Only In Your Dreams (20 page)

“Ew,” Blair Waldorf muttered at her reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door. She liked to keep her closet organized, but not too organized. Whites with whites, off-whites with off-whites, navy with navy, black with black. But that was it. Jeans were tossed in a heap on the closet floor. And there were dozens of them. It was almost a game to close her eyes and feel around and come up with a pair that used to be too tight in the ass but fit a little loosely now that she’d cut out her daily after-dinner milk-and-Chips-Ahoy routine.

Blair looked at the mirror, assessing her outfit. Her Marc by Marc Jacobs shell pink sheer cotton blouse was fine. It was the fuchsia La Perla bra that was the problem. It showed right through the blouse so that she looked like a stripper. But she was only going to Nate’s house to hang out with him and Serena. And Nate liked to talk about bras. He was genuinely curious about, for instance, what the purpose of an underwire was, or why some bras fastened in front and some fastened in back. It was a big turn-on for him, obviously, but it was also sort of sweet. He was a lonely only child, craving sisterhood.

Right.

She decided to leave the bra on for Nate’s sake, hiding the whole ensemble under her favorite belted black cashmere Loro Piana cardigan, which would come off the minute she stepped into his well-heated town house. Maybe, just maybe, the sight of her hot pink bra would be the thing to make Nate realize that he’d been in love with her just as long as she’d been in love with him.

Maybe.

She opened her bedroom door and yelled down the long hall and across the East Seventy-second Street penthouse’s vast expanse of period furniture, parquet floors, crown moldings, and French Impressionist paintings. “Mom! Dad? I’m going over to Nate’s house! Serena and I are spending the night!”

When there was no reply, she clomped her way to her parents’ huge master suite in her noisy Kors wooden-heeled sheepskin clogs, opened their bedroom door, and made a beeline for her mom’s dressing room. Eleanor Waldorf kept a tall stack of crisp emergency twenties in her lingerie drawer for Blair and her ten-year-old brother, Tyler, to parse from— for taxis, cappuccinos, and, in Blair’s case, the occasional much-needed pair of Manolo Blahnik heels. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, two hundred. Blair counted out the bills, folding them neatly before stuffing them into the back pocket of her peg-legged Seven jeans.

“If I were a cabernet,” Blair’s father’s dramatically playful lawyer’s voice echoed out of the adjoining dressing room, “how would you describe my bouquet?”

Excusez-moi?

Blair clomped out of her mom’s dressing room and reached for the chocolate brown velvet curtain hanging in the doorway of her dad’s. “If you guys are in there together, like, doing it while I’m home, then that’s really gross,” she declared flatly. “Anyway, I’m going over to Nate’s, so—”

Her father, Harold J. Waldorf, Esquire, pulled aside the velvet curtain, dressed in his cashmere tweed Paul Smith bathrobe and nothing else, his nicely tanned, handsome face looking slightly flushed. “Mom’s out looking at dishes for the Guggenheim benefit. I thought you were out. Where are you going exactly?”

Blair stared at him. He wasn’t holding a phone, and if her mom was out, then who the fuck had he just been talking to? She stood blinking at him with her hands on her hips, tempted to peek inside his dressing room to see who he was hiding in there.

Does she really want to know?

Instead, she stumbled out of the master suite, clomped her way across the penthouse, grabbed her blood orange– colored Jimmy Choo treasure chest hobo, and ran for the elevator.

Outside it was breathtakingly cold, and fat flakes fell at random. Usually she walked the twelve blocks to Nate’s house, but today Blair had no patience for walking—she had just discovered that her father was a lying, cheating scum-bag, after all, and a cab was waiting for her downstairs. Or rather, a cab was waiting for Mrs. Solomon in 4A, but when the hunter green uniform–clad doorman saw the terrifying look on Blair’s normally pretty face, he let her take it.

Besides, hailing cabs in the snow was probably the high-light of his day.

The stone walls bordering Central Park were blanketed in snow. A tall, elderly woman and her Yorkshire terrier, dressed in matching red Chanel quilted coats with matching black velvet bows in their white hair, crossed Seventy-second Street and entered the Ralph Lauren flagship store. Blair’s cab hurtled recklessly up Madison Avenue, past Agnès B. and Williams-Sonoma and the Three Guys coffee shop, where all the Constance Billard girls gathered after school, and finally pulled up to Nate’s town house.

“Let me in!” she yelled into the intercom outside the Archibalds’ elegant wrought-iron-and-glass front door as she swatted the buzzer over and over with her hand.