Work Text:
Blair kisses Dan Humphrey, and it means nothing at all.
Blair will not be so crude or uncouth as to say that it is a bad kiss. It is a perfectly satisfactory, perfectly respectable kiss. Humphrey has clearly learned plenty from his days of kissing his social betters, because once he gets over his shock that Blair has taken matters into her own hands — well, lips — his technique is fairly decent. His skin is still cold from walking outside in the chilly Manhattan March, but his lips are warm, which is an intriguing contrast. And considering how much time he must spend on the subway every day, his personal odor is not unpleasant.
But the scale on which Blair rates first kisses is: Would I turn my back on my boyfriend of ten years and lose my virginity to someone I half-despise in the back of a moving vehicle for this kiss?
And on that scale, well … on that scale, Humphrey simply doesn’t rate.
Which is a relief, in Blair’s opinion. It means she doesn’t have to deal with any messiness. No reason to bother Serena, no reason to incur Chuck’s wrath. She can simply continue going on, just as she has been.
Except, she supposes, that if nothing is actually happening with Humphrey, and if all those clandestine meetings and emotionally furtive conversations have just fizzled right out along with that perfectly adequate kiss, then that means she’s got nothing at all going on in her life right now.
Her quest to become a powerful woman has stalled out. She has no job, not even an internship. Classes at Columbia are boring her lately. There is nothing to distract her.
If she wants to feel that she’s moving forward and making progress, the only thing left to do now is get back together with Chuck. Really, she should call him and tell him so.
Blair finds herself oddly exhausted at the prospect. Instead of talking to Chuck, she takes to her bed for a week.
*
Once Blair makes it out of bed, she finds that Chuck has no interest in moving forward or making progress at all. So that takes care of that, then.
*
Humphrey is taken aback when Blair shows up at his door with a DVD in her hand a few days after that travesty of a photoshoot, after she decides that she won’t be getting back together with Chuck after all. But Blair can’t see why Humphrey should be so surprised. They’d both agreed that the kiss meant nothing, hadn’t they? So why should anything change?
“Blair, hi,” he says. “Did we have plans I somehow forgot? Or should I have just telepathically sensed you were coming and canceled all my prior commitments?”
“Please, like you have those,” Blair says briskly. She pushes past him to walk inside, since Humphrey has neglected to invite her in, and makes herself comfortable on his tragic little thrift store couch. Honestly, Humphrey could at least offer her a water.
“Well, I could,” Humphrey insists, which means she was right and he doesn’t. And then he shuts the door behind her, which means he isn’t going to fight her too hard on this and is only offering up a protest for form’s sake. “You don’t know. Maybe I have exciting plans here in Brooklyn, with people you don’t know, doing things that aren’t at all relevant to you but are still important to me. Maybe I have an NYU rager to go to! Or a date!”
“Maybe you do,” Blair says, with laudable patience. “And maybe there’s no way you’re going to get a better offer at eight PM on a Wednesday night than watching Jules et Jim with me, and you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“Oh …” says Humphrey, wavering. “Well, all right, it’s not like I’m going to turn down some spontaneous Truffaut; I mean, I’m not a monster.”
“Of course you’re not,” says Blair soothingly. “Now, we’ll need your laptop, some popcorn — preferably caramel — and at least two bottles of French wine. You do keep French wine in this place, don’t you, Humphrey?”
“I’m not even twenty-one yet, of course I don’t keep French wine around,” says Humphrey. “I have some hard liquor my dad left behind and some beer I scored from a guy at school. Not all of us have staff to buy us booze, you know.”
Blair shuts her eyes and breathes deeply. “I have no one but myself to blame,” she says out loud, so that he can observe and marvel at her grace and maturity in the face of his lamentable failures. “Simply assuming that Dan Humphrey would have the proper refreshments on hand in his impoverished Brooklyn garret was an incredible lapse of judgment; I see that now.”
“Okay, we got some Hendricks and tonic water here chez Humphrey,” he says, rummaging through his cupboards. “Is gin and tonic snooty enough for you, Waldorf?”
Blair wrinkles her nose. “It would go better with Hitchcock, but needs must, I suppose.”
Blair mixes up the gin and tonics, because she doesn’t trust Humphrey to know how, and he pops the popcorn. It isn’t caramel, and he pops it by sticking it in the microwave, but Blair supposes she shouldn’t have expected anything more from him. Microwave popcorn is actually surprisingly delicious.
“So listen,” Humphrey says after the movie starts, as Marie Dubois does unspeakable things with a cigarette onscreen. “It’s not that I don’t cherish these visits of yours and everything, but you usually only bother coming all the way down here if you’re avoiding something in Manhattan. Or if you want to yell at me. Is everything okay?”
“What on earth do you mean by that?” Blair demands, outraged, because this claim is simply patently untrue. She’s been to Brooklyn to watch movies lots of times. Twice at least. Maybe just once. “You and I have established that we are friends, and that we are friends who watch movies. So here I am, with my friend, watching a movie. What’s so unusual about that?”
Humphrey gives her a knowing look. He’s been doing that more and more lately, tossing around these smug glances. Like he thinks he really gets her. He’s insufferable. “Yeah?” he says. “So Chuck’s not buzzing around looking back to get back together again?”
