It's worse now because he knows what it's like to kiss her. Before the wedding, before she left, just before... all he could do was imagine it. He was too afraid to start it because he just knew he'd light himself on fire or something and he had to admit, that would be one way to really ruin a kiss.
Right now, though, it's so hard to resist. He's that happy to see her. And yes, it's all caught up in feeling like dirt for wanting to kiss her but... he can admit to himself that he loves her. He's never felt as good at one time in his life as when he was kissing her at the wedding -- and it had nothing to do with the champagne.
But I didn't come back for you.
He barely sees her anymore. This is the first time since she got back and her lips are just slightly more pink than normal, he's guessing it's lipstick, but whatever is... he wants to know how it tastes. Would she still taste like champagne and sunshine and perfection and...
He's driving himself crazy and, more importantly, he knows Blair has probably noticed him staring at her blonde best friend. She probably always noticed and he really does feel all the appropriate guilt that comes with that.
But he tongue darts out to lick her lips and he's entranced. He's felt the tip of her tongue against his, on his bottom lip and it turned him on. Her tongue on his skin went all the way through him, and on his neck made him shiver beyond his own control in her arms. Her breath on his cheek while he moved inside her... well. He can't let himself think about that because thinking about kissing is somehow safer and more innocent. He might be allowed to kiss her, but he definitely won't get her alone long enough to...
It's all interrupted when she looks over at him, though. It's one thing to think about kissing her, but it's another thing to be reliving that memory while she's looking. It turns it from a fantasy into something bittersweet.
He can't look away, though, because he can still feel the ghost of her tongue and her lips and... all he can do is smile. When she smiles back... just. God. He wants to kiss her. At least he can admit it now.
It's perfectly natural, she thinks, to end up kissing someone like Christopher Vanderbilt. She's never been all that free with her kisses because she didn't feel like most guys deserve her attention. Christopher, although he is noncommittal and promiscuous... he's a lot of other things. He's smart, he's funny, he's genuine and polite. She wants to kiss him, even if she knows she's not going to have sex with him. She honestly thinks she could learn a thing or two from kissing him.
Plus they play games. They flirt like crazy and she thinks if she doesn't release the tension somehow, she'll go insane.
So without any sort of preamble, she does to him what he did to her. She follows him to a more secluded hallway, grabs his hand and spins him, then presses him up against the wall painted a garish shade of green. She only notices the color because she notes the nice contrast of his navy blue button down shirt against the paint as her eyes slip closed.
She's not gentle about it at all. She's been driven by curiosity since he kissed her, softly and fleeting. That isn't what she wants right now. It's brazen and, if she hadn't been thoroughly teased by the sparkle in his blue eyes or the chiseled smirk her gives her every time she talks... she'd have the decency to be a little embarrassed. As it stands, she's being aggressive in a way he rarely seems to like... but he kisses her back. His hands find the right spots on her body to hold her without being vulgar, and his tongue slides against hers.
It feels even better than she thought it would and she presses against him more, learning the texture of his mouth with patient force. Whether it's the intensity of the kiss or the hard lines of his body under her hands, she doesn't know, but something is turning her on. Her heart beat is a little faster and she needs air, but all she can focus on is the way his head changes angles and his tongue does too.
After her lips start to hurt and she can feel them swell, she pulls away from him, giving him a closed-mouth grin and patting his cheek with her hand. Without a word or a sound, she walks away without a glance back, swaying her hips and knowing he's watching. She took some time pairing her skirt with heels he would find hot. It's all by design. And she thinks she'll have no problem doing it again.
The sound of a door closing snaps her out of it immediately and ruthlessly and she sits up in bed before her eyes are even open. Her heart is still pounding, though, and she can't quite catch her breath. She can hear Carter moving through the suite, even if she can't see him because it's the middle of the night, and she presses her hand to her chest like that'll help get her heart rate under control.
