035. make up words to songs you used to know [2/2]
Title | make up words to songs you used to know
Chapter | 2/2
Rating | pg-13
Characters | Serena. Nate/Serena, Tripp/Serena
Summary | I"I hope she'll be a fool. That's the best thing a girl can be in this world - a beautiful little fool." -- The Great Gatsby
Christmas Eve, back from the small church the van der Bilt family has been attending on Christmas and Easter for decades, she sits on the couch. She is holding a frothy glass of eggnog, made by one of Nate’s uncles with the assistance of the cook and packed with no much liquor that her head already feels fuzzy.
Tripp leans so close that she can feel his breath against her cheek, and it makes her shiver like she used to - it’s just the eggnog, she tells herself.
“Dinner with the van der Bilts,” he whispers mysteriously, and she can hear the smile in his voice.
And she giggles, because he remembered, and it gives her that same thrill she first had when they were beginning. When she first got involved with him, her life now is nothing what she ever would have imagined or wanted it to be; maybe that’s okay, though, if beneath it all they still remember, if he remembers.
“I was wrong about the movie,” he murmurs to her. “You looked beautiful, and you were…you were incredible. I’m proud of you.”
She tilts her head toward his, offers a smile back. They’re in a room full of people, his family, but she feels the same sense of quiet, comfortable confidence between them that she’s been craving for months.
“I’m proud of you too,” she whispers back. And then, spurred by the look in his eyes and the alcohol in her system, she grabs hold of his tie and tugs him just a bit closer to her, close enough for a kiss.
It feels like he’s betrayed that quiet moment of confidentiality between them on Christmas Eve when he gets down on one knee in front of her on Christmas afternoon.
He speaks sweetly (she catches the sentiment, but not the words), and looks solely at her (earnestly, but confidently), and she can only gape back at him for a moment, trying to convey her panic through her eyes.
But then she remembers who she is, where she is, this future that she never meant to commit herself (at the time she’d chosen it, she’d been too afraid to consider her future at all) and she presses her lips closed, looks at a spot on the wall just behind his head.
And she cries, and nods yes because she can’t say it out loud. Tripp smiles, his family claps and coos, and Serena finds herself wearing the Cornelius van der Bilt diamond ring that her best friend used to dream about.
He kisses her, cups her chin in her hand and presses his lips chastely to hers.
(And the second they break apart Serena’s eyes do lot fly automatically to where Nate is standing near the back of the room, and she does not feel the way the shattered look in his eyes is like a hammer to her own heart.)
“You’re my fiancée,” he says.
She bites her tongue to keep from saying that she knows, that she could never forgot, not with the weight of this ostentatious ring on her finger reminding her every single second.
“I don’t see how that pertains to the issue,” she finally says, her voice cool, a far cry from the way she used to speak, warm and airy, like she might burst into laughter at any second.
He seems alarmed by her tone, but his eyes narrow, and it, like so many other things, is forgotten. “You’re going to be my wife, Serena. You cannot be kissing other men.”
“It’s a movie!” she explodes.
Tripp steps closer to her, until they are face to face with only a breath between them. “Don’t play naïve, Serena. I know you’ve always done what you wanted, and admittedly, there was a time I really admired that about you. But I’m in the public eye; my last name means something. I know you never acknowledged what yours did, but when you become my wife you’re going to have to understand the significance of mine.”
She grits her teeth. “It’s acting.”
His eyebrows fly up, almost condescendingly. “Would you like to have that debate with the Buckleys?”
Catching his eye, she whispers: “You said you were proud of me. For the movie.”
“I was.” At her sharp intake of breath, he waves a hand in the air, rolls his eyes and lazily corrects himself: “I am. But you need to realize that morality, not our feelings about each other, is what’s at issue here.”
She takes a step back and crosses his arms. “What are you saying? That I’m a whore?” she spits back.
“No,” he says evenly, in his press-conference voice, “I’m saying you need to find a job that makes you look less like one.”
So Serena steps behind the camera, calls up the photographers she worked with as a model, digs out that camera she bought downtown that one day. She spends a lot of her time in Central Park, taking photographers of nature and people and city life; she gets taken under the wing of her favourite photographer, the one who shot her perfume add.
He adores her, and teaches her well, and she admires him - but one day when they’re working late, deliberating over pictures for a modeling campaign that she declined a place in, he smiles at her and says, “You know, I envy you, Serena.”
She stares at him with big blue eyes, tries to figure out what, in her life, is enviable at all.
“Don’t look at me like that! Successful, selective movie career, amazing modeling gigs; wealthy, good-lookin’ fiancé who doesn’t mind you staying here late; an Upper East Side upbringing…all of that, and you’re how old?”
Serena pretends to be comparing two photographs. She does not say this is everything I never really wanted.
She says, “Twenty.”
One day in Central Park she says Nate, playing a lazy game of soccer with some friends, wearing a Columbia hoodie and mittens with his jeans.
She takes a picture not with her camera but with her mind, his body animated with energy and his blue eyes bright, the image preserved in her memory.
A single appointment with the florist is all it takes to reveal to Serena that she has no sweet clue how to plan a society wedding.
She calls Blair.
And they fall back into their friendship like they do every single time, laughing over ridiculous invitation designs and the snobs Serena’s obliged to have on her guest list, but it’s different. It’s different, because Blair is carefully constructing her life and her future and is thus far satisfied with the results; Serena is floundering, meandering.
She wonders if she even knows how to grow up.
While Tripp stares tiredly at policy briefs at their kitchen table, Serena carefully addresses wedding invitations with a calligraphy pen. Everyone who’s anyone is society is going to receive a thick, creamy envelope with an RSVP card inside. She puts special effort into Chuck and Blair’s, and Eric’s, and a couple for her model friends. She addresses one to her mother and her step-father.
“Nate?”
Tripp looks up at her, vaguely irritated. “What about him?”
She blushes; she hadn’t meant to say anything aloud, but the sight of his name on the guest list had shocked her.
“He’s my cousin. He’s your friend.”
“Yeah,” she whispers, her lips quirking up into a silly-me kind of smile, but her lips won’t stay there. Her chest is tight and her cheeks feel hot; something about his name, neatly typed by Tripp’s secretary onto eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper, makes everything hurt, because this is what he’s been reduced to in her life: little letters on a piece of paper.
Tripp is no longer paying attention to his policy briefs. “He is your friend, isn’t he?”
“We grew up together,” she tells him faintly, feels her face hardening. “You know that.”
“Alright. So, you’d want him at our wedding. I want him at our wedding. That’s why he’s on the guest list.”
She drops her pen, presses a hand to her eyes. She’s not going to cry, not under the pressure of his gaze, which is only gaining intensity.
“Is there something you want to tell me, Serena?”
Her hand falls away from her face, back to the table, curled into a fist with her fingernails biting into her skin. She looks at her fiancé with clear, dry eyes, and lifts one of her eyebrows. “No.”
Tripp reaches for her hand, uncurls it in his grasp. “We’ll have to move,” he tells her in a tone meant to put this to rest, meant to coax a smile from her. “We’ll get a house, lots more bedrooms, hire staff…you could even have a darkroom.”
She swallows.
“Sounds perfect.”
Blair cries the first time she sees Serena in a wedding dress, even though the first one she tries on is this disastrous, poufy thing; simply because she’s Serena’s best friend and she loves her, so Serena loves her for it even if she thinks she looks like a giant marshmallow.
It’s the third one she puts on that causes her own emotional breakdown; pretty, light fabric that hugs her body in all the right places and trails off into a romantic-looking train.
“Is this the dress?” her bridal consultant asks happily, noting the tears in Serena’s eyes once she’s carried her train on the way out of her dressing room to the main part of the small, exclusive store, where Blair is sitting patiently on a couch.
