seventeen.
title: caramel- nate/vanessa
type: fanfic
rating:pg
notes: this is for abvj abvjand it's part of the new Gossip Girl series I'm starting entitled Freshly Ground Heaven.
summary: Spanning time, distances and heartbreaks. Our favorite New Yorkers contemplate life, love and sex over a cup of coffee.
disclaimer: All the characters are the property of the CW and Cecily. This is merely my own wild imagination.
Coffee, chocolate, men. Some things are best rich.
He smoothes down the lapels of his grey over coat, passes a hand over his hair. It’s all habit. Sprucing himself up for a date, his finger move to straighten his tie in an automatic gesture before he rings the doorbell and he can’t remember if these actions are by products of his pre adolescent marriage to Blair or a life long friendship with Blair Waldorf.
It’s hard to think of either when she pulls back the door. “Nate,” she starts, emerald eyes going wide, “You’re early.”
“I missed you,” he breathes, with that sheepish grin that’s melted hearts since he was ten, and his girlfriends own lips twist in reluctant response. She reaches forward to stroke his forelock in a gesture that has come to mean “Good Morning,” and it lifts Nate’s heart because with her, he no longer needs kisses and promises.
Her fingers through his hair say it all.
They step into the café, quiet and waiting and watch the dawn peep through the blinds. She’s at home behind that counter, book propped up against the cash register and he takes a stool across from her.
His eyes flick over her dark mauve t-shirt, long sleeves rolled back so that her cinnamon skin is exposed, her long legs clad in skinny jeans and knee length boots and he smiles.
She pours him a cup of coffee. Not too strong, not too light and a shot of caramel. He never drank the stuff before he met Vanessa.
His mother drank tea in the afternoons and served Nate a cup when she felt lonely. Blair drank espresso, to chase away the bleary mornings because she’d been up all night studying for that test. Chuck drank Scotch be it morning, noon or night and Serena survived on sunshine and cheeseburgers and the occasional mimosa.
He’d tried all of these things, with his family and truth be told, he’d liked them, too.
He liked walking Blair to school, her head resting on his shoulder like it carried the weight of the world, her Starbucks pressed between them for warmth. He liked sipping chamomile with his mother and texting Chuck under the table and he liked getting drunk with his friends.
But all those activities were never truly his. They belonged to people he shared them with and he was merely an onlooker to the ritual.
Caramel cappuccinos every morning with right before him, her brow furrowed in concentration as she flips through Fitzgerald. They own this equally, no words, no instructions and no dope needed to complete the moment.
“Vanessa,” he whispers into the spell bound air and he waits for her to look up. Blue meets sea and -“You hit the spot.”