A/N: Why hello there. Here is the next chapter, busy filling things in. I really haven't had much inspiration for this story as of late but I'm keeping at it. Leave me some inspiration? (also known as a review) Always much appreciated.
Walking along with his soul in his lungs.
Ya stare at him long you can find a new song.
Everyone thinks they've got a new phrase.
But you're still miles away.
You're still miles away.
I said, "You're still miles away."
Hold me now. Don't start shaking.
You keep me safe.
Don't ever think you're the only one
when times are tough in your new age
- The Polyphonic spree
Chapter Eighteen:
Humid air filled the master suite and rose to the ceiling. The scent of summer flowers was carried along, like beads on a necklace, glass one could look though. A cat eye marble. Blair leaned against the backboard, eyes closed as she imagined the silence between her and Mark growing into weeds, taking root between them.
She wondered how she could break the air, make more room for thought. A book sat sitting between her fingers but the words were like water, drifting down the margins.
He glanced up from the crossword he had been doing, she pretended not to notice. Blinked.
"Did you guys have fun today?" Mark asked.
She nodded, looked over at the bedside table behind him, at her own hands as she set the book down and organized a response.
Tula and Henry were tiny against the chests of their parents as they had been carried up the stairs and tucked into bed. Two cups of hot milk, fervent kisses on the cheek and they had fallen asleep. No words had really been exchanged.
"It was great," She smiled - a shadow, "you were missed though."
"I know," He sighed, "but I just figured I'd let you guys do your thing. I needed to catch up on some stuff around here anyway."
"I guess, but they don't even want to spend time with me, all they want is their dad." It was true.
He was their father, the man who had been there through everything, who had held her up when she fell, brushed the sweat off her forehead, cradled them in his arms hours after birth. He was everything to her.
"What about you?" He raised an eyebrow, "Did you miss me?"
She pressed her hand to his bare chest, "I'd be lying if I didn't say I hadn't considered it."
More then he knew.
"Oh," He kissed his way down her neck, slow and deliberate, pools of warmth. She fluttered.
"We ran into Chuck Bass," She sighed, looking down at him.
He froze, his hands resting on her thighs, perplexed. She hoped she hadn't laid too much into the way the words had rolled off her tongue.
"And?" He prompted, curious probably as to why she had felt the need to tell him just then.
The whole thing was tangled, there were thousands more reasons then she could unwind or measure in lengths but she needed to start somewhere, fill him in with the pieces.
She propped herself on her elbows and he shifted onto his ankles at the edge of the bed, his eyes on her own.
"Yeah, he was there scouting buildings for a new development I guess," She explained. "I saw him on the boardwalk alone and before I knew it, we were catching up on old times."
He remained silent and still.
"Actually we happen to keep in touch with quite a few of the same people," She added lamely.
"Well that's cool, you guys knew each other in high school, right? I forget."
"Briefly," She agreed, they had just been two young kids lost in each other.
He grinned, lopsided and beautiful. And the pause was finished. She placed her hand on his as he kneaded the skin on her hips.
She knew him. His smell. Skin like paper, veins purple rope that she traced up to his shoulder. He wasn't smoke and mirrors, a signal in the night. She could hold him, feel his presence as much as her own beating heart.
He moved to her ear, lips settled there. "I wish I had known you as a teenager," He whispered, soft like a paper crane.
Mark. The captain of the debate team, a proud athlete, the boy with a solid upbringing in rural Boston.
And all she had to show for her high school years were the schemes she seemed to occasionally pull off and the friendships she had maintained simply for status. She would have eaten him for breakfast had they met back then.
"Why would you want to?" She asked, he had never expressed an interest before.
"I've never known all of you," He replied, "It sometimes feels like I don't have much to go on."
The way he said it seemed so common, a secret she should have already known.
She grabbed his chin, searched his eyes, kissed him roughly, an abandon in the way she prodded his tongue with her own. He tasted of milk chocolate and sugary coffee.
