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Your first book ended on that, the last line, a cliffhanger of sorts - Where will you be? Where will I find you?
It was a rhetorical question, of course, and even if it weren't, this is the last thing you would've expected.
But - "Humphrey," he drawls, and it's like an electric jolt, no one's called you Humphrey in so long now. You're a writer, you're in the business of aliases, no one flinched when you said you wanted a clean slate. But they laughed behind your back; you know that now.
"Chuck."
"Please, sit."
You sit. He doesn't ask what you're doing in Prague ten years later, doesn't comment on the fact that the slant of his eyebrows was enough to draw you back in, to force you to remember. He orders a whiskey for you - you get the impression he wants to drink answers out of you, but you remember that wasn't his preferred method of interrogation.
"What are you doing here?" you ask. Your fingers don't shake when you take your glass. You'll leave fingerprints.
Chuck laughs. You try not to look at him, not to see how his shoulders broadened, how his grin looks like now, tamed to a slash of steel. "Humphrey. Always so forward. I'd say to buy me a drink first, but..." he gestures to his glass. He still drinks gold, after all these years. "What about you, what brings you to this charming city?"
Prague isn't charming. Prague is cold, you like it even less than New York. But you don't trust cities anymore. "Book deal," you say succinctly, taking a gulp for courage - for luck.
His eyes grow distant. "I needed a holiday."
He doesn't say more. You have questions, lots of them, you're still the same: you want to know if he's got an empire waiting for him back in New York; if he really is what the papers say he is; if he left a woman ship-wrecked once again, broken and humiliated and came here to drink the collateral damage.
Instead you say, "Have you got a room here?"
In the low light, his grin looks downright predatory. "Why, Humphrey, I thought you'd never ask."
*
Is it you or has his skin grown coarser?
Someone knocks at the door. "Room service," they say in mangled English, and Chuck dons his silken bathrobe, opens the door for them and flops back on the bed, watching unashamedly as the stewart pushes the tray to the bed, bare feet resting on the bedpost.
"Thank you," he says in Czeh, his tongue sliding on the words.
"How long have you been here?" you ask.
He turns his eyes on you, sharp and cutting. Smiles. "How many books have you written?"
You sigh, irritated. He laughs at you, then takes a cigarette out of his pack and walks to the window. The bedroom is a suite, of course. Yours is too, but you feel like you've earned it.
"So you're one of us, now?" he says without looking at you, his eyes somewhere far outside, taunting. You're never one of them.
"Yes," you say.
He says these words exactly: "You never give up," leaning heavily over you. You think of the things you could say, but you do, but then he's kissing you with a mouth full of teeth, and you forget.
*
You make it a whole two days without talking about her. It's not like she wasn't here, leaning over your shoulder and spouting her sarcastic little quips, biting your lip when you come, her ghost skimming over your skin as you eat your breakfast with Chuck before leaving for your meetings; but until now she hadn't made it past the barrier of your lips, she had kept silent.
"... Blair?" you say. The sentence could have been have you heard of Blair or even where is she, because of course he heard of her, he's Chuck Bass - but you don't know. Maybe you just said that: her name.
He gives you a crooked smile. It's broken, like a field full of trenches. "Why do you want to know?"
"I'm a writer. It's my job to want to know things."
"Why, do you want to have another swing at teenage autobiography, Humphrey? I thought we were past that."
He's read your books, then. Did he see that he was in a few of them? He probably did. He was flattered, and then he forgot. You don't make it into the minds of him and his kin, as much as you always wanted to.
You could banter, it's what you do best, and it makes something predatory move inside Chuck, but you don't. Instead you say, "Just tell me," in a whisper. You're begging, you realize. It feels foreign.
He looks at you for a moment, his eyes impenetrable. "I don't know," he says with the voice of a man who's worked too hard to forget. If you can't forgive him for that - it's not your place, anyway -, at least you can understand.
*
You're jumpy on the plane. You'll never get used to it: without the gravitational pull of the earth you have nothing, you're an empty-headed jar with no morals and no words, you're no better than Chuck Bass. You feel confined, you're scared; a part of you wants to jump out over the ocean and escape.
In the end Chuck hands you a sleeping pill that you drown in alcohol.
