I am pleased and proud to announce that this chapter is rated M for a reason. If you don't enjoy the sex, then I'm sorry to say you're just going to have to read it anyway. There's important plot points in that there sexin'.
Enjoy.

Vingt: La Luxure

Blair pressed her face into the pillow and tried to ignore that which was, unfortunately, eminently clear: there was a lunatic trying to break down her door. Although she had expected consequences of some kind for her abrupt departure from his side after a long night of revelations, gambling and failed debauchery, she had at least bargained on a good day and a half's sleep – for it had to be the very early hours of the morning by now, at least – before she was forced to face Chuck and justify herself. Despite any outer play of languor, however, she could not deny that a choir of angels had settled somewhere about her navel and were now keeping her awake with an endless round of hallelujahs which sounded oddly like: he loves me! He loves me! He loves me!

"Miss Blair."

"I know, Dorota."

"Will you not go down?"

Blair raised her face from the crisp white linen and regarded her maid and foremost confidante thoughtfully. "What is your opinion, Dorota? Of my lord Mister Chuck?"

"That he will damage paintwork," Dorota replied.

"As a man, I mean."

"As a man?" There was a small huffing sound as Dorota pushed the air through her teeth, her blue eyes set. She then bit down upon her lip, and set to rearranging Blair's latest floral tribute: a vase of insipid, milk white blooms, no doubt sent by the formerly affianced Marcus Beaton. "I think he is proud, Miss Blair. I think he is rogue, but would like to be more of rogue than his heart say is good. I know you are only lady he has ever met with on more than two occasions without – without –"

"Immorality taking place."

"Yes."

The knocking became louder, and Blair winced as the roaring repetitions of her name increased, both in volume and in frequency. She looked sheepishly at Dorota, whom she could have sworn was concealing a smile behind one work-roughened hand. "I have a decision to make, don't I?" She sighed. "He has every right to be angry with me, I fear. I called him out so many times, and when he rose to the challenge, I...I ran away."

"Miss Blair." And to the great surprise of both, Dorota bent and kissed her charge lightly upon the forehead. "You are good girl," the maid said firmly. "And you have good, kind heart. Even ten Mister Chucks battering the house down will not change that."

Blair sighed once more, drawing her robe towards her and slipping into the sleeves. "Very well, Dorota. Show him in."

The drawing room flickered orange and red, the fireplace and its blazing occupant the only light the space afforded. Chuck gazed into the serene brown eyes of Blair's portrait and felt the overwhelming urge to tear it from the wall and burn it. Vixen, how had she deceived him – that the price of her heart was a few paltry words, a quiet touch of sincerity? He had still not abandoned his plan of dragging her about the place by her hair until she agreed to love him properly and stopped behaving like a silly chit, though the barest minimum of logic he still possessed in the face of such a snub prompted him that a very great amount of screaming was liable to result, and not the sort of screams which best became a lady. Still, he had most probably roused the entire street with his knocking and deeply embarrassed himself besides, but who cared for that? She was irresistible; he could not rest until he knew whereof her damned 'thank you' had sprung.

Blair entered the room not a little tentatively, though she put back her shoulders and raised her chin and adjusted her robe – scarlet silk, and now she regretted putting it on – as though she had no qualms about facing her erstwhile lover. "What do you want, Chuck?"

"What do I want?" He laughed without mirth, shadows flickering across his face in demonic succession. "I think the problem lies with what it is that you want, precisely. I was under the impression that you necessitated a declaration in order to add me to your circus of fools. Tell me –" His eyes burned at her as the firelight shone in their depths, flame into flame. "Were Marcus and Carter your only other suitors, or is there some sort of trial by combat I have to undergo before my intentions toward you are explicit? What further games do you expect me to play?"

