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nine.
The espresso burns smooth and bitter down his tongue, leaving muddy drops on the saucer that earn him dirty looks from the waiter. The café they’ve stopped in for lunch is nicer than any he’s been to back home, but the all too familiar itch that never ceases when he’s alone and out of place in a crowd isn’t there. Dan wonders if that isn’t why Harold found it so easy to make a home here, despite having to leave something so important behind.
Well, that, and who he made it with.
Dan tries not to stare, he really does, but it’s hard not to–they’re magnetic together, Roman’s hand resting naturally in Harold’s, like someone somewhere carved them from the same stone, forever to be fit together.
Despite the lack of the inadequacy itch, sweat still creeps under Dan’s collar, his heart fuzzy and his tongue too thick to sit in his mouth. He hates lying, and even though he keeps trying to remind himself that it isn’t lying, it totally is, that bullshit about it being storytelling might’ve worked to quell his nerves last night, but right now he’s alone in front of two men who think he’s sleeping with their daughter, which he isn’t and never would be, he’s not even literally sleeping in the same bed as her, which is the entire definition of a lie, but that’s not even what feels the worst right now, that’s not even what’s making him feel like he’s had ten times more caffeine than he actually has, because what he can’t stop thinking is: I have never fit with someone like that.
Well.
(Maybe he has, does, maybe he fits by Blair’s side like something lost returning home—or, really, like something glued together because it wants to be there—maybe he’d leaned into that kiss after breakfast because it felt like the most natural thing in the world, like anything that wasn’t his lips on her soft skin was completely wrong—but that seems like way too hopeful of a notion, which totally goes against everything he stands for, i.e. hope less romanticism. Or maybe he’s going insane.)
“Are you okay, Dan?” Harold asks warmly, leaning forward in his seat to catch Dan’s attention.
“Oh, I’m—I’m just—yeah, I’m fine.”
“Missing Blair already?” Roman teases.
Dan wrings a hand on the back of his neck, mustering a grin. “That obvious, huh?”
“It must be quite serious if she’s brought you all the way out here,” says Harold, and there’s an edge to it—not unkind, but like he’s willing to be if Dan says the wrong thing. No pressure or anything.
He tries to imagine what a serious relationship with Blair would look like. The ones she’s had involved cheating with her best friend and her body being sold for a hotel, so if that’s his basis, it’d be pretty easy to do better than that.
He imagines a lot of waiting around for her to get ready. A lot of being forced to watch Audrey Hepburn movies. A lot of stupid, petty arguments. Dinners he can barely afford and social events he detests and being dressed up like a Ken doll.
He imagines love and loyalty like a blinding light and a lifetime of being cared for and someone who’s really, truly proud of him and god, the sex would be—
Nope. Not going there.
Okay, so, a serious relationship with Blair would be a lot like a serious friendship with Blair. It’s not lying.
“I’m very serious about her,” he says, but that just sounds like anything any asshole boyfriend could say. “I’m—“ What was it? Ass backwards crushing? “I—“
It’s not lying. It’s not lying if you just—
“Blair’s my best friend,” he says finally. “It’s hard to put it into words. Which sucks when you’re me.”
“No words,” Roman agrees, consonants curling. “You lay eyes on them and you just know.”
“Yeah,” Dan says. “Well, uh. That’s not really how it was for me. I don’t even remember the first time I saw Blair. She was everywhere, it would’ve been harder not to see her. But the first time I looked at her…I thought—what is up with this girl?”
Harold laughs, nodding. Roman smiles and says, “And then the internship.”
Dan thinks for a moment. “I—yeah, I guess. I mean, before that we were kinda forced to hang out to help a friend. And it was…weird. Unpleasant. But then we started hanging out on purpose, and every time we did it was like I was finding something new in myself. And the internship…I found something new in her, too. She was—is—a force to be reckoned with, and god, did I want to reckon with it.” He laughs lightly, unsteadily, shaking his head. “I realized she could bring out this side of myself that I hated, and another that I really loved, and I’d never felt that before. I’d never felt so much at once. Sometimes—okay, most of the time—I feel like I’m invisible. Blair reminds me that I’m not.” He shrugs. “Sometimes it feels like I am to everyone but her. I kind of like it that way.”
Harold and Roman share a fond look. Well, that wasn’t so hard.
“So you’re not here to ask for Blair’s hand, then?”
Spoke too soon.
“Harry,” Roman warns. He gives Dan an apologetic look. “Harold is très protective of Blair.”
Dan swallows, smiling. “Then we have that in common.”
☆
Her weight on him is like a pebble in water, light but consequential, her shaking rippling under his skin. He’s prided himself on becoming quite levelheaded with age, but right now he feels, frankly, homicidal.
“Why doesn’t anyone want me as much as I want them? What’s wrong with me? Why—“
She shudders, the light of the fire starting to wane, flickering like her short, staggering breaths.
“Fuck,” he sighs, dragging a heavy hand over his face, “there is nothing wrong with you, Blair. If—if you could see what I see right now, you’d see that you’re— fiercely strong, and so beautiful, and I—“
Something dies in his throat. She won’t look at him, and he’s finding it harder and harder to keep looking at her like this, but looking away would only be worse. He wants to rip out the pages of his stupid, battered notebook and spread them around her, say see, say, look—look how much there is to love. He wants to crack her open and crawl inside her chest cavity to keep her heart company.
He’s going to have a killer hangover in the morning.
He doesn’t hold her, because he knows she doesn’t want him to, but he keeps as still as he can so as to not disturb her as she falls into a fitful sleep, and he hopes she can’t hear the way his pulse keeps tripping over her.
eight.
“George Sand used to be a regular here at Lapérouse,” Blair says as they step up side by side into the bustling, opulent lounge. “So were Hugo and Flaubert, but that’s a little less important. I just love it here. I think it might be the most romantic place in Paris.”
