G O D H E L P T H E G I R L
blair/dan. 5990 words. neighbors au.
summary: At nearly three a.m., the idea of murdering one's neighbor starts to get just a little too appealing.
note: I saw the cutest tag spiral on a lovely DB AU graphic, and I could not help myself, I had to write it. I've been wanting to write romcom-y DB for a while now, and it was basically perfect, so: inspiration credit to otherromanticverbs and blairbending both! Hope you guys don't mind my idea theft.
This is basically my favorite kind of AU, aka one where everyone is normal and cute and they do normal friend things.
At nearly three a.m., the idea of murdering one's neighbor starts to get just a little too appealing.
Blair is running on caffeine and fumes, she has to be up for work in four hours, and she's well versed enough in criminal procedure to get away with it. It's not like anyone could possibly convict her; she's practically a saint for putting up with this nonsense as long as she has. She dares anyone else to suffer through nineties throwback garbage at full volume for half the night without cracking. She dares them.
Normally, Blair would never allow anyone to see her overworked three a.m. face except God and the framed North by Northwest poster on the wall: she's bloodless and bleary-eyed, without even the saving grace of a BB cream to make her look slightly human. But the soon-to-be-dead person living in 3B simply has to be dealt with, so Blair puts on her slippers and goes to deal with them.
One angry elevator ride later, she's hammering on the door with a closed fist.
"Wow, okay," is the greeting she gets as the door opens, "Are you for real?"
"Are you for real?" Blair snaps back, rather shrilly if the wince on the guy's face is anything to go by. "Some of us have jobs and need peace and quiet and also, occasionally, sleep– none of which is possible with your shitty music thumping through the walls."
"Shitty?" he repeats with a note of offense, as if that's the most important thing, then, "I didn't – are you next door?"
Blair crosses her arms, foot tapping. "One floor up."
He glances up, hand rubbing the back of his neck, and does look a little sorry. Took him long enough. "Oh. I guess I didn't realize it was that loud."
"You guess?"
His eyebrows raise, but instead of arguing, he says, "I'm sorry. I'll keep it down."
"You better," Blair snits. She's a little disappointed that it isn't more of an argument, actually; it's anticlimactic. "I'd rather not have to perform public service in the middle of the night again."
He gives her an odd look, like he finds her more funny than bothersome, which is immensely irritating. "You're 4B, then?"
"That is how apartments work, yes."
"Uh-huh." He has a cigarette behind one ear that he pauses to put in the corner of his mouth and light. He gives her a look, informs her, "Your magazines are always fucking up the mail," and then shuts the door right in her face before she can respond.
"But is he cute?" is, of course, Serena's first question.
"If you like boys who are skinnier than you," Blair answers, adding venomously, "Not that it matters; he isn't long for this world."
Blair is getting home late from work (or, getting home from work; late should always be implied) when she finds 3B lounging at her door. He's leaning back with a foot up against the wall, one arm crossed over his chest to prop the other, which holds a folded-over paperback aloft so he can read. He has that stupid cigarette behind his ear again.
"Aren't you sixty years too late for the James Dean thing?" she says, unceremoniously thrusting her bagful of papers at him so she can rummage in her purse for her key.
He ignores the jibe. "I wanted to apologize for being an ass the other day," he says, holding out a cup she like a peace offering. She hadn't noticed it before.
Blair sniffs the air. "Herbal tea?" she asks distastefully.
He gives her a half-smile. "You seem like you need to chill out a little."
"You clearly don't value your life at all, do you, 3B?" Blair finally gets the door open and snatches her belongings back. "You can make it up to me by removing yourself from my presence."
He gives her a mocking salute. "You got it, uptight girl in 4B. And it's Dan, by the way."
"Whatever, Dave," Blair says pointedly, hand on the door ready to slam it. She wavers, but then takes a half step forward and plucks the cigarette away. God, she hasn't had one in months. "This is a disgusting habit, by the way. One of many you seem to have."
"We really got off on the wrong foot," Dan says. "I don't mean to –"
And she gets the satisfaction of closing the door on him this time.
What follows is a handful of unintentional run-ins.
Blair is heading out for work when he's coming back in one morning with his coffee and paper, offering her a tired smile that she answers with an appalled frown. One night as she's prepping for the next day she hears a sudden racket outside and peers out her window, sees him in the middle of a pack of unbrushed hipsters all coming inside. Another time she's going on a Serena-enforced blind date and spots him across the street with his arm around some redhead.
Not that she's looking or anything.
Saturday finds him perched on the stoop with a pencil between his teeth as he scrawls with another pen all over some magazine article. Blair is returning from a farmers' market with a picnic basket full of goodies; the first few years of living in this neighborhood, she'd rebelled against such cutesy nonsense but in all honesty she really can't deny the quality of the produce.
