Fic: I tell you all the time [1/1]
Title: I tell you all the time
Summary: inevitably AU after 5x14, spoilers for 5x13. Dan and Blair: the retreat. ‘Oh God, I’m in a spy film with Dan Humphrey.’
Rating: PG13
Length: TOO LONG. Ahem, 5,300. [2/12 of 12in2012]
Notes: it’s all hariboo’s fault. And tumblr. Mainly the meeting of both, with a superhero assist from that sinkhole, youtube. Also, this is Gossip Girl-level plausibility. I ask no more of it than that.
They stop the car in an alley in Brooklyn (+3 for stealth).
Blair looks through the gap in the seats, past the pink ribbons and to the street scene at the end of the alley. It looks like the background of a moving car shot in an old film. She throws her back against the back seat and tries to take a breath. Dan leans back over the seat and uh oh she knows that look: concern is Dan. Dan is concerned.
Blair laughs, high whooping bubbles that push Dan’s eyebrows up into his frankly ludicrous hair.
The eyebrows slam together when Blair slaps a hand onto her knee (six layers of taffeta and white and it’s not like she feels it) and takes big, gulping breaths that she hears echoing scratchily in her ears. And then she’s crying, but she’s measuring it by drops on the dress and Dan leaving the car to get in the back with her, because it’s not like she feels it.
*
Dan’s sofa might have also been in Brooklyn but it was comfier and his suited arm around her bare shoulders isn’t right but it’s warm, it’s warm. It’s warm.
*
She thinks she’s cried out. She thinks.
Dan shifts awkwardly on the seat next to her. ‘We need to ditch the car.’
‘Oh God I’m in a spy film with Dan Humphrey.’
Dan opens the door as she starts to hyperventilate again. ‘Hey, hey, Blair, if you can insult me, you can get out of the car. It’s a good thing. Come on, we’re in Brooklyn. Trash cans. You can kick them.’
She laughs again, and seriously, where they’re going better have Xanax at this rate. Blair thinks she should have asked her mom for some after all. It only crossed her mind four times before breakfast was over. It hits her again that breakfast until now are all the same day. She doesn’t know what to do with that: it’s too big a day. Big day.
‘Blair-’
She snaps her eyes to Dan’s - he’s getting his suit filthy by kneeling on the ground - and he’s staring at her, mouth slightly open and eyebrows free of usual ironic contortions. ‘Blair-’
Blair’s always been good at being what people need her to be. She takes a sharp breath. ‘The car. We should ditch the car.’
Dan lets out the breath he’s been holding while she freaked the hell out. ‘I have a bit of a plan.’
*
They take Dan’s bit of a plan and add it to Blair’s improvised genius and they have a sort of a plan.
It sounds a lot like the last six months when you say it like that, but Blair’s not thinking about that too hard.
There isn’t much chance of sneaking Blair into the front of Dan’s building, so they don’t try. Instead, Blair keeps the cell phone and sinks low into the back seat of the car while he goes upstairs. Dan stops halfway out the door of the car, scrabbling in the glove compartment and swearing under his breath. ‘Can I-’ he holds out a hand and Blair clutches the (crappy) cell phone she stole from a random table oh God at the wedding reception to her chest. ‘But it’s -’
She blinks. It is the only thing she has. Everything else is at the reception or her apartment.
Dan takes the phone and saves two extra contacts in it: A-HUMPHREY-HOUSE and A-DAN-CELL.
She’s about to tell him that now is not the time for his linguistic tricks when she realises he’s writing them in such a silly way so they’re the top of the contact list. Oh.
She’s about to tell him that she knows the numbers already. Oh.
He’s already closing the door with a hand on the window like it’s her shoulder.
*
‘So while I was upstairs I was thinking - ‘
Dan slides back into the front.
‘What is that?’ Blair points at the duffel bag with a skull and crossbones that he throws in next to his sensible blue gym bag that he’s had since they were at school.
‘I grabbed a bunch of stuff for you,’ Dan replies, leaning over the back. ‘You’re almost certainly going to hate all of it but some of it might actually fit into a passenger seat.’
He looks at the wedding dress meaningfully.
Blair rolls her eyes.
‘I mean, I’m assuming we’re making a run for it,’ Dan says, uncertainty creeping in. ‘That is why you called me, right?’
‘From royalty to international people of mystery to Bonnie & Clyde in an hour,’ Blair rattles off, fingers curling around the handles of the duffel bag, ‘Yes, Humphrey, we are totally making a run for it.’
