Every time Dan looked at Blair, he was uncertain whatever made him think that he was strong enough to stay away from her. He chewed on the tip of his pen as he watched her brush a piece of hair away from her face and behind her ear. He was in the library to write an essay about a book he had been assigned to read but instead was inspired more to write something about Blair- maybe he could find his calling as a poet.
"You're staring, Humphrey," Blair said, turning her head slowly to look at him. "I won't study with you if you continue to stare."
Dan huffed as he trained his eyes back to his computer screen. He was now staring at a blank screen, trying to find any words that would properly describe a book that he had despised. "Blair," he said, trying to whisper not to evoke the library's scorn.
"Humphrey," she said, dropping her pen that she had been taking notes with on to the table. "Can it wait?"
"About the other night-"
Blair put her hand up, "No, we're not going there." Dan pouted. "Humphrey, we both agreed that it was a one time, get it out of our systems thing. We have to move on. We did it, we're done. We can move on to this stage of friendship."
"Fine," Dan said, turning back to his computer screen. "But can we talk about it?"
Dan's hand pressed on Blair's lower back as she climbed the stairs of the bus to the upper deck. She insisted on riding in the front seat on the way back to dinner. She said if she was going to be using public transit, she wanted the best view. "Can you imagine what everyone back home would say?"
"About what?" Dan said, as he sat down next to her in the seat. "You being with a Brooklyn guy across the pond?"
"Who cares about that?" she laughed. Blair tilted her head against the window, "Me being on a bus."
"Oh," Dan said, exaggerating a shiver, "the horrors."
"Humphrey," she said, hitting his chest with the back of her hand. "It's not nice to poke fun at me."
Dan caught her hand before she took it back and interlocked their fingers, holding it close to his chest for a second. "But you make it so easy." Blair smirked. "Did you have a good time? I was glad to have you there. It was nice to have someone who wasn't speaking a language I can't understand."
She nodded, "Amelie seems nice. Are you sad that she has a girlfriend?"
"Why would I be sad? I root for all of my friends to be happy."
"And you have so many friends to root for," Blair said, pausing for a second before laughing at her own joke. Dan frowned and Blair reached over to pinch his cheek, "Come on, you can give it but you can't take it, Humphrey?"
"I can take it," Dan clarified, "but that seemed like a low blow."
"Some people are born to be social and some people are you," she said, one shoulder raising as she jabbed her finger into his chest.
Dan nodded slowly, "Maybe, some people would have more friends if they weren't preoccupied with a girl from the Upper East Side. Let me tell you," he said, clapping his hands together. "Ever since this ended? I have people lining up around blocks to be my friend. My social life has been booming."
"Oh yeah," she challenged, "tell me about all your friends."
Blair didn't look up from her computer as she responded, "There is really nothing to talk about. You seduced me with cheap red wine, which was a good way to remember that I have standards when it comes to wine and men."
Dan scoffed. "And men? What do you mean by that, Blair?"
"I just remembered you being better in my head," Blair said, looking up and giving him the sweetest smile. "Maybe you are out of practice?"
Dan squinted at her, "Out of practice?"
"I don't know," Blair shrugged, as she tapped her finger against her cheek. "Or maybe I was just in a rebellious phase at the time and let you get away with mediocrity."
He clenched his teeth down, trying hard to not respond. He felt his fingers move rhythmically on the keyboard as he tried to form sentences about the book. All he could do, however, was write the word 'fuck'/ over and over again. He looked back up at her, "Are you joking, Blair?"
"Humphrey," she said, dramatically rolling her eyes as she closed her notebook. "Why would I joke about something so serious? I'm sure you will find a girl out there patient enough to help you improve." She leaned over, her shoulder grazing his, to look at his screen. "Oh my God, you have wasted two hours of my time. What is that?" she asked, tapping his screen with her fingertip. "You have not written any of your essay. What does that say? Did you just write the word 'fuck' over and over again?"
Dan swatted her hand away and closed his lap top. "I already wrote my essay," Dan lied. "It's saved. I've just been waiting for you to finish whatever you were working on."
"Well, that was stupid," she said, putting her notebook into her bag and standing up. "I've been waiting for you for the last hour. And now that we are both done, I will allow you to walk me back to the dorm."