“In fact, he’s not,” Blair says triumphantly. “He’s knee-deep in Thorpe drama again this week and has no time for romantic pining. And nor, frankly, do I. I’m supposed to take this time for myself to focus on blossoming into my full potential, thus becoming the rose of a woman I was always meant to be. Remember?”
Now Humphrey’s face is doing that other thing it’s been doing more and more lately. Where he’s trying to hold back a smile from the corners of his mouth, but he can’t stop it from reaching his eyes, so they’re all lit up and melting. Like he’s laughing at her. Blair’s made up her mind to be offended by that look, but she always seems to have trouble maintaining the outrage she’s planned for in the moment. She’ll have to work on that.
“Right, the rose speech, I remember now,” he says. “So how’s that going for you? Are you lining up another internship?”
Blair turns and stares straight ahead at the screen. “Well, how could I be doing that when I’m busy watching a movie with a friend?”
“Blair,” says Humphrey. “Come on. Are you even looking for one?”
“I don’t see why I should,” she says, and while some people might describe her tone now as whining, Blair is prepared to strongly refute the characterization, “if I crash and burn from the first real job I’ve ever actually wanted. And then I’m such a toxic wreck of a liability that my ex has to placate me by getting me fake-hired for a pity job so he can coddle me into feeling ready to get back together. Because no one was ever going to actually want me without Chuck Bass pulling strings for me. Obviously I’m unhireable and everyone knows it!”
“Everyone who works in any fashion magazine anywhere thinks you’re unhireable?” Humphrey says, in that annoyingly measured way he has. “You messed up at one entry-level job at one magazine because you’re also a full-time student and shouldn’t have been doing both of them in the first place, and so therefore the entire industry is closed off to you forever and you’ll never be able to break in on your own merits? So therefore you just shouldn’t even bother doing the research to see who might be hiring interns?”
“I don’t appreciate this over-reasonable tone you’re taking with me,” Blair informs him. “I’m not a child. I understand that there are other opportunities out there. I just hate failure.”
Also Blair prefers it when Humphrey’s pep talks come with less condescension and more compliments. Not that she’d tell him that.
Sometimes she thinks about him sitting there in that coat check and calling her an evil dictator of taste. Sometimes she thinks about it a lot.
“Sure, I mean, who doesn’t,” says Dan. “But is there anything you can do after failure except try again?”
“Yes,” Blair explains patiently. “It’s called avoidance, and it’s what I am attempting to do right now.”
“Okay, no,” Dan says, with his voice very warm and his eyes crinkling at the corners. “I’m happy to watch movies with you, Blair, but I’m not going to let you use me to avoid the things you know you should actually be doing. If you want to distract yourself from finding a new job, you have to do that on your own.”
Blair huffs with annoyance. “Me avoiding,” she says. “What about you? You left W way before I did, and I haven’t seen you looking for any new internships of your own. What about all your professional ambitions?”
“Yeah, but like you said, I don’t actually want to work at a magazine,” Dan says. “I was just there hoping to build some connections with editors. What I actually want to do is write.”
“So shouldn’t you be off working on your great American novel right now?” Blair counters. “Where’s all the important writerly work you’ve been doing?”
Humphrey looks evasive. “I’ve been working on some things.”
“Right,” Blair says. “So let’s see it.”
Humphrey says nothing, and she arches her eyebrows at him. “Well?”
“You know what, you’re right,” he says. “It’s none of my business if you want to take a break from looking for a new job. Let’s just watch the movie.”
Blair likes a win, even a win that feels suspiciously easy, so she takes it.
Humphrey does this thing that he says Vanessa got him addicted to where he melts extra butter and then pours it over the popcorn with nutritional yeast. Like why does Blair even bother.
*
The next time Blair wants to watch a movie, she makes Dan come to her, because the Waldorfs know how to keep a pantry properly stocked with movie snacks. Well, Dorota knows. But Dorota only knows because of Blair’s exacting and precise instructions, so it amounts to the same thing.
Humphrey comes over with two bags of M&Ms and, improbably, a DVD of The Women.
“I figure since you have the girliest taste in the world,” he says, “we should at least indulge it with one of the best of the women’s pictures.”
“I loathe Norma Shearer,” Blair informs him. “She’s got the blandest personality I’ve seen since Kati left Constance.”
“Figured you would,” Dan says. “But what about Rosalind Russell, though?”
Blair grimaces. “She’s so awful and catty in this one. And she can’t even scheme properly — I mean, she falls into the garbage!”
“Yeah, okay,” says Dan, doing that not-quite-laughing thing again. “I don’t know why I thought you’d like her.”
Dorota brings them Manhattans and proper stovetop popcorn with sea salt and coconut oil, and they watch The Women in Blair’s room. With the door closed, just in case Serena comes home earlier than Blair expects and she needs to pull an emergency covert operation to avoid having to answer any awkward questions.
Humphrey mixes his M&Ms with his popcorn. It’s disgusting.
“I’ve been researching internships,” Blair announces halfway through the movie, because she’s getting tired of waiting for Humphrey to bring it up himself.
He glances over at her with a smile hovering behind his eyes. “Oh yeah?”
“It’s too late to get one for this semester, obviously, so I suppose this entire spring will have to be a write-off, professionally speaking. As far as my résumé is concerned I really could have spent the whole semester hibernating in Antarctica and saved myself the trouble.”
