Author's Note: My excitement over Thanksgiving produced this entire piece in four hours. I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking, but I wish you all a lovely Thanksgiving or some joy on Blair's favorite holiday, if you are not celebrating.
She should not be standing in front of him. She should not be here saying nothing but asking for everything. It is late, and she – she broke up with him. He said that he loved her, and she walked away from him. Yet he's weak when it comes to her, and he'll give her anything and everything. Even when he thinks he has nothing left to give.
She walks straight towards the assorted bottles of liquor in his living room. Normally, she would go for a martini or a glass of champagne or – if she is feeling particularly frisky – she'll take a shot of vodka because vodka doesn't smell and no one will be able to tell. He can tell, though. Reads her like an open book as she pulls out a bottle of scotch and pours herself a glass. She takes a swig, grimaces at the taste.
"My father would be disappointed in you," she informs him before drowning the glass. The comment is a throwback to all those times he spent with her father being educated on the value of a good scotch. This is not good scotch. She reaches for the bottle, ready to pour another drink when her eye catches his disapproving glare.
"Don't judge me, Matt," she snaps at him. He wants to scream at her, wants to remind her that he has never once judged her. You don't judge the one you love. You can disapprove, you can be filled with disappointment, but love blinds you to all judgment. And – god help him – he loves her. He loves her so much that it consumes him, leaves him burning in the fire of yearning and desire long after she's extinguished their relationship.
"What are you doing here, Audrey?" The apathy he tries to weave into his tone is crushed by concern. He wonders briefly if he will ever be able to stop worrying about her, stop wondering where she is and what she's doing. Maybe, more importantly, he wants to know if he will ever be able to stop asking himself why she doesn't love him.
Her brain searches for an answer. She could say that she was in the neighborhood, stopped by to have angry break-up sex with him. Their summer of hate sex between junior and senior year had been so wonderful, but something in her reminds her that it had become wonderful because they ended up back together by summer's end. The possibility of return is gone, crushed when she failed to repeat the words back to him and buried deep underground.
The chiming of the clock answers for her. The sound reverberates through her body, pulling at the darkness inside her and taunting her with memories of nights spent in his arms or under his body. Nights when neither of them slept and when she felt so sure of herself, of him, of them.
"Happy Thanksgiving," she bites out bitterly. She told herself she would not cry and yet the last word in the salutation causes her to crack. Sobs rack her body; tears clouding her vision. She can feel him before he touches her and, although she knows he probably only wanted to embrace her, she twists so that her lips brush against his.
The fire is still there, and she cries harder because she does not know what she wanted. She would have died had it been gone; she wants to die with the knowledge that it is still there. She'll never be able to escape the inevitability of this; she's doomed to wander this earth just like him.
He breaks the kiss because this is not how he imagined this moment going. But he is no gentleman and a softly whimpered plea from her pulls him right back in. He paws at her coat, tugs on the hem of her dress while she pulls at the buttons on his silk pajama shirt. Her fingers slip and slide – the alcohol affecting her coordination – as he backs her against the wall. She gives up after a moment, focuses instead on his kisses and undoing the drawstrings of his pajama pants. And then, because the last eight months has been enough foreplay for them both, he's slipping inside her and making her feel more alive than she ever remembers feeling.
The absence of her sleeping mask to block out the streaming sunlight is what causes her to finally awaken. She lies in bed staring at the ceiling for a moment, worrying about what she will see when she rolls over. She will not be able to handle seeing him asleep beside her as though the last eight months never happened; she'll die if she looks around the room and sees every trace of her has been removed.
She knows that she is being selfish – living with a portrait of him on her bedside table, seeing his clothes in her closet, or watching the opening credits of his favorite movie every time she turns on the DVD player for the last eight months would have surely sent her over the edge – but they had been as good as living together then and him expunging her from his life like this? The thought makes her physically ill.
The distant buzz of her cell phone is what propels her out of bed. She keeps her head low as she pulls on her bra and slips into her panties so she will not look for those telltale items that proclaim to everyone that she lives here too.
Lived here, she corrects herself. Because she does not live here, and she has no claim to this space any longer.