Blair gets to her feet and touches the fabric of the skirt, glancing up at Serena. “I knew Vera Wang was the right choice. S, you look so - ”
But Serena is shaking her head, gasping for breath, closing her eyes against a rush of dizziness. Her heart is pounding so hard it hurts.
It’s a blur, as Blair reaches for her, pulls her toward the couch with it’s soft, squishy cushions, and unclips some of the pins holding Serena’s dress together at the back. She must say something to the consultant, because all of a sudden they’re alone and Blair is titling Serena’s face up with a hand to her chin and ordering, “Breathe. Not just into your lungs, deep down, to your stomach.”
She does as instructed, and the first couple times her breath catches in her throat, but then she’s okay and her heartbeat isn’t echoing in her ears anymore.
Serena presses her hands to her hot cheeks as Blair looks her over, clearly surprised. “I’ve never seen you have a panic attack before.”
“Is that what that was?” She tries to laugh, but it’s quiet and breathless and free of any mirth.
“What is it, Serena?” Blair’s looking at her intently, reaching out toward her. “You just had a panic attack. You’re still crying.” She softens her voice, repeats: “What is it?”
Serena looks at her - this is her best friend, keeper of all her secrets, solver of (most of) her problems - but she doesn’t know how to say it; doesn’t know how to pull herself out of the tangled-up mess she’s created for herself, and doesn’t know what would come after.
But she’s still crying and this dress, it makes her think of beaches and bare feet and the boy who’d sneak into her dressing room before the wedding because screw tradition, I can’t wait to kiss you…
“I can’t get married,” she gasps, her words mangled by the tears in her throat.
The way Blair is looking at her, holding out a box of tissues, is gentle but almost eager, her eyes bright and calculating, as if she’s just been waiting for Serena to say that exact sentence. “Oh, honey -”
Serena shakes her head, snatches a tissue out of the box and amends, “In this dress, I mean. I can’t get married…in this dress.”
Her best friend’s face changes, falls; but she lets Serena pretend.
“Okay. Let’s find you another dress, then.”
Lily responds to her wedding invitation with a phone call rather than simply returning the RSVP card.
“Married, hm?”
Serena nods, forgetting that they’re on the phone and her mother cannot see her.
Whatever maternal instincts Lily has are particularly honed at this moment, it seems - maybe they stockpiled, after she’d had so little contact with her daughter for so long - because she seems aware of Serena’s physical action on the other side of the line.
“Well, best wishes, Serena.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Lily’s voice sounds a bit tighter when she adds, “You’re going to be a very beautiful bride.”
“Thank you,” Serena repeats, and feels a pulse of childish need for her mother for a brief, painful moment.
“I miss you.”
Her mother is crying on the other end of the line, Serena just knows it; she can envision the embroidered handkerchief Lily is holding at this very moment. She swallows down her guilt and her own tears and tells herself this is okay, because Lily abandoned her time and again, this is nothing more than karma.
Nevertheless, she blurts out, “I miss you, too,” and her cheeks feel wet.
Lily clears her throat. “I saw your photographs. They’re beautiful.”
Serena smiles. “Airbrushing,” she murmurs, and is surprised to hear her mother laugh.
“No, darling. The photographs you took.”
Something swells in her heart and she feels like she’s been reduced down to a little girl again. “You think so?”
“Of course I do, baby.”
Serena van der Woodsen gets married when she is twenty-one (too young), only months after her birthday, in the early fall (not the summer). Her whole family, all the van der Bilts, and every member of New York society is there. She looks beautiful (radiant, her mother says afterward when she gives her a hug and a cheque) and Chuck walks her down the aisle (you’re my brother) and Tripp’s best man is some guy she’s only meant twice (he smiles big and pats Tripp on the back, like a best man should).
Tripp smiles, vows til death do us part, pushes back her veil and kisses her tenderly; he never stops touching her at the reception, whirls her expertly around the dance floor. And in return she says I do, cries at the wedding and glows through the whole reception. And together they accept a flurry of congratulations and make promises for next week, two years from now, for always, together.
And because Blair helped her plan the whole thing, because Blair loves weddings and Blair loves her and Blair memorized Upper East Side decorum when she was about five years old it is nothing short of marvellous -
- and because they all know how to play their roles flawlessly, it is nothing short of perfection.
She finds Nate, sitting on Tripp’s side of the cathedral, only a millisecond after Tripp slips her ring onto her finger, binding them for life.
For that second when her eyes meet his, blue and blue, blurred by her tears, she is dizzy enough that she thinks she might have a panic attack again.
Because it all breaks down in that small, small moment, just a second, she thinks of everything that she was too afraid of. She remembers being seven years old, sitting in a fortress composed of pillows and sheets, hidden away from everyone in the world but him - and the way they’d defined forever then, the only requirements being ice cream and each other, the way she’d said I won’t ever marry anyone, not ever and the way it’d gone unspoken: except maybe you.
Just for an instant, she allows herself to think that this was always meant to be her ring, but that it was given to her by the wrong man.
Tripp’s lips find hers and their friends and family cheer and she says I love you the very second they break apart.
As if she’d ever been foolish enough to believe those words were a cure for anything.
They honeymoon in Cuba.
(Serena wanted to go to India.)
She feels more comfortable on the beach, sand between her toes and their hands linked, thinks that this is okay, this is right; she’s meant for this, right here, with him. She has to be.
It’s three weeks of laziness, late dinners and sex and sleeping in, and unending cycle that she relaxes into. Every once and a while he’ll get a call from his office, and she’ll roll her eyes and steal his phone, and he’ll smile and laugh at her (and she will ignore the way he always takes it back and talks anyway).
Most of the time she feels rather content, lazing around in bed or letting him buy her beaded necklaces, and those moments are enough so that she can pretend that he never forces her into conversations about houses and properties and jobs she could do and children.
On their last night there she has an ache in her chest; she will be homesick for this foreign place simply because it is where they felt most like the way she wants them to. They eat out, an extravagant meal, and she wears a flowing blue dress and forces herself to enjoy the evening.
She twirls out in the street, looking up at the stars, and when he laughs as he catches her around the waist and pulls her into a kiss, she closes her eyes and smiles against his mouth.
She drags him to the beach, pulls off her high heels, and she tugs on his hands until he follows her all the way to the edge of the water. She wades in, but he won’t follow her.
“No,” he says, but he’s still laughing and he’s giving her that earnest, admiring look she’s always loved, so she doesn’t relent.
“C’mon!” she cries, wading out a little further. “For me,” she pleads, shooting him her best smile.
Tripp keeps laughing, shaking his head. “Not even for you,” he chuckles.
She ignores the words, reaching down and splashing water toward him, ready to say now you’re wet, you have to come in!, but instead -
“Serena!”
The tone of his voice makes her freeze, makes the smile fall instantly from her lips. “Come on,” she says, more softly this time, “I -”
He pulls his cell phone out of his pocket, shooting her an incredulous glance as he examines it for water damage. “What are you doing? We’re not children. You’ve ruined my clothes.”
Suddenly cold, she shivers, still up to her knees in the water. “I…” This was why you used to love me.
“Let’s go back,” he says, in this tolerant voice that makes her blood boil. “I need to call New York.”
“You go,” she shoots back, but her voice is still soft and shaky and the night feels particularly dark.
“Serena,” he tells her, in a quieter tone that reminds her of the earlier days, when he seemed like everything good in her life, “Don’t do this already.”
She lets out an incredulous laugh. “So do it when, Tripp? In ten years?”
She waits until he’s walked back up the shore, toward their resort, to kick at the water in frustration.
“Why did you marry me?” she screams in the direction he went, long after he’s out of earshot.
Why did I marry you?
(Nate came and found her before she got married, navigated the complex hallways at the back of the church, somehow sneaked past all her bridesmaids that were handpicked by his grandfather. He didn’t say anything for a minute, just leaned back against the door he’d closed and looked at her standing there by the window, in her wedding dress.