‘No one else I’d rather take a tour through the genres with,’ Dan comments with a grin. Blair cannot believe he’s actually calmer now that they’ve resolved on the most extreme course of action she can think of. Then again, so is she, so maybe they’ve something in common there. ‘Now, about this car. I have an idea.’
*
Dan’s “idea” is to drive the car into the basement parking lot where his dad keeps the car he barely uses, because even Brooklyn is somewhat metropolitan enough to make parking a bitch.
Blair clenches her fists and hisses repeatedly as they drive in. She can’t believe she agreed to this.
‘Hey,’ Dan says without turning his head, ‘would you quit drumming your fingers on the back of my chair? Creepy, Waldorf.’
‘This is just great, just great, and no, because it’s not you the entire country is looking for, so just - ugh!’
‘Exactly - it’s not me the entire country is looking for.’
Blair glares but goes with it. He sort of has a point. How did she get into this again? Oh yes, she called him.
Dan pulls the car up as close to the beaten up four-door as he can. ‘Right, hold on.’
Blair frowns. What the heck are they waiting for? She peers over the edge of the window to see Dan getting in the world’s most boring blue sedan and leaning back to lift the lock in the back seat.
‘I can’t believe you insulted the security of my royal wedding when the car doesn’t have central locking,’ she hisses after executing a quick dive into the back of the sedan, the effect of her biting comment rather ruined by the duffel bag with the skull and crossbones hitting her chest with an oof. ‘Mind the corsetry!’
‘Oh, I’m minding,’ Dan calls back, and Blair can hear him fighting a grin. ‘All right, here we go.’
‘Here we go,’ Blair Cornelia Waldorf Grimaldi (apparently) repeats, swallowing.
*
One well-placed phone call later (Dorota, please wear a trench coat) and they have Blair’s back up purse. Among other things, it includes her pre-Grimaldi iPhone and several credit cards Blair hugs with intent.
It takes an hour and a half of traffic, but they make it out of the city. The buildings get smaller and smaller, like a graph falling off, and Blair doses on the back seat even when she doesn’t think she can, because Dan’s hipster music doesn’t seem to be an album like she thinks of an album - with, you know, separate tracks - but seems to be one endless wail at nature for someone else’s girlfriend. Or something.
‘I think we’ve cleared the last of the cameras for a while,’ Dan looks back and Blair nods. ‘So you can get changed in the back if you want.’
’I am not getting changed in the back of a moving car, oh my God, Humphrey.’
As soon as she says it, she shuts her mouth so hard her teeth click. Because there’s only one thing she can think of when she says things like ‘back of a moving car.’
‘Of course you won’t. Well, you can sit in the passenger seat if you like, if you’ll do something about folding up the-’ Dan makes a gesture to the skirts taking up the back seat.
It goes against Blair’s fastidious nature to fold up the skirts, which, as she’d been told by everyone except Vera Wang, cost tens of thousands of dollars and months of work, but she just about manages it and sits on the rest when Dan pulls into a rest stop.
‘Where are we going?’ she asks, watching the skyline ahead of them, the one they can look out onto but don’t usually drive into. ‘Because all I’m getting is we’re going west and do not sing, sing nothing.’
Dan runs a hand through his hair. ‘Does it matter? I can guarantee we’re not being found anytime soon.’
Blair sinks further into the seat as the headlights flicker on and the outside lights get further and further apart. It feels like there’s nowhere else to be and no one else on the road, even though nothing could be further from the truth.
‘I don’t suppose it does.’
*
Dan isn’t sure if Blair sleeps or if she just stares ahead into the long cuts of light the car makes in the dark. She responds when he asks for the map from his duffel bag.
He fights the urge to yawn.
Or to scratch at his neck where the starchy collar is higher than his usual and itches.
He settles for rolling his neck on a quiet stretch of road to try to ease the way the jacket seems to be binding his shoulders to each other.
Dan knows why he didn’t just change when he was upstairs getting them the bare minimum of stuff for the journey. It was the same reason the cordless was the first thing he picked up on the way in and the last thing he sat down on the way out.
But he’s not freaking out.
*
They’ve been on the road three hours when he realises a couple of things. Firstly, that they skipped out without telling anyone anything so he’s directly aiding and abetting an international incident and they’re probably going to think he’s kidnapped Blair, that is, if they haven’t tracked down Chuck’s apartment and accused her of running away with Chuck.
Secondly, he’s really hungry. The meal was light and the buffet was after they left.
