3. The Art Of Intoxication

Informal calls were nothing of the sort, and Blair abhorred them. Four hours at least and sometimes more in the very best parlour – far too rococo, with floral friezes and china shepherdesses peeking out from every alcove with empty, limpid eyes – Eleanor and her daughter would take tea with the great and the good of New York for the socially acceptable half hour, during which time comportment was next to godliness and godliness was whatever Eleanor Vervelde Waldorf wanted it to be. Blair would take her tea with lemon, and she would accept that invitation to dine with the Astors, and she would sit up straight and hold herself cold and distant in the presence of any gentleman caller who did not reach her mother's high expectations.

A week had passed, and Blair wanted to scream. She was dressed in the palest shade of shell pink imaginable, to match the room: her bodice was striped and her sleeves were not, and a string of perfectly matched pearls rested lightly on her clavicle and took on lustre from her skin.

"And as for the water, well –" Frederick Codrose was deep in conversation with her mother about his recent trip to London, though his eyes were fixed on the curve of Blair's throat and so she made an attempt to look animated. In her head, she recited passages from Scott's Castle Dangerous, half for their dramatic and entertainment value, and half to remind herself that there were worse things in the world than the company of young men who wore bottle green trousers and bowlers of a similar shade.

Chuck Bass, for example.

He'd never been far from her thoughts in the seven days since their reckoning in the conservatory, and although she'd given up on spitefully attributing him with occult powers – he'd taken the servants' stairs into the house, not simply materialised as Satan seemed wont to do – Blair still felt cold at the thought of him, and wondered if he could feel her discomfort radiating across the city and into whatever cesspit he inhabited. When she tried to focus on Mr Codrose, her mind drifted; she wanted iced water, she wanted a cigarette, and most of all she wanted to forget the things she couldn't help but remember every time she heard a footfall outside her bedroom door.

Waldorf Mansion, Fifth Avenue
1897

"Blair?"

She sat bolt upright in bed, clutching the sheet to her chest. Her chemise was silky and covered her from ankle to wrist, but it was still fine enough to be almost transparent over her small breasts and neat waist.

"Who's there?"

"Waldorf," the voice rephrased sardonically. "Let me in."

He came every Friday night, after they had refused to talk to one another at balls and parties and receptions, when she had seen his mouth twitch across the room and averted her own eyes in case she began laughing too. He was a smuggler, a pirate: he always came armed, pockets bulging with contraband cigarettes, a hip flask of liquor and the sugar-spun dainties her mother denied her. She would pull the covers up to her chin and he would laugh at her, call her 'proper'; then he would reach out to light her cigarette, and the pad of his thumb would linger too long on her cheek, and her heart would thud and fill her ears with its echoes.

"Scotch?" Blair wrinkled her nose when her first 'ciggie' was just ashes, smoke curling in the air. "No."

"Are you afraid?" Chuck knew how to tease her, had always known. His eyes slanted like a cat's, and there was always a challenge in them somewhere.

"No!"

Her first sip was like wildfire, and tears sprang to her eyes. She never took a second.

He kissed her to take the taste away.

They did that many more times.

"Miss Waldorf?"

Blair sprang back to life with her cheeks and lips burning, so lost in the memory that her heartbeat still beat an unladylike tattoo against her wrists. "I'm so sorry, Mr Codrose, your descriptions are just so transporting!" Her fingers latched onto the pearls at her neck, as if the wealth they represented could smooth her back into sanity. "Do continue."

"Forgive me, but I must be going." A bow over her mother's hand. "Mrs Waldorf." And a look – a look which was as charged as a touch, far too familiar for mere acquaintances. "Miss Waldorf."

Eleanor's lips pursed, and her daughter put a book before her eyes and pretended to read. Blair's pulse was still erratic, her mouth still tingling in a way that had nothing to do with Frederick Codrose's presumption. It was enough to feel her mother's disapproval radiating in every direction, and it gave Blair no small amount of pleasure – for a little while, anyway. After a minute or so of staring at words which would not form lines for her, she lay down the book on the loveseat's damask cushion and folded her hands neatly. They made a slight indentation on the crêpe de Chine overlay of her skirt, but otherwise left no sign that she had ever rearranged herself or her temper at all.

After a moment, Eleanor pressed two fingers to her temple and said, "Would it be so very difficult for you to be a little kind to Mr Codrose?"

"I'm sorry, Mother." The crêpe was milky pale, translucent, and it cast shadows as it shifted. "I didn't sleep well last night."

"And is that an excuse for rudeness?"

Very gently, Blair bit down on the tip of her tongue. "No, Mother."