"What are you doing?"
Dan looks up and Blair gets a better look at him: scruffy, hair too long, flannel rumpled, boots scuffed. And, well, kind of hot. Disconcerted, she glares at him a little harder.
"Pointing out inaccuracies," Dan says, turning the article towards her briefly. "And checking out the competition, kind of."
"Competition?"
"I write for the other guy." He closes the magazine and she glances at the title – some music magazine she wouldn't bother with if you paid her. Then he tucks it under his arm like he's settling in for a conversation. She did not sign up for that.
Blair frowns. "Oh, so that explains the hours you keep."
He nods slightly. "All the best writing happens between midnight and four in the morning."
"That remains to be seen." She shifts the basket from hand to hand. "Do you write things besides articles no one reads?"
"Stories no one reads," he says, and smiles, looking at her a little closer. "You know, you keep pretty odd hours too. Since you were awake to yell at me and all."
"Yes, well. I have a real job," she says.
"And I'd love to hear all about it, but –" His gaze shifts past her and he stands. "Date's here."
It's that redhead from the other day. One of those girls who doesn't wear makeup and doesn't style her hair but manages to look casually sexy and windswept anyway. Blair is doing her own version of casual for the weekend: designer jeans, soft sweater, wedges. But for some reason now she feels overdressed.
Blair's nose wrinkles. "Who goes on dates in the middle of a Saturday?"
"People without real jobs, apparently," he says on his way down the steps – but then he turns to look back at her. "What did you say your name was?"
Blair feels a sudden stupid rush of displaced embarrassment that this entire time he hasn't known her name. "Blair," she says. "Waldorf." She straightens a little bit. "Esquire."
He smiles, a real one this time. "Your Vogue's here." He points behind her into the small lobby. "Clogging up the mailboxes again."
Blair looks, and by the time she's turned back, he's halfway down the street.
On Tuesday she bums a cigarette off him. Whatever.
Serena says, "You should invite him this weekend!"
Blair doesn't even look up from her book, except to eyeball the girl doing her pedicure. "Why would I invite my annoying neighbor," she says, very flatly, so Serena is aware that it is not a question but an accusation of ridiculousness.
"You said he wrote for some music thing, right?" Serena says thoughtfully, ignoring Blair. "And what's his name? Dan Something?"
"Dan Humphrey," Blair supplies. Not that she'd looked. It was just there next to his apartment buzzer.
"Dan Humphrey," Serena repeats with a ta-dah implicit in her tone, as though his name means anything. "He eviscerated my client's last album. She cried."
Blair perks up a little. "Really?"
Serena goes on to pull up the review and read it aloud, with all the expected Serena personality and to much laughter from all the salon girls. Blair is glad to have a distraction from Serena's endless matchmaking and also possibly just a teensy tiny bit impressed.
Turns out it didn't really distract from Serena's matchmaking.
It's an industry party, the kind Blair doesn't really care for but continuously gets talked into. She prefers benefits, sit down dinners, black tie – not a bunch of pop stars in leather pants snorting coke off every available bathroom surface. But Serena insists that all of Blair's lawyering needs to be counteracted with aggressive fun, so Blair put on the tight dress and came to the party.
She's at the end of her third martini, violently stabbing for the olives, when there's a light touch to her elbow. "So you do exist outside of the building," Dan says. "I was starting to wonder if you were a really mean ghost."
Blair turns to blink at him then narrows her eyes. "What are you doing here?"
"Your friend invited me," he says. "Which is interesting, considering I have not reviewed her clients kindly in the past."
God, Serena, Blair thinks. Can't you ever be subtle?
"I'm sure she's around here somewhere," Blair says, waving him away. "Look for the leggy blonde surrounded by admirers."
Dan pauses, awkwardly, like he wants to say something. He looks almost respectable, she notices, in a gray shirt and black blazer. "Uh, okay," he says. "I'll see you around, then, I guess?"
"I guess," Blair says tersely.
Serena ends up pouring Blair into a cab somewhere in the vicinity of dawn, after one free drink too many made it hard to stay vertical. She hadn't seen Dan the rest of the night.
She spends the early hours alternately cuddling into her fluffiest robe and puking, and she's nauseous enough that even the smell of the bakery on the corner sends her right back to the bathroom. She's just going to close the window when there's the insidious smell of cigarette smoke and then the sound of laughter following. It takes a minute for her foggy brain to make the connection, but she realizes that Dan is on the fire escape just below hers, entertaining someone. And in that moment Blair is so annoyed and sick and strangely mortified that she fills up a glass pitcher with water then upends it right outside the window. She is happily rewarded with a shriek and some muffled cursing.