“It’s nice,” Dan says dumbly, because his mouth has gone dry and his face is flushed with the sudden, sticky warmth of being inside, and she’s got this glint of a smile in her eyes as she looks at him, and she’s so beautiful. Seriously, heads are turning. There’s a strange zing through the insecurities that still linger within the deepest parts of him that she’s here with him. Because she needs him for a convoluted plan to fool her parents, but still, beggars can’t be choosers.
“Find us a place to sit?” she says, handing him their coats, and it takes a moment, already too-warm with wine, for the words to take meaning outside of the shape they make her lips. He nods, venturing deeper into the dimly lit lounge, surrounded by couples huddled close together, the cigarette-smoke stench of outdoors giving way to clouds of cologne, just loud enough that it’s hard to hear himself think, which is probably a good thing.
He sinks back into the empty corner of a plush velvet booth, watching Blair retreat to the bar, her lush curls falling down her back and her dress hugging her so tight it looks like it was carved just for her. There’s something more relaxed about her here. He’s noticed it all day, even at dinner with her parents, even when her mom tried to make her feel smaller than she is. The set of her shoulders and the lack of stiffness to her back. If the world is a stage, Paris feels like the dark corner behind the curtains.
Maybe it’s just because Blair’s always been good at keeping history close, but it’s like he can feel it, thrumming through the dark walls, the lives that have been lived inside them, that have passed through before them and will pass through after them. He doesn’t think he’s ever really stopped to think about that, back home, but here, with her, it seems unavoidable. And this place really is romantic—which isn’t saying much, since it’s Paris, and everything he’s seen today has felt blindingly romantic, especially seeing it through Blair’s eyes—piano tangling with the foreign language that curls in the air, lights pooling warm over the wall of whiskey behind the bar, the man in front of the bar talking to Blair.
Oh. She has a hip leaned against the bar, but Dan can’t see her face. He can see the other man’s, though, and other than the glaringly obvious fact that he’s incredibly hot, he’s got that born and bred air of sophistication that Dan could never quite grasp, no matter how long he spent getting ready before an event and staring into the mirror and hating what looked back at him.
Blair looks over her shoulder, eyes meeting his for a brief moment, and Dan’s okay with it, really, if she’d rather stay over there with him, strike up a conversation in a language he never learned, stick around and find out if he’s the someone better she can bring home to her parents. He is, by all accounts, the kind of guy Blair is supposed to be with. The kind of guy who could buy her a drink here and have it not physically hurt. The kind of guy who fits here, the way she fits here.
But then she’s turning around and making her way to him without a second glance back, and something inside Dan clicks, and he realizes that all day, everywhere, and especially here, he feels like he fits, too.
☆
The cold, crisp air does more to sober him immediately than the espresso did, taking in a deep breath and burning his lungs. The drinks and the day swirl in his stomach, and when he looks at her, she’s already looking at him, something almost expectant in her gaze. He swallows and says, “Do you think George Sand ever threw up out here?”
She laughs, face scrunching up and head tipping back, linking her arm through his for stability. He thinks of the intangibility of history, and if stories have more truth to them then the facts do, but mostly he just tries to keep her warm.
six.
He rests his temple against the frozen traincar window, tender as a bruise, yielding to the cold. His fingers hold open the pages of his notebook, scribbled over so much the paper is starting to curl, the lines etched through to the other side, black and bleeding and ugly like all the things he’s been trying to swallow down since last night, all the things that Pandora’s box of a fucking kiss opened up.
As if waking up in bed next to her wasn’t enough—it’s not uncommon, waking up next to her, but, fuck, he doesn’t think he’s ever wanted to kiss someone so badly as he did seeing Blair bare-faced, hair mussed and cheeks blossoming with a blush, in bed with him —the multiple blankets and his overawareness of himself thankfully obscuring the hard evidence of morning from her, because that would’ve been more embarrassing than he could stand. It’s not like he didn’t know how soft her lips are, what they taste like, what it’s like to have them open and shut and surrender and take control in turn, but also—he really didn’t. He had no idea. He’s been fooling himself with fantasies of a reprisal this whole time, because the kiss in the spring had nothing on the makeout last night that ended with him in the bathroom blinking blearily at his reflection in the mirror and trying to talk himself down from a raging hard on.
He’s too tired to really read, having sat up most of the night before writing nonstop, so he rifles through the pages of the notebook just to distract himself, most of them nearly unreadable, both because of how unflinchingly, disgustingly honest and open and raw the words are, and also how messy his writing gets when he’s trying to be discreet, or the lines are just coming faster than he can get them down. There’s notes on artworks he’d never heard of before this trip, things Blair said that were either absurd or achingly beautiful, and every few pages there’s a scribble of: remember this moment. Like a heartstring tied around his finger, a weaving of words in spirals and scribbles, remember this moment; remember the fall of her hair, the slant of this light, the burn of this coffee, the wet pavement and her eyelashes and that laugh she lets out for you sometimes.
He finally falls asleep with his head back against the peeling traincar seat and the lingering sweet of her lipgloss still stuck to his tongue.
☆
It’s not like he’s scared of Jenny, because he’s still got the mental image of her as his rowdy toddler partner-in-crime who he spoonfed with a small, unsteady hand and made up bedtime stories for every night, and also he’s a grown man and being afraid of his little sister would be totally pathetic, but he’s…nervous, to say the least. He’s been running his speech through his head the entire ride and walk from the station to the little London apartment: Blair asked him for a favour and he said yes. He knows it’s ridiculous and harebrained but, come on, she’s done some pretty ridiculous and harebrained things in her time, so she can’t judge him too harshly.
Well, she can, he just hopes she doesn’t.
He thinks he’s mentally prepared himself enough by the time he finally works up the courage to knock on the door. But when it swings open, it’s not Jenny he’s faced with, but a petite girl with her dark braids thrown up haphazardly on the top of her head.
“Oh,” Dan says. “Sorry, I must have the wrong apartment.”
“Jenny, Dan’s here,” calls the girl, in a thick London accent, without looking away from him.
