I don’t want this moment

But it’s more than a moment – it’s hours and hours afterwards, just breathing, just looking into and through each other’s eyes, into the thoughts in their heads. It’s an oyster silk slip, a purple bowtie.

To ever end

In the end, of course she gets out of the car. There’s nothing to do but return to the way things were, until they can’t, and it’s pale skin, black gauze, diamonds and unexpected tenderness.

When everything’s nothing

Nothing is said when everything should be, in the pure white light of a tainted summer. Three words and eight letters should come so easily. He shouts them in his head, her in her look: I – you.

Without you

Then they are without each other, slipping through each other’s fingers, holding on for mere seconds at the Snowflake Ball and in her bedroom, passionate thoughts, dispassionate deeds.

I wait here forever

They stayed on that street corner forever, and then stepped into the future together, into games, into laughter, into the warmth of two in one but two just the same and the idea that this could be.

Just to see you smile

She doesn’t smile when he plays her for a fool, when he plays her like a chip, when he plays his heart false. The bullet rips into him but it’s no more than the absence of her and his knife in her back.

‘Cause it’s true

He can’t get away from her need, from her want, from her pleading eyes and the glitter on her palm that should be on her finger. I love you has been said, over and over. Not will you – me.

I am nothing

Worse than nothing is when they’re with other people, when they can only come together in the back room of a bar burning down, when they’re burning, burning, burning up.

Without you

Without pause they take turns maturing, regressing mutually on the way to marriage and disaster. He’d love her baby as much as he loves her. She loves him too much to see him break and bend.

Through it all

Through Hell, through high water, through princes and paupers and fathers, she’ll go to him. They’ll walk over hot coles which sear their skins together on a bed in Monte Carlo.

I’ve made my mistakes

No more mistakes, no more giving up on power and prestige. They’ll be crowned together or not at all without so much as a kiss but a welcome ball and chain, a welcome weight around her neck.

I stumble and fall

And he stumbles off the edge, and it seems their future goes with him – no. Flowers and friends and a few seconds of old Hollywood and all the gossip and the lies and the hurt have been for something.

But I mean these words

Their son has a sturdy body, his mother’s lips, his father’s looks. He loves their baby as much as he loves her. She loves them, her boys, the Holy Trinity of Chuck, Blair and Henry, hope, faith and love.

His mother’s dressing room is a place of reverence, where Henry would rather watch the confusing process of Mama getting ready than go foraging in her closet and end up stuck inside the hooped skirt of a Marchesa gown for half an hour again. Everything in here is precious, and pale blue-green, and whatever Daddy has most recently brought home in a box for her is shimmering on the left side of the vanity.

“Mama?”

“Henry?”

She lifts him onto her lap so they can talk to each other in the mirror, two Blairs, two Henrys.

“Your dress matches Daddy.”

“My dress matches Daddy’s dress?”

Henry’s brow wrinkles. “Not his dress. Your dress matches Daddy.”

“That’s right, sweetheart.”

“Your dress always matches Daddy. Why?”

Her hands are constantly in motion, pulling him closer into her, smoothing his hair, smoothing hers. “Mama and Daddy have always matched. That’s because –”

And then Henry is flying upwards, and Mama’s scowling at Daddy, who has stolen him from her. They look down at her, her boys, although which part of her they’re looking at definitely differs. Chuck smirks.

“It’s because Mama is very bad at expressing herself,” he explains. “And I forget that she loves me at least once a day, so the dress is her way of telling me that we go in a pair – you know, like cards or those hideous china cats you so helpfully smashed last week. If I’m in the middle of a party and happen to forget who I’m going home with, I just look for whoever’s dress matches my suit.”

“Not forget me, Daddy.”

“No, Henry. Not forget you.”

“Henry, my man! Why’d you have to keep stealing all the good looking ladies?”

Uncle Nate keeps candy bars in his pockets. He insists he has a sweet tooth, but Henry suspects otherwise.

“He takes after his father that way.”

Uncle Nate and Mama kiss, but not in the Mama-Daddy way, in the way that means lady friend-man friend. He knows. He had Dorota sit down and explain it to him. They also discussed whether it was too soon for a trade-up from ‘Mama’ to ‘Mommy’, and left that for next month’s agenda.

“Keep trying, Archibald. Who knows, maybe after all this time, she’ll finally go for you.”

Daddy must have said something funny because everyone laughs, and Uncle Nate and Henry go to watch a programme about brightly coloured dinosaurs, because that’s what Uncle Nate says real men do. Henry sits on the couch beside him and tried to subtly begin excavating his jacket.

.

“Where’s Henry?”

Auntie Serena has a lot of golden hair, like a princess, and she’s very pretty – not as pretty as Mama, obviously, and Daddy agrees. No one ever is.

“I’ve got a lion out here…who wants to eat him up!”

Auntie Serena likes to run and play and climb things more than anyone Henry knows, but she also let him sit on her lap for a whole day when he was sick, and rubbed his belly when it was sore. It isn’t sore anymore, so Henry feels justified running away from the lion, shrieking as he goes.

“A tasty morsel, yum yum!”

Henry always aims to be caught, because Auntie Serena likes to turn him upside down and shake him, or right way up and spin him around. These are some of Henry’s favourite ways to spend the afternoon, so who is he to deny Auntie Serena the fun she has doing them too?

.

“Look who it is!”

Uncle Dan Humpty has two names, because Mama sometimes says ‘Dan’ and sometimes ‘Humpty’, which usually makes Daddy kiss her cheek and Uncle Dan Humpty roll his eyes.

“Have you brought me your latest opus?”

It is a bestseller, the book Henry and Uncle Dan Humpty wrote. It’s about a boy called Henry, which Henry was sure would appeal to everyone, and he was right. Everyone gave him a dollar for a copy of the book, and Grandpa Cyrus gave him five whole dollars for his signature on the first page.

“Front page of the Spectator, Henry, I guarantee it.”

Uncle Dan Humpty gives Henry strange Polish dumplings, which he likes and Mama disapproves of, and then they read to each other until it’s time to go home again. Uncle Dan Humpty is reading Peter Pan, because he isn’t very smart. Henry is reading The Art of War.

They stop: stop thinking, stop scheming, stop planning, stop caring. They just stop still. The film stutters on the reel. He loves to see the nape of her neck, but it’s worth the difference when her hair comes down and she tugs gently on his sleeve and leads him to her childhood bed.

They’ve consummated, consecrated it before, of course.

It’s worth the difference, holy water blessing the match, holy fire lighting the match. They burn the midnight oil, burn the candle at both ends in pursuit of perfection –

It comes.

It comes when fingers linger, when tongues can’t help but taste. It comes with the familiar sting of her nails in his spine, the unexpected cool of her wedding ring soothing the skin. It comes when he turns her over (he’s a voyeur, albeit it a married one), and she has and holds until he rises to meet her, and their mouths meet in the middle, and it’s soft and sweet and sharp like the first time, a vow broken but a vow kept.

“I love you.”

The dawn is pink and promising, the end of a long night, the beginning of the longest day of their lives.

“I love you too.”

Blair stares into the mirror, at her still taut skin, smoothing one hand back over her forehead to erase the anxiety of raising her son. The fact that he’s still alive, at nineteen years of age, and hasn’t fallen out of the window – he spends enough time in skyscrapers – or been taken out by the mob – he plays enough games of cards, all of which he wins. She has his father to thank for that, who doesn’t even have a sprinkling of salt and pepper in his hair has just now come into the room with a sheaf of papers in his hands.

He’s allowed to have forgotten this year, she thinks charitably, adjusting the straps of her negligee.

“Are the children downstairs?”

“Dorota’s umpiring their latest argument: why Henry keeps punching all the boys who hit on his little sister.”

“That’s my boy.”

Chuck slides his hands along her shoulders, cups her throat. “I was all those boys.”

“And it didn’t do you any harm to get punched now and again.” She leans into him with a sigh. “I remember Nate and you wrestling on the limo over me…”

“It wasn’t wrestling.”

“Well, that’s how I prefer to remember it.”

Her eyelids flutter as he bends down, kisses first one side of her neck and then the other. “I remember many, many things from our wasted youth…” All it takes is a blink, and there are diamonds resting on her clavicle, layers of sparkling leaves like a triumphal wreath.

“All hail,” he says solemnly. “Empress Bass.”

“Happy anniversary to you too. I had a dinner arranged later, a string quartet…”

“Stop talking, Waldorf.”

It’s been twenty years, but he’s still a wolf, and she’s still hungry to give back as good as she gets.

He’s still but she’s shaking, teeth chattering, disbelieving that they’re up the stairs and in a room and out of the trunk with no snipers on the roof, no flashing blue lights. She chafes her hands together but can’t seem to get warm.

“Take off your dress.”

“What?”

“Just do it.”

They do it together, in fact, peeling it away from the slip beneath like zest from skin, beneath which there’s another, and if they stripped for long enough, maybe she could speak the thoughts which are making her tremble. He steps in instead, rubs her arms and strokes her décolleté, hugs her tight around the middle and spreads his fingers. She’s frozen and she melts, gripping his shoulders for support, murmuring something about how he feels.

“This isn’t about me.”

Her feet go backward and his go forward and they quickstep towards the bed, where he untangles them, where he tucks her in beneath the covers and lies on top of them, for the sake of propriety, except not – for the sake of…something.

“You don’t have to…”

“It’s okay. Go to sleep, Blair. It’s alright.”

And when she does, exhausted but no longer shaking, he hangs her dress in the bathroom, then lies down beside her and strokes the hair off her temples until his own thoughts overwhelm him, and his shuddering shakes the bed.

“That is it!” Her voice rises to ear-splitting decibels, but Henry is well used to Mama’s tantrums. That’s when Daddy picks him up, and they go and sit at the bar with Monkey and do business. Daddy likes doing business with Henry there, he says, because Henry can always spot a cheat. Daddy says he’s smart that way.

“Blair –” Which is Mama’s name, and which Henry occasionally hears late at night in a tone Daddy never ever uses with anyone else.

“No, Chuck! Our home is not ‘the Party Plaza’, this is not ‘where that hot rich guy lives’ and no, you may not have a tour of ‘the scandalous homes of Manhattan’s elite’!”

“Not to mention the National Guard of Monaco dropping by.”

Mama spoke French to them, which Henry is only just beginning to understand, and Daddy was very rude to someone with a gun. Dorota told him he mustn’t worry, since Daddy’s been shot already and come back to life and found Mama’s ring again, so he didn’t.

“You’re right, of course,” he goes on. “Especially now Henry’s older. I don’t want him growing up in a hotel.”

She comes close to them, straightens his lapel even though it’s not crooked. Henry tucks his face into Daddy’s shoulder and peeps, as he always does when Mama gets that expression on her face. They might kiss in a second, which is both a fascinating and disgusting process.

“You turned out alright.”

“Just.”

“Then no penthouse either.”

“You turned out alright.”

“Just.”

They do kiss, closing their eyes, which Dorota says is because people who love each other see stars when they kiss, so they close their eyes to look at the pretty sight.

“Serena, sit down.”

“What? Why?”

“There’s something I want to tell you.”

“To tell…oh B, I already know!”

“What?”

“You haven’t touched a drop of alcohol for the past month, you’re glowing like you’ve had an oxygen facial every other day, of course I know!”

.

“Mother, I…”

“I know, darling, I know. Do you think a mother can’t tell when her own daughter’s expecting? Put your feet up. Dorota will fetch you some ginger tea.”

“I already brew it, Miss Eleanor.”

.

“Nate, hi. Do you have any time to talk?”

“I always have time for you, Blair. What’s up?”

“We thought about throwing a party to announce it, but that seemed too much like when I was with Louis, so –”

“Don’t worry about giving me the big speech, I know you’re pregnant.”

“Who told you?”

“Chuck came into the office whistling. Then he shook hands with an intern and complimented my tie. Either your marriage became a publicly traded company, or there’s a Bass in the oven.”

.

“I don’t even know why I’m bothering to speak to you –”

“Because you want me to swear on that Bible you’re holding that I won’t satirise your unborn child?”