And she’d wanted to cry, had wanted to say say something come closer touch me how long has it been, this, us? but she’d seen such a clear echo of his sixteen-year-old face in his expression at that moment (I didn’t come back for you!) that she could do nothing but stare back.
“You look…really pretty,” he’d finally said after what had to be the longest silence she’d ever experienced, stumbling over his words.
She’d laughed, choked on it a little. “That’s all you’ve got, Archibald?”
His whole face had relaxed and he’d taken five confident steps toward her, leaving them only a foot or two apart. “Beautiful. I just…I always thought you’d wear something different.”
It had cracked her apart, the way he’d just known, and she fought to keep her face from crumpling and failed miserably. “Natie, I -”
“Don’t marry him,” he’d blurted then, closing the distance between them until they were so close she could have touched him very, very easily. “Don’t do this. You don’t want this. I don’t want this.”
“Nate…”
“Please, S. I know this is late - it’s so late, because I always…you’d say no and I’d listen because I want…I want you to be happy, but this isn’t what’s going to make you happy.”
Her lips trembled. “If I said it was, would you walk away right now?”
Nate was breathing shakily, even as he cracked a half-hearted grin. “I would try,” he murmured, his eyes searching her face.
And then he had kissed her, hands wrapping tightly around her waist, pressing her body to his. She very nearly whimpered, had almost forgotten how this (he) made her feel, absolutely horrified to fall but as if she couldn’t not take the leap; she’d almost forgotten the perfect way they fit and the taste of his mouth and the way this could just feel like everything. She kissed him back just as fiercely, with just as much longing, her arms slipping around him in turn.
She didn’t know who had pulled back when, but she was on the verge of crying and had gasped, “I’m getting married.”
He had not let go of her. “Don’t. Serena, I…”
“What’m I going to do?” she whispered, a challenge and a plea all rolled into one. “Walk away? This is the society wedding of the year, I can’t cause that kind of scandal.”
Nate smiled, the kind of smile she had always adored, and she couldn’t help but kiss him again. “Scandal,” he murmured, breaking the kiss to specifically tell her this, “has never stopped you before.”
“But Tripp -”
“Tripp will be fine. You’re not in love with him.”
“You don’t know -”
“I know.” His hand had moved along the back of her dress, tied tightly corset-style, and she was grateful there was no easy way for him to get her out of it.
“How?” she had pulled back a bit, demanding this from him. “How do you know?” Show me. Save me.
He had cupped her face gently with his hands, kept his blue gaze steady on hers, and said very simply, very softly, “I love you. I don’t know when I started and I don’t know how to stop. I love you, Serena. And maybe you don’t love me back right at this moment but I know that you could, if you’d just let yourself.”
And it was everything she’d needed to hear and everything she couldn’t handle.
She had pulled away from him, tears in her eyes, the feel of him all over her, all over the dress in which she was supposed to marry another man.
Nate had watched her pull away, had watched her try (in vain) to stifle down all her emotions, and had not flinched once. “You can,” he told her again, you can love me, like a promise.
Serena hadn’t been able to continue looking at him.
I do. “I can’t.”)
The man running all moving operations for their huge country manor house laughs when Serena walks into the kitchen in her hip-hugging jeans and comfiest boots, which will serve as her casual moving clothes.
“What’s a pretty young thing like you doing here?” he chuckles in his booming voice. “People buy a house like this…means they’re rich folks, settling down.”
She adjusts the position of her Birkin bag on her shoulder, touches her hair to make sure it is still the way she elaborately twisted it up that morning, feeling self-conscious about the rock of a ring on her fourth finger.
“I’m Mr. van der Bilt’s wife,” she says tightly, no sign of the encouraging smiles she used to give even the people she was told were beneath her.
She can see his thought process, painted across his face, the conclusion he draws, and when he leaves the kitchen to organize his boys she turns on the taps to splash cool water on her face.
Here she is, exactly who everyone said she would turn out to be when she was younger, exactly who she’d always fought against becoming.
I am a trophy wife.
Her life flies by (uselessly). She becomes an expert at cocktail party conversations, spends a lot of time wandering around in their large, lonely house, and escapes to the city with her camera whenever she can.
She works her way through every novel ever deemed a “classic”. She takes up yoga. She takes an online course in Mandarin. And she tries to learn something useful, like how to cook, but Tripp thinks it’s ludicrous.
“That’s why we have help, Serena,” he lectures her with an amused smile on his lips. “My wife doesn’t need to be cooking.”
Biting her lip, she ignores the way he ignores the meal she worked so hard to make for him. “I’m not just your wife.”
He touches her cheek, and then kisses it. “I know. But it’s definitely my favourite thing that you are.”
One day, when she’s tidying (not cleaning, because that’s the help’s job) the coffee table in the most casual of their three living rooms, she stumbles across the latest copy of The New Yorker and flops down on the couch to read it.
She has nothing better to do.
She’s startled to stumble across a poem written by Dan Humphrey; even more stunned to see that it describes a beautiful, alive, easy-and-yet-so-very-difficult-to-love girl that can only be her sixteen-year-old self.
It takes only a heartbeat, a click of the mouse, to track down his phone number.
“You wrote about me,” she says, skipping pleasantries altogether.
He chuckles on the other end of the line and his voice is warm as he says, albeit a bit mockingly: “Always a pleasure, Serena.”
She laughs, hugging one of the couch cushions. “Hi, Dan,” she says obligatorily. “How are you?” she adds, genuinely interested to know.
“I’m…good.”
She recognizes downplaying when she hears it. “You’re published!”
Dan chuckles again. “Yeah, there is that, isn’t there? But hey - you too, in a way! All that modeling, and the movie…actually not a bad interpretation of Tiffany’s.”
From Mr. Literary Critic, this is high praise, she knows, and she beams. “You think so?”
“And you looked amazing.”
“Makeup,” she shoots back.
“Your acting, too,” he says, clearly amused. “You were good, Serena.”
“Thank you.”
There’s an awkward pause, some history and a year or two of silence between them.
“I’m, uh,” he clears his throat. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to your wedding, Vanessa and I -”
“It’s okay!” she cuts him off brightly, because she is the girl who stashed her wedding dress at the back of her expansive closet, who never takes out the albums to admire them. “Thanks for the waffle-maker.”
Dan pauses. “You haven’t used it once, have you?”
Caught, Serena rolls her eyes and changes the subject, fingering the page with his poem on it. “Why’d you publish this one?” she asks softly, “it’s from forever ago.”
“It’s one of the best things I’ve written,” he tells her, an honest answer, the kind she rarely gets these days. “Our relationship was…a rollercoaster, but you were one of the best muses a guy could’ve asked for.”
“Yeah?” she asks softly.
“Yeah! I mean…you’re you,” he says simply, a bit of the reverence for her that he had back when he wrote this slipping into his voice.
“And who’s that?” She intends for it to be a joke, but it comes out shaky and the words have suddenly blurred on the page.
Dan is silent for a second, gathering his thoughts, before he says gently, “I don’t know, Serena. I never did. That was always the problem with us - who I wanted you to be, who I thought you are, and who you are…they’re two different people. That’s not to say,” he rushes on, “that you’re not a really amazing person, because you are. But I needed to realize that you can’t just dream people up, and you needed someone who wasn’t…me.”
She presses her lips together for a second before blurting: “And what if that person doesn’t exist?”
He analyzes her words like they are straight out of a novel, a character’s dialogue, and he gets right to the root of what she’s saying. “Listen. I didn’t know exactly who you are, I wasn’t lucky enough to find out, but I feel like I have a pretty good sense of who you’re not. And I think that’s exactly who you’re trying to be right now.”
It makes her want to both laugh and cry, that years and miles away, this is a truth that is blatantly obvious even to Dan. “I…”
“Serena, any guy would be lucky to have you,” he tells her quietly, “it’s just a question of finding the one you’re meant to be with.”
She bites her lip hard enough to draw blood. “But what if I found him?”
