In Fair Manhattan - Act 2, Scene 5
“Here comes the lady. Oh, so light a foot
Will ne'er wear out the everlasting flint.”
Act 2, Scene 5
A nightclub in Manhattan.
He knew the precise moment she stepped out of the cool Manhattan air and into the heady mix of sweat and lipstick that was his precious Victrola. She parted a lingering curtain of heavy cigar smoke and broke the yonder flickering lights of passing cars and neon advertisements that filtered through the doorway.
There was no reflection cast in the eyes of the main stage's most flexible dancers, nor did he catch a strain of her delicate perfume amidst the stink of electrified men and the women who sparked their desire. A hush did not fall over the club when she arrived, nor did anyone bow their heads in honor of her rare and sought after presence. Blair did not call his name; no waitress leaned over the back of his couch to inform him of a pretty young virgin girl asking to see him.
Chuck simply knew she was nearby.
His chest tightened in anticipation of those juicy lips, or of the deep cadence of her voice when she whispered. He had only ever heard her speak in whispers, and wondered if her voice was so alluring when they were not concealed in shadows or lit only by the pale light of the moon. There were heels on the floor behind him and a cord pulled at his fingers when he remembered the curve of her hips beneath the voluminous skirts of her ballgown.
She had found a way out into the world, past the golden bars on her chamber window, around the upbringing that had taught her to be conscientious and responsible. She had taken a ride in a stranger's chariot to serve as his most prized and unexpected gift.
His shoulders tensed and he sat upright in his seat, so overpowering was the sensation of her nearness that he could think only of unwrapping her the way he had the night before. There were rooms in Victrola where they could be alone, or any number of hotels whose bellhops and maids would no sooner breathe a word of his nightly activities than they would be silenced and never seen working in the city again.
Blair Waldorf was, after all, a lady, and it would not due for her to be seen gallivanting around the executive suites with the heir to Bass Industries. It would not due for anyone to recognize her in the club, and he was counting on the fact that no one would dare believe she had lowered herself to thrumming bass beats, corsets, and feather boas over hydrangeas, sparkling champagne, and orchestral string sections.
She was merely a look-a-like. Perhaps an enterprising young girl he would hire to imitate her on one of the poles or behind the bar. But not Lady Blair. Never Lady Blair. And certainly never in the company of Chuck Bass.
He had beckoned her down from her lonely tower to his own cavernous lair, and the fact that she had abandoned her overbearing mother, her judgmental nursemaid, her influential step-father, her doting stepbrother all to join him in the shadows once again...
It proved she was everything he had been waiting to find. She was a debutante, but there was nothing insipid about the way she had matched him wit for wit all the while never once arousing the suspicion of her blushing groom to be.
That made the world see her as an angel. He saw her for what she was, a quietly conniving, tragically imprisoned, overtly naïve little girl grappling to take control of her reins as a woman. The tabloids and Gossip Girl and Page Six made the mistake of calling her 'Lady B', but he would soon correct them.
Because he did not intend to measure her back for a set of angel wings. Rather, he intended to have her fitted for a regal crown befitting any rightful Queen of the Upper East Side.
His stepsister Serena was the one who thrived in the sunshine, the unfaltering Princess who prized peace and valued friendship, and forged sturdy alliances with family acquaintances, bartered business dealings that brought everyone joy and fruitfulness. She was of the house of Bass, yet dined freely with Lord Cyrus Rose and danced thoughtlessly, publicly, with his only son. She was the ray of diplomacy that kept her broad and varied circle from disintegrating or imploding. People followed her because she showed mercy and forgiveness, was tactful and things came so very easy to her.
But there were things she could not do, measures she could not take when the need arose. For though she was the pretty face that attended parties and wore fluttering gowns for people to ooh and ahh over when they saw the glossy photographs in over-hyped gossip magazines, she had no real power. There was nothing substantial to her tenuous alliances, only kind white smiles and her sterling record to back up her promises. She was a light-squared Bishop, restrained by her easily won image, resigned to the same patterns of persuasion, hindered by the same roadblocks she could not overcome.
A Queen would not be so restricted.
