Part 3

This was not how his marriage would end.

This was not how his happiness would shatter.

This was not how he would lose his wife.

He glared at the quiet way she moved. He used to adore watching her in the menial little tasks she could do to distract herself. When she had agreed to have a baby with him, she also agreed to put aside looking for a job. Blair Waldorf Bass was left with everything that a high society woman would do to occupy her time—charity work and waiting. Now here she was, exhausted and depressed, and she placed clothes into her bag.

But they were happy. They were so happy.

He worked, and she was beautiful in those charity events. Not once in his life did he ever think he would be twenty six, hard at work, with Blair waiting for him at home. He doubted if she ever predicted the turn in her life that brought her here.

He loved this life. This was not going to break them apart.

Even if the very prospect was like a vise squeezing his heart.

She placed another dress inside her suitcase. It infuriated him. Chuck stalked over to her and slammed the suitcase closed. She barely had time to jerk her hand away so the cover would not crush her fingers. Blair turned to him, her eyes brilliant and pained, and he hated that she was hurting. If he could fix the hurt, he would.

"I'll be in the hotel, Chuck," she said.

"You're not leaving," he told her, his voice firm, brokering no disagreement.

But she could always disagree with him, and he could always forfeit. Not this time.

Blair looked up at him and he could see the pain her decision was giving her. "I think it's time you review this deal, Chuck. You're on the losing end." She sat heavily on the edge of the bed, as if the very words exhausted her. "You're a businessman. You already know when you need to dump unprofitable stocks."

He was businessman. But she could never question that he was a husband first. Over the years he'd proven it. "You're asking me to forfeit on this too," he said.

Blair shook her head. "I'll forfeit," she offered. "While you're young enough that getting married again isn't such a big deal."

Not a big deal.

Chuck pushed the luggage off the bed, sending the bag and the clothes to the floor on a heap. She made no protest when he took its place beside her on the bed. He wrapped his arms around her. "Are you less in love with than you were when you married me?"

"God, no!" she sobbed.

"I'm more in love with you than I was when I married you. I'm more in love with you that I was yesterday, more in love than when I asked you that question two seconds ago," he said softly.

She burrowed deeper in his arms, into the nooks and crevices she always settled into in their embrace, and it was preposterous to him that she could think of leaving when they fit together so well.

"Then you're not leaving. The only reason I'll accept is if you don't love me anymore."

She sucked in her breath. "That's insane. You know I'm never going to stop."

And he did. He was there. Over and over when he tried to make her stop, when he tried to turn her away. She held on so tight the way he was doing now.

"Then we stay together."

"Even if we never have a baby?"

His heart clenched and screamed at him. "Even if we never have a baby." Somehow he would learn to live with only himself and Blair. That was more than what other people had in a lifetime.

"Liar," she whispered.

"I want to try. Help me," he said, burying his nose in her hair.

He felt when her body lost its tension. Chuck lay down on the bed with her holding onto him, gripping his shirt and her leg thrown over his. She was fooling herself if she thought she could ever leave this.

By the end of the week, Chuck had entrusted the company to his uncle—the first time he had fully surrendered the reins to his father's empire since he took over the company eight years ago. Even during his honeymoon, or all the trips they had taken afterwards, he had kept close tabs on his father's inheritance. But this trip, for him, was different. Chuck Bass stunned Manhattan with a formal leave of absence from Bass Industries.

If she was right, and they were fast approaching an end, they would not go gentle into the death of their marriage. Against the dying of the light, they would rage and fight tooth and nail to survive. This was how Chuck and Blair would face the end like the faced the beginning, stubbornly, passionately, with a tinge of desperate need that sent them clutching at each other, catching their breaths.

When their private plane touched down in France, Chuck sat forward in his seat and extended his hand to his wife. Her eyes flickered to his palm and gave him a small smile, then placed her hand in his. "Are you ready?" he said, his voice smooth, slick and just a little challenging.