He hesitated, looking at his computer and knowing that if he left now, he would be in for an all nighter to finish the essay he just told her he wrote. "You know what, Blair, why don't you go back? I have something else I just forgot that I should do." He reopened his essay, deleting all of the curse words on the word document.
To his surprise, Blair sat back down.
"What are you doing?"
"Reading," she answered, taking Breakfast at Tiffany's out of her bag and leaning back in her chair. "Carry on."
Blair's head moved from the window to his shoulder some time during the trip back to their dorm. His arm wrapped around her, pulling her closer to him as they watched out of the big window the city of Brighton disappear as their school came back into view.
"You smell nice," she said, burying her had into his chest. "You're not allowed to smell nice, you're supposed to smell like Brooklyn."
"One of these days," Dan said, mindlessly stroking her hair, "you'll stop making these Brookyin generalizations."
"Never."
The bus was close to their stop and Dan reached over Blair to ring the bell. As the bus stop, Dan stood and offered Blair his hand. She pulled herself up, stumbling slightly as she stood. He walked down the stairs carefully, turning at the bottom to take her hand again. The air was chilly as they stepped off the bus and Dan slipped off his jacket to put it around her shoulders.
"Humphrey?" Blair asked, her voice low. They walked close together back to the dorm, their sides brushing with every step.
"Mmm," he answered, hyper aware of how his knuckles were touching hers.
"Do you think there is still wine left?"
"I'm pretty sure we finished that bottle, but," he pulled out his phone, "it's still pretty early. Do you want to get another bottle?"
Blair shook her head even as she said the words, "Yes."
"Is that a no or a yes? You're giving off mixed signals."
"Yes," she said, her voice rising in volume. "Actually, no."
Dan nodded, "Okay."
They finished the rest of the walk to their dorm in silence, Dan silently cursing himself out in his head as he replayed asking her to clear up the answer. He should have just taken the initial verbal yes as a cue to walk them both to the liquor store on campus to get a bottle of wine (he would have let her choose any bottle) so they could continue the night.
Blair tapped her card against the reader, "Well, Humphrey. This was a pleasant night." She shimmied her shoulders, letting his coat slip off her arms. "Thank you for this," she said, handing it back.
He took her hand as she placed the coat in his arms and leaned in to her. It was awkward, the jacket in between them, but he tried to maneuver around it. He ran his thumb against the back of her hand as he lifted his other arm to run his fingers through her hair. "Blair," he said, his lips dangerously close to her mouth.
"Humphrey, we shouldn't," she said, but he felt her step forward and into him. "It's the red wine." She leaned into him and onto her toes as she pushed herself up to meet his mouth. This kiss was quick before she pulled back and looked around the area that could constitute as a lobby in the dorm. "Do you want to-"
"Yes."
"I didn't even finish, Humphrey," she said, pulling her hand back from his and laughing.
He shrugged, "I would have said yes to anything you asked."
"Okay, do you want to have a threesome with Nate?" she laughed wickedly.
He groaned, "Blair."
They stepped into the elevator and she pushed the button for her floor. "I'm joking," she said, as she backed him into the wall of the elevator and he bent to kiss her. "But if you said yes, I could make some calls."
An hour later, Dan finally closed his lap top. He wouldn't say he wrote a good essay but he had, in fact, wrote an essay. "Done."
"How was your second mysterious assignment, Humphrey?" Blair asked, raising her eyebrows and putting her book down.
Dan made a face at her as he packed his lap top in his bag and stood up. "You could have left at any time."
"And miss you make your concentration face?" She imitated him, sticking out her tongue slightly and biting it and scrunching up her face.
Dan rolled his eyes, "Is that what I look like? It's a wonder you didn't pounce on me."
"God, Humphrey, if you think you are that irresistible, it's shocking you are still single," Blair said, handing over her bag. "You can carry this for making me wait."
"Wait for what, Blair? I will repeat, you could have left."
Blair ignored him, walking a few steps in front of him. As they left the library, they walked into a dimming sky. "God, Humphrey, next time at least give us some kind of daylight." He caught up with her, adjusting her back on his shoulder. She looped her arm in his, "I have a surprise for you."
Dan raised his eyebrows, "Is it something I'll like?"