Dan scoffs on the other end of the line. “You think Tripp van der Bilt is the man for you?”
She could argue with him. She could say you don’t know him like I do, you don’t know anything at all. But she’s tired, and he knows, so she sucks in some air and tells him what she knows is true: “That’s not who I’m talking about.”
He is quiet for long enough for her to rethink her words, to wish she hadn’t said that, that she hadn’t broken down into admitting something that has the power to break her apart, that has always had the power to break her heart.
“What you wrote about me,” she says shakily, “…about who I used to be. It’s beautiful. She’s beautiful. I wish…” She doesn’t have his vocabulary; doesn’t have the words she needs to tell him what she wants to.
“Yeah,” he agrees, “She is beautiful.” And then he gives her what will be his first and last piece of step-brotherly advice: “So find her again.’
Chuck proposes to Blair in the spring they are both twenty-two years old, and they marry in the wintertime when he is twenty-three and Blair has just turned twenty-four.
A year and a half, and Serena cannot for the life of her remember what she has accomplished, while the whole city is raving about Tripp’s successes.
Mostly, she supposes, she helps Blair plan her dream wedding, which includes horse-drawn carriages and an extensive guest list and more cake-tasting and wine-sipping sessions than Serena thinks are necessary. But it’s fun, and it’s easy, to help Blair, to spend time with her best friend.
But it makes her ache, the way Blair beams like her whole life is settling into something not perfect, but thoroughly wonderful. Serena can’t remember the last time she wore smiles like the ones Blair’s always got playing across her lips.
(She forgot that perfection is relative; got so damn terrified of her own version of perfect that she found herself caught up in someone else’s.)
Nate, whom she has studiously avoided since her own wedding, is Chuck’s best man. And Serena, of course, is Blair’s maid of honour. And she can’t, cannot do it; she will just die if she does walk down an aisle with Nate Archibald.
She wants to say so, wants to yell it and cry about it, but this is Blair’s wedding so she doesn’t, she just hooks her arm through his and pretends it is not a big deal.
She pretends, also, not to realize that he doesn’t have a girlfriend, and that she doesn’t spend nearly the entire ceremony thinking about what that might mean.
He drops pecans onto the plate that holds her half-eaten piece of wedding cake so that they form a smiley face, takes a seat next to her, and touches her cheek. She stops breathing, leans into him the slightest bit.
“It’s your best friend’s wedding,” he tells her softly (and stops touching her, keeps the kind of distance that friends should have). “She’s marrying your brother. These are two of the people you’ve known for nearly all your life. And you look like you’re at a funeral.”
It’s scary, but she gathers her courage and forces herself to, and finds herself falling into his navy blue eyes so easily; if she’d made herself be brave right from the beginning, could it have been this easy all along?
“I’m sorry,” she says, and she means to be apologizing for her general lack of happiness on this day, but it comes out solemn and strained and I’m sorry I broke your heart; I’m sorry I broke mine, too; I’m sorry this is all I ever seem to do.
“It’s okay,” he says, and his mouth grins but his eyes don’t even come close. He touches her cheek again, a finger gently poking the stop where her dimple usually lies, a spot he must have memorized years and years ago. “Smile for me, S.”
She does, because it’s the least she can do for him, forces the corners of her lips to turn upward.
“That’s my girl,” he comments approvingly, casually, but it hits her right in the heart.
They stay there, best man and maid of honour, smiling sweetly at each other for everyone to see.
“Don’t you think about it?” Us. Her voice sounds broken even to her own ears.
Nate scoffs, shakes his head a little, as if he can’t believe she’d ask. “Of course I do.”
They sit there, and they smile.
Serena and Nate chase Chuck and Blair’s limo down the street, throwing confetti and yelling have fuuun!, and when they stop, when they’re alone, almost-but-not-quite out of her husband’s sight, he reaches out to hug her.
She stops him, bats his hands away, knows that she won’t trust herself if he does.
(It does feel like a funeral, their own, but she can’t bring herself to say goodbye.
And neither can he, it seems, his fingers tugging at her hair like they used to when they were so much younger, when they had so much possibility; he says, “I always…” and leaves it at that.)
Three months after Chuck and Blair are married, two months after the honeymoon, Serena receives a giddy phone call.
Blair’s pregnant.
Everyone’s happy, everyone’s thrilled, Serena included: she can’t wait to be an aunt.
She tells Tripp over dinner, some pasta thing that he loves but she’s never really liked.
His eyebrows rise and he smiles at her across the table, almost mischievously, and she has a flash of the look on his face the day, when they were kids, that he gave her the scar she has on her wrist. She touches it without really thinking, and smiles back. This is a good day.
“It would be great if your kids, yours and Blair’s, grew up together, wouldn’t it?”
Her mouth falls open and any possible words she could use to respond get stuck in her throat.
Serena’s mother is on vacation in Morocco, her best friend is six months pregnant, her little brother is excelling at Berkley; she is twenty-three and she is fighting with her husband on the day that it happens.
They’re driving into the city, and they’re fighting, not the muted kind of arguments they’ve been having for what feels like millennia but has really only been years, but the big, ugly kind of fighting. They’re yelling at one another in the confined space of the vehicle and she’s too angry to even cry.
It’s her I’m not ready to be a mother! versus his I didn’t say right now - and this about us, not you, her not now, not anytime soon against his I want this for us, Serena; it is his declaration of I want a family with you! that sets a spark in her and has her spitting you don’t! you just want a family and I’m the one who happens to be here!
“That’s ridiculous, Serena,” he says in a quieter voice, and he seems genuinely wounded. “I love you.”
“You don’t,” she says firmly, matching his quiet tone, and her eyes ache with unshed tears.
“What?” he turns to look at her, shocked by the certainty in her voice.
“You don’t, I know you don’t, because I don’t love you either.”
She can feel herself unravelling, but she knows it’s necessary now; she has to ruin it all before she can fix it (you can, he had said), she has to find the courage to get herself where she knows she needs to be, and with who she needs to be with (I always…). Her voice, as she starts to tell Tripp this, is deadly and quiet and calm.
And so is the accident that kills her.
Tripp wakes up after a day in a medically-induced coma a driven politician; he becomes New York’s youngest ever congressman half a year later.
Oh, the grief, it drove him into his work, is the accepted piece of gossip over the situation, but Serena knows better.
She knows that he planned her funeral, showed up in a suit and buried her with her wedding rings, and that he cried (but never publicly). She knows that he left all of her clothes, and all of her things, in the closet, but that he closes the doors and never opens them again. She knows that after he mourns, he puts himself back together and continues living without her (he has the help, after all), delegating her to his memories, the whims of his youth, the girl he might’ve loved.
But it’s not her (ex)husband Serena spies on from heaven, it’s his younger cousin.
He loved her, is what they say about Nate, and she believes it.
She knows that he attends her funeral a dishevelled mess, doesn’t quite cry but doesn’t quite manage not to. She knows that, in his childhood bedroom he digs out every relic of her, photographs and grade-school Valentines, the shirts of his she used to borrow to sleep in, every silly little present she gave him, and spends hours looking at them. She knows that he never really stops mourning, that he thinks of her everyday (of course I do), and that he suggests Serena as the middle name for Chuck and Blair’s baby girl whom he is godfather to, wanting to make sure she keeps living in some way.
And she knows that he visits her grave, always in the summetime, and brings forget-me-nots to rest on her headstone. She knows, like he knows, that those were the flowers that were growing on the side of the road where they pulled over on the summer’s day, on the way to his family’s home, the beginning of the end. They were so young, so close to the cusp of something that day, together and happy and so in need of each other that he stopped the car so that she could pull him into the backseat, so they could make love under the sun and spend the subsequent hour giggling and whispering and hoping no one would drive by on the rarely-used back road.