“How –”

“Serena told me. She’s learning to knit so she can make you a quilt.”

.

“Hello, Blair. I smell the pheromones of a baby Bass coming off you like waves.”

“I thought she’d just put on a few.”

“Shut up, Jack. We’ll pick you up a gift on our way to Agent Provocateur. Maybe a baby bong?”

“That’s my girl.”

With this ring, I thee wed.

He has his hands on her, she has her hands on him, they have their hands on each other when mouths and lips and whispers engage for the second, third, fourth time. The palms are warm, the fingers are cool and unfamiliar.

With my body, I thee worship.

What does that phrase mean? The reverence with which her dress comes apart, perhaps, to be laid carefully aside, to be wrapped in tissue and remembered. The way her hair comes down slowly, perhaps, uncoiling when her headband is gone, glittering in a far off corner. When she grips his shoulders, perhaps, when the sheets are a great white sea. When he turns her over, perhaps, and they rock in time with the tide.

And with all my worldly goods I thee endow.

“Do you feel powerful now?”

“I feel married now.”

Her foot strokes his calf beneath the duvet, he runs rings around her navel.

Everything is quiet on the top floor of the Empire, except for the waves as they break, sounding like passion and battle, both at once.

“Would you like to hear a story?”

It was good to see her calm again, thought Chuck: Blair had already fired the doctor, threatened the paediatrician with a lawsuit and told the homoeopathist his remedies were all just water anyway. He couldn’t blame her, not when Henry was still hot and itchy and tear-stained, his little hands bandaged into paws to stop him scratching.

“What story?”

She settled him onto her lap, which was nothing short of miraculous. Her Armani skirt suit was at risk of disease and dead skin, but that was irrelevant when it came to her son.

“It’s a story about a very handsome prince with great business acumen, and a very beautiful princess with excellent taste, and a dragon. Well, several dragons.”

He was at that age when monsters were more interesting than true love. “What were the dragons’ names?”

“Insecurity,” said his father, joining them on the blue quilted bed. “And its twin, Indecision.”

“Then there were Louis and Dan…”

“Eva and Raina…”

“And King Bart the Bad,” Blair finished, taking Chuck’s hand before he could pull away. “A dragon with a black heart who wanted everyone to be unhappy so their hearts would be as black as his.”

Henry wrinkled his nose. “Why were there so many dragons?”

“The prince and princess lived in…um…towers that were separated by this sea of dragons. To get to each other, because they were best friends, over the course of many years they had to slay the dragons. Insecurity and Indecision needed both the prince and princess to plunge their swords in at exactly the same moment, and it took a long time for them to agree on that.”

“Louis and Dan and Eva and Raina spoke kind words to the prince and princess, and made it seem that although they’d never reach the opposite tower, they could still be happy if they stayed with the dragons. But the truth was that it was all a spell the dragons had cast with their…um…magical accents, so those dragons were slain and on they travelled.”

“And King Bart the Bad?”

Blair opened her mouth, but Chuck’s fingers tightened around hers. His expression didn’t change as he took over the narrative.

“King Bart couldn’t bear to see the prince, who he hated for living in the tower that had once been his when he was human, happy. He twined himself around the tower and threatened to crush it; he caught the princess in his jaws and threatened to hurt her. The prince, who’d once valued his tower above all else, which is why it had taken him so long to leave it to slay Insecurity and Indecision, now knew that what he couldn’t live without was the princess.”

“Did he love her?” Henry demanded.

“Yes.”

“Like Paul loved Holly?”

“Even more. And that made his heart strong, and there is nothing worse for a black-hearted dragon than a strong-hearted man. That’s the kind of person you have to be to slay bad dragons, someone who accepts responsibility for his actions and who takes care of his family. Of course, being devilishly handsome helps.”

“And then the prince and the princess lived happily ever after.”

“Not quite,” interjected his mother. “The princess still got mad when she didn’t mean to sometimes, and the prince still worked too long on the holidays, but other than that they made a pretty good team.”

“The princess still complained about closet space…”

“The prince still left scotch glasses everywhere…”

“The princess still insisted on attending galas for endangered fungi…”

“The prince still insisted on her attending burlesque shows!”

“Henry –” Chuck kissed a pock-less place on his forehead, and Blair followed suit. “Your mother and I are going to bed now.”

“We love you, and Dorota will bring your milk in a minute.”

The door closed quickly behind them, and Henry put his head on one side. Were they…running? And…laughing?

“What’s burlesque?” He asked no one in particular.

Spotted: Chuck Bass…

Spotted: Blair Waldorf…

Spotted: The Motherchucker…

Spotted: Queen B…

He’s torn between curiosity and the desire to gouge his eyes out. There are always women in his father’s pictures, always headbands in his mother’s; he looks strange and she looks stiff, and they definitely do not look like the parents Henry knows, who do couples’ yoga and have date night every Friday (as well as every Wednesday, Saturday and occasionally Monday).

Even the captions don’t sound like his parents. There’s pot and Playboy and Prague on one hand, and princes, prestige and prep school on the other. They did awful things to people, some of which he kind of admires.

They also did awful things to each other.

“Henry? Henry, it’s time to –”

The screen is frozen on the picture of her in a long pale dress, not dancing with his father so much as trying to get away from him.

“When…why were you like this?”

His mother comes in, her heels sinking into the carpet. She shrugs. “We were left on our own a lot. My plan to marry Nate –”

“Uncle Nate?!”

“Didn’t work out, and he…he was there for me, in a strange sort of way. I liked him more than I should and he liked me more than he could stand, so instead of asking me to Cotillion, he got my escort kicked out so he’d look like the better option.”

“Dad did that?”

“Dad,” Blair says drily. “Ruined Cotillion, made a beautiful speech to me at his father’s wedding, then stood me up for our summer in Tuscany, then wouldn’t say I love you –”

“Then said I love you.” Henry wonders whether his voice will ever be deep enough to rasp, the way his father’s is. “Then dated you, then lost you, then was found by you in a train station in Paris –”

“Then lost you to a French girl –”

“Then lost you to a Monegasque prince, then Humphrey –”

“Dan Humphrey?!”

“Then was found by me in Monte Carlo, then made a pact to get married, then got married, then had Henry, happily ever after.”

“You’re forgetting the vow to God,” Chuck reminds her.

“You’re forgetting the sweaty horse comment.”

“You’re forgetting your birthday party.”

“Which one?”

They’re inching closer together, and Henry slams shut the laptop. “Don’t want to know!” He announces at the top of his lungs. “Don’t want to know, don’t want to know…Dorota! They’re doing it again!”

“I know what sex is.”

Both of them flinch.

“And I know what condoms are.”

“Safe sex is…um…all well and good.” His mother is twirling the ruby ring she wears on her right hand round and round, like she always does when she’s nervous. “But when you have it for the first time, you should be in a committed relationship with someone you care about.”

“Why? Dad wasn’t. Dad was the biggest player there was. There are blogs dedicated to him.”

“Dad was the biggest fool there was.” His father has a wicked sense of humour, but it isn’t in evidence today. “I thought that by using and throwing away the most girls, I was proving something. I thought not getting attached meant that I was powerful, that I wasn’t subject to the same ridiculous feelings other mortals were. I had a god complex, and it didn’t make me any less lonely at four AM when those girls went home.”

“But –”

“A man waits for a woman he’s attracted to more than physically. A man waits until he’s ready, and she is too. You have to be comfortable and honest with each other. That’s the adult thing to do.”

“What about you two?” Their son challenges. “When you had it for the first time?”

“I did it to do it,” his father admits. “And she…she was terrifying.”

“So you broke the rules. Mom?”

“With the biggest player there was, who I never expected to hear from again.”

“And did you – oh God, Mom.”

“Oh God Mom what?”

“Please tell me you didn’t get married to him. Please tell me you didn’t get married and have a child, and then ruin that child’s life by telling him this.”

His parents inspect their nails and say nothing.

“How am I ever going to get that image out of my head?”

“There are images of the hour beforehand on Gossip Girl, actually –”

He makes a sort of snarling sound and bolts out the room, one long, still growing streak in a St Jude’s uniform, and they give each other the glad-eye side-eye and begin, very quietly, to laugh.

“Daddy?”

Chuck jerks awake. His back hurts and there’s no warm body beside him: he’s fallen asleep in his study, glass of scotch untouched, and a pale little face is peeping round the door.

“I had a bad dream, and Mama isn’t here.”

Henry’s feet are bare, and Chuck fights the urge to tear off his own socks and offer them up. When it comes to his son, he’s pretty sure he’d tear his arm off and hand it over if it was necessary.

“I’m scared.”

Of course he’s afraid, who wouldn’t be afraid? There’s a storm raging outside and Blair is at the opera with a buyer for a Spanish department store. He’s handsome, his English is accented and she’s fallen for Europeans before. It took a lot out not to invite himself along with her, use the word ‘wife’ every few seconds and kiss her passionately every time the conversation got too intense.

“It’s okay, little man. Come here.”

Such a contrast to Chuck’s childhood, the ease with which his son clambers onto his lap, how right he feels there. They rock gently from side to side, watching the lightning.

“Shall we go back to bed?”

A shake of the dark head.

“What if I check for monsters first?”

A pause, a considering look. That’s Blair’s look, the intensity of the eyes, the lips pushed slightly outwards.

“Okay.”

And so they go through the nightly ritual of Daddy under the bed and bureau for monsters, shaking Henry’s blanket three times and tucking him back in. Then – slowly, because this is usually her job – he eases himself down on the edge of the bed and nudges off each shoe with the toe of the other.

“Sing.”

“Daddy can’t sing, Henry.”

“Sing!”

Which is why when Blair comes home, trying to move silently as she peels off her gloves and unpins her hair, she finds her son fast asleep and her husband singing the Sound of Music, which he only knows from Nate’s stoner playlist.

He’s surprisingly good.

“I will break down this door!”

“Then enjoy buying me a new door!”

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing!”

“You have absolutely no idea what I’m doing!”

The honeymoon period is officially over. That must be the reason, all that time wrapped up in each other, not counting calories or fat units or wasting time on the time of day. He’s heard her every morning this week, has played it down when he’s mentioned it over breakfast, has snapped at him when he’s tried to offer help. She twists grapes off the stem and will eat nothing else, and her mouth is sour as she chews.

“If I need to drag you to a therapist –”

“I am trying not to vomit and to pee on a stick simultaneously, Charles, so a lot less yelling and a little more consideration would be appreciated!”

They lapse into silence. He crawls closer to the door, lays his hand on the wood.

“You should’ve told me.”

Her voice is a thread.

“We didn’t plan this. You didn’t ask for this.”

“We didn’t plan us. I would want this, I swear to you. I would want this with all my heart.”

“I had to wait.”

“I know.”

“If it isn’t…”

“Then we’ll talk. Blair, open the door. Please.”

Her eyes are bloodshot, her skin is milky pale. He grips her slender ribcage in the place where his fingers fit.

“Three more minutes.”

“Blair –”

“Chuck.”

She’s not hoping in case there’s nothing to fight for.

“I’m going to love our baby as much as I love you.”

She’s coming down very slowly, sparking from the stroking of fingers up and down her limbs, becoming aware of the body behind her, the arms that anchor her, the scents of lavender from the candles and musk from the skin.

“You’re blooming,” he murmurs, letting his hand explore rib, hip, the tiny mound in between.

“It’s about time. Most people show before now.”

“Four and a half months is perfectly –” She gasps, but he can’t resist the nape of her neck when it’s bare and tender and inches away. “Normal. And you’re not most people.”

They traverse the bump together, drawing lines in the bubbles, thinking silent thoughts about its presence, its firmness, the promise inside.

“I’ll be so good to you,” he swears. “I’ll be so good to you both.”

“I know you will.” Her teeth catch his bottom lip when they kiss, and that goes where it goes, and their child drifts and dreams, unaware of anything but the spike of hormones and the two sounds, one higher, one lower, which lull him back to sleep.

She knows in her head she’s gone mad, but her heart’s fine, the monitor says so, and her arms are reaching out and her insides are aching.

“Give him to me.”

“Mrs Bass –”

“Give him to me!”

