gossip girl fic: the lateness of the hour
the lateness of the hour. gossip girl. vanessa/nate. Vanessa stops eating in cafes. Nate finds her anyways.
sigh. I don't even know you guys. Nate and Vanessa are sickeningly, awesomely adorable and I was doing a Season 2 rewatch. There are a lot of feeeeeeeeelings.
The last time they were in Europe, it started with a bet.
Nate, his hand splayed wide on the small of her back as her feet tripped in between the cobblestones, said, “I bet I can drink more limoncello than you.”
“We’re not in Italy,” she laughed along his jawline, her fingers brushing away his bangs. She was drunk off of too much beer and him. The stars blurred behind his head.
“I don’t care,” he pouted, twirling her around the near-empty street. A cab driver yelled something as he drove by.
This was Berlin. Neither of them spoke German but it sounded better coming out of Nate’s mouth. “Ich Mann dein Deutsch,” they both gargled, the pronunciation mangled and ugly.
Nate stole the words out of her mouth with the slip of his tongue and his fingers threaded into her hair. Her feet never touched the ground.
Berlin is for lovers, no one has ever said.
She isn’t drunk, not exactly, not yet at least, but the bottle of wine in front of her is half empty. There’s grit on her teeth, dark red, and she feels it settling into a stain. Someone pours her another, the wine falling into the glass slowly, almost beautiful. Later, she claims that is why she doesn’t see him.
The bar is quiet and small. Someone plays Spanish guitar in the corner and Vanessa’s friends are all artists. They all think they are living in a Woody Allen movie, really. This is Barcelona.
Someone says, “Vanessa?”
A poet begins to drunkenly recite his poem at the other end of the table.
She says, “Nate?”
The world doesn’t go quiet. Her stomach flips. She would never make a movie out of this moment. Five years since she’s seen him; nothing about this makes sense. Vanessa wouldn’t even pair them together if this was her screenplay.
“Of all the gin joints,” he says, beaming as he pulls up a chair, “although technically this seems like more of a café.”
He’s wrong but she doesn’t bother to correct him. Vanessa curls her fingers under the edge of her skirt and almost smiles. Her hair is short and straight, kissing the spot where her neck smooths into her shoulder, the layers of blood and muscle and bone meeting in a clean crisp line. He’s never loved her like this before.
“Hey,” she says finally, her voice thick with wine and surprise. She forgot what seventeen felt like.
“Hey yourself,” he whispers, his smile as white and pretty as it’s ever been. His shoulder presses into hers.
Twenty-five feels too young all of a sudden.
The poet starts his third stanza.
There was something unhealthy about high school, the slow toxic way they leached onto each other and refused to let go no matter how deep the wound, no matter how much salt they poured into each one. Vanessa spent her formative years with people she didn’t even really like, worrying about Serena and Chuck and Blair as if they were people she’d want to know in five years.
There was Dan, of course. There has always, always been Dan and part of her thinks that will never change. She was in love with Dan before anything else of note had happened to her. A mean, bitter part of her thinks that he’s written himself so completely into her story solely so that she always will be.
Nate was her person in high school. She loved him and hated him and fought with him and fought for him more times than she ever thought she would for some silly boy. He was her high school boyfriend, she realized one night, the letters typed out in a san-serif font on clean white paper. The lead love interest in her contrived romantic comedy.
Nate had Blair first and then Serena, or maybe it really was the other way around, and there was Jenny too, her knees knocking together as mascara ran down her face. Vanessa has never fancied herself as much more than a footnote.
The point is, he has never really been hers.
“How is everyone,” she gestures vaguely, her hands waving around the space between them. He raises an eyebrow and Vanessa almost blushes.
Her apartment is a cozy thing. She rests her feet on a stack of dusty old books and opens another bottle of wine. Nate takes up most of the space on her couch.
“Do you really care?” he asks. It doesn’t sound mean and she shrugs, her mouth struggling to match his. Vanessa pours them both glasses. She sits on the floor.
Nate laughs.
“I don’t bite, you know,” he teases, eyes heavy-lidded and only half as blue. His fingers twist around her wrist and they are still the same people they were all those years ago, she thinks. He is still charming and she is still rude.
“What are you doing here Nate?” she asks, her feet criss-crossed applesauce underneath her. His name coming out of her mouth almost startles her. She could believe any answers he gives except: to see you.
There are no candles in her apartment.
He sips out of her wine glass instead of answering.
“I thought you’d have more easels or something.”
Her fingers itch for a cigarette.
