He's got heart breaking brown eyes and a crooked grin that falls with ease across his chiseled olive features. He looks like the first boy that you snap in half and then regret it years down the line. He is exactly the kind of boy that you would marry if you had the opportunity to do so.
But your lot in life has been cast long before you ever saw the world and everything in it.
[-]
You are golden. Blessed with high class genes and blue blood. Everything about you screams status. From the way your pout is puckered seashell pink with the tiny freckle that lingers under your Roman nose topped by sea blue eyes. From your vicious mane of blonde tumbleweeds that wildly bounce around your tiny waist and sky high legs. You are clad in the latest insert designer's name here attire and the most chic handbag dangles from your well weekly manicured fingers. Baubles and beads worth more than a third world country drip from arms, ears, neck.
And when you walk in the room, the entire universe comes to a halt. It's the way it has always been, always will be. You are fucking Serena van der Woodsen.
[-]
He is from Brooklyn. He lives in a loft apartment with a fire escape and the walls are lined with records and dated art that you find fascinating. When you get to live in his world, you admire it like some kind of museum exhibit. He laughs and pours you some milky, too sweet just the way you like it coffee and flips a chocolate chip pancake and chuckles to himself.
The word comfortable comes to mind.
His shirt is flannel and his jeans are weathered, but his face is full and the promise of never letting you down is all you can see. It was there at sixteen and now at twenty two, it still remains. True, it is dated a bit by age, resistance, you, but it still holds firm.
[-]
Dating Nate was miserable in a way because it was what everyone expected from you. Beautiful blondes with beautiful sky colored eyes and beautiful sun kissed long limbs and beautiful blue blood. He was Natie to you and you were just this vision he had since he was a little boy come to life and it felt so suffocating that when he appeared with cocoa eyes and olive hands and dirty, filthy blood that you ran for your life.
You fell into sheets and up against walls and it happened again and again and again. He grins tiredly each time you reach for his hand and whisper a runaway into his ear. But he will always go with you.
[-]
By the time you learn that your mother was once in love with his father, you kind of can't help but shrug and wonder why it took you sixteen years to catch up to her. When you are nineteen and they finally marry, you hate her for her selfishness even though you have given up on your future together a long time ago. This princess doesn't get to marry this pauper.
[-]
Often you find that your world is marked by caviar, fine scotch, pearls, and scandal. So it really is no surprise how you are paired off long before. You are going to be with some man with no face that screams society and has one of those damn opera boxes and takes you to the ballet and gives you apricot roses because red roses were just so last season. And you fucking hate roses, of any color anyway and think the opera box exists for making out and giggling into champagne flutes.
Once he took you to the mandatory by your status ballet and your seats sucked and he snuck in popcorn and you both crunched so loudly and your original skin tight lace column dress from Armani was stained with bits of caramel and it was the most fun you had in a long time when your grandmother snuck in and yanked on your perfectly teased ponytail and told you that ladies don't act like that. He smirked behind his olive hands and pretended not to pay attention to Cece but you saw him look directly at her eyes, challenging her authority and all you wanted to do was giggle.
But that's not how ladies act was on the tip of your blue blooded tongue.
[-]
This one time you imagined a wedding. You're not Blair, so this is not a common occurrence. And you didn't picture it with thousands of pink peonies or lots and lots of sake martinis or anything like that. You were barefoot and your hair was down and the dress, god, the dress made you look ethereal and so much like your mother when she was twenty that you almost didn't think you could live up to the expectation. And he was there and your lips were raw because you couldn't wait until the actual ceremony and you tasted like that first date you had in the dive bar where you played pool and he looked at you like you were sixteen.
In shame, you realize that you have pictured this more than once, but this wasn't your reality. It was your mother's. They married in the park in a magenta gown that went all the way to her bare feet and her husband was scruffy and olive skinned and looked exactly how you always wanted it to in your dream. She stole it from you, but like mother like daughter. It was her dream too long before you ever came around.
[-]
You go through a string of men that have the perfect genes to match yours.