She doesn’t want him cleaned up, smelling like Johnson and Johnson, a stereotype in a blue baby blanket. She wants him as she is, naked, bloody, squalling, as enraged as she is that they haven’t yet touched.

The instant they’re skin-to-skin, the ache in her abdomen lessens. She can smell the perfect scent of her son, see the little face she already knows, every wrinkle, the length of every eyelash. She shifts and he whimpers.

He wants her too.

“It’s you,” is all she can think of to say, because it is.

“It was a beautiful ceremony.” Eleanor settled back in her chair with a sigh.

“But?”

“But what, Blair?”

“But?”

Her mother rolled her eyes. “But not as beautiful as yours, darling. Are you sure you and Charles wouldn’t like to do it again, perhaps with a few other people present, you know the mayor’s always been a great fan of yours…”

“Eleanor,” said Chuck, greatly daring, depositing Henry on his wife’s lap so she could squeeze and tickle and use him like a stress ball. “You know how the game is played. You’re can’t use invent an impediment now, five years on.”

She chuckled, watching her daughter turning Henry upside down and shaking him like a pepper pot while he shrieked with delight. “You’ve devastated her – but you’ve also made her happier than she’s ever been, and so has he.”

Serena drifted over as the music begins, claiming Chuck and Blair’s squealing son as her dance partner. She tries very hard to keep a straight face as he leads, and in the end they compromise and Dan picks him up, and they both dance with the bride who is radiant, whose beauty today of all days could compete with the midday sun.

For once, Blair isn’t envious of the golden limbs, the golden hair, the golden links of her friend’s life stretching out before her.

Her own beauty – her own life – is evidenced by the little person who totters back to her side and demands his own dance with her, giving Daddy a stern look like he’d better not start something.

“Something regal.”

“But not French.”

“Something classic.”

“But not classic movie.”

“Something powerful.”

“Blair. We are not naming the baby after any Roman emperors you happen to have in mind.”

She raises her eyebrows ever so slightly, and her round stomach makes her seem demure even though she’s anything but. “You have the Empire, I have a fashion empire.”

He rubs her shoulders, eager to keep the peace. “But the blood sports you and I enjoy don’t involve Christians or lions.”

“That’s true.”

“Not Cary, Gregory or George.”

“Not – ah. That’s an idea.”

“What?”

“In Charade, as you well know –”

“You hate Charade.”

“I hated Charade in the context of Marcus Beaton when you were being stubborn. Anyway, in Charade, Reggie wants to name her sons after her husband’s aliases. You only have one that I’m aware of.”

“Henry Prince.”

“Which is itself based on Henry V, a young man who steps out of his father’s shadow and achieves greatness, despite the roistering of his youth.”

“I don’t want you to see the baby of think of Eva.”

She tilts back her head to gaze up at him, her hair thicker and lusher and tumbling over her shoulders. “I’ll see the baby and think of you, and me, and Paris, and all the things I love most in the world. He’s a prince, Chuck. He’s a prince at the very least.”

He kisses her, the wrong way round, the right way of kissing her, inhaling bitter orange and green tea from her shampoo.

“I could live with Henry.”

“You’ll like Henry,” she commands, and goes back to writing thank you notes with the envelopes balanced precariously on her bump.

There were conversations, and promises, and agreements ‘not to be down the business end’, ‘not to look at anything that might put him off sex for life’. He acquiesced for the first six hours of her labour and sat still, letting her break all the bones in his hands and snarling at nurses, demanding ice water, no pillows, angry at himself because she had to do this herself, terrified every time she doubled up and keened with pain.

He doesn’t let go of her hand, but he breaks all his other promises when they say it’s time. It’s not the business end, it’s like the opening of a flower, and some magic births his son, immediately loud and demanding, immediately quiet when he’s placed on her chest.

Chuck doesn’t dare touch him. He’s told he’s strong, that his healthy, that they can tell by the power of his lungs. He still doesn’t dare touch him, a small red and white flower who clings to Blair’s finger and mouths things only she’ll ever understand.

It’s her who takes his hand and puts it on the tiny head.

It’s that which awakens the beast in him, the need to growl and make everyone go away, the need to stroke his son’s creamy limbs and feel that strong heartbeat and look at him forever. Anyone who harms his family will die slowly and painfully, and he will enjoy it. Anyone who takes these moments away, who asks tentatively about names and birth certificates, will never work in the city again.

He has a family of his own, and there’s no shame in tears about that.

“That’s Blair’s hair,” Serena says of the blanket. “It has more red in it than yours, Chuck.”

“Blair’s mouth,” Dan agrees, and everyone glares at him. “What?”

“That is Mister Chuck’s nose,” Dorota points out and everyone nods in agreement. “He is wrinkling it again, quick!”

At least five phone shutters click, and the assembled guests stares entranced as Henry Bass scrunches up his small nose, yawns, and goes right on ignoring them.

“Those will be Waldorf eyes,” Eleanor says firmly. “I would put money on that, Charles. Dark brown.”

“But they’re the same shape as Charles’,” Cyrus interjects. “Same eyebrows, too. That means he’s going to look like you when he’s mad.”

“Better me than Blair.”

“Yes,” his wife agrees. “Or you’ll never be able to deny him anything.”

“And you will?”

“I manage well enough with you,” she says sweetly.

Nate decides to broach the subject, and attempts to do it delicately. “How long until you can…”

“Six weeks,” Chuck replies, and everyone groans.

“What?!”

“Charles, darling.” Lily lays a soothing hand on his arm. “Everyone here remembers high school.”

“The banter –”

“The angst –”

“The side-eye –”

“The glazed expression whenever’s Blair’s in the room –”

“Six weeks is just a guideline,” she finishes smoothly.

Blair tucks the blanket around Henry’s delicate ears and glares at them all.

The Basses are terrifying – not even mildly frightening, like most parents. He has that purr of a voice that makes her think things she shouldn’t about a married man, which deepens to a growl when he’s displeased. She…she made every teenage girl’s life a living hell and she looks exactly the same, same perfect tailoring, same perfectly-pitched voice like a nuclear bomb going off in a satin factory.

“The thing is, Mr and Mrs Bass…Henry won’t stop speaking French.”

“That would be because Henry speaks three languages, Ms Schultz. If he’s too precocious for you, might I suggest adult education classes?”

“I apologise for my wife,” he says, but their hands entwine in the way that means a direct hit. “But Henry recently took a trip to see his grandfathers and found he enjoyed French more than English.”

“But it makes it very difficult to educate him.”

“Do you not understand what he’s saying?”

“I do, but –”

“Is he not getting the answers right?”

“He is, but –”

“Then there’s no problem.” She smiles like a shark and tilts her head on one side, pricing up every article of clothing on the woman opposite or possibly valuing her soul. “We’re taking him to the Russian Tea Room on Friday afternoon. Perhaps you should invest in a dictionary at the weekend.”

Their maid, sitting at the back of the room, narrows her blue eyes and nods.

Their chick, raised in his opulent nest, will be catered to – or they’ll drink champagne and circle her dying corpse, leaving nothing but the bones.

It’s Thanksgiving, and they’re drinking ginger tea and eating sugar cookies in the place Chuck thought he’d never call home. The Waldorf kitchen has proved a sanctuary today: he and Cyrus sat quietly and tried to stay out of the way while Blair and Eleanor whirled about, shouting and basting and blind baking pastry. Now Blair is still, and Cyrus and Henry and snoozing in the same arm chair, and every hair on her head is still in place despite the hours of preparation, consumption, organisation.

That’s when he knows.

“Blair.” He rubs his thumb over her knuckles, explores her palm, tests her hand in every way to find if it changed, if that’s what stopped him being afraid to hold it.

“Chuck.” She knows what he’s going to say before he says it, of course. She creeps into his mind, his dreams, makes him reach out for her in the night even though he knows she isn’t going anywhere.

“It’s time.”

“I thought so too. A girl this time?”

“If you can manage it.”

“He’s a big boy now. He’s been dropping hints about a sister.”

“The piano’s free…”

“You shut her mouth, Chuck Bass.”

She closes his mouth with hers, warm and spicy, threads her fingers through his hair. “Tonight,” she promises, although she’s already slipped halfway off her chair and into his lap.

“I’ll put the Dom on ice.”

“Would you like to know the sex?”

“Oh, we’ve known the sex – very well, in fact.”

The doctor smiles, and Blair kicks him neatly in the kidneys. She’s become more violent as the pregnancy has progressed, and even when prone is a force to be reckoned with.

“Yes, we would.”

“Okay. Let’s take a look.”

The wand begins to move and Chuck winces as her nails carve tracts in his palm. There’s nothing to be nervous about, a boy is as perfect as a girl, a daughter as much of a marvel as a son. This whole process has been a marvel to him, he who never attended baby showers or baptisms and whose only experience is humping a few strollers down some steps when he’s been in a particularly generous mood.

The woman he loves is getting larger, and angrier, and he’s in the seventh heaven of delight about it.

Strange.

“Congratulations, Mr and Mrs Bass. Your son is very well-endowed for his age.”

There’s a long pause, and then the doctor politely averts her eyes as she hands over the tissues.

If you described it to a doctor, he’d diagnose it – an anxiety attack – and prescribe it – Xanax – or deny it – come back in a week, tell me how you feel then. He’s never dared describe it to a doctor, not these five years. He’s too afraid of being told it’s a chemical imbalance that can be put right with another pill to swallow, another shrink to see; he doesn’t want to be fixed.

He wants her, all of her, when she comes towards him in her black dress, to the table where he’s waiting in black tie, and doesn’t dare deny the butterflies that swirl in his stomach just as the sight of her. They belong to each other in every way imaginable and prove it daily, so to deny them would be to deny them, and he’s done with denial and a medical diagnosis.

“Still fluttering?” She slides her hand into his.

“Yes.”

“Still sick?” Her engagement ring glitters the most, and the waiter knows better than to linger.

“Yes.”

“Do you want my cure?”

“What’s your cure?”

She locks the door of the ladies’ restroom behind them, laughs at the hammering on the door, travels up and down him twice and orders the rosé veal for dinner. He doesn’t want anything. He wants to watch her eat. He wants her, all of her.

He’s got guests in his gut, anyway.

“Why won’t you listen?”

Her hands slam down on his desk like her back will slam against the wall, door, floor.

“Because you’re not making any sense!”

His fingers worry his tie like his mouth will worry her cheek, lips, throat.

“Because you’re not listening!”

Her heels clack, her heels will dig furrows in his back.

“I am goddamn listening!”

His teeth bare, his teeth will be there.

Blair’s leans towards him and her blouse is low, lower than is proper and Chuck responds because he’s mad, madder than is proper with his wife whom he loves the rest of the time but right now he hates, right now he hopes will scream and realise he’s the only one in the world to make her come undone like that.

He cups the back of skull and draws her towards him, close enough to spit in his face.

“I am goddamn listening.”

She makes him white out, as a matter of fact, and roar as he does.

They’ve done everything possible to get him to sleep – even attempting attending church, leaving abruptly when Henry set his father’s coat on fire and the congregation became convinced it was a sign from Satan. Chuck merely raised his eyebrows over the charred cashmere, while Blair slipped a cold relief capsule into her son’s milk and hoped for the best.

And still he won’t sleep.

His mother’s eyes are bloodshot, and her head keeps nodding. “Henry, please…how will Santa be able to deliver your gifts if you’re not asleep?”

“You said to thank people for gifts. I can’t do that if I’m asleep.”

“Santa Claus doesn’t need thanks.”

“That’s rude.”

Blair wishes she hadn’t raised him so well.

Chuck tries a different tack. “If you go to sleep now, it’ll be Christmas Day much faster.”

“It is Christmas Day, Daddy,” says Henry, consulting his alarm clock. “Going to sleep would be wasting it, and not staying up to say thank you to Santa Claus would be rude.”

Dorota comes in to take the next shift – ‘there will be nothing but coal for you, Mister Henry, if you do not go to sleep’ – while his exhausted parents traipse back to their bedroom, peel each other’s clothes off and fall asleep in mutual exhaustion.

“Wake up, wake up, it’s Christmas!”

