In Fair Manhattan - Act 2, Scene 1
Act 2, Scene 1
A bedroom in the Waldorf-Rose household.
“Can I go forward when my heart is here?”
Her miserable face was the last thing Chuck saw before the elevator door slid shut.
The golden P above their heads slowly faded out and gave way to numbers that represented hollow floors with empty halls and deserted rooms for ghostly shells of people-hollow, empty, and deserted, they walked forever without a purpose, because Chuck felt with some sort of ethereal certainty (from the profound way his heart was beating a hole in the cavern of his chest) that the only destination worth reaching was the warm and silky embrace of her porcelain skin wrapped uncertainly but willingly around him and pulling them so flush against each other that it was impossible to be certain where his one-of-a-kind black dress shirt ended and the dark lace of her bodice began.
He pinched the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes against the blinding, almost fluorescent light in the elevator. With every taunting little ding that signaled the rapidity of their descent, he was painfully aware of just how quickly she was slipping away from him.
But, he was insane to think he could ever reel her back in. His dark and mysterious angel, with the witty mind and the beautifully quirked eyebrows and the ruby red lips, was more off-limits than even the wealthy Republican Senatorial candidate’s very talented triplets or the influential French dignitary’s pale white and flaxen blonde daughter.
The moment his lips had melted against hers, he had as good as signed his death warrant.
Blair Waldorf was every bit the enigma old folk tales were made of. For over a year, she had been confined to her tower bedroom, riddled with some unnamed illness that had kept her name and freshly ripened flower of a face gleaming from the glossy folds of every northeastern society magazine, and even a few western European ones. That was, perhaps, how the British Lord Marcus Beaton had first learned about the woman Lady Eleanor Waldorf-Rose was so keen to have him call his bride.
Blair Beaton. He had only known her for less than fifteen minutes, and the thought already made him ill.
Had he ever touched her as Chuck had? He had seen them dancing quite properly to a stuffy waltz, but she had moved so singularly and independently of his stretching and searching hands, that she had seemed to be in the room with no one but herself. Had their lips ever met like two cords of white-hot fire? They had hardly touched hands the entire evening.
No matter what her domineering mother or her meddling maid (who had impeccably awful timing) or any of the little vultures she called friends said or thought or wanted, Chuck Bass had more of a claim over their virginal ‘Lady B’ after several feverish embraces than her reputed fiancé had after weeks of dutiful courtship.
The doors opened and Nathaniel clapped him heartily on the back as Eric pulled them both into the rapidly crowding front lobby. Chuck glanced at both of them and saw from the familiar glaze in his best friend’s eyes that he had managed to procure his favorite poison from his favorite apothecary, who had undoubtedly also snuck into the party with an ill-acquired invitation and tainted the feast with his designer wares. Eric was not under any influence but his own good will, which worked better in Chuck’s favor. His step-brother was somehow even more perceptive after a few glasses of red wine.
He made his decision without one more wasteful thought of consequences or the fallacies of his cynical mind.
“Nathaniel,” Chuck drawled convincingly. “Give me your keys. There’s no way you can drive.”
Nate looked as though he very much wanted to argue, but then something more interesting caught his fancy and he chuckled. The keys he pulled from his pocket all dangled from one chain-there were sharp little brass ones which presumably opened specific doors in the Archibald household, jagged silver ones friends and admirers had bestowed upon him as tokens of entry into their domains, and several specific circular ones that opened penthouses up and down the island of Manhattan. The one Chuck wanted had the letters W and R engraved on its head in ornate curls and loops.
“Here, man.”
Chuck snatched the offering out of his friend’s proffered hand and immediately disappeared into the massive crush of people.
Blair knew that, at some point, Dorota had taken advantage of her dazed immobility and led her up the curving staircase to her tranquil, blue bedroom. Judging from the facts that her hair had been released from its pinned and coiffed prison and was free to dangle loosely around her bare shoulders, that her shoulders were bare and her lifelong companion had utilized her usual discretion and gentleness in undressing her and replacing her evening garments with a pale yellow silk nightgown, and that she smelled perfumed and felt scrubbed clean, she had been in her little tower for quite some time.
The rooms beneath her feet were still, presumably because the staff had completed their duties and the Waldorf-Rose home was exactly as it had been before the joyous festivities. Any lingering wine stains would be remedied by Dorota’s special and mysterious concoctions the following morning, when Blair would sit down for a quiet breakfast with her mother, step-father, and step-brother. They would enjoy freshly picked fruit and pulp-free orange juice while Cyrus sipped specially-mixed Brazilian coffee straight from a carafe and her mother enjoyed a perfunctory sip from a well-hidden wine snifter.
And if Blair was very, very lucky, Lord Marcus Beaton would be far away, enjoying his breakfast in England with the queen or his staff of unsmiling guards, or whatever it was he did at his estate in London. She hoped desperately to never find out first-hand.
