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watching the chemtrails over the country club
Blair peels off an eyelash. It lays in the middle of her white vanity, bottles of perfumes and foundations and cleansers all clumped together in neat piles out of the way. There are only so many hours in a day, and she's wasted them all already. It smells like an orchid, there's dying roses sitting high on her dresser. In the mirror, her eye blinks brown, a glittery gold mess painted upon the lid, a smudged wing trailing down her cheekbone. He had tasted like expensive whiskey when she had kissed him, her palms pressed hard against his chest, his back against the wall. A knot of pearls dangle from her throat.
In the bathroom she hears her husband on the phone, a business deal. In the baby monitor, she hears her son cry.
She touches the pad of her fingers to her lips, a faded pink that she wipes off with a clean cloth. He mustn't think much of her anymore. Her diamond glistens in the mirror as she reaches for the other eyelash. He had smelt faintly like an old library.
Blair is sixteen in the middle of the van der Bilt manor, a ticket to her future stuffed in her mouth and an heirloom diamond falling off her finger. It is summertime when she sings for them, bending under their commands to get into their good graces. He tells her it doesn't matter, a mouth full of weed. Her fingers bleed as she sits with the older ladies learning to crochet, they sit and sweat and bitch until their voices go coarse. Blair blends easily into their family roster, well-versed in the age of manners and grace they expect from a future in law. On her knees in the bathroom, on her knees in his bedroom. She knows how to be a bit of everything.
He wasn't the one, and practice doesn't make perfect when you don't marry into a legacy.
"Do you love me?" She asks the question over coffee. It spills from her lips, a stray thought toying at her mind made visible out on the table. Serena blinks in surprise. A long forgotten ritual of Sunday morning croissants and confessions where the question was commonplace. Her best friend is more of a best friend out of necessity than care these days, more of a history than compatibility. Blair wonders if the love would have remained as fierce if they hadn't spent years trading boyfriends like they used to trade lip glosses.
Serena is stiff and polite. "Of course, B." Of course, and of course, I'll love you forever. Pinky promises on playgrounds and pinot noir in parks. Blair blushes pink, ducks her head in embarrassment, insults Serena's coat for equal footing.
"It's really a hideous colour, S. You should know better." Blair swirls the chardonnay around in her glass, sipping lightly as Serena frowns. She's not as golden these days. Her hair is dry, there's a shadow underneath her eyes, she runs a little haggard. She's still getting fucked each night by the boy Blair pretends not to love. "Chuck and I are hosting a gala next month for Huntington's disease. We would love for you to do a little write-up on Nate's blog." The words are laced with venom Serena will detect but not decipher; a write-off of the career she's carved for herself.
Sometimes Blair looks at the two of them and knows that they've ended up exactly where they've always wanted to be. It doesn't mean they have to want any of it anymore.
He leaves a purple bruise at the base of her breast. His nails dig into her upper arms when he fucks her, voice low and languid in her ear. Blair sometimes daydreams sketches in the middle of sex: gushing gauze green skirts, detailed stitches across a pink sweater, bleeding red knee high latex boots. He makes her cum without trying, leaves to take a call. It's not how it used to be, isn't what she imagined it would be.
Blair goes back to school in secret. She studies from her home office, rushing notes in the margins of invoices for her mothers company. There is a bitter taste in her mouth each time someone shows her a new swatch of fabric. Her brain can't see a pattern, but it can see a critique; it can see an image in a magazine spread, but not a model on the runway. She throws her lunch up on a Tuesday after a particularly dreadful day of uninspiring patterns and a morning exam.
There is a line of success measured in her reluctance to begin.
He sees her at a party. The boring kind. Blair is in a design that is not her own, but off the rack at Nordstrom. A slinky, conservative silver number with her hair in a bun, a flute of bubbles fizzing away in her hand. Lily is talking at her about some Greek holiday she's recently been on, exploring the ins and outs of local life. Serena buzzes around in secret, red-stained cheeks and a notebook and a boy, probably, tucked away in a room. Dan should be jealous or angry or curious, but he remains indifferent to the extra curricular affairs she partakes these days; their relationship is of convenience, a hobby they can't let go of.
