You're the One That I Want (20 page)

"EVERYBODY OUT!" she shouted again, her mouth opening inhumanly wide, like Lucy on Peanuts when she's seriously pissed off at Charlie Brown, which hurt like hell with such a newly pierced lip.

"What the fuck?" a guy wearing nothing but a pair of orange Princeton boxer shorts demanded.

"Who the hell is she?" his girlfriend whined.

But these were well-bred kids, and no one likes to stick around at a party when they're not welcome. Slowly, people began to trickle out the door and down the stairs. Vanessa even thought she heard the distinct sound of a pick-axe clat-tering to the floor.

She sat down on top of the stove, swinging her combat boots against the oven door as she watched everyone leave.

"Why didn't she just ask us to keep it down or something?" somebody grumbled.

"What are we supposed to do now? It's only midnight," someone else complained.

Of course Chuck Bass had the perfect solution. "We'll move the party to my house!!" he cried, gathering up his monkey and tucking it into his shirt. He put his arm around two of the blond Georgetown girls. "You can even sleep over if you want."

Tiphany stalked past the kitchen wearing only a black bra, which was probably Ruby's too. She tossed something at Vanessa. "There's her goddamned shirt."

Vanessa didn't think that sort of behavior warranted a response. She watched with smug satisfaction as Tiphany grabbed her ferret by the scruff of the neck and dragged her army duffel bag across the living room and out the door.

It wasn't like she'd be homeless. Chuck had plenty of mom.

d and v do it with words

There were only a few stragglers left now. Vanessa turned the fuses back on and surveyed the damage. She would have to hire a cleaning service to help her deal with it. Maybe she could find some way to charge it to Tiphany.

Dan was on his hands and knees, looking for his shirt and shoes. His scraggly brown hair was matted over his eyes and he, could barely see.

Vanessa hopped off the stove. "You can stay," she told him gently. What had happened was her fault, after all. If she hadn't been so swept up in Tiphany's bullshit, she and Dan would be living together and getting along fine instead of drowning in disaster.

Dan found one Puma sneaker and shoved it on. One was better than none. He stood up. Vanessa's upper lip was crusty with blood but she still looked better than he felt.

"Gotta catch up with the band. They want me to be their front man," he slurred with drunken urgency.

Vanessa had no idea what he was talking about. Maybe if they just sat down and talked to each other like they always used to, things would go back to normal.

"It's my birthday," she reminded him, trying to keep her voice from breaking. "Will you read me the poem you wrote for me?"

Dan shook his head. Nearly everything he'd ever written was for Vanessa. "It's a song. They're all songs."

"Whatever." Vanessa retrieved the piece of paper from the bathroom drawer, grateful that some nosy girl hadn't rum-maged around in there for some hair gel or something and taken the poem with her.

She handed it to Dan and sat down in front of him. It was such a relief just to be alone together again, even if the walls were crumbling down around them.

Dan's heart was still pumping wildly, but the rest of his body had slowed way down. He read the poem carefully, his tongue heavy with liquor and fatigue.

a list of things you love:

black

steel-toed boots

dead pigeons

dirty rain

irony

me a list of things I love:

cigarettes

coffee

you and your apple-white arms

but the thing about lists is they tend to get lost

"They are lyrics, aren't they?" Dan observed. "I mean, that would be so much better with music." He tried to reread the poem again to himself, but the words began to dance around the page and he couldn't make sense of them anymore. He knew he'd written them for a reason, but he couldn't remember what the reason was.

Vanessa made a funny little gasping sound and he looked up to find her crying the gaspy, chokey sort of crying of someone who doesn't cry very often. Only a moment ago Dan had been having a ball, shouting his lungs out into u microphone. How had everything gotten so serious all of a sudden?

Vanessa took his hand. Her face was wet and blotchy, her nose was running, and there was a bloody silver ring in her upper lip. "Look, I know everything is all messed up, but it's still gonna be okay. I mean, it's just like in your poem. I like ugly things. We both like it when things aren't perfect, right?" Dan's hand hung limply in hers. He knew what Vanessa was saying was important, but he couldn't concentrate. What he needed was a cigarette, and as far as he could remember he was all out. Or maybe his cigarettes were with his other shoe. "I need to find my shoe," he told her.