“No, it isn’t,” says Blair firmly, tucking her head more comfortably beneath her husband’s chin. “And it’s rude to come into Mommy and Daddy’s room without knocking.”

Chuck makes a grumbling affirmation without opening his eyes.

Henry is their son, so he behaves in the manner passed down through generations of Basses and Waldorf: badly.

He pulls the fire alarm, and Christmas begins with shrieking and sprinklers.

“I think I’m going to vomit.”

“Calm down.”

“I know I’m going to vomit.”

“You’re pregnant, that’s normal.”

“There is nothing normal about this situation!”

“Take deep, soothing breaths, just like the birthing coach said – just like you did in Saks last week.”

“Don’t – remind me – about – those shoes!”

“That’s better.”

“This is a disaster!”

“I don’t see why.”

“Two of the most toxic people in Manhattan were just – just –”

“Deep, soothing breaths.”

“It was unnatural!”

“I know.”

“And illegal!”

“I’m not sure that’s true…”

“Then it should be made illegal!”

“What’s the problem if they’re happy?”

“They should not be happy in my city, they should not do that in front of my gestating child!”

“Blair.”

“No.”

“Blair.”

“Charles.”

“Look at me.”

“No, Chuck!”

“All you saw was how serious they are about each other, and after all…”

“Don’t say it!”

“…they were only holding hands.”

The beat pounds through the floor, the walls, reverberates through Blair’s chest. She touches her silk blindfold curiously and clings to her husband’s hand.

“Chuck, you know wild card night is Friday.”

“This isn’t a sex game.”

“What a shame.” She can imagine his grin as they step forward, but is secretly glad their one month anniversary isn’t going to involve any swings or cages. There’s chatter coming from all around, and the scent of perfumed smoke, and some treacly jazz tune mixed with a heavy bassline is oozing out of speakers she can’t see.

“Your usual spot, Mr Bass?”

“Please, Salome.”

Blair is pushed gently back against a banquette and frowns, turning her head from side to side, running her fingertips over everything we can reach.

His breath tickles her ear. “Destination number one.”

She starts automatically as Chuck’s mouth moves against hers and then gives over to it, knowing there are people around from the whoops and applause but not caring. He tastes confusing and familiar and comforting and sharp and sweet, all at the same time, because she’s blind and knows where she is now.

Someone called her name.

Well, not her name.

Someone called ‘baby vamp’.

“Victrola.”

The blindfold is removed, the lights pulse crazily; he kisses her again.

“I love you.”

“I love you too.” He has a slightly crazed look about him, which she knows she shares. It’s being here again, it’s all the layers of clothes between them, the everything and nothing that happened on that stage: everything said and nothing at all left to say. “Arthur will take us to Kati Farkas’ brother’s building next.”

“Or we could stay.”

“Or we could stay. Happy anniversary, Blair.”

“Happy anniversary, Bass.” She very deliberately removes the pins from her hair, lining them up along the line of his thigh. “Stick around. There might be a show later.”

“Dad, Mom –” He introduces her, their nonchalant son with his impossibly disordered hair and his perfectly knotted tie.

“Mr and Mrs Bass…” And the poor thing curtsies. She doesn’t know what else to do, so she curtsies, and Chuck remembers who he married and smiles, noting the updo that has replaced her headband, and Blair tallies up the number of Waldorf Designs items Henry’s ‘girlfriend’ is wearing to this interview.

Shirt, pinafore, purse, tights.

Two is acceptable.

Three is trying too hard.

Four is indecent.

“Why don’t you two go into the study? Dorota will bring you some snacks and you can start work on your projects. Dorota!”

The poor thing trembles, like a leaf in a strong breeze.

Not Bass material, but she’ll do until he learns better.

“Refresh your drink?”

“Bring the bottle.”

The ache in his gut is, for once, less than the ache in his chest. If Nate knows, then everyone knows, and the world the way it is makes it okay for him, but not for her – how dare she. How dare she push and push and push him away and then expect to lean on him when she’s hurting. You can’t lean on someone who’s a thousand miles away, which is clearly where she wants him. How dare she.

How dare she get her claws into his heart with a blink of her pretty doe eyes.

How dare she crush him in her fist with a ripple of her pretty doll body.

But he didn’t use her, break her, make her fit for the saddle and nothing else – those were nothing but the wrong words to say. He could try to mount her and she’d throw him, and she’d throw the world off her back if it tried to sit astride her.

She would have.

She always would have before.

“Bring another bottle,” he says to the bartender, and wishes Blair a thousand miles closer, within the reach of his hand.

“Henry, what you saw was something adults like to do when they’re alone.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re in a loving, committed relationship with each other.”

“Why?”

“Because it makes them happy.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s like…playing a game. A game only adults can play.”

“Oh.”

“Do you understand?”

“Mama?”

“What, sweetheart?”

“Whatever you were playing, Daddy was winning.”

The eggs are watery and underdone, there is pulp floating in the orange juice. Both toast and bacon are burnt black, and the croissants aren’t so much croissants as piles of crumbs. The suite smells of smoke, the fire alarm has sounded twice and Monkey is running round in endless circles, barking at the top of his lungs, terrified of the havoc his master has wreaked.

Blair didn’t really want to be woken this way, at six AM on her birthday.

She kisses him anyway, and fingers the single peony in its cut crystal vase.

“I love you.”

He tried.

“Aramis.” Henry nods his head at the icy blonde sitting opposite.

“Why does Allegra get to be Aramis?”

“Because of her holier than thou attitude, of course.”

“Shut it, Bass!”

He’s taking her to prom, if she’ll stop sniping at him long enough for him to ask her.

“Athos.” Howard ‘Ward’ Archibald nods back, flipping a cocktail stick from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue. He’s ‘cool’ that way.

“Porthos.” Liberty Humphrey protests being the dandy of the group, but she does hold the record for most dates in a week and most poetry readings attended, so she sighs and submits.

“Who does Henry get to be d’Artagnan?”

“Because Henry created the Musketeers, Libby.”

“Because Henry was too into himself to eat in the cafeteria like a normal person.”

It’s such a shame that she thinks she’s not into him, it really is.

They light the tops of their shots and raise them high.

“Un pour tous, tous pour un!”

They protect monarchy, fraternity, and Liberty from undesirable acquaintances.

They are the Four Musketeers.

The coughing, sobbing, heartfelt wail wakes her and makes her body ache. Why did nobody tell her motherhood would make her like this? More to the point, why did no one tell her love would make her like this? Blair sits up, grumbling internally. Hear Chuck, shock below the waistline. Hear Henry, shock below the waistline.

Worlds apart but equally irritating.

The cries get quieter as she gets closer, and they’re not coming from the nursery.

She pauses in the doorway.

“I know, I know.” Chuck’s pacing like he always does when there’s a problem, but this time he has a hiccupping Henry in his hands instead of a glass of scotch. “You were warm and safe and now you’re not, so you’re mad with us. I know. But could you please let her get some sleep? Three times in an hour is not okay, and you know she won’t make Dorota stay over for you. Shhh. It’s not so bad.”

It’s automatic for him to fit the tiny head in the crook of his arm, to carry on a conversation with his newborn son like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Blair goes back to bed and cries for twenty minutes straight.

It’s the hormones.

“Coffee for me, black tea for my girlfriend.”

“You can put my girlfriend’s purchases on my account.”

“If you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment with my girlfriend.”

“May I introduce my girlfriend?”

Blair rolls over onto her stomach, her hair tumbled, her mouth bare, her slip ivory silk. “You don’t have to keep saying it, you know.”

“What?” He runs his fingertips across the warmth of her cheek, because he’s allowed to do that now.

“Girlfriend. I know that you mean it now, you can call me whatever you want.”

Chuck grips her by the elbows and, though she rolls her eyes at him, pulls her onto his chest and watches her watching him. “I like it. I like people to know it.”

“Possessive, much?”

“Unforgivably so. I like you in the morning,” he adds.

“Why?”

“Because you always look like Christmas.”

Blair’s first word was ‘Bottega’. She held back for as long as possible, past when she knew she was supposed to be able to speak, deliberating and dismissing words such as ‘Mother’, ‘Daddy’, ‘dress’ as too mundane and too obvious. In the end, it happened as she was stroller-ed by a store window on a spring afternoon.

“Bottega,” said Blair, wrinkling her little brow.

Eleanor despaired that it wasn’t ‘Chanel’.

.

Chuck’s first word was ‘tie’. Both bowties and neckties were strange concepts at first, but he was growing used to them, and beginning to differentiate between the two in his infantile mind: neckties were for daywear, and bowties were for special occasions, like when his father came to the nursery.

“Tie,” Chuck commanded, and flapped his hands.

The nanny was sent back three times until she got his order right.

.

Henry’s first word was ‘love’, since it was the one most often used in his home.

“Love,” said Henry, and continued to say it loudly whenever his parents were around.

They were the ones who had taught him, after all.

“Waldorf!” He yells above the music. She’s completely smashed, twirling in a space and beneath a light source all her own, sparkling from champagne, the straps of her little red dress sliding inexorably off her shoulders.

“Bass,” she purrs when he’s close. “Drink?”

“Dance?”

Blair laughs and grabs his hands, solid gold proof she’s off her face. She runs her own through his hair and then drapes them gracefully over his shoulders, gazing up at him with a little black smirk on her face.

“What?”

“You’re looking dapper tonight. Threesome later?”

“How did you guess?” Chuck twirls her in a circle, oblivious to the other dancers who have to jump out the way – no one would dare be bumped into by their Queen B, not even in this season of goodwill. “And where’s Nathaniel, by the way? He should be taking care of you.”

“One day, Chuck Bass,” she replies, too loudly, too brightly, with eyes that shine with her secrets. “I’m going to let you take care of me.”

“Is that right?”

“Sexually.”

“I see.”

“For hours and hours and hours.”

“If you say so.”

“Until then –” He shivers as her lips brush his ear, as she teeters on her toes. “I want you to think about me when you’re alone, and I want you to come in your pants.”

Satan brings tidings of discomfort to him that year, dressed in red with a white fur wrap, winking at him over her shoulder as she disappears into her have and forgetting everything she said by the next day.

Henry doesn’t know a lot about babies, but they look like dollies, and dollies must be handled carefully else their heads fly off. He presses gently on his sister’s button nose, surprised when she wriggles and seizes his finger.

“She won’t let go.”

“Baby is saying hello, Mister Henry.”

“She’s so small.”

His mother smiles ruefully. “She’s heavier than you were when you were born.”

“It must have been much more difficult for the stork to bring her, huh?”

Dorota nods. “And the heavier baby is, the more knots the stork has to tie in blanket. Miss Blair has been up all night untying knots and is very tired.”

“Are you too tired for hugs, Mama?”

“Of course not.”

Regretfully – because it’s nice to be liked on one’s first day of acquaintance – Henry retrieves his finger and climbs up on the larger, emptier side of the hospital bed. It smells familiar.

“Did Daddy sleep here?”

“Yes. Whenever we got a break from untying the knots.”

Henry does know a lot about mothers, first and foremost that they’re good at everything.

“Well done, Mama.”

“How far along?”

“Fourteen weeks.”

“Which is more than three months.”

“Yes…Chuck, what are you –”

His hand slips lower than the plain of her belly, and Blair gasps, leans into him for the good of anyone walking past the glass partition of her office, presses against his neck for her own good, in case she needs to use her teeth.

“Public,” she reminds him.

“Which you love. After avoiding me –”

“Oh God.”

“For three months, afraid you were sick or getting heavy –”

She does bite his neck, hard, digs pale green nails into his pale green covered shoulders.

“I think you deserve a little thank you gift.”

“Here?!”

“No. There.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“I prefer Chuck Bass, but if you insist.”

He watches them suspiciously sitting across the table. There’s a big glass of milk between his small hands that he sips sporadically, and that Blair has a bad feeling will be a glass of nicely matured scotch at least a year before it’s legal for him to drink it.

“Henry,” she begins. “We have something to tell you.”

A quizzical expression rather than a reply.