The last time she said I love you and meant it, she’s sure, is when she breathed it against his neck on that perfect day, the sun making the world behind her eyelids explode with colour.
fin
Chapter | 2/2
Rating | pg-13
Characters | Serena. Nate/Serena, Tripp/Serena
Summary | I"I hope she'll be a fool. That's the best thing a girl can be in this world - a beautiful little fool." -- The Great Gatsby
Christmas Eve, back from the small church the van der Bilt family has been attending on Christmas and Easter for decades, she sits on the couch. She is holding a frothy glass of eggnog, made by one of Nate’s uncles with the assistance of the cook and packed with no much liquor that her head already feels fuzzy.
Tripp leans so close that she can feel his breath against her cheek, and it makes her shiver like she used to - it’s just the eggnog, she tells herself.
“Dinner with the van der Bilts,” he whispers mysteriously, and she can hear the smile in his voice.
And she giggles, because he remembered, and it gives her that same thrill she first had when they were beginning. When she first got involved with him, her life now is nothing what she ever would have imagined or wanted it to be; maybe that’s okay, though, if beneath it all they still remember, if he remembers.
“I was wrong about the movie,” he murmurs to her. “You looked beautiful, and you were…you were incredible. I’m proud of you.”
She tilts her head toward his, offers a smile back. They’re in a room full of people, his family, but she feels the same sense of quiet, comfortable confidence between them that she’s been craving for months.
“I’m proud of you too,” she whispers back. And then, spurred by the look in his eyes and the alcohol in her system, she grabs hold of his tie and tugs him just a bit closer to her, close enough for a kiss.
It feels like he’s betrayed that quiet moment of confidentiality between them on Christmas Eve when he gets down on one knee in front of her on Christmas afternoon.
He speaks sweetly (she catches the sentiment, but not the words), and looks solely at her (earnestly, but confidently), and she can only gape back at him for a moment, trying to convey her panic through her eyes.
But then she remembers who she is, where she is, this future that she never meant to commit herself (at the time she’d chosen it, she’d been too afraid to consider her future at all) and she presses her lips closed, looks at a spot on the wall just behind his head.
And she cries, and nods yes because she can’t say it out loud. Tripp smiles, his family claps and coos, and Serena finds herself wearing the Cornelius van der Bilt diamond ring that her best friend used to dream about.
He kisses her, cups her chin in her hand and presses his lips chastely to hers.
(And the second they break apart Serena’s eyes do lot fly automatically to where Nate is standing near the back of the room, and she does not feel the way the shattered look in his eyes is like a hammer to her own heart.)
“You’re my fiancée,” he says.
She bites her tongue to keep from saying that she knows, that she could never forgot, not with the weight of this ostentatious ring on her finger reminding her every single second.
“I don’t see how that pertains to the issue,” she finally says, her voice cool, a far cry from the way she used to speak, warm and airy, like she might burst into laughter at any second.
He seems alarmed by her tone, but his eyes narrow, and it, like so many other things, is forgotten. “You’re going to be my wife, Serena. You cannot be kissing other men.”
“It’s a movie!” she explodes.
Tripp steps closer to her, until they are face to face with only a breath between them. “Don’t play naïve, Serena. I know you’ve always done what you wanted, and admittedly, there was a time I really admired that about you. But I’m in the public eye; my last name means something. I know you never acknowledged what yours did, but when you become my wife you’re going to have to understand the significance of mine.”
She grits her teeth. “It’s acting.”
His eyebrows fly up, almost condescendingly. “Would you like to have that debate with the Buckleys?”
Catching his eye, she whispers: “You said you were proud of me. For the movie.”
“I was.” At her sharp intake of breath, he waves a hand in the air, rolls his eyes and lazily corrects himself: “I am. But you need to realize that morality, not our feelings about each other, is what’s at issue here.”
She takes a step back and crosses his arms. “What are you saying? That I’m a whore?” she spits back.
“No,” he says evenly, in his press-conference voice, “I’m saying you need to find a job that makes you look less like one.”
So Serena steps behind the camera, calls up the photographers she worked with as a model, digs out that camera she bought downtown that one day. She spends a lot of her time in Central Park, taking photographers of nature and people and city life; she gets taken under the wing of her favourite photographer, the one who shot her perfume add.
He adores her, and teaches her well, and she admires him - but one day when they’re working late, deliberating over pictures for a modeling campaign that she declined a place in, he smiles at her and says, “You know, I envy you, Serena.”
She stares at him with big blue eyes, tries to figure out what, in her life, is enviable at all.
“Don’t look at me like that! Successful, selective movie career, amazing modeling gigs; wealthy, good-lookin’ fiancé who doesn’t mind you staying here late; an Upper East Side upbringing…all of that, and you’re how old?”
Serena pretends to be comparing two photographs. She does not say this is everything I never really wanted.
She says, “Twenty.”
One day in Central Park she says Nate, playing a lazy game of soccer with some friends, wearing a Columbia hoodie and mittens with his jeans.
She takes a picture not with her camera but with her mind, his body animated with energy and his blue eyes bright, the image preserved in her memory.
A single appointment with the florist is all it takes to reveal to Serena that she has no sweet clue how to plan a society wedding.
She calls Blair.
And they fall back into their friendship like they do every single time, laughing over ridiculous invitation designs and the snobs Serena’s obliged to have on her guest list, but it’s different. It’s different, because Blair is carefully constructing her life and her future and is thus far satisfied with the results; Serena is floundering, meandering.
She wonders if she even knows how to grow up.
While Tripp stares tiredly at policy briefs at their kitchen table, Serena carefully addresses wedding invitations with a calligraphy pen. Everyone who’s anyone is society is going to receive a thick, creamy envelope with an RSVP card inside. She puts special effort into Chuck and Blair’s, and Eric’s, and a couple for her model friends. She addresses one to her mother and her step-father.
“Nate?”
Tripp looks up at her, vaguely irritated. “What about him?”
She blushes; she hadn’t meant to say anything aloud, but the sight of his name on the guest list had shocked her.
“He’s my cousin. He’s your friend.”
“Yeah,” she whispers, her lips quirking up into a silly-me kind of smile, but her lips won’t stay there. Her chest is tight and her cheeks feel hot; something about his name, neatly typed by Tripp’s secretary onto eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper, makes everything hurt, because this is what he’s been reduced to in her life: little letters on a piece of paper.
Tripp is no longer paying attention to his policy briefs. “He is your friend, isn’t he?”
“We grew up together,” she tells him faintly, feels her face hardening. “You know that.”
“Alright. So, you’d want him at our wedding. I want him at our wedding. That’s why he’s on the guest list.”
She drops her pen, presses a hand to her eyes. She’s not going to cry, not under the pressure of his gaze, which is only gaining intensity.
“Is there something you want to tell me, Serena?”
Her hand falls away from her face, back to the table, curled into a fist with her fingernails biting into her skin. She looks at her fiancé with clear, dry eyes, and lifts one of her eyebrows. “No.”
Tripp reaches for her hand, uncurls it in his grasp. “We’ll have to move,” he tells her in a tone meant to put this to rest, meant to coax a smile from her. “We’ll get a house, lots more bedrooms, hire staff…you could even have a darkroom.”
She swallows.
“Sounds perfect.”
Blair cries the first time she sees Serena in a wedding dress, even though the first one she tries on is this disastrous, poufy thing; simply because she’s Serena’s best friend and she loves her, so Serena loves her for it even if she thinks she looks like a giant marshmallow.
It’s the third one she puts on that causes her own emotional breakdown; pretty, light fabric that hugs her body in all the right places and trails off into a romantic-looking train.
“Is this the dress?” her bridal consultant asks happily, noting the tears in Serena’s eyes once she’s carried her train on the way out of her dressing room to the main part of the small, exclusive store, where Blair is sitting patiently on a couch.
Blair gets to her feet and touches the fabric of the skirt, glancing up at Serena. “I knew Vera Wang was the right choice. S, you look so - ”
But Serena is shaking her head, gasping for breath, closing her eyes against a rush of dizziness. Her heart is pounding so hard it hurts.
