Hello, my old friends. I'm sure everyone stopped really holding their breath on this one, but I take promises seriously and I did say many times I might have huge pauses, but I'd never entirely abandon this fic.

Anywho, my life has changed so much since I last posted, Covid happened ffs, I got a grown-up job and both reading and writing took a back seat. I recently got back into writing after over 5 years of almost no writing, and I knew what I had to complete before starting any new undertakings.

I have tried continuing this fic many times, but the end was never visible until a couple of nights back.

I will give you Blair's separate freak out in the next chapter, already working on it.

8. What did I do?

Chuck Bass is having an existential crisis. Is he too young, at eighteen, to be having an existential crisis? Probably, but who wouldn't after the night he's just had? His mind had been reeling for the past two hours since he woke up, and the previous night had begun playing on a non-stop loop in his mind. Him lighting up outside, Blair arriving looking like sin, his thoughts falling out of his mouth with no control, the contrast of Blair's milky white skin and the dangerous black dress moving on the stage, champagne, giggles, and then the limo. The limo. He was going to have to sell the damn thing if he ever wanted to forget what transpired in its back seat.

And he was going to have to forget. Wasn't he? His mind takes him back to the end of the night. They'd just had synchronized, mind-blowing orgasms, as evidenced by the scratches Chuck could feel stretching the skin of his back with each breath. Blair was running her hand over them, breathing heavily against him, but she had gone eerily quiet as soon as the last sparks of pleasure left her body. Dread begins gripping Chuck's lungs at an alarming rate as he gingerly finds his balance enough to lift himself on his elbows and look at Blair's face. He finds her head turned to the side, and his thoughts begin to spiral. What if he'd just fucked everything up and lost his best friend forever?

He lifts a hand to the side of her face, touching her gingerly.

"Blair?" he rasps out in a silent plea.

Her eyes fly to his face, and there is a brightness in them that leaves him breathless. She brackets her arms around his torso, and her lips twitch in a small smile.

"I knew I could count on you."

A chuckle leaves him in a rush at her words. Of course, she remembered the last time she experienced a first with him.

"Your thirteenth birthday party was on my mind right before you arrived tonight." He twists them slightly, turning them until she's on top. He uses the switch to let himself slide out slowly and dispose of the condom. She lets out a breathy moan that scrambles his already hormone-flooded brain, and he groans, hugging her to him. Blair brushes her cheek against his, sending a tingle down his spine.

"How is it that you keep claiming all these important firsts of mine, Bass?"

The second goal of switching places was for her to have the freedom to create distance if she wanted to. Blair, on her part, shows no such inclinations. Instead, she relaxes between his legs, crossing her arms atop his chest and using them as a pillow as she looks at him questioningly.

"I'm not sure, Waldorf," he exhales softly. "Maybe we just gravitate towards each other since the day we met."

If you'd asked Chuck Bass that morning if he knew every single expression his best friend could make and what they all meant, he'd have probably scoffed at the question. There is a look on Blair's face right now, though, that he has either never seen or doesn't have enough brainpower to decipher right now. He grabs his discarded suit jacket and pillows it under his head to look at her properly.

Blair shakes her head slightly and cocks her head in a speculative way. "I can hear the gears turning from here. Relax."

Chuck laughs humorlessly at that and starts, "Blair, are you...?"

He is unceremoniously interrupted by Blair dragging herself up his body just enough so they're face-to-face once more. The action deprives him of all capability for rational thought.

"I swear to Hepburn if you ask me if I'm okay after that, Bass," she says, narrowing her eyes at him and dragging herself up his body slightly. "I just experienced the kind of first sex that isn't supposed to exist outside of books. I'm more than okay."

Chuck's eyes widen in surprise for a fraction of a second before he schools his expression back into that of growing amusement. She certainly isn't traumatized or regretful; what's more, she seems to have had just as earth-shattering an experience as he did. Something is still nibbling at his subconscious in the back of his mind, but Blair's naked, warm form on top of him is too distracting to dwell on it much.

The bubble of their perfect moment in time shatters with a shrill ring of Blair's phone, and they spring into action like teenagers hearing the front door open. They find Blair's clutch jammed in between the seats, and she digs it out to answer.

