses, struck. There were many times in her life, in the arms of Chuck, in the midst of trying to manage a company, that she wished she was still the person in that book.
…and that’s too bad, if you could only see what I see.
She swallows those thoughts along with her drink and asks Serena for a refill.
They chat well into the afternoon, talking about their careers and being at odds with their parents, how that never goes away. How Eleanor wonders why Blair can’t keep it together, and how Lily thinks that Serena doesn’t have a single clue how to.
They reminisce about their childhood, about roleplaying with silks they stole from Eleanor's studio, and say, I can’t believe we’re married as if there aren’t big asterisks on both of their relationships.
Blair’s phone makes a sound that cuts through the air and in the world where Gossip Girl exists, there isn’t enough decorum in the universe that can stop someone from looking at a blast, mid-conversation.
It’s a picture of Serena, ever the protagonist, in another European beach, in the arms of someone tall and dark and with a perfect, toothy smile. Blair looks up and notices the tan line peeking through Serena’s dress strap, the slight burn on her nose. She just got back, she hasn’t even unpacked, her suitcase tipped over by the door. Serena takes a moment longer, looking at the screen before meeting Blair’s gaze.
Blair doesn’t know what face she’s making but it makes Serena look back down onto her hands.
“I just,” Serena sighs. “I meet people and they’re all so beautiful, and lovely, and fun.”
If Blair had been her best friend all these years, she’d understand easily. She’d recognize that this might be the best set-up for a married Serena. To have all this and that pining boy that knows her better than anyone, keeping her bed warm and her home safe so she always has a place to fly back to.
But they haven’t been best friends. What they have is this tenuous reconciliation that’s as rocky as it is liberating. And Blair has been sleeping with that beautiful pining boy under Serena’s roof and spends the nights when Serena is away tracing the line of his sleeping jaw with her finger until it unclenches, until he absentmindedly pulls her closer to him.
“Aren’t you just running away?” she questions, her heart starting to race, the way it does when she’s bluffing. She knows that Serena has all the leverage, holds all the cards even though there’s only one she needs to pull to unravel everything.
“That makes the two of us,” Serena says pointedly, and Blair remembers that there’s this side of Serena, too. It’s always been there, the one who plays her games the best.
“Dan... does he want—he isn’t like—”
“Don’t tell me about my husband and I won’t tell you about yours.”
Blair’s face falls and Serena softens, biting her lip. It goes like that: no one is really allowed to hurt them except each other. Because first loves never die.
“I’m sorry—that’s not—It works, B.” Serena says, giving in. “For me. It’s what I want.”
“What about Dan?”
“I think we both know what he wants.”
There it is.
“Do you want me to go home?” Blair asks, softly.
Serena doesn’t hesitate to grab her arm. Blair remembers that drunken night on the balcony, how Serena saw that cut on the inside of her arm, right where her elbow bends. It was too fresh and tender to cover up with a concealer, she opted for sheer sleeves draping loosely on her dress.
She doesn’t remember exactly how much she said about anger issues and accusations and broken glasses and mirrors and vases. But she remembers, her mouth slurring, but he never, ever, touched me.
“No,” Serena says, her voice a little bit alarmed. “Your home is with me.”
She can’t help but fuck Serena’s husband under the roof of that home while her mind races: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
There are a million things to apologize to each other for. It feels like they could do it for the rest of their lives.
--
Chuck never stops leaving her messages.
--
Dan doesn’t say anything as she deletes the voicemails from her phone first thing in the morning, when she thinks he’s still asleep. He doesn’t say anything, but he finds it hard to believe, that Chuck and his army of private investigators wouldn’t know where Blair is at that moment. But still, Chuck makes a show of going around Europe, looking for his wife in between business deals and openings of new hotels. He has this specific skill of making things look grand and romantic, Dan is almost jealous. Gossip Girl keeps track of him better than any investigator can.