"You have every last bit of me Mark," She said, as they broke apart, resting against his forehead, "We make up each other, don't we?"
"I guess we do," He agreed. His breathing heavy with lust.
"Good," She licked her lips. "Now, where were we exactly?"
It was with a great deal of chagrin that Blair woke up a few hours later, dew drops of grey light spitting across the floor, encircled in her husbands arms, that she thought of Chuck. And she tossed and turned within her own thoughts, the girl she had been, while Mark slept through the night.
It was true. He had everything about her in his heart, she loved him without measure, but Chuck seemed to answer to a different call, the woman she had been, the person she could barely remember.
And it was then that she knew she was reaching for something else.
December 29th, 2011.
The penthouse was empty, his calls remained unanswered, the flowers in his hand were loosing petals all over the hardwood floors just like his patience.
Eventually, feigning calm that seemed so far from where he was, Chuck sat down and pulled out his cell phone.
35 missed calls in the last hour and a half, all Nate and Serena. He leaned into the cushions, amused slightly as he scrolled through the text messages. The phone vibrated, an incoming call, he flipped it open.
"Hello?" He grumbled, frowning.
"Chuck?" Nate sounded frantic, "Hey man listen, have you been home yet?"
"I just got here," He edged, "Why?" There was only a small pause before he added, "Is Serena with Blair?"
"No ... she isn't," The words were solid.
Chuck stood up, shook out his jacket, peeled it off his shoulders with one arm.
He was tired, he wanted to be with his girlfriend and it had been one hell of a long flight, he certainly didn't want to waste his time on dances in the dark when he could be calling her, telling her that he'd come home early.
Not early enough to still have Christmas, but it was something, the best he could have done.
"I'm exhausted Nathaniel, call me later and we'll go for drinks or something."
"But Chuck ... wai-" Before another letter could pass into his ear, Chuck had hung up and turned his cell phone off.
Silence. He toddled towards the shower, played out the scene between him and Blair over and over again, trying to perfect it.
It might have been the way everything seemed polished, as though the floor hadn't been scuffed in a few days, like the walls were whispering from loneliness. He cautiously looked about, noticed that the hall was void of pictures, the ones they had taken together on their last trip to Europe.
It was then that he jumped a little, tried to dig out memories of that time. The sun askewed most of it, the laughter was piercing. But now he could hear his own heart beat, the foot steps on the ground, not matched by another and he knew.
He was alone.
The foriegn feeling of anxiety bubble in his veins with each step he took towards the bedroom. He took a deep breath, pushed the door open with his palm, stepped inside. The king sized bed was perfectly made but the shadows that stretched across the square room left an emptiness, something was missing.
He slowly walked towards the mattress, kicking his shoes off as he went, laid down across it, sighed deeply.
Something to let go. He always knew she would leave him. He always knew there was a single thread, loosing count the further apart they moved, the more he loved her, the less he knew how to deal with it, how to see their relationships through to a solid base, the end of an era.
And sometime later, he fell into a dreamless sleep, awaking only to himself, the dark night covering New York like a wool blanket. He stood up, brushed the lint off his clothes, turned his cell phone on.
Chuck didn't need anyone to tell him that she wasn't going to come home, all her things were gone. The candle keeping the penthouse alight had left little trace of its existence. The worst part of it was that he ached for her, for the soft touch he couldn't get back, an apology wouldn't be enough now.
The bouquet of roses he had brought home was crumpled on the floor, ground into the carpet by the heel of his shoe. He stood in the kitchen, rubbing his forehead, leaning against the counter. She was gone.
He didn't know what to do with himself.
The morning he had left her, the last moments she'd spent wrapped up in his arms before he slipped from the room, everything else but the memory seemed to melt away. It was the last time they had made love, had been together and not as apart as it often felt.
He found the vodka she kept in the back of the fridge, gulped it down, let the warmth of it spread through his veins. The sun was beginning to come up, strips of pink and yellow flickering across the walls and for the first time in his life, Chuck Bass wept.