"Mom! Hey! Yeah, all is well; Chuck is just taking me home." She looks pointedly at Chuck, who understands her wordless demand, knocking on the partition to signal to poor Greg to start towards the Waldorf residence. He needs to give the man a bonus.

"Yeah, we got carried away; I can't believe it's already." She looks at her phone briefly, her eyes widening. "Wow, half past five."

Blair is shaking her dress out as she answers Elanor's questions, all the while looking ridiculously sexy in just the garter belt, stockings, and heels. He reluctantly pulls his eyes away from her to avoid looking like a love-struck schoolboy and turns his attention to locating his clothes.

By the time Blair has finished confirming her well-being and reassuring her concerned mother, they've turned the corner and reached Blair's high-rise. She turns away from him, lifting her hair up, and he zips her dress back up and places his hands on her shoulders. Placing one hand on top of his, she turns her head to look at him over her shoulder, and her eyes are wide and shiny. Before he can decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing, she presses her lips to his in a short but heated kiss. The sun suddenly hits his face, and she's out of the car before he can open his eyes.

He had arrived home in a daze, thought to shower, but decided to go straight to bed and crashed the moment his cheek hit the pillow, the night's adventures and excitement catching up with him. His last thought was that he was forgetting something.

The very second Chuck had woken up, around six hours of sleep later, he knew exactly what he had forgotten—what the nibbling thought in the back of his head had been. If it wasn't so tragic, it would be funny, really. She has a soulmate. And more importantly, she's spent her whole life waiting for him, to the point where she dumped Nate-freaking-Archibald, the ideal boy prince, the day she found out he wasn't the one. What did this mean for him? Did she decide she wanted to have some experience when she finally met her forever love? Was this just a favor between friends, like the kiss had been?

Chuck gets up to get his smoking kit and goes to plop down, facing the glass wall that overlooks Manhattan's skyline. He tries to focus on breaking apart buds, looking at the city, and keeping his mind empty, but he can't keep the swarm of thoughts at bay. It feels as though years of thoughts and feelings are fighting for a spot in his mind.

When he was a kid, his world was so big and scary, full of serious adults surrounding Bass and the kind but professional staff in charge of raising him. And then he met Blair, and she was his first friend—there to make the mean boys who mocked him for not having a mom cry; there to read him the riot act when she caught him with his first joint at fifteen; there to remind him someone would be lucky to have him.

And then he was back at soulmates. This was why he had never allowed himself to consider Blair anything more than a friend. That's a lie. He'd considered. He'd considered with every guilty glance over the years, with every stab of jealousy at darling Nate, with every locked-down half thought he never let himself think. She was the one person he could never afford to lose—the one safe harbor in the mess that was his life. And he had known, felt it instinctively, that if he ever let himself want her, he'd probably never be able to stop. This is so much worse; he touched her, felt her fall apart, and the scent of her clings to him in a way he fears is permanent.

He had lied when he told her she was much closer to his idea of a perfect woman than the front she presented to the world. She IS the perfect woman; she always has been; in a way he never acknowledged consciously, in the way he's measured every woman against her without knowing he was doing it. She is certainly feminine and sexy, beautiful in a wide-eyed old Hollywood way, but other women are as well. It's her deliciously wicked mind that makes her perfect, her cunning ideas, her fierce loyalty to those she loves, her uncompromising beliefs, her flair for the dramatic, the way she knows what he's thinking with one look, the way she takes her pleasure boldly, and the way she kissed him this morning.

Chuck comes out of his daze with his fingers pressed to his lips and clarity in his mind for what feels like the first time in his life. He is irrevocably painfully in love with Blair and has been for so long that he can't even pinpoint when it began. He's in love with her, and now that he knows what it feels like to be wanted by her, he will die alone after having lived a life of debauchery to hide his love for her. She, in the meantime, will find her soulmate, get married, have kids that Chuck will be the fun uncle to, and live the happily ever after she deserves.

Chuck watches the last embers of his third joint go out and realizes he's sitting in darkness, metaphorically and literally. He laughs a dark, hollow laugh.

There you have it folks, as always I'd love to hear what you thought, but I'm mostly just happy for those of you who supported me in my first proper writing attempt all those years ago, to read my writing once more.

xoxo,

Sarrrah