She pokes her head out the window but doesn't see the girl, just Dan glaring up at her. "Smoking is a disgusting habit," she informs him.
"You smoke!" he says disbelievingly, wiping water out of his eyes. He's drenched. He must've gotten the worst of it.
She smirks. Good.
"I am trying to quit," she says loftily, and snaps her window shut.
She regrets it as soon as she's both fully sober and no longer feeling ill, but at that point there's nothing to do except cringe quietly to herself and hope she never runs into him ever again in her life.
And then she drops an earring under the fridge.
She stands there in the kitchen in her stockings glaring at that little gap of space between fridge and floor. If she's not out of here in twenty minutes, she's going to be late for work. She has other earrings she could just as easily wear. But Blair has a problem deviating from predetermined plans and she really does like those earrings a lot. Plus it's a very tiny fridge, intended to fit inside her coffin sized Manhattan kitchen, and she's had to resort to shifting it before, in similar situations. She can do this.
As it turns out, she cannot. She can physically move the appliance, but as soon as she does, she cracks some prewar wiring in her charming old-fashioned apartment and there is a sudden outpouring of water everywhere.
Blair stands there, shocked, and then tries to stem the flow somehow, which proves impossible, and – god, it's going to ruin her floors, she is definitely late, and she's going to drown here in the titanic outpouring from the stupid too-small refrigerator. So she piles towels on the ground and does something else she'll later regret: she goes out the window, down the fire escape, and bangs on Dan's window like a psycho stalker. While dripping everywhere.
When Dan appears at the window, he looks tired and unimpressed. "You are the neighbor from hell," he tells her.
"I know, I know," Blair says impatiently, shivering a little. "It's just –"
"From hell," he repeats. "When everyone in New York decided as one not to get to know their neighbors, it was because of people like you."
"I know," Blair snaps, which probably she shouldn't do in this scenario, and then gives up the whole story, adding, "It's just a desperate situation, I don't know who to – can't you just come up for a minute?"
Dan stares at her and sighs and finally says, "This is karma at work, you know."
"Yes, yes, I'm very terrible and I'm getting what I deserve, I know," Blair says. "Please?"
That seems to win him over, thankfully, and in a few minutes he's slipping across her soaked floor to assess the damage. He fiddles around underneath the sink for ten minutes and whatever he does ceases the tide, thankfully.
"You need to call a real plumber," he says as he gets to his feet again. "But at least it's not gushing anymore."
"Thank you," Blair says. "How did you know how to do that?"
"I lived in a lot of shitty apartments before this one." He crosses his arms. "Why did you ask me to help?"
"I don't know anyone else in the building," she says with a shrug. "Um. I did say thank you, yes?"
He rolls his eyes. "Yes. I just meant, you know… You clearly don't like me very much."
"I neither like nor dislike you." Blair shifts her weight a little. "Why do you say that?"
Still staring at her, he releases a little huff of a laugh. "Uh, well, let's see. You glare at me all the time. You're not very polite. I went to your party to flirt with you, and somehow that ended with you pouring a bucket of water on my head."
She finds herself fidgeting again, drip drip dripping onto the floor. "It wasn't my party," she mumbles. "And it was a pitcher."
"What a distinction."
"I'm sorry?" she tries.
He doesn't seem to buy that, not that she blames him, and instead starts to excuse himself. At the door, he half-turns to say, "You're not terrible. I mean, maybe not everyone's type, exactly, but…you're just a little –"
"Insane?" Blair supplies.
Dan looks at her. "Intense," he says. "That's not always a bad thing."
"Too bad I only use my powers for evil." At this point no amount of denial and avoidance in the world could erase the embarrassment of this entire situation, so she'd really just like for him to leave.
"Too bad," he agrees, and gives her a little nod before going.
Blair sighs and looks at the clock. There is no salvaging this day.
The next day Blair has some cupcakes sent to his apartment. That seems the thing to do. When she gets home, there's a post-it stuck to her door with his number on it. She shoves it to the very bottom of her purse and does not call him.
Blair needs something to distract her from recent disasters, and Serena is always good for that. She organizes a girls' night out of sorts – Blair tries to take over the planning but Serena is having absolutely none of it, and Blair is kind of grateful for that at the end of the day. It can be nice to cede the reins once in a very, very long while.
There's a fair amount of club hopping that ends in some very drunk karaoke, Serena painfully off-key on Ace of Base's All That She Wants. Blair does not exactly remember the transition from the last club to here, and thanks to the steady stream of girly cocktails she doesn't really care either.
Serena and Penelope are in charge of queuing up the songs. Blair is just being pushed to the front of the room for that Mandy Moore song that she pretends not to know the lyrics to when she realizes there is a person hesitantly lurking by the door and that person is Dan.
