In Fair Manhattan - Act 1, Scene 4
Act 1, Scene 4
A hall in the Waldorf-Rose house.
“Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!”
The three most faithful servants of the Waldorf-Rose household stood in a corner of the room with their masks covering their faces. Beside them were Nelly Yuki and Kati Farkas, both bedecked in periwinkle blue and glancing down at their cell phones every three seconds to see if Gossip Girl would announce the arrival of Chuck Bass, whom they had seen enter the party between Penelope’s perennial crush Nathaniel Archibald and Princess Serena’s younger brother Eric, and in a red devil mask no less. It was mystifying to them that no one else had seemed to notice that distinct, defined jaw, or the blazing inferno that lit the black spaces of his tempestuous eyes.
The house’s diligent maid and attendant, Dorota, bustled around the party offering drinks and snacks to the many guests in all their finery; Lord Cyrus rose took a goblet of wine from her proffered tray, then stood regally atop the living room’s chaise lounge with his mask sliding off his shining red face as he pronounced in a booming, buoyant voice, “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen! Mazel tov!” he paused to smile romantically at Lady Eleanor, who rolled her eyes fondly, “Let’s dance!”
The band struck up a lively tune as the Lord descended from his soapbox to thunderous applause and greeted Princess Serena with a jovial hug. “Serena, Serena,” he beamed up at her; the good Lord came to underneath her chin, drawn up to his full height, but she wore heels with her yellow Valentino gown and towered over him like an Amazon. Her gentle, tinkling laugh and warm, familial hug set her apart from that fearsome image, which served her purpose well.
She had come to talk peace.
On the other side of the room, confined in sinister shards of shadow beside Eric, Chuck saw through the parting crowd of dancers to a pale girl dressed all in black. Her midnight hair fell effortlessly in gentle waves upon her neck, which was bare and milky white in the light of the moonbeam she danced in; he saw only her harlot red lips contrasted so wickedly against her bone china skin, wanted to see the face that hid behind plated gold and mocked him from afar.
There was something familiar in her demure smile; something he had imagined once before...
“Who’s that girl?” He asked his step-brother, confident he would know the answer. “Dancing with the knight?”
So trained were Chuck’s eyes on the dark-haired flower, he did not see the hesitation in Eric’s face. “I don’t know. It is a masquerade, after all.”
Chuck had been with hundreds-very likely thousands-of women in his young life. He had beheld beauty, seen its true form and shape, heard its voice honey-soft in his ear in the midst of heavy breathing and delicious sweat-drenched skin. There had been more than one maiden to deliver herself, a virgin sacrifice, to the pleasures of his bed; but never had he seen one so breathtakingly pure, so delicate, so untouched. No man’s hand had ever rested against the pounding of her heart; no mouth had ever tasted the sweet red forbidden fruit that was so unapologetically displayed on the bow of her plump lips.
He saw her dancing with another man, but she moved like she was alone. Alone in a room full of strangers.
Chuck Bass saw her and he wanted her.
And Chuck Bass always got what he wanted.
Near him, Serena nursed a festive cup of wine with the man she almost thought of as a second grandfather. The tiny golden hairs on her arms prickled at the low, forbidden voice rumbling within range of her ears because it was the voice of her dastardly step-brother, come to rouse up trouble when her main goal was to hearten peace. As the Princess knew, he was very much loathed not only by those whom in the 5th Avenue penthouse resided, but by many of their supporters in the streets, who for some reason pinned all manners of violent peace breaking on him.
And, she knew Aaron was in a corner somewhere, ready to loathe any peasant who may invade his father’s celebration and mock his noble wishes with their upper middle class candor.
“What’s the matter, my dear?” Cyrus found her displeasure, a wintry thundercloud in the middle of springtime revelry. “You don't look happy.”
“It’s nothing,” she managed the sunny smile that often earned her praise for illuminating the entire city. Her teeth clenched to control the volume of her statement. “What do you think, milord? Can you be convinced to meet with my step-father and discuss a way to end all of this hostility?”
Lord Cyrus crinkled his brow and peered carefully into her eyes. “Is he willing to renegotiate his contract with The Palace?”
Serena hesitated, fingers sore around the stem of her glass. “No.” At Cyrus’s angry look, she pressed on, “But he is willing to renegotiate his contract with you.”
She saw the machinations behind his carefully drawn face, but she did not receive her answer, for her worst fear came true. Aaron Rose, her friend and the man who had made her meeting with Lord Cyrus possible in the first place, had spotted her brazen step-brother and stepped between them to inform his father of the intrusion. “That man in the devil’s mask-it’s Chuck Bass. He’s making you look bad in front of all your guests.”