Blair could traverse light and dark with ease - he could teach her everything he knew about eliminating her enemies, forging shady alliances based on mistrust and born only of necessity and lack of other options, how to instill fear to get the desired results from the expendable pawns... She could make enemies if that was what needed to be done.
Serena was the cover girl for all that was “right”, but there were gaps in society she could not fill, actions she could not take for fear of ostracizing the wrong group. From what little he had seen and the abundance he had heard of her, Blair was all about necessary ostracizing. Her months of confinement had cultivated her legend, even as they had hampered her from flourishing and blooming among the living.
If there was something she was sorely missing, it was that which Chuck could freely give to her: unfettered life.
He did not rise from his seat when the dark angel stopped behind him and set her hands familiarly on his shoulder. Her nails dragged slowly across his collarbone, a shaky touch and an uncertain gesture, an unsteady falter that made even his breath hitch. That was when he knew, unequivocally, irrevocably, absolutely knew that she was the woman for him.
She was the something he had been looking for.
“This is where you choose to meet me?” she breathed her inquiry into the shell of his ear, and he moved a hand to cradle her neck and keep her there. Whispers of what they could and would do together caressed his cheek every time she exhaled. “A burlesque club?”
“This is Victrola,” he informed her, clutching his glass of perfectly aged Scotch at the sensation of her loosely hanging curls tickling his throat, and shut his eyes to appreciate the intoxicating aroma of her freshly washed skin. A jolt of fire lit his stomach when her arms slid around his shoulders and her fingertips grazed his abdomen. “Where your wildest dreams come true.”
Blair pouted - he felt the motion against his cheek, like a shadow of a kiss - and moved around to sit on the plush cushion that adjoined his. “I've never had a wild dream.”
“No,” Chuck rested his hand on her knee and gave her conservative outfit a once over. “I don't believe you have.”
Someone pressed a flute of champagne into her empty hand, and she cupped it to her cheek, enjoying the feeling of something cool against her flesh in the midst of everything she could see and hear going on around her. It was an assault to the senses, being around so many people who did not incline their heads to her passing figure, or break into whispers at the sight of her walking and talking just like a real girl.
It occurred to Blair, as her eyes landed on the mass of corseted bodies writhing against each other on the stage directly in front of her, that perhaps she did not know exactly how a real girl was supposed to move. They contorted and spun hypnotically, moving their hips in ways she had never guessed they could be swayed - like pendulums in the stately grandfather clock in her bedroom hallway.
“You escaped your wardens,” Chuck commented from beside her, but she was too entranced to look away from the dancer in the middle, whose rhythmic dips and pelvic grinds were all at once offensive and desirable. She did, however, spare him one unguarded smile to let him know she was listening. “How do you feel?”
“Relieved.” Her answer was punctuated by a sip of her bubbly beverage. “I feel relieved.”
The middle dancer had caught her lingering gaze, and was now staring intently into Blair's eyes with such focus and heat that an honest to god flush bloomed from underneath the frilly collar of Blair's gray Pilgrim frock. It spread to her cheeks and made the frothing champagne glass only more welcomed against her skin.
The music was a steady beat, rough and unpolished and abrasive. A woman was singing, but Blair could not decipher all of the lyrics over the chattering and catcalling, not to mention the heavy thud each and every one of the speakers leaked from the ceiling. It hummed in her body, a lot like the excitement she had felt in her room when she imagined where Chuck Bass would direct his limousine to take her for their secret rendezvous, and she was reminded of a scene from one of her contraband romance novels.
A woman undercover amidst the lower class to gather important information... forced to doff her clothes and prance around for the pleasure of men and their unblinking eyes.
The woman in the middle of the main stage cluster was in a red corset, and had a blunt haircut that did nothing to flatter her jawline or detract from the fact that her nose was a little too big for her face. The dramatic makeup she had smeared around her eyes and lips and eyebrows only accentuated the comedic tragedies of her unfortunate facial features. But when she threw her head back and stretched her gloved arms to the ceiling, so that the sinewy muscles of her body caught the circles of flickering light, something tore at the pit of Blair's stomach and made her long to arch her stiff and proper back under the watchful gaze of some leering patron.