“Oh,” Dan says again, dumbly. “Are you, uh, Jenny’s roommate?”
The girl raises an imperious brow. “Is that what we’re still calling it?”
Before Dan can ask what that means, Jenny appears at the door. “You’re early,” is all she says.
“Well, you know me.”
“Always early, are you?” the other girl says flatly.
“Dan, this is Anita,” says Jenny. “My girlfriend.”
Dan resists the urge to say Oh for a third time, but what comes out instead is: “Hey, that’s great!” which is exponentially worse.
Anita continues to stare at him flatly.
“Am I… are you gonna let me in?” Dan says, and honestly, if he was them, the answer would absolutely be no. But they both sidestep out of the entrance, making room for him to come in, head bowed sheepishly and bag thudding against the door frame.
“Tea, Dan?” Anita asks.
“That’s so cliché,” Dan says, smiling. Jenny gives him a sharp look. “I mean, I love it. Um, yes, please. Thanks.”
Anita makes her way into the small, cramped kitchen space, waving back at them. “Go ahead. Debrief. Pretend I’m not here.”
Dan drops his bag at the foot of the beaten up couch, and says nothing. Jenny stares him down, saying nothing back.
“So,” he says finally. “What’s new?”
Jenny narrows her eyes at him.
“You called Dad recently?” Dan says.
“Have you called Mom recently?” Jenny shoots back.
Dan rolls his eyes, letting out an indignant huff. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Pot, kettle.”
“Okay, I can explain.”
“No need,” Jenny says. “You’re tired of dating nice girls and instead want one that’ll treat you like shit. A somewhat sudden change in type isn’t something you want to explain over the phone. I get it.”
“That’s—yeah, I had that one coming. But, it’s—it’s not real.”
“What’s not real.”
“The relationship,” Dan says. “It’s…a scheme, kind of.”
Jenny blinks at him. “You’re going to marry her and then poison her and get her inheritance?”
“Ha ha. No, I’m—I’m pretending to be her boyfriend for the holidays so her parents will see that she’s capable of being in a stable relationship with someone who’s good to her.”
“And she chose you?”
“Wow, really feeling the love here, Jen.”
“No, I mean—“ Jenny purses her lips, “you’re good to her, Dan? Enough so that she asked you?”
“I try to be,” he mumbles. “You know we’re friends, Jen.”
“Let me get this straight—she’s showing that she’s capable of a steady relationship by pretending to be in a steady relationship, instead of actually just being in one?”
“Okay, when you put it like that, it’s—“
“Pathetic?” Jenny supplies.
“She’s not pathetic,” he says sharply. Jenny blinks, surprised. He clears his throat. “She’s guarded, that’s all. I’m doing her a favour because I care about her. If that’s too hard for you to grasp, then—well, I don’t have any threats to make because I’m actually really happy to see you. So.”
There’s a beat of silence. “Tea’s ready,” Anita calls.
“Thanks,” Dan says stiffly.
He moves to turn around, but before he can Jenny throws her arms around his neck in a hug. He eases up, hugging her back, tucking his nose against her hair. She smells like cigarette smoke and the perfume he first smelled on Anita when he came in.
“You’re living an honest to god fucking Hallmark Christmas movie,” mumbles Jenny.
“That’s the meanest thing you’ve said so far,” he says back.
It takes some pushing, but eventually Anita—an aspiring fashion photographer whose sharp wit and sharper tongue leads Dan to only be able to describe her as Constance Queen material— deigns to take them on her personal tour of London; which consists of exactly one tourist destination and a million graffitied, cigarette-stubbed alleyways. Not that Dan’s complaining—it’s as if Anita has a story for every sharpie-scribbled bathroom wall and street-performer filled corner. She takes them by the mosque she goes to on Fridays and makes them try something at all of her favourite food carts, and Dan finds himself finding Blair in all of it. Not in the way Paris reflects her; the city shaping itself around her like seafoam around the newborn body of Aphrodite, but just that—he sees her in everything: streetlights luminescent on wet pavement like spilled honey in the sun, every dust-filled nook and cranny of the record shops they traipse through, where he buys her a Billie Holiday record and a 45 of Moon River, in the spot they watch the early sunset from, Jenny and Anita sharing a cigarette, the sun red and wavering as the burning cherry, and Dan has never believed in God, not really, not in a way that sticks, but he does believe that she’s done something intricate and irreversible to him, that she’s taken his heart and reshaped it into something better using just her hands, impossibly soft and unbearably gentle, that she’s shown him her true face and seen his in return and hasn’t shied away from it, not really, not in a way that’s stuck, and he wonders if that isn’t the same thing.
They shiver through the ink-soaked streets after sundown, pulling him into a hipster hole-in-the-wall that boasts a rich history but doesn’t have much to show for it, taking a squeaky back booth and ordering their weight in chips and beer, and Dan is hit with that same pang of bitter envy and aloneness, that creeping sense that he’s missing something due to his own cowardly stupidity, when he sees the way Jenny throws her head back laughing at every one of Anita’s barbs in a way she hasn’t since she was a little kid, her bitten, black nails circling easily over the back of Anita’s hand, her eyes on him awfully knowing.
Maybe Dan wouldn’t catch it, if he hadn’t known her all her life, but he has and he does—the small pinch she gives Anita’s elbow, the brief look they exchange before Anita excuses herself to use the bathroom.
“So,” Jen says.
“So,” he says back stubbornly. There’s a stretch of silence that Dan is perfectly willing to sit in.
“What do you think?” she says finally.
“Would probably be better if they would play something other than The Strokes.”
“Dan,” she says.
“You really care what I think?” he says. She nods, small, and that startles him. “I think she’s great. I think what you two have is really, really great.”
“It is,” she says, smiling a little.
“And she’s…good to you?” he asks.
“Would you come to blows with her if she wasn’t?”
“No. There may be hair pulling, though.”