“Oh my god,” Humphrey mumbles through a mouthful of popcorn and M&Ms. But he seems to be speaking mostly to himself, so Blair chooses not to dignify his rudeness with a response.
“But this does give me ample lead time to prepare for the summer, so I’ve begun extensive research on all the hiring managers working on my top ten possible internships. I’ve already lined up informational interviews with three of them.”
“That’s great, Blair,” Humphrey says. “I’m sure you’ll be able to terrify at least one of those ten people into offering you a job.”
“Fear is a better networking tool than flattery,” Blair agrees. “Now, how’s your writing going?”
“Fine,” says Humphrey, watching the laptop screen.
“Well, when are you going to finish a story?” Blair asks.
“Not working on a story,” Humphrey says, still not looking at her. “It’s a novel.”
“Ambitious,” Blair allows, “but also a good excuse for not having to show pages to anyone, since everyone knows novels take months to finish.”
“Yup, that’s my master plan,” Humphrey says. “I knew I’d have to come up with an excuse to avoid your nosiness somehow, so I decided to make up an elaborate lie about what I’m writing to throw you off the scent.”
“And where are you in your process?” Blair demands.
“Of the lie? Well, it only just occurred to me, so I think I’ll have to polish it up before I put it to proper use.”
“Humphrey.”
“I have a lot of drafting done,” he says, relenting. “I’ve been working on it for a while. But I think almost all of it needs to be revised. The way I think has changed a lot since I started.”
“Send me the chapter you think needs the most revision and I’ll give you notes,” Blair proposes.
Dan gives her a startled look at that. “I don’t think I need the ego demolition that would be edit notes from Blair Waldorf,” he says, “but thank you.”
“What, you don’t want your writing to be the best it could possibly be?” Blair says, offended. “You’d rather show it only to people who will tell you it’s great instead of someone who’ll tell you the truth even when it’s hard to hear? I am brutally honest with people as a favor, because I think they have the power to be better. Like how you would be living a better life if you burned that jacket.”
“My dad wore this jacket on tour in 1991,” Dan says.
“I’m serious,” Blair says, and now she’s the one who isn’t making eye contact with him. “I don’t like owing people stuff. And you’ve been really supportive during my own professional odyssey. I would like to return the favor.”
“Oh,” says Dan. And then his face goes all soft and warm and gooey, like people’s faces never get around Blair.
They shouldn’t get like that around Blair. They get like that around Serena, because Serena is all sunshine and sweetness and would never take advantage of someone’s soft gooey face. Blair would take advantage. Blair does take advantage. Dan Humphrey, of all people, should know that.
“I appreciate that a lot, Blair,” he says. “I really do. But I don’t think this is something you should be editing. You know all the people that it’s about, and I don’t want to put you in that position.”
“Oh.” Now that Blair thinks about it, that makes sense. “I suppose I don’t particularly want to have to edit a hundred thousand words about what an angel in human form Serena van der Woodsen is,” she allows.
“Exactly,” Dan agrees. “Why inflict that on yourself?”
“But I’m going to give you notes on your query letter when you start looking for agents,” Blair adds. “And I promise to be brutal.”
“I would expect no less,” Dan says, and leans back against her pillows, gaze focused on her laptop screen to watch Rosalind Russell be catty to Joan Crawford.
Blair does not care to see Rosalind’s humiliation at Joan’s hands, so instead of focusing on the screen, she watches Humphrey out of the corner of her eye. In addition to Rufus’s atrocious cast-off jacket, he’s wearing Levis that have never come near a tailor, and some grubby old henley from a no-name brand.
He looks good, lying there on her bed in his terrible cheap clothes. Good in a way Blair doesn’t think he looked in high school, but which does make her dimly grasp what Serena was thinking back then. Good in a way that makes Blair remember kissing him two weeks ago, just down the stairs from this very room, and the rush of warmth that swept through her when he eased his mouth open under hers.
But Blair has already made up her mind that the kiss meant nothing, and that it is not something she’s going to be thinking about again. Certainly it’s not something she’s going to think about while Dan Humphrey is lounging on her bed right next to her, just a single shared bathroom away from Serena’s room.
So instead of thinking about it, Blair steals a handful of Humphrey’s popcorn and M&M mixture. Every time you eat an M&M you might as well just be pouring cheap sugar and carcinogenic food coloring directly into your mouth. She eats them all anyway.
*
The next time Humphrey comes over with a movie, he brings Belle de Jour, at which Blair arches an eyebrow.
“Okay, I know Buñuel isn’t really New Wave,” Humphrey says, which is not at all what Blair is surprised by, “but I have this theory that you can read Severine as kind of a lost Rohmer character floating around in the incorrect world, and that’s why it all goes wrong for her. I need you to tell me why I’m wrong.”
“Well, that should be easy enough,” Blair says, and they settle down in her room to watch it.
The last time Blair watched Belle de Jour, it was at the Empire with Chuck. They were role playing: he was Marcel the criminal, Blair was the beautiful housewife-prostitute Severine, and Chuck was ravishing her in a seedy Parisian brothel.
(Chuck liked that fantasy a lot, the one where Blair was a prostitute. Blair thought it was pretty sexy at the time. And it would be humiliating if either the hotel or Eva affected her enough to change her mind about that, so it must still be sexy.)