Chuck is cradling their baby, their six month old son. Dan has never once seen Blair hold him, not even at his own birth. She had curled her lips in distaste when Serena had tried to hand him off to her, her role as doula at her home birth pushing forward. Blair, in blood and sweat, had politely said she was too tired and asked for privacy as she bathed. Dan had lingered a second too long in the room. He stopped making an effort to guess at the nature of their relationship or her mind. He wasn't her first choice, or even her second. He wasn't any choice. He was the leftovers left rotten in the fridge, lingering in case nothing better came along.
He watches her move from Lily through the crowd up the stairs, and on instinct he begins to move. The only moments they've had in private have been sparse since she left him in Rome all alone, but he chases them like a lovesick fool, a dog begging for scraps. She stands in Serena's old room, somber and sweet.
"Do you think I'm a bad person?" She asks, curious. He stands in the doorframe as a stranger, as a friend who has seen every part of her. He has had her stripped bare in his bed and has had coiled tightly in disguise. Blair doesn't know what she's looking for when she asks him. He feels as far away as the other side of the world, an ocean of distance between them. She hasn't spoken to him like this since before, unbridled honesty, just searching for the truth. He lies to her rarely.
He shrugs as he steps forward. "Sometimes, Blair." He thinks of a summer left sweltering, ice-cream melting down the cone. "I think sometimes you do bad things." He thinks of Serena coming home in tears, calling her a bitch and throwing her coat on the couch. "I think you choose to be sometimes, because it's easier for you to show the worst than try for your best."
Blair rolls her eyes on impulse. "Rich, coming from you." Brushes past him like he's stranger, filth on the bottom of her heel. He is nobody; a boy from high school, an estranged boyfriend of an estranged best friend, a loser hiding behind a superiority complex. It's harder to pretend when he catches her wrist with his fingers as she moves past him, stopping her in her tracks. Frowning, "Let go of me, Humphrey." He drops her wrist without waiting even a second, sheepish as he ducks his head in slight shame; a barrier he's crossed, a line overstepped. She wants to push him on the bed, talk to him all night long, let him wear her lipstick off. Their past plays like a film reel before the future she decided on steps into the room, a worried crease between his eyebrows.
He works his way into her line of vision at the beach. Her son is on Chuck's lap, incoherent babble baby speak. Serena coos over him with an old film camera that used to belong to Rufus. Nate is off in the surf, a bead of sweat trailing down his stomach. Humphrey looks at her like she's always wanted to be looked at, and then he looks at her with distaste as he picks up her book. Zadig or Destiny. He flips it over in his hand, loses her place. There are no words exchanged as she roughly reaches back for it. He walks towards her son, sunny disposition and a joke that Serena laughs at; Chuck frowns.
Blair is sixteen when a boy first breaks her heart. He has held it in the palm of his hand since he was twelve years old, and shatters it in her bedroom. On his knees, head buried in her lap. She thinks of a wedding she missed, a girl so golden you wouldn't want to blink and miss her. Champagne, and his tongue inside her mouth. That girl beneath him like she's seen in movies, watched in porn. Moaning and writhing and gripping his arms.
She forgives him, eventually, because it's expected. Family disappointment sticks to your bones like a bad breed.
He meets her by the pier where she asks him for a cigarette that he pretends he doesn't have. "Please," She looks up at him doe-eyed, he slides it wordlessly into her palm. She takes a long drag as the waves crash into the rocks, asks him what he's been reading lately. She's missed his friendship as if there has been a hole in her favourite sweater. Every once in a while you need to pull it out of the back of the wardrobe and see if it's salvageable. He talks to her about a new book from Kiley Reid. She tells herself she's never thought about kissing him again, just to taste if he's still the same. She tells him about a movie she saw that week.
He drags a cigarette out of his pack for himself, slotting it easily between pink lips. He blows smoke easily out into the ocean, she hooks her fingers around her purse. They get into a spat about French philosophers, and her stomach cramps from laughing when they're finished. She critiques the notes he reads from his phone, and he tells her she could be doing so much more. She presses her lips to her cheek after she's stubbed out her smoke; a goodbye, a greeting. Her lips linger, his fingers in her hair. If she moved an inch, she'd never move again. She always used to think he tasted more bitter than sweet, a boy built from coffee grounds, nicotine and New York bagels.
"I'll see you," She says it as a loose promise. He doesn't watch her as she leaves.
In spring it all splinters.