It wasn't real. She uses that thought, over and over, like it'll do anything for her arousal. It won't, the same way the hand on her chest won't help her heart. It was a byproduct of not really kissing before.
It's natural, she thinks, to be attracted to Christopher -- but it isn't real. Just like the dream. Her reality is much better for her. (And he's coming back to bed.)
He knows for sure he's the best big brother ever when he's a sophomore, just barely getting his shit under control to the point he can drink and just have fun, and he passed this knowledge onto Caise one night while they're parents are... who cares. Not home. Or even in the fucking country because, really, when are they?
Oliver's been pretty sure he was adopted since the age of six when his nanny (which one, am I right?) explained exactly where babies come from because he asked and she took him literally and he was pretty well convinced his parents had never been on one spot long enough to fuck properly and have a kid. Let alone two kids. Whatever, this is not the fun loopiness that happens when the buzz starts to set in.
No, he's the best big brother because of the drinking together when his parents were delusional enough to leave him in charge. After Caise's nanny quit this morning. He's pretty sure their parents aren't stupid enough he was actually their first choice.
Besides, the thing about Caisson is the kid is fucking smart and warp-ten with his hair on fire. Even if he's only, like, eleven, he needs something to settle him down. And Oliver's been caught drunk at school once and he got the lecture, straight from the counselor, about how drinking when you're underage will make your brain smaller or whatever. To be honest, Ollie thinks Caisson could use a little shrinkage in that department.
So in the nanny-free and parent-free Andrews household, on a Saturday night in whatever time of year it is, he tells Caisson he's bored and has an idea. His brother isn't easy, but Oliver knows the kid is bored, too. So they hack into the untouched side of his dad's liquor cabinet and Oliver regulates their consumption of Beluga Gold until the room starts to spin just a little and life is good.
It doesn't slow Caisson down. He'll eventually learn that nothing can really do that. But when they're drunk together for the first time, he learns other things that are probably funnier anyway -- like the fact that Caisson knows all the words to some tragically lame rap songs and will perform them, substituting words he can remember for the ones he can't. And dance. On video.
Cheiloproclitic - Being attracted to someone's lips.
It could be considered a hobby of his in some ways, probably. He watches people. More specifically, he watches their mouths and it's one of those weird things that's always held his attention a little longer than another feature might.
Mouths are fascinating and you can tell a lot about a person from their mouth. He doesn't mean you can tell if they're rich or poor (but usually you can tell if they have access to reasonable dental care when you look beyond their lips), but you can tell if they're sexy without looking at the rest of them. You can guess by how fast their lips move if they're pissed off or stupid or if they want you. The last one is probably the easiest to read because there's sometimes tongue involved in that. Tongues.
God. Don't get him started. It's like the added bonus hiding behind lips.
He kind of spends a lot of time talking to Talia. Part of it is that she's entertaining to talk to, sure. But really, he could lose an afternoon watching her lips. Not for a stupid reason, like he loves them. For a good reason, because they're sexy as fuck. Her upper lip curls when she gets all confident and sassy, so pretty much always. She bites her lips when she wants a reaction from him and the gentle scrape of white teeth against the bold pink drives him nuts. That's usually what she's going for, so he generally tries not to make it known, but all of their encounters that are more than conversations begin and end with biting lips. If he likes it when she bites her, he fucking loves it when he bites hers. He's not saying that out loud because he isn't an idiot.
There are other things he wants to do to her lips. He wants to watch his dick disappear into them, her perfect lips wrapped around him, soft and firm. (Her lips, not his dick. At that point it would be hard. And shut up, he'll return the favor. He's attracted to more than one kind of lip, okay?)
He also wants to kiss them until the pink deepens to a bruised red.
In short: her mouth is fucking distracting. And he's really, really glad it's the bartender she's been talking to. He'd be in a world of shit if she caught him staring at her mouth instead of listening to her snark.
Good thing he can multitask, even as she's distracting as fuck wrapping her lips around the straw on her freshly refilled drink.