Now Blair is watching Belle de Jour in her own bedroom, on her own bed, next to Dan Humphrey. With a little tray of macarons and French 75s in front of them, and also a package of Swedish Fish that Humphrey brought with him. Blair thinks maybe she’s going insane.
“The sound mixing in this movie is so smart,” Humphrey says. “All the little cat noises and bells that get threaded into the soundtrack, it’s really clever. Did you ever read Ebert’s essay on it?”
“I don’t need bald men from Chicago to explain cinema to me,” Blair says, which Humphrey seems to find unduly hilarious. “You ought to read some Kael sometime and expand your horizons.”
“Ebert has a full head of hair,” he says. “But you have a point, Pauline Kael is a more interesting critic.” He tips back his head to take a ship of his cocktail, and Blair watches the way his throat moves as he swallows.
It’s not that Blair is attracted to Dan Humphrey. For one thing, he’s her best friend’s ex-boyfriend, and she would never. For another thing, he is from Brooklyn, and she would never.
For a third thing, they experimented with that kiss, and that just underlined how very much Blair would absolutely never. There is nothing at all between them, simply zero, and that kiss is all the proof she needs.
“So I was thinking about what you were saying the other day,” Humphrey says, jerking Blair out of concentrating on how little she wants to kiss him. “About how this semester’s a waste of time because there aren’t any internships until summer. And I was wondering. Are there any campus publications at Columbia you could maybe do something for until then?”
Blair grimaces. “From Condé to college rag? That’s rather a precipitous tumble down the professional ladder, don’t you think?”
“Hey, as you love to remind me, Columbia’s an Ivy,” Dan says. “And the whole reason we’re going to these schools in the first place is to learn stuff we’ll need to know to work at places like Condé Nast after graduation, right? So what’s the harm in getting some practice someplace where the stakes are lower?”
Blair considers. It’s true that having conquered Hamilton House, she’s felt little need to rule the campus of Columbia as she ruled Constance. As a result, she perhaps may have neglected the many Ivy League amenities now at her disposal. “I believe there’s an arts journal,” she muses. “I suppose I’ll have to oust whatever unfortunate idiots are currently in charge, but a scheme could be a refreshing change of pace.”
“You could also just try collaborating with them,” Humphrey suggests.
Blair gives him a look that she hopes fully expresses the lunacy of such a proposal.
“But I mean, either way, it seems like you could use a project,” he adds hastily.
“Humphrey,” says Blair, “this is a surprisingly un-terrible idea you have.”
His face goes bright and pleased. Like it means something to him that she gave him a shitty half compliment. “Well, I have to give you a reason to keep me around beyond my incredible good looks and charm,” he says.
Blair thinks that line is so incredibly cheesy. And he’s joking, anyway. Somehow their faces seem to be pretty close together regardless.
But because as she long ago accepted, Blair was cursed at birth by an unlucky god, it’s at this moment that Serena chooses to walk through the door from their adjoining bathroom, a full hour before Blair expected her back from her cousin-bonding date, saying, “B, have you seen my pink YSL —”
Blair tumbles off the bed in a shower of macarons and Swedish Fish, shrieking, “Dan was just here to borrow a book!”
Dan simultaneously jerks to his feet, grabbing at the first thing in reach, which is in fact Blair’s laptop and very much not a book. “Serena! Hi!” he says.
Serena freezes, staring from one to the other of them with narrow eyes. “Huh,” she says.
From Blair’s laptop, unhelpfully, comes Catherine Deneuve’s voice, murmuring in soft, intimate French. “Humphrey, for god’s sake, make it stop,” Blair hisses.
Dan stabs at the space bar over and over again, and Serena’s eyes get narrower and narrower.
*
The ensuing talk with Serena is not one of the better experiences of Blair’s life. She seems convinced that there’s something actually going on between Blair and Dan, simply because they were sitting on Blair’s bed together (platonically), watching a sexy French film (also platonically), and she somehow knew that they had also recently kissed (not quite platonically, but experimentally, which certainly, Blair reasons, is different from a romantic kiss).
Humphrey beats a hasty retreat once he sees the warning signs of a classic Blair-Serena faceoff, which Blair supposes only indicates that he has decent self-preservation instincts. The fight doesn’t even last that long, all things considered, but it’s still deeply unpleasant. And then after Serena storms off, Chuck swings by, all in a lather. Apparently the Thorpes are up to some new kind of sabotage now, and Chuck’s convinced that they’re going to try to target Blair.
Weaker souls would crumble under this sort of pressure, but Blair prides herself on thriving in a crisis. Life has a way of simplifying itself when she’s faced with two obstacles rather than one, and she sees a very simple solution to all her problems staring her in the face right now. She explains it to Humphrey when she drops by the loft with Rebecca, because her current scheme feels dark and sordid and gothic to her.
“I’m sorry,” says Humphrey. “Your solution to all this is for us to kiss again?”
“It’s genius,” says Blair. “Don’t you see? Russell Thorpe is only targeting me because he believes I’m Chuck’s weak point. The solution, therefore, is to create a scenario in which Chuck catches me in an embrace with another man and does not react, which Russell can observe. I’ll simply warn Chuck ahead of time of the plan and coach him through his response, and Russell will realize that Chuck is over me and I am of no use to any Thorpe plot whatsoever. Then I’m free as a bird and Chuck will be left to sort out his own problems.”