Jenny hums amusedly. “She doesn’t,” Dan says all of a sudden. “Blair. Treat me like shit. She’s really good to me. I was just telling her last night that she’s changed the way I see the world. The way I see myself, really. I think…she’s made me better, without even meaning to.”
“Oh, for fucks sake,” Jenny says exasperatedly. “You’re in love with her.”
Dan feels his ribcage constrict, squeezing his heart through the cracks, disgustingly tender and bloody, a caught animal trying to escape.
“I am not…in love…with Blair.”
Jenny laughs, a knuckle-crack of a noise. “Yes, because that was so convincing.”
Dan swallows. “I am not in love with Blair,” he says again, firmer this time. Not because I don’t want to be. Because I can’t be.
Something behind Jenny’s eyes shifts, like she remembers that this is serious, realizes that she’s stealing this moment. “She shouldn’t have gotten you involved in this.”
“It’s harmless,” he says. “I mean, really, this is one of her tamer ideas. No one gets hurt.”
Jenny looks at him for one long, terrible moment, but before she can say more, Anita is sliding back into the sticky booth next to her.
Back at the flat, they switch from beer to bad wine, Dan in his NYU hoodie and Jen in her CSM one, and it might be the nicest night they’ve spent together since. Well. Dan doesn’t like to dwell on it.
“What’re you doing for New Year’s eve?” Jenny asks, from where her and Anita are tangled together on the floor in front of the couch.
“Same thing as everyone else,” says Dan. “Getting so drunk I forget the past year.”
Jenny snorts, twisting in Anita’s arms to look up at him. It’s funny. She hasn’t done that in years. “We’re having a party,” she says. “Why don’t you come?”
“You don’t think I’ll cramp your style?”
“Well, now I do.”
Dan smiles, shaking his head. “No, I don’t think—I mean, Blair and I will be home by then.”
“Bring her,” Anita says without looking away from the TV.
“Oh, I don’t know if—“ he glances back at Jen warily, “if, well—“
“What, bringing your girlfriend along to a party with copious amounts of booze and women cramps your style?”
“No,” Dan says. “Nothing like that. And she’s not my girlfriend.”
Anita’s brows raise. “So you’re one of those guys.”
“I’m not any kind of guy,” he says. “She’s really not my girlfriend. Weren’t you eavesdropping on the conversation from earlier? It’s a fake thing, for her parents, we’re just really good friends.”
“Really good friends is what my Gran thinks Jen and I are,” Anita says.
“Enough,” Jenny laughs. “If Dan wants to ring in the New Year alone and sad in his bachelor pad in Brooklyn, let him.”
“Who said I’d be alone?” Dan says. “Or sad, for that matter?”
Anita and Jenny share a look, then burst into a fit of giggles. Dan knocks Jen on the back of the head with a socked foot.
After the girls retreat to bed, he pulls the couch out, the springs whining with his weight. He takes out his laptop and notebook to transpose the bits left over on paper, and is scared shitless when, quiet as a slinking cat, Jenny appears next to the bed, her eyes covered with her hands.
“Are you decent?”
“Fuck off.”
She slips in next to him under the thin, ratty covers, the way she would when they were younger—sneaking across the divide between their rooms after the lights went out for one more story, or when she had a bad dream. It was so much easier, then. The bed never creaked under either of them. He can’t bring himself to look at her.
“When did it happen?” she whispers.
“When did what happen.”
“The first step is admitting you have a problem,” she says.
“But the second is believing there’s a power greater than you that can make you better, so that immediately falls through.”
“True,” Jenny says. “But Blair is definitely a power greater than you.”
Dan laughs lightly. “That she is.”
“I’m going to propose something totally outlandish here,” Jenny says after a silent, still moment. “I think you should talk to her.”
“Oh wow,” he says dryly. “You think I should do the mature thing? Have you met me?”
Jenny gives him a shallow half-smile. “Talk to me, then.”
He sighs, staring at the ceiling. “She’s just made everything better,” he says. “I know that sounds weird because she has a habit of making things worse, but…I like who I am when I’m with her. Who I am because of her. I never really knew what that felt like before.”
“And here I thought you were suffering from writer’s block.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve been telling everyone,” he says. “It’s better than the alternative.”
“Which is?”
“The truth,” he says. “I can’t stop writing something I don’t want anyone to read.”
Jenny hums. She picks at her short thumbnail with her front teeth. “When I met Anita, I started sketching more than ever,” she says. “There were all these things I wanted to make because I wanted to, like, see them through her eyes. I wanted her to see me. And I was so scared. I’d felt it—before, I mean, on some level I knew, but it was nothing like this, it was nowhere near this strong or like, arresting. I was so fucking alone when I came here, but she made me feel like I had someone to be alone with. I told her everything about me, everything that happened, and it didn’t change a thing. She still smiled at me like I was something that deserved to really be smiled at. So I just thought, fuck it— and I told her. And, well—“
“The rest is history,” Dan mumbles. “Fuck it. That’s a pretty good philosophy.”
“It worked for me.”
He turns to look at her finally, her face bare and in shadow like a bluing bruise, and even though she’s right in front of him, he misses her indescribably. “I should’ve done more.”
Jenny shrugs. “It wasn’t your job.”
“When did you grow up?” he says quietly.
“A long time ago,” she says, “and not nearly soon enough.”
He swallows. “I’m not. In love with Blair, that is—but I understand why it would upset you. If I was.”
“What’s upsetting me is that you’re tiptoeing around this because of me. It’s really starting to piss me off. Blair apologized. Was it a good apology? Absolutely not. She needs to take a class on that. But was it genuine? Yeah, I think so.”
“So you’d be…okay with it?”
“If I told you I wasn’t, would that honestly stop you?”
Dan sighs. “No,” he says, after a moment. “But I’d feel guilty about it.”
“If you were in love with her—and note how I’m entertaining the delusion of a hypothetical,” Jenny says, “she would be very, very lucky. Luckier than she deserves to be.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
Jenny smiles at him knowingly. “Which part?”
He shifts onto his side to face her fully, lowering his voice barely above a whisper, and yet it still sounds much too loud. “Please be okay with it.”