It’s a blur, as Blair reaches for her, pulls her toward the couch with it’s soft, squishy cushions, and unclips some of the pins holding Serena’s dress together at the back. She must say something to the consultant, because all of a sudden they’re alone and Blair is titling Serena’s face up with a hand to her chin and ordering, “Breathe. Not just into your lungs, deep down, to your stomach.”
She does as instructed, and the first couple times her breath catches in her throat, but then she’s okay and her heartbeat isn’t echoing in her ears anymore.
Serena presses her hands to her hot cheeks as Blair looks her over, clearly surprised. “I’ve never seen you have a panic attack before.”
“Is that what that was?” She tries to laugh, but it’s quiet and breathless and free of any mirth.
“What is it, Serena?” Blair’s looking at her intently, reaching out toward her. “You just had a panic attack. You’re still crying.” She softens her voice, repeats: “What is it?”
Serena looks at her - this is her best friend, keeper of all her secrets, solver of (most of) her problems - but she doesn’t know how to say it; doesn’t know how to pull herself out of the tangled-up mess she’s created for herself, and doesn’t know what would come after.
But she’s still crying and this dress, it makes her think of beaches and bare feet and the boy who’d sneak into her dressing room before the wedding because screw tradition, I can’t wait to kiss you…
“I can’t get married,” she gasps, her words mangled by the tears in her throat.
The way Blair is looking at her, holding out a box of tissues, is gentle but almost eager, her eyes bright and calculating, as if she’s just been waiting for Serena to say that exact sentence. “Oh, honey -”
Serena shakes her head, snatches a tissue out of the box and amends, “In this dress, I mean. I can’t get married…in this dress.”
Her best friend’s face changes, falls; but she lets Serena pretend.
“Okay. Let’s find you another dress, then.”
Lily responds to her wedding invitation with a phone call rather than simply returning the RSVP card.
“Married, hm?”
Serena nods, forgetting that they’re on the phone and her mother cannot see her.
Whatever maternal instincts Lily has are particularly honed at this moment, it seems - maybe they stockpiled, after she’d had so little contact with her daughter for so long - because she seems aware of Serena’s physical action on the other side of the line.
“Well, best wishes, Serena.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Lily’s voice sounds a bit tighter when she adds, “You’re going to be a very beautiful bride.”
“Thank you,” Serena repeats, and feels a pulse of childish need for her mother for a brief, painful moment.
“I miss you.”
Her mother is crying on the other end of the line, Serena just knows it; she can envision the embroidered handkerchief Lily is holding at this very moment. She swallows down her guilt and her own tears and tells herself this is okay, because Lily abandoned her time and again, this is nothing more than karma.
Nevertheless, she blurts out, “I miss you, too,” and her cheeks feel wet.
Lily clears her throat. “I saw your photographs. They’re beautiful.”
Serena smiles. “Airbrushing,” she murmurs, and is surprised to hear her mother laugh.
“No, darling. The photographs you took.”
Something swells in her heart and she feels like she’s been reduced down to a little girl again. “You think so?”
“Of course I do, baby.”
Serena van der Woodsen gets married when she is twenty-one (too young), only months after her birthday, in the early fall (not the summer). Her whole family, all the van der Bilts, and every member of New York society is there. She looks beautiful (radiant, her mother says afterward when she gives her a hug and a cheque) and Chuck walks her down the aisle (you’re my brother) and Tripp’s best man is some guy she’s only meant twice (he smiles big and pats Tripp on the back, like a best man should).
Tripp smiles, vows til death do us part, pushes back her veil and kisses her tenderly; he never stops touching her at the reception, whirls her expertly around the dance floor. And in return she says I do, cries at the wedding and glows through the whole reception. And together they accept a flurry of congratulations and make promises for next week, two years from now, for always, together.
And because Blair helped her plan the whole thing, because Blair loves weddings and Blair loves her and Blair memorized Upper East Side decorum when she was about five years old it is nothing short of marvellous -
- and because they all know how to play their roles flawlessly, it is nothing short of perfection.
She finds Nate, sitting on Tripp’s side of the cathedral, only a millisecond after Tripp slips her ring onto her finger, binding them for life.
For that second when her eyes meet his, blue and blue, blurred by her tears, she is dizzy enough that she thinks she might have a panic attack again.
Because it all breaks down in that small, small moment, just a second, she thinks of everything that she was too afraid of. She remembers being seven years old, sitting in a fortress composed of pillows and sheets, hidden away from everyone in the world but him - and the way they’d defined forever then, the only requirements being ice cream and each other, the way she’d said I won’t ever marry anyone, not ever and the way it’d gone unspoken: except maybe you.
Just for an instant, she allows herself to think that this was always meant to be her ring, but that it was given to her by the wrong man.
Tripp’s lips find hers and their friends and family cheer and she says I love you the very second they break apart.
As if she’d ever been foolish enough to believe those words were a cure for anything.
They honeymoon in Cuba.
(Serena wanted to go to India.)
She feels more comfortable on the beach, sand between her toes and their hands linked, thinks that this is okay, this is right; she’s meant for this, right here, with him. She has to be.
It’s three weeks of laziness, late dinners and sex and sleeping in, and unending cycle that she relaxes into. Every once and a while he’ll get a call from his office, and she’ll roll her eyes and steal his phone, and he’ll smile and laugh at her (and she will ignore the way he always takes it back and talks anyway).
Most of the time she feels rather content, lazing around in bed or letting him buy her beaded necklaces, and those moments are enough so that she can pretend that he never forces her into conversations about houses and properties and jobs she could do and children.
On their last night there she has an ache in her chest; she will be homesick for this foreign place simply because it is where they felt most like the way she wants them to. They eat out, an extravagant meal, and she wears a flowing blue dress and forces herself to enjoy the evening.
She twirls out in the street, looking up at the stars, and when he laughs as he catches her around the waist and pulls her into a kiss, she closes her eyes and smiles against his mouth.
She drags him to the beach, pulls off her high heels, and she tugs on his hands until he follows her all the way to the edge of the water. She wades in, but he won’t follow her.
“No,” he says, but he’s still laughing and he’s giving her that earnest, admiring look she’s always loved, so she doesn’t relent.
“C’mon!” she cries, wading out a little further. “For me,” she pleads, shooting him her best smile.
Tripp keeps laughing, shaking his head. “Not even for you,” he chuckles.
She ignores the words, reaching down and splashing water toward him, ready to say now you’re wet, you have to come in!, but instead -
“Serena!”
The tone of his voice makes her freeze, makes the smile fall instantly from her lips. “Come on,” she says, more softly this time, “I -”
He pulls his cell phone out of his pocket, shooting her an incredulous glance as he examines it for water damage. “What are you doing? We’re not children. You’ve ruined my clothes.”
Suddenly cold, she shivers, still up to her knees in the water. “I…” This was why you used to love me.
“Let’s go back,” he says, in this tolerant voice that makes her blood boil. “I need to call New York.”
“You go,” she shoots back, but her voice is still soft and shaky and the night feels particularly dark.
“Serena,” he tells her, in a quieter tone that reminds her of the earlier days, when he seemed like everything good in her life, “Don’t do this already.”
She lets out an incredulous laugh. “So do it when, Tripp? In ten years?”
She waits until he’s walked back up the shore, toward their resort, to kick at the water in frustration.
“Why did you marry me?” she screams in the direction he went, long after he’s out of earshot.
Why did I marry you?
(Nate came and found her before she got married, navigated the complex hallways at the back of the church, somehow sneaked past all her bridesmaids that were handpicked by his grandfather. He didn’t say anything for a minute, just leaned back against the door he’d closed and looked at her standing there by the window, in her wedding dress.