Chuck takes over and has no idea what he’s getting himself into – a tantrum? Tears? Is this good or bad news for the child who’s spent five years being the apple of his parents’, grandparents’, uncle and aunts’ eyes?

“Mama’s going to have a baby. You’re going to have a brother or sister.”

But there are no tears, and no tantrum seems imminent. Instead, he puts his head on one side and says, “How?”

“What?”

“Why is Mama going to have a baby? How did it happen?”

Blair’s nails are digging into his hand beneath the table; Chuck winces, but can’t see a way out.

That’s why he spends the next half an hour telling a very complicated story about wishing on stars, a stork and Santa. The baby is due the week before Christmas, and it’s the best he can do under the circumstances.

Henry’s neatly turned out for his after school special: pinstriped shirt, school tie knotted in a half-Windsor, single-breasted blazer and khakis. He leans back on his chair a little, so it doesn’t look like he’s listening too carefully – even at such a young age, that wouldn’t do. He has a reputation to uphold.

“Girls.” Chuck knows maybe too much about girls and has no idea what to say to his son. “You asked me about girls.”

“I wanna ask Allegra Newbold to the school dance.”

“Why do you want to ask her?”

“Because she won’t talk to me.”

And there’s that famous Bassian logic: aim for the girl who claims to hate you. He can’t help but smile. “Do you try talking to her? On her own, away from all your friends?”

“The she still won’t talk to me. She keeps standing next to me in the line so she has to be my partner, then telling me boys who wear bows are stupid.”

“Boys who don’t wear bowties are stupid.”

“That’s what I said.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said boys who weren’t stupid asked girls to dances.”

“Which means she wants to go with you.” Chuck crouches down to meet his son’s eyes. “You know when your mother says something to me that sounds mean, but one of us laughs? That’s because girls don’t know how to talk to boys, even grown up girls. If Allegra says not stupid boys ask girls to dances, that means she wants to go with you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Trust a married man, Henry,” he says sagely. “They never grow out of it.”

“Your behaviour has been…reprehensible.”

“It has, hasn’t it?”

“I can’t even begin to imagine a suitable punishment.”

“I humbly await your judgement.”

“You’ve never been humble in your life.”

“I’ve bent the knee for you enough times.”

“Haven’t I done the same?”

“Not recently. You’ve let me down, and I really think you’re the one who should pay for it.”

All this in raised voices, all this purred or drawled or shot across the room like arrows that melt on the skin. All this while she paces a furrow in the floor in her Cole Haans, all this while he draws in scotch through his teeth and watches her curve every time she turns again. He’s tempted to drop the glass on the floor, to see pleasure light her up as it smashes and their resolve smashes too.

“No!”

The mood breaks like the tumbler still in his hand might have, and the lovers – parents again, not combatants – leap to reassure the confused creature in the doorway whose thumb immediately jumps into his mouth.

“Mama and Daddy weren’t fighting, Henry.” Blair lifts him on to her hip, automatically pleased at the solidity, at how fast he’s growing, automatically heartbroken that her baby is disappearing faster than seems possible.

“Were.”

“Were not.”

“Were!”

“Sweetheart.” She kisses the top of her head and stays a moment, smiling because he still smells baby sweet. “Sometimes children play dress up, and make pretend they’re adults. Sometimes adults make pretend they’re mad with each other.”

“Why?”

Chuck receives her panicked look, interprets and acts. “Because adults don’t get to play war, or knights and dragons, or anything like that. We have to have fun other ways.” He raises his eyebrows meaningfully at his wife and gets the evil eye for his trouble.

“So you weren’t fighting?”

“No.”

“Oh. Down, then.”

And he wobbles off, happy as ever, leaving the elder Basses bemused. Chuck is the first to react.

“Continuation of our conversation?”

“Later.”

“Now.”

“Later!”

“Now!”

Blair shakes her head at him and bites her lip on a smile. “Fine. But you will pay for your recent…negligence.”

“As ever, I am at your service.”

“We’re free.”

She lays her head on his shoulder, careful not to disturb the coiffure that was put up so quickly but looked right in the cool light in front of the Bethesda fountain, that looked so right beneath the fluorescents of the police station, that felt like her crowning glory when she smiled like a cat glutted on cream and told them she was afraid she couldn’t say anything about her husband’s whereabouts on the night in question.

“You’re not.” In the dark of the car, caged within tinted windows and metal doors, his voice makes her shiver. “You made vows.”

“So did you.”

His fingers trace the line of her neck, her shoulder, down her arm to her wrist. “We’ll have another wedding, if that’s what you want. We’ll have a church and a string quarter and a maid of honour and bridesmaids and a best man and ushers and flower girls.”

“I don’t want another wedding. I don’t want another husband. I want ours. I want you.”

He turns his head to look at her and she kisses him: so sweet, as sweet as a virgin bride with nothing to hide, sweet as sugared almonds, and so sure, as sure as the first time when she shuffled over to him in her slip and her glory and the pitch black of her pupils bade him a little closer.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Mama has three daddys but you don’t have a daddy, so I only have Grampy Cyrus and Grandpa Harold and Grand-Père Roman.”

“That’s right.”

“Does it make you sad, not having a daddy?”

This conversation starts over a game of chess; Chuck is suddenly conscious of his son’s eyes fixing on the king, of the whirrings and clickings in Henry’s small head as he tries to work out whether he’s said something wrong. Blair, the white queen in a deep orange cardigan, cuts off her call to Paris and comes to sit with them.

“Chuck…”

“It’s okay.” He takes her hand anyway, beneath the table. “Henry, you know how the lady who made clothes died, and your mother was very sad, and went to a sad party in a black dress?”

“A funeral,” Henry pronounces.

“That’s right. Well, the same thing happened to my father, but it wasn’t very sad for me because I didn’t know him very well – like you weren’t sad because you didn’t know the lady who made clothes. We didn’t live together, like the three of us do, and we didn’t go to feed the ducks or go to the theatre together.”

“And living together and going to feed the ducks and going to the theatre together makes you happy instead of sad?”

“Very happy.”

“Good.”

When he smiles, they both smile back, and hold onto each other less desperately. They know they’ll always be there: waiting for each other, waiting for him.

“Checkmate.”

Uncle Dan Humpty does not like restaurants, and always fidgets – that is why Auntie Serena invited them all here, Henry supposes. He suspects that Uncle Dan Humpty is not a good cook either, but has no time to test his theory: as always when they go out, Henry is swooped upon by his nearest and dearest and carried off to be shown things. Today, Auntie Serena is explaining elephants, a topic Henry enjoys very much, especially since elephants come in so many colours (the pink paisley one is a particular favourite).

“Hungry,” he says, and is immediately seated beside Mama and given his juice.

Daddy, on his other side, wisely passes him another napkin. This is code to spit out what he doesn’t like and not to be mean about it.

Henry announces his interest in elephants.

Auntie Serena goes off a giraffe theme, and then Mama says something about giraffes in Manhattan which Daddy finds very amusing, and then Auntie Serena mentions something about ‘models’ and ‘scorned woman’, which is apparently a game, and then Mama slices her steak perfectly down the middle with a flick of her wrist and everybody winces and massages their own throats.

Uncle Dan Humpty has cheese instead of dessert.

Henry is not impressed. Mama calls Dorota on his behalf – after all, she says, it won’t do for a person of his high social standing to be seen at a party where they have cheese instead of dessert.

Daddy escorts him home, looking smug.

“What, Daddy?”

He shakes his head and seems not to have heard.

“Dan and Blair,” he says to himself. “Blair and Dan.”

Then he starts laughing and doesn’t stop until Arthur stops and they’re home again.

Her eyebrows ascend. “I was born here.”

“I know.”

More. “I was raised here.”

“I know.”

And more. “I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

“So you’ve never been held against your will by a mad billionaire?”

“So you’ve never been shot by some two-bit hustlers?”

“That was in Prague – two-bit hustlers?”

“I was waiting for my samples, I was bored.” She inspects her nails. “I won’t be treated like a princess again. I won’t be escorted here, there and everywhere, I won’t stop spying if spying is what needs to be done, and if you don’t like me out in New York at night then –”

“Then what?”

“Then get me a gun.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I like my genitalia the way it is, thank you.”

They have to remind themselves to slow down, quieten down; but the house is silent. It could do with seeing a little joy after all the blood and guts that has splattered the walls. It occurs to Blair as she floats for the first time in a long time that they do, in fact, have all the time in the world, and that this bed isn’t really her bed anymore.

“Where will we live?” She asks. They can’t even move an inch away from one another without something happening, some champagne cork popping, the need to have and hold resurfacing and then stringing them out for hours.

“Anywhere.”

“On the moon?”

“Anywhere you want.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“Yes.” Chuck turns her on her back and frames her face with his elbows, waits for the slightest flare of…well, anything really. Any fear, any anger, any anything. She smiles, and she’s been smiling maybe since the day he was born, but he can only see it now, now her gown is draped over a chair and off to cold storage tomorrow to be preserved forever. “But you could pack us up and move us in with Humphrey and I wouldn’t care.”

“Don’t talk about Dan.” Her fingers take a walk down his chest, over his heartbeat. “Don’t talk about anyone.”

“Let’s talk about you.”

“Or not talk.”

Down to the grain, she has measured the spicing: the cinnamon, the nutmeg, the lemon juice. Down to the millisecond, she has calculated the time: so long, and check, and so long, and check, and remove. The crust/filling was worked out with mathematical precision, she Skyped with her father in France so he could tell her when to stop sprinkling of mixing or rolling.

The pie is baked.

The only obstacle is sitting before her.

“Taste it.”

He moves his fork ponderously over the dish, selects a seemingly random spot and strikes. She almost winces as her beautiful crust yields and steam and sweetness fill the air.

“Moist.”

Yes.

“Hot.”

Okay.

“A pleasure for the tongue.”

Better than okay.

“It tantalises the taste buds. Its aroma is seductive. The passion of that pumpkin lying so insouciantly beneath the crust is –”

“I hate you!”

“For being helpful?”

“For trying to turn me on with my own pie!”

“You’re turned on by your pie, I’m turned on by your pie…”

“That was not the point of the exercise – put me down!”

From the moment of conception, his son terrified him. He hated the idea of hating him, he hated the idea of gaining the child and losing the mother or vice versa. For nine months, his son terrified him, and for the extra week he refused to reveal himself, he terrified him ever more. Henry waited until the last possible minute to be born, until she was ready to be induced – he’s like his father that way, delaying the inevitable – and then decided that now was the time to introduce himself.

He seemed to understand the climate of fear he’d created, and made sure to be safely asleep whenever Chuck wasn’t.

But this is it.

He can’t hide anymore.

The nursery was blue anyway, and the moonlight makes it more so. They sit in the rocking chair and play chicken with each other’s sleep patterns, peeking at the other while they dream of blue skies, blue walls, blue skin before the first flush of life lit him up.

The first flush of light lit the sky up, and Chuck waited.

Henry looks his father in the eye: baby blue, bright blue, all the brightness and curiosity and ferocity in that one look that scans him interestedly, makes what it can of him, decides not to cry and not to retreat and not to fight to be put back to bed again.

That’s it.

He’s gone.

It’s impossible not to love their child, who looks at him the same way she does.

He thinks they don’t hear him slip out the door, but they do, and they see him too: grey suit, long legs, bowtie, all.

He’ll never cut his hair and it looks better that way, even though his mother tells him to because that’s what mothers do. That’s her hair, that deep brown, the flash of red in the summer. Those are her eyes girls will hope to have linger a second longer later tonight, and they never will. He knows better than to choose one who wants him without his having to try.

He thinks they don’t hear him slip out the door, but they do, and they see him too: pocket square, cool look, Ferragamos, all.

He says he doesn’t smoke and he doesn’t, but his father knows he gets high on the sly somewhere, and expects no less. That’s his jaw, his stubbornness, his resolve to do wrong when right would come easier but to do wrong right. That’s his nose that follows the scent of the newest sensation and dismisses it before he sees it. He knows there’s no sharper shark in the city.

