And You Had So Much Promise Then;

Blair Waldorf keeps a t o o t h b r u s h in her purse, and it’s got nothing to do with obsessive dental hygiene. Her ideal weight is 95 pounds, and her mother can tell when a single ounce appears if it wasn’t there the day before. Her father never cared—then again, her father didn’t care about much of anything, besides his career and his gay lover. Eleanor may not seem like she cares, but at least she loved Blair enough to stay. It was more than Harold ever did.

The brunette beauty gets the plummeting feeling that her life is a cycle that she can’t break. It’s not even that she sees herself in her parents, but she’s begun to see her parents in her r e l a t i o n s h i p s. Serena van der Woodsen loved her unconditionally. She was the one who didn’t care about what she looked like, she cared about her. They were best friends, and Blair loved her more than anyone, but Serena cared more about fooling around with Nate and jetting off to boarding school.

And Nate… he was the only other person she thought she would l o v e forever. Nathaniel Archibald didn’t accept her without strings, the way Serena did. Then again, he wasn’t supposed to. He was her boyfriend; he was supposed to notice how beautiful she is. It was all for him, and in the end, it was all for nothing. She still couldn’t stack up against her blonde bombshell of a best friend. She could binge and purge and pluck and tweeze and pinch and curl and paint and dye until there was nothing left of her but chemicals and bones, and it still wouldn’t be enough for him.

If she were a more sardonic sort of girl, she’d be half amused by the way that everyone who accepts her runs away, and everyone who stays tears her down. As it is, if the i r o n y didn’t force her to gag, the plastic toothbrush wedging its way down her throat would.

Her stomach rebels in that familiar way, and Blair wishes that she didn’t find that so soothing. Her throat feels raw and her eyes fill with tears and her entire body shakes, but there’s a peace after the storm that makes lying on the bathroom floor feel alright. She can live in this solitude. The p r i n c e s s of the Upper East Side is never out of the spotlight, but when she’s alone, she can’t usually feel the prying eyes. Today, however, she feels that familiar prickle of being watched, and it was as if a bucket of ice water had drenched her and washed all that peace away.

As she turned slowly on her side, Blair’s eyes found the prettiest shade of blue. She would recognize it anywhere. She’d been staring into Nate’s eyes (lovingly, longingly, angrily, desperately) for the last eleven years. He was hardly the deepest of boys, so after all that time, Blair had figured she knew all of his expressions by h e a r t. The one he was currently wearing was a new one.

“Nate? What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice atypically raspy, as she tried to ignore the look—somewhere between d e v a s t a t i o n and astonishment, bordering on anger—on the face that had always been so handsome.

“What are you doing?”

Nate Archibald is not easily s h a k e n. Growing up in a family as wealthy as he had, as good looking as he was, in a crowd that moved as fast as his did, with as many drugs as he did, made one relatively unflappable. He’d seen and done it all, a few times over. It had made him cool and i n d i f f e r e n t, generally emotionless, even though he hadn’t noticed it until recently. All he wanted to do was break free—California and Serena seemed like the way to do that. It didn’t occur to Nate until that moment that he didn’t want a new life; he wanted the old one. He wanted to cuddle in Blair’s bed on Saturday mornings, staring at her while she mouthed all the words along with Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He wanted to go sailing with his dad. He didn’t give a **** where he went to college; he just wanted to feel alive while he was there.

“What are you doing?”

One of the things that Nate had always loved about Blair was the way she never threw him for a loop. Everything around them could change, but she would always be stubborn, dramatic, delicate, demanding, beautiful Blair Waldorf, pouting when she didn’t get her way and waxing philosophical about their f u t u r e together. Blair was a constant in his life, maybe the only one. It was why he went to her house that night, why he felt the immediate urge to make things right between them. Nate Archibald had rarely been a man of action, but he wouldn’t be able to stand the way she would look at him if he let this situation lie. Their relationship was practically an arranged marriage from their parents’ standpoint, but to them, it had always been realer. He couldn’t let that shrivel away; he couldn’t live with himself knowing it was all his fault.

But now… lying curled up on her bathroom floor, tears running down her cheeks, frail body heaving with sobs… this wasn’t his Blair. This wasn’t the predictable, consistent Blair Waldorf. His g i r l f r i e n d wasn’t like that. Or maybe she was, and he was too much of a self-absorbed ass to know it. Dropping to his knees, he slowly moved closer to her.

“I’m not doing anything,” she whispered, her hand drifting behind her back, obviously hiding something.

“Then what’s that?” he nodded at the wandering arm.

“It’s nothing,” she said with a breezy laugh. It was so obviously a lie that it almost h u r t him that she would even try it.

“I don’t usually hide nothing behind my back,” he stated mildly, slumping against the counter.

“Everything you hide, you do behind my back,” she retorted with her familiar brittle smile, her eyes fixed on some point above his head.

“You’re right,” he said, and her wide eyes darted to his. Nate knew that Blair wasn’t e x p e c t i n g him to admit that. Finding fault in himself was never something he had done easily, but he would do it for her. “And I’m sorry.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Blair mumbled, slowly moving to sit upright.

“Yes it does! Yes it does, Blair. Why do you keep pretending all of this is nothing?” Nate raised, then quickly lowered, his voice. His f r u s t r a t i o n was obvious, but he never wanted to yell at Blair. It always seemed to frighten her, and he never wanted to be that guy.

“Because if I don’t, it’ll destroy me. It’ll destroy everything,” her tears were rapidly returning, and she buried her face in her hands. She didn’t want him to see her cry, he realized. Cautiously, he reached out to take one of her hands. He had always loved how tiny she was compared to him, how d e l i c a t e the bones of her hand were when they were wrapped up in his own.

“We can’t fix it if we don’t talk about it.”

“You want to fix things?” she asked, sounding a little bit astonished.

He didn’t answer right away, staring at their interlocked fingers. Nate Archibald had held hands with lots of girls, but he’d never wanted to keep a hold of someone as badly as he did right now. He rubbed over her left ring finger, and let his mind wander down the path where Blair’s seemed to have taken up permanent residence. Where would they be in five years? Yale for her, of course. Maybe USC for him, but probably Dartmouth. She would be succeeding brilliantly, he would probably be scraping by, but he would be the life of the campus party scene. He thought about how hard it would be to keep up a long distance relationship, how much time they would spend commuting, how many new people they would meet and be tempted by. Nate knew, all of a sudden, that he didn’t care. He couldn’t say for certain where either of them would be down the road, but he knew that they should be t o g e t h e r.

“I’m in love with you. You deserve so much better than me, and I’ve been terrible to you. We both know that’s true. But if you’ll give me another chance, I’m never going to let you go. Is that good enough for you?” Nate wondered if Blair could see his h e a r t pounding in his throat.

“That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” she smiled, her genuine 1000-watt beam of joy. It was his favorite of her expressions, and she s a v e d it just for him.