You freaking loathe Carter Baizen so much that it might be criminal but damnit all if he doesn't make your blood boil under your skin because he looks so flawless in his chinos and pastel striped shirt. He looks like a treat in a candy shop that you just can't help apply to your sweet tooth. But he is too rich, too quick, and too filling without being satisfactory.
Colin is beautiful in a way that may outdo yours and you hate that, hate that, hate that. His skin is too brown and close to olive that it makes your eyes burn against his green ones and he stands too tall and doesn't lean into you and he is everything you are supposed to want. He looks impeccable in his tuxedo with that million dollar grin that goes all the way up to his burgeoning crow's feet.
Don't even get her started on poor, sweet Natie. She wanted to love him, really, she did. But he was too golden and she was too tarnished and all he wanted to do was save the damsel in distress when he was really the distress that she was in to begin with. He is fantastic in navy and yellow like some kind of fixture in a polo match, but he is all clean cut and nice and sweet in the way that she just cannot fucking stand.
Then there's him. All loose ends frayed on his collar and she can see the sleeves rolled up to expose his tanned forearms and his eyes are brown and familiar and everything that she knows she is meant to loathe and for some reason that only makes her love him more because when he grins at her all she can see is an invitation to keep going and never stop until they get where they need to go because even though his vest is old and his haircut is raggedy and those shoes need a shine…he is going to be golden.
At least to her.
[-]
Truthfully, he is genetically damned. He is the son of a musician and a painter. He lives for poetry and literature and thinks that more can be said with a pen than anything else. Some days he doesn't even seem real. Just this thing that she thought up one day when she was trapped in a silk dress with pearls in her ears and fright in her eyes and the calloused world twirling between her fingertips. And he appeared out of nowhere with a second hand jacket and a half-smirk that made her think twice about the lies that usually pour out of her mouth.
She found out during Christmas vacation that he had loved her since the day he saw her. He was invited to a birthday party, by accident of course because someone of his caliber is sure as hell not going to be snacking on sushi and sipping martinis with ease, and this blonde Jezebel with ocean eyes snuck in like a thief in the night and ravaged the chasms of his heart. Or something poetic like that. Something like that he would pen onto parchment without even thinking. And he writes it, writes them.
She is golden and he is tarnished and she never, ever tells him that she has always thought it was the other way around. Because even though she stands tall and statuesque and utterly fucking perfect, she's just a girl. But him, he's on this pedestal of hers and she will never, can never knock him down because unlike her, he deserves to be up there.
[-]
They fight of course because they are not of the same. What she loves so much about him [that flannel shirt, the same fucking black silk vest with the rip in the left hand bottom corner, his olive skin, the sound of his hand against the paper] and what he loves so much about her [golden, golden, golden, and so wild but tamed with just one of his fingers pressed into the blonde tumbleweeds] is exactly what makes them hate the other.
Most of the time, he writes the truth. And it is fucking brutal. But that is what makes it a good story.
[-]
When they are together, everything in combustible. And it really is all their fault. He thinks she is so high above him that he cannot even reach the hem of her satin dress and she deludes the flannel shirt into the word poverty that makes it so exciting to love. Pretty soon there are raised voices and torn pages and the literature is fantastic and the sex is even better but the whole thing is just a mess. She cries and shoots more vodka into her bloodstream than is necessary and he chain smokes his way through glasses of black coffee at a corner shop in Brooklyn.
And every time they say the same words and do the same things until, they grow up and then the game changes.
[-]
She swallows her pride and her status and all that fucking class and goes running towards him with such force, long golden legs swinging with the autumn wind of New York until suddenly she is in the park and there he is and he is grinning because he is wearing that blessed flannel shirt and stupid, shitty vest.
He never ever gives up on her. Though she may be golden and he may be damned to the very core of his sorry Brooklyn blood cells, they do ultimately cancel the other out. And to be completely honest, she would rather be in damned and in love than saved and solitary. Because as it turns out, he is the golden one and she is black as sin.
[-]
And as dirty as it may be, blood may be thicker than water, but their love is thicker than blood.