She finds her BlackBerry buried under the pile of her clothing in the living room. Her Waldorf Original is wrinkled from a night spent lying on the hardwood floor; her Falke stockings are shredded where he had torn them from her garter belt last night. Eight months ago, she would have yelled at him for ruining yet another pair. Today, she leaves them crumpled on the floor and concentrates on locating her cell phone.
The clock on the front screen informs her that it is nearly noon. She's slightly stunned at the knowledge because Matt has always been an early riser much to her disgust, and she cannot image how she managed to wake before him. The phone buzzes again in her hand, and she clicks the ignore button just as soon as the name flashes on the screen.
"Glad to know I'm not the only one who's calls you screen."
She whirls around at the sound of his voice. He's standing in the doorframe – his chest bare, his pajama pants slung low on his hips, and a poor joke on his lips.
"It's my brother," she offers because she doesn't know what else to say.
"Which one?" He inquires with a smirk. The question is one often repeated between them because all those years ago when they first met, she had failed to mention exactly how many brothers she has. Their first non-official date had been an exhilarating affair. Their first official date had been an uncomfortable event where he arrived at her home and was greeted with so many inquisitive faces.
"Henry," she offers softly. "The oldest."
The reminder is unnecessary, and they both know it. Two years of dating is not erased after only an eight month break-up no matter how many times he had searched out God and the devil himself to remove the memories of her from his mind.
She glances at the phone in her hand when it begins ringing. Henry. Again. Ignored. Again.
"What are you doing here, Audrey?"
The question catches her off guard even though he had asked it of her last night. He's standing there, eyeing her warily, and she's never felt so unsure of herself. Last night, when the alcohol had been coursing through her veins, the idea of showing up here had sounded foolproof to her. After all, being here in his arms had been the last place she felt safe.
"I…," she trails off before taking another shaky breath, "…don't know."
"You shouldn't be here," he replies coolly, and she finds herself nodding in agreement. She knows she shouldn't be here, but the alternative –
"You should be with your family today."
"No," she snaps at him because that is the last place she wants to be.
"Audrey, they need you," he replies. "You need them."
"I need you," she retorts. It's a low blow, but it has the desired affect because he's standing in front of her gaping like a fish.
"You broke up with me," he reminds her once he finds his bearings. She shuts down immediately, turns away from him and busies herself with pulling on her dress. "You walked away from me."
"Yeah, well, my mother walked away from me," she replies sharply as she yanks on the zipper of her dress. It gets caught on her brown curls and jams. She cries out in frustration because her smooth exit has been thwarted by poor construction. She involuntarily flinches when she feels his fingers sweep her hair to the side.
"That's not fair," he whispers in her ear as he tugs the zipper up for her. "Your mother was sick. She didn't want to leave you."
The silky smoothness of his voice is enough to push her over the edge. Her tender grasp on her emotions is lost and before she can fight it, he is pulling her flush against him and surrounding her with his embrace.
"She wasn't supposed to die," she sobs against his chest. "She wasn't supposed to leave me."
"I know," he whispers softly. The diagnosis had come as a complete shock given her young age and even the weight of her and her husband's empire hadn't been enough to win the war.
"I can't go there," she informs him. "It's like a mausoleum, a shrine to a woman who is never coming back."
She want to tell him about how nothing has changed about that house in the last eight months. Her mother's portrait still hangs in her father's study, her mother's smaller yet more risqué portrait still hangs in her parent's en-suite bathroom, and her clothes are perfectly pressed in her dressing room, waiting for her to sweep in from work and change into a gown for this social function or that business event.
She wants to confess how her heart breaks every time she sees her father because he is no longer proud and regal and strong. Instead, the last time she had gone home, she had found this small and feeble man standing in the middle of his closet wondering to himself if this bowtie or that one would better match his wife's dress. She had wanted to scream at him in that moment, remind him that his wife was never going to change her clothes again. Instead, she stayed away from her childhood home from that point onward.
"It's Thanksgiving. We're supposed to make her pie together. Who's going to make her pie with me?"
"Me."
The response seems like a giant cliché, one right out of those movies her mother loved so much. And, yet, it astonishes her for no other reason than the fact that it is one she had never considered before.