She returned with a playful grin and answered, "Always."

If this would not work, he thought, then he would make sure the memories they made were worth coming back to for the decades he would spend alone.

He surprised her with the Audi that waited at the hangar. Their luggage was loaded at the back, and he held up his hand when more were carried. "We're leaving the rest here." And he turned to his wife. "We'll get anything else we need along the way."

When he spied the sparkle of intrigue, he knew he had won this battle at least. "Where's the limo, Bass?"

He smirked, then flashed a key hanging from his finger. "I thought we'd drive our way across the continent this time."

She laughed, and the sound thrilled him. "Do you even know how to drive?"

He shook his head with his mirth. "Just because we can afford to pay someone to chauffeur us all over Manhattan doesn't mean I can't take the wheel myself."

"Well, Bass," she said as she sat in the passenger seat, "it looks like there are still some things I need to learn about you."

Seven years together and there was still a lifetime of little discoveries to make.

"You do know that it would be easier to backpack than to take a car," she said idly as she rested her head back in the seat.

He eyed her with a faint trace of derision that he was sure delighted her. "I can only slum around so much." It was a trip that was about the two of them. He had never driven more in his life.

They started in Paris and never even told her father than they were in France. He woke her at five in the morning and they strolled to a bakeshop to buy breakfast. And they ate it on the way back to their small motel.

"Now I know why you chose Best City Hotel," she told him thoughtfully.

Chuck eyed his wife, then asked, "Why?"

She shrugged. "It makes a difference when we're out of Manhattan and we're not us."

She was right. In Sukhumvit, drunk out of his mind, he had not been Chuck Bass the way he would have if he had been in he were in the business district hiding out in a Bass hotel. But he disagreed with one thing. "We're more ourselves now than we were in New York."

In New York, she was Blair Waldorf Bass, who lived a perfect enviable life—with a handsome, young husband who was rich and obsessively loyal the way no one ever suspected he could be. In New York, she was Blair Waldorf Bass, who threw fundraisers for children's charities because her life was already so complete that she could afford to think of others.

No one ever saw Blair but him.

Their motel was small and sparse, but they could glimpse the Eiffel Tower in the daylight while they drank wine and made love in the morning. When she melted above him, and her thighs gripped his hips in full abandon, Chuck swore he could live forever in bread and wine in this little motel and he would not complain once.

In the Louvre he pulled her along with him and lost their tour group. She had looked up at him with slight exasperation.

"I wanted to see the Monets," she pointed out.

He had pushed her back against the white wall beside a statue he could not stare at for too long, and he just knew that security would spy them from their surveillance cameras. Someone would come, and soon. But her breaths were fast and shallow, and he could see the excitement winning the battle in her eyes. So he said, "I love you."

And she said it back, pressed her body up and against him, and accepted his tongue when he kissed her.

They stumbled back to their tour group, laughing at the small phrases they caught from the security guard who had shuffled them back towards where the other people were.

In Amsterdam, she wanted to go biking around the city. Chuck arched his eyebrow at her and said, "You will never see me bike."

And his wife, the bitch that she was, had shrugged and said dismissively, "That's fine. I doubt you would be fast enough. Only Lord Marcus has ever beaten me biking."

Chuck found himself on top of a bicycle the very same hour, pedaling through the city like a teenager, or an old man. How far he was now from being the CEO of Bass Industries. Then again, that was the very point, he thought. They passed by an unassuming house and found out it was Ann Frank's, and she insisted they stop.

By the end of the afternoon, he had beaten her to their inn and he had won a bet. And so that night he took his wife strolling through the red light district.

Just before they slept, she stepped under the shower with him and held onto his shoulders as he pressed her back on the tiled wall. Blair's legs wrapped around his hips. A cry of satisfaction flew out of her mouth when he slid inside her. She rose and fell above him when they made love, and the slapping sounds that their skin were drowned by the running water.

"I don't want to take anything away from you," she whispered as she traced circles on his wet skin.