They say the rumours out loud, in the middle of a social scene. A gala, a ball, a charity. Serena is off-shore with a tousled, beach bouyed Nate who has taken himself back to the sea. She imagines them sun-speckled, salt licked. There is a sharp jealous in her belly. An immaturity, a possessive streak she still holds over him. Serena sends her a postcard with all formalities, lacking the warmth from when they were younger. Blair tacks it to the fridge, spins Henry up in the air, cries into an empty bed. Dan calls her late at night, to says he misses her. Blair pretends for a second that it's her that he misses. She tells him to read American Dirt. He says Charade is streaming.
They don't slip until the credits roll. His voice is low on the other end, a soft breathing that lulls Blair into a quiet, sort of safe space. "Did you think you would marry her?"
"Yeah," She can imagine him stretching out against his bed. "Glad I didn't."
Henry grows, and Blair leaves Waldorf Designs behind. She spends a month in France with her father, while Chuck is in Mexico with a business associate whose name she doesn't press for. Serena drops by, meets her in a chic cafe. She wears the Archibald diamond on the wrong hand. Tells her tales of Santorini and Crete and Ibiza. How they fucked in Minorca, the sand slipping inside of her each time Nate did. There are bug-bites on her shoulders, a blossoming bruise on the nape of her neck. She smells like the sea, despite the plane ride over. She smells like heady sex, the back of a bar, like her mothers bottle of Chanel. There are rows of hoops in her ears, rings she picked up from markets on her fingers. Her bag is a frayed tote she bought in Spain where they met Vanessa.
Blair smiles and oohs and aahs. She plays the dutiful role of best friend like she plays the role of wife, mother; detached, removed, engaged, inquisitive. She asks the right questions and smiles at the right times and ignores the crawling envy that is buried in the pit of her stomach. She sips on her espresso, ordering another. Serena tells her she loves her, the way a girl can when she's happy and her best friend is a stranger but she's happy, so every bit of love she's ever felt pours out of her at every moment.
"You glow." Blair tells her, fussing with her napkin. The waiter brings out two chocolate danishes. Serena flips her hair, blonder than it's ever been, behind her sun-kissed shoulder. She looks the way she's always supposed to look: full. There had always been a lingering emptiness that had clung to her cheeks, to the bags under her eyes, a limp kind of movement to her body as she danced around the city as if it was her playground with everything at her disposal. But now she flushes a golden rosy hue, and her eyes shine with no influence, and she speaks as if she has swallowed the sun.
"I'm happy, B." Her hands reach for Blair's across the table, her chipped pink nails curling over Blair's polished, manicured black. For a second they feel so small, tangled together like that. Serena's diamond glinting against Blair's. Two grown women pretending they're still children. Blair wants to pull away for a second, but she latches on as if this is the last time Serena will ever touch her like this. For a while now she's been sensing the end. She's sure this is going to be their goodbye. Her eyes are so blue and stern when they gaze into Blair. "I just want the same for you."
I'm happy. I'm happy. I'm happy.
If she thinks it like a daily mantra, says it as a prayer in front of the mirror. Well. Maybe one day she will be.
Blair smiles, dropping their hands. She picks at her danish, peeling back flaking pieces of pastry. "I'm so happy, S." She swallows the lump in her throat. She wonders if Serena can tell a lie from her lips anymore, wonders if she ever looked hard enough back when. Her defence has always been pretend. Even the best could miss the most visible ache in her voice. "It's about time you were, too."
Humphrey calls her drunk, sometimes.
It's rare. He speaks in riddles over the receiver. She stays silent as her husband snores.
"I don't love you." Blair practices the words in the mirror as she applies concealer to a pimple forming next to the bridge of her nose. He is away, downstairs, somewhere in the house, but not here, not next to her, not right now. Last night he had come home drunk, smelling of sour scotch, his fingers pressing into the flesh of her thigh as he crawled into bed. He had whispered mean, drunk things in her ear and then kissed her sweetly on the mouth this morning. He loves her more than he's ever known how to love anyone, and she loves him the way she's always been taught to love: unconditionally. But she has bruises she can't talk about, and he doesn't like it when she has things of her own.
She puts pink across her lips. She says it again. "I don't love you." But she's not thinking Chuck when she looks in the mirror, and she knows she's not brave enough to sign another set of divorce papers, and the tabloids would have a field day. Henry lets out a short cry from his crib. She knows she'll stay forever. Unhappy and miserable and fading away. Her mother is due to visit any day. She swoops the baby boy up in her arms and stares at him as if he is a stranger, a strange creature she birthed, the strangest mix of DNA. He seems so much sweeter than her and Chuck have ever been.