Three days into Serena’s trip to the Maldives, the blast comes. He doesn’t receive updates anymore, but he does know what that alert sounds like. Serena has it installed on her phone. He doesn’t hold it against her as much as Serena probably expects him to, keeping the notifications silent and the scrolling a secret. He gets it, in the same way he knows what the notification sounds like. The same way that one can’t simply pass by a full-length mirror without taking pause, checking for that unflattering angle.
They aren’t the main draw anymore, New York has an endless supply of dramatic socialites, but the “legacy” tab still holds their names in hyperlink and Serena’s exploits won’t ever stop being a Gossip Girl staple, her coverage a perpetual love letter to New York’s golden girl.
“It doesn’t bother you,” Blair says. Dan doesn’t have to check what she’s looking at, suddenly dropping silent in the middle of Spoorloos. Not that it’s a film that requires much commentary. There are nights that are perfect for movies like this: straightforward and terrifying. He turns to her, catching a flash of blonde on the phone screen.
He simply shrugs, an action he’s learned in the years after Inside, realizing that there might be such a thing as too many words. He knows he’s said enough to implode his life a number of times. He can tell Blair doesn’t particularly take to it, though, the times he’s opted for silence. She bristles at it, always expecting a fight. But he’s been good at swallowing his words, his anger. She doesn’t know what to do with that.
“I didn’t think you’d actually make a career being her doormat,” she says, the first small explosion since she’s settled in their house. “Don’t be a fool.”
“Blair,” he says, tired. This is what he and Serena have: consolation prizes with a dash of true love. He expects, maybe unkindly, that Blair, of all people, understands that. He tells her something to that effect.
Blair recoils. He frowns. Maybe Blair hates his silence, but he hates how easily he can hurt her now, remembering the days she’d tear him down before he can even form a single sentence. Sometimes it feels like something broke in her, that motor that runs her biting, quick wit. He knows what that feels like, it's difficult to return to that smooth banter when they're both plagued with tender spots.
Dan feels compelled to apologize, hates remembering that he can be cruel like that. But he lets the silence run, willing themselves to sit through this.
They keep hurting each other somehow. Still.
“You don’t deserve that,” Blair says, after a while. It surprises them both.
Dan shifts, and with some hesitation, “then tell me what I deserve, Blair.”
Blair looks up at him, eyes searching, and he thinks they don’t understand each other anymore.
But then Blair kisses him with enough force to push him back onto the couch and he can’t help but return the fervor. He immediately tangles one hand in her hair while the other guides her by the hip until she’s straddling him. He knows they can so easily fall into that trap again of letting lust take over, of letting misunderstandings pile up and sate the more carnal longing inside. And Dan would let her, would let her lead him around in circles until he’s blistered his feet chasing after her.
But Blair pulls back, keeping her hands on either side of his face, and looks directly at him.
“Someone who stays.”
He feels a bit winded at her words, like getting hit when you thought you had all your defenses up. He didn’t think that he had so many openings left for her, still. His mouth opens and closes a few times as he lets his arms drop to his sides.
“Nobody stays,” he eventually tells her. It’s a universal truth that he’s accepted. His eagerness to plant his feet somewhere, to grow roots in someone, turn them into a home, is always in contention with the world around him: a mother who leaves, a father who tries to bury that itch to go on tour and chase after love, a sister he must let go so she can rule the world. Serena, whom Dan doesn’t have the heart to stifle anymore.
“I would,” she says and can feel her hands shaking slightly. “It’s what I do.”
He pauses for a bit then shakes his head because he can’t help but think of the man she did all that staying for. She looks back at him, confused and guarded. He reaches for her shoulder first, to stop her from running, then slides down his hand until its at the bend of her elbow. His thumb presses at her pulse point. He thinks about what Serena told him the night of that party; what Blair showed her on the balcony—that raw gash.
“No, Blair, you didn’t stay,” he says, tracing the non-existent scar. “You got away. And it’s the best thing you ever did. Your future is wide open.”