“I just want you to be happy.”
“I am,” he says. “I’ve never been happier.”
“Me too,” she says back.
With Jenny back in her own bed, he picks his laptop back up, sitting back and taking a look at his screen, a good look, scrolling through page after page and willing himself to be objective, to not hate it simply on the basis that it has his hands behind it, to give it merit, the kind of merit Blair would grant it, and fuck.
It’s a book.
It’s not done, not nearly, but it’s got a shape to it. A solid shape. Five and a half feet and big brown eyes. It spells out her name clear as day and fuck fuck fuck he’s in love with her, he’s so fucking in love with her, he’s so fucked.
He reaches for his phone, wanting to hear her voice. She picks up halfway through the first ring, and Dan has always been so good at talking and so bad at saying anything that matters.
five.
He paces as well as he can around the cramped space of the copy depot, hand running ragged through his hair, the sun starting to set, the elderly man behind the counter eyeing him suspiciously, probably because he looks fucking suspicious.
He still has the records to fall back on if she hates it that much. Although, if she hates it that much, she’ll never want to speak to him again, so he won’t need anything to fall back on.
Maybe this was a bad idea. Maybe the way he feels about her should never see the harsh light of day.
But he’s watched Jenny be the brave one for as long as he can remember; stood back in the shadow she casted with every risk she took. He tried to do things exactly the way they were supposed to be done, hated to step out of line or make too much noise to make up for every time Jenny did.
So maybe he’s not supposed to be in love with Blair because of the tangled knot of history that tugs beneath the surface of every moment they spend together, threatening to ruin them. Maybe she’s not supposed to be in love with him back for the same reasons. But that doesn't mean she couldn’t be.
Dan has looked at this life Jenny has made for herself—how she burns the waffles she makes, how she makes a note on the fridge to buy more almond milk for Anita, how she opens the shabby curtains and has a cigarette on the small balcony, and looks happy. Content. She hums into Anita’s kisses like morning birdsong and she drips syrup all over the counter and she lives. Really, really lives. All because she took the risk. All because she said something. Dan wants that—that love so thick it’s like the smell of burnt pastry in the air—and he wants it with Blair. He wants her to come home to him after a long day and kick off her heels and put her feet in his lap. He wants to wake up next to her and not have to hold back. He wants the brunches and the banquet halls that he hates. He wants to make her as happy as his sister is right now, even after everything. He wants to say something.
And—okay, it’s no Frank O’Hara, or anything, but it’s good. It paints the whole picture of her, of them, and it’s really, really good—maybe the only good thing he’s ever made.
Even if it isn’t, Blair’s always been terribly conceited. So it has that going for him.
The printer spits out the last of the pages, and Dan collects the heavy, hearty stack in his hands. Untitled by Daniel R. Humphrey.
He gives a nod and a smile to the man behind the counter, stepping back out into the freezing cold, and pretends he isn’t terrified.
three.
Dan stumbles through the party, calling out bonsoirs! to people he’s never even met before (because that’s what Blair told him to say), feeling weak in the knees and stupidly, wonderfully giddy. His fingers already miss being on Blair, in her, and he has half a mind to forget about a refill and go right back to her when he breaks through into the starkly lit kitchen and is met with Aaron and Cyrus mixing drinks.
“Dan!” Cyrus calls, the eggnog in his hand sloshing. “Great party, don’t you think?”
Dan blinks back at him dumbly, blushing. He has a bite mark throbbing at his shoulder. He just watched Blair ride him. He knows what she looks like, sounds like, feels like when she comes. He could catch on fire and this would still be the best fucking party ever.
“Yup,” is what he settles on saying.
Cyrus is promptly whisked away by a frenzied Eleanor who doesn’t spare a glance for either Dan or Aaron.
Aaron rolls his eyes at the scene, but Dan thinks, he like, gets it now. Who cares how crazy your girl is when she’s your girl, you know?
“So you and Blair,” Aaron says, like he read Dan’s mind, although it wouldn’t be that hard, since there’s a 90% chance at any given moment that he’s thinking about Blair. Aaron hands him a fresh drink which he takes gratefully as he searches through the wine bottles to find Blair’s favourite.
“Me and Blair,” Dan says wistfully, like the lovestruck, just-fucked fool he is.
“That’s a thing,” says Aaron.
“It sure is.”
There’s a beat, and then Aaron says, “I mean, this is weird, isn’t it? Or have I been gone just long enough that it isn’t?”
Dan pauses as he pours another glass for Blair. Is it weird? It doesn’t feel weird. It’s not like he barrelled into this headfirst. He slipped into it slowly, carefully, until it consumed him. Until anything that wasn’t being in love with Blair felt weird. He’s not even sure when that happened, only that it’s made his life better, brighter. He’s never loved anyone as much as he loves Blair. He didn’t think it was possible to love someone this much. He wonders, absently, if it isn’t. If he’s stumbled on something new, something no one else has ever felt before.
If anyone could create a whole new feeling, he knows it would be Blair.
☆
He’s melted into Blair’s side as the party winds down, full on more cheese than any one human ever needs and really drunk and haunted in the best way possible with the image of Blair smearing sticky lipgloss all over his dick, when he catches Eleanor eyeing them suspiciously. He leans forward, clearing his throat.
“Do you want me to get you something?” he asks her, and it’s not sharp or sarcastic, it’s genuine, she made his favourite person on the planet so he’ll get her whatever she wants, and did he mention that he's really fucking drunk?
“No,” Eleanor says. “Don’t mind me.”
Dan nods, slouching back into Blair, who turns to look at him quizzically. “What was that?”
“I think your mom knows I defiled you in the middle of her party,” he mumbles.
“Please,” Blair scoffs, smiling, pulling him in by the collar. “If anything I defiled you.”
“And I couldn’t be happier about it,” he says, staring at the wine-stained, kiss-bruised curve of her lips before she leans in.
“Me too,” she says when they pull away.
two.