Dan runs into her at the book store on the corner of the office she works at for Harper's Bazaar. He is pursuing Proust and she gets lost in the self-help section for a second too long. His fingers knock into hers as they reach out for the same book on the Best New Fiction shelf. He laughs, full and bodied, and she wonders what he's had for breakfast that morning. If he smeared honey on his toast and licked his fingers clean, the way he once did when they were dating. It's been so long since she's known anything intimate about him. Blair doesn't think about the past anymore, not if she can help it. She tried her best to rid her mind of all things private she knew about every boy that had ever played a starring role in her life. But seeing Humphrey now, unexpectedly, so far from where she should be seeing him - it draws her back into the thick of it, all those hazy memories she had squandered the moment she had placed Chuck's diamond around her neck like a noose.
"Hey, Waldorf." He says her name easily, a smile and ironic joke. It feels as if he's prodding her with bare fingers against her bare ribs. There is a sickening feeling in her stomach: a sour blend of hate and admiration. She crinkles her nose, primly pulling the first book with a pale pink cover she sees.
"It's Bass, you know that." She hisses.
He moves past her correction and follows her as she moves deeper into the store. "I'm sorry I missed Henry's birthday."
"It was months ago."
"I'm sorry, still." He's reaching out for something - a book, an olive branch, maybe her.
"I'm sorry about Serena." She retorts. He doesn't look crestfallen, not hurt the way she wants him to be.
He smirks. "It was months ago."
Blair reaches the fashion section. She's looking for DV by Diana Vreeland. He's looking at her.
"Don't you have an elsewhere to be?" She crooks an eyebrow, grabs the book she needs and pushes past to the counter. He stays frozen in the fashion section, and she pretends to miss his wave as she leaves the book store. She vows to never come there again.
Blair is sixteen when a boy she doesn't know mends her heart in a way she hadn't told anyone it was broken. Her back is against the wall, her thighs sticking into the ground. It's probably infested with rats, the whole building. He's probably infested with something, too. He speaks to her like she's a close friend and not a bitch who tried to ruin his budding relationship. He doesn't press for answers, either, no prodding into her personal life.
She hates him on principle, but leaves hating him a little less.
Chuck takes her to a charity event. It's the middle of a harsh winter and she has a fur coat draped over her shoulders, a cigarette hanging loosely from her lips atop a balcony. He dances downstairs with a blonde girl- barely scraping twenty, on the payroll at his company. Her lips are a deep, dark red she wants to smear over his skin in a fucking fight. Drag her nails down his back and make him bleed. The sky is starting to pour; piss down with rain that will soak her completely to the bone. Blair doesn't move, trying to light the cigarette in the curve of her hands, with a lighter she found outside.
"Fuck," She cries, dropping the lighter. She kicks it with her heel, watching it skate across the cement. She wonders if the two of them have escaped to fuck yet. She wonders how many people saw them together and pitied her tonight. Was she just the laughing stock of Bass Industries? Of high society? Poor fucking oblivious Blair Bass. Her fingers tremble as she ransacks through her purse, shoulders shaking in the cold. She knows she has to have a lighter or a match buried somewhere deep inside the velvet pouch she had pulled down from her wardrobe tonight. Her fingers run over cases of lipstick and twenty dollar notes and her phone- buzzing with a text, she pulls it from her bag and sneers when she sees his name light up against her screen.
"Humphrey." She bites out, the wind whipping her hair into her mouth.
He mumbles a far-away Blair and she rolls her eyes. Usually, she entertains these little calls: amusement, boredom, a deep desire to escape the marriage she's trapped in- a buried love she has for him, somewhere hidden that she's never confronted. "I don't have the patience for one of your drunk rambling confessions-"
He cuts her off with a snort, "Are you at that fucking leukemia event?" He asks her.