Chuck and Blair pretend not to see their son go out to break hearts on a Friday night, but they don’t pretend not to know where he gets it front. He wore red and she wore black and they hid behind masks that made them hotter, and when the dance ended they married and made him. Better than a hotel, he’s not made out of bricks. Better than a gown, he’s not woven from silk. He’s their Henry: ‘their’ meaning he’s them, a later but still reputable remake with all the arrogant gloss of they two combined.

“Not bad for a first try.”

“Not bad at all.”

“You sure?”

It’s such a little question, like it’s such a little word: sure. Certain, definite, positive. But what it means is big, as big as the sky at night where the horizon seems not to taper at the edges but to go on, to engulf everything and to eat up the idea of there ever being a morning.

She kisses him, like she did the last time, her leg sliding over the leather of limo seat and brushing his, her hand reaching for nothing and finding his hand, their fingers fusing together, kisses like brands on faces and neck, eyes like fire and spines of steel.

And she climbs onto him in her little black dress, and they make love, and they make their second child in the middle of midnight on New Year’s Eve when the world is just beginning and their love is just beginning over again.

Chuck and Blair go to the movies, but she’s got a little net veil over her dark brows and darker eyes and he’s got a manila envelope in his hand instead of a ticket stub. They sit in the front row, the pre-arranged spot, tapping their feet and not watching the movie. There’s cash in the envelope, black gloves are preventing their fingerprints from being all over it.

The Indian contact arrives, takes a seat on Chuck’s other side. The briefcase is passed to Blair, the envelope to the contact. They stagger their exits by five minutes, and are long gone before anyone can complain about their silhouettes blocking the view.

“So?”

“Real Shahtoosh,” she says reverently. “Just as I was promised. This year’s collection is going to be stunning.”

.

Chuck and Blair hold hands, but his fingers keep balling into a fist and she has to dig her nails in to keep him from snapping like a taut rubber band.

“Louis.” She smiles, but refuses to curtsey.

“Mrs Bass.” Even the sound of his voice makes the hand jump within hers, so she holds it all the tighter. That’s her name, and that’s the name by the place on the poker table where she won herself a king’s ransom, which is better than a prince because she won it through deceit and no one is telling her not to lie or cheat or wear Italian designers.

“Happy now, I see.”

“Second time lucky,” Chuck manages from between his teeth.

“For the both of us, it would seem.”

“Not being married to each other? Yes, I suppose that is very lucky indeed.”

.

There’s a bed on the plane which they share, nose to nose, lulled by the hum of ascent and decline.

“Life with you…” His voice is dry, raspy from the altitude. “Could never be boring.”

And with the secret she’s been keeping, there’s no chance it ever will be again.

She’s done with late nights and early mornings and snatching moments; the lock clicks behind her the moment she enters, the glass wall of his office bleeding darkness into the floor, draping her in shadow.

“Blair? What are you doing here?”

He’s not engaged enough to note the flicker of skin between her hem and her garter every time she takes a step.

“You’re coming home with me.”

“I can’t. Not tonight.”

“You’re coming, one way or another.”

As she walks, she sheds her coat, and it disappears into the gloom like smoke – someone will find it the next day, maybe trip over it, maybe connect the dots. Who cares. There’s room for two in his chair, there’s a place for wine-coloured lipstick on the collar of his shirt.

“You haven’t even noticed, have you?”

To be fair, he wouldn’t notice an apocalypse going on outside the window as she rubs against him like a cat and he grips her waist for something to hold onto.

And then he does.

The pleated skirt parts over her thigh, the white stockings gleam in the white light of a document. Does he really need to read it now? Doubtful. He reads her body like a blind man instead, reaches the crown of her head and finds that bow, that bitch-fest fuck-me more-please bow.

“Waldorf,” he breathes.

The white buttons on her blouse undo so easily, the white lace of her bra undoes him so easily.

“We need someone who’ll guide him morally.”

“And be a good influence.”

“And guide him spiritually.”

“Or possibly just educate him about spirits.”

“Someone who’ll always be there for him.”

“Someone who’ll always be there to keep him when you and I need a night off.”

“We,” announces Blair, adjusting her bundle so Henry gets the maximum support for his delicately fusing skull. “Will be entrusting you with the moral and spiritual education of our child. After considering several dignitaries and Desmond Tutu, who was passing through New York and offered, we have chosen you.”

Nate and Serena look dumbfounded. Slowly, very slowly, the hand holding Nate’s phone retreats into his pocket and comes out empty. Serena swallows and puts down her copy of People.

Chuck smirks. “We thought there are no possible mistakes that one or the other of you hasn’t made already, and once you’ve related your life stories, he’ll be prepared for just about anything.”

Blair gesticulates in the air, her head pillowed by the endless folds of the bride’s skirt. “Does Dan…does he do the thing with you, S? I hate the thing. Can’t understand why anyone would like the thing.” Where’s the champagne gone? Oh yes, she left it in the bathroom, and it’s too long a walk to go and get it now.

“What thing?” asks Serena, and the entire confection of her gown rises in a lamé tsunami as she tries and fails to sit up.

One finger rises above the froth and performs a corkscrew motion in the air.

“I love that thing!”

“That thing is awful. Now, Chuck does this thing…”

“Ewww!”

“This thing where it’s like that, and then that and that, and one time one of the legs of the bed just broke, and I said, ‘are you going to finish that?’”

“Blair!”

“And the Basstard did, and it was delicious, and I had to stay in bed for the rest of the day.” Maybe the champagne isn’t really that far away… “I really hope you’re happy with Humphrey. Even if he does do the thing with you and you’re weird enough to like it.”

“I love you, B.”

“I love you, S.”

The last time he tried to have a photo taken with his family, his family refused. She walked away from him. She ate gelato. He stood alone, and he stared at the proofs, and he hated them.

This time, it’s Hell on earth. It’s makeup artists, stylists, people combing him and spraying him and manoeuvring him and stitching a smile onto his face that doesn’t belong there. They’re the Great Gatsby, or something similar, where Daisy isn’t a flyaway little flower and Jay has what he wants. Her cream silk gown falls in elegant folds, her hair is set in waves and she whispers in his ear how much she enjoys seeing him in white tie, and out of white tie, and with white shirt on the floor of their bedroom too…

She holds the baby who doesn’t seem old enough for her to look that good, cooing at him, making him look like a seashell, a priceless pearl, something equally elegant.

He holds her, makes her bare her diamond for the camera, sees her smile that secret smile and smirks back instead of grinning like a Polaroid porn star.

The Basses - father, son and former Waldorf - gaze out of the page with their hot cold dark eyes, and smile like nobody’s watching even though the world is, and waiting too.

"Chuck Bass."

They’d been wandering through the Louvre-Tuileries, picking up a few things that growing preschoolers who preferred formal suits to romper suits needed, when Chuck heard his name. Unwilling to take his eyes off his son, who enjoyed Paris and had his mother’s tendency to lose himself in it, he hoisted Henry onto his hip and turned.

"Louis," he said without emotion. The prince was wearing a linen suit and an expression of surprise, studying Henry as if he were a piece of particularly baffling surrealist artwork.

"Your Highness."

"Louis."

"This isn’t really your district," he remarked. "The Montmartre would surely be more suitable…and speaking of that, how is Blair?"

Chuck had had to stop cursing and hitting people in front of his son, but he could still grind his teeth. “Blair is successfully running the company your family tried to bankrupt,” he replied. “She’s expanding into Asia next month.”

"Is she still chasing after royalty?"

"Since that would be in direct contradiction to the vows she made on our wedding day, I think not." He couldn’t remember saying anything about fidelity and not caring about fairytales anymore, but it had been implied. "This is her son. This is our son. Henry Charles Bass, Prince Louis Grimaldi."

Louis sobered. “He looks like her. I imagine our child would’ve looked like her.”

"I imagine you would’ve thrown her away if it didn’t, if she didn’t raise it as you wish or when the amount of pressure you placed on her made her buck and throw you off."

His mouth tightened. “I wish I’d never met her.”

"I’m glad you did," Chuck replied. "It gives me a list of things to do right because you did them wrong. She deserves better than you. She deserves him.”

Henry feels it first when his teacher tells him to say sorry to Teddy, who got in his way, who took his swing, who broke the sacred code the other children honour because even children know who Henry Bass will one day be -

He will say sorry now, but he will not be sorry, and he will not let the matter go.

He is five years old, and more than capable of holding a grudge.

After dinner, after half an hour of colouring - he’s better than Daddy at staying in the lines, obviously - they go to his mother’s study, which is full of soft clothes on hard dollies and where people come out crying when they haven’t done something to her satisfaction. Even Daddy knocks, even though Daddy sometimes goes in and drags Mama out for dinner, sleep or respite.

She likes to crack the whip, apparently.

It’s here, seated on a cushion to make him taller, than his parents explain the family motto: get mad, then get even. They agree he didn’t deserve to be punished. They agree he should wrong the wrongdoer. They are ever so proud of him.

They plan until an hour past his bedtime, and when Teddy van Buren wets his pants and has to be taken home, no one suspects Henry Bass. He has his swing, his kingdom and now he knows this word, this new word -

This ‘scheme’.

Where Chuck Bass goes, the party followers. He visits his favourite best friend’s girlfriend in a lavender argyle sweater with his scarf around his neck, and since Blair’s always wanted to live like she’s in Paris in the twenties, she partakes of the green filled bottle he offers and goes off her head. Absinthe: not to be taken lightly by a lightweight in a light-coloured blouse who refuses to speak English thereafter and walks around the lounge barefoot like it’s a lawn and she can feel life squishing between her toes.

"You’re fucked, Waldorf."

"You’re always fucked. In class, you’re fucked. At parties, you’re fucked. You were even fucked in church that one time." Her mouth twists prettily, dirtily every time she says that particular word.

"The sermon was boring."

"You’re boring."

He leans forward. Their noses touch. She squints at him.

"You are, aren’t you?" Her eyes are comically wide, her features porcelain perfect, her air impossible. She is an impossible thing, this Upper East Side virgin. "You’re as boring as the rest of us, hating our parents, always wanting more than we have, always wanting what we can’t have."

"I want you."

"Of course you do. You’re fucked."

They flop down on the floor/lawn together, and he says, “The stupid thing is you could have everything you wanted if you just unwound and asked for it.”

"The stupid thing is you’re too stupid to see that the only way I could have everything I wanted was if I were more like her, and if she gave it up first."

He takes her hand, which isn’t fair, so she doesn’t look at him, only up at the ceiling, then unbuttons the first two at the top of her blouse and hopes he peeks at the flesh beneath.

Graduating high school was supposed to be a graduation from her old life, from her old loves, from the old Blair Waldorf. That was impossible, however, when he was there - sitting in the row above in her econ class, smirking down at her; in the bars and clubs she patronised with her new minions, smirking at her from his booth; choosing the same paths to walk across campus, the same teachers to schmooze, the same parties to attend, all the while smirking at her and refusing to allow her to forget.

To forget him.

To forget them.

How he ended up in her dorm room on that sticky May night, she couldn’t explain. He’d just come to her door, binder in hand, until she pulled him inside and explained without speaking that there was no need for the binder. Where her roommate had disappeared to, why she hadn’t decided to go out that night, why she gave in, she didn’t know. She just did, and it was just easy.

For her.

For them.

"I love you," he tells her. Dorm lighting is awful and he looks sickly and yellow, but that doesn’t change anything.

"Don’t follow me around anymore," she tells him, lazy and high on the musky scent of skin.

They go places together after that.

They own places together after that.

Sleepy, nearly dreamy, she lays her head on his shoulder and sighs. “We’re in my mother’s living room.”

"You’re terrifyingly observant today."

"Well, did you start the day thinking we were going to have our first dance in my mother’s living room?"

"I started the day thinking I was going to jail and trying my hardest to think of a way out of it for you." He looks down at her, at how small she suddenly sees, at how small she suddenly feels. "I didn’t think I’d end the day married to you."

"Even for legal purposes."

"No." They turn, perfectly in sync. "Whatever came as a consequence, it wasn’t for legal purposes."

"We don’t have to stay this way," she offers, even now being his safety net, even now giving him a way away from her. "We don’t have to live as a married couple. We don’t have to have shared assets or a house or a family. Not yet, if you don’t want to."