The bouquet of flowers he bought her off a street stand hit the ground of the alleyway next to him, gracefully, like even now, even here, she’s being considerate. The cold concrete bites through his jeans, but the heat building everywhere else beats it tenfold. Someone, somewhere, laughs—a far off, twinkling noise that makes this moment all the more real. It sparks low in his stomach, the thought that anyone could see them, could see him, on his knees for her.
He gets her stockings down to her knees, gripping her thighs, and the position isn’t ideal, the angle too awkward; but there’s a mouth-shaped mottled bruise on the crease of her inner thigh that sends a thrill through him when he sees it. She hasn’t chastised him for it, so she must not have seen it.
That, or maybe she likes it there; not so much some claim of ownership over her, but one of her over him—the mark of his mouth where it belongs.
He scrapes his teeth over the tender spot ever-so-slightly, and she whines, high-pitched, her grip in his hair tightening deliciously when he presses a lingering kiss to her pretty folds. Then, without warning, she yanks him back, tipping his head up, up, up, blinking down at him blearily, and it knocks him in the gut; how beautiful she is—skin like Vermeer’s paint pot personified, prickled with goosebumps, cheeks gone pink and eyes ever-dangerous, sweet little mouth bruised by his kiss.
“Look at you,” she says, drawing her thumb over his mouth, and he presses a kiss to it before she shoves it roughly between his lips. “Your mouth is watering. You’re so desperate for it.”
Her hand in his hair is this side of too tight, holding him back, out of reach of her, and he knows he could fight against the hold, but it doesn’t feel like it—it feels like she has him by the spine, his breath in the palm of her hand, his heart laid at her feet.
He sucks on her thumb eagerly, eyelids getting heavy, and she smiles, a stunningly evil thing. “You’re making a mess in your boxers right now, aren’t you?”
Well, fuck. He doesn’t answer, but his cock twitches, spits, betraying him. She pops her thumb out, pressing it to the centre of his bottom lip.
She says, “Ask nicely.”
He shudders, a lump in his throat like a clenched fist ready to swing. “Blair,” he says, plaintive. She’s growing slicker by the second, clit bloomed hard and red, like making him beg for it feels so impossibly good; the scent of her filling the space between them, leaving him punch-drunk and blissfully broken. “Please.”
She hums, shaking her head. “You can do better than that,” she says, low, voice ruined with arousal, “You are a writer, after all. I think you can spare a few more words for me.”
God. She has no idea.
The city spins in endless motion around them, but he’s never felt quite this kind of calm and quiet, held by her here. He thought, even long before he ever cared to admit it, that Blair could see something in him others couldn’t—some special sort of downfall. And maybe she can, does, and pets through his hair anyway. Maybe she can, does, but sees something else, too, something he can hardly see himself. Something good. Something too good for him to ever look at it too long. He wants to twist out of her touch, but leans into it instead.
“I-I want to make you feel good,” he says, and means: I need to. His cock weeps so hard it hurts, cheeks burning with embarrassment, and she cups them in her palms. “Please, please, Blair, let me.”
Something he can’t quite make out in his haze flickers behind her eyes. Her smile is small, sincere, and maybe a little bit scared. She nods.
He spreads her open, putting his mouth on her and moaning at her taste. She gets wet so easy, and he’s learned she’s quick on the trigger if you know where to pull, so he drags his tongue around her clit teasingly, working her up, before alternating between sucking and circling with his thumb, licking up the bittersweet release of her first climax before it threatens to make a mess of her. His name hangs from her lips like it’s something so sweet, ripe and syrupy on her tongue, like it was made for her to say—and when she pets over his hair, soothing the spot she’d pulled, he knows it was, knows he was—made for her. Made to be on his knees for her. Made to love her.
They both laugh as they set her right again, and she pulls a napkin out of her tiny purse and wipes the remnants of herself off his face, and then she’s kissing him, sliding her hands up under his shirt, and they’re freezing, and he loves them.
“I’m not getting on my knees in an alley,” she mumbles into his mouth.
“I would never ask you to,” he says back.
Her smile stretches wider at that. She stuffs a hand down his pants with a feverish intent that makes his knees buckle, and she giggles when she feels him, leaking all over himself, and she says, “You’re lovely, too.”
He wants to bury his blushing face in the crook of her neck but she’s holding him by the hair at his nape so he can’t, he can only look into her eyes and bite his tongue and love her. A raindrop kisses her nose, and he kisses it off—then another, on her cheek, and on her forehead, then clinging to her lashes and to his hair, until it’s an onslaught, and she shrieks, both of them laughing again as the rain soaks over them, enough to drown in.
☆
After dinner, Aaron, Blair and him sprawl on the plush rug in front of the fireplace, engaged in a lighthearted (at least on his end) debate on Robert Mapplethorpe, his skin tingling like shaken champagne, and maybe he doesn’t hate parties after all, maybe all he needs to make those upper-crust society events more than bearable is Blair slotted into his side, her teeth catching on his earlobe and her hand sliding into his lap whenever no one’s looking.
They bid goodnight to Aaron at the bend in the hall, going their separate ways, Dan’s limbs loose and heavy with liquor and love. After so long alone, he likes retreating back to the same room, the same bed as Blair. Back home, they’ll be split up by the bridge, but he knows easily, intrinsically, that he’ll be willing to make a home wherever she pleases, as long as he gets to fall asleep like this every night.
In bed, they’re cuddled under the weight of the covers, her back to his chest, his sweats rolled down and her slip pulled up, his dick inside her, because that’s just a thing that happens now, apparently.
“We should walk up the Eiffel Tower tomorrow,” she says, “the view is magnifique.”
“If you’re able to converse I’m obviously doing something wrong.”
She hums, scratching at his arm around her idly. “You’re doing great,” she says. “You don’t actually walk all the way up to the top.”
“What?”
“The Eiffel Tower,” she says. “An elevator takes you there after three hundred steps.”
