He's seen her a few times over the past few weeks, never in the same place twice, sometimes alone, sometimes not, sometimes drunk off her face. But they really meet for the first time a few weeks after Thanksgiving. They're both at the same seedy bar in London, he's playing poker with some friends and she's smoking away her life at the bar alone, getting glares from the bartender and looks of annoyance from the other girl in the place because maybe her dress is really a shirt and she's showing too much leg to their boyfriends but he can see she doesn't give a shit. He ditches his game and takes the seat next to her, steals her cigarette and the rest is sort of history.
He doesnt call her J or Little J or Brooklyn or Queen J or any other fucking nicknames she'd grown to hate. He doesnt even call her Jenny. He calls her Jen and she fucking loves it (though she doesn't tell him) because she's never been Jen before, only Jenny and she sure as hell has never been Lou. And it's new and she's free of all that old shit. She thinks he knows anyways.
She cums hard the first time her calls her Queenie during sex and then punches him when he teases her about it.
They go back to New York together, flying coach because he cant afford First Class and even though she can, she prefers coach because she likes making fun of all the strangers sitting too close to her.
They move into a one bedroom apartment with no hot water surrounded by other one bedroom apartments with no hot water and she hangs Egyptian Cotton from everything and he fucks her against the refrigerator they wont ever use. He gets a job as a bartender in Brooklyn and she starts at FIT, and he gets fired for starting fights with workmates and she barely attends school, and they work.
They don't go near the UES, because she says the whole idea of it is not what or who she wants to be. She calls the whole place poison and refuses to go there unless it's to see her family. He doesn't care because he has no interest in Barneys or The Empire or whatever, though he admit he loves when she comes home in designer panties because he gets a little thrill from ripping it off and making them unusable.
She doesn't introduce him to her family and he doesn't ask, because frankly neither of them are into that. At that point they're only really interested in each other.
In the begining, he sometimes liked to entertain ideas of saving her (sometimes when he's being honest, he too, just like all the rest wants to save her).
"We could be happy, you know." They could be happy together.
"This is me happy." She tells him, her sticky Jungle Red lips wrapping around the filter of her seventeenth cancer stick as she took yet another drag and poured another shot.
"Don't you ever want to be happier?" He asks her as she downs the shot.
She looks at him, her eyes clouded for a moment and he wants to cry because she looks so fucking lost. She looks like the Little J she talks about so horribly. She looks like a little girl, not a woman of nineteen... but then its gone and she's smirking and laughing cruelly, "Baby, I don't think you understand. There's nothing more for me, no happier, no happiest." She glared, "This. Is. It."
"There could be more." He insists even as he watches her eyes close up.
"Not for me." And he knows she believes that. Then she's up and away from him, and puking in his kitchen sink and it's times when he's holding back her hair that he thinks maybe if she wasn't so broken he'd hate her. But he knows he could never hate her as much as she hated herself and that just makes him sad.
She smirked even as she puked because in a sick way she feels strongest when she's puking even if it isnt self-induced, and it's familiar and she doesn't feel when she's puking- and suddenly her eyes are hard and cold, looking at him for the first time in weeks like he was just another little boy who didn't know her and yet wanted to fix her up with sticky tape and superglue and not the man she was starting to fall for. She looked at him like he was just another little kid she'd keep around for a few days, maybe a few weeks as he struggled to find all the littlest (all the sharpest) parts of her that has already broken off and become lost, so maybe he could begin putting it back together. He looked away and she went back to puking and he wondered why she couldn't just be happy.
When they had sex that night it's not slow or sweet at all, but in a way he starts to heal her. With every kiss he forgives her for sleeping with her stepbrother, for lying to Blair and ruining a bunch of nameless girls' lives. He erases any lingering hatred for Agnes or Serena or Vanessa or Nate or Eric or her father. And with every touch he tells her he loves her. Because he knows she didn't want to hear it, after watching Blair and Chuck she would hate to hear it.
But she wanted to feel it. And for the first time in their relationship she let herself love him back.
When he's been with her three months he knows he's lasted a lot longer than most guys have with her and that's why he slams one of her hands above her head, trapping some of her white-blonde hair between his hand and the wall as she wraps her legs around his waist, she hisses that she likes it, and he grabs her harder. She looks up at him, her blue eyes sparkling behind all the black fucking eyeshadow she's wearing. "What do you want from me, Jen?" He growls in her ear, faintly thinking that he hopes she doesn't think he's begging (because then he'd be gone in a snap, because she cant stand begging).
She smirks at him, rubbing her La Perla covered crotch against his own jean-clad one, biting his lip and using her free hand to scratch her nails down his face, "From you? Nothing. Right now all I want it a kitten, a new boyfriend and some Jeffrey Campbell shoes."
They fuck against the wall in the alley of the building next to the Humphrey/Van-der-Woodsen apartment, a few floors away from her brothers (the writer, the gay one and the one she fucked) and her father and stepmom and 'friends', not caring at all if they're discovered by Gossip Girl or the police or whoever. He wants her to forget about looking for a new boyfriend (not that she'd actually look for a new boyfriend. No, they find her). She doesn't close her eyes once, not even when they kiss, and neither does he. They have sex staring into each others eyes and then pretend it's not a moment. Afterwards they walk back to their apartment and she calls her family to reschedule their board-game night and they spend the rest of the night in each others arms.
The next day he brings home a kitten and she calls it Brinka Humphrey the Adorable Mess of a Kitten. Brink for short.