She opens her mouth to say something but she stops, seemingly in the middle of a thought, and just kisses him again, running her tongue inside his mouth as her fingers curl on his hair, pulling at his scalp. The sensation causes him to jolt his hip upwards involuntarily, the sting making him moan against her lips. He dips his head, kissing down her neck and scrambling to get her top up over her head.
He leans back to look at her body, feeling his erection twitch at the sight of the lace of her black bra against her pale skin. When he reaches behind her, she jumps a little when his fingers trace her ribs. He unhooks her bra and carefully guides the garment to the floor.
“You’re so beautiful,” he sighs, feeling a little lightheaded.
Before he could move to touch her, Blair bites her lip and pulls him close, embracing him until his head is settled on her bare chest, his ear pressing on her sternum. He listens to her frantic heartbeat, letting it resonate in him. He wraps his arms around her, vaguely aware that he might crush her if he squeezes any tighter. He wonders if there’s a way to bring them even closer, more than their skin melting together. He thinks about how he’s never stopped wishing for that, always daydreaming of a world where time stopped in that loft he grew up in, planning a summer in Rome. He didn’t care about Italy or Chuck or what will come to pass, he just wished that he had known that that would be the last time.
Except it wasn’t the last time.
The mounting pressure in his pants starts to become unbearable but he steadies himself, breathing slowly as he waits for her cue.
“I love you,” she whispers.
Another sucker punch. He feels the oxygen completely run out of the room.
When he tries to look up at her, she tightens her hold on him, keeping his head in place. “Don’t- Let me, Dan—”
He nods slowly and focuses instead on her heart beating, a mile a minute. Like it’s trying to break out of her ribcage. He can feel his own trying to do the same.
“I love you. I’ve loved you all these years and I didn’t even know,” she says in a hush. “And when I did, I didn’t know what to do with it.”
Dan wants so badly to see her face in this moment, to know the shape her lips make when they finally spoke those words. Instead, he rubs at her back tenderly, trying to ease her tense muscles with his shaky hands.
“What do you want, Blair?” he asks.
Blair finally loosens her grip on him and he slowly leans back to see her face. She looks flushed and torn and on the verge of crying-- he has a sinking feeling he knows why. He kisses her, as softly as he can with his frantic thoughts.
She takes his hands, and slides them up her thighs, under her skirt. She lets him move closer to her center, the heat between them becoming unbearable. With some maneuvering, he slides her panties out of the way, head too full of static to try to remove them completely. Dan groans when he feels her dripping onto his fingers. Blair rushes to kiss him, as if to swallow the noises he makes. When he enters her, two fingers deep, she makes a sound that will ring in his ears forever.
He continues to work through her, cherishing the pain when her nails start to dig at his shoulders. He wants to tell her how she feels so wet and warm around him, how he can feel her tighten when the pads of his fingers graze that spot inside her. Angling his hand, he uses his thumb to press on her clit, swiping at her in rhythm with his index and middle finger. Blair’s mouth moves sloppily against his and he tries to drown in it, the strangled whimpers, the soft curses, the echoes of I love you.
Right before she comes, he adds another finger inside her and she stiffens up against him for a second, all muscles tensing before coming apart completely. Her legs shake, squeezing his thighs, and he works through her orgasm before she goes limp against him, head resting on his shoulder, expletives against his ear as his fingers feel the waves of a residual pleasure.
Blair has always been intoxicating, in the way luxurious things are, in the way that he suspected things he was never allowed to taste would be. When he takes his fingers, covered in her, into his mouth, he wonders if heaven could ever be like this. She watches him, half-dazed and half-mortified.
“What do you want, Blair?” he asks again. What do you want? I’ll give it to you right now.
“I want…” she starts, and in his mind, he begs for something drastic, anything and everything, we could leave it all behind. “I want you inside me.”
His body moves faster than his mind. Their fingers burn when they brush against each other, both rushing to unzip his pants.
“You aren’t angry anymore,” Blair tells him. Her hand on his face, tracing his jawline, his cheekbones. It startles him awake, his heart ringing in his ears, the ghost of a dream disappearing from his consciousness, two lights in a dark space. They’re on the floor of the living room, beside the couch, stretched out on the rug with a blanket covering them haphazardly, something he half-remembers taking from the armchair. The only light is from the television showing a loop of the DVD menu.