And she’d wanted to cry, had wanted to say say something come closer touch me how long has it been, this, us? but she’d seen such a clear echo of his sixteen-year-old face in his expression at that moment (I didn’t come back for you!) that she could do nothing but stare back.
“You look…really pretty,” he’d finally said after what had to be the longest silence she’d ever experienced, stumbling over his words.
She’d laughed, choked on it a little. “That’s all you’ve got, Archibald?”
His whole face had relaxed and he’d taken five confident steps toward her, leaving them only a foot or two apart. “Beautiful. I just…I always thought you’d wear something different.”
It had cracked her apart, the way he’d just known, and she fought to keep her face from crumpling and failed miserably. “Natie, I -”
“Don’t marry him,” he’d blurted then, closing the distance between them until they were so close she could have touched him very, very easily. “Don’t do this. You don’t want this. I don’t want this.”
“Nate…”
“Please, S. I know this is late - it’s so late, because I always…you’d say no and I’d listen because I want…I want you to be happy, but this isn’t what’s going to make you happy.”
Her lips trembled. “If I said it was, would you walk away right now?”
Nate was breathing shakily, even as he cracked a half-hearted grin. “I would try,” he murmured, his eyes searching her face.
And then he had kissed her, hands wrapping tightly around her waist, pressing her body to his. She very nearly whimpered, had almost forgotten how this (he) made her feel, absolutely horrified to fall but as if she couldn’t not take the leap; she’d almost forgotten the perfect way they fit and the taste of his mouth and the way this could just feel like everything. She kissed him back just as fiercely, with just as much longing, her arms slipping around him in turn.
She didn’t know who had pulled back when, but she was on the verge of crying and had gasped, “I’m getting married.”
He had not let go of her. “Don’t. Serena, I…”
“What’m I going to do?” she whispered, a challenge and a plea all rolled into one. “Walk away? This is the society wedding of the year, I can’t cause that kind of scandal.”
Nate smiled, the kind of smile she had always adored, and she couldn’t help but kiss him again. “Scandal,” he murmured, breaking the kiss to specifically tell her this, “has never stopped you before.”
“But Tripp -”
“Tripp will be fine. You’re not in love with him.”
“You don’t know -”
“I know.” His hand had moved along the back of her dress, tied tightly corset-style, and she was grateful there was no easy way for him to get her out of it.
“How?” she had pulled back a bit, demanding this from him. “How do you know?” Show me. Save me.
He had cupped her face gently with his hands, kept his blue gaze steady on hers, and said very simply, very softly, “I love you. I don’t know when I started and I don’t know how to stop. I love you, Serena. And maybe you don’t love me back right at this moment but I know that you could, if you’d just let yourself.”
And it was everything she’d needed to hear and everything she couldn’t handle.
She had pulled away from him, tears in her eyes, the feel of him all over her, all over the dress in which she was supposed to marry another man.
Nate had watched her pull away, had watched her try (in vain) to stifle down all her emotions, and had not flinched once. “You can,” he told her again, you can love me, like a promise.
Serena hadn’t been able to continue looking at him.
I do. “I can’t.”)
The man running all moving operations for their huge country manor house laughs when Serena walks into the kitchen in her hip-hugging jeans and comfiest boots, which will serve as her casual moving clothes.
“What’s a pretty young thing like you doing here?” he chuckles in his booming voice. “People buy a house like this…means they’re rich folks, settling down.”
She adjusts the position of her Birkin bag on her shoulder, touches her hair to make sure it is still the way she elaborately twisted it up that morning, feeling self-conscious about the rock of a ring on her fourth finger.
“I’m Mr. van der Bilt’s wife,” she says tightly, no sign of the encouraging smiles she used to give even the people she was told were beneath her.
She can see his thought process, painted across his face, the conclusion he draws, and when he leaves the kitchen to organize his boys she turns on the taps to splash cool water on her face.
Here she is, exactly who everyone said she would turn out to be when she was younger, exactly who she’d always fought against becoming.
I am a trophy wife.
Her life flies by (uselessly). She becomes an expert at cocktail party conversations, spends a lot of time wandering around in their large, lonely house, and escapes to the city with her camera whenever she can.
She works her way through every novel ever deemed a “classic”. She takes up yoga. She takes an online course in Mandarin. And she tries to learn something useful, like how to cook, but Tripp thinks it’s ludicrous.
“That’s why we have help, Serena,” he lectures her with an amused smile on his lips. “My wife doesn’t need to be cooking.”
Biting her lip, she ignores the way he ignores the meal she worked so hard to make for him. “I’m not just your wife.”
He touches her cheek, and then kisses it. “I know. But it’s definitely my favourite thing that you are.”
One day, when she’s tidying (not cleaning, because that’s the help’s job) the coffee table in the most casual of their three living rooms, she stumbles across the latest copy of The New Yorker and flops down on the couch to read it.
She has nothing better to do.
She’s startled to stumble across a poem written by Dan Humphrey; even more stunned to see that it describes a beautiful, alive, easy-and-yet-so-very-difficult-to-love girl that can only be her sixteen-year-old self.
It takes only a heartbeat, a click of the mouse, to track down his phone number.
“You wrote about me,” she says, skipping pleasantries altogether.
He chuckles on the other end of the line and his voice is warm as he says, albeit a bit mockingly: “Always a pleasure, Serena.”
She laughs, hugging one of the couch cushions. “Hi, Dan,” she says obligatorily. “How are you?” she adds, genuinely interested to know.
“I’m…good.”
She recognizes downplaying when she hears it. “You’re published!”
Dan chuckles again. “Yeah, there is that, isn’t there? But hey - you too, in a way! All that modeling, and the movie…actually not a bad interpretation of Tiffany’s.”
From Mr. Literary Critic, this is high praise, she knows, and she beams. “You think so?”
“And you looked amazing.”
“Makeup,” she shoots back.
“Your acting, too,” he says, clearly amused. “You were good, Serena.”
“Thank you.”
There’s an awkward pause, some history and a year or two of silence between them.
“I’m, uh,” he clears his throat. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to your wedding, Vanessa and I -”
“It’s okay!” she cuts him off brightly, because she is the girl who stashed her wedding dress at the back of her expansive closet, who never takes out the albums to admire them. “Thanks for the waffle-maker.”
Dan pauses. “You haven’t used it once, have you?”
Caught, Serena rolls her eyes and changes the subject, fingering the page with his poem on it. “Why’d you publish this one?” she asks softly, “it’s from forever ago.”
“It’s one of the best things I’ve written,” he tells her, an honest answer, the kind she rarely gets these days. “Our relationship was…a rollercoaster, but you were one of the best muses a guy could’ve asked for.”
“Yeah?” she asks softly.
“Yeah! I mean…you’re you,” he says simply, a bit of the reverence for her that he had back when he wrote this slipping into his voice.
“And who’s that?” She intends for it to be a joke, but it comes out shaky and the words have suddenly blurred on the page.
Dan is silent for a second, gathering his thoughts, before he says gently, “I don’t know, Serena. I never did. That was always the problem with us - who I wanted you to be, who I thought you are, and who you are…they’re two different people. That’s not to say,” he rushes on, “that you’re not a really amazing person, because you are. But I needed to realize that you can’t just dream people up, and you needed someone who wasn’t…me.”
She presses her lips together for a second before blurting: “And what if that person doesn’t exist?”
He analyzes her words like they are straight out of a novel, a character’s dialogue, and he gets right to the root of what she’s saying. “Listen. I didn’t know exactly who you are, I wasn’t lucky enough to find out, but I feel like I have a pretty good sense of who you’re not. And I think that’s exactly who you’re trying to be right now.”
It makes her want to both laugh and cry, that years and miles away, this is a truth that is blatantly obvious even to Dan. “I…”
“Serena, any guy would be lucky to have you,” he tells her quietly, “it’s just a question of finding the one you’re meant to be with.”
She bites her lip hard enough to draw blood. “But what if I found him?”
