A/N: Nate and Blair. Together. What a hot mess. (Sure, Chuck and Blair are a hotter mess... but Chuck and Blair don't include Nate, my favorite character of all time. he's my OT1.) Oddly enough, I keep trying to extract myself from how I imagine Nate's brain, but I can't seem to stop writing these. Oh, well.
Disclaimer: You know who Cecily and Josh are. You don't know who I am. Consider that.
This is after Serena leaves but before she comes back.
Three piercing, loud explosions filter in through the screen door of the covered deck. They might only be firework noises: bangs and sizzles. Maybe someone just died. Blair doesn't even glance up; she just continues methodically cutting out capital letters from construction paper. Nate jumps a mile.
"What do you think that was?" he asks, if only to make conversation. Silences with Blair can stretch five minutes into several hours. Blair uncrosses her legs and gives Nate a scorching once-over. She pulls her ponytail over one shoulder and resumes work on her poster board.
Nate looks down at her already-cut letters, slightly askew on the carpet. 'The History of the Gas L,' they read. Nate isn't sure what her project is on. The History of the Gas Lamp? The History of the Gas Llama? The History of th—honestly, it doesn't matter. Nate never even took basic Chemistry, much less the college-level course that Blair was enrolled in. He opted for 'Academic Support' instead. (It's a glorified study hall.)
Nate lowers his head down onto the floor, using his history textbook as a convenient pillow. He cracks his knuckles, one finger at a time. Pop. Nate loves the sound of joints cracking. He also loves the sound of glass breaking, but people don't really appreciate him saying that. He's on his fourth finger.
"Stop that," Blair snaps. The silence resumes. Nate continues to lie on the floor, one arm behind his head. He runs his fingers through his hair. Nate's left hand still has a finger un-cracked. He feels an intense need to crack the three joints on his pinky. First the top one, right below his fingernail, twisted to the left and back to the right; next the centered one, pull his finger backwards, let off the pressure, pull it back again; finally the base, the socket where the digit connects to his palm—pull sharply up from the bottom of his finger, and twist to the left. He can see each motion in his mind. Nate holds his hand straight up above his face, clenching and unclenching it into a fist.
But then Dorota walks in with a tray of lemonade. And pastries. Nate is relatively sure that he has never tasted anything he enjoyed more than Dorota's signature pastries. Chuck sneered at him once, when he explained how much he adored them, telling Nate, as if he were a particularly dim-witted child that the only ingredients that they contained were two layers of pie crust and a bit of store-bought Nutella. Except Nate really likes Nutella.
So Nate scoots over to the snacks that Dorota left for them on the low table, and he hands Blair a glass of lemonade, because Blair really likes lemonade. The pastries are for him. Nate knows that Dorota knows that Blair wouldn't touch a pie-crust-and-Nutella sandwich with an elbow-length latex glove slathered in anti-biotic ointment.
Not even if the inside contained a pair of exclusive Tiffany earrings. (It would go: pie crust, Nutella, pie crust, earring, Nutella, pie crust. Mmmmm.) Blair takes the lemonade with her dainty, thin hands, but she doesn't say thank you. Her letters are glued onto the poster, now. Blair cuts out several printed pages of research that she plans to also attach. (Her project is on The History of the Gas Laws. Nate doesn't know what those are.)
Except now he's eaten all of the dessert sandwiches. And the sun is starting to set in the late September heat. He thanks Dorota when she comes back to collect the platter. She merely purses her lips and nods, but Nate can see the smile playing at her lips.
Dorota dotes on him, sometimes. He knows that she knows the true dynamic of his relationship with Blair. But even still, she calls for his rides home, and she makes him little mini-sandwiches of heaven. Nate rolls the sleeves of his school uniform oxford up to his elbows. Blair crosses her legs again, tucked under one side of her body. Nate thinks she looks pretty, and he tells her so.
"Thank-you," she says. Cars honk in the distance on the busy roadways below. Nate has found that if he sits really, really still, he can sometimes smell the pollution wafting up from the city. Nate loves the smell of pollution, which Serena once told him was sadistic. He didn't know what sadistic meant, but he thinks that he could figure it out now. At least, if he were given a bit more context.
Except that Serena's gone now. And Serena used to act as the glue that held them all together. So now Chuck spends a lot of time brooding alone. Nate and Blair spend time together, but Nate hates it. It feels like a duty, like going to school, or dinner with his grandparents. He feels like secretly Blair hates it, too.
But Nate and Blair get along relatively well when they aren't talking—their bodies fit well next to one another, and Nate knows he's a good kisser. They spend hours on her bed, TV on, his arms around her delicate waist. He traces his fingers along her collar bone, over her shoulder, across her jaw line. He dips a thumb below her waistband, drawing it along the bottom of her stomach.
Blair sucks herself in, every time, and Nate loses the line he was following in the concaveness of her body, running into her hipbones as he traces her lines, so he pulls his thumb up and runs it through her hair instead. Nate and Blair get along relatively well—even if they haven't had sex. (Not that Nate's about to push Blair to loose her virginity after well, he lost his. By having sex. With someone who isn't Blair.) Plus, they're both pretty, and Blair is conservative enough to stick to the status quo. But things worked better when Serena was around, that's all.
The four of them would sit, in the sunroom on the deck of Blair's building, and do homework together. They were funny. Nate used to laugh. Nate misses how they all used to laugh together. Serena's hair would shine in the same sunset that Blair was basking in. Nate misses Serena.
"I miss Serena," Nate says. Blair pointedly sets her bottle of Elmer's glue onto the blue-grey industrial carpet. She sits up straight, the outside of her left thigh pink and imprinted with the pattern of the ground.
"Maybe you should go home now," she replies, voice low, her eyes piercing through the skin of his forehead. "It's late." So Nate has no choice but to stand up, smoothing out the wrinkles in his khaki's and tucking his Algebra text back into his backpack. He gives her a customary peck on the lips before loping off through the sliding glass door and back through her kitchen.
"Thanks again for the snack," he tells Dorota as he winds his way through the hallway into the elevator. Nate pushes the button for the bottom floor and watches as it lights up, orange. The only thing is, as he feels his body slowly descending from the sky, he watches the counter slowly tick down the floors; he kind of feels like punching someone.
Nate's not really sure why he feels this way—figuring out the nuances of his emotional range never was his strong point, but he knows that he never used to feel this way when they all hung out together. When Serena was still around. And they used to laugh.
A/N: Reviews pretty much make my life. I get all shrill and I jump around and sing and my brother and my neighbors work together to silence me, altering between bribery and confiscation of my computer. True Story. Please make this happen more often.