"That’s a shame," he responds. "Because it feels like I’ve been waiting to be married to you for half my life."

They turn, perfectly in sync.

"George Sand," she says, turning her head slightly to loosen the pull his fingers have on her hair.

"That’s your show author," he replies, and doesn’t let go. "Sun Tzu."

"Ernest Hemingway."

"You hate misogyny. You resent Julius Caesar for invading Britain and creating the cult of patriarchy there. Eugene Onegin."

"Mikhail Lermontov."

"I’ll allow it."

"You already know all of this." She turns over onto her front, ignoring the painful/pleasurable tugging on the roots of her hair, plants her elbows in the centre of his chest. "My tastes haven’t changed just because I’m sleeping with you."

"Then tell me something I don’t know." He talks to her mouth, lips against lips. "Tell me a secret."

"Emmanuelle Arsan."

That effectively ends the conversation.

"So you took Mom to Cotillion?”

"Yes…"

"Because the two of you were dating."

“Were dating, and when we broke up she…became better friends with your father, who didn’t ask her to Cotillion, so I did.”

"Dad totally wanted to ask her."

"You weren’t even there, so…"

"He gave her that diamond necklace with the lillies on it when she was seventeen. That was before Cotillion. He totally wanted to ask her."

"And Blair and I had always planned to go to Cotillion together. We’d been dating since we were much younger, everyone expected - I know she expected - that we’d attend together, graduate high school together, go to college together, get married…”

“Married?”

"That’s what she wanted."

"Mom only ever wanted to marry Dad, except that other time with the prince that didn’t really count."

"You go ahead and ask your mom about wanting to marry me. While you’re at it, ask your dad about the time I gave him a beat down on the hood of his own limo over Blair. He loves that story."

The room must be kept at an ambient temperature of sixty eight degrees with a fire lit. She wants Paraguayan, white-fleshed, doughnut-shaped peaches and spearmint toothpaste. Baby’s breath is banned from the house and she wishes he would light up with Nate more because Baby has a taste for passive herbal inhalation.

Not that he would ever concede to that last.

It reaches a point. It reaches ‘the wall’. Dorota is wheezing on the couch like a perforated chew toy, Serena has been drawing a bath for the past three hours and Blair, sitting straight on her chair in more than six month splendour, is crumbling cookies to dust between her fingers and glaring at everyone and everything.

As for Chuck…no rest. No respite. Her demands are voracious and may well be exacerbating an underlying heart condition. Her demands are much more creative than they used to be, which is no bad thing, except when one hour becomes twelve becomes a long weekend away for two on a private yacht in the Mediterranean.

He’s a broken man. He has nothing more to give.

She is unsatisfied.

She’s been on her knees, on her front, on her back and she hates the way he makes her feel. Slowly, Chuck Bass is taking her places she’s never even thought about asking about. He likes the feel of her, she thinks, the way she fits between his hands, wrapped around his fingers, the way her thighs fit around him. He likes the newness of her, she thinks, the way every petit mort more matters more and is the first because of this or that. Every one that comes after will be judged by his standard.

Every come that come after comes courtesy of him.

When do you give up on being separate, she wonders. Where is the line between being two people and being a beast with two backs? When every part of you has been kissed, licked, sucked, bitten, explored, exploited, is there any point on being anymore? Is there any point in being anywhere but there, with anyone but him? When you know everything about a person there is to know with regards to the body, not the mind, not the soul, even if you’re so exhausted you think there has to be something more.

There’s nothing more.

There’s only sweat, and sex, and secrets.

And she’s coming to terms with how much she likes it.

Any new parent would recognise it: the permanent curvature of the spine into a letter C, the bloodshot eyes…Henry Bass is trying to walk and refusing to talk, and his parents have been bent double leading him around and speaking to him in any and all of the eight languages they have mastered between them.

"I need a chiropractor," Blair says hoarself.

"I’d offer my services," Chuck replies. "But I imagine you’d prefer a chiropractor who can stand straight and not minister from a chair."

It’s then, when his exhausted parents are looking at each other, stretching out their hands for each other without a word, not a word of comfort required or exchanged, that Henry focuses on the edge of the Queen Anne end table and, scowling with effort, grips it, pulls himself up and begins to toddle towards them.

His mother gasps.

"You little Basstard," his father says affectionately. "Just when I’d given up on the video camera."

"Chuck!"

"Blair -"

"Henry," announces Henry, and sits down with a flump.

He is already aware he’s the most important person in the world, and their awe reinforces that.

"I’ll have your purchases delivered to your home this afternoon, Mrs Bass."

Blair twitches.

"Is everything alright?"

Of course it’s alright. That’s the name she chose, the name of the person she loves, the name she says in anger and sometimes worse.

"What did you just call me?"

The shop assistant looks bemused. “You are Mrs Blair Cornelia Bass? Address, penthouse suite, the Hotel Empire?”

Blair twitches again. Not for long, she’s not.

"That’s correct."

"Then…"

"Except I don’t recall getting my credit cards changed."

The shop assistant swallows visibly. “I…um…read about your lovely wedding in the society pages?”

'Mrs Bass' bares her teeth. “Nice try.”

Mr Bass stares at the phone like it’s a bomb about to go off.

"Chuck, man, what’s the matter?"

"Nathaniel…she knows.”

"Stop." She lays her hand on his chest, above his heart. "I just…I don’t want it to be different. I want to be one hundred percent sure I’m as back to myself as I can be."

He sighs. “You’ve done Kegel exercise classes - even I wasn’t aware those existed - had full body wraps and topical light therapy for stretch marks, taken mother and child yoga - I’m very proud of our son’s flexibility, by the way - and you’ve been running around organising the Waldorf Designs pop up event every moment you’re not with Henry. What more can you do, Blair? What more can I do to convince you that you were perfect, just as you were, and you are perfect, just as you are?”

"You fell in love with me when I was eighteen."

"I made a vow to love you when you were twenty two. You never change. Not for me. Not even eighteen hours of labour with you hurling abuse at me and lawsuit-worthy behaviour towards several nurses can alter that."

"You sure?"

She was. He is.

He slides his hands up her ribcage and the skin feels different, but the bones are the same. They kiss and her mouth is the same, even if he feels different, even if he knows better. Her legs tangle with his, the same, but there are harder muscles in thighs now, different. All that really matter is he has to show her - she has to know - that she did something heroic, carried nine months of burden, birthed it in blood and rage, barely caught her breath before demanding more, to hold him, to have him, to love him.

That love for someone else is just another thread between them, stitching their bodies together, uncertain but sure, unready but not unwilling. If anything, it feels like the first time.

It feels like finding each other after so much absence, and refusing to wait any longer, and refusing to be ashamed or lonely any longer. Yes, it feels like the first time.

"No pie this year?" Their father asks, utterly offhandedly. Henry and the twins exchange glances, but only because they’re grocery shopping with their parents, who never grocery shop. Their mother is trying to make this Thanksgiving ‘more authentic’ than previously.

"I thought you didn’t like pie anymore." She straightens her skirt and lowers her lashes. "You haven’t had any pie for a good…month and a half. Your excuse was you’ve been too busy negotiating with the Waldorf-Astoria for anything more than dinner, straight up."

"Blair, I love eating your pie."

"That’s news to me."

"But your pie requires time…"

"Oh, really?"

"Skill…"

"Please."

"And above all, dedication."

"You make eating my pie sound like a chore."

"Never," he says vehemently. Their children have ceased to exist, the air around them is hot. "I regard it as one of my foremost pleasures in the arena of dinner and dessert." His hand closes over hers, which is holding the basket. "I’d do it now if I could."

Henry is sixteen, the twins twelve. They’re all far too old to still be under the illusion that this is about their mother’s famous pumpkin pie and are all humming loudly and staring fixedly at the frozen turkey carcasses piled up at the end of the aisle.

They pretend not to notice their parents disappear, as boldly as if they belong there, into the manager’s office.

"Come out from there."

"No."

"Do you really want the children to see you like this?"

"They’re with Lily."

"Blair -"

"No!"

He reaches a hand towards her and she hisses like a snake, actually hisses. She’s clutching a box of Godiva truffles like it’s a lifeline and wearing a pair of his silk pyjamas, scorning her filmy negligees and peignoirs the way she’s scorning their bed - Blair is camped out under the piano and won’t come out until someone turns back time and makes her thirty nine again.

"Forty is not the end of the world."

"That’s easy for you to say, you’re practically still a foetus!"

"Funny, that’s not what you said when I -"

"Chuck!"

"Although you did say that."

There’s only one possible course of action, and he takes it. That’s what their marriage consists of, getting under pianos for each other, even though it’s stupid, even though it’s dramatic, who knows when the old instrument will collapse and kill one or the other of them.

"I got you something."

She sniffs. “Don’t you always?”

He does, but this year is different. This year the black velvet box doesn’t contain diamonds or pearls, the handprints of their children, the severed head of John the Baptist (he’s never managed to get the goods on that one). This year, the box contains something she never thought she’d see again.

"My headband…" She murmurs. "I thought I lost it that night at Victrola." It wasn’t the only thing she lost that night, but that’s very nearly but not quite irrelevant now.

"You’ll always be sixteen to me," he promises.

And she always will.

Henry told her first - his busy mother in her perfect suit, gliding from this task to that and effectively demolishing each or demolishing each person previously doing it wrong. She didn’t even sit him down to tell him that his life was over, that he was dying of something toxic and incurable.

"Oh, Henry," she said to her eldest. "Who are you in love with?"

He choked on the tea she’d given him and denied everything. Web M.D. didn’t list ‘love’ as the reason behind his symptoms or, if it did, it was buried beneath the list of diseases which could be tying him up in knots. There was no coincidence. He and Allegra had watched the party they’d conspired to close down being raided from a rooftop, drinking stolen champagne, and she’d danced on the edge of the building, and he’d known…absolutely nothing. When he took her hand and took her home, he knew…absolutely nothing.

Henry turned to the next most rational person on his list - his busy father who wore pastel-coloured suits and instructed his son to do likewise if he wanted to get anywhere in life. He wore them well, he did business well, and in fact, there wasn’t nothing his son didn’t know him to excel in.

He laughed. Actually laughed.

"What’s her name?" He asked.

"Who?"

"The girl you’re in love with."

"You’re both -"

"Ask your mother to tell you some time," his father dictated, smirking at a photograph of his wife as it if might smirk back. "About her seventeenth birthday party, and the boy with butterflies."

"What happened to him?"

Except Henry knew. Of course he did.

There were butterflies painted all over the walls of his mother’s dressing room.

Chuck refuses to go to Monte Carlo, Blair refuses to speak to him. It’s their place now, she insists, who cares if it’s in Monaco? She wanted to do a grand tour of Europe and the places that matter to them, Tuscany, Paris…but he won’t even consider the place where she told him this time, she was all in, so she’ll barely look at him, let alone speak to him.

Breakfast is an antisocial affair, his chin on his chest as he reads the newspaper, her chin in the air as she expect the moulding on the ceiling - it’s far more interesting than he could ever be.

The jam pot nudges her hand. Blair didn’t request jam. Blair rarely eats jam. Perhaps she’s lost a pound or two since the wedding, but she’s been busy! It’s allowed!

The jam pot nudges her more insistently.

"I worry about you," Chuck says.

"But you shouldn’t worry about us."

Her hand closed around the jar, and the newspaper descends, and he closes the distance between them, and she melts into him again like butter sinking into hot toast.

"Hey, beautiful."

"Carter." No compliment.

He places his hand on the bare sweep of her back above her black dress, leads her conspiratorially to one side. “Long time, no see.”

"And there’s a reason for that, you being in love with my best friend and you and I having only used one another for sex and to improve our palates for well-aged scotch, with and without ice."

"And you being married to one of my many nemeses ," he returns, lifting her hand. "Jesus, that thing could sink the Titanic. Did I mention your husband caught me at the door, by the way?”

"And said what?"

"And warned me off you."

He’s still standing by the door and watching them, his white tie still pristine. If she were to go closer, she bets she’d hear the glass in his hand creaking from the pressure of his grasp. She bristles.