She feels offended on principle, shuffling the phone to her other ear. "Humphrey. Leukeima is a serious disease that affects-"
He cuts her off, again. "I know, I know. It's just that I'm here and well-"
"I'm upstairs. Balcony. Bring a match." She hangs up without another word, shoving her phone back into her bag and pressing her hands around the railing, holding tighter and tighter until her knuckles turn white from lack of blood flow. There's an excited trill that spreads through her stomach. It's from the knowledge that she's about to make a grand mistake. She hasn't made one in a while, hasn't gone loose since her Senior year of high school. Her teeth on her upper row bite through her lower lip until she produces blood, gently chewing away at the skin that peels off.
He's on the balcony mere moments later, lighter in hand. He closes the gap between them in a second. She picks her cigarette up again, places it between her bleeding lips smeared with red lip stain, and waits for him to light it for her. Her pussy throbs when he takes a step closer, her fingers curling around his forearm to balance herself on her heels. He laughs, a little, nervous or self-assured she can't tell.
"Be careful not to fall," He whispers, glancing at her heels and the wet pavement.
"I won't." She promises. Her fingers dig deeper into his skin, pulling his body an inch closer to hers. She feels hot all over.
"Do you want this?" She whispers, barely an octave higher than the rain pounding down on them. Her fingers slipping into his, pulling his hand towards the hem of her dress.
He steps back, unexpectedly. "Not like this."
The next morning word gets out that Serena abandoned Nate in Pico to spread her legs for Carter in Stockholm.
Dan gets drunk most nights to fuck half of Manhattan. Blair knows this from the voicemails he leaves her: guttural groans as he gets himself off, long detailed entries about the friends he takes home, the filthy messages he leaves about what he misses about her. It would be wrong to say it was uninvited, crossing a line- she started it, picking up the phone once she was safely enclosed in the master bathroom, calling him to tell him about everything she wants from him and everything Chuck had given her instead. He tells her at first they're too old to play these games, sick and perverted and cruel - to each other, to him. Blair clutches her pearls in the bathroom, gripping her phone tightly, hangs up on him. Calls him back to talk about French literature like she hadn't called him to talk about the way she'd gone down on her husband moments prior; her mouth still dripping with the cum she'd spat out in the bathroom sink.
It's a scene that's moved too fast, a blurred barrier that was broken before she knew it was there. But once she had opened the gate, unlocked the alarm code for his entry, she couldn't stop her games if she even tried. He gets under her skin and into her head. She picks up her phone every morning at 5AM to listen to whatever he's left for her. Sometimes, it's nothing dirty. It's a critique on a new film they promised to watch together, or a recommendation for a new book she should pick up, and sometimes he talks about his day in general - running errands, calls with his father, his dinners. Blair has heard him only play her a record, the scratching and the voices singing feeling like distant friends whose conversation she shouldn't be overhearing. She curls up on the edge of her bath, wrapped in a nightgown, a nail polish varnish gripped in her palm. She wants to climb inside of him some mornings. Unrobe, peel back his brain, sit inside.
She thinks about fucking him more than she should for a married woman. Her mind gets stuck on elevators and bar alleyways and her childhood bed and his loft: the couch, the kitchen counter, his little kid bed with Cedric keeping a watchful eye, the bathroom, the balcony. Blair had touched every space and touched every part of him. They'd crossed their ankles together after, shoulders pressed together and read the same book, or a separate article. They'd smoked sometimes, indulging in habits they kept secret. We're both so neurotic. He used to grin, his fingers pressed to her temple, to her chin, to her heart.
Blair thinks about how she used to care for him more than she'd ever care to admit. It used to terrify her - the way he was a stranger and then a reluctant friend with shared common interests and then her best friend, the one who would look at her whole and tell her he'd still be there, the only one she could turn to in a city full of people who knew her, and then he was something more. Something that eclipsed a best friend. Blair had given her heart over and over again to boys and men and she had been left in the dust every single time. She had always put her heart first, an acute awareness of how she felt at all times. She had known she was in love before she ever allowed herself to know them, let them know her, and by the time they all laid exposed, someone would get bored. Dan was the only one who ever crept up on her.
She deletes each voice mail he leaves her. She stops thinking about how she maybe loved him, once. It was so long ago, she chastises herself. Picks up the pieces that lay around her, clip her hair back, starts the shower. She washes each dirty thing he said to her off her skin, each random remark off her body.