“I need a smoke.”
His face lights up at that, mouth splitting into a perfectly white, even grin. Vanessa feels her lips tilt upwards, too.
“Don’t get too excited, Archibald. I meant cigarettes.”
His brow furrows but he puts his wine glass down on the coffee table.
“I’ll come with you then.”
Vanessa almost expects to see his tail wag.
A piano sits in his hall. He can’t bring himself to play it.
At twenty-two he has a diploma on the mantel and his grandfather’s trust fund.
Chuck says, “What do we do now, Nathaniel?”
There are two cigars in his hand. Nate reaches out for one and smells it.
“Grandfather says law school at an Ivy,” he sighs, eyebrow raised.
Chuck pours himself another glass of scotch and smirks.
“Yes, but Nathaniel,” he says, swirling the glass, his velvet slippers padding soft along the thick carpet, “where’s the fun in that?”
There are no street lamps on the corner outside of her building. He tells her that doesn’t seem very safe and she rolls her eyes at him.
“I’m a big girl, Archibald. You could spend your time doing more valuable things than worrying about me.”
“Sorry,” he says, unapologetic, “I can’t help it.”
It would appear his hero complex is alive and well.
Vanessa leans against the brick wall and smokes. It’s an artist’s habit, after all. Something she picked up in Budapest.
Nate scrunches his nose.
“You ever coming back to New York?”
He sounds so earnest, which is to say that he sounds exactly the same as he always has. Blair used to call him a golden retriever. Vanessa wishes he hadn’t asked.
“Miss me, Archibald?” she teases.
“So what if I do?”
Vanessa wonders how many girls have stood before him, knees weak, and believed him. The declaration doesn’t surprise her. She is only surprised it took him this long. Nate has never really been friends with a girl, after all.
“I don’t think it really matters,” she says, mouth slanted downwards.
The lie tastes like ash on her tongue.
Even then, the inside of her mouth painted with smoke, he kisses her first.
Her mother always told her, you make mistakes so that you can learn from them, Vanessa.
You never listen, Mommy Dearest used to say and that applies here as well.
(Later, she will play this over in her head and wonder why he kissed her. There was nothing in her words that welcomed it.
Later, she will remember: I don’t think it really matters and realize that was his opening, some kind of strange hope he grabs on to because his misguided heart has decided to love her again.
She should’ve said: It doesn’t matter at all.
That was her mistake. She is not nearly as good at lying to herself as she thought.)
Nate falls in love too easily. This, Vanessa suspects, is still true.
They have always done better in the winter. She’s never met a scarf she doesn’t like and despite his California dreamboat looks she thinks he looks best in a cashmere sweater. He’s wearing one now, dark charcoal gray. Her hands shake when he puts the key into the lock and his hands are pressed flat to her stomach.
“This could be a really, really bad idea,” she warns. Nate’s forehead is resting on her shoulder, fingers sneaking across her ribcage. She sucks in her breath and forgets what she was going to say.
“Or it could be a great one,” he murmurs into her skin, fingers still moving, searching for more skin.
He turns the doorknob for her and they tumble into her small apartment, his knees knocking against drawers full of forgotten things. She bursts into laughter underneath him, hands on the broad plane of his chest.
Nate takes her bra off with his teeth, a neat little new trick, and Vanessa forgets about everything else.
In the morning, she wakes up first and tiptoes over to her kitchen. The cappuccino maker on her counter is loud but Nate sleeps through it anyways.
When they were high schoolers, and god isn’t that something? Enough time has passed between the two of them that they are now in a completely separate era. She gets nostalgic more often that she thought she would. Anyways, high school.
“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” he told her.
Vanessa’s hair curled against his pillow.
“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me,” she laughed, clear and high, deliriously happy.
He pinned her down to his bed, knees slipping against the soft sheets.
“That’s the point,” Nate said. Vanessa heard a duh in there somewhere, unspoken.
“I want to know everything about you,” he said.
Oh, she thought, heart stammering in her chest.
“I broke my collarbone learning how to ride a bike,” she offered. Nate had her wrists trapped in one of his hands. He planted sloppy, open-mouthed kisses on her collarbone from left to right and she squirmed underneath him.
“Not enough,” he smiled onto her skin.
“I said everything,” he sulks, childish in his insistence. His face was designed to fall in love with. She is sure of that.
“Ok,” Vanessa whispered, trying to catch her breath.
The sun set through his window and he kissed her and she kissed him back and you have to understand, she saw this through a camera. She saw this as a movie.