Making pumpkin pie had always been her and her mother's tradition, passed down from when her mother was a little girl and Grandpa Harold still lived in the States. Her brothers had lost interest after a few years, enthralled with watching the football game with Uncle Nate or pretending to be just as aloof about the holiday as Daddy.
But Audrey knew the secret of Thanksgiving – how she and Mommy would make the first pie together for the family but how Mommy made a separate pumpkin pie just for her and Daddy to enjoy after their children had gone to bed because Daddy loves her pie. She had been twelve when she realized pie was a euphemism for more than just the baked good, but even that knowledge had not tinted the memories she had of spending Thanksgiving morning making pie with her mother.
"I love you," she whispers to him. She feels him stiffen in her arms, knows that he heard her. She had expected him to say it back, and she wonders if she is eight months too late.
"Say it again," he demands because he wants to be sure that this isn't a dream, that Audrey Waldorf-Bass is actually capable of confessing love for someone.
"I love you, Matt. I love you, and I'm sorry."
"I love you, too."
She is honestly confused when the maid temporarily hired for the holidays directs her to the kitchen. She cannot remember ever seeing her father in the kitchen in all the years she lived in this house, and she is not prepared to find him standing at the counter staring at the ingredients with her mother's apron thrown on over his suit.
"Daddy?" She calls out to him softly; his head snapping to attention. His hair is grayer than she remembers, but his features are still the same sharp angles. Her mother told her once that people used to coward under her father's gaze, but she has had him wrapped around her finger for so long that she cannot understand exactly why people are so afraid of him. Chuck Bass the businessman may be formidable in the boardroom, but Chuck Bass the husband and father is a giant pushover.
"What are you doing in here?"
"I…" her father pauses, his eyes sweeping over the ingredients in front of him, "I'm trying to make pumpkin pie."
She knows immediately why he is stuck. This has always been her mother's closely guarded secret, passed down to her daughter for tradition's sake and kept from her husband as insurance for him to always keep her around. The joke seems cruel today. Here is her father on Thanksgiving Day sans pie and sans his beloved wife.
"You're missing the secret ingredient," she replies as she steps towards the cabinets to their right. She has to stand on her tiptoes despite her high heels to reach the spice jar her mother hid in the back of the cabinet.
"Here," she replies as she hands him the bottle. "You need a tablespoon of this."
"I miss your mother's pie," her father confesses as he gingerly traces his thumb along the lid of the container. In this moment, she knows pie is more than just a euphemism for her mother's anatomy, and her breath catches in her throat with the realization that this is the first time she has heard her father reference her mother as anything other than out for a quick shopping trip. "I don't know how to be Chuck Bass without Blair Waldorf."
"I told Matt that I love him," she replies after a long moment because she doesn't know what else to say.
"Good," her father says. "Your mother was right. You aren't Audrey Waldorf-Bass without Matthew Weidner, as much as it pains me to admit it."
"That scares me. I don't -"
"L'amore fou," Chuck interrupts wistfully before sharpening his tone. "Don't fight it. I spent too much time fighting it. I didn't tell your mother that I loved her enough."
"That's not true, Daddy," Audrey replies with a firm shake of her head. "She knew. We all knew how much you loved her."
"Love," he corrects. "How much I love her."
Audrey focuses on mixing the necessary ingredients together. She doesn't want her father to see her cry and she's afraid that if she looks up, she'll see him crying too.
"We're going to need another pie tin," she finally tells him. When he doesn't reply, she glances up at him with red rimmed eyes and gives him a knowing smile. "Please, I know about the extra pie. You and Mom weren't that sneaky."
"You knew about that?"
"Walked in on that," she informs him. "But I thought you and I – we could share the extra pie and talk about Mom. Start our own tradition."
The request is a lot to ask of him. Her father does not talk about her mother. Not with anyone, and certainly not at any depth other than what he has already given her – mentions and references to things that she already knows.
"On one condition," he replies, always the savvy businessman. "You call Matt and invite him to the van der Bass-Humphrey soirée. There's a ring your mother asked me to give him."