"My games?" Blair snapped. "I am not the one who was too afraid to confess until the very last moment! I was begging you to fight for me at every opportunity, with Marcus or with Carter or even simply as myself, I, Blair, asking you!" She lifted the hem of her nightgown above her bare feet and stalked toward him, only aware of the heat in the room when her cheeks flamed in protest. "You reserved those three, significant words until there was literally nothing else between us but to say them; how was I to know that it wasn't euphoria at not losing your fortune that prompted you to speak so, or relief that you were finally rid of Carter Baizen? You told me you loved me when you had no rivals, no witnesses, and nobody to judge you for letting such a thing slip!"

"There was no aberration in my judgement," he snarled. "I merely wished to fulfil your desire for me to –"

"So such words were for my sake? Oh, happy day!" Blair threw herself down on the chaise longue in manner utterly void of grace. "You extracted them from your repertoire simply to placate me, then?"

"No!"

"Then why?"

"Because, you arrogant, empty-headed little fool, I wanted to tell you the truth!" He glared at her, chest rising and falling with each furious exhalation.

Blair's expression softened not a jot. She glared back at him with all the venom she could muster, her own breathing rapid. How dare he speak to her in such as manner, and still call himself a gentleman! How dare he slander her so, in her own house! How the Devil could he dare to profess to love her when he treated her with such disdain? Such a smug, self-satisfied, canker of a man was he – why, she knew not how she could possibly love him at all! – and yet still she felt every part of herself drawn towards him, fractured when she could not touch him, not at peace when he was not at peace with her.

This would prove quite problematic.

"Well, you have certainly ruined everything." She stood to poke the fire, somehow more brazen in her red silk robe and proper nightgown than she had been even in the barest and filmiest of white. "What am I to do now, Chuck Bass? Consider myself scorned by you, and by the male species at large? I hardly care." Blair laid down the poker and the flames leapt up anew, casting flickering shadows over her face and hair. "I renounce gentlemen entirely; I shall retire to the country and keep cats."

"And is there not," Chuck inquired evenly, his tone as sweet as honey but his tongue more sour than whey. "Something you wished to say to me, in return for my confession?"

"No." Her eyes were heavy-lidded, teasing, dark as cherries with no distinction between iris and pupil.

He looked back at her blackly with no hint of humour. "Then I rescind my words: I hate you."

"I have always hated you."

"There is no one I hate more."

"Every nerve ending in the body is electrified – by hatred."

"There is a fiery pit of hate burning inside me, ready to explode."

"So it's settled, then?"

They had advanced on each other like warriors as they spoke, ready to do battle and slay dragons, if not one another. The heat in the room was tangible; each breath he took stirred the hair on her forehead, each tiny inhalation from between her lips like cannon fire. It seemed like no more could be said when he grasped the smooth curve of her throat, thumb pressed over the wildly beating pulse – better to hear the gasp when it inexorably came.

"We're settled," he replied.

There was no instigator of what began next, the sudden leap from bitter enemies to lovers in less than a heartbeat. Too long had Chuck and Blair been playing at lord and lady, ignorant of the animals they had unleashed in the other's breast. Time came apart, ripping at the seams as lips collided, battled, crushed and subdued each other, rising for air for mere modicums of moments before once again sinking, drowning into the long denied embrace which bodies had longed for and minds now knew to be true. She wrapped her arms around his neck, gripping on as tightly as if it were her only defence from going under. His lips parted – or were parted, by her insistent tongue and yielding waist beneath his hands – to the fierce union of their togetherness, finally, bound like the sash around her waist and already coming undone.

Chuck lifted her; in truth, he knew not what else to do. Neither of them would ever make it up the grand staircase to her bedroom, and he did not honestly wish to make a woman out of his woman in the entryway when patience was a necessary commodity. Likewise, the couches were all the way over on the opposite side of the room, and in sight of the window.

Blair felt herself being carried and didn't care that her robe had dropped to the floor and fallen away, most probably trampled. She knew when she alighted on something solid and they were of a height and she was fumbling, fumbling in the most unladylike manner imaginable for his waistband, slipping one fearless hand inside and letting the hard, glorious length of him fill her palm with a repressed shiver of nothing but triumph. She toyed with the taut skin, exploring it with her fingertips so that Chuck groaned into her neck, shaking his head over and over as if trying to bring home a point to himself.