"And for vexing me?"

"No, Mother."

"And for forgetting that, without my guidance, you would have been lost to an entirely undesirable match years ago?"

Her teeth clenched involuntarily, and Blair tasted blood. It bloomed in her mouth with a flavour like iron, but she was oddly glad of the pain. It shook off the mist of memory, truly waking her up and demanding that everything go back into its box. "No, Mother. Of course not."

The brackets around Eleanor's mouth loosened. "You will stay here and greet anyone of consequence who comes through that door, Blair, anyone. I am going to lie down and have Jenny bring me a cold compress and try to think – for your sake, not for mine – how best to go about soothing Mr Codrose's undoubtedly wounded feelings." She rose in a ripple, for her skirt was in tiers of deep grey, as dour as dismal as the look on her face, and left with great solemnity. Blair practised the forbidden art of crossing her legs, and then uncrossed them. She rubbed the smooth skin of her arms. She closed her eyes, and then opened them as wide as they would go.

Restless. She was simply restless.

The book beside her was Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women, hardly worth the paper it was written on, and she was too restive to read in any case. She tapped her feet on the polished walnut floor, her hands on the arms of the loveseat.

She was as she had been for a week; waiting for him.

So unaware was Blair of her waiting that she lit a contraband cigarette with her face perilously close to the fire, exhaling smoke into the clean burning hearth so it might drift away up the chimney and leave her hair and hands free of taint. The end papers were left over from the night before, and were a smoky blue that seemed too cool and clarid for the ornate room with its many chiming clocks. She checked her hair in the mirror crowning the hearth, stuck the cigarette between her teeth and almost giggled. In the space of a few minutes without her mother, she had jumped from sorrow and self-reflection to almost giddiness. If she were unfettered, Blair felt sure she could fly.

"Waldorf."

She should have seen him coming this time, seen his reflection in the mirror. He looked well, and he knew he did: broad shoulders well defined in black, his waistcoat and the curl of his cravat mimicking if not quite matching her dress. She felt the change in the air that was her lightness evaporating, lost like tobacco smoke, leaving her in a rush and abandoning the Waldorfs' very best parlour to silence and static, tension humming in the air as vibrato on a string.

"Your father's study."

It was not phrased as a question, and her only answer was to follow him. He knew the way almost as well as she did, though it was a room rarely used since her father's death. Blair had encapsulated her father's spirit by taking his chair, and she needed no more of him than that – so, despite her mother's indifference, the study had been left as it was. The walls were panelled with near black mahogany until waist height, above which they were olive green leather. The chairs were upholstered similarly, the desk was the same; the air smelt faintly of cigar smoke, and she realised the reason for his choice. She was still pushing back the memories, almost denying they ever had been.

He wanted to drown her in them.

As if to reinforce her thought, he asked, "What do you remember?"

"Skating in the park. Cotillion. My father's death."

Chuck's mouth curled in response. "I wouldn't advise baiting me."

"Then I would advise phrasing your questions better."

"What you remember of us, then." He removed his hat, the black silk as shiny and nap free as could be, and placed it jauntily on the bust of Plato that stood on the mantel. Blair could summon no desire to laugh.

"Skating in the park," she said woodenly. "And almost going through the ice when you let go of my hands. Cotillion, before we properly knew one another. My father's death, when you brought me peonies and told me I would survive the pain. I didn't realise that was because you were rearing me as a lamb for the slaughter."

"You brought this on yourself, and you know it." He traced a line in the dust on the window sill, and Blair experienced a bizarre fit of embarrassment at poor housekeeping in a room she so seldom entered. "And to that end...I've devised a little test for you."

"You can't make me get on my knees for you," she snapped, and he chuckled.

"Not that."

"Nor on my back."

"What will it take for you to understand that your body no longer holds any attraction for me?"

"What, then?"

People sometimes wondered if Blair Waldorf was all that she seemed, for the simple reason that her eyes were large and brown and doe-like, and there was sometimes such a light in her face and lightness to her gaze that it was hard not to think her utterly naïve. Few could see the truth of it, but Chuck Bass could: Blair kept her face blank to hide the gears working behind, the cogs turning as in a clock, slipping and sliding until she had what she wanted. She knew the value of collateral, how to hurt people if needs must, and he admired her for it.

Yet he was as masked as she was, and so crossed the floor to a glass-fronted cabinet unperturbed and without expression. The bottles were clean from their seclusion and, Chuck surmised, the better for it. He removed the stopper from one decanter, and amber liquid poured in an unbroken stream from bottle to glass. He warmed the whisky between his palms, extended his arm.

"Drink it."