"Nelly Yuki, this one's on you," Blair says, shoving the microphone at her and hurrying off. She half-trips on her heels and has to reach out for Dan and whoever is standing next to him to catch herself.
"Why are you here," she demands. She gives a dirty look to the girl she'd landed on so she'll move away.
Dan glances at the girl too, then looks back at Blair. "Uh, well, I'm sort of realizing that you drunk dialed me."
Blair's eyes widen and she gasps, "I did not!"
"I – It's fine." He's a little sheepish, maybe. "I'll just…I'll go, you have fun with your friends."
But before Blair can say a word, Serena has swooped in on one side of Dan and Iz on the other, both of them explaining why he has to stay as they drag him off towards the other girls. Blair takes a minute to gather herself as best she can before following.
Dan is a good sport about being the new entertainment for seven shitfaced socialites who make him sing boy band songs for the better part of half an hour. Blair has somehow been relegated to the end of the sofa, like she's Nelly Yuki or something, watching all of her blitzed friends fawn over Dan half-assing Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely.
"I'm going," she decides, but no one hears her. So, louder, and standing for emphasis (though she wavers a little), "I am going."
Which causes Serena to look up at her with that mischievous twinkle that has never meant anything good for anyone ever. "You and Dan should go together. Because you live in the same building. It makes all kinds of sense. And logic."
Blair makes a sour face at her, but seeing as she's genuinely too drunk to make it to the door without assistance, she says snappishly, "Fine. 3B, are you coming?"
The combination of fresh air and walking seems to make Blair three times as drunk, and she has to clutch Dan's jacket all the way into the cab. "I did not call you," she says stubbornly. She doesn't let go of him even though they're sitting now. "I would not have done such a thing."
"You left me a message," he tells her. "You can listen to it if you want."
Blair would honestly rather die. She buries her face in his shoulder and groans loudly.
"It wasn't that bad," Dan says, sounding amused. "Honestly. I thought it was cute."
"Cute?" Blair repeats, pulling back just enough to peer at him, frowning. "Bunnies are cute. Drunken embarrassments are not cute."
He's smiling a little. "You are really cute."
Blair tries not to make any expression. "Shut up, Humphrey."
It's on the way out of the cab that she realizes she left her purse at the bar. Her hand reaches for it automatically and closes around nothing; she has her phone in the pocket of her jacket, but her keys are definitely nowhere nearby.
"I can take you back," Dan offers, but Blair bites her lip, shakes her head.
"If you could lend me your couch…" For some reason a funny thing is happening in her chest as Dan looks at her.
"Okay," he says after a moment, measured. "If you're sure."
She feels more herself as they approach his door, but she still has the sensation that lights are too bright and surfaces too mobile. She keeps blinking like doing so is going to flip a switch to sobriety.
He holds the door for her, hand reaching out to feel along the wall for the light. Blair enters tentatively. She had wondered what his apartment was like.
The layout is not dissimilar to her own: an open living space giving way to cramped kitchen and small bedroom. But whereas hers is meticulously decorated in creams and blues, with everything in its place, his is like a haphazard explosion of well-loved pieces all stuffed in together regardless of the final effect. There are books on every surface and records stacked up in piles (he's that kind of hipster, then), worn-out chairs spilling stuffing in places. There are still several boxes too, though as far as she knows he's been in the building almost six months.
"Oh, uh, I'm still not fully moved in," he says sheepishly, following her line of sight.
She arches an eyebrow. "I can tell."
He insists on giving her his bed, making it up with fresh sheets. While she sits there stiffly, he gets her water and aspirin, a shirt to sleep in, and a spare toothbrush still in its wrapping. It's all so stupid and so stupidly thoughtful that Blair is almost angry.
"What?" Dan says, giving her a curious look. "Is something –"
"Oh, for god's sake –" Blair kneels up so she can yank him down into a kiss.
Dan doesn't quite react except to freeze, which makes it a particularly awkward situation, made worse when Blair pulls back after a moment. Her hands are curled in his shirt but his are held out to each side like he doesn't know what to do with them.
"Here I thought you didn't like me very much."
"I don't," Blair says obstinately, pouting. When he raises an eyebrow, she adds in a huff, "It's just not very easy for me."
"What's that?"
"Being…" Her nose wrinkles. "Having emotions. At other people."
Now he's kind of openly laughing at her, which Blair shouldn't abide but somehow does anyway, though she shoves him back a little for good measure. "Yes, I can see that you have trouble with that."
"Don't make fun." Blair flops back to her seated position, a little genuinely sulky now. He doesn't have to kiss her but he could certainly avoid making her feel worse about it.