Her mother calls her on a dead-line. She sounds far away and unimpressed and slightly concerned. Blair doesn't understand why everyone seems to think she's unhappy - she has her diamonds and her gowns and her dream job and friends who mean something and friends who mean nothing. She measures her happiness in miles of success (marriage, motherhood, a looming promotion). But it never seems to be enough to anyone but here. I'm happy, it's not an outright lie; she could be happier if she ditched the dead weight of the husband she carried around, but she's not walking around miserable and moping. Eleanor says she loves her in a clipped tone, reminds her to come visit. Blair feels frozen in time for a split second, of course, she says but she has - charities to attend, galas to host, editorials to write, fashion shows to review, a son to care for.
There is a fashion show she attends, front-row. Girls walk down the platform in high heels they stumble on, wide-eyed and adolescent. Blair makes notes about the clothes in the margins of her book. Neat and impeccable handwriting, critical analysis. She bites down the bile that rises in her throat and the new instinct that claws at her skin to jump out and protect these girls from the harsh world they've entered into. Blair remembers backstage, she remembers the crushing loss and weight of expectations and the feeling of never being chosen, never being good enough. She looks at the girls now and feels awfully ancient in her black dotted tights, turtleneck and mini skirt; an adult playing pretend high school. Her body has carried a baby, she has lived through a hundred lives.
Serena is supposedly somewhere in this crowd. But her blonde hair and golden laugh don't stand out anymore; there is no light that immediately goes her way, is anchored to her ankle. She is not the most thrilling girl in the room, she can't be when she's a woman. Blair thinks she almost has the power to change it. She could write an expose, or be critical in her editorial role of the age of girls they send down the runways or she could have hired women of an appropriate age to model when she was still creating clothes. But she doesn't, and she won't, and when the show is finished, she doesn't seek out Serena like she always used to. She rides a car her husband sends for and doesn't cry in the backseat, she feels somber and alone and a little aloof when the driver asks her if she is feeling well. Blair is feeling anything other than well these days.
She could end her marriage tonight, if she wanted to. Their house is dark when she comes home. She would end her marriage tonight, if her husband were home.
Summer jumps out at her like a surprise.
Henry is at her legs, little baby fingers reaching up towards her. She lifts him up in her arms, pondering how he has gotten so big. Chuck has been asking for another baby, late at night with kisses across her throat that she pushes away. A girl, like you. It's her worst nightmare, but she doesn't tell him that.
The air is hot and thick and heavy with sweat and salt air. Blair walks along the sand bare-foot, reckless, a little careless; age has afforded her such liberties. When she was younger, she cared so much, all of the time. Fit herself into boxes and lines that she conditioned herself to believe as right. These days she allows herself to wander a little out of focus, off-centre, dares herself almost to misbehave in small ways. She steps on a shell, smokes in the open summer air. Image is still everything, but it's not her only thing. She'll regret it in the morning, but she can't right now. Her husband is lounging on a beach chair, a drink in hand, his young assistant looking at him wide-eyed. Blair digs her nails into her palm, takes a long drag as she approaches them.
Early in the morning she had accessed their security camera footage. "Chuck, darling." She purrs as she reaches him, curling her fingers around the back of his chair, bending down to press a kiss against his cheek: red, nicotine filled. His smile dissipates, his voice gets low.
"Blair." He replies curtly, "Are you smoking?" He reaches out to grab the once-lit cigarette from her other hand, ready to rip it out of reach. She lets it fall in the sand before he can grab it.
She's prettier in person, prettier than in the security footage. Prettier when she's not being fucked in Blair's bed by Blair's husband.
"I was." She smiles, all saccharine. Picks up his glass from his hands, swirls the scotch. "Are you drinking?" She knits her eyebrows together, feigns suprirse.
He looks ready to hit. It almost makes her genuinely smile. He looks like the Chuck she remembers: the one who's going to be ready for a fight, to knock her where it hurts and expect the same in return. It feels like a game of cat and mouse, a chase that she's ready to pounce on. In that second she almost loves him again.
"Hi," His assistant pipes up, sheepish as she smiles at Blair. They almost share a secret language. "I'm Kathleen, I don't believe we've -"
Blair spins on her heel before she can finish. She downs his glass in one gulp, her throat stinging as she stalks back to their Hampton house.
Henry doesn't ask where his father is. Blair doesn't care to call Chuck and ask either.
Blair is sixteen when she peers down the barrel of her future. It's her mother on the floor of her bedroom, door open half an inch. Her father is somewhere in France, with a secret lover. Their marriage had been crumbling, and now it's all torn apart.