This was such a new and foreign thought to her, that she almost choked on the champagne she was not drinking. So recently she had considered her undergarments only worthy of Chuck Bass's eyes, but...
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Chuck had leaned back into his casual lounging position and was enjoying the show just as much as she was.
But then his chocolate eyes swiveled to meet her own, took in the radiantly naked glow in her embarrassed expression, and he smirked so easily she thought it looked like someone gliding into a trusted pair of Italian leather loafers.
“You know, I can dance,” she told him, a strangled sort of proclamation that she hadn't intended to make. Unfortunately for her, there was a lull in the heavy pounding of the hypnotic song, and her unlikely suitor was able to hear every single world.
“Really?” The stage lights tripped gleefully across his forehead and around his chin and chest, shadowing all of his most mischievous angles. “Then why don't you get up there?”
“No!” She tried to brush him off and be cavalier, with a dainty laugh that exposed more of her straight teeth. “I'm just saying... I like to dance.”
The music picked back up again, and both their faces were illuminated in swirling circles, which caught the crinkle between her brows, and the way her cheeks hollowed out as she tried her best to look appalled at the blatant displays of lust and debauchery on the balcony behind her. But the nervous patterns her fingertips subconsciously drew on the dull fabric of her unimaginative skirt, along the tops of her thighs and between her knees, told a different story.
Chuck leaned in and spoke to her in that voice that had haunted her dreams the night before. Silky and smooth but hard and substantial, firm and deep. “You are ten times hotter than any of those girls.”
He spoke so frankly that she was abruptly reminded of the first words they had shared at her mother's masquerade, when he had smoothed his rough touch with a gentle kiss and dragged her willingly into his web of reckless abandon and disregard for all semblance of society rules. It was what had initially attracted her to him, aside from the obvious and many appealing physical attributes, and it was what prompted her to bite her lip thoughtfully. She had been called many things before, had been complimented endlessly on the delicacy of her delightful porcelain face... but no one had ever stoked the nerve endings that now seemed to be everywhere on her body and called her “hot”. It was such a... common word.
Blair felt an array of emotions briefly crack the paint she had so carefully applied, before she was able to control herself and retreat into the powdered mask of a neutral doll and purse her lips in disapproval. But Chuck, who she had seen observing her lips and licking his own in a thrillingly predatory way, bore down on her in a rush of lips and eyes and luxuriously soft hair and a probing, slick, sharp and clearly talented tongue. It was hot, as he had called her, and...affectionate. Exploratory.
She dipped her own tongue into his mouth on a whim and was surprised and thrilled at the moan it elicited from deep in his throat.
“I know what you're doing, Chuck Bass,” she smiled against his mouth, then withdrew to affect a too-little-too-late coquettish shyness. But when his eyes did not leave her face, when she could hear his breathing and feel its results on her temple, when his fingers grasped hers and brought them to that same mouth for feather light pecks along the insides of her bared wrists... She pouted again. “You really don't think I'll go up there.”
Men who held prized notions about her courtly place in their patrician futures might have taken that opportunity to leap to her side in hopes of winning over her temperament and gaining access to further compliant conversations. But Chuck Bass, who she could see did his level best to never have notions past what bow tie he planned to knot tomorrow and with what one-of-a-kind silk shirt, leaned closer and bit her bottom lip hard enough to leave a mark.
“I know you won't.”
The competitive voice in her head, whose mantra was Kill Kill Destroy Destroy, bristled at his declaration and rose up on its haunches at the challenge. She had never danced in public the way she did in her bedroom, when the chamber door was locked and she was allowed to sample songs from Penelope's, Hazel's, or perhaps Kati's much broader playlists - with hundreds of eyes of her, she could do the most complicated Viennese waltz without so much as flinching, so how hard could it be to stand up in a semi-darkness and twist, bend, wiggle, and squirm her way up and down the stage?
Lady Blair took a very unladylike gulp from her champagne flute, set it down with a firm resolve, and got to her feet all in one fluid motion.
“Guard my drink.”
And then, she took the stage.
“A lover may bestride the gossamers
That idles in the wanton summer air,
And yet not fall. So light is vanity.”