A/N: Here's part two and the conclusion to my little Dan/Blair ficlet. It probably seems like it could go on, but it is indeed finished! This whole thing was kind of stream of consciousness and it would be hard to go in a further direction with it. But trust me, I will be writing more DB, no worries!
Some people will tell you a moment can last a lifetime. Some people say those moments add up and create snapshots of a fleeting time, but they're enough. Some days they aren't. It's true Dan never thought of that time chronologically, his memory would roam over clips and photos and yes, moments in no particular order. But once they were through, it seemed as if they were never enough. Instead of lasting a lifetime, they lasted seconds and then pulled at something in him similar to yearning or regret. He'd often take an aspirin; heartburn. Truth was, it was becoming less frequent lately.
It hadn't been this hot in the city in years. Seven years, to be exact.
"You look absolutely ridiculous in that hat, Waldorf."
Blair looked back at him, an oversized, floppy sun hat on her head, round bug like sunglasses shielding the sun from her eyes. He could feel her eyes rolling.
"I'm trying to avoid being seen with you, Humphrey," she snapped before sipping her lemonade through a bright pink straw.
"You're the one who wanted to go out."
"I never would have pegged you for an indoor cat." Her espadrilles pivoted on the pavement as she turned and continued her way down the sidewalk.
"And can you please stop walking five steps ahead of me?" But she didn't listen and the cuffs of her pink shorts hit just perfectly bellow the curve of her behind with each dainty step.
"Wow. And he says please. Tell me, where did you learn such refined etiquette having grown up in Brooklyn?"
Dan increased the pace of his steps and rushed to catch up with her. Once side by side, Blair remained focused straight ahead, so Dan stepped in front of her, walking backwards as she bulldozed forward.
"Hey, hey come on. Stop," he said and halted so that she nearly ran into him. His fingers laced around the brim of her floppy hat and pulled each side down to frame her face. "Come here," he said in a low voice before he leaned in and grazed her lips with his own.
When he pulled back a few inches to look at her, he said, "Don't worry, no one can see you. That hat was a good idea after all."
"Shut up, Humphrey. You talk too much," she replied and leaned in to kiss him again, deepening it this time and ignoring the passers by who had a problem with incognito PDA. The day was hot and humid and they could feel the heat between their lips, like burning. When she broke the kiss, finally, it was to meddle her straw up between them. She wrapped her lips in a circle around it and sipped daintily.
"Thanks for the lemonade, by the way," she said.
xoxo
He remembered how she purposely rummaged through his closet, choosing his best Versace button down to wear. It went perfectly with her sex hair, her Dior lip-gloss entitled "Audrey" and her La Perlas. She would tell him that while she had agreed to slip away with him in his bohemian bungalow, she'd never adopt the practices that accompanied it, like eating thai food from a plastic delivery box or wearing flannel. He found he realized he didn't want her to.
xoxo
The first time Blair burst into his solitary loft in Brooklyn, it had been tough getting her there.
"Good, you're here," Dan called out from the back room.
"So? What, are you going to make me waffles for brunch?" she asked with a cocked eyebrow.
His head popped into the doorframe. "Blair, I can safely say that I will never make you waffles."
"I hate when a man cooks," she said distractedly as she took in the layout and the décor of the place. "So? What's the surprise?"
As she inspected the thread count of the upholstered couch, he swooped in at her side and snaked his arms, bare and exposed from the wife beater he wore, around her waist and under her silk top. His nose buried in the nape of her neck as his hands explored the smooth coolness of her back.
"This top, I love this top. Where did you get it?" he asked in between kisses along her collarbone. His fingers found the string tied behind her neck and pulled at it.
"What? Bendel's. Why?" She asked breathily.
"And you smell. You smell so damn good. Better than you've ever smelled before." He dropped the silk scrap softly to the floor and hooked his thumbs into her belt loops of her white shorts and pulled her against him.
"It's um. Lemon Sugar from Fresh," she said. She was perplexed. He liked it.
"Delicious."