"You drink too much," he says, his voice ironic, and you don't tell him how right he is.
You nightmare until Chuck's hand is on your shoulder, shaking you awake. "We're here," he says, and your dazed mind sees a king on his face before you blink.
You look out the tiny window. The plane is diving towards New York, the city glittering and ferocious, always awake, and you want to tell the pilot to turn back.
*
Your luggage is light. You want to go now, for fear of losing your nerve and becoming a coward again, but Chuck is more measured than he used to be, or if he isn't he pretends well. He pushes you into a taxi and you swerve and zigzag until it's the Empire Hotel emerging from the darkness.
The staff looks at Chuck with blank eyes, he ducks the greetings, drags you along. Where is his showmanship? you think, irritated. Did he grow out of his character and into a man?
The suite is pristine but unlived in. "I haven't been here in a while," he says, as though you hadn't sold your apartment years ago to flee from this noxious place.
A while. Years.
You want to talk, draw up a plan, write a novel in a night, fueled by alcohol and the hot pressure of him in your back, his mean remarks. But you lay your head on the pillow and freefall into sleep instead.
*
When you wake up Chuck is talking on the phone, hushed. "Darling," he's saying, sharp and almost vindictive. "Humphrey and I are paying you a visit."
There are more murmurs but your stomach is full of nausea and you pad out of the room, quiet even though you don't want to be. When you join Chuck at the breakfast table he's reading the paper, as though he'd never left.
"So," you ask, "anything new in the city of wonders?"
"Serena disappeared," he says lightly. It's not in the paper. You learned about it a few years ago; Jenny called you.
You can't say 'Good riddance' but you have no tears left for Serena Van Der Woodsen, so you don't say anything.
"I wonder if they made a telefilm out of it yet," Chuck muses.
They did. They asked you to write the script but you refused, and then you got head-splittingly drunk. You didn't fuck a prostitute or get stabbed, though. At least you're no worse than Chuck Bass.
"They did," you say simply. Chuck looks up.
"You called Blair."
He takes a sip of orange juice. Is it laced with something? No. You're the alcoholic these days. "I did," he says. "She doesn't like surprises."
But she liked you. For a while she was different, she read books and her sarcasm was softer, you put a leg in her machinations, then an arm, and you would have gotten crushed entirely if it meant they stopped and she was yours, just for a second. For a while you liked to think that you changed her, and then you outgrew aimless arrogance.
"You're right, she doesn't," is all you answer. But you've already made up your mind: whoever she is, this new Blair has nothing to do with the one you fell for, or the one he loved.
*
When her mother died, Blair sold her business and kept the house. You saw her in the papers, she looked good in black but not grief-stricken. You know: she does all her mourning in secret, like it's a shameful thing, the way she does love and illness, too. Now she lives in a house full of ghosts. It's a good metaphor for who you are, you think.
You've never liked the elevator, but now it's an instrument of evil: you can see yourself in the mirror and you're inadequate, too old, your eyes are circled with sickly purple and your Hugo Boss is too nouveau riche.
Chuck throws you a sharp glance. "Calm down, Humphrey," he drawls.
Make me, you think, but before you can say it the doors are opening and Blair Waldorf is standing in front of you.
"Good afternoon," she says with a smile.
*
Blair wears a ring. "I'm not married," she says when she catches you looking at it. Chuck's gaze is panning over the windows she had put in, his body thrumming like he wants to get closer to the vertiginous drop, maybe open a door hidden in the glass and try to fly again. "I just like the ring."
It's a gold band peppered with little diamonds, worth more than you can imagine. You wonder: who gave it to her? Did she love them? How long did it last? The papers didn't say, or you didn't read.
Blair goes back to her room, says she has something to show you both; you watch her go, your gazes pushing her like a hand at the small of her back. She must feel it, but if she does she doesn't show it.
When she comes back she's holding a box. She opens it: it's full of rings.
She takes one in her hands, Chuck's when he proposed to her all that time ago. "Look how it glitters," she says, holding it in the sun, but really she means, look how many people have loved me.
*
Maybe she's the one who fared best, out of the three of you: but you all have fates full of nooks and crannies, vaguely Greek with all their soul-crushing tragedies.