She doesn’t react to his wakefulness, still working through his features with the edges of her fingers. He wonders if she does this often. If she’s done it the whole time. Before this, before letting her in this home, during those angry encounters where he often woke up alone.
Back then, he would gather his things in a huff, bitterness refueled, and assumed Blair left as soon as she could, not even sparing him a look as she ran back to her ivory tower.
But now he blinks up at her, her hand startlingly gentle but familiar. She navigates his face like she’s known it all her life.
“Do you always do this?” His hand catches the one that’s caressing him by the temple, her thumb resting between his eyebrows, smoothing out the crease. He pulls her hand to his lips, kissing it once, then presses it against his chest. She opens her palm flat against his skin and he becomes acutely aware of his unsteady heartbeat, coming down from a vivid dream that’s been pushed out of his mind.
“You aren’t angry anymore,” she repeats, ignoring his inquiry. “You—you seemed so angry, around me. All the times we—but then suddenly you weren’t anymore. I thought—I was worried you had given up.”
Dan frowns, not yet understanding what she means. Her open hand curls slightly around his chest. He thinks of her grasping at his heart.
“Oh,” he says, as it slowly dawns on him. He thinks about all those poems he wrote, hopeless and violent. Not very rage, rage against the dying of the light. He shakes his head again, it’s not that.
He wants to tell her what he felt when he saw them on the balcony, her and Serena. It’s a bad habit, a white knight syndrome. He had resigned himself to such a bleak fate, which he found isn’t quite uncommon in the Upper East Side. But when he saw them, the only two girls he’s ever really loved besides family, tucked inside his jacket, clinging to each other and their love in the bloodthirsty world they’ve lived in since they were kids, he felt a feeling akin to hope. A hope that he could do something for them.
But that isn’t the complete truth.
“I am, still— Angry, I mean. At myself mostly.” He confesses, he’s full of regret. At the things he did and the things he didn’t do. He confused himself a lot of the times, teetering between an outsider and the ultimate insider. He let those conflicting identities dictate so much of his life that he finds that he's grown but hasn’t quite figured anything out.
“Towards me? Are you angry?”
He shakes his head. Not anymore.
It would be embarrassing, maybe, if he’s a little more awake, how much his heart is racing, how hot Blair’s hands feels on his chest. There’s nowhere to hide, she’s holding his heart.
“Just in love. Like I’ve always been.”
Three weeks later, Serena disappears.
--
Don’t look for me.
-S
B, this is your chance.
Blair’s thoughts are replaced by a high-pitched frequency. It’s been three days since Serena left for Malta and there hasn’t been a text, no Gossip Girl blast, no postcard. She’d been caught up in her own life: divorce proceedings well underway, catching up on work that requires her physical presence, secretly preparing for her return to Columbia.
There’s no need to hide anymore, she’s been spotted. But under Serena’s protection, there’s little even Chuck Bass can do. There hasn't been any talks of her moving out.
She paces a bit on the floor, finding the note inside a Breakfast at Tiffany’s DVD case, letterheaded with Waldorf Designs. Serena had meant for her to find it on a Sunday.
She takes a deep breath and reaches for her phone, scrolling through her recent calls list to find Dan’s name at the top. They talked twenty minutes ago as she barked orders at him to not cheap out on the Prosecco because she wants to make Bellinis if he’s going to take control of the kitchen again for brunch. She was smiling when she ended the call. It’s all terribly domestic in the way that makes her so happy it twists her guts.
She stares at the screen for an extra second before calling. The ringing is almost deafening in her ears and right before he picks up, she rips the bottom of the note, taking the post-script with her.
A few nights before she left, Serena slept in the guest room with Blair. Dan wasn’t home, visiting his mom in Hudson. Serena had planned to come with but decided not to join—with no complaints from Dan as he didn’t want Blair to be on her own, too, antsy and suspicious of Chuck waiting for her to be alone before breaking in.