There would be no point in trying to find her. If Blair knew nothing else she always knew where best to hide.
And she had taken him with her, in the folds of her heart, the pieces of himself he had never owned. He was merely living with the memory of her smile, of her laughter.
The ghost of their love as if it could have been more.
The same night:
If nothing else soothed her, it was the sound of her city, its restlessness. She could find solice there.
She shut her eyes, counted to one hundred, tried to hear the emptiness of the apartment, the people living in the apartment above Tess and Mark that were probably sleeping by now. A television blared in the distance.
Minutes passed, the deadbolt slid back, clicking into place and the front door opened. Low grumbles filled the hallway, footsteps nearing, eyes still closed as the door slammed shut, locked.
She felt lost in translation, a foreign language misinterpreted.
"Is Tess staying at Brent's tonight?" Mark's voice startled her; she opened her eyes, nodded.
He slid down beside her, pressed his back up against the couch. She could smell the heavy scent of liquor that wafted towards the open windows, the bitter cold air.
His breathing was uneven and she watched him toil, his hands pressed to his cheek.
They said nothing for some time.
"How was your poetry reading?" She finally asked, sitting up, letting her hair fall in waves across her neck.
Mark looked at her slowly, eyes glossed, expressionless. He pushed his hands into the corners of his pockets, stretched his feet in front of him.
"It was alright," He smiled, "The same ol' pretentious bullshit."
"Ah," She said, "I could see that."
He was a meek drunk, sloppy, not at all possessed of himself but well mannered enough, nothing to hide.
Unlike Chuck…the man with a tumbler in his hand. She would always know the sound of ice clinking against glass because of him. He understood the art of drinking, how to be senseless - he was always that way.
But it wasn't an art, only an excuse, just like everything else.
She felt the spark, it burned her skin, made her guilty but she just wanted to be held, to be intrigued and Mark did just that.
He was someone her hands didn't know, someone with a smile that reached his eyes and lingered there, like golden opportunities.
Instead, she turned away. After all, she was just stirred up and shaken down by the chaos of Chuck Bass. It would take some time to unlearn all that she had picked up in his love.
"Do you feel any better?" He turned, looked at her and she felt it.
"A little, not much."
"You know," He sighed, "You should probably go to the doctor."
It had been almost two weeks.
"I think I will," She countered, "If it doesn't settle down soon."
They drifted into silence and she lay back down, crossed her hands over her stomach. Eventually, he followed suit, their bodies in opposite directions, looking up at the same squares of ceiling.
"So, what exactly are you doing?"
"Listening," She replied, "Brooklyn sounds so much more ... alive ... then where I come from."
"It's because nobody living on the Upper East Side actually lives."
She wanted to disagree, opened her mouth and ready to argue, but closed it when the words settled enough for her to see the truth in them.
Most people she knew enjoyed the days from the bottom of a champagne glass.
"Is that what you think of me?" Her gaze slid over.
"I don't think you're anything Blair," He replied.
The blank slate.
She was moving towards him before she could even notice, the little signs of surrender. She needed some other meaning, everything else was pressing so hard against her that she could barely breathe. There was a long moment of nothing.
He swallowed nervously.
And she kissed him, soft like crushed rose petals. He could anchor her to the ground.
Thoughts of Chuck began to slip too easily from her hands as if they had been looking for reasons to leave her mind. She didn't make any attempt to grab at them.
They made love on the floor, between each other with the thickest of touch. He was unfamiliar bunches of territory; she couldn't inhale enough of his smell, coveting the secret to being as if it might reveal itself.
He was a different lover, a different kind of man.
When they were finished, he didn't leave her side, his eyes weren't clouded with darkness, he remained still. It was the sweetest thing to happen in a long time even if she didn't know what she was doing and he was slightly drunk.
And in the apartment above them, the television blared like keys to a forgotten musical.