"Do you think I would give you something you wouldn't like?"
"Actually," he said, flashing back to the Christmas gift she had given him, book of pictures that he had packed carefully away when they broken up, not quite ready to throw it in the fire, "I remember you being almost too good at surprises."
He watched her profile as her lips pulled upwards. "Ah, well, compared to one Christmas gift it might be a little disappointing." She unlinked their arms as they reached the dorm. "Maybe you should go drop your bag off and then meet me in my room."
Dan's eyebrows raised.
"Humphrey, get your head out of the gutter," she scoffed.
He made quick work of dropping his bag off, but spent a few minutes to freshen up. Even if she said to get his head out of the gutter, he had just spent the entire day in the library and brushing his teeth and throwing on a spritz of cologne certainly couldn't hurt.
Dan took a deep breath as he knocked his knuckles against her door. Blair opened it and behind her, on her desk, sat a bottle of red wine and a grainy picture of Nate. "What is this?"
"The threesome you promised me."
"I didn't-"
Blair led him to her room, unlocking the door and pulling him in by his shirt. "No one can see," she said and then laughed. "Actually, anyone could see. No one cares here, no one cares that I'm Blair fucking Waldorf."
Dan kissed her, his hands on her hips as he pushed her against her door and locked it. "I care."
"Of course you do," she said, pulling his shirt out of his pants.
Dan kissed down her neck, placing strategic kisses from her shoulder to her collarbone to hear the slight purr Blair made when his lips touched the dip between collarbones. His hands ran down her sides as she moved against him, her arms laying across his shoulders and her fingers touching the back of his head. He rolled his neck against her hands.
"The bed, Humphrey," she said, and he hoisted her from the floor and carried her the foot distance to the small twin bed.
"What did you say," Dan said, kissing her throat again as he pulled her shirt from her jeans, "about this not working? At dinner?"
"It's not nice to gloat, Humphrey," she said, lifting her arms he could remove her shirt.
Blair shut the door behind him and smirked, taking the cork out of the bottle. "I thought about actually calling Nate, I have a feeling he would have said yes- he does like getting a rise out of you, but thought this would do for now. It would take too long to explain the entire story to him and then I'd have to answer all his questions and-"
"I thought you didn't want to talk about this."
"Who said anything about talking?" Blair said, lifting the bottle to her lips. "Much better than your offering," she teased as she handed him the bottle. "I might have exaggerated before. Perhaps the itch isn't completely scratched. And, honestly, Humphrey, if I let you loose into society so rusty with your skills- well, I consider myself somewhat of a feminist and that would just be a crime against my fellow women."
Dan frowned, trying to follow what she is saying. "So, you want-"
"To have a friendship where we spice it up with maybe a session of break up sex thrown in there every couple of weekends," Blair said, taking the bottle back from him. "I've thought about it. None of these English boys have done anything for me. And, well, it's nice to be with someone who knows me."
"So what you want is a friends with benefit situation?" he asked.
"A what?"
"When you are friends, and there are benefits?"
"Isn't being friends with me the benefit?"
"That's not-"
Blair huffed, "God, Humphrey. I'm from the UES, not Mars. I know what friends with benefits is. I guess, if we need to put such a crude label on it."
"Why," Dan countered, "can't we just talk about what happened and maybe why it happened?"
She put down the bottle, "Because you broke my heart, Humphrey. I'm not willing to do that again, not with you, not right now. It's this or nothing. And by nothing, I mean we never mention this again and you erase it from your memory."
Dan nodded, "Well, who I am to turn down lessons from Blair Waldorf?"
"That's the spirit," she said, lifting up the bottle again. "Should we shake on it?"
"Seems a little formal."
Blair nodded, "Alright, then, see you tomorrow."
"Wait," Dan's head tilted. "What?"
"This was the negotiation phase. You think I'm going to do this mostly sober with no dinner before hand? I spent the day in the library, Humphrey. The entire day. That's not exactly mood setting."
Dan shook his head in disbelief, "A dinner? Before having sex? So a date?"
"A dinner between friends and then that might turn into sex between friends."
"Ah, right," Dan's eyes widened. "Whatever you say, Blair."
She opened the door behind him and gently pushed on his chest to get him to leave. "Goodnight, Humphrey."
