In Fair Manhattan - Act 2, Scene 3
"Pardon, good Mercutio, my business was great;"
Act 2, Scene 3
A clearing.
Pale beams of emerging sunlight filtered through the thick grove of sycamores like warning pinpricks: night was retreating from Central Park - stars were disappearing unseen above all of Manhattan, twinkling in vain as they mourned the fierce competition from flashing headlights and sky scraping buildings dripping in neon and flooded with people who forgot their nightly sentinels.
Nathaniel himself often had to be reminded of the moon's glistening companions, often glanced out a window in Connecticut or stared through an oval airplane shutter and was surprised to see them smiling down on him.
Under their weary glow, shaded in the safety and seclusion of his favorite refuge in the city's sprawling exhibit of Nature at Rest, he gutted a cigar with a razor blade and viscerally removed its tobacco. He and Eric had separated from Chuck after the conclusion of the Waldorf-Rose masquerade ball and, upon purchasing some cheap cups of coffee and devouring them in several large gulps, found themselves wondering where the devil their best friend/stepbrother had stolen off to.
Not only were they increasingly concerned for his safety, but he held the keys to Nate's cherry red Ferrari.
To pass the time, they turned up the ringers on their cellular phones and retreated into the comfortable darkness of an old secret haunt to share a hearty breakfast of cannabis (for Nathaniel) and cherry danishes (for Eric) and several more paper cups of bitter black brew.
“Where the hell is he?” Nate paused to lick the outside of the cigar, and rolled the brown paper carefully over its new contents. “Are you sure he didn't go back to the Palace?”
Eric shook his head and glanced down at his phone's dormant touchscreen. “Not according to Vanya.”
Between the two of them, Eric knew he and Nate had already left Chuck at least seven voice mails inquiring after his whereabouts. The staff at the Palace swore up and down that he had not come through their front or service entrances, and several maids and bellhops had knocked on 1812's locked door to make sure he had not somehow evaded their security's attentions. Either Chuck had stolen Nate's Ferrari for a joyride with whatever willing strumpet he had happened across, or he had gone to the new condo his father and Eric's mother, Lily, had just finished decorating for their new family.
They were willing to believe the second only after they had exhausted every other possibility. Chuck loathed staying with his father.
“There is a note waiting for his return,” Eric leaned back on his elbows to passively observe and carefully appreciate the slow death of night. “Delivered by courier from the Waldorf-Roses, on behalf of a man of the house.”
Nate looked across the grass at his younger friend, his handsome brow chiseled in concentrated thought. “What business does Cyrus have with Chuck?”
“Perhaps it is not from Lord Cyrus.”
Eric puckered his lips together and met Nate's eyes with a certain knowing pity. He had, after all, been a witness to his stepbrother's brash and none-too-subtle actions at the masquerade ball: the person responsible for the streaming video on Gossip Girl's front page had not been the only party-goer to view glimpses of Lady Blair's impropriety. And before he had been foisted into Princess Serena's golden arms, Aaron Rose's face had held nothing but contempt and aggravation at the presence of a red devil darkening his stepmother's heavenly marble nest.
“Then who? Not his son Aaron?” Nate clicked the puzzle pieces together as he fished through the pockets of his discarded coat for an engraved lighter.
“You've heard about the...incidents between Lady Blair's band of followers and Serena's charge, Jenny Humphrey, haven't you?”
The Archibald heir was lost momentarily in a haze of slowly twirling smoke, but when his face emerged surrounded by curling wisps of ephemeral gray tendrils, it was quirked slightly with amusement. “I heard from Serena that they were more along the lines of civil brawls that she was only barely able to keep from exploding into outright social scandals. But yes, I did hear all about them when she took it upon herself to enlighten me yesterday over our customary cup of mid-morning coffee.”
For the life of him, Eric could not understand how Nate became more eloquent while under the influence of his apothecary's pricier inoculations. Pricier, he supposed, because they were so swift.
“Did she also tell you that Aaron has had it with the hostility and is prepared to take drastic action against Chuck himself should Gossip Girl report any more incidents?”
A shadow fell over them, darker even than those cast by the canopy of trees.
“Aaron Rose subscribes to Gossip Girl blasts?” Chuck's lips twisted upwards in what could certainly never be called a smile, but rather an impressive affectation. “And here I thought he was too preoccupied selling his overindulgent finger paintings to the ignorant bourgeois.”
Nate got over the surprise of Chuck's uncharacteristically abrupt arrival, only to be immediately bowled over by the appearance of his best friend in exactly the same ensemble he had been wearing upon their exit from the Waldorf-Rose penthouse elevator, right down to the steadily worsening haphazardly crooked wrinkle in his dark red trousers.
“Some might call you the ignorant bourgeois,” he managed to say, after removing the blunt from its perfectly molded position between his lips and offering it to Chuck in a silent way born from years of such brotherly divvying, “considering your father has asked him to provide artwork for The Palace's executive suites.”
Chuck removed his rumpled jacket and dug through its pockets for some jangling object before flinging the whole thing aside aside, rather than accepting the proffered morning treat, much to the intense surprise of his bleary-eyed comrades. Nate and Eric exchanged bewildered looks through the now heavy curtain of smog.