“Okay,” he splutters, even though he knew that, because she has the advantage here and she must know it, he thinks he’d probably agree to murder in this position, and he’s always felt that being with her makes him smarter, but being in her absolutely, definitely makes him stupider, the smarts just leaking out of his ears, net zero intelligence, even though the angle isn’t that great for him and her hair is in his mouth and he’s sweating way too hard under the extra blankets, because she lets out this sigh, this little thing, all light and sweet, and her head falls back further and she says his name like a revelation, like a respite—and, okay. He knows. He’s self-aware enough to realize it’s objectively ridiculous of him to have been looking at rings in a store in Montmartre and picturing that white Parisian Christmas wedding from her childhood dreams and getting lost in the thought that if she had a daughter she would absolutely want to name her Audrey, and he’d pretend to put up a fight but ultimately give in because he’d give her anything, like, it’s crazy, he knows, but.
What else is there to think about, now?
“But we can’t take pictures,” she continues. “I hate it when people clog up the space taking pictures in front of it.“
“Not everyone has a Parisian vacation home.”
“Then they can buy a snow globe,” she says. “It’s tacky.”
“It’s what it’s there for,” he says, his fingers slipping over the spot where they’re joined, just feeling, then moving to play with her clit to see if it’ll make her shut up.
It doesn’t. “It’s there as a symbol of art and innovation.”
“Your buddy Bougeureau was against its installation.”
“You take one art history class and suddenly you think you’re a genius.”
“I am a genius,” he says, even if he isn’t one right now. “And you’re a snob.”
She clenches around him, in retaliation or because she liked the name-calling, either way making his head spin, any vestiges of sensible thought he was clinging to slipping right through his fingers.
“Could—could we switch?” he murmurs.
Her eyes flutter open, turning to look at him. “Yeah,” she says, pulling him out and shifting to straddle him—but he places a hand on her hip and presses her down into the bed instead. She watches him curiously, a brow quirked and lips parted, but doesn’t object. Slowly, he rids himself of his t-shirt, dropping it onto the floor next to the bed, then slides his hands under her slip, bringing it up over her head and discarding it the same. His hand spans her outer thigh, hiking her leg up around his hip and slipping easily back into her, her walls hugging him so tight, reveling in the feeling of her skin bare and heated on his, her lip catching on her teeth and just barely concealing her soft moan. She tangles her arms around his neck, drawing him to her to slant their mouths together, but he pulls back after a brief, messy moment, just wanting to look at her.
He brings a hand up to trace over her blushing cheek in wonderstruck reverence, dragging down to circle the pretty, stiff peak of her nipple as he presses a soft kiss to the corner of her mouth. Her gaze flicks away from his, uneasy, like at any moment she’s going to tell him to stop, but when he stills questioningly she only urges him back on, hands smoothing to the bottom of his back, but still won’t really look at him.
He watches her throat work as she swallows, and he tips her chin with a gentle hand, an even gentler stroke of his thumb down the ridge of her throat, a slow circle at the base, and she gives him that same look as before, back in the alley before the rain came crashing down, like a rose without the thorns, like she’s a little bit afraid of him. His lips part, ready to ask what’s wrong, and like she anticipates it, she pushes back against his hand on her neck and strains up to kiss him, a hot, dirty thing that feels so good, and she presses her hand over the back of his and guides him to squeeze, moaning full at the feeling, and he comes without meaning to.
His blood thunders in his ears, trying helplessly to catch his breath, mouth latched to her saltslicked collarbone. “Sorry,” he murmurs, and feels her shake her head, running her fingers through his hair.
“It’s okay,” she whispers.
He slides out his softening cock and shifts down without really thinking about it, a moth begging for a burn from her pulsing, flickering flame, dipping in to catch a dribble of his come that leaks out of her. She gasps, hips arching eagerly, and he curls his tongue up inside her, tasting the mix of his release and her arousal, rolling her clit insistently between his fingers, her fist flying up to her mouth and her body writhing against the bed.
After they clean up, which involves changing out the sheets because they’re so soaked Blair refuses to set back on them, he wraps his arms around her, less like he’s holding her and more like he’s holding on. He yawns, kissing behind her ear, “Goodnight.”
“‘Night,” Blair says back quietly. As he’s dozing off, he thinks he hears her sniffle.
christmas.
He doesn’t know how long he’s been walking around when his phone rings the first time, his lips and knuckles cold-cracked; face and hands ruddy with rime because he walked out without gloves or a scarf or his headphones, meaning he’s sad and freezing in France and he doesn’t have a soundtrack for any of it—and seriously, what’s the point of angsting without music?
He at least has his wallet, as scant as it is, so he can get a coffee and a pack of cigs and a lighter from the one open place he can find—all of which he promptly throws away, because the coffee is shitty and the cigarettes are gross and he doesn’t even smoke cigarettes, but he’s sad and freezing in France and it just felt like the thing to do.
The phone rings, the second time, and he lets it.
We go back to the real world.
He knows her, knows that Blair bites when she’s backed into a corner. Is that what he had done?
The last thing he ever wanted to do was stifle her. He’d watched others do it, take her for granted, try and smother that gorgeous, bright flame behind her eyes. Keep her locked up and caged in. The thought sends a horrible shiver down his spine. He’d sooner let her go than do that to her.
Because—she’s right, isn’t she? Because, really, what does he offer her back home?
Sure, things look a little less bleak since his dad got remarried to the richest widow that side of Manhattan, but the only sure things Dan’s really got to his name are stellar record and book collections, a couple vintage guitars, and that stupid fucking book. Even if he sells them, all of them, it’s still an empire of dirt compared to what she’s had.
The book.
Fuck.
The stupid fucking book is still wrapped up under the tree with her name on it, in it, all fucking over it. Even if he wanted to, which right now he really does, he can’t take it back, can’t hide it anymore.
The phone won’t stop ringing.
He’s spent the past year wanting to make things better for her. Good, in any little way he can. Maybe, underneath everything, that’s why he really agreed to come here. He would do anything to make things even just a little bit better for her.