Blair wonders if Serena already planned it then or it was an impulse in the morning. She didn’t even hear her leave.
That night, they faced each other on the bed like they had many times before. A position assumed from being raised on sleepovers in Blair’s deep-blue room. Their legs tangled up with each other, confessing their biggest secrets in hushed voices.
I really love Nate.
I think dad isn’t going to come back.
They weren’t talking about anything dangerous, laughing easily as Serena recounts every petty drama that went on in the galas Blair hasn’t been able to attend. They were discussing whether it was time to corner Dan for a haircut when Serena leaned over and kissed her on the lips.
“Wow, we haven’t done that since high school.”
Serena laughed, taking Blair’s hands into her own. Slotting their fingers together, adding to the points in which they were connected. Tethered hearts forever.
“How did we ever let those silly boys get between us, B?”
Now it was Blair’s turn to laugh, and she followed the urge to kiss Serena back. Slow and languid, coconut mango shampoo filling her senses. She felt just a little bit dizzy afterwards.
Serena was still smiling at her when she pulled away and Blair bit her lower lip.
“But Dan isn’t just a boy to you, is he?”
“He isn’t,” Serena answered and after considering, “He’s family.”
Blair scrunched her nose and almost scoffed, thinking, I don’t think you’re allowed to make those jokes, S. But then she remembered.
“You are. You’re married.”
Serena nodded, playing with their fingers.
Then, too late to be an afterthought, Blair added quietly, “I don’t know how to take him from you.”
Serena’s body went rigid for a moment, but she didn’t let go. Blair felt tears form in her eyes, but she willed them dry, knowing she didn’t want to cry about this. She didn’t have the right to, not when she had chosen to open the floor, to be the worst person in the room.
It was a few agonizing seconds before Serena spoke again.
“I couldn’t, too. Take him from you.”
She worries that Dan will kick her out, kindly, of course. She imagines he’ll tell her that they can’t move forward like this. She isn’t deluded to think that this is their happy ending, that they’ll live together in this house, breakfast food on the table, Serena out of sight, out of mind. That Chuck will stop calling.
She thinks of that night and finds that guilt that’s been steadily eating at her all her life, still finding something to scrape at the pit of her stomach.
Dan arrives home in a rush and stares at the note a little too long for comfort. When he runs his finger on the ripped edge at the bottom of the paper, Blair feels like her heart is going to leap out of her chest.
He soon calls Lily, asking for a list of every single one of CeCe’s properties all over the world, and if any, which Rhodes relative is staying there. Blair thinks this is it, it’s her turn now. She’ll have to watch Dan turn his back on her as he travels all over the world chasing after his true love and she’ll be left wanting. Her knuckles turn white as Dan holds the phone at the crook of his neck, his hands writing furiously on his leather-bound notebook.
But after the call, Dan turns to her and gives her that lopsided grin. She wants to scold him, there is a certain level of decorum expected of those in the Upper East Side whose wives run out on them.
Blair remembers that she’s an Upper East Side wife that ran out on her husband.
“So,” Dan starts, still grinning. “How are your finances?”
Blair gives him a look.
He laughs, tipping his head back slightly.
“Okay, then let’s go Waldorf.”
On the flight to Athens, where they’ll catch a connecting to Mykonos, she thinks back at that last sleepover. How she and Serena followed each confession with a kiss.
“He was the first boy I really fell in love with,” Serena said as they were falling asleep. Blair almost didn’t catch it. “The first boy to ever break my heart.”
“I didn’t know you could feel that way,” Blair confessed. “Before Dan, I didn’t know that someone could break your heart like that.”
Serena frowned. Moving closer, she pulled the duvet up their shoulders.
“Don’t be ridiculous, B. You were my first heartbreak.”
Blair stared at Serena in the dark, a bit stunned. They’ve been together since they were children.
“I guess you were mine, too.”