“I’m at Oxford law,” he admits.
This is the third day since he found her. Three days of waking up to his stupid perfect face and she’s only just getting used to the way her heart beats around him. It’s been a while, really.
“Oxford law?” she repeats, dumbfounded. He’s still in her bed.
Nate shrugs.
“I used to talk a big game about getting out of the Upper East Side. This felt like the last chance to actually do it.”
“So,” she asks, careful, “this vacation was…?”
“Very much an excuse to see you.”
Nate sits up in her bed, her sheets pooled around his waist. Stubble shadows across his face. He looks so god damn handsome it’s unfair.
And isn’t that just typical? For him to ride in on his big white horse and sweep her off her feet all over again.
She says, “Oh.”
Her best medium, after all, has always been visual. She’s not Dan.
“I missed you,” he says easily, happily.
Vanessa almost wants to laugh.
“I’ve been missing you, and it’s not some fleeting fancy or romanticized notion of you, or, or-“
She can see it now, Dan’s chicken scratch in red pen in the margins of the script - not enough character development, unbelievable. She chooses to ignore it.
“Big words, Archibald. Is this a rehearsed speech?” Vanessa says, voice even. She’s still perched on the edge of the bed. Nate is tan and his smell is all over her thin sheets. It’s only been three days, she thinks, and almost laughs. Who knows what kind of damage he could do if they started talking in forever?
Vanessa finds herself smiling.
“Maybe,” he shrugs, scrubbing at the sheepish grin on his face.
“Ok.”
“Ok?” he asks, hopeful, and something twists neatly in her ribcage. This is not something she ever thought she would still want.
“Ok,” Vanessa says again, laughing. Nate threads his finger through hers.
It’s a messy thing, this Euro trip. It doesn’t rain once while they’re in Vienna and every inch of her skin was always warm. Vanessa wore skirts that flirted with her fingertips. They’re textured and patterned, a riot of colors and each one of them felt different when Nate reached for the hem as she spun away from him.
“Wait up,” he told her, over and over again, after dinner, during sightseeing, before dancing.
She was always ahead of him and the wind caught her hair when she turned around.
“Hurry up then slowpoke,” she scolded, sticking her tongue out playfully. Her arms crossed her chest.
Vanessa almost never wore heels, so she fit under his chin nicely.
The first place they go is Italy; Vanessa drinks him under the table.
sigh. I don't even know you guys. Nate and Vanessa are sickeningly, awesomely adorable and I was doing a Season 2 rewatch. There are a lot of feeeeeeeeelings.
The last time they were in Europe, it started with a bet.
Nate, his hand splayed wide on the small of her back as her feet tripped in between the cobblestones, said, “I bet I can drink more limoncello than you.”
“We’re not in Italy,” she laughed along his jawline, her fingers brushing away his bangs. She was drunk off of too much beer and him. The stars blurred behind his head.
“I don’t care,” he pouted, twirling her around the near-empty street. A cab driver yelled something as he drove by.
This was Berlin. Neither of them spoke German but it sounded better coming out of Nate’s mouth. “Ich Mann dein Deutsch,” they both gargled, the pronunciation mangled and ugly.
Nate stole the words out of her mouth with the slip of his tongue and his fingers threaded into her hair. Her feet never touched the ground.
Berlin is for lovers, no one has ever said.
She isn’t drunk, not exactly, not yet at least, but the bottle of wine in front of her is half empty. There’s grit on her teeth, dark red, and she feels it settling into a stain. Someone pours her another, the wine falling into the glass slowly, almost beautiful. Later, she claims that is why she doesn’t see him.
The bar is quiet and small. Someone plays Spanish guitar in the corner and Vanessa’s friends are all artists. They all think they are living in a Woody Allen movie, really. This is Barcelona.
Someone says, “Vanessa?”
A poet begins to drunkenly recite his poem at the other end of the table.
She says, “Nate?”
The world doesn’t go quiet. Her stomach flips. She would never make a movie out of this moment. Five years since she’s seen him; nothing about this makes sense. Vanessa wouldn’t even pair them together if this was her screenplay.
“Of all the gin joints,” he says, beaming as he pulls up a chair, “although technically this seems like more of a café.”
He’s wrong but she doesn’t bother to correct him. Vanessa curls her fingers under the edge of her skirt and almost smiles. Her hair is short and straight, kissing the spot where her neck smooths into her shoulder, the layers of blood and muscle and bone meeting in a clean crisp line. He’s never loved her like this before.