He leaned in to kiss her finally but she pulled back. "I want my present."
"There is no present," he smiled and caught her lips quickly.
"What?"
"It's the only way I could get you here. I know how you hate leaving Manhattan."
"Dan Humphrey, you sly minx. I'd almost be proud of you," she said saccharinely and leaned in close, trailing a finger from his Adam's Apple to the hem of shirt and dragged it down with her nail. "That is if I weren't so furious!" And she pushed him back.
"Hey, Hey, Waldorf, come on." She picked up her shirt and began redressing. "You don't have to go outside, you can stay here. We can order in, from your favorite restaurants even, from Butter, and you can spend the weekend here with me."
"Don't flatter yourself. I was going to the Hampton's to visit Serena this weekend."
"Isn't Chuck there right now?"
She stopped dead, the front door halfway open.
"Yeah, I thought so," he said with a drop of arrogance and know-it-all. "Well played, don't you think?" he added and he'd never felt so deliciously devious.
The next thing he remembered was her rush into his arms, pushing him back roughly, into the doorframe, back pedaling back into his room, his back hitting the sheets of his bed, her thighs around his hips gripping tightly. The way her nails scratched his side as she dug out his shirt from underneath his pants and tore it over his head.
It was much too hot for such exertions. But he didn't especially care.
How he came to have Blair Waldorf in his bed, he didn't know either. And he didn't especially care.
xoxo
Dan was going crazy. Three days after their elevator incident and he was more unsettled than ever. He was downing coffee and if he had a pen in his hand, no hard surface would be safe from its tapping. Kissing Blair Waldorf was without a doubt the strangest thing that he'd ever done…no, wait, the strangest thing he'd ever had happen to him. Obviously he'd been possessed by some otherworldly dues ex machina playing a cruel trick on him. And dammit if he couldn't stop thinking about it. Her alabaster, porcelain like skin. Her perfectly pouting lips and how her shining gloss had rubbed off on his.
He thought about it all the way to the bedroom door of her penthouse.
"Dan, what are you doing here?" She sounded startled. She'd never just called him plain old Dan before.
"I…I should have called. Yeah, that would have been better. Calling before, showing up to someone's house who, where I'm not welcome nor ever have been."
She stood, staring expectantly.
"I should go," he said and turned.
"Wait," she called after him.
He faced her again. "Uhh, yeah?"
"What happened," she began. "It never happened."
"God, yes. I'm so glad you feel the same way," he breathed a huge, audible sigh of relief and grinned nervously. "Suuuuch a relief. Whew."
"Excuse me?"
Now he was lost. "What?" It was all over his face.
"I'm no Georgina Sparks you need to keep hidden in your closet labeled embarrassing hookups with psychotic bimbos."
"You're not?"
"You kissed me!" she cried, becoming hysterical.
He was utterly lost.
"Wait a minute, you kissed me," he said.
"Ew, as if I'd ever."
"Don't flatter yourself into thinking I've been carrying around some sort of sick, revolting baggage of feelings for you just because I've been nice to you once or twice," he bit back.
"Good, well neither have I!"
They were at a standstill, the three inches of the doorframe separating them.
"Good."
They had gotten close.
"Good."
Too close.
And once again whatever sick deity or god or monster or demon had pulled them together in the elevator did so again as they rushed in a frenzy towards each other as if three inches was much too much space to have come between them. Again, their kiss was messy, rushed, tumultuous as if they had been thirsty for a long while and had just now found the source of water where they had previously thought a mirage.
When they were able to pull away, Blair looked up at him with her eyes large and wild and deep. "What the hell are we doing?"
"I have no idea," he responded and kissed her again, twirling them around and pressing her back up against the doorframe so as to get steadier access to her. His lips wandered from her lips to her jaw line to her ear and neck.
"You're revolting," she said, but it came out as more of a whimper as he raked his teeth softly along where her jaw.
"And you disgust me," he murmured back.
She found her hands wandering along his shoulder blades and put them to use, pushing them out pin straight and creating a space an arms length between them as her palms lay flat against his shoulders.