“So this is all about Chuck now,” Dan says.
“Well, it’s also Serena,” Blair explains. She’s rather proud of the nuance she’s managed to pack into this little plan. “She thinks that there’s something between us because we hid the last kiss. But if we clue her into this plan and have her watch it along with Chuck, that will show her that we are simply the sort of friends whose thoroughly platonic relationship can withstand the occasional meaningless kiss.”
Humphrey has an unreadable look on his face. Eyes fixed on the laptop on the coffee table before them.
“What do you say, Humphrey?” Blair demands. “Are you in or out?”
“You call me by my last name a lot,” is his rather opaque reply.
Blair is bewildered by this non sequitur. “Yes, and?”
He shrugs. “It’s just weird, that’s all. None of my other friends call me by my last name exclusively.”
“I call all my guy friends by their last names,” Blair informs him.
“Okay, but like, are we in some kind of a prewar British novel?” he says, refusing to let this inane topic go. “Do we have to save each other’s lives and then solemnly shake hands before we’re allowed to be on a first name basis?”
“You know, you could stand to read a little less Fitzgerald and a little more of the prewar Brits, as a matter of fact,” Blair says, distracted in spite of herself. “It might finally help your dreadful etiquette.”
Dan mostly laughs when she makes fun of him, which is — not attractive, per se, but does seem expressive of a confidence that makes Blair feel safer around him. Like she knows she’s not going to dig too deep and hurt him more than she means to. But at this his face goes thoughtful.
“You want to know a secret that makes me sound really dumb?” he says.
There aren’t many things that would would get Blair to drop her focus on pinning down a yes, but the prospect of humiliating gossip is one of them. She sits back on the couch. “Obviously,” she says.
“I tried that once,” Dan says. Blair frowns in confusion, and he clarifies. “Freshman year. I tried reading a book to see if it would help me understand better how to act in school. An etiquette book.”
“Oh no,” Blair breathes, gleeful.
“It wasn’t too bad at first. Mostly just saying sir and ma’am with adults and please and thank you to everyone, right? And getting up when girls left the room, but you didn’t have to worry about that too much at St. Judes. But then this one time, some assholes started playing keepaway with my math homework in the park. They didn’t even go to St. Judes, they were from Chapin. Another guy made them cut it out and give it back to me, and I —” Dan cuts himself off, laughing softly, covering his eyes with his hands. “I offered to shake hands with him. I thought it was the thing to do.”
“Well, that was very polite of you,” Blair says, voice gentler than she means it to be.
“I spent all the rest of high school being grateful Chapin doesn’t do Gossip Girl,” Dan goes on. “If they did they would absolutely have had her calling me Handshake Dude instead of Lonely Boy, and if you’re going to pick between two terrible nicknames, personally I’d rather be Lonely than Handshake.”
Blair is under no obligation to repay this secret with one of her own. The rules of the Met steps say that secrets only have to be reciprocated if they’re high-value gossip about an enemy, and telling on yourself doesn’t count. Dan chose to share that humiliating story with Blair of his own accord, and if he doesn’t care for her response, he should have thought a little bit harder about who he was talking to first.
“I told the whole school I was going to get a pet deer once,” Blair bursts out instead.
Dan’s eyebrows flick up.
“Audrey had one,” Blair goes on. “Pippin was his name. They met while they were filming Green Canal together, and she took him home at the end. There are pictures of them shopping in Beverly Hills together, and it’s the sweetest thing; Audrey’s wearing this perfect little pink suit, and she’s got a ribbon in exactly the same shade of pink tied around the deer’s neck. He’s all curled around her like a cat, right there in the grocery store aisle. Audrey’s aura was so calming that the deer thought she was his mother.”
“And you wanted to do the same thing?” Dan asks.
“So much so that I thought that if I told everyone it was going to happen, I could make it happen. I was maybe twelve. My parents were fighting a lot, and any time I heard them fighting and then started crying, Daddy would always buy me a big extravagant gift, so I thought, well …”
“Your twelve-year-old schemes were truly diabolical,” Dan says, with a touch of awe.
“But it didn’t actually work!” Blair concludes. “My dad sponsored a deer in my name at a wildlife refuge, which isn’t what I wanted at all, and then got me show riding lessons. I was awful at it, but I did like the outfit. But the girls at school just would not let me forget that I’d told them I was getting a deer. They kept asking me and asking me when I was going to get her, and what I would name her, and would I be able to take her to school. I held them off for a while, but one day Penelope said, ‘I don’t think there really is a deer. I think you’re just a baby who made up a Bambi of her very own.’ And then all the girls spent two weeks calling me Bambi!”
“You do have pretty giant, Bambi-like eyes,” Dan says critically.
“I had to leave Penelope off the Pinkberry list twice, and make Nate drag some of his guy friends to afterschool hangs before I wrestled control of the group back.” Blair sighs. “Come to think of it, that was really the first coup I fought off. A shame it wasn’t with a worthier adversary.”
“Do you still want a deer?” Dan asks her.
“Do you still have the etiquette book?” Blair shoots back.
“Yup,” says Dan. “I keep it around so if I’m ever in a situation with finger bowls, I know what’s what.”