And, he’s made her happy, these last few days, hasn’t he? Before that, even. He’s made her happy. That was real. He knows it.
A small, gnawing part of him doesn’t want to go back. Doesn’t want to face that he might be wrong—that she meant what she said, that it wasn’t real, that this, that they, would never be enough for her. But he thinks of that little London apartment, and how it brims with the light of a new day, a light so bright it drowns out the dark past.
If that's his basis, it’d be pretty easy to do better than that.
So he can’t give her the childhood fairytale of WASP-y perfection, or an entire empire or a fucking kingdom. But he can make her happy, which is more than they could say.
He can love her, all of her, and show her every day. He does, whether or not she loves him back, whether or not she ever will.
He can accept it, if she doesn’t. He loves her enough for that. But he’ll never know if he doesn’t go back.
☆
Billie Holiday croons through the scratch of vinyl from where the little pink record player sits in the corner of the bedroom, a cup of chamomile tea between each of their hands and his head in her lap.
“You use the word captivating too much,” she says, circling yet another line in red marker. “And effulgent is a stupid word. Incandescent sounds better.”
“Is it weird that this is kind of turning me on?” he mumbles, shifting to kiss her inner thigh. She hits him on the nose with the back of the marker.
“Not now,” she chastises. “I’m editing.”
LONDON. ONE YEAR LATER.
They’ve been kissing for so long his head is swimming, lights of the buildings around them blurry every time he breaks away, but that’s never for long. His skin is so heated he hardly feels the bite of the cold out here, her small hands pressing into his lower back, urging him to grind against her. From inside, there’s another pop of cheap champagne.
New Year’s in London. It’s become something of a tradition.
“No,” he says into her mouth, when she flicks open the button on his pants. “Nuh-uh. Absolutely not.”
She pouts. “No one will even know.”
“I will, and it will haunt me forever. On my deathbed I’ll still be feeling guilty for the time I had an orgasm on the balcony of my sister's apartment.”
“Kissing at midnight is so pedestrian,” she drawls. “We should come.”
“Nice offer, honey, but it’s not happening.”
They both jump suddenly at the sharp noise of something shattering inside, Blair’s chin jerking towards the sliding door. “That better not have been the decanter I gave them.”
“Well, that one’s on you,” Dan says, petting his hand over her slightly disheveled curls idly, lovingly. “They drink grocery store wine out of the bottle, what the fuck do they need a decanter for?”
Blair huffs indignantly, and he leans forward to kiss the pucker between her brows. “That’s mean,” she says. “I’m a great gift-giver. I’m trying to give you a very meaningful gift right now.”
“Sure, you are,” he mumbles, catching her mouth again, this side of too-tipsy, blood pooled and pounding between his legs. She sneaks her hands up his untucked shirt (when did his shirt get untucked?), scratching her short nails on his stomach temptingly. He leans back as a gust of wind blows over them, the city glittering in her dark eyes, her lipstick kissed off but her lips bruised almost the same shade of red, and he says, “Take the job.”
She blinks at him. “What?” she asks breathlessly.
“You have to take the job,” he says, hands on her shoulders, shaking them, “it would be insane of you not to!”
She laughs, batting at him. “You’re drunk.”
“Maybe,” he says, “maybe I am, and maybe I said I wouldn’t tell you what I think you should do because the decision should be one hundred percent yours, but that was sober Dan talking, and if he’s no longer with us then I can say: you have to take the job. It’s everything you’ve ever wanted.”
“You’re everything I’ve ever wanted,” she says softly. “What about you?”
“Me? Well, you’re going to leave me behind in a pub in New York to drown my sorrows in whiskey,” he says flatly. She gives him a look. “I’m coming with you, obviously.”
“But we finally finished moving all of your stuff into the apartment.”
“Yeah, and I’ve been really missing the daily stress-induced panic attacks from moving, so I want to start from the beginning immediately, and add cross-continental travel to the mix.”
“Dan,” she says seriously.
“Blair,” he says back, just as serious. “It’s not like it’s a forever thing—it could be, if you want it to be—but right now it’s just a year, and I can see us here for a year, can’t you? I can write in a café all day and learn how to smoke Gauloises—“
“You’re not smoking Gauloises.”
“And we can visit your parents on weekends—“
“We are not visiting my parents.”
“I’ll visit your parents on weekends, and we’ll go to Lapérouse every night for dinner, and hey, I’ll take a French class so I know what you’re saying when you’re yelling at me!”
Blair, smiling, says, “You don’t want to know what I’m saying.”
“I love you, and I love Paris, and I love Jenny and Anita’s shitty little apartment and being closer to it, and did I mention that I really fucking love you? And I am so proud of you, and why are you looking at me like that?”
She presses her lips together, eyes wide. “Do you remember telling my father you’d spend the rest of your life with me if I would have your hand?”
“I remember everything,” he says.
“I want it,” she says. “Your hand. All of you. I’m asking.”
“Seriously? Here?”
“No one has to know,” she says. “We’ll do it properly later. When everything is settled. You’ll do it properly. On your knees, and such.”
“One knee, honey.”
“Pedestrian,” she whispers. He laughs, taking her face in his hands, her cheeks warmed pink in the dark.
“Yes,” he says, “yes—fucking—obviously, yes.”
She takes her lip between her teeth, tapping a finger to his. “Such a dirty mouth when you’re drunk.”
“I’ll show you a dirty mouth,” he murmurs, kissing her, tasting her laugh as it bubbles up the back of her throat. He pulls away just far enough to say, “Do you think we can make it back to the hotel by midnight?”
“Nope,” she says, “but we can make it to that death-trap of an elevator.”
“Deal,” he says, and then she’s pulling him through the sliding doors, back into the warm bustle of the party, and he just looks at her, the back of her head as she leads him, a little disbelieving, but it’s only a moment before she’s looking back at him over her shoulder, smile gleaming. Wherever she’s going, he’s going her way.