If there's one wish Blair Waldorf needed to be granted (apart, of course, from a solid, guaranteed Yale admittance, Serena van der Woodsen's fall out of the spotlight forever, and a steady, obliging boyfriend for a perfect happily ever after), it's to split Constance Billard's library in half.
No.
Not that she didn't value books…she's had a fair share of favorites on certain titles…
Not that the library was a sanctuary of imagination and the center of nurturing the minds…she's had no objection to the anticipated fact (at least, of the Headmistress)…
What Blair minded—gave very much a damn, out of her precious spare time, to be precise—were the distractions.
St. Jude's Boys, in short.
Oh, she's not distracted by the tall, well-built frames of those potential young men—not every one's a boyfriend material. Blair Waldorf did not go 'flirting,' like some worthless slut. They come to her.
Except one distraction in particular, that she felt altogether disgusting to even be allowed in the so-called area of studies.
No, he wouldn't come here. Of course he wouldn't.
Fancy seeing Chuck Bass in the library.
And yet there he was. Right in front of her library table.
'There's nothing there…there's really nothing there,' she tried telling herself, as the unembarassable Bass stepped closer to her table every itching second.
Without any invitation, his hands intrudingly traced the page to which her Algebra II textbook was opened to, "Fancy seeing Blair Waldorf in the library," he began, Blair squinting harder at the formula she'd been writing.
Damnit. How could he read my mind?
"So? Is it any of your business?" she snapped back, slamming the textbook closed on his hand. With a twitch of his face and a hidden 'ouch,' in his tone, Chuck straightened his face out, poker-emotionlessly peering at the topic on Blair's pink, pick-me-up post-it note. "Inverses, huh? I thought an AP girl like you—"
When would he ever stop bothering the hell out of me?
Blair shook her face in one quick motion, answering flatly, "Peer-tutoring. And definitely not for you," hands behind her swiftly gathering her bags and books, "I'm leaving."
But he grabbed her textbook before she had a chance.
Constance Billard's Queen Bee simply managed in her most authoritative voice. "Give it back, Bass. You know better than this." The last sentence she muttered under her breath.
"You know what I want," she finally said.
His reaction was not surprising in the least. Chuck smirked, mimicking her tone. "You know what I want."
Blair's hand gripped on one side of the textbook, Chuck's on the other.
"Chuck Bass." Her intense brown orbs met his glittering ones, her voice expressionless, polite yet vague. "I've told you before, and I'm not going to say it again."
He put the textbook gently down on the table again, motioning Blair to sit opposite him. The girl obeyed, hands crossed at her chest, frustrated like a schoolchild caught cheating in front of the principal.
"Let me show you some math equations, shall we?" he suggested, pulling out his cell from his pockets, to make a quick call. "Oh, and, by the way, I don't think your 'peer' will be coming anytime soon." Chuck added as he flipped back the cell.
Blair made a face, too exasperated to argue. "You—" her word accusing, a sharp dagger at Chuck.
He smiled in response, calm as ever, snatching Blair's blank paper to draw a trigonometric graph.
She raised a questioning eyebrow, incredulous that the Bass had actually learned something in class where, if not dozing or secretly nursing himself from last night's hangover, he spent texting 'business' and 'contacts for entertainment.'
"An inverse tangent graph?" was what escaped her lips. "You've been paying attention in class, huh?"
"If not more or less so," he said, finishing the graph with a flourish.
Blair privately thought he, exempting from those playboy, rock'n'roll-devil-may-care habits, could have made a nice artist, though she'd rather die than he find out her inner thoughts were still circling around him when she, ideally over him, could have been Frenching some British lord.
Instead, her wayward mind had given in. She had even obliged to follow his commands today, for God's sake.
I hate Chuck Bass. I despise him more than life. I am just doing this to get my precious textbook back. I do not want anything whatsoever to do with this man. He has no business going off with me—
Denial. Denial, said her mind.
Stupid mind, Blair thought back, trying to command her mind in bite-size sentences, occupying her thoughts as Chuck turned the paper so that the graph was facing her side.
"I was thinking," he began again, Blair's mind boggling at the idea that he spent time musing over such a concept which would otherwise proved unnecessary to Chuck Bass. "Our life—love life, that is—sort of resembles this graph. Before, my life without you had been deep down in the pits, thus the lowdowns." Blair would have remained immune to the remark, save for his fingers tracing her arm, sending shivers down her spine.
"And there was Victrola," his hand traced down, teasing her. "That was the origin of us, of you and me." The other remained, pointing at the (0,0) of the coordinate plane.
Blair opened her mouth, starting to interrupt, when Chuck raised his hand to stop her. "We fought, we had some memorable banters. And kisses. And moments I, against my better judgment, view as inappropriate to mention at school, much less at the library." He added, grinning.
Blair's response to his trip-down-the-Blair-and-Chuck-that-never-were-memory-lane was so much of a growl.
"What are you stopping me here for?" she burst out. "Some musings of the past? It doesn't work that way, Bass. You can't waltz in here and take me back with a—a stupid inverse trig graph!"
His index finger pointed at the upper right corner of the graph, where the line rose and eventually sloped down to an almost straight line, wavering on the paper. "That," he said, "is where you're wrong. We stopped here. Just here, because—"
Blair grabbed the pencil from Chuck, hastily scribbling down a mathematical rule. "Because you've never said it. Neither will I." She shoved him the paper. "Hence, it can be written algebraically. Like matrices' law of commutative multiplication, we are, and will still be, BC ≠ CB, mathematically."
"You're always so ahead of me, Blair," he mused. "But we had our ups and downs."
Blair, clearing her throat, had her hands on her hips.
"Flip the paper," Chuck ordered. "I wrote something for you."
Snorting, Blair obliged once more. The sight silenced her, froze her numb to the spot.
There were four mathematical operations written on the paper: a heart positioned inside a square root, a cos of a heart, a d/dx operator of a heart, and an inverse matrix of a heart.
All with the product and sum of: Blair.
She looked up, meeting his irresistible stare, the Chuck move that let she know he was targeting her directly.
"I can't calculate love, Blair," he confessed. "It's illogical that way. It doesn't always have to follow matrices rules or the inverse tangent graph pattern. Love is more to it than that. Mathematically, you are my only answer."
A shade of blush crept up Blair's cheeks.
"I love you."
Her heart doing double flips, Blair pushed the book aside, and, mind over matter, carelessly walked over to his side, doing what she should have done a long time ago: pressing her lips to his.
"I love you too, Chuck Bass," she whispered, "You mathematically illiterate fool."
A/N: Inspired by the mentioned matrices rule. And a "useless" drawing on the web.
I've made it. After this idea's been swimming in my head for so long! (I don't know, 5 months?)
THANK YOU for all hits and reviews,
Your ever humble fanfic writer :)