--
Chuck doesn’t stop calling. Every now and then, she makes the mistake of listening to a voicemail.
Blair, this little game of yours—
She deletes the message.
--
“It was like this, when I started to fall in love with you,” Dan says, looking out onto the Aegean Sea. He taps his pen idly onto the notebook page.
When he turns to Blair, she looks up from the book that she’s reading: Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami. It’s on his suggestion, plucking it from his bookshelf right before they left, but now the narrative feels too on the nose.
“We’ve never been to Greece,” she says, holding her page with a delicate finger. She sounds pleased and a bit shy.
“No, I mean, when we do something like this” he lifts the notebook up, the names of people and places on the list now with lines running through them. He just finished calling some cousin who laid anchor in Amagansett for the time being, swearing Serena wasn’t there (I don’t think we’ve been in the same room since we were in diapers. But congrats on marrying her uh—Daniel.) “Like that road trip to Connecticut. Or when we brought Georgina’s parents to New York.”
“You first scheme” she teases. He almost misses the slight blush on her cheeks. She sits up on the bed and dog-ears his book before closing it. She has little reverence for his things and he likes it that way—the creases on his books, the red edits on his drafts, lipstick marks on his collar. “Of course you did, you always love being told what to do.”
The wind blows in through the large windows and it lifts the bottom of Blair’s white sundress, causing it to hike up her thigh. She doesn’t make a move to fix it and he doesn’t hide the way he stares.
Dan coughs. “I guess I do.”
Blair smiles, “Come here.”
He almost trips over himself.
“I’m not so sure about you falling in love with me,” Blair says, her dress long discarded on the floor along with the rest of their clothes. The sun is setting, casting the room in a warm orange light. It takes him a minute to figure out what she's talking about, mind still in a haze from pleasure. “If I recall correctly, you were very much in love with Serena back then.”
He blinks a few times, instinctively tightening his hold on Blair who’s head is resting on his bare chest, her body warm and pressed up against his side. It used to be that Serena’s golden thread was the only thing that bound them together, before the tendrils of movie dates and museum walkthroughs set their roots in them. But he couldn’t articulate it then, what it meant to have a love that only one other person in the world understands. They sought each other out in those moments, the only people who are willing to go that far, to give themselves up for that bright, blinding smile.
He remembers telling Serena that one of the reasons he fell in love with her is the friendship she had with Blair. He didn’t expect that it would also work the other way around.
“I think that’s a part of it.”
--
When he reads her Sappho, she scoffs at him, saying she doesn’t need another man telling her about Sappho. She’s already read fucking Franny & Zooey.
He seems to take genuine offense to that. She smiles at him brightly.
When she sings him Abba, two glasses of wine in, he laughs and sings along.
They swim naked on the beach exactly once and they chase after boats to different islands where the locals say a beautiful, blonde American with a bright smile passed through. They never find Serena in those quaint village clusters and Blair begins to think that they’re just being humored or sent on wild goose chases. They spend more days in the water.
“You know, the more of CeCe’s properties I look through, the more I realize that all of you really are the problem.”
They’re back on the beach, waist-deep in the water. They’re leaving tomorrow.
“Oh please, that’s your grandmother-in-law,” she argues, rolling her eyes. Then, to add, just to be mean. “slash-step-grandmother.”
Dan crinkles his nose.
“In terms of succession rights, I think Scott has me beat.”
Blair lets out a surprised laugh. And, just to be mean, splashes water at him. He chases after her, closing that short distance before grabbing her by the waist and pulling her against him. When they face each other, he shakes his damp head, sending water droplets flying at her.
“You dog!” She squeals.
“Now this is how I get my money’s worth out of this trip.”
She stops pretending to escape his grasp, but she doesn’t let him kiss her yet. He pouts a little, his lower lip jutting out, and she finds it terribly endearing.
“Nobody told you to spend your advance here.” She wants to run her hands through his wet hair.
“This is work,” he says.
Blair rolls her eyes at him. She had to stop him from bringing his typewriter.
“Tell that to my mother.”