With enough earnestness that she almost believes him, Dan promises, "I'm not. I'm just… You're very drunk right now."
He's switched to that gentle tone people often use with drunks, so Blair must be acting highly pathetic. She grimaces. "I don't need pity," she informs him archly. "I clearly misinterpreted, so –"
"You didn't," Dan says.
But Blair has entered the self-pity part of the night. She drops onto his bed, sinking into the duvet a little, and pulls a corner of it up over herself. Dan sits next to her and then lies next to her, very purposefully keeping some blanket between them.
"It's all very difficult," Blair says after a moment, looking up at the ceiling. And she doesn't know why, but, "My last boyfriend wasn't very nice to me."
"I'm sorry," Dan says.
"That's not really…" She purses her lips briefly. "I do things like yell at strangers at three a.m. And dump water on my neighbor's dates. And act very mean to people when I don't intend to, sometimes to push them away but really because I just like to."
And kiss boys who obviously don't want her to kiss them.
The look in Dan's eyes is softer than it should be considering there's a crazy girl he hardly knows in his bed telling him too much about herself.
"You dumped water on my sister," he says.
"The redhead's your –"
He shakes his head. "No, she's – a complicated situation, but that night of the party, that was my sister."
For some reason that is the straw that breaks the ridiculous camel's back and Blair just starts laughing, hands coming up to cover her face. "I was really, really hungover," she says. "I can't be held responsible. You can probably tell by now that I do not make appropriate choices when alcohol has been involved."
"I don't know," Dan says, something of a smile in his voice. "Tonight went pretty okay, by my estimation."
She moves her hands down so she can stare at him. "How much did you drink?"
He laughs quietly, shifting onto his side so he can see her better. "Nothing," he says. "But I ended up with the uptight girl from 4B in my actual bed, so…"
She thwacks him with the shirt he'd handed her before. "You shot me down, remember?"
"No," he corrects, "I gave you an I.O.U."
Blair laughs again. "A sex I.O.U.?"
"Hey, whoa now, who said anything about sex?" Dan says, smiling. "I don't remember offering sex before we've even had our first date, what kind of guy do you think I –"
Blair tilts up to cut him off with a kiss a second time. Only this time it isn't uncomfortable or clumsy, it's just nice.
What she likes even more than the kiss is seeing Dan open his eyes and pull his bottom lip into his mouth for a moment.
"Have you thought about it?" she murmurs, and off his questioning eyebrow turns slightly coy, says, "You're really good in my head."
He takes that same lip between his teeth, like maybe he needs a minute. "You're pretty good in mine too."
Blair smiles a little then, not quite shyly but not not shy, and suddenly doesn't feel so bad anymore.
Of course she wakes up so wretchedly hungover that she'd prefer to crawl underneath the bed rather than interact with another human ever again, let alone a human she's kind of sort of maybe reluctantly interested in.
Not that she's at all justified in using half of those qualifiers considering she near-literally threw herself at him. Blair makes a muffled sound of mortification and buries her face in the pillow.
Dan's pillow.
He'd gone to sleep on the couch at some point, possibly after she'd passed out, so Blair is alone in the bedroom. She's still in her clothes, having never actually gotten into the t-shirt – though someone kindly removed her heels and set them beside the bed.
She does some furious cleaning-up in the bathroom and then makes her rumpled dress look as decent as she can before rummaging in his closet for anything she can fashion-McGuyver into a cute look. She comes away with a white dress shirt (very nearly her size; ugh, hipsters), a slightly tragic but nevertheless necessary hat (her hair is just…no), and a pair of sunglasses someone must have given him as a gift, because they're actually nice.
Then she steals out of his apartment like a thief in the night, pausing only to glance at him asleep on the couch, shoulders seemingly bare beneath the blanket.
She meets Serena for brunch, and also to get her purse back.
"Walk of shame outfit," Serena notes proudly. "That's my girl."
"Ew, nothing happened," Blair says. She doesn't bother taking off her sunglasses inside the restaurant, and refuses to even look at the waitress until there's coffee in front of her. "He was a perfect gentleman."
Serena looks, if anything, prouder. "I'm happy for you, B. He seems really nice."
Blair's lip curls a little. "It doesn't matter. The entire horrible night was a horrible mistake."
At that, Serena's eyebrows raise. "But I thought –"
"I was humiliated!" Blair says. "Never in my entire life have I made this much of idiot of myself, particularly with such consistency, in front of some guy."
"I know," Serena says with a little smile. "You must really like him."
Blair just gapes at her. "That's hardly –"
"You're nervous," Serena continues. "Figuring stuff out. Wanting to make a good impression. It's like your Yale interview, only with sex."
Blair scrunches down into her seat, pulling the hat down lower over her face. "Don't remind me of that," she hisses.