“It comes on the dessert plate after the table is crumbed,” Blair says.
“Or on the fruit plate, if the host is serving fruit rather than a formal dessert,” Dan says.
“Not bad, Humphrey,” Blair says. “Keep it up and my mother may just let you cater waiter her next gala.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Dan says. “She might hear a rumor that I’ll go around trying to shake hands with all the guests.”
“Like I’d tell my mother,” Blair says, revolted, and Dan’s face does that thing again where it goes soft. Then he seems to catch himself and turns his face back to the laptop.
Onscreen, Laurence Olivier is saying in his most thrillingly stentorian tones, “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool,” while Joan Fontaine swoons.
“I fucking hate this movie,” Dan says suddenly. “The book too. He’s a murderer and he’s condescending on top of it, and she’s so weak and insecure that she just goes along with it rather than facing being alone.”
“It’s fiction, Humphrey. It’s not supposed to be a book of ethics, it’s supposed to be romantic," Blair says. Humphrey's sanctimony has reminded her why she came over in the first place. "Now, I’ve got a plan that’s going to fix all our problems. Are you in or aren’t you?”
“Oh, but you don't understand. It's that I'm not the sort of person men marry,” Joan Fontaine explains from the laptop. “I don't belong in your sort of world, for one thing.”
“This is really important to you, isn’t it?” Dan says at last. “This plan.”
Blair doesn’t know when that started to be a thing she could count on, that Dan would do something for her that he didn’t want to do simply because he knew it mattered to her. But she’s absolutely certain of it now. “Yes,” she says.
“Yeah,” says Dan. “Okay.”
*
Dan kisses her at the Pink Party, and there is no movie playing when he does it.
It all goes down exactly as Blair planned it, up to a point. She pulls Humphrey off into the butler’s pantry, and Serena and Chuck follow after them right on cue, pretending to be hunting down one of Lily’s favorite crystal bowls. Serena’s unnervingly helpful cousin Charlie sends them a text confirming that Russell Thorpe is hot on Chuck’s tail, and Humphrey says, “Showtime, I guess,” and bends his head down to Blair’s and kisses her.
This is meaningless, Blair reminds herself, completely meaningless. Dan is sliding his hands around her waist, and it is still meaningless; and she opens her mouth and he strokes his tongue against hers, firm and even passionate, really committing to the truth of the moment, but it is still meaningless; and she’s got her hands on his shoulders, bracing herself, because she’s not entirely certain her legs are going to keep holding her up, she is even perhaps staggering just a little but it still means nothing; and Dan’s hands are instantly firmer around her waist with this sort of warm, affectionate press, ready to take all her weight if she wants and to let her stand on her own if she wants that too, but it still means nothing, absolutely nothing, nothing at all.
And then Dan just barely breaks the steady, insistent press of his mouth against hers, just for a moment, to breathe in sharp and ragged before he’s kissing her again, and in that fraction of a second Blair hears her own breath breaking and then her whole mind is lit up with panic even as she’s kissing frantically back because it does mean something. It does. It does.
There’s a gasp, and then Chuck laughing his dirtiest laugh. “Well well well. What have we here?”
Blair jerks herself violently away from Humphrey, which is not at all the plan, and sees Chuck and Serena standing in the doorway of the pantry, Russell lurking in the hall behind them.
Chuck is lounging in the doorway, eyes like slivers of ice; indifference always came easy to him. But Serena’s mouth is set in a firm, unhappy line.
She knows she knows she knows she knows plays in a chant through Blair’s mind. And that’s not what Blair was planning at all.
*
As soon as she can escape from the party, Blair’s curled up in her own bed in her softest silk pajamas with a box of macarons at her side and Breakfast at Tiffany’s on her laptop. She doesn’t want to wear out a classic, but at times like these only Audrey at her absolute best will do.
Dan calls her three times, and Blair sends every last call straight to voicemail. She watches Audrey being elegant and calm and lovely in the way Blair always wants to be but never, ever is, and she tries to work out how it possibly could have come to this.
It wouldn’t be so bad if only there were someone else hanging around, some other prospect in her life besides Dan or Chuck who she could distract herself with. She could throw herself into a new relationship, enjoy feeling butterflies for someone she hasn’t already known for years, someone who didn’t come with built-in baggage. It would be distracting enough that she’d be able to convince everyone the kiss didn’t matter, including herself.
But Blair hasn’t met anyone she’d deign to look twice at since Paris. And after what happened at that photoshoot, she knows she can’t stand to be with Chuck just now. So there is nothing that can keep her from just looking the dreadful fact in the face: she has feelings for Dan Humphey.
God. Dan Humphrey, of all people.
Audrey ends up with a struggling writer from a different social class in Tiffany’s. When Blair realizes she almost switches to Roman Holiday instead, but in that movie Audrey doesn’t end up with the writer from the different social class, which is maybe worse.
Serena comes in when the movie’s almost over and Audrey’s in the pouring rain in her trench coat. Blair waits for Serena to accuse her of awful betrayal, the worst kind of violation of the friend code, but instead Serena takes a macaron out of the Ladurée box and settles on the bed, curling herself around Blair’s body, still in her pink dress and her perfect perky ponytail. Blair has never in her life been able to make a ponytail look like that, even back in high school before she gave up her extensions.