“A pithy attempt at a peace offering.” He dangled the set of keys from their yellow, red, white, and green striped chain before tossing them onto Nate's own wadded up jacket.
“What took you so long?” Eric wondered, sweeping his fingers through his hair and wetting the locks with vestiges of the ground's morning dew. “You swiped Nate's keys and vanished for...” he consulted the golden watch on his wrist and raised his eyebrows when he noted the passage of time, “five and a half hours.”
“He gave us the slip,” Nate accused, and his sapphire eyes held in them the accusation most of Manhattan would attribute to Chuck Bass's nocturnal wanderings. “And stole my damn car to give it to someone else.”
Chuck lit a cigarette that had been dangling unused between his fingertips and enjoyed a slow inhalation before he chose to answer. “I apologize for the disappearing act. I had very important business to take care of,” a much more convincing representation of what normal people deigned a smile appeared on his dry, chapped, vaguely reddened lips, “it was so important that I had to forget my courtesy and good manners.”
At that, the two golden-haired boys snorted in perfect unison. Their friend was known for many things; his reputation spanned the isle of Manhattan, up and down the East Side, across the park to the west, and down the numbered streets and across the tree-lined avenues to the financial district and the lower reaches of urban sprawl, across the East River and Hudson, even to the outer burroughs and the foreign country that was New Jersey. Hardly any of those things involved courtesy in the strictest sense of the word, and none of them could be mistaken for good manners.
“In other words,” Nate snickered, “important business didn't involve the removal of your scarf?”
Eric sucked in a breath to keep from laughing outright. Beside him, Chuck's famous smirk was in full effect. “It wasn't chilly at all this morning.”
“Oh, then you did take the scarf off?”
“That's a very...” Chuck took a drag as he considered his vocabulary. “Polite and courteous way to put it.”
“Yes,” Nate, bolstered by the jolt from his favorite insubstantial breakfast, sat up straight to engage further in their verbal duel. “I'm Nathaniel Archibald, the master of courtesy and manners. The finest company for the blushing pink...flowers you and your inattentive and neglectful manners leave wanting when you slip off into the night with those insipid debutantes you've come to loathe so much.”
Chuck eyed the dwindling amount of cannabis left for Nate's greedy consumption and chuckled, a trace of mirth dancing behind his dark eyes. “The pink flowers.”
“You heard me, man.”
“Well, then, by all means,” Chuck exhaled a puff of smoke, curving his lips and blowing just so to form a perfect, wavering ring. “Perhaps you can tutor me in the art of wooing one of your polite and courteous pink flowers.”
“Give up my valuable trade secrets?” Nate distorted his features, the better to look mock affronted at the very thought. “Not when we're finally having an actual conversation. Isn't this better than your half-conscious whiskey-drenched ramblings about the terrible state of your oh-so-cursed life? I was beginning to think I was going to have to call Carter Baizen and arrange a lost weekend to snap you out of your privileged depression. You were beginning to sound like me.”
The cigarette burned itself out in his grasp before Chuck answered, and even then his eyes stared sightlessly past the line of trees at something Eric and Nate could only guess about. “That won't be necessary.”
“Are you sure?” Eric had heard the tales from upperclassmen about the debauchery and subsequent self-discovery achievable at one of Carter Baizen's famous lost weekends, though he had never been able to witness or experience the fun for himself. The prospect of gaining admittance to a real festivity not bogged down by adults or propriety sounded like just the thing to really snap his stepbrother out of his self-described rut. “I'm sure mom wouldn't mind me tagging along, if she thought it would make you feel better.”
“I've already seen Lily this morning,” Chuck said almost so quickly that he nearly stepped on the end of his young stepbrother's well-meaning suggestion. “And she's been assured that my mood has improved.”
“What's gotten you so out-of-sorts?” Eric moved into Chuck's field of vision to capture his full attention. “Where did you disappear to?”
Thoughts of the usual opium dens and designer apothecaries filled Eric's imagination, but when he saw those chapped, dry, red lips tugged apart by humored dimples in full cheeks and smoldering purpose in the sharp set of that angular jaw, he realized he could not possibly cobble together an explanation for what had so completely and quickly turned weeks of bitter pulp into instant, flourishing fermented wine. Something tensed in the back of his neck, at the base of his skull, urged him to recall some knowledge he knew he possessed but could not gain access to for the heady weight of a dawning contact high and the desperate need for honest-to-God rest in his very own bed.
“I've got things to do.” Chuck planted his feet on the ground and hoisted himself back into a straight-backed standing position. His hands found their way to his jacket, which he swung back over his shoulders and slipped his arms into with one single, fluid motion.
“Are you going to come to dinner tonight?” Eric asked every night, though he always knew the answer.
This time, however, rather than simply saying 'no', or scoffing at the mere suggestion, Chuck cordially shook his head and crushed the cigarette under his heel to ensure its effective death. “I have a meeting with a queen.”
He left Nate and Eric as he had found them, alone in the grove of sycamores with only their cups of coffee and the invisible light of the stars to witness their bewildered gazes.
“Do we know any queens?” Eric inquired, at precisely the same second Nate took a final puff from from his blunt and asked, “He has a meeting in Queens?”
"and in such a case as mine a man may strain courtesy."