There is a party Serena hosts early in August for her birthday, once the excitement of a nomadic lifestyle has waned off. She kisses Carter full on the mouth in front of a crowd, and sings Beyonce hits off-key on an old sing-star. She wraps Blair in a hug, the kind that squeezes the life out of her, and tells her she loves her. Truly and deeply, Blair believes she means it as much as she believes their friendship will always hang by that loose thread of string that has connected them for all these years. Nate is drunk in a bathroom, with a new girlfriend holding his dick in her hands.
Blair wanders through the halls of the van der Woodsen Hamptons estate like a lost child. Until she finds Dan lingering by a family potrait.
"It could have been you." She observes, noting the addition of Nate in frame.
He laughs, a little hollow. "It's old." She wonders if Carter minds, or if this is all temporary for him. She doesn't know, and she doesn't know how to ask. Serena spins in another room, twinkling and free of burdens that she confesses to Blair. Dan would have fit nicely inside it all. He would have grounded her, she would have pushed him outside of his comfort zone. She supposes if the two of them had gotten married, they'd all have settled into a nice little conformed life. Brunches, drinks, playdates for their children. Blair longs for it some days, loathes it on the days she wakes up and realises she's the only one living it.
He would have been happy if he married her. "You look so forlorn, Humphrey." She notes. I can fix it. She wants to say it, wants to wrap him in her arms and turn his grey skies blue again; or, more accurately, she wants to wrap him up in her arms and push him into an empty room, onto an empty bed. She wants to feel his heart beating under the palm of his hand.
He shrugs his shoulders. He has a girl he bought along with him - not a girlfriend - wandering through the halls. Blair saw her when they first arrived. Older, greying at the temple, fine lines wrinkling from her eyes. Dressed in silks and velvets, her arm linked through his. They had looked like the literary talk of the town.
"Blair," He pulls her attention back to him, "Are you happy?"
"Nobody ever asks me that except for you." She says, reaching up to smooth out the collar of his shirt. Her hand brushes, it smoothes, it lingers. She smiles but it doesn't reach her eyes. He's the only person she can be vulnerable with, even when she hates him, even when she loves him, even when she doesn't know how she feels about him. His judgement can sting twice as bad, but still she'll peel open her heart for him. "I'm happy in most ways. I'm happy in the ways that count."
He nods, as if he understands. She supposes they're one in the same. They have been all this time. "You can leave him, Blair. If you wanted to." He says it so softly. She thinks she could for a second.
"Thank you."
They end up in bed together. A guest room, a party around them. His mouth on her lips, on her ear, on her neck, holding her down, holding her tight. She wants more than he can give and he's giving her everything - she pulls his hair, curls coming undone around her fingers. His hands slide up her thighs, under her dress, over her underwear. She always feels weakest underneath. Submitting to power, she falls apart. He tells her secrets in hushed whispers, his fingers sliding over her. Shut up, Humphrey, pushes his hand back towards her cunt. He laughs, buries his nose in her shoulder. If she could give him more, she thinks she would.
Dan flees the Hamptons like a man on the run. A weekend after and the beach is clear of any sight of him. Henry pouts, Serena bounces between her boys. Blair writes him handwritten letters in the pink glow of her study that she never intends to send. She makes herself cum on the couch when nobody is home, thinks about his head buried between her legs like a reverent man. She calls him in the mornings, listing off her chores and plans, rattles off voicemails to him in the evenings about the books she's reading. She thinks about him when she doesn't want to be thinking about anything.
He answers, sometimes. He laughs, he cries. He tells her he misses her, but never that he loves her. He asks about her husband, her son. She tells him about moving to France, how her house will be so empty, she might need some company. They talk dirty in the early hours, when the moon is bleeding into the stars. He gets her weak in the knees, on all fours. She thinks about how he would fuck her from behind. He never has before. She asks him if he's had sex recently, her fingers messy with frosting from birthday cupcakes. He says yes, describes the last time they saw each other in graphic detail. She eats macaroons in the bath, his voice in her ear. She asks him to come back, he says he will eventually.