Father turned back to son and laughed, the same barking laugh he often bestowed upon much less serious situations. “Relax, Aaron. He hasn’t done anything to deserve that.” When he saw how dead-set Aaron was against Chuck Bass’s presence in the penthouse, Lord Rose’s face hardened uncharacteristically and he took his son by the shoulders to will reason into his very bones. “Just ignore him.”
“I can’t.” Aaron had seen the way he was staring at his step-sister. She was too naïve to know how to resist him. “I won’t.”
“You will,” Cyrus’ voice was hard as granite and pointed as a newly sharpened razor. “Now have some fun. All right? Why don’t you two dance?”
Aaron nodded and Serena moved dutifully to link her arm through his own. But before she could pull him into the thick of the festivities, he cast an insolent glower in Chuck’s direction. The only problem was, where previously there had been two men leaning together against the far wall, he saw only the mild Eric van der Woodsen. And when he scanned the party for a sign of his impossible-to-miss costume, his view was obscured by the crush of bodies that populated the penthouse living room.
Chuck had seized his opportunity, and swam through the sea of party goers to where the dark angel stood beside the tall knight. Far from her step-brother’s fiery gaze, the devil moved deftly behind the pillar against which she leaned and stood so still to enjoy the entertainment of the evening’s hired band. He pressed his back against the cold marble, felt his feet in contact with the black-and-white tile, and knew exactly where she was behind him from the heat that rose in his chest.
As her escort became enchanted by a troupe of acrobatic performers in the center of the room, Chuck slid his arm around the column to touch the silk that bound her tiny hand together; then, without hesitation, he grasped the black glove and pulled it off her arm. There was a soft, girlish intake of breath and he quickly slid his fingers through hers, penetrating the space between them and tugging her from her place to stand nearer to him than to the loathsome knight. He still could not see her face, but he could smell the sweet perfume of her bare neck, could appreciate the swell of her breasts beneath the pitch black of her skintight bodice.
He had never craved to kiss a patch of skin so fiercely in his entire life.
Blair felt something in her core, something warm and slippery that she could not give a name. Then, there was a fluttering against her ribcage, like her heart was beating a tattoo of hummingbird’s wings against the inside of her chest. And then came soft fingers grasping roughly at her knuckles, and she was pulled urgently around the column that stood between the penthouse’s illuminated living room and its darkened foyer.
“That was a bit rough of me,” he said, not in a whisper but a low, criminally slow drawl. “Come closer.”
His words were more of an order than a request, but something in her didn’t mind so very much. In any other situation, she would have ripped her hand away and demanded that, whoever this vagrant was, he remove himself from her presence at once and never spoil her pretty life with his squalor again. But the slow string music urged her body to welcome his scalding touch, and she obeyed.
“I can make it up to you,” he urged her to speak with his dark, slanted brow. When her lips did not part, because she was too busy trying to steady the tremble behind them, his hot breath was on her hand, and then his lips were, and the world went very white and very colorful for one brilliant, electrifying moment. “If you’ll let me.”
She felt the under silk of her dress against her thighs and realized he had pressed nearer.
“Let you what?” Blair managed to whisper, curious as to how he planned to apologize. Perhaps there would be chocolate involved.
When he spoke, a secretively pleased shiver vibrated up and down her spine. “Let me kiss you.”
This was not a request either, and in fact was a demand. She heard it in the steady way he breathed against her knuckles.
Men had asked to kiss her before, but she had never felt so powerfully moved to let them.
“Sir...”
She felt the blush paint her cheeks and was glad the mysterious stranger could not see her behind her golden mask. He waited for the rest of her sentence, which was more than any suitor before him had done-all they had wanted to do was get to the next winning point about themselves, about how great a match for her they were, about how beautiful she was, how brilliantly their engagement ring would sparkle on her left hand. She preferred the bewildering silence; she felt like what she said mattered.
“You don’t have anything to atone for. We’re,” Blair cleared her throat and unconsciously tensed her fingers around his.
He squeezed back, more intentionally, and her blush renewed.
“We’re only holding hands,” she continued, lower than before because Marcus reached for her other hand and clasped it in his own. “You haven’t done anything wrong-after all; pilgrims touch the hands of saints, when they go to church and pray.”
Her dark companion chuckled low in the back of his throat, and her eyes fluttered closed as she appreciated the rich, smooth sound of it. So there was chocolate involved...
“Don’t saints have lips?”
Her eyelashes slowly parted and Blair smiled despite herself, and was very aware of how very sensitive her own lips were to the boisterous, invigorating air. Why had she never noticed how every nerve ending that resided beneath their pale pink folds was easily lit aflame at the mere thought of touching someone else’s hot skin?