Chuck held her up, still inside her body, then bit at her neck. "Then you won't leave me."

He had all the answers, even if it was just a repeat of everything he had said before. She was exhausted, and so was he. But you never gave up on love. They soaked the sheets on bed when they stumbled on it with their dripping hair and wet skin. He looked down at her and her teary smile, and felt himself grow harder.

She felt it too, he could tell. Her lips parted, and she swallowed as she fixed herself, spreading her legs wider and urging his hips forward with her hands. And time, it was she who said it for them, "I love you."

The Audi was useless when they departed for Venice. And his wife did not hesitate to tell him, "I told you so." And in his frustration, and partly because Blair looked delicious in her off shoulder yellow peasant dress—that should really not be called a peasant dress because it cost seven hundred dollars—Chuck stole a gondola.

She laughed at the sheer exhilaration as he rowed and flexed muscles he did not know he had, only to discover that the boat they stole had a motor installed. They were in a small gondola, along the canals and then into a way that was devoid of any other gondola. And then her laughter calmed, and she narrowed her eyes. "Chuck Bass, you did not steal a gondola!"

He smirked, and said, "No I didn't. I paid the guy to rent it to us."

They stopped near a side street, and Chuck jumped onto the street first and extended his hand to pull up his wife. He strolled with her, and she pointed out the crumbling buildings that made him sentimental even if he had never been to Venice before.

"They're romantic even if they're deteriorating," she commented of the ancient white gates that were half-gone, decayed by the water.

And the comment struck such a thread of fear in his heart that he pulled her with him to a dark alley. She looked up at him, and he could see it in her eyes. He released the breath he had been holding, then cupped her face with his hands. He leaned down and kissed her lips.

There were no tourists in sight, and they were young and in love. She took his hand and pulled him deeper into the alley. Her hands fumbled at his belt, and she easily freed him to her sight. Chuck glanced towards the street to ensure they were alone. And he hissed when he felt her mouth wrap around him. He gripped the wall behind him and looked down, found it illicit the way he could glimpse her full lips as she took him into her mouth.

His eyes rolled back in his head when he felt her hot tongue wrap around him. Her inner cheeks massaged him, and then he felt her hands squeeze on his balls. He exploded in her mouth with a grunt. Chuck took his time to recover, and then he kissed her mouth, tasted himself on her lips.

"Thank you," he rasped.

And then he was kneeling on the ground, with her pretty yellow dress around his head and legs over his shoulders and he licked and thrust his tongue into her. He heard her guttural cry when he flicked his tongue over her sensitive nub.

She held onto him so tightly as they strolled by the Doge's Palace, and Chuck held her hand so tightly he could not believe that once upon a time, he thought they would ever lose who they were if they ever walked hand in hand. He kissed her temple and felt the faint perspiration that gathered there.

He paid a boatman to take their rental back, and hailed another gondola to take them to the house from where they rented a room. The ambience was family, and it was his favorite out of all the places they had slept. After a heavy meal, he stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist.

"Imagine a lifetime of this," he said, his voice thick, his embrace firm. "We'll make love in every city in the world."

The breeze blew and he smelled the Venetian canals in the air. The city was beautiful, but he closed his eyes so the only sensation he would be aware of was his wife's presence in his arms.

"There are still so many left we haven't seen."

And she agreed, because she loved him, and he was trying. He buried himself inside her that night, over and over, on the balcony floor. The stars and the moon were high above them, and he delved so deep inside her that for long moments he could not even tell where he ended and she began. She held his gaze, and swallowed, meeting his thrusts with her body so he would know that she was right there along with him for each and every pump of his hips. When he spent himself, and she broke into her climax, she kept her eyes open and she accepted the burning fluid that poured from him until it dripped from her to the floor.

Someday, they would run out of cities. Someday, they would have visited all the towns that mattered, and hopped on all the islands they could.

That day was not today.

tbc