"What?" She asks suspciously, eyeing him as she swallows her first sip.
"Nothing," he replies. "You already know you're hot. I don't have to tell you."
But if he were to tell her... he doesn't know where he'd start. Her lips -- or her throat. Or... or... or... it's really for the best that he just takes her hand and leads her out to a place they can dance, which everyone knows is code for rubbing up against each other.
He was still three quarters of the way asleep when he answered the phone in the middle of the night; as bad as it probably sounded, that was half the reason he answered. He couldn't even see Blair's name flash across his phone without a stab of guilt anymore and things were rapidly getting out of hand there. Something was going to have to happen and he didn't expect it to be answering the phone at two in the morning. But that's what it was and he really, really couldn't get out of it when the first thing he heard was a sniffle.
"Natie. You answered," she said post-sniffle. Her surprise ripped him wide open. He was definitely awake now, more awake than the half-hearted 'yeah' he responded with.
"They're um... my dad moved into the guest room."
He knew things at her house hadn't been great lately; her dad, her hero had some indiscretions that were pretty devastating. Apparently. She'd been trying to deal on her own, though, which was good because he didn't know if he could be there for her for this while he had such a guilty conscience weighing him down.
"They've been going at it for hours. I can hear them through the walls and I know it's late but..."
Nate knew her. Yeah, it'd gotten away from him a little, but he knew and he cared and he was only human. And half-asleep. But human. He had a heart and she was part of it and just ugh. Life was so confusing.
She was asking him to sneak in. She needed him.
"Okay. Okay. I'll be there. Soon."
It was as much of a promise as the one he made himself -- he wasn't telling her about him and Serena. She needed him. She needed her boyfriend while her parents fell apart. He didn't know much else about it right now because he hadn't been paying attention, but he knew he couldn't tell her. He couldn't turn two of the men in her life into cheaters, even if they were. Not right now.
Gymnophoria - The sensation that someone is mentally undressing you.
He’s never been a stranger to the feeling that someone is watching him. People are always staring and watching. It’s gotten a little more intense or whatever, though, since the breakup because now he notices it in a new way. He notices girls — women — doing it. Maybe it’s just because he knows how good sex can feel now, but sometimes it turns him on. It makes him think thoughts. And as much as he’s normally sad and overwhelmed and he feels like an asshole — there are moments that he likes the attention. There are moments he catches them a little and then he thinks about how it could go if only one of them got a little brave and made it real instead of imaginary. He gets turned on and sometimes it’s a little awkward.
Seeing Jessica across the room shouldn’t do all of that, except it’s just that he knows what it feels like when she actually jumps him. It starts with the look she’s got on her face right now.
The next time he sees her, her cheeks are a little more pink and she seems almost startled that he noticed she was looking at him. It gets a little harder for him to breathe, because she licks her lips. It’s completely inappropriate, given her planning of a Girls Foundation thing that he’s basically… well he didn’t have any plans and his mom made him suit up and show up and it’s not at all okay for him to want to throw down right now with his mom’s employee.
That doesn’t stop him from appreciating the dirty in her eyes, the fact that they know how hot it can be when they’re naked together… and it definitely doesn’t stop him from meeting her gaze every time he can. And it could never stop him from tilting his head toward the door in the universal ‘wanna get out of here?’ gesture as soon as he can— because every single dirty thought in his head is reflected in her gaze.
Mamihlapinatapei - The look between two people in which each loves the other but is too afraid to make the first move.
They've been doing this for years, he thinks. Or minutes or seconds, but they're all piled together and it really doesn't matter. He's on board with Socratic unexamination, and no he doesn't fucking care if that's even a word or a thing or whatever, he's good with it. Still, though, they've been doing this and not talking and not thinking and not whatevering.
He's really not as mad as he sounds in his own head. He isn't defensive, he isn't annoyed, he isn't determined... nothing that strong. Whatever it is has snuck in, over time and while he was unaware and, God, of course the only time it's crystal clear is when he's saying goodbye.