"Why?"

"How will I ever know how you behave in public if I can't test you in private?"

"Why." It ceased to be a question when her mouth declined to shape it. The words squeezed out through her gritted teeth.

"Because it's exactly what you don't want – therefore, I want it."

There was a full measure of smoky liquid in the cut crystal snifter, and Blair balked at the idea of letting even one drop of it touch her tongue. She glanced at Chuck, at his closed lip smile; there would be no mercy from that quarter. He adjusted the foppish sleeves of his fawn coloured coat, waited.

She took the glass and raised it to her lips.

Waited.

His hair was pomaded to one side, casting a shadow over one cheekbone that was absent from the other. "Drink."

Her lips parted almost of their own accord, and she gasped even as she gagged.

Even more than a handspan of height and width gained and lost between then and now hadn't changed Blair's disgust, scotch running over her tongue and burning the sides of her mouth and setting tears streaming down her face. She gulped down the first vile mouthful, and it blazed in her throat and shot her through with fever to her toes. They curled inside her black stockings, and she gasped once her mouth was empty, bending forward at the waist and choking on her own saliva. The hand holding the glass shook.

"Drink," Chuck murmured, his voice almost a purr that made her sicker than the alcohol. "Or the world will know your little secret."

Immediately defiant, Blair tossed her head, prompting a few dark curls to slide down her neck. Her eyes were brilliant, cheeks deep with colour. She drank again, another gulp to try and finish the damned thing before she lost her nerve or remembered its flavour. It rattled between her stomach and her lungs, flaming, and she was racked with coughs. The final measure, thank goodness, was the shallowest, but even that was enough to do her harm when she risked holding it in her mouth to lessen its potency. Finally she stood triumphant, her head raised on its slender swan's curve of neck, a single drop of liquor descending from the tip of her tongue over her lip.

Chuck had remained still, a study in stillness, brow smooth, but there was a sense of ferocity in his limbs as he came towards her, put out his hand. Blair held those black gold eyes with her own as his thumb swept beneath her lower lip, caressing the curve of her chin, trapping the droplet with his fingertip. There was a queer heat as he cleansed her skin, a queer coldness when the moment passed and the day was done, and she had won. She shuddered all over, down to her toes once again, and he withdrew hid fingers.

"You'll heel nicely, I think."

"Get out of my house."

"And never return?" He mocked. "And never 'make your ridiculous offices to my daughter again'?"

Blair was suddenly reminded why her blood ran cold, why she could not walk in the conservatory or look upon a peony or open her heart further than just enough to let a little light in. Daring to look Chuck in the eye was just as dangerous as ever, though there was no risk of falling; she was at the risk of pitying him.

Still, her repetition came stronger, more distinct. "Get out."

"There's a reception tomorrow evening," he returned, moving not an inch. "At the Needholds'. We're celebrating the success of our wells, and you and I will open the dancing."

"You mean the whole world will see us dancing first, and imagine we are all but engaged."

"You don't get nearly enough credit for your wit."

"Nor you enough censure for yours."

Chuck's voice was soft, too soft, confidential and intimate and almost directly into Blair's own mouth. It was the voice he reserved for seduction, as if he might seduce the fear out of her. "You have no idea how much pleasure watching you suffer will bring me – like watching a butterfly trapped in a cobweb. How proud you were of your wings, and now they betray you." His gaze dropped to her quivering lips. "How proud you were of being beautiful until it was no use. We're the same, you and I. Perhaps you should give into the pain and stop trying to fight it."

"I will fight until my last dying breath," she told him passionately. "Because any resemblance to you is something I would hate about myself!"

"I will meet you in the foyer," he instructed coolly, disregarding her words, the flush and slight dewing still present on her fair skin. "At eight o'clock tomorrow night, so we can go in together. Our grand entrance will be the talk of the gossip columns, and you'll squirm through it all...or will you hold your pretty face still and your shoulders haughty, and not give them a passing glance?"

"I wouldn't give you the satisfaction."

"What a pity." Plato was denuded of his hat, the table of Chuck's gloves, Blair's skirt of his proximity. "So much wasted potential."

Blair touched her mouth as his footsteps retreated, and cold blood ran hot through her fingertips.


Thanks to: thegoodgossipgirl, QueenBee10, MegamiTenchi, Arazadia, chair4Ever, Lalai, tinamarie333, GGfan73104, Kate2008, Spiros, Bellemme, Lexi1x07, Maribells, teddy bear, I see your true colours, batgirl2992, jamieerin, notoutforawalk, TruC7, ggloverxx19, CBBW3words8letters, mlharper and lisottina81.