“Hey,” she says finally, her voice thick with wine and surprise. She forgot what seventeen felt like.
“Hey yourself,” he whispers, his smile as white and pretty as it’s ever been. His shoulder presses into hers.
Twenty-five feels too young all of a sudden.
The poet starts his third stanza.
There was something unhealthy about high school, the slow toxic way they leached onto each other and refused to let go no matter how deep the wound, no matter how much salt they poured into each one. Vanessa spent her formative years with people she didn’t even really like, worrying about Serena and Chuck and Blair as if they were people she’d want to know in five years.
There was Dan, of course. There has always, always been Dan and part of her thinks that will never change. She was in love with Dan before anything else of note had happened to her. A mean, bitter part of her thinks that he’s written himself so completely into her story solely so that she always will be.
Nate was her person in high school. She loved him and hated him and fought with him and fought for him more times than she ever thought she would for some silly boy. He was her high school boyfriend, she realized one night, the letters typed out in a san-serif font on clean white paper. The lead love interest in her contrived romantic comedy.
Nate had Blair first and then Serena, or maybe it really was the other way around, and there was Jenny too, her knees knocking together as mascara ran down her face. Vanessa has never fancied herself as much more than a footnote.
The point is, he has never really been hers.
“How is everyone,” she gestures vaguely, her hands waving around the space between them. He raises an eyebrow and Vanessa almost blushes.
Her apartment is a cozy thing. She rests her feet on a stack of dusty old books and opens another bottle of wine. Nate takes up most of the space on her couch.
“Do you really care?” he asks. It doesn’t sound mean and she shrugs, her mouth struggling to match his. Vanessa pours them both glasses. She sits on the floor.
Nate laughs.
“I don’t bite, you know,” he teases, eyes heavy-lidded and only half as blue. His fingers twist around her wrist and they are still the same people they were all those years ago, she thinks. He is still charming and she is still rude.
“What are you doing here Nate?” she asks, her feet criss-crossed applesauce underneath her. His name coming out of her mouth almost startles her. She could believe any answers he gives except: to see you.
There are no candles in her apartment.
He sips out of her wine glass instead of answering.
“I thought you’d have more easels or something.”
Her fingers itch for a cigarette.
“I need a smoke.”
His face lights up at that, mouth splitting into a perfectly white, even grin. Vanessa feels her lips tilt upwards, too.
“Don’t get too excited, Archibald. I meant cigarettes.”
His brow furrows but he puts his wine glass down on the coffee table.
“I’ll come with you then.”
Vanessa almost expects to see his tail wag.
A piano sits in his hall. He can’t bring himself to play it.
At twenty-two he has a diploma on the mantel and his grandfather’s trust fund.
Chuck says, “What do we do now, Nathaniel?”
There are two cigars in his hand. Nate reaches out for one and smells it.
“Grandfather says law school at an Ivy,” he sighs, eyebrow raised.
Chuck pours himself another glass of scotch and smirks.
“Yes, but Nathaniel,” he says, swirling the glass, his velvet slippers padding soft along the thick carpet, “where’s the fun in that?”
There are no street lamps on the corner outside of her building. He tells her that doesn’t seem very safe and she rolls her eyes at him.
“I’m a big girl, Archibald. You could spend your time doing more valuable things than worrying about me.”
“Sorry,” he says, unapologetic, “I can’t help it.”
It would appear his hero complex is alive and well.
Vanessa leans against the brick wall and smokes. It’s an artist’s habit, after all. Something she picked up in Budapest.
Nate scrunches his nose.
“You ever coming back to New York?”
He sounds so earnest, which is to say that he sounds exactly the same as he always has. Blair used to call him a golden retriever. Vanessa wishes he hadn’t asked.
“Miss me, Archibald?” she teases.
“So what if I do?”
Vanessa wonders how many girls have stood before him, knees weak, and believed him. The declaration doesn’t surprise her. She is only surprised it took him this long. Nate has never really been friends with a girl, after all.
“I don’t think it really matters,” she says, mouth slanted downwards.
The lie tastes like ash on her tongue.
Even then, the inside of her mouth painted with smoke, he kisses her first.
Her mother always told her, you make mistakes so that you can learn from them, Vanessa.
You never listen, Mommy Dearest used to say and that applies here as well.
(Later, she will play this over in her head and wonder why he kissed her. There was nothing in her words that welcomed it.
Later, she will remember: I don’t think it really matters and realize that was his opening, some kind of strange hope he grabs on to because his misguided heart has decided to love her again.
She should’ve said: It doesn’t matter at all.