“You really like him, huh,” Serena says, and nudges Blair’s shoulder gently with her own.
Serena is the only person in the world who ever touches Blair like this, so generously, without any ulterior motive or strings attached. Just because Serena cares about Blair and wants to be close to her.
Serena is the only person in the world who touches Blair like that, besides Dan.
“It doesn’t matter,” Blair says. “I know he’s yours. Dan belongs to you. And I — maybe I’ll always belong to Chuck. No matter how hard I try not to.”
“Oh, B,” Serena says. “Remember what Audrey says. People don’t belong to each other.”
*
Dan texts Blair saying he wants to talk to her, but Blair does not respond. Instead she throws herself into the thing she was actually supposed to be focused on this whole time, namely her career.
The Columbia undergraduate arts journal is called The Mobius Strip, which is an absolutely dreadful name. Changing it is point seven on Blair’s ten-step plan for taking control of the journal and turning it into the nation’s premier college-level thought leader on matters of arts, culture, and lifestyle.
The Strip is a fairly diverting challenge, as these things go. It’s been a while since Blair got to put a scheme to work in a venue worthy of her talents, and Ivy League art bitches can give even a Waldorf a run for her money. But in the end, it takes Blair only two weeks of determined effort, grit, and determination (plus just a trifle, really the merest soupçon, of sabotage) to be named editor-in-chief.
And then when she’s done she sits there at her stupid pathetic college extracurricular desk with her stupid pathetic college extracurricular nameplate saying editor-in-chief on it, and like an idiot, like an absolute fucking moron, she thinks, I can’t wait to see the look on Dan’s face when I tell him.
Just how pathetic can one person be?
It’s entirely Dan Humphrey’s fault, and filled with resolve, Blair summons a town car to take her to Brooklyn so she can tell him so.
*
“No,” says Dan when he opens the door and sees her standing there. He tries to shut it in her face, but Blair sticks her foot in the entryway to stop him.
“No what?” she demands. The sheer rudeness of people from Brooklyn never ceases to stun her.
“No to whatever scheme you’re here to pitch me on,” says Dan. “No I’m not helping Chuck, or Serena, or fucking Cousin Charlie or whoever. No I’m not going to kiss you so Gossip Girl will send out some blast about how crazy it is that Queen B would stoop to touch Lonely Boy and then that will all be part of your master plan to undo child labor laws somehow. No. I’m done with all of it. Whatever you’re going to say to me. Just no.”
Blair can feel her jaw drop a little. She snaps it back together. “I came here because I wanted to talk to my friend,” she says.
“Oh, so we’re friends now?” says Dan. “Because it didn’t feel like it when you were ignoring all my calls and texts for two weeks. It didn’t feel like it when I did something I didn’t even want to do — for Chuck Bass, of all people — and then you wouldn’t even look at me afterwards.” In his frustration he gestures emphatically enough to create an opening between his body and the door, and Blair seizes this opportunity to push past him and inside, where it will be harder to get rid of her.
“Perhaps I should have returned your calls,” Blair allows. “But I’ve been very busy. With, I might add, the task you personally suggested I take on! I’ve just been named editor-in-chief of the Mobius Strip.”
Dan stares blankly. “The —?”
“I’m going to make them change the name,” she interjects hastily. “But you know. The campus art magazine. Like you said. I took your advice. I’m running it now.”
“Okay,” says Dan. “Congratulations.” His voice is still horribly cold.
“You’re the first person I told,” Blair says. With humiliation she realizes that her own voice sounds apologetic. Weak, even. “I thought you’d be happy to hear it. Because you’re my friend.”
“You know what, Blair, friends don’t treat each other the way we’ve been treating each other,” Dan says. “Friends don’t sneak around behind everyone else’s backs just to watch movies and go to art shows. Friends don’t keep making up schemes that involve kissing, and then ghosting each other afterwards. Friends don’t — god.” One hand on the back of his neck, thumb nervous over the curls there. “Friends don’t write books about how they’re just completely obsessed with each other.”
“You’ve lost me,” Blair says. Frankly the confusion is a relief; her fight or flight reflexes were about to go haywire the way he was talking before, and she doesn’t know that this friendship is strong enough to survive a full Waldorf take down. “Who wrote a book? Who’s obsessed?”
Dan grimaces, and Blair is fascinated to see that his face takes on an expression very close to the one Blair always imagined Anne Boleyn’s had when she said, I have heard the executioner is very good, and I have only a little neck. “I am,” he says. “Apparently.” He swings his arm to indicate the scene behind him.
Blair hasn’t paid attention up to now, but the floor of Humphrey’s sad little loft does seem to be even more cluttered than usual. There’s piles and piles of typewritten pages on the floor, with red notes scrawled all over the margins.
“Oh,” says Blair. “So you actually were writing a novel.”
“I told you I was,” Dan says sulkily.
“Writers say a lot of things,” Blair informs him with asperity. “But I don’t see why you’re angry with me about that. If your book’s terrible, that’s on you.”
“You know what? You can read it,” Dan says. “I’m sick of talking around this. Just read it, and then you’ll know.”
Blair holds herself as still and rigid as a statue. “No thank you,” she says. “I for one actually am invested in holding onto our little — alliance, if you have such a problem with the word friendship. And I don’t see it surviving if I get a full picture of all the things you thought about me in high school.”