She wears her ring to the country club. Puts Henry in the pool with the other kids, has wine with the other moms. She pulls at the pearls at her neck, adjusts the diamonds pierced through her ears. Brushes off the questions about Bass Industries, the prying intrigue into her run as a Princess, the brief side-mentions at her once political dynasty agenda. She drinks too much champagne, excusing herself to throw her guts up in the bathroom. Her head spins, the world tips. She does it every Sunday until they pack up and go home for the Autumn.
In the city, she sees Dan in hotel rooms.
Blair comes home covered in secrets. She asks him to fuck her in her penthouse, but he won't step foot inside the walls. He kisses her sweetly, full-on-the-mouth every time she leaves, like a lover would. A man who loves her would. She brushes her fingers through his hair, always pulls herself in for one more kiss; his hands firm on her lower back, pulling her closer before she pulls away.
She meets him in bookstores and cafes and art museums and cinemas. Together, they laugh over red wines as they talk about Monet and French imperialism. Blair doesn't try to hide it when nobody is looking. If anyone cares, they keep their mouth shut. She lets him touch her hand, briefly, only in passing, their fingers reaching out like secret lovers in the middle of wartime.
"Humphrey," But he always kisses her before she can ever ask the question.
I would leave you. Blair hisses at him over dinner, wine in hand. The other couples at the table remain oblivious to their on going war. Chuck rolls his eyes, presses his fingers into his temples. He calls her a bitch, says she won't. Blair cuts her dinner into pieces without taking a bite, gulps down glasses of wine as if she's dying of dehydration. He laughs at what an investor says, offers Blair up on a silver platter to boast to another wife with. It feels like history repeating. She's nothing but a prop for his games.
She leaves early, feigning sickness. In the cab she calls Humphrey, crying in a way she hasn't allowed herself to cry in a long time. By the time she gets to Brooklyn she realises she's not sure where he lives anymore. Her heels get stuck on cobblestone streets, her coat blowing in the wind. Her hair gets stuck to her lip gloss, her hands freeze in the cold. He calls her when she's late, after she's called another car and left. This is nothing. She tells him, leaning into the leather backseat of a car that belongs to Chuck. It's nothing, Humphrey.
Blair has never wanted an affair. She untangles her hair with a comb, presses anti-wrinkle cream underneath her eyes. She reads the Brontë sisters by the fire, sips lightly at her peppermint tea. She flips through mail that arrives, invitations and bills. She thinks she's old enough to know what love might be now, she thinks she feels it with Henry on some days, on the days he doesn't look like a splitting mirror image of his father. She calls her lawyer while she soaks in the bath, milk melting into her skin. They say it won't be easy, she says she won't go without a fight. In her vanity she second guesses herself, washing her face clean of any trace of product. She thinks to leave she'd cut everything from the chain he holds, would give him everything he wants to be free without the drama.
"I think you're missing the merits Harper Lee bought in her time period." Blair argues, head propped in her hand. Dan lies next to her, the two of them snuggled in his cheap polyester sheets. She had bought silk sheets from the store, he had tossed them on the chair in the corner of his bedroom.
"It still pushed the idea of a white saviour storyline into public perception." Dan fights back. He follows with vague articles he's read and a friend of a friend's word. Blair rolls her eyes, sinks down further into the bed. Her head slips off the pillow, her toes curl in his socks.
"I am sure it was there long before her." She looks at the clock hanging crooked on his wall. Frowns as she pushes the covers off of her body. Dan used to pout a little each time she had to leave, but that was before this - back when he was her boyfriend, an entity that fit neatly into her life. Now he doesn't really do anything, doesn't say anything most of the time. It used to be easier, she wishes it could still be easy.
"Do you have to leave?" He whispers, only hard and bitter enough for her to hear. Her ears are attuned to the fine details, to the ways she has failed.
"I have to pick up Henry." She zips her dress up herself, picks her bag from up off the floor. Glances in the mirror; she looks out of place, everything slightly askew. It feels like a little bit of a fuck you, it feels a little too much of a slippery slope. I wish I could do better for you. But it can't work like that, she runs her fingers through her hair and turns around to say goodbye. Dan slouched in his bed, face sour. Only a minute ago he was animated, involved, committed. She almost says she loves him, like that's a phrase that will fix everything thats wrong.
"I can't keep doing this, Blair." He's soft when he says it. She always expected violence when it was to come to a close.
"I know." Her hands close around the knob of his door, she doesn't look back as she leaves.
Blair files for divorce on a Thursday, goes out for drinks with Humphrey on a Friday.