Annoyingly, Serena grins. "Don't be so hard on yourself. It's not like he doesn't like you back. I mean, did you see how much NSYNC he let us make him sing?"
Blair is back in her building afterwards, impatiently jabbing at the elevator button when she hears someone pause in their descent down the stairs. Her spine prickles, she turns, and sure enough – it's Dan.
His gaze travels over her slowly, up and down. "Looks like I was robbed."
Blair bites her lip. "I only borrowed a few things," she says. "You can have them back."
He comes down the rest of the way. He has a book tucked in the crook of his arm; she's tempted to ask if he ever does anything with his time besides hip picturesque nonsense, but she doesn't. When he gets to her, he reaches over to pluck the hat from her head and put it on his own. "I should hope so," he says. "Considering it's my stuff."
Blair has a private, desperate my hair! moment but she brushes past it, pushing the sunglasses up onto her head as a distraction. "Where are you off to?"
"Nowhere important. Why?"
The elevator finally opens with a soft ding behind her, so Blair takes a step back into it. Her fingers are at the buttons of the white shirt. "I thought I could return your things," she says innocently.
Dan's smile sends a little flutter through her chest, but as soon as he gets close enough, she hits the door close button. "Better luck next time," she calls through the rapidly closing gap.
The look of huffy annoyance on his face is absolutely delicious.
On Saturday he comes to the farmers' market with her. He holds her basket and makes her buy artisanal truffles. They share one cigarette on the way back, because Blair is quitting.
Dan appears to take her on a date. Blair is unprepared, her hair in a messy bun with a pen stuck in it, and about two more hours worth of work before she is allowed to relax with a glass of white wine. Therefore she is less than enthused about the timing of said date, or the lack of planning. She is not a spontaneous person.
"C'mon," Dan cajoles. He looks relatively good in just a t-shirt and jeans, which means Blair's standards must be grossly slipping. "Just a movie. Brooklyn Bridge Park. It's going to be so adorable it's gross."
Blair presses her lips together, internally debating. The fact that she's even allowing herself to be swayed is telling. "Fine. But I have to get changed."
By the time Blair is fit for public consumption they're running very late. Dan gives her a long-suffering look but Blair assumes it's just for show, considering he takes her hand as soon as they're outside.
The first problem: he wants to take the train. Blair demands a cab, obviously; she may have deigned to live in Park Slope, but she does not travel underground like a mole person.
So, she wins that one.
The second problem: he wants her to sit on the grass. He lays out a blanket and then gives her puppy dog eyes until Blair very begrudgingly sits down.
One point Dan.
"If I see one bug," she warns him, "Just one–"
"Yeah, yeah," Dan says, like she's absurd but he likes it, and puts his arm around her.
Once the movie starts Blair allows herself to relax a little, then a lot. She lets herself lean back against Dan's chest, lulled by his gentle breathing, the way he smells like coffee and the cologne she saw on his dresser, with just the tiniest hint of cigarette smoke. Her hand comes up to curl against his jaw before her mouth follows, soft kisses against stubble until he turns his mouth to hers. Then they're the horrible people who make out in the middle of public places and don't even care, to the probable disgust of everyone around them.
"See," Blair murmurs, "If you didn't have to drag me out of our building then we wouldn't be half an hour from your bedroom right now."
"Less than fifteen minutes without traffic," Dan corrects.
She arches an eyebrow. "Wanna test that?"
As soon as the elevator doors close on them, Dan sweeps her into his arms so immediately that Blair can't help laughing against his mouth.
They barely make it into his apartment (not Blair's first choice, of course; her emergency sex candles and champagne are up at hers, but his is closer and she's short on patience) from the elevator, and the buttons of her shirt definitely do not survive the trip. She had expected Dan to be shy, maybe, or at the very least kind of gentle and hesitant, but he's far from it. Blair likes the way he touches her with confidence, doesn't pass judgment on her eagerness; she likes how he grabs both sides of her face to kiss her, the sound he makes when she pulls his hair.
She pushes him back on the bed and climbs onto him, her skirt hitching up around her hips.
"I like to be on top," she tells him.
"That works for me," Dan says, pulling her down into another bruising kiss.
In the morning Blair wakes first out of habit, tugging on one of his shirts before going to investigate the kitchen. He has the expected sad bachelor fridge so breakfast is out – which is just as well, really, since all Blair knows how to do is scrambled eggs. She does intend to make coffee (he has French press, which, of course he does) but when she lifts the boiling kettle somehow the top comes off and scalding water cascades over her hand; Blair shrieks a furious stream of curses that does not even start to cease until Dan has stumbled out of the bedroom.