It's the almost-not-quite-start (because they've been together for a lot longer than she thought they'd be) of a very un-beautiful relationship.
A few weeks after they first met she told him not to expect much from her because she goes through boyfriends like those plastic lighters she gets free with a new pack of Marlboro Reds every second day of the week. And he realised pretty quickly that she never called them 'cheap fucks' like her stalker did so often (Gossip Girl. Really? He'd laughed when she showed him the website, almost not believing her for a second before realising any website that followed her around 24/7 would probably get a lot of horny teenage boy and girl subscribers). She didn't call them lovers or fuck buddies or whatever they really were when you think about it. She always called them boyfriends.
"Boyfriends. It's classier, you know? I knew this girl- way back when I was still- you know, who hated me like I hated her- you'd have loved her, she was a fucking bitch. Anyway, she taught me how to be fucking classy. Fucking Audrey Hepburn kind of classy." They were both naked on his bed because they never slept at her place, as they talked into the morning, only leaving the bed to fuck on his balcony while she smoked and he ate and she rolled her eyes at the people down below on the street. She said she liked the thought of them probably going through the day horny as fuck while she got her kicks a couple of metres above them.
She looked at him and smirked (He'd never seen her smile), "I knew you were going to try and save me. They always do." She'd chuckled like it was the most amusing thing in the world, like every single boy she'd ever met had tried to fucking save her. And then he'd found out they had- nearly all of them. Tried to save her like she was a damsel in distress, then tried to ruin her when they found out what she was really like.
Later when they're sitting in the kitchen and she's teaching him to make waffles and Brink jumps up on the counter and falls in the batter and they order pizza instead he knows she doesn't want to be saved, and he's kind of fine with that.
After they've been together for six months he kind of knows his time is almost up. He's lasted way longer than Nate or Chuck or Damien or Roy or Rich or Dick or whoever else she'd fucked. They're sitting on a deck chair, her in his lap, sharing a vintage leather jacket. They're still connected in the most intimate of ways and he starts talking as they wait for him to get ready for round four.
It's times like this when he likes to think just... fuck everybody. They could just leave. Go back to London or maybe Prague or Australia or something.
He could take her away from everything; the pop-punk bands and the gin she'd fallen in love with when she was only fourteen and trying to fit in with the girls who wore strings of real pearls around their necks like little noose's. He could take her away from the bruises she wore like badges of honour, take her away from the fucking ("Oh, against the wall, on the floor, baby hurry up and fucking fuck me!") and the cigarettes and the fucking short leather skirts and fishnets she wears like a fucking superhero costume as she walked in too-high, too-expensive designer heels like they're Chuck Taylor's and she's an athlete.
He looked at her, too-thin because she never eats and when she does she brings it back up because classy girlsaren't fucking fat and she knows that for a fact, she tells him, because Blair fucking Waldorf taught her that. He doesn't know who Blair fucking Waldorf is, but he likes to think she's locked up somewhere where she cant hurt anybody else with her advice. He looks at her body, the lithe little body he just fucking adores, tracing her bones, thinking how he just wants to mark her, make her know she's his. He doesn't care if she's fucked up. in fact he kind of likes it.
And he tells her that, kind of ashamed that he wants to hurt her so much. But then they share a look and she says okay and she's drinking, and then he's drinking and they're drinking and then they're fucking and biting and scarring each other and he's leaving his mark on Jenny bloody Humphrey and he pretends he doesn't see her smirk knowingly.
When he realised they'd been together for over ten months he wondered how he could ever leave her. They'd become as 'official' as they'd ever be at yet another seedy bar. Seedy, dark bars were kind of their thing these days. They'd danced for hours, stopping only to pop into the bathroom for a quickie or to pop a pill before going back to their grinding on the dance floor. Some time between all of the dancing and drinking and smoking they'd realised that they were each others', and suddenly Jenny was laughing because she felt free. He made he feel free.
And because Jenny had wanted to wear expensive clothes and jewelery and perfumes her whole life, and because when she finally got it she got bored of it pretty quickly, Jenny Humphrey had always searched thouroughly for where the next thrill would be. It was why she went through boys and men so quickly, why she pushed everybody away. Jenny could take over a school or a city if she wanted, and she could go to parties with her family and all the other 'right kinds of people'. She could stage guerrilla fashion shows and drink gin with Blair Waldorf every day, but it wasn't until she was surrounded by leather and him that she could smile and be a real girl.
For the first time in what felt like forever, Jenny found that now she'd gotten to where she was (gotten to the very top of the ladder), she didn't have to look beyond that moment to feel happy.
Now they were curled together, she on his lap, his leather jacket covering them to protect from the chill as they shared the deck chair on the balcony of their crappy apartment. It was lightly snowing and they probably should be more warmly clothed. Or well, just plain clothed would have sufficed. The only thing covering them besides the leather jacket was Jungle Red lipstick (in places lipstick probably shouldn't be) and they were both shivering accordingly- the leather jacket spread over two people really wasn't appropriate protection from New fucking York weather at four a.m, especially when they were naked. However, neither wanted to move.
He grinned lazily, wrapping his arms tighter around her, "We could be happy, you know."
They could be happy together. It was a possibility (an amazing, terrifying possibility) that had remained un-said these past few months, though ever present in their minds, ever since the last time he'd brought up the future. But now, sitting here with her, he could feel it.
The could be happy. The could be amazing.
She smirked at him, flexing her slim fingers through his own, bigger ones, "We kind of already are though, aren't we?"
He smiles back, relaxing, "Yeah, we kind of are."