Dan scoffs on the other end of the line. “You think Tripp van der Bilt is the man for you?”
She could argue with him. She could say you don’t know him like I do, you don’t know anything at all. But she’s tired, and he knows, so she sucks in some air and tells him what she knows is true: “That’s not who I’m talking about.”
He is quiet for long enough for her to rethink her words, to wish she hadn’t said that, that she hadn’t broken down into admitting something that has the power to break her apart, that has always had the power to break her heart.
“What you wrote about me,” she says shakily, “…about who I used to be. It’s beautiful. She’s beautiful. I wish…” She doesn’t have his vocabulary; doesn’t have the words she needs to tell him what she wants to.
“Yeah,” he agrees, “She is beautiful.” And then he gives her what will be his first and last piece of step-brotherly advice: “So find her again.’
Chuck proposes to Blair in the spring they are both twenty-two years old, and they marry in the wintertime when he is twenty-three and Blair has just turned twenty-four.
A year and a half, and Serena cannot for the life of her remember what she has accomplished, while the whole city is raving about Tripp’s successes.
Mostly, she supposes, she helps Blair plan her dream wedding, which includes horse-drawn carriages and an extensive guest list and more cake-tasting and wine-sipping sessions than Serena thinks are necessary. But it’s fun, and it’s easy, to help Blair, to spend time with her best friend.
But it makes her ache, the way Blair beams like her whole life is settling into something not perfect, but thoroughly wonderful. Serena can’t remember the last time she wore smiles like the ones Blair’s always got playing across her lips.
(She forgot that perfection is relative; got so damn terrified of her own version of perfect that she found herself caught up in someone else’s.)
Nate, whom she has studiously avoided since her own wedding, is Chuck’s best man. And Serena, of course, is Blair’s maid of honour. And she can’t, cannot do it; she will just die if she does walk down an aisle with Nate Archibald.
She wants to say so, wants to yell it and cry about it, but this is Blair’s wedding so she doesn’t, she just hooks her arm through his and pretends it is not a big deal.
She pretends, also, not to realize that he doesn’t have a girlfriend, and that she doesn’t spend nearly the entire ceremony thinking about what that might mean.
He drops pecans onto the plate that holds her half-eaten piece of wedding cake so that they form a smiley face, takes a seat next to her, and touches her cheek. She stops breathing, leans into him the slightest bit.
“It’s your best friend’s wedding,” he tells her softly (and stops touching her, keeps the kind of distance that friends should have). “She’s marrying your brother. These are two of the people you’ve known for nearly all your life. And you look like you’re at a funeral.”
It’s scary, but she gathers her courage and forces herself to, and finds herself falling into his navy blue eyes so easily; if she’d made herself be brave right from the beginning, could it have been this easy all along?
“I’m sorry,” she says, and she means to be apologizing for her general lack of happiness on this day, but it comes out solemn and strained and I’m sorry I broke your heart; I’m sorry I broke mine, too; I’m sorry this is all I ever seem to do.
“It’s okay,” he says, and his mouth grins but his eyes don’t even come close. He touches her cheek again, a finger gently poking the stop where her dimple usually lies, a spot he must have memorized years and years ago. “Smile for me, S.”
She does, because it’s the least she can do for him, forces the corners of her lips to turn upward.
“That’s my girl,” he comments approvingly, casually, but it hits her right in the heart.
They stay there, best man and maid of honour, smiling sweetly at each other for everyone to see.
“Don’t you think about it?” Us. Her voice sounds broken even to her own ears.
Nate scoffs, shakes his head a little, as if he can’t believe she’d ask. “Of course I do.”
They sit there, and they smile.
Serena and Nate chase Chuck and Blair’s limo down the street, throwing confetti and yelling have fuuun!, and when they stop, when they’re alone, almost-but-not-quite out of her husband’s sight, he reaches out to hug her.
She stops him, bats his hands away, knows that she won’t trust herself if he does.
(It does feel like a funeral, their own, but she can’t bring herself to say goodbye.
And neither can he, it seems, his fingers tugging at her hair like they used to when they were so much younger, when they had so much possibility; he says, “I always…” and leaves it at that.)
Three months after Chuck and Blair are married, two months after the honeymoon, Serena receives a giddy phone call.
Blair’s pregnant.
Everyone’s happy, everyone’s thrilled, Serena included: she can’t wait to be an aunt.
She tells Tripp over dinner, some pasta thing that he loves but she’s never really liked.
His eyebrows rise and he smiles at her across the table, almost mischievously, and she has a flash of the look on his face the day, when they were kids, that he gave her the scar she has on her wrist. She touches it without really thinking, and smiles back. This is a good day.
“It would be great if your kids, yours and Blair’s, grew up together, wouldn’t it?”
Her mouth falls open and any possible words she could use to respond get stuck in her throat.
Serena’s mother is on vacation in Morocco, her best friend is six months pregnant, her little brother is excelling at Berkley; she is twenty-three and she is fighting with her husband on the day that it happens.
They’re driving into the city, and they’re fighting, not the muted kind of arguments they’ve been having for what feels like millennia but has really only been years, but the big, ugly kind of fighting. They’re yelling at one another in the confined space of the vehicle and she’s too angry to even cry.
It’s her I’m not ready to be a mother! versus his I didn’t say right now - and this about us, not you, her not now, not anytime soon against his I want this for us, Serena; it is his declaration of I want a family with you! that sets a spark in her and has her spitting you don’t! you just want a family and I’m the one who happens to be here!
“That’s ridiculous, Serena,” he says in a quieter voice, and he seems genuinely wounded. “I love you.”
“You don’t,” she says firmly, matching his quiet tone, and her eyes ache with unshed tears.
“What?” he turns to look at her, shocked by the certainty in her voice.
“You don’t, I know you don’t, because I don’t love you either.”
She can feel herself unravelling, but she knows it’s necessary now; she has to ruin it all before she can fix it (you can, he had said), she has to find the courage to get herself where she knows she needs to be, and with who she needs to be with (I always…). Her voice, as she starts to tell Tripp this, is deadly and quiet and calm.
And so is the accident that kills her.
Tripp wakes up after a day in a medically-induced coma a driven politician; he becomes New York’s youngest ever congressman half a year later.
Oh, the grief, it drove him into his work, is the accepted piece of gossip over the situation, but Serena knows better.
She knows that he planned her funeral, showed up in a suit and buried her with her wedding rings, and that he cried (but never publicly). She knows that he left all of her clothes, and all of her things, in the closet, but that he closes the doors and never opens them again. She knows that after he mourns, he puts himself back together and continues living without her (he has the help, after all), delegating her to his memories, the whims of his youth, the girl he might’ve loved.
But it’s not her (ex)husband Serena spies on from heaven, it’s his younger cousin.
He loved her, is what they say about Nate, and she believes it.
She knows that he attends her funeral a dishevelled mess, doesn’t quite cry but doesn’t quite manage not to. She knows that, in his childhood bedroom he digs out every relic of her, photographs and grade-school Valentines, the shirts of his she used to borrow to sleep in, every silly little present she gave him, and spends hours looking at them. She knows that he never really stops mourning, that he thinks of her everyday (of course I do), and that he suggests Serena as the middle name for Chuck and Blair’s baby girl whom he is godfather to, wanting to make sure she keeps living in some way.
And she knows that he visits her grave, always in the summetime, and brings forget-me-nots to rest on her headstone. She knows, like he knows, that those were the flowers that were growing on the side of the road where they pulled over on the summer’s day, on the way to his family’s home, the beginning of the end. They were so young, so close to the cusp of something that day, together and happy and so in need of each other that he stopped the car so that she could pull him into the backseat, so they could make love under the sun and spend the subsequent hour giggling and whispering and hoping no one would drive by on the rarely-used back road.
The last time she said I love you and meant it, she’s sure, is when she breathed it against his neck on that perfect day, the sun making the world behind her eyelids explode with colour.
fin