"Ten minutes in the kitchen and you have already hurt yourself." He brings her patiently to the sink so he can run her hand until the cold water. "I should consider myself lucky you didn't break the fridge."
Blair pouts at him. "This is not my sphere of expertise. One hires people for this sort of thing."
"Pouring water?" he teases.
"Ha ha, very cute, 3B."
"I know, I am very cute," Dan says with a deep, put-upon sigh. Blair punches his shoulder with her uninjured hand and he laughs, bringing the scalded one up to kiss. "I'll get you some ice, princess, and I'll make the coffee, because I am just that good."
"Wow, I might actually end up keeping you around," Blair says with a little smile. "However, this all depends on how the coffee turns out."
"Considering I've managed to transfer the hot water from the kettle to the press without injury to anyone, I think I've got one up on you."
"This is going to be one of those things you harp on about, isn't it? If you want a kitchen-savvy girlfriend, you're going to have to look elsewhere."
"It's okay, I'll be kitchen-savvy enough for the both of us."
Blair watches him move around in just his boxers, hair sticking up, and thinks: yes, it was probably a good thing she chose to let him live.
blair/dan. 5990 words. neighbors au.
summary: At nearly three a.m., the idea of murdering one's neighbor starts to get just a little too appealing.
note: I saw the cutest tag spiral on a lovely DB AU graphic, and I could not help myself, I had to write it. I've been wanting to write romcom-y DB for a while now, and it was basically perfect, so: inspiration credit to otherromanticverbs and blairbending both! Hope you guys don't mind my idea theft.
This is basically my favorite kind of AU, aka one where everyone is normal and cute and they do normal friend things.
At nearly three a.m., the idea of murdering one's neighbor starts to get just a little too appealing.
Blair is running on caffeine and fumes, she has to be up for work in four hours, and she's well versed enough in criminal procedure to get away with it. It's not like anyone could possibly convict her; she's practically a saint for putting up with this nonsense as long as she has. She dares anyone else to suffer through nineties throwback garbage at full volume for half the night without cracking. She dares them.
Normally, Blair would never allow anyone to see her overworked three a.m. face except God and the framed North by Northwest poster on the wall: she's bloodless and bleary-eyed, without even the saving grace of a BB cream to make her look slightly human. But the soon-to-be-dead person living in 3B simply has to be dealt with, so Blair puts on her slippers and goes to deal with them.
One angry elevator ride later, she's hammering on the door with a closed fist.
"Wow, okay," is the greeting she gets as the door opens, "Are you for real?"
"Are you for real?" Blair snaps back, rather shrilly if the wince on the guy's face is anything to go by. "Some of us have jobs and need peace and quiet and also, occasionally, sleep– none of which is possible with your shitty music thumping through the walls."
"Shitty?" he repeats with a note of offense, as if that's the most important thing, then, "I didn't – are you next door?"
Blair crosses her arms, foot tapping. "One floor up."
He glances up, hand rubbing the back of his neck, and does look a little sorry. Took him long enough. "Oh. I guess I didn't realize it was that loud."
"You guess?"
His eyebrows raise, but instead of arguing, he says, "I'm sorry. I'll keep it down."
"You better," Blair snits. She's a little disappointed that it isn't more of an argument, actually; it's anticlimactic. "I'd rather not have to perform public service in the middle of the night again."
He gives her an odd look, like he finds her more funny than bothersome, which is immensely irritating. "You're 4B, then?"
"That is how apartments work, yes."
"Uh-huh." He has a cigarette behind one ear that he pauses to put in the corner of his mouth and light. He gives her a look, informs her, "Your magazines are always fucking up the mail," and then shuts the door right in her face before she can respond.
"But is he cute?" is, of course, Serena's first question.
"If you like boys who are skinnier than you," Blair answers, adding venomously, "Not that it matters; he isn't long for this world."
Blair is getting home late from work (or, getting home from work; late should always be implied) when she finds 3B lounging at her door. He's leaning back with a foot up against the wall, one arm crossed over his chest to prop the other, which holds a folded-over paperback aloft so he can read. He has that stupid cigarette behind his ear again.
"Aren't you sixty years too late for the James Dean thing?" she says, unceremoniously thrusting her bagful of papers at him so she can rummage in her purse for her key.
He ignores the jibe. "I wanted to apologize for being an ass the other day," he says, holding out a cup she like a peace offering. She hadn't noticed it before.
Blair sniffs the air. "Herbal tea?" she asks distastefully.
He gives her a half-smile. "You seem like you need to chill out a little."
"You clearly don't value your life at all, do you, 3B?" Blair finally gets the door open and snatches her belongings back. "You can make it up to me by removing yourself from my presence."