“Yes, pilgrim,” she answered sweetly, her smile turning into a smirk. It was fun to deny him at every turn. “Lips they pray with.”
“Well then, saint,” he nimbly countered her, and a thrill went up her arms as his grip tightened further. “Let lips do what hands do.”
“What’s that?”
And then her hand slipped out of Lord Marcus’s and was suddenly set upon a broad, firm chest, beneath which beat the steady rhythm of a pounding heart. A smell invaded her nostrils, musky and earthy, something not tainted by artificial soaps or colognes. His arm went around her waist and pressed her against his torso, and she felt every part of him against every part of her, but there was no more blood in her left to blush. Instead, Blair paled considerably within this illicit embrace-the man society yearned for her to call fiancé stood not two feet away-and whimpered slightly when the same breath that had blown over her knuckles flowed past her dark red lips and floated slowly down her throat.
He smelled like she imagined a man ought to smell.
“They pray,” he shared her every labored breath. “I’m praying to kiss you. So grant my prayer.”
Blair grappled for something to keep their game alive, something to match or best him with. Never before had she been allowed to engage in an unmonitored conversation that allowed her to use the knowledge she had gleaned from so many hours of reading and learning from books-not the histories or the sciences, but the romances Penelope gifted her and which she kept hidden between her mattresses.
But, she was carved in her place, like a statue of the Virgin Mary or one of the saints they were so hypothetically referring to, and knew deep down that the words in those dime store novellas were not meant for her to live by. So, she sighed regretfully, “Saints don’t move. Not even when they grant prayers.”
“Then you stay still,” he commanded something of her for the third time that night, and for the third time she found it excited her more than it should have. No man had ever insisted she do anything-it was always ‘Lady Blair, please do this,’ and ‘Oh, my beautiful Lady, would you mind if...’ and on and on until she was sick and tired of granting their wishes with a sunny smile and a ladylike nod of her ladylike head. This man in the shadows told her to stay still, so she became as rooted to the ground as an ancient oak.
The pyrotechnicians her step-father had hired for the evening chose that moment to release their host of fireworks, and in their bright bursts of white-hot illumination, she saw every sloping curve and dipping jagged valley of his uniquely handsome face. His delicious lips quirked and moved to hers.
“I'll pray...”
When his lips touched hers and he felt her move inexpertly beneath him, Chuck pulled the dark-haired girl closer, turning them both around so he could push her against the sturdy marble pillar that her knight so diligently guarded in the light. In the darkness, her little gasps for air thrilled his very blood as it pumped adrenaline in his veins and sent the old familiar feeling of lust cascading down his torso. But when he pressed against her little body and felt her hips under the layers of silk, chiffon and lace, it wasn’t old or familiar, and it was the very opposite of boring.
She moved differently, because she didn’t know how. She wasn’t like the other virgins he’d shoved into walls or tasted in the night; she was genuine and pure, was really parting her lips to admit his probing tongue on pure physical instinct and not because it was what she thought he expected her to do.
Something different, he had found. It pervaded his mind and addled his brains, let him know that even though he was in the dark and did not need his full vision, when he did go stumbling back into the light he would be seeing three of everything and it would all be violently bright and better, because he had sucked the blood red lipstick from her mouth and savored the sweet wetness of her tongue against his.
When she moaned, it was soft, and prompted Chuck to stop and admire what little he could see of her.
“Now I've given my sin to you,” he jested, watching her pulse beat in her naked throat.
When he saw her pout in the faded light, it was the sexiest pout he had ever seen.
“My lips are covered in your sin?”
Chuck saw that he had tainted her for good, but that she didn’t yet know what to do with the stain. He smirked and leaned back in to share her breath, pausing mere centimeters from the dewy morning rose that bloomed in her swollen, sinful lips. By her very nature, her sweet and mocking mouth, she encouraged his crime against her sweet chastity.
“I guess I'll have to take it back,” was his next husky decree.
And then, he took it.
She was ready this time, and Blair moved her mouth in measure with his as best she could; he had clearly done this many more times than she ever would, probably with many more partners with infinitely more experience, but when he groaned into her she felt it resonate even in her lowest depths and even further below, and somehow she thought he didn’t mind her naïveté that much at all.
She smirked against him, feeling like her old self-before the illness, before the suitors, before the pressure of finding a suitable husband to please her loving mother, delight her proud step-father, and fulfill the vicarious expectations of every society matron on the Upper East Side. A time before she fully realized how foolish her childhood fantasies were, before she had come to the conclusion that there was no man to take her into the world and show her the raw gratification that came from not only being in the world, but from living in it.
