He lifts her chin up and waits for her to answer. Instead, she stays silent as the tears start to fall.
"Blair? What happened?" He lets her cry into his shoulder. His arms are softly wrapped around her as she does, offering a silent comfort he doesn't know she really needs. Sure, they are both in a difficult place. He, on the outs with his friends and his family and she, desperately trying to run away from life.
"I don't know what to do anymore." She says in between sobs. Then suddenly, "Why don't you have a crappier life than me right now?" She looks up at him with her puffy eyes, a brow raised in confusion. He chuckles. She's still in there somewhere, he thought. Then the sobbing starts again.
…
She wakes up in his bed, covered in a blanket. Beside her, she finds Dan staring at the book he's holding in his hand.
"Do you have some sort of photographic memory? You just stare at the book then you suddenly know what it's all about?" She snuggles close to him, not at all bothered by the proximity they've recently developed. He puts her arm around her and smiles.
"Hey…" He says as he rubs her shoulder.
"Hey…" She responds to him without really looking.
"You ready to talk about whatever it is that happened?" He is pretty hell bent on finding out what she's been going through. She nods meekly. There's no point running away anymore.
"Spill it, Waldorf." He says jokingly.
…
"I thought I was pregnant." It's the first thing she tells him because she could not think of where to start. She gets up from his bed walks to his office. He follows.
"Did Louis know?" He asks her. He isn't sure why it breaks his heart to know that she could have been pregnant with another guy. She shakes her head and he looks at her, confused.
"It wouldn't have been his if I were." She says with a little hint of embarrassment. He suddenly understands. The first emotion that he feels then is anger. "Chuck?" He asks knowingly. She nods, feeling a little apprehensive of what the consequences could be.
"Does he know?" He tries to maintain composure. The one thing he really wants is to march to Chuck and punch him in the face. He feels protective of Blair. Anything or anyone that causes her pain makes him angry.
"No. He doesn't need to know." She looks at him sadly. "I told Louis about it because the guilt was killing me. He told me he kind of expected it already. He realized it may have been too soon for him to decide that he could accept everything about me… even the bad side."
"I'm sorry, Blair." That's all he says but he looks pained, not for him, but for her. He wants her to be happy but he doesn't know how that's going to happen now that she's lost her fairytale.
…
"Look, Dan. I know how you feel about Chuck. It's just that I was scared. In the greater scheme of things, Chuck's the familiar. I came back to him the moment I felt scared. But we're really over now." She looks at him and recognizes his expression. "And punching him wouldn't help, Humphrey." He laughs to himself but avoids veering away from the conversation.
"Well…yes, but because of him, you lost Louis. I know how much you wanted that fairytale, Blair." He takes a DVD from his movie shelf.
"I think it would still have ended even without Chuck. It wasn't much of a fairytale once you go deeper into it. That's mostly the reason why I left. With Chuck, it was all games. With Louis, it was fun but mostly easy. I couldn't be really myself when I'm with either of them. They could only love a part of me that they identify with. I wasn't exactly happy." She watches as he loads the DVD into his laptop.
"Breakfast at Tiffany's: a pick-me-up movie. It's your favorite, right?" He tells her with a smile. He sits on his couch and gestures for her to join him. She sits beside him and places an unopened copy of Inside on his lap. He stares at the book then looks at her sadly.
"That's the other reason I came back. We need to talk about this." She takes his hand and squeezes it. He remains quiet and just looks at her, unsure of what to say. He's not quite sure there's anything else he could say that isn't on the book.
"Humphrey, I'm being overly cheesy here and I don't think you're picking up on the hints here. If you don't say anything, I'm leaving." She says desperately.
"I wrote what I wrote as an observer. But sometimes, you can't help to put in your emotions into things you write." He lets out a deep breath. "To put it simply: Blair, I may be in…like…err…love…with…" She cups his face and cuts him off with a kiss. He stares at her, shocked. Then he smiles and tucks her hair behind her hair. "You." He looks into her eyes and finishes.
"I guess that means we can bring my bags in now." She smiles at him innocently as he throws her a confused look. "But before that, the movie…" She sighs contently and snuggles to his chest as he presses play. The bags sitting outside his loft door can wait.