Thirdly, the car’s getting thirsty. He’s glad it had a decent amount in the tank when they started, but that’s running down fast.
The twenty-four hour service station in 20 seems to solve all of his - their - problems. The immediate ones, anyway.
*
‘No, no, are you-’
‘It’s not like we’ve got a huge amount of choice, here -’
‘Fine, okay, fine, but-’
‘Can you make a list?’
‘Of course I can make a list, I’m Blair Waldorf, am I not?’
*
They take the turn off into a harshly lit service station. As they drive slowly towards the pumps - no queue, no other cars in sight, Dan’s pretty sure he’s seen horror films start like this - he takes off his jacket one stiff, tin-soldier sleeve at a time and passes it to Blair.
‘I’m the adored girlfriend sleeping under the jacket. Got it,’ Blair responds, voice taking on an edge of nerves, settling in under the jacket, which covers at least some of the bright white shock of the wedding dress and light-catching detailing. ‘Will I do?’
He said 'adorable', but 'adored' works. Dan tries not to judge himself too harshly when he reaches across to pull some of Blair’s hair across her cheek. ‘Now it’s perfect. For disguising purposes.’ He fails miserably on the judging.
Dan stops the car by a pump and reaches down to pull out a zip up hoodie from his duffel bag. He shrugs it on and steps out of the car, casual wave to the sleepy guy through the window of the store and cash checkout, heart hammering against his chest.
When the tank’s filled up, he rubs his palms free of the stray oil on the handle on the $2000 suit pants he wore at the wedding. (And he put on that morning and thought he’d pretty much be where he is by midnight, but he did not think Blair Waldorf would be in the passenger seat.)
Dan walks around to Blair’s side of the car and taps the window. She ‘wakes up’ and rolls it down. He gestures to the store and makes a show of kissing her cheek. Blair nods and sits back, eyes sliding towards closed for appearances’ sake.
As he walks to the store, he thinks about it: he didn’t kiss her on the cheek, just leaned close enough to say that he wouldn’t be long and to cover her hand with his where hers is tight around her phone. His presses against his leg when he leans against the car door.
Dan walks into the service station and nods. The guy behind the counter is tall, mid-weight and more interested in his magazine. Dan walks at a pace that physically pains him, but he reminds himself that he’s not supposed to be in a hurry. He uses the shitty hot drinks machine that reminds him of hospitals to make two coffes and two hot chocolates, picks up half the kinds of carbs and chocolate he sees on his first sweep, throws in a pack of toothpaste after a moment’s hesitation and goes to the counter.
‘How’s the road?’
Dan blinks before realising that this is a basic question to which he knows the answer. He mishears it as do you have a missing princess in your car right now for some reason.
‘Dry enough,’ he says, reaching for his wallet. The number on the register reminds him why he’s really glad he doesn’t usually run a car, or away from weddings. ‘Hey, is that the new issue of Rolling Stone?’
The guy spends more time looking at him after that and no time looking at the name on his card.
Dan tries really hard not to look at the muted rolling news channel in the corner. It’s got Blair’s face on it. He throws in an evening paper as an afterthought - they’re already out of decent phone signal for loading the internet on their phones, at least not at a pace that doesn’t infuriate them both.
Not that Blair’s expressed a desperate need to know.
He heads back to the car.
‘That’s what you call not taking long?’ Blair snaps as soon as he shuts the car door.
Dan hands her a bottle of water from the bag with a raised eyebrow. ‘You’re welcome.’
He doesn’t mention how his shoulders feel less constricted not for being out of the suit jacket, but because he’s back in the car already.
*
‘Pull over,’ Blair says at the next rest stop.
Dan pulls over and sits back. ‘You okay?
‘I’m not turning back.’ Her chin juts out. Even in the dark Dan can see that there’s a pale undertone to her skin that isn’t usually there.
‘Not what I asked,’ Dan turns in his seat.
Blair rolls her eyes. ‘You’re a regular Sorkinite, aren’t you?’
‘Writer,’ he retorts, ‘comes with the territory.’
‘Of course.’ Blair shakes her head and holds up her phone. ‘We’re not stopping tonight, are we, even though that’s completely against the highway code and I can’t spell you?’
‘I hadn’t thought about it,’ Dan answers, running a hand through his hair when it falls into his eyes. ‘But when you put it that way. Is it the shoes?’
‘Ha,’ Blair says, ‘no, it’s that if we get pulled over, I really don’t want to show my license, what with it having my name on it and all.’
‘Point,’ Dan pulls out his own phone. ‘How do you want to do this?’