"Humphrey," she said, hesitation and warning in her voice. She was trying to gain composure.
They both inhaled and exhaled several times, at a loss for anything to say.
"I'm sorry I just really have the urge to kiss you again," he said finally.
"Oh, God this is awful!" She bit the nail of her thumb quietly as she gazed down at the floor.
"And I have no clue why. I may need to be psychologically evaluated after this because, clearly, something is very very wrong—"
"This is so wrong," she said to herself.
"I feel dirty."
She looked up at him and met his eyes.
"Well, what are we going to do?" she asked.
"We're about to do something very, very, very, stupid," he conceded.
xoxo
The first time he'd lifted her up, light as a feather, and her legs squeezed around his waist and her back arched, he could feel the shape of her. She gasped as the coolness of the stainless steel refrigerator she was up against. He could have held her there forever. He thought of everywhere they'd have sex in that position. In the elevator with the emergency lever pulled, in his apartment, in her shower, and once in the ladies room of the Metropolitan Opera.
Then there's be just flashes, images. Her face lit by candlelight on a muggy night, something he probably failed to take notice of at the time. How once she wound a curl of his hair around her index finger mindlessly.
And finally, came the end. The end moment, the ending scene, the final number.
xoxo
"The moment when the guests had been daringly lifted above conviviality into the rarer atmosphere of sentiment," Dan read from the pages of an old book. "…was over before it could be irreverently breathed, before they had half realized it was there."
She lay wrapped in his sheets and nothing else, hair in curls cascading down her shoulders. The afternoon sun was shining through; the windows wide open while the air conditioning buzzed. She was listening intently, for she had never read Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night.
She'd never been read to by a lover, nor had he. Two intellectuals discovering the sensuous rolling of the tongue over words on a page was something new and private and calming. They put aside the banter, the snark, the insults that they so loved and held dear and found common ground in literature.
Dan read the line before reading it aloud and with his thumb pressed between the covers against the open page he let it drop to his side. He crawled forward from his chair to the bed where she listened and repeated it as he neared her.
"You're the only girl I've seen for a very long time that actually did look like something blooming," he said and kissed her, soft and slow and unlike how they usually kissed. It was a lazy afternoon, hot, and the city and their lives seemed to be moving as slow as the Deep South.
The kiss was languorous and long until they tapered off and he read once again, her head on his chest and arm strewn lazily around his middle.
"We were just like lovers--and then all at once we were lovers--and ten minutes after it happened I could have shot myself--except I guess I'm such a Goddamned degenerate I didn't have the nerve to do it."
"Sounds familiar," Blair said.
"We're still on minute nine," he told her.
She smiled devilishly into his mouth when he kissed her again. Her hand snuck around him until she found the book and snatched it away.
She sat up. "My turn."
She read for pages and pages, entranced with the story and the words. Dan had never heard her sound so serene, her voice a perfect soft melody that could have put him to sleep out of sheer pleasure at hearing it. He may have drifted off to some peaceful hazy place, but returned when she paused. She glanced up to look at him, some fear and hesitation in her eyes. He looked back at her, silent, until she dipped down to read once more.
"We can't go on like this--or can we?....What do you think?... Some of the time I think its my fault--I've ruined you," she read softly.
He said nothing.
Eventually she continued, and when she got to, "Tangled with love in the moonlight she welcomed the anarchy of her lover," it was all over.
The book fell casually to the floor and they never reached the end.
He put away his typewriter then. He didn't care much for the end anyway. He was in no mood today to try and figure out why a flame flickers out or why the sun shines jut as bright but turns cold. He didn't much care to chronicle how someone moves on from minute nine to minute ten.
He recalled reading the first sentence of Fitzgerald aloud to her; he'd forgotten to begin that scene there, so he fished the same old copy from his messy bookshelf and opened it.
He thought that when you revisit beginnings they often carry a heavier load than before, as if the words are weighed down by the finality of the story about to be told.
"On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, rose-colored hotel."
He closed the book.
