"I love you, Chuck. I love you more and more each day if it's even possible to love someone that much."
He brings her macaroons, flowers, and Breakfast at Tiffany's. (The 40th anniversery edition, because Blair practically owns ten copies.)
Dorota offers him a drink, Eleanor stares him down behind her Gucci glasses, and he runs up the staircase anyway.
They have known each other almost their whole lives and sometimes he thinks he might think differently of her if he didn't know the truth of her. He'd hate her, he's pretty sure. He doesn't always like her, that's for certain, but he could never hate her.
They have shared nannys together at the ages of two and three and four and spilt food on each other and tugged at each other's hair and stolen toys and broken ornaments and screamed and screamed and screamed just because they could until their parents came close to tearing their hair out.
It was always the four of them: Chuck, Blair, Nate and Serena. It was ring-around-the-rosie in the living room, where Chuck would break a priceless artifact and his father would pretend to be okay with it and punish him later. It was math homework in Nate's bedroom where everyone would copy Blair's and Blair would pretend to be mad but really, she'd blush profusely when Nate called her the smartest girl in fifth grade. It was passing joints around a circle on St. Jude's lacrosse field, where Blair would glare at Nate and shake her head at him. He'd shrug sheepishly and she'd pick up her Michael Kors bag and leave the field, huffing and puffing, dragging Serena along with her.
He regrets not chasing her, grabbing her arm when it was very visible Nate had ditched her to get high with the St. Jude's boys, he regrets telling her over and over again how stunning Serena looked in her Valentino dresses and failing to even compliment Blair once. He regrets letting her go with Louis, not standing up for her, not telling her how he felt that day on the sidewalk of Madison Avenue, before getting in his car and driving off.
He looks at her these days, traces the whole weary weight of her with his eyes and gets flashes of a giggly eleven-year-old whose father promised her whatever she wanted. It must have been hard, he thinks sometimes, it must have been hard for her to go from being one person's world to being a small face in a sea of many. Blair Waldorf was never a girl who was going to be invisible, he realises now.
They see each other often these days. At first it was because of their families and Lily's refusal to let Eleanor be alone while Cyrus goes to Europe for a special case but now they elect to seek each other out. They pass long lazy afternoons quiet in each other's company and she teases and he teases her and it is easy.
Easy is good. It is pleasing and calming and vastly underrated.
They do not discuss Nate or Serena or Dan or Jenny by unspoken consent. If their conversation veers near it they steer it away. He catches himself sometimes with sentences like remember that time Nate was so drunk he fell into that pond in Central Park and you went insane over him? on the very tip of his tongue and bites them back barely a second before they head out into the world and do harm. He thinks she might do something similar, gets a hint of it in her face before she turns away every now and again.
They do not go out in public much. He is chased by the press and she tried to dethrone Serena so many times that all of the Upper East Side knows about it. Eyes follow them quietly wherever they go—
Judge them wherever they go—
And Chuck is not brave enough to deal with things like that. Some days Blair is (but not many).
So they sit in his flat or hers and they both read and sometimes they curl up together on the sofa and her socked feet press into his legs and her head droops onto his shoulder and he puts an arm around her as she reads aloud and he likes the way this feels. He likes it more than is probably sensible.
A/N: I arrived in Serbia and because it's so hot everyone stays inside and watches TV. I always catch reruns of GG and I get a little bit nostalgic, so this happened.