"Chuck Bass is not the boss of me."

"I guess what matters is that you’re now the boss of him. Well done, Waldorf. You should run along, put him down for a nap before he breaks something. He seems overtired to me."

"I’ll put you down, period."

"Nice talking to you. Hot dress."

There is no one more terrifying than Eleanor - he thinks.

There is nothing more to be afraid of - he thinks.

Harold is dressed impeccably in colours which delicately clash with his daughter’s sundress when he hugs her. He snatches her carry-on, comments on her beauty, turns her around on the spot and congratulates her. He then passes her on to Roman, who was holding the sign ‘Mr and Mrs Charles Bass’ and turns to greet his new son-in-law.

And practically breaks his fingers.

"Mr Waldorf, I -"

"She didn’t marry you the first time," the dignified former lawyer hisses, just out of Blair’s earshot. "Which means at some point, my daughter considered you undeserving of her love. If you ever do anything to make her feel that way again, I have a rather lovely iron maiden we picked up at an antique shop in Paris, and that’s where you’ll go. And die."

"And die?” The bones in Chuck’s hand are being slowly ground into powder by the strength of his grip.

"Welcome to the family, Charles. I must say, you’re looking very well…"

Every parent’s nightmare is that first drop of blood. They hadn’t dropped him, knocked him, or even so much as nudged him - but now his knee was gushing, literally gushing, and there was every need for an ambulance, no matter what Dorota said, and they were going to sue the city of New York for every penny it had, and they were never going to play catch again, not ever.

Lily van der Woodsen smoothed a Band-Aid over the little boy’s graze, kissed his dark mop of hair and smiled.

"New parents," she said knowingly. Eleanor smiled in agreement and sipped her tea.

“Bartholomew Bass?”

The room is deadly quiet.

"As in the same Bartholomew Bass who tried to have my husband killed - yes, I’m aware that was never officially verified - who had me kidnapped, who faked his own death? That Bartholomew Bass? Yes, I’m aware he constructed most of the Manhattan skyline!"

He read the invitation and left. She felt useless, so she’s making calls.

"Jack? I need a favour."

Bottles chime in the background.

"Put it this way: you will do me this favour, or I will hold things over your head that even Georgina will balk at being associated with. Yes, of course we’re still hosting you for Thanksgiving! Please bring that stuffing from last year, it was wonderful. Goodbye."

They don’t attend the benefit.

It’s hard to dress for an event ‘accidentally’ filled with underage schoolgirls.

The things she does for love.

It is not a serene imagine - in fact, there’s something rather animalistic about it. The nurses cower as Blair glows seraphically, rocking her son and occasionally shooting glares to left and right, snapping orders, vibrating with indignation when they aren’t obeyed. Chuck is transfigured, so lost to everything he’s discarded his tie and doesn’t quite look himself without it.

They exchange glances.

They know what to do.

Champagne, to wet the babies head, a deft Serena sweeping concealer under her friend’s eyes and Nate gripping the baby like a life raft as he walks him round and round in circles, cringing at the thought of dropping him. The very fact that Dan is there brings the new father back to himself - he visibly twitches, looks at his wife, looks back, practically snarls.

In the space of five minutes, with a little help from their friends, they are themselves again.

"This is Henry," Blair tells them, beaming, while Chuck feels the tiny hand grasp his and fights the urge to snatch him, carry him away and stare at him for hours on end. "This is our son."

Leaning on the doorway, she watches him fight it - but not for long. Christmas Eve or no Christmas Eve, Henry Bass falls asleep like clockwork and Blair smiles smugly when the Mothers with Mani-Pedis ask her how she does it. He’s been this way since he was a baby, subconsciously willing to accommodate her, proof positive that she procreated with the right person.

Speaking of…she sighs at the arms around her waist but shies away from the kiss he intended for her cheek.

"No, Chuck."

"Hear me out."

"I have."

"And all my well thought out plan has resulted in is you avoiding me like the plague?"

"There are a dozen different things you could do to make me forget to take my pill in the morning, and you know it. Most of them involve your tongue, but let’s not discuss that now."

"Blair…"

"No!" She turns, plants her palms on his chest and gives a little push. "Do you know how much I love Henry? It’s irrational. I find myself actually wondering whether I can eat him, because everything he does is so delicious." The set of her mouth softens. "Do you know how much I love you? I could never love another man so much. The same is true of a baby. I don’t want to short change our second because I love our first so much."

"Do you doubt my ability to love it?"

"Of course not!"

"But it still seems reasonable to doubt your own. Waldorf -" He tilts her chin up. "You taught me to love you, and then love came naturally. You loved Henry from the moment he was born. You’ll love another baby just as much. You’ll be just as irrational and worryingly cannibalistic."

"I…"

"Besides, I promised your mother."

"You what?!”

He digs his thumb into the arch of her left foot, and she kicks like a horse and purrs like a car.

"There, right there!"

"You haven’t asked me to do this in a while."

In, say, four years and three months.

"I know, I think it’s Fashion Week looming…mmmm…I don’t have time to eat or sleep or even breathe most days. The sight of food makes me want to gag, I’m so nervous about putting on even a pound, and I’m up to my eyeballs in fabric swatches when all I want to do is sneak home and seize Henry the second he gets back from school and smell his head for hours on end."

He smiles knowingly. “And you’re sure the cause of all this is Fashion Week?”

"Of course. What else could it be?"

That, say, it won’t be soon before she’s inquiring oh so casually whether he has any Red Hots, because she has this odd craving. It must be Fashion Week.

"No."

"No."

"No."

"No."

The shop assistant’s smile is a grimace and she’s visibly sweating. “Please…Mrs Bass…” As if she might appeal to her husband, but Mrs Bass is not in the mood for mercy. Her son is neatly swaddled and in her arms, her loose fitting dress is a soft pink, but she is not in the mood for mercy.

"All I am asking for," she repeats sweetly, as if it couldn’t possibly be too much trouble. "Is a three piece suit to be made to my son’s measurements and ready in a week’s time."

"You’re forgetting the cravat," Mr Bass drawls, tracing the blinding diamond on her finger and ignoring the shop assistant completely.

"No, he can’t attend possibly this wedding without a cravat."

"Mrs Bass…" Her throat clenches painfully as she swallows. "He’s less than a month old."

"This is Henry Charles Bass," his mother announces. "His father is the most prominent businessman in this city, or possibly state, or possibly America. His mother is the owner of a fashion house and a hostess without compare. He may be less than a month old, but trust me: you’re going to make this suit, and I’m going to dress him in it for this wedding, or so help me there won’t be a sweatshop in Hong Kong who will take you in."

"Tres Les Miserables."

"Thank you, Charles."

Book bag, brown bag lunch (like they were going to let their firstborn eat anything non-organic, touched by plebeian hands), blazer, brush through hair, hand in Daddy’s, hand in Mama’s, trailed by Dorota like a wolf pack or a guard of honour. Practised words about fun and learning and being over before he knows it, graduating before he knows it. Hands on hair, hands on cheeks, kisses on cheeks and forehead. Being held aloft by his father and squeezed while his mother snapped something at a passing parent.

Dorota takes him into class because Blair can’t bear it, is already snarling and weeping copiously, is already repeating her vow to never bear him another child, despite the fact that she’s eight months along. Chuck’s nails gouge into Chuck’s palms and Chuck’s heart breaks that little bit he never expected it to because his son is getting too big to hold, too big for the nursery, too big for his parents alone to adore and be awed by. This is the only logical step. This is his way into the world where he belongs.

Henry Bass’ first day of school very nearly destroys his parents.

"Are you aware –" She slides her glasses to the end of her nose and gives him a frosty look over their rims. "What your son did to Penelope Shafai’s daughter in that very pool house last summer?"

"I thought he had better taste."

"Mini Chuck’s been in love with Mini Blair for as long as he’s been in bowties," Serena decrees, wriggling her shoulders leisurely as Nate works massage oil into her back and both pretend that it’s normal, natural and non-erotic. The Basses practically go at it in front of their dinner guests, after all. "But she was painting in the Dordogne and Treasure was all over him. What do you expect?"

"At least we don’t see him for days on end now." Blair stretches out and pokes her husband with her toe just because he’s within reach. "Not that I don’t adore my only son and heir, but it means he’s making progress with her. We know, by the way."

"Know what?"

Chuck grips his wife’s foot at the ankle and is rewarded with a pout. He’ll get to that later. “That you two are sleeping together. You were sleeping together before the divorce, you’re sleeping together now, and you’ll be sleeping together after the lavish outdoor wedding Blair’s already thrown herself into planning.”

They’re all too lazy, too sun drenched and indolent to do anything more than twitch as this latest bomb drops and enjoy its consequences at their leisure.

"Everything was simpler when we were kids," says Nate, conveniently forgetting.

Nobody sulked like Blair-Bear, especially when Nathaniel wasn’t available. Smiling wryly, Harold adjusted the red bow on the top of his daughter’s head and gestured her ahead of him into the auditorium. A step behind her, strangely reverent, Charles Bass sauntered forwards and took the seat beside his hostess, the one she’d intended for Nate.

But she couldn’t stay angry for long, and it didn’t take her long to cry. Hearts were broken, violins swelled and people died. Her father considered taking her hand, but didn’t want to embarrass her - which was when he realised that their guest had had the same idea. Blair was still staring straight ahead, tears dripping daintily off her cheeks, but now Chuck was holding her hand. It looked smaller in his grip, and she looked smaller beside him…and they fit, the way they were both dark-haired, red-coloured, silent.

"Did you enjoy that, Charles?" Harold couldn’t resist asking as the lights came up.

Poker faced, the boy replied, “I did. I like tragedies. You dropped your purse, Waldorf.”

It gave her an out to let him go, and it gave him a chance to look down at his toes and blush as crimson as the drapes.

Is is strange to wait? It seems strange to wait.It feels strange to wait, but Eleanor chartered a jet and Harold moved out of his house, and then there were shirts in lighter colours and sundresses to be packed and passports to squabble about - should she get her name changed? No, he should - and friends to be kissed goodbye and hands to shake and a city to leave far behind them on the ground. She hasn’t slept since the day of their wedding, and he’s only napped, his head in her lap in a way that never worked before.

"Blair."

She stirs and automatically pulls him towards her, down on the bed beside her. Her eyes are still closed but her mouth makes a little kissing shape, and the pillow is warm from the heat of her head.

"I planned something special for tonight. I thought…"

"No."

She wants him now, she means: lazily, easily, on top of the covers because it’s too hot any other way. The house groans and the birds call and their bodies make up for the absence. They fit, quite simply, like puzzle pieces, like good money and good wine. They pour all over one another and pore over one another, exploring what they already know is firm, soft, sweet. A kiss becomes a taste becomes a fight to take the top spot, a fight becomes a scratch becomes her nails finding purchase in his back, old dogs, old tricks.

"I love you."

"I love you too."

The day begins and they end, and begin all over again - they’re still Chuck and Blair, Blair and Chuck, but now there’s someone waiting when the chips are down with a gun to the head of sorrow.

From the moment of conception, his son terrified him. He hated the idea of hating him, he hated the idea of gaining the child and losing the mother or vice versa. For nine months, his son terrified him, and for the extra week he refused to reveal himself, he terrified him ever more. Henry waited until the last possible minute to be born, until she was ready to be induced – he’s like his father that way, delaying the inevitable – and then decided that now was the time to introduce himself.

He seemed to understand the climate of fear he’d created, and made sure to be safely asleep whenever Chuck wasn’t.

But this is it.

He can’t hide anymore.

The nursery was blue anyway, and the moonlight makes it more so. They sit in the rocking chair and play chicken with each other’s sleep patterns, peeking at the other while they dream of blue skies, blue walls, blue skin before the first flush of life lit him up.

The first flush of light lit the sky up, and Chuck waited.

Henry looks his father in the eye: baby blue, bright blue, all the brightness and curiosity and ferocity in that one look that scans him interestedly, makes what it can of him, decides not to cry and not to retreat and not to fight to be put back to bed again.

That’s it.

He’s gone.

It’s impossible not to love their child, who looks at him the same way she does.