"What were doing in Prague?" Blair mocks. There's only one city for her; the rest are only holiday destinations, one-time wonderlands she lounges in until the magic wears off.
You repeat your lies but she doesn't buy it, laughs at them with her shoulders shaking a little. She's less regal than she used to be, now she looks like a woman and not like a furious, breakable girl. Maybe it's Serena's curse being lifted, something like that.
"I read your books," she says to you, but doesn't offer either praise nor criticism.
Chuck is the one who breaks character first, because he only likes love when it's rushed and catastrophic. He stands up, opening his jacket with two fingers; leans in and kisses her.
When she pulls away her eyes are dark. "Is that what you came for, then?" she asks, her face hard.
"Isn't that what you want?" Chuck says.
Blair sighs. Her lips are red and you love her, you never stopped. "I wasn't waiting for you," she says, but she stands up all the same, leading the way to the bedroom.
*
Maybe it's a sign that her bed is big enough to fit three. Maybe this is what you were made for, all of you - but no. It isn't.
When you wake up, your legs tangled with Blair's and Chuck's fingers grazing your hip, it's after noon. The sun is honey and cream and drips all over the translucent drapes. You'd forgotten the obscenity, left it behind with your youth.
Blair is awake too. She looks into your eyes, and Chuck stirs.
"I fucked your sister, you know," Blair says. "It was good."
You nod; you know. Jenny told you that, too, and you pretended not to care. Your words: "It's not like it was ever going to work between me and her, anyway," and Jenny chuckled, a little surprised that that's what you would say to the news, eight years later. When she said, "It's not like it's serious," you had a guilty jolt of relief.
"Little J," Chuck rasps.
You kiss Blair and Chuck kisses your shoulder and then it's not about kisses but about the rest, bodies that twist and bend and hurt but so beautifully, with so much talent that you can almost forget what it means, what it undoes.
"I tried to forget you," you say, knowing they'll take it as a compliment.
They do.
*
Blair wants to have breakfast at the Four Seasons and you do what Blair says. You put on suits and she a dress, you each give her an arm and this morning is the best morning in history, you're certain of that. You're at the top of the world again, you're a band of phoenixes and the world is yours to take and to ravage, you'll herald the new century, you'll do whatever there is to do.
Yes, you're drunk - but you're sitting over the city drinking mimosas in a restaurant that reeks of privilege and you made it here, not together but it doesn't matter, you're here now, licking honey from the silverware. You tell each other everything you've seen over the years, paintings and landscapes and exotic places, you laugh, you leave out the sordid details. Love never looked like that outside of the Upper East Side.
You almost wish there was still a Gossip Girl to write about you now, messed-up and perfect as you are, loaded with insecurities, to say, Look whose babies are all grown up. Not.
But you're on the inside now. You are.
*
Love, Chuck tells you and Blair once as he swings drunkenly on the balcony, is a game of a poker. He strings the metaphors: love is a jar of shit, love is a river of diamonds, love is toxic love is wrong.
"That's all you," Blair says, sounding unsure and commanding, but she's right - it's all him.
Because you're three tiny humans, queens and kings, and you only want love one way: undercooked, still bloody, almost raw. In your version of events, love only ends with destruction.
It could've gone another way, you try to convince yourself later, but you know: it really couldn't.
*
It comes to Chuck like an illumination, one evening as the dusk softens their features. He stands up on the end of the bed, naked except for a sheet that dangles haphazardly over his shoulders, still looking dignified because he's Chuck Bass and that's more than a name, that's etched onto his bones and it'll be their downfall.
"I love you," he says, almost wondrous.
You say it back almost instantaneously; Blair plays hard to get and purses her lips until you tickle it out of her, children, rolling around on the bed until you're out of breath and "I love you," is the only thing she says, between kisses - is the only thing you say, all of you, language has disappeared and those are the only words left, cheesy and expected but you're making them great.
You'll fashion yourselves into anything. You can take this train if you want; the worst that could happen is that you'd crash into the wall and be blown to pieces.