Eleanor Waldorf was predictably unimpressed with Blair’s plans to leave the company to finish an art studies degree in Columbia. It was over a video call but even Dan, from the corner of the room, makes a face at that palpable disappointment that emanated from Eleanor.
In the middle of it, she was struck by how often Dan had helped through those crises involving her mother. She remembered a scene, a lifetime ago, of them sitting on the floor of a hallway, their first real conversation (she thinks that's the first of it: outside of time, outside of space). It's a mystery how easily she opens her heart up to him, especially when she doesn't mean to-- and she never means to.
It didn’t make the scolding easier, however, sitting still like a child in front of her laptop. It's always embarrassing to have a witness, even if it was Dan. But near the end, Eleanor asked, and about Charles, are you still ignoring his calls?
Of course, mother.
Good. She almost sounded proud.
Dan and Blair didn’t stick long enough to find out how she’d take it when she discovers Blair delayed her readmission for a semester to frolic the European countryside with Dan Humphrey.
But it’s a page out of Serena’s book: eschew responsibilities and get on the earliest flight to somewhere sunny. And kiss a cute boy, Blair notes to herself.
Dan licks the saltwater from Blair’s collarbone and let his curls flop onto his forehead. She gives in and kisses him sweetly on the lips, pushing his hair away from his face. He smiles and she thinks he’s obscenely handsome in the sunlight. They don’t often see each other like this; she usually thinks of him in fall colors and dark rooms, hiding from the world.
But in white hot Greece, he gets a bit of a tan and a blush on his cheeks, and he looks at her like she’s brand new. He looks at her like with that terrifying love and she can’t help but think, mine.
And when the guilt sinks in her stomach, Dan holds her tenderly.
“We’ll find Serena,” he says, voice low and soothing. “We have so much to tell her.”
Blair finishes the Murakami book and makes Dan read the last page out loud.
“We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line,” he recites. She lets his voice lull her to sleep. “All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.”
--
When Gossip Girl posts a picture of them in Granada, kissing in the middle of a vineyard, the calls from Chuck stop coming.
Cruel to the end, so you can hate me forever.
--
In Spain, she finds Dan’s manuscript.
Peeking out of his suitcase, it’s shameful how it comes as second nature to her. To pluck a secret from him and devour what she can before he even notices. He just left, saying he was going to the mercado—practicing his rolling Rs— to put together a charcuterie board for the many wines she purchased at the vineyard.
She told him that he wouldn’t know the nuances of a good wine pairing. He threatened to bring back Rold Gold.
She scans through the pages as fast as she could, convincing herself she didn’t plan this from the start, that she didn’t implant the idea of a charcuterie board and a movie night in Dan’s mind so she would have time to snoop through his things. It’s so easy to slip into old habits.
It’s an old work. Old in that it was from before their trip, written on his typewriter. The one he never showed her, even though the sound of his keys filled many of their quiet, cozy afternoons. Even though the idea of him being in the other room, steady and present, and just there, made her feel the safest she’s ever felt in years.
Song to the Siren
By Daniel Humphrey
When she reads it, she remembers the night the three of them watched L’Avventura.
The novella is about a man who chases after a beautiful ghost that appears in recurring dreams. He half-believes that his dreams were leading him to a specific location in which he would find the ghost and another half of him just wanted to escape the tragedy of his life. In his quest to find the ghost, he meets a woman who claims that the ghost he was describing was a very vivid imaginary friend she had while growing up.
They don’t get along, for most of the pages, even as they decide to work together and find this ghost. But, sure enough, they fall in love.
Blair speeds through the book but reads the last few pages several times, not knowing whether she wants to cry or throw up.
Only because she realizes that she isn’t the first person to read the draft. Stapled on the last page is a piece of paper, the Waldorf Designs letterhead familiar and daunting:
Consider this an apology. Love you always.
-Serena
“That isn’t the title.”
Blair jumps, dropping the manuscript.
“Huh?” she says, unable to form words in her shock. She sees him shut the door with his foot while he balances two bags of produce, deli items, and cheese in his arms.