It isn't a true goodbye. It's not. They have this casual little arrangement and have for years. She's doing her thing -- whatever that may be at the moment. He knows about it, her application to study with a photographer and her internship and her internal debate over stuff like medium, coloring, abstraction... he only knows because she rambles when she's drunk and that's part of their casual little arrangement. The only time they discuss things that matter or are coming up is when they're drunk. It's part of the ground rules they laid somewhere back in a beer-soaked memory he's not even bothering to dwell on.
Anyway, it's not goodbye because the nature of the casual arrangement is it packs light and it travels well. An ambassadorship does not, though, he sort of has to go to Belize to be the Belizian ambassador. Central America is a lot further away than his job for a lobbyist has been for the last few years, though. So it may not be goodbye, but it's an 'I'm making it a fuck of a lot harder for you to come to me.'
There are words on the tip of his tongue. Words that line up with feelings he still can't fully admit he's got because he's him and she's her and they're sober.
"I hear there's some really kick-ass beer there you can't get here," she finally says. smiling a little and making his heart skip a beat (he's not admitting it, so fuck you. She probably knows anyway.) Their silence hasn't been awkward, but they both breathe and look at each other because thank God it's over.
And instead of skipping a beat when he looks at her with the same smile, his heart starts pounding. It's all that cliche bullshit -- time standing still, telepathy, and it's terrfying. He's never been legitimately terrified or unable to speak before, but when their eyes lock, he totally is.
He loves her. He doesn't want to save a case of beer and wait for her to come. He doesn't want to hear through an email about things she's seeing or doing half a world away. He really, really doesn't want to even look away from her. He loves her. He wants her with him, like she is now, looking at him like she loves him too and she's too afraid to say it, like he is.
There's a honk, though, and a flight and he cannot miss this flight because he has a meeting scheduled for almost as soon as it lands. He pulls in a deep breath and he still can't fucking make words. It's not gonna happen. So he kisses her cheek and hopes, somehow, she felt the words he couldn't say on her skin.
"Let's go. You should come with."
He's always been a gambler, and he's willing to bet she'll know what he was going for. Hell, maybe she'll even be there when he's done with his stupid meeting.
Druxy - Something which looks good on the outside, but is actually rotten inside.
It's their tradition-- strip down to almost nothing and dazzle each other with terrible cinema. Sometimes they actually try to find a decent movie, and sometimes they succeed.
This is not one of those times.
As Charlotte watches the image flickering across, and probably ruining, her 60" Samsung plasma, she knows the look on her face. She was prepared to watch a really good, sassy movie. Instead she's watching, very much not good or sassy, so the look on her face says 1) they're sticking with on-demand instead of redbox and 2) What the hell am I watching?
The soundtrack is terrible in a way she can't articulate. The video itself is grainy and, God... if this is dialogue instead of improv, she doesn't want to know what kind of drug-state it would take to write.
So while she's been sitting there, watching because it's like she's frozen and she has no idea what else to do, her head has tilted to the side as though she's trying to figure out an intricate position. She's not because, honestly, she's not that innocent and she knows exactly what they're doing.
Then the title displays, though, (Let's Play Stain the Couch) and she can't help it. She starts laughing harder than she may have ever laughed before. She's not given to hyperbole, either. She throws one of the fluffy pillows she normally sleeps on at her boyfriend.
"Oh my God, that's rotten. You are henceforth fired from picking a movie for naked movie night. Banned."
"I didn't do it!" He protests, but he's laughing too. And throwing the pillow back and then pulling her down into the covers. They're all tangled, breathless, and yeah... the movie is still moaning in the background. Kind of. "Although as far as Redbox pranks go... someone got them good."
She tries to come up with a retort, or anything else to say but the comic timing of a fake orgasm interrupts her and she really cannot stop laughing. (Until he makes her.)