"Won't...be able..."

Blair understood and pulled back as he decided upon a different tactic, rending the finely spun lawn of her nightgown along the line of her spine and revealing an expanse of lily white skin to the orange glow of the banked up fire. The sleeves became slack around Blair's wrists as she sighed, the still air puckering her nipples to hard peaks. She arched as he nuzzled one, first softly, and then began to explore this Newfoundland of flesh with insistent fingers, probing tongue. He circled the rose petal flesh with his lips, only risking to nip and bite when she was pleading, begging, her hands fisting uselessly in his hair as she stared blindly up at the ceiling. Her perfume rose to enwrap them, enshrine them and assault Chuck's senses, the sweet saltiness of her skin a curlicue of ecstasy between his waiting lips.

"Don't," she whispered when he paused to look up at her, and her eyes seemed shot through with gold.

"You'll like it," he promised, and then dropped to his knees to sample her core.

There were slender, unexpected muscles in her thighs from riding, each tautening to a further degree as his hands strayed beneath the remains of her nightgown. Chuck searched without hesitation for the centre of Blair, the place a heart of ice had melted and was trailing out heat.

She breathed out slowly when he parted her, too quickly when she felt his fingers stroking the soft outer flesh; all that remained of the white lawn was now puddled around her thighs. She could feel darkness all around her, caressing like velvet, and when he bent his head to kiss she stiffened and then collapsed, supine, spread-eagled on the pianoforte as the torture began.

He felt alive as she fell away, her trust and love for him a promise in the air, now spoken between them and free to grow wings. In tribute, he lavished butterfly kisses on the rosy skin, whispering soft adulations into her heat when she whimpered. He tasted her – the essence of her – with a darting, flickering tongue which left her moaning, crying out, imploring for she knew not what. He was a practised seducer, a lover of women and creatures far superior to herself, while she remained an innocent: naïve, until now, of the fire below, the blaze of her true self beneath eighteen years of frippery and lies. Her mother's words were of little consequence, for Blair was assured that Eleanor could never have felt was she was now feeling: union with a man in almost every way possible, still with more to discover and more to learn about herself, about them together. Whore? In her mother's eyes, she would have been. There was suddenly no greater satisfaction than the thought of her mother's face if she, Lady Waldorf, had discovered her daughter being made love to by the most infamous man in London on top of a pianoforte.

Then his tongue snaked inside her, and Blair thought she would go insane.

And she shook her head just as he had, understanding suddenly quite what she had been doing to him.

"You," she ordered, sweaty and sticky with her own lust. "I love you. I need you."

Blair couldn't restrain a roll of her eyes when he kissed her cunt in parting, leaving it with a promise of, 'better acquaintance at a later date'. She was laughing by the time he kissed her again, laughing at her own petulance, at the unfamiliar taste of her flooding her own tongue. Chuck stroked her hair, quiet for a long moment as he simply looked into her dark eyes, so star-scattered that any pleasure gained from his own performance was more than equalled by the fact that she was looking at him – not Nathaniel, his best friend and golden boy, nor the fish Marcus or the bastard Baizen, and certainly not for his pocketbook like every whore he'd ever fucked, pound notes the only presence in the room to make them scream.

"I love you too," he told her, and then pressed forward so that they were almost, nearly, achingly close.

The first pain as he entered her was to be expected; Blair had expected it, anticipated that it would be great as he broke past all her maidenly defences and made her sob with agony and delight. As she grew used to the sensation of his being there, of copulation – of being connected as men and women had always been meant to be connected – the sense of foreignness changed, subtly shifting to acceptance, wonder...

Belief.

Chuck kissed her temple. "We can stop."

"I cannot," she whispered. "God help me, but I cannot."

"Then I hope He redeems us both," came the reply, surer and stronger than hers.