‘Same time,’ Blair answers immediately. She twists to look out of the window of the car and points. ‘I’m going twenty feet that way. Don’t shout while I’m on the phone.’
Dan bites back a comment about how he should probably be saying that. ‘Fine,’ he says instead.
*
Dan walks fifteen feet from the car and takes a breath. He doesn’t know why he’s nervous - his is the easiest of the calls by far.
‘Dad,’ he says, ‘I know it’s late, I’m sorry - yes, 2am, I see that, but -’
He pauses and takes a breath. Easy is a relative term.
‘I’m sorry you were worried, I just had to, I don’t know, go - what, why would I lie about -’
‘Yes, well, I guess, no, okay, that is Blair shouting. You can hear Blair. Please don’t tell anyone. Or tell them she’s in Europe or something. They’ll believe Europe.’
’I don’t believe this.’
‘Yeah... about the cars.’
*
‘Nate, thank God.’
‘Because- you’re the only one who doesn’t seem to have a vested interest in my whereabouts, and hasn’t also told Chuck any of my personal secrets lately? No, I’m not telling you my whereabouts.’
‘Dan is- can we not talk about Dan right now.’
‘I’m safe, I’m good, even, just. I need time.’
*
Dan walks as far as he can without dropping out of sight while Blair gives messages for her parents, Serena, even Chuck, and as far as Dan can tell, everyone who isn’t her husband or in law.
He knows he shouldn’t ask (and he won’t, not yet, anyway), but he remembers her voice when she called him at the reception. Something in her voice that had him running down the stairs to the parking lot.
Dan wants to think Blair has just realised the life she was signing up for wasn’t for her. He doesn’t want to think bad things about the shy, decent guy who wanted him to write wedding vows Blair deserved. He wants to think a lot of things, though.
He watches the train of her wedding dress drag in the dirt of the roadside, the white standing out in the night like a negative of a silhouette. When she turns away, her hair melds with the dark and all he can see is the outline of her dress.
*
From: Nate Archibald
To: Dan Humphrey
Time: 0223
Hope you know what you’re doing. I’ll cover what I can.
From: Dan Humphrey
To: Nate Archibald
Time: 0224
She told you? & thanks.
From: Nate Archibald
To: Dan Humphrey
Time: 0225
She didn’t have to. knew you would if she asked. be careful, man: EVERYBODY KNOWS you would if she asked.
*
Alibis and half truths in place, they get back in the car silently.
Dan reaches for the CD player and then he doesn’t.
Blair takes his jacket from the back, shreds the remains of the buttonhole, and sinks beneath it.
‘All right, Humphrey.’
Dan drives.
*
Blair wakes up as the sun comes up behind them and they go onto a rockier kind of road that makes the discarded drink cups rattle around her ankles. ‘Eeugh.’
For a minute the thought crosses her mind that she could have been in the Maldives or Mustique by now, and it almost comes out of her mouth.
Then she remembers a hand on the small of her back and a voice in her ear talking about a show, and she freezes.
‘No coffee for an hour yet,’ Dan says from the driver’s seat.
‘More’s the pity,’ Blair blurts, ‘you look terrible. Pull over right now, Humphrey.’
Dan stops at the side of the barely-there road. ‘I stopped for an hour at 4am.’
‘Which was-’ Blair takes the gum and water he hands her, ‘three hours ago. When does where we’re going open?’
‘The site office opens at, uh-’ Dan looks through the leaflet he stuffed inside the map. ‘9.30am.’
Blair smacks him on the arm and pushes his jacket back at him, lifting the water and her skirts out of the car. ‘I’m stretching my legs,’ she says with an extreme form of dignity. ‘You will sleep for an hour. No arguments.’
Dan doesn’t argue particularly hard.
*
At 10am, they stop around the corner from the (oh no) log cabin that Humphrey assures her is the (oh God) site office.
It’s not what she had in mind, and she has slept in a wedding dress in a car, and she has not washed, and she is not pleased.
But she absolutely understands what Dan meant when he said no one would think to look for her here.
Dan comes back to the car walking with the gait of the living dead and finds Blair in the driving seat.
He slumps on top of his thoroughly crushed formal jacket and points at the forks in the road, cabin keys jangling in his lap.
*
They barely acknowledge the cabin, the car that they half-abandon, the living area, stairs and bedroom except to fight instantly and viciously over who has first rights to the bathroom and shower room, in that order.
The second part turns out to be academic because Blair is in a Vera Wang wedding dress.