*
Sometimes you cross people in the street. You'll be holding a book, reading passages to them; Blair will be rolling her eyes and calling you a nerd and Chuck will be smirking by her side - and then someone will disrupt your peace, want to say hello and how have you been. It'll be Carter or Penelope and they'll look between you, trying to find the formula, the equation that solves this particular riddle.
"We're only here for a few weeks," you'll say, or invent places to be back from, because thinking of the future terrifies you; and they'll purse their lips, say 'Are you?' like they're suspicious, like they thought, they thought you would be here forever, and never leave...
But you answer - "Yes," you say, laughing at your own lies.
Then you start walking again. Blair spots the entrance of a museum, she wants to go in, you and Chuck follow. This is bulletproof; the only thing that can kill it comes from the inside.
*
You break up. You break up once, the suite at the Empire is ruined, not from sex this time but from rage, ashtrays through the windows, the only things Chuck treasures smashed to pieces, shattered on the floor -- and your own fury is tamer but no less devastating, final, is disappointment and tiredness and the snug arrangement of your arm around Blair's shoulder, you're a good actor, you pretend this is all you need -
You break up twice. Someone snaps a photo of Blair in the street, jaw clenched and showing teeth, the hem of her dress burnt and her face stained with soot while you watch from above and condemn -
You break up again and again: there are police cars and insults and your pasts thrown back at you, you hurt and you bleed, you screech, you tear yourselves to ruin, there is nothing between you anymore, the world isn't big enough for you to be apart, friends are called in to comfort, you foam at the mouth and seethe, if only, if only I could forget I ever met you, if only -
But you can't, and you come back. You all come back: you meet in the middle, chin high, and agree to pretend it never happened until it happens again.
*
You go to one of Jenny's shows in Barcelona, pristine and matching. She smiles, doesn't lose her countenance, kisses you at random and none of you flinch. Eventually she pulls you on the side.
"This is a crash and burn," she hisses.
You think about what they would say ("Don't be melodramatic," "Are you worried about me, Little J?"); sometimes it's hard to remember which one you are. "Don't worry about it," you say. "I'm in control."
"You don't look in control," she says, pouting. She's wearing purple lipstick; it gives her a strange look, like an oracle.
"I don't?" you ask. You thought you did. You are. You're holding the wheel.
She sighs, exasperated. "Open your eyes and pull yourself together," she says, and walks away to a gaggle of models, smiling widely.
The champaign sloshes in your stomach. "What if I don't want to?" you ask when you're sure she can't hear.
*
How will it end? It will end. You won't grow old and gray together: your species are made to die young. Maybe you alone could have survived, could've been a centenary writer with mediocre ambitions and three bestsellers under his belt. But with them you won't. With them you wonder how you'll die; not when.
Maybe you'll throw yourself off Chuck's window? Maybe there's a river somewhere that's deep enough that you can drink it all and drown? Maybe a modern-day Midas will turn you to rigid gold? Maybe the pages of your books will make you bleed out, a thousand paper cuts? Maybe this love will inflate in your chest, like a tumor, and suffocate you from the inside?
Or maybe you'll tear each other apart, and you'll fight, Blair will storm out and come back with a gun, you'll have a knife, there'll be detonations... maybe you'll toe the line to hatred and hate with the same intensity, resent all the nights where you weren't enough, all the things you could've done, all the growing up you missed out on; maybe you'll be enraged, maybe you'll be desperate, maybe there's nothing in the world that can keep you from fate...
"Dollar for your thoughts," Chuck drawls, reclining in his lawn chair.
Blair's feline smile shines from under her hat. "I'll bid higher," she says. Her swimsuit makes her look like a siren.
"You sure?"
Chuck rolls his eyes. "Don't tease, Humphrey, it's rude."
You tell them. They laugh and push you in the pool, and there they crowd you against the wall, the wall that makes your back bleed but they laugh again, they get some on their fingers, it tastes of chlorine and they lick it, and then they kiss you with copper mouths.
*
Will you make it into the paper? When you die, will there be a headline?
Blair draws boredly on her cigarette. "Don't be silly," she says. "Of course there will be."
She's right, you think as Chuck joins you with a bottle of Merlot and three glasses.
So you say it - "A toast to our glorious death," and the glasses clink, this is who you are now.