Their dance began slowly, gently, the languorous kiss and the leisurely thrust and his smile as he heard her purr. There was a fire in Blair, and he was stoking it: another spark each time they parted and came together again, his flesh in her flesh, until sparks were not enough and she needed flame; heat. There could be no sweet lovemaking when it had taken a lifetime to bring them here, and while he may have been master of his desires, she was indubitably not of hers.

Blair raked her nails down Chuck's back and felt them bite through fabric, tearing through his skin to the animal – not the gentleman – she desired. He hissed, snarled out her name in warning as she did it again, again, lifting up her hips and pushing into him so that she met him and equalled him, his mate and his adversary and his love, now and forever. She felt the sparks begin to build with a tightening in her belly as the room become hotter and the sounds from her lips – was it truly her, making those guttural, wanton noises out loud? – became more desperate, the coiling inside winding tighter and tighter like a clock spring so that Blair saw and knew nothing, had nothing, but needed this, this promise, this everlasting gift as his fingers found the swollen nub just above where they surged together and teased her, coaxing her towards the end of the world.

She came apart in flames, spirals of glorious inferno that set her clenching around him and forcing him down with her. They rose together in a ring of fire, her head thrown back and his buried in her throat as dark delight swept through both, a starburst of pure ecstasy with a white hot surge. This was them, who they were and not who they pretended to be: complete, invincible when joined together, separated before by man but hereafter only by the hand of God itself, reaching down from Paradise to put what he had made asunder. They both came again, quickly, her leading like a storm lantern with the warmth of her sheath engulfing him, leaving blood drumming beneath skin and sweat cooling on backs and breath still coming quickly, still sparks shooting as he silently lifted and held her to him once again.

There they were, broken but whole in lightness and circumstance; intertwined and never to be free.

"Marry me," Chuck rasped, almost surprised not to be struck down by lightning as the words passed his lips.

And Blair – who in direct opposition to the teachings of her mother had gambled with a libertine, exposed her beating heart and surrendered her virtue on a pianoforte – simply bent her head to his and told him everything with her kiss.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that. It was written, unsurprisingly, directly after my very first viewing of 4x07, with the piano scene on repeat to guide the way. As much of a lover as I am of the final scene in 2x25, I wanted my Chuck and Blair to go up in flames together - there never was any question for me about their journey together not being a fight to the finish. Can you even remember back to chapter one, where Chuck eyed up Blair at Rufus' funeral, or their first kiss in chapter eight? I feel like we've walked a million miles since then - and I say we because that's me, Chuck, Blair, and a whole load of you amazing people cheering us on and poking them together with sticks. I will address how very orgasmic you all are in the epilogue, because I know if I start now you'll have a three thousand word chapter, and a ten thousand word essay on how much you all rock.

A shout out this chapter: to TruC7, who is not only a faithful reviewer but also one who analyses everything I write in chocolate sprinkled commentaries which are about ten pages long and which I plan on printing out and framing. You rock my world.

I wanted your love, but you held back on the revenge. Thanks and kisses for last chapter go to: bethaboo (my truly wonderful Twisted Sister who rivals Mrs McDreamy Meredith for her good sense, compassion and excellent hair), hotlittlestarlet, thegoodgossipgirl, abelard, Lalai, QueenBee10, Syrianora, Krazy4Spike, tvrox12, Stella296 (I knew you wanted Carter's brains blown out, honey, but I couldn't serve up the guts when there was true love to configure!), Petite Poppy (yours is the best kind of amnesia I have ever inflicted, hope the shower wasn't too terrible), SaturnineSunshine (you know how I feel about you: word), HnM skinnys, annablake (yes, I know yours was not a review, but even though you've left me I shall still love you ad infinitum), niinjjakiitten and Star-crossed92 (flowers? For me? You shouldn't have!). You really shouldn't have to ask what I wish you this chapter. If you need a reminder, just read it again.

Just as a by-the-by: I tend to have an FAQ as the final chapter to my long fics. Please PM any questions you have about anything to do with TFB or my historical environs, or just how long it took me to find out whether Blair could actually get her hands down Chuck's Victorian pants. Love you.