The devil pulled away, and she smirked wider. It was obvious he had done a great deal of living. “Did you go to a special kissing school for billionaire playboys, or something?”
She saw him grin back at her, was eagerly awaiting his retort when there was an affronted ‘ahem’ from their left, and she turned to find her faithful nurse Dorota standing beside them. Her hands were on her hips, her mouth was set in a severely straight line that read ‘God always watching, Miss Blair’, and the stony disapproval on her normally affectionate and smiling face made Blair gulp slightly in guilt.
But it felt so good to feel guilty; she couldn’t help but stay in the stranger’s arms.
“Miss,” Dorota snarled protectively at the boy damaging her precious charge’s purity, “your mother is looking for you.”
The dark angel looked up at him for a brief moment, and then she moved back into the light and out of his world.
Chuck watched the crowd swallow her whole, but saw the top of her feathered hair above the other masks. “Who is her mother?”
The maid stopped in her tracks, for she had been moving away, and snarled at him again. He merely stared evenly at her, thoroughly not intimidated by her oddly territorial overprotectiveness; all he wanted to know was where that heavenly creature came from, where she got those lips, and that voice that made him want to peel the dress slowly off her lily-white skin and tenderly kiss every inch of it as it became exposed-to claim every part of her as his, and his only...
“Her mother the Lady of the house,” said the maid, and Chuck stopped his daydreaming. “She a good Lady, Mr. Bass. I nurse her daughter.”
The overprotectiveness made a lot more sense in wake of this statement, as did her expressed loathing for him-she knew exactly who he was and exactly how much he should not be standing in the Waldorf-Rose foyer with the good family’s one and only virginal daughter.
“You go now, sir, before I tell someone what you up to.”
Chuck put his hand against the pillar to support his weight, and lifted the devil’s mask off his brow. “She’s a Waldorf?”
The maid nodded shortly, and then followed the path his dark angel had taken.
From around her came Eric, then Nathaniel, both unmasked and grinning ignorantly at him.
“Come on,” said Eric, clapping Chuck’s shoulder and pulling him away from the fateful pillar. “We’re leaving in style.”
Chuck followed listlessly, allowed his step-brother and best friend to steer him towards the waiting elevator that would deliver him from the house of his father’s enemies, the house of those who held his life in their very hands; every bone in his body was aware of how much trouble had had just landed himself in.
They joined the line streaming steadily between the shining doors, which caught her reflection in a distorted band of gold and he remembered suddenly where he had imagined that demure smile before. Dreamers often lie in bed while they dream about the truth. No, he had never been with a Queen.
Not yet.
As the revelers disbanded, Blair moved to Dorota and hugged her like she had done every night before bed, since she was a small child. Perhaps more out of habit than any remaining motherly affection for her charge, the Polish countess stroked Blair’s hair in return and kissed her cheek goodnight. As she tried to move away and clean up the mess the Eleanor Waldorf-Rose’s guests had left behind, however, Lady Blair clutched her wrist in a newly strengthened iron grip and held her fast.
“Wait,” her voice was soft and modest, a far cry from the throaty tone it had held in the wake of her indiscretions. “Who is that man?”
Dorota bristled and waved to Carter Baizen, whom she knew all too well. “The son and heir of Mister Baizen.”
Blair withheld a frustrated growl and restated her question. “The one getting into the elevator with Nate. Who is he?”
“Well, that one,” Dorota informed her impatiently, “is young Eric.”
“Who’s the one with them?” Blair snapped, annoyed at her nurse’s artful dodging. “The one who wouldn’t dance?”
“I...” Dorota examined a nonexistent crack in the pristine ceiling. “I don’t know his name.”
“Dorota.” Blair clenched her fingers tighter around the maid’s arm and knitted her dark eyebrows together over the crackling lightning that bit behind her eyes. “You know I hate secrets more than anything.”
Her nurse looked at her, sadly and sympathetically and judgmentally, though Blair understood none of these emotions. She understood only that something was being kept from her, something vitally important to her very survival in the world-if she did not find out the name of that darkly handsome devil who had kissed her and awakened feelings latent in her stomach she never would have discovered otherwise... It was hours until she could command her minions to discover his identity for her! If she did not know his name that instant, could not let its beautiful syllables caress her lips in a breathy whisper, she felt she would shrivel up and die at the lack of knowledge.
“His name is Chuck,” said Dorota quite suddenly and very ruthlessly. “He’s a Bass. The only son of the man who betrayed your step-father.”
Blair's heart dropped to her knees and fell silent. That name could never pass smoothly over her tongue.
“For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.”