The tears kept falling. Vanessa gripped his hand tightly, desperate to finish what she'd started, to explain what she thought Dan's poem meant and how true she thought it was. "We don't have to go to the same school or even live together. We can just be." She wiped her nose on the back of her free hand. There were little spots of blood on her zebra-striped pants from her piercing. She rubbed at them angrily. "No matter what we do, we'll always sort of be together, right?"

Dan nodded. "Right," he agreed robotically. It wasn't that he didn't feel her pain, he just couldn't have such an intense conversation right now.

Vanessa's shoulders shook with a silent sob. She wiped her

nose again, leaned forward, and kissed him on the lips. Dan tried to kiss her back, but he was afraid of hurting her lip.

"All right." She let go of his hand and attempted a smile. "Get out of here. Go be a rock star or whatever."

Dan stared at her. She was letting him go?

Duh.

"Would you just leave already?!" Vanessa gave his chest a nudge as she fought back another round of sobs.

Dan scrambled to his feet. He could barely see the floor, it was so littered with cigarette butts, empty bottles, left-behind clothes, and destroyed crap. "I can come back tomorrow and help clean up," he offered lamely as he limped away through the mess.

Like tomorrow he was going to be all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to put on rubber gloves and mop up with the Mr. Clean?

b and n do it for real

"You still have this?" Blair pulled the moss-green cashmere V--neck she'd given Nate over a year ago off the back of his desk chair, where he'd left it the night before. She turned it inside out, checking to see if the tiny gold heart pendant she'd sewn inside one of the sleeves was still there. It was.

Nate stood in the middle of the room, watching her. He wanted to whip his clothes off, grab her, and throw her on the bed, but he knew from experience that Blair liked to do things her way, so he would have to try and wait.

Blair put the sweater down and ran her hand over the model sailboat on Nate's desk. Beside it was a picture of him and his buddies from St. Jude's, holding up the two big fish they'd caught on a fishing trip up in Maine. With his strong, tanned arms, broad white smile, golden brown hair, and glit-tering green eyes, Nate was the cutest of them all. Not that she hadn't always known that.

She didn't know what she was waiting for, and she wasn't stalling exactly. She just hadn't been alone with him in this perfect, intimate way in so long, she was relishing it. And the funny thing was, all the other times--and there had been many--that she'd thought they were about to have sex, she'd been nervous and fidgety and hadn't been able to stop talk-ing. But not this time.

"Do you want to listen to some music or put a movie on or something?" Nate asked, wondering if he needed to enhance the mood. If only he had some candles or incense or something. Massage oil? Handcuffs?

Okay, let's not get carried away.

Blair walked over to the bookshelf and turned on the ridiculous globe lamp that Nate had had since he was five. Then she switched off the overhead light. Light from the globe mingled with the moonlight shining through the sky-light overhead, casting the room in a soft blue glow.

"There." She kicked off her black Kate Spade flats. Her toes were painted dark red and looked sexy even to her. She grinned at Nate. "Come here."

He did as he was told, tucking his hands up under her shirt and helping her off with it while she practically tore his head off removing his. Her bra was filmy, white, and wireless, and when she unhooked it, it fell away like tissue paper to the floor.

Nate stood his ground. He'd gotten this far so many times before, it wouldn't have surprised him if Blair's mom knocked on the door and told them that she was actually hav-ing triplets and the other two babies were arriving just this minute.

Blair wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her body into his. All the times she'd imagined doing it, she'd put herself and Nate in place of the actors in a love scene in some old movie. Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon. Kathleen Turner and William Hurt in Body Heat. But this was so much better, because it was real, and it felt so nice.

He couldn't stop kissing her. She guided his hand down to the waistband of her jeans and then reached for his. Okay, maybe no one was going to knock on the door and the sky wasn't going to fall in. Maybe this time it was really going to happen.