*
‘No way.’
‘Man up, Humphrey, you’ll have to do this someday. Consider this practice.’
‘I don’t understand how you can go to the bathroom in this but now it’s a problem.’
‘Oh you do not even want to know the yoga-inspired lengths I went to to avoid that scenario. Why do you think I had Serena as my maid of honour? She who has seen all there is to see from the age of five? Now help get me out of this dress, because I am not sleeping in it again.’
‘Are these things even designed to come off?’
‘Please tell me someone told you what happens when grown ups really love each other. Also it’s Vera Wang. She assumes help will be on hand in these situations.’
Dan mumbles something.
Blair hears him take a breath.
‘Okay, I’m closing my eyes.’
Blair rolls her eyes. Now that they aren’t in a car and she doesn’t think she’s actually in shock anymore - just static-sounding panic if she thinks too hard about how this is not actually a dream, she is in a cabin in the not-city with Dan Humphrey - she just wants the dress off. It weighs a ton. It’s filthy from roadside escapades. It’s crushed from the passenger seat. She's sure she tore some layer when she tried to beat Dan up the stairs. She’ll lay it out and fold it and hope some clothes genius in the employ of her mother can salvage the material for a child’s dress sometime in the future, for a first communion. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with it?
The thought hits her like a punch in the gut and she puts her hands over her abdomen as the dress peels away from her body.
Distantly she feels Dan hang a bathrobe around her shoulders and diligently she puts her arms in the sleeves, tugging it closed as the dress falls away to pile on the floor.
Looking at it as Dan excuses himself, she can’t believe she wore it all for so long.
Blair remembers the calm she felt when she told Serena and her mother that she could learn to love Louis. That she had made peace with it.
Something similar descends on her as she sits in the men’s bathrobe, pulling pin after pin out of her hair in the too-high and scratched bathroom mirror, setting aside the jewels carefully (they’ll have to be returned, no doubt). Taking off her ring.
*
The cabin has two floors. The top floor has a bathroom, a shower room and a bedroom. The ground floor is open plan with a kitchen, a breakfast bar, a door onto a balcony that faces away from the road, and a living area with a desk instead of a TV.
Dan sees as far as the couch.
He crawls the last three feet and drags himself up onto it as he hears the shower start to run upstairs.
*
Blair feels the water run over her muscles. It’s a lumpy shower spray, big fat drops hitting her skin, but it’s warm and it’s working. She feels her hair sink as the product comes loose and finger combs where the pins were.
She feels the calm crack like it did on the dance floor and slaps a palm against the tiles.
*
Dan wakes up when Blair sits on the end of his couch and his end springs up a bit.
‘Hot water if you want it. I’d say it’s less want and more need,’ Blair raises an eyebrow.
When he comes back, Blair has claimed his couch and his blanket.
Dan shrugs, grabs the first of the daily food baskets that come in from the site office every day from the car, puts some stuff in the fridge, and then claims the armchair instead. His feet just about touch Blair’s when he props them up on the edge of the couch.
*
‘So are you going to explain - this?’
It’s 8pm, and twenty four hours before, they were running away from her wedding.
‘It’s a writer’s retreat,’ Dan replies lazily, sipping the coffee from the pot. ‘My publishers thought it would be a good idea after the wedding. They had this place set aside for me from yesterday for a month. I don’t think they expected me to arrive the same day, though.’
‘So that’s why it’s all glam camping,’ Blair sits forward on the couch. ‘It’s like when poets used to pretend to be shepherds for a week to write idyllic epics.’
Dan rolls his eyes. ‘Yes. It’s just like that.’
Their stomachs rumble.
They look at the kitchen.
*
From: Chuck Bass
To: Dan Humphrey
Time: 1915
They’re playing the secluded honeymoon card. I think they still expect her to come back. You and I know better.
From: Dan Humphrey
To: Chuck Bass
Time: 1918
I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m on a writing retreat. Go away Chuck.
From: Chuck Bass
To: Dan Humphrey
Time: 1918
Please don’t insult my intelligence. You have been warned.
*
Dan puts his phone in the kitchen drawer where he can’t sneer at it in terrible Chuck impersonations.
They put things in a pot and what comes out isn’t royal fayre, but it’s edible and they’re both suddenly really hungry and they’re totally willing to go to desperate measures at this point. Like cooking.
They eat dinner in something like quiet.
When Dan pulls the ottoman in front of the couch and props his laptop up on it - he has to sell this writer’s retreat thing somehow - Blair considers herself clear to use him as a human pillow. It’s a movie night thing. It’s totally normal. For them.