Her mother had urged her not six hours before to consider his outstretched hand in marriage, but as hard as Blair had tried to smile at his charming accent, the attractive upsweep of his ash blond hair, and the delightful crinkle around his eyes when he smiled down at her with his rows and rows of bright and straight and perfectly pearly white teeth, she could not think of marrying him. A title and all its amenities were nothing if she was not in love.
As a little girl, she had thrilled to the enchanting fairytales her father had read to her from the pages of old and worn and much-beloved volumes, and when she sat on the edge of her window seat and stared unseeingly at the gleaming vastness of her empty kingdom, Blair found herself wishing desperately that her father would hear her plight from across the glittering ocean and return to her.
She pressed her white forehead against the cool, unmoving glass, and sighed. Her breath stained the chocolate box view much like her mother’s insistence on Lord Marcus fogged every wish and hope she had ever dared to dream about her future.
“So, this is your bed?”
The reflection in her window slammed into focus, and in between the white pinpricks in the velvet blue sky she saw the candlelit face of the only man she had ever kissed. Her lips, now pale and pink and a little dry around the edges and slightly cracked in the middle, pulled together in a pucker that seemed to reach out towards him. Come closer, please, come closer.
“You’re Chuck Bass.” It escaped her in one absurd breath. The name was much easier to whisper than she had thought.
His fingers, as deft and sure as they had been on the buttons of her bodice and against the frayed nerves of her shuddering skin, traced nonsensical patterns on the silken bedcovers that adorned her queen-size bed. They seemed to write everything he had ever done with a woman, everything he could do and probably wanted to do with her, possibly right then, quite obviously right where he pressed his palm against the sheets and let it linger.
A ghost traced those same patterns on the small of her back. Blair blamed the wind.
“I can be whoever you want me to be,” he stepped into a shaft of moonlight, and smirked beguilingly. “But yes. I’m Chuck Bass.”
The array of questions she should have asked-Who let you in here? What makes you think you can be here? (It’s highly, highly inappropriate, and my reputation will be utterly tarnished.) Where did you really learn to kiss like that and would you please teach me some more? (No, no, no, no, no.) Where did you get that candle, by the way? (Someone’s going to miss it and figure out you’re in here.) Why are you in here? How did you get in here?-festered in her brain as she reached for her charmeuse dressing gown.
Instead, she did what seemed to come naturally whenever she spoke to him.
She made something up.
“What if I want you to be Lord Marcus?”
Her fingers stumbled and slipped on the knot she was trying to tie, and with a remarkable swiftness Blair thought must have been what had led him to her-both at the party behind the pillar, and then in the dark silver shadows of her private bedroom-he strode across the distance between them and did up her robe for her. He left his hand pressed against her bellybutton, and a swarm of heat bloomed rose red across her torso.
Then, all she could see were his dark eyes as they drilled into her own and all she could feel was his hand as it swept around her waist in a slow, deliberate drag, and came to rest where the phantom trills of his fingers still danced. Blair was freshly pomaded and ready for someone to tuck her tired body in-between the cool embrace of her bed sheets.
Chuck smelled like cigar smoke, alcohol she could not put a name to because her mother forbid her to even look at it, much less consume it, and a raw cologne that pressed against her senses like a heavy hammer, the oppressive heat of a mid-July day, the vibrating hum of a song played at too high a volume...
“You don’t.”
She really, really didn’t.
Chuck grasped the mellifluous cloth that flowed like a slow-moving stream across her back and rippled it in his hand. She was exposed in front of him, a little ivory statue with long and natural lashes underneath half-moon networks of pale and beautiful veins. He licked his lips, and then swept his tongue across the chapped cliff that jutted out so dangerously above the sweet curved stroke of her tremulous chin.
He felt her start to pull away, but when she put her hands against his chest to act as the wedge that would drive them apart, he acted with the swiftness his experience afforded him and grasped them between his own. Before she could struggle too adamantly and spoil the sumptuous symphony of her quick little breaths and uncontrollable sighs that reached crescendo in time with the pounding of her hummingbird heart, Chuck smoothed his mouth around her bottom lip and drew her into a slow, floating high the likes of which all of Nate’s best apothecaries could not provide.
He managed to keep her between him and the window for several torturously long moments, before she finally seemed to remember her modesty and successfully drew away. Chuck did not move to stop her or pull her back, but let his fingers drip away from hers one by one and watched the dark silhouette of her curves in the glowing radiance that streamed through her windowpanes.
“You should go,” she muttered, her words obscured by her fingertips on her lips. “You should really go.”
Chuck slid the robe he himself had tied in place off her left shoulder and ran his palm down to her fingers, which instinctively curled around his own as he slid their embraced hands back up the length of her stomach, over the sweet swell of her unbound breast, to rest on the pulse point just atop her clavicle.
Blair arched her head back when he nipped her earlobe and whispered, “You can’t tell me Bertie Wooster is satisfying your needs.”
“You forget who you’re talking to.”
She spun around to play the proper virgin, but the devil still held her hand in his grip and he was not letting go. “So do you.”