“Blair, come on,” says Dan. “You’re not that clueless. You know how to read people better than practically anyone I’ve ever met, it’s part of what makes you so scary. I haven’t spent a free night without you in literally weeks. I brought over Belle de Jour to watch in your bed. You know. You have to know.”
Blair imagines that she is a statue made of ice, cold as the north pole, cold as the snow queen in Hans Christian Andersen. People can try to melt her down, but nothing can get to the arctic heart of her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.
“Okay, fine,” says Dan. He picks up a pile of paper from the floor and hands it to her. “So then read this. And then after that, if you still want to, then we can talk about being friends.”
One wannabe writer’s lame first draft cannot melt ice. Blair takes the pages and starts to read.
It’s a description of that essay contest she won junior year of high school, of all things. Except Humphrey’s renamed her Clair Carlyle, because he’s got all the creativity of Andy Rooney.
Blair has a very clear memory of that contest and her parents not showing up to see her accept her award, because she remembers very clearly every time her parents demonstrated they didn’t care about her. But she didn’t know Dan Humphrey was there, watching her parents not be there and taking notes. How humiliating.
Or anyway, it should be humiliating. Blair should be offended that he’s written this failure of hers into his book, the same way she should be offended by the way he keeps laughing at her. But she still can’t seem to quite grasp at the appropriate emotion, somehow.
It’s strange, but it doesn’t seem exactly like a failure, the way he’s written it. Or anyway, it doesn’t seem like she’s the one who failed.
With a red pen in the margins, he’s written, Why can’t you just STOP, and underlined stop three emphatic times.
Blair touches the underlining with the very tips of her fingers.
“It’s all about you,” Humphrey says from where he’s collapsed on the couch, propping his head up with his hands at his jaw and his elbows on his knees. Still looking martyred as a Tudor queen. “The whole book. I’ve been working on it for four years, and somehow now it’s all about you. I don’t know when it happened. It’s so stupid. I can’t cut you out.”
Blair makes up her mind.
“Dan Humphrey,” she says, marching over to him, “you make me feel like the biggest idiot on the planet sometimes. And I don’t know why, when you’re right there being a bigger idiot than I am.”
That makes him jerk his head up in indignation, opening his mouth for a retort that would no doubt be laughably weak if he were ever to say it. But Blair never finds out what it is, because she cuts him off by kissing him.
Dan makes a muffled sound of surprise in the back of his throat, and then he brings his hand up to her jaw and kisses her back.
And it’s nothing like the kind of kiss that would make Blair turn her back on her boyfriend of ten years and lose her virginity to someone she half-despised in the back of a moving vehicle. It’s something else. It’s on a different scale all together.
*
It’s very odd, how much dating Dan Humphrey is similar to being covert friends with Dan Humphrey.
Blair goes over to Brooklyn after she’s finished her last meeting of the day with the Lion’s Share Review, which is what she’s proposing as the new name for the Strip, and Dan has It Happened One Night cued up on his laptop.
“Dorota delivered your groceries,” Dan announces. “You know, you could have just asked me if you wanted me to stock up on something.”
“You’re underage, remember?” Blair says, unpacking her Burleigh’s gin, because Rufus’s leftover Hendricks is very middle class, and her vermouth and cocktail onions, because gibsons go with screwball. “Honestly, Dan, you should just go into Manhattan, I haven’t been carded in the city since I was fourteen.”
“Okay, but that’s because you only drink at bars where you know the owners,” Dan says. “I don’t know if any liquor store owners’ children went to St. Judes.”
“Well, I should hope not,” says Blair, appalled, and Dan rolls his eyes and asks if she wants pizza.
And then they’re sitting on the couch watching Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert on the bus, and Blair is dabbing grease off her pizza with a napkin while they argue about whether the scene where everyone on the bus sings “Man on the Flying Trapeze” together is sentimental Frank Capra bullshit at its worst (says Dan, a philistine who is incapable of understanding happiness), or an outpouring of joy and reflection of the human spirit during a time of national tragedy (says Blair, correct as always). Blair gets so heated that she finds she’s eating her pizza with her fingers, even though Eleanor always said that was vulgar.
“You’ll see this time,” Blair says darkly. “I know you, Humphrey, you ridiculous enormous sap. When we actually get to the song, you’ll be crying, you’ll be so moved.”
“Excuse me, I only cry at actually good cinema,” Dan says, looking aggrieved.
Blair, delighted, passes the tedious Jacksonville scenes guessing every movie she can think of to see which ones have actually made Dan cry, at which he only sighs deeply and does more of his Anne-Boleyn-before-the-executioner-face. Blair’s starting to think he just likes being martyred.
But when they get to the scene where Clark and Claudette have to pretend to be a married couple sharing a motel room, Blair lets her head Dan’s against his shoulder, and he seems to like that an awful lot more. When Claudette Colbert is standing by the sheet dividing the two beds in her slip, Dan kisses Blair, and by the time Clark Gable is buttoning Claudette’s blouse back up as they finish their charade, Dan is undoing the buttons on Blair’s.
When they finally get to the “Man on the Flying Trapeze” scene, Blair is too distracted to see if Dan actually cries. But she’s willing to watch the movie again to find out.