But halfway through the film she starts talking: about Louis, the church, Chuck, the dance, the phone call. She mentions Serena and the lie like it’s even on a par.
By the end of it, Dan has his arm around her waist and his head on top of hers. They don’t move for a while.
*
Three days of quiet DVDs and books later, they’re approaching something like equilibrium. Sleeping arrangements are fluid: Dan takes Blair fighting for her right to sleep in a bed, Humphrey, I want to sleep in a bed, have a great sofa time as a good sign.
*
From: Chuck Bass
To: Dan Humphrey, Blair Waldorf
Time: 0900
My working day begins.
From: Chuck Bass
To: Dan Humphrey, Blair Waldorf
Time: 0901
Manhattan will have an exiled prince by the end of the week. If anyone knows of any objections, speak now or forever enjoy the peace.
*
Dan sits his phone on the table in front of Blair, who is wearing what she has deemed the least offensive items of the bag he brought (a combination of a few items of hers forgotten over the months and a lot of t-shirts and old Jenny clothes, the irony).
She draws a fingertip down the screen, mouth quirking at his attempt to deny they were in the same place, he presumes.
Blair pauses and carefully sips her coffee, rubbing her left finger absent-mindedly.
‘Send this from your phone, please? I’d like some air.’
After Blair takes herself and her coffee cup from the kitchen area, Dan looks at the screen and presses SEND without adding to the message.
*
From: Dan Humphrey
To: Chuck Bass
Time: 0912
You have your ways. Use them.
*
Dan leaves the phone on the table and follows.
He doesn’t know how to leave well alone, he knows. He never really has, when it comes to Blair, and that would be the real reason he’s in this mess.
‘So who do you want to ask about first?’ Blair looks over at him from the edge of the porch. ‘Chuck, Louis, or are we going all the way back to the Nate years?’
Dan doesn’t actually know what possesses him. ‘You. It’s always you first.’
Blair does pretty much what Dan would recommend she do if she’d asked for advice about anyone else: she makes an inarticulate noise and slams the door on the way in.
Dan wonders, not for the first time on this ridiculous trip, about grand gestures and selfishness.
*
He sits outside until it rains. And then he sits on the porch, edging in closer the cabin wall little by little as the wind pushes the rain more and more towards the porch.
He wonders if it would be easier to sit outside until the month runs out and they send helicopters or whatever is about to happen in this surreality he used to call his life.
Dan sits there until the door opens and a paper plane with this is not a solution, Humphrey on it pokes him in the back.
*
Dan pulls on a dry t-shirt and sits on the edge of the bed cross-legged.
Blair glares and pulls her knees even further closer to her chest.
‘It was a dick move. And I’m sorry,’ he starts.
‘At least you own it,’ Blair says archly and sighs with a roll of her eyes. She looks him in the eye again. ‘Do you know how many numbers I know by heart?’
Dan blinks. ‘Um.’
‘Three, Dan Humphrey. Serena’s apartment when she was six, because she used it as a locker combination for more years of high school than I care to remember and she was hopeless at remembering it; my own apartment, because Dorota would pick me up even if my own mother forgot; and apparently, yours. A fact I realised when I used a stolen phone to dial it in the middle of my own wedding reception.’
Dan runs a hand through his hair. It is, he realises, his new nervous thing, and resolves to get it cut.
‘Well?’ Blair asks, blinking a lot. ‘Any epiphanies you’d like to share?’
‘Everybody knows,’ he mutters. ‘Most of Manhattan knows. They got in line to tell me when I was slow on the uptake.’
‘Peachy. Just great,’ Blair says and eyes him. ‘You know I don’t need another complication right now, don’t you? Least of all from you?’
Dan levels a look in her direction. ‘Least of all-? What’s that supposed to mean, Blair?’
‘It means -’ Blair shakes her head. ‘It means I thought I knew what was going on here and apparently I don’t because I know your stupid number and I called you but there’s all this stuff going on that I need to fix and I stole a phone to call you, God!’
‘I stole a car!’ Dan retorts.
They pause and look at each other. Dan can’t help it; he laughs. Blair joins in a second later.
Blair sticks out a hand.
Dan takes it.
‘We’ll figure it out,’ Dan says without thinking.
Blair nods. ‘We have to. You’ve got me.’
END
[IT WAS GOING TO BE. THEN THIS HAPPENED: ALL THE CANDLES THAT BURN ON THEIR OWN]