“How did you get in here?” Blair finally asked, the curiosity burning behind her eyes like a bonfire built of puzzlement.
Chuck tugged on her hand and pulled her to fall against his chest. “I used a key, Waldorf.”
“Why didn’t anyone see you?” She frowned and he held his candle up so the flame danced and cast shadows across her lovely, bare neck.
“They didn’t want to.” He sucked a gust of breath from her mouth and stole another invasively deep kiss. “Act happy to see me.”
Blair hated cliché’s, but there was no way to describe the way she was feeling except to say that her head was spinning; his proximity tensed all her red alerts, but the fact that he had procured a way to defy everything that was logical and right in the universe to sneak through her house and overrun the sanctity of her childhood bedroom set the romantic giggle in her heartbeat aflutter. The most romantic thing Marcus had ever done was press a chaste kiss to her knuckles and tell her she was more beautiful than any of the precious flowers that decorated her rooftop retreat.
Empty words, empty touches, empty smiles.
Everything from Chuck Bass was ablaze and thrumming with some inaudible melody. Touch me, touch me, please, touch me.
She was a proper lady who sat demurely in sunlit rooms for tea and finger sandwiches with distinguished matrons of the upper echelons of society. There were whispers that The Colony Club wanted to induct her as their youngest ever member as soon as the leaves in Rhode Island turned red and gold and she was allowed to walk the streets with the dazzling Beaton engagement diamond weighing down her ring finger.
Outwardly, she was everything a well brought up girl should be.
Inside, she wanted his hands on her every second of every day because then, she wasn’t who everyone knew she was; she wasn’t a doll, or a lady, or a prize to be auctioned off to the highest, most eligible bidder. When he touched her and she felt the guilty rush throbbing in her stomach, Blair Waldorf was just the passionate young woman The Colony Club and her ladies-in-waiting and the society pages did not want her to be. The innocence everyone else prized so highly scalded and offended and clawed inside her in a desperate attempt to be freed.
Nothing in all her years of debutante training and dainty lace doilies and girlish satin headbands permitted Chuck Bass to get within ten feet of her. Everything she had ever learned from books and tutors curled her fingers within his and screamed at her to push him away and scream for someone to save her from the fiery temptation she could smell on his skin.
“I don’t know you,” she protested. How could she be happy to see someone she did not know?
That smirk that looked so very at home on his perfectly angled face grew dim, but in its darkness it was somehow more intense.
“But you want to.”
And with that, Lady Blair could not argue.
But she heard footsteps in the hall outside, her mother going downstairs to arrange begonias or fret over hydrangeas and make up a to-do list ten miles long that Dorota would be expected to complete the following day, or perhaps Cyrus on his way to make an important business call in the private study at the end of the hall. It was even possible that Aaron had decided to make use of his guest bedroom and was passing by her closed door on a quest for a glass of water.
Whoever it was, whatever they were on their way to do, they reminded her that she and Chuck Bass were not the only two people in the universe. It was true, the thought of getting to know him, seeing what other kinds of feelings he could inspire to crack the veneer of her porcelain shell, was a very appealing one-even more appealing than blue boxes tied with white ribbons or an army of loyal servants dedicated to carrying out her intricate social plots without question. But however they would come to know each other, it could not be in her penthouse in the early hours of the morning with so many of her family members on guard to protect her virtue.
They would have to meet another time, somewhere no one would think to look for her.
Chuck Bass seemed to think much as she did, for he extinguished the candle with one gust of breath and bent down to whisper again into the keen shell of her ear. She felt his finger tracing a line across her collarbone, and realized he had pinched a bit of wax from the candlestick and was spreading it like a seal into the dip of her throat.
“Tomorrow night at nine,” he murmured in that prayerful voice she remembered him using just before their first kiss. “I’ll send a limo for you.”
“They’ll never let me out on my own.” Blair again proved she was a fast learner and rounded her blushing lips against his neck as she spoke. She heard him exhale and glanced up to see that his eyes were clenched shut and his mouth was set in a relaxed, but very intentional thin line of concentration. “The doctors haven’t said I’m allowed to be unsupervised.”
Her newest suitor, if one could call him such a tender thing, peeked at her from under his eyelids and saw her culpable frown. Without the candle to illuminate their tête-à-tête, her face seemed to shine like the polished depths of a cultured pearl. With her dressing gown dripping off her yielding body and her chocolate curls tumbling around her serene face like a dark halo, he thought she looked like a morsel of dessert fit for him to top with whipped cream and devour.
He could only imagine (and hope that he would see) what she looked like when that supple skin glowed after the sweet release of the passion she was so sheltered from. It beat against her bones like a caged bird aching to soar into the blazing sun, and he could see the tell-tale signs that a forbidden fruit was soon to be ripe for the plucking.
“You’ll think of something.”
Chuck nudged her chin like he had seen Humphrey Bogart do in an old black-and-white film and slipped from her embrace without another word.
“Turn back, dull earth, and find thy center out.”