That was her mistake. She is not nearly as good at lying to herself as she thought.)
Nate falls in love too easily. This, Vanessa suspects, is still true.
They have always done better in the winter. She’s never met a scarf she doesn’t like and despite his California dreamboat looks she thinks he looks best in a cashmere sweater. He’s wearing one now, dark charcoal gray. Her hands shake when he puts the key into the lock and his hands are pressed flat to her stomach.
“This could be a really, really bad idea,” she warns. Nate’s forehead is resting on her shoulder, fingers sneaking across her ribcage. She sucks in her breath and forgets what she was going to say.
“Or it could be a great one,” he murmurs into her skin, fingers still moving, searching for more skin.
He turns the doorknob for her and they tumble into her small apartment, his knees knocking against drawers full of forgotten things. She bursts into laughter underneath him, hands on the broad plane of his chest.
Nate takes her bra off with his teeth, a neat little new trick, and Vanessa forgets about everything else.
In the morning, she wakes up first and tiptoes over to her kitchen. The cappuccino maker on her counter is loud but Nate sleeps through it anyways.
When they were high schoolers, and god isn’t that something? Enough time has passed between the two of them that they are now in a completely separate era. She gets nostalgic more often that she thought she would. Anyways, high school.
“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” he told her.
Vanessa’s hair curled against his pillow.
“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me,” she laughed, clear and high, deliriously happy.
He pinned her down to his bed, knees slipping against the soft sheets.
“That’s the point,” Nate said. Vanessa heard a duh in there somewhere, unspoken.
“I want to know everything about you,” he said.
Oh, she thought, heart stammering in her chest.
“I broke my collarbone learning how to ride a bike,” she offered. Nate had her wrists trapped in one of his hands. He planted sloppy, open-mouthed kisses on her collarbone from left to right and she squirmed underneath him.
“Not enough,” he smiled onto her skin.
“I said everything,” he sulks, childish in his insistence. His face was designed to fall in love with. She is sure of that.
“Ok,” Vanessa whispered, trying to catch her breath.
The sun set through his window and he kissed her and she kissed him back and you have to understand, she saw this through a camera. She saw this as a movie.
“I’m at Oxford law,” he admits.
This is the third day since he found her. Three days of waking up to his stupid perfect face and she’s only just getting used to the way her heart beats around him. It’s been a while, really.
“Oxford law?” she repeats, dumbfounded. He’s still in her bed.
Nate shrugs.
“I used to talk a big game about getting out of the Upper East Side. This felt like the last chance to actually do it.”
“So,” she asks, careful, “this vacation was…?”
“Very much an excuse to see you.”
Nate sits up in her bed, her sheets pooled around his waist. Stubble shadows across his face. He looks so god damn handsome it’s unfair.
And isn’t that just typical? For him to ride in on his big white horse and sweep her off her feet all over again.
She says, “Oh.”
Her best medium, after all, has always been visual. She’s not Dan.
“I missed you,” he says easily, happily.
Vanessa almost wants to laugh.
“I’ve been missing you, and it’s not some fleeting fancy or romanticized notion of you, or, or-“
She can see it now, Dan’s chicken scratch in red pen in the margins of the script - not enough character development, unbelievable. She chooses to ignore it.
“Big words, Archibald. Is this a rehearsed speech?” Vanessa says, voice even. She’s still perched on the edge of the bed. Nate is tan and his smell is all over her thin sheets. It’s only been three days, she thinks, and almost laughs. Who knows what kind of damage he could do if they started talking in forever?
Vanessa finds herself smiling.
“Maybe,” he shrugs, scrubbing at the sheepish grin on his face.
“Ok.”
“Ok?” he asks, hopeful, and something twists neatly in her ribcage. This is not something she ever thought she would still want.
“Ok,” Vanessa says again, laughing. Nate threads his finger through hers.
It’s a messy thing, this Euro trip. It doesn’t rain once while they’re in Vienna and every inch of her skin was always warm. Vanessa wore skirts that flirted with her fingertips. They’re textured and patterned, a riot of colors and each one of them felt different when Nate reached for the hem as she spun away from him.
“Wait up,” he told her, over and over again, after dinner, during sightseeing, before dancing.
She was always ahead of him and the wind caught her hair when she turned around.
“Hurry up then slowpoke,” she scolded, sticking her tongue out playfully. Her arms crossed her chest.
Vanessa almost never wore heels, so she fit under his chin nicely.
The first place they go is Italy; Vanessa drinks him under the table.