She pulled him backwards onto the bed and they shim-mied out of their pants and underwear. Then there was nothing left but them. They kissed again in every kissable spot, until it became obvious that certain measures needed to be taken. Nate fumbled in his bedside bureau drawer for a condom.

Now for the awkward part.

Only it wasn't awkward. Without a word, Blair took the condom, kissed her way down his body, and carefully rolled it on. There. All better.

Nate had forgotten what it was like being with Blair. How touching her wasn't a haunted-house experience, where he blindly had to guess where things were and what they were, and wound up bumping into walls. With Blair, he just knew. And everything seemed to fit just right.

Blair didn't even have to tell Nate to slow down. They were so in sync, all she had to do was close her eyes and wrap her arms around him, arch her back a little, and feel it hap-pening.

Toda!

When it was over, they lay on their backs, holding hands and smiling up at the ceiling, because they knew that in a few minutes they could do it again. They could spend the rest of their lives doing it if they wanted to. Have food sent up to Nate's wing of the town house. Take their finals online.

"Maybe I won't even go to college," Nate mused. Why should he, when there was so much pleasure to be had? He kissed her hand. "We could sail around the world together. Have adventures."

Blair closed her eyes and tried to imagine sailing around the world with Nate on the yacht he'd build especially for them.

"I'd wear a different Missoni bikini every day and have the best tan," she whispered out loud.

In her head the fantasy continued. Their bodies would be all strong and wiry from working on the yacht and from their diet of raw fish, seaweed, and champagne. At night they'd make love under the stars and in the morning they'd make love to the sound of the seagulls' caws. They'd have beautiful, tan, blond, green-eyed babies who swam like dol-phins and never wore clothes. They'd stop in exotic ports, where the natives would dance for them and give them gifts of rare jewels and furs. Eventually, they'd amass such a col-lection of treasure, they'd be known around the world as the richest seafarers in the universe, and pirates would come after them to plunder their booty and steal their impossibly beautiful Ralph Lauren model-type children. By then, having nothing better to do with all those hours on the boat, she and Nate would have their black belts in karate, and they would fight off the pirates, sending them plunging to their deaths in the shark-infested seas. Then they would sail off into the moonlight, unharmed, and more in love than ever.

It could happen.

"Or maybe we'll both go to Yale," she said hopefully. Some doctor at her mom's hospital had left a note with her doorman today saying he wanted to write her a recommen-dation to Yale's premed program. She'd never considered becoming a doctor, but if it was going to get her into Yale, why not?

"I'll play lacrosse and major in geology," Nate murmured into her hair.

"Yes," Blair agreed dreamily.

Nate would excavate the Connecticut woods looking for rocks and wearing the beautiful Aran sweaters she'd knit for him during her lengthy premed lectures. All the female premed students would be in love with a brilliant young biol-ogist who also happened to be Blair's advisor, but she would pay him no mind--she'd only have eyes for Nate.

"And we'll live together," she added aloud. In a ram-shackle old Victorian house right near campus. They'd make hot cider on the wood stove and cook s'mores in the fire-place.

Nate grinned happily. "We'll get a Great Dane."

"No, two great Danes and two cats," Blair corrected. And they'd be so involved in their studies and making love on their antique bed in their creaky Victorian bedroom that they'd for-get to cut their hair or buy new clothes and they'd look like hippies, but they'd still graduate magna cum laude.

"And we'll get married," he whispered.

"Yes." Blair squeezed his hand beneath the sheets.

They'd have a gigantic wedding in St. Patrick's Cathedral, and when they returned from their yearlong honeymoon in the south of France, they'd live in a Fifth Avenue penthouse overlooking the park. She'd be the surgeon general of New York, and he'd stay home with their four golden-haired, green-eyed children, building sailboats in the living room. And he'd always pack a Hershey's Kiss in her lunch to show that he loved her.

Blair turned over and rested her head on Nate's chest. The possibilities were endless, but they didn't have to decide now. The only decision they had to make right now was whether to do it again, or wait a few minutes and then do it.

His heartbeat rang in her ears, an urgent, vibrate sound. She lifted her head and kissed him.