“That isn’t the final title, that’s just a place holder,” he says in a tone she can’t quite decipher; he drops the bags onto the kitchen table. “You know, the Tim Buckley song.”
“Oh,” she says lamely.
Dan walks over to where Blair is and picks up the papers. He sets it down on the coffee table before sitting on the couch. She stands awkwardly for a few seconds, the feeling of getting caught still reflecting on her heart rate, the distinct ringing in her ears. In her head, she runs through a litany of excuses, including the few that she practiced when she was hatching this plan. None of them seemed fitting.
“I’m sorry,” she says instead.
Dan opens and closes his mouth, looking surprised, and she realizes he was waiting for her to get mad at him.
“No—Blair, it’s— no. Blair, it’s okay,” he stutters through, scratching the back of his head. He looks at her again, steady, and she thinks it must be obvious, how she’s so tightly wound. He reaches for her hand, and she lets him take it, feels him squeeze her fingers a few times before guiding her onto the couch. In a fit of nerves, she sits on his lap which causes him to let out a surprised chuckle. She relaxes, letting his low voice cut through the ringing in her ears, and circles her arms around his neck. “I was going to show you, eventually. I brought it with me for a reason.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because… I thought if I showed you,” he starts, and she can see her anxiety reflecting back onto him. She doesn’t think he’s cognizant of how his hands instinctively wrap around her waist, pulling her close. “You’ll find out that it was my fault.”
Blair looks away from him and thinks of that piece of paper she stuck inside her wallet. B, this is your chance. Something burns in her. She brought it with her for a reason, too.
After a bit too long, long enough that he started twiddling his thumbs by her hips, she shakes her head.
“It’s not your fault, Dan. How could it be your fault?”
He stays quiet for a moment.
“There are many ways to turn yourself into a ghost,” he says.
She bites her tongue, stopping her instinct to tell him that quoting yourself is dreadfully gauche. She lets it go, resting her head on his shoulder, instead.
“I didn’t understand the ending,” Blair tells him. He hums in response. “Was the ghost real or not?”
The novella ended in a series of plot twists with the protagonist devolving into an unreliable narrator. The man finds out that the woman has been lying to him the entire time: the ghost wasn’t an imaginary friend but a real childhood friend. He discovers this when he stumbles upon an old photo of the two girls.
But then he recognizes their uniform and finds out that they all attended the same school, the setting of his traumatic adolescence. He struggles with this knowledge, that he knew them both, had grown up with them, and he’s bombarded with images of their shared memories. It’s described in great detail how he can’t keep his story straight, the names and faces of the ghost and the woman swapping in his memories. It becomes unclear what’s reality and what isn’t.
The story ends with them finding the location in his dreams: a clearing in the middle of a forest, an open field full of white flowers. But they find that it’s only the woman that’s allowed to enter the area. He watches them from the outskirts, the two girls happily reunited, and they smile at one another, never looking back at him.
“I… I don’t know yet,” he admits sheepishly.
Blair hums. “I told you being too abstract is a cop-out.”
He laughs, his body relaxing. She likes him like this, so close to her she doesn’t have to guess what he’s feeling. She moves in to kiss him, his lower lip chapped from that habit of chewing it, but she finds it tender all the same. When they part, he looks at her with those eyes again.
“I just wanted to give the both of you a good ending,” he says. Dropping the pretense that the story is about anything else.
Blair frowns.
“You deserve one, too.”
He smiles lazily, like he doesn’t fully believe her. At times like these, she wants to scold him. All that pining, all that self-sacrifice, and hurting, where did that get him?
In your arms, he would probably say.
She sees the three of them scrambling around, trying to figure it all out, maybe in a field of white flowers. They could do that for the rest of their lives, she thinks, the future is wide open. But she knows they can’t really begin until they’re back in New York with Serena.
For now, they’re in a time outside of time, a space outside of space.
So she kisses him until he’s breathless, until the stars that cross them burn out into nothing.