He gives her a mocking salute. "You got it, uptight girl in 4B. And it's Dan, by the way."
"Whatever, Dave," Blair says pointedly, hand on the door ready to slam it. She wavers, but then takes a half step forward and plucks the cigarette away. God, she hasn't had one in months. "This is a disgusting habit, by the way. One of many you seem to have."
"We really got off on the wrong foot," Dan says. "I don't mean to –"
And she gets the satisfaction of closing the door on him this time.
What follows is a handful of unintentional run-ins.
Blair is heading out for work when he's coming back in one morning with his coffee and paper, offering her a tired smile that she answers with an appalled frown. One night as she's prepping for the next day she hears a sudden racket outside and peers out her window, sees him in the middle of a pack of unbrushed hipsters all coming inside. Another time she's going on a Serena-enforced blind date and spots him across the street with his arm around some redhead.
Not that she's looking or anything.
Saturday finds him perched on the stoop with a pencil between his teeth as he scrawls with another pen all over some magazine article. Blair is returning from a farmers' market with a picnic basket full of goodies; the first few years of living in this neighborhood, she'd rebelled against such cutesy nonsense but in all honesty she really can't deny the quality of the produce.
"What are you doing?"
Dan looks up and Blair gets a better look at him: scruffy, hair too long, flannel rumpled, boots scuffed. And, well, kind of hot. Disconcerted, she glares at him a little harder.
"Pointing out inaccuracies," Dan says, turning the article towards her briefly. "And checking out the competition, kind of."
"Competition?"
"I write for the other guy." He closes the magazine and she glances at the title – some music magazine she wouldn't bother with if you paid her. Then he tucks it under his arm like he's settling in for a conversation. She did not sign up for that.
Blair frowns. "Oh, so that explains the hours you keep."
He nods slightly. "All the best writing happens between midnight and four in the morning."
"That remains to be seen." She shifts the basket from hand to hand. "Do you write things besides articles no one reads?"
"Stories no one reads," he says, and smiles, looking at her a little closer. "You know, you keep pretty odd hours too. Since you were awake to yell at me and all."
"Yes, well. I have a real job," she says.
"And I'd love to hear all about it, but –" His gaze shifts past her and he stands. "Date's here."
It's that redhead from the other day. One of those girls who doesn't wear makeup and doesn't style her hair but manages to look casually sexy and windswept anyway. Blair is doing her own version of casual for the weekend: designer jeans, soft sweater, wedges. But for some reason now she feels overdressed.
Blair's nose wrinkles. "Who goes on dates in the middle of a Saturday?"
"People without real jobs, apparently," he says on his way down the steps – but then he turns to look back at her. "What did you say your name was?"
Blair feels a sudden stupid rush of displaced embarrassment that this entire time he hasn't known her name. "Blair," she says. "Waldorf." She straightens a little bit. "Esquire."
He smiles, a real one this time. "Your Vogue's here." He points behind her into the small lobby. "Clogging up the mailboxes again."
Blair looks, and by the time she's turned back, he's halfway down the street.
On Tuesday she bums a cigarette off him. Whatever.
Serena says, "You should invite him this weekend!"
Blair doesn't even look up from her book, except to eyeball the girl doing her pedicure. "Why would I invite my annoying neighbor," she says, very flatly, so Serena is aware that it is not a question but an accusation of ridiculousness.
"You said he wrote for some music thing, right?" Serena says thoughtfully, ignoring Blair. "And what's his name? Dan Something?"
"Dan Humphrey," Blair supplies. Not that she'd looked. It was just there next to his apartment buzzer.
"Dan Humphrey," Serena repeats with a ta-dah implicit in her tone, as though his name means anything. "He eviscerated my client's last album. She cried."
Blair perks up a little. "Really?"
Serena goes on to pull up the review and read it aloud, with all the expected Serena personality and to much laughter from all the salon girls. Blair is glad to have a distraction from Serena's endless matchmaking and also possibly just a teensy tiny bit impressed.
Turns out it didn't really distract from Serena's matchmaking.
It's an industry party, the kind Blair doesn't really care for but continuously gets talked into. She prefers benefits, sit down dinners, black tie – not a bunch of pop stars in leather pants snorting coke off every available bathroom surface. But Serena insists that all of Blair's lawyering needs to be counteracted with aggressive fun, so Blair put on the tight dress and came to the party.
She's at the end of her third martini, violently stabbing for the olives, when there's a light touch to her elbow. "So you do exist outside of the building," Dan says. "I was starting to wonder if you were a really mean ghost."
Blair turns to blink at him then narrows her eyes. "What are you doing here?"
"Your friend invited me," he says. "Which is interesting, considering I have not reviewed her clients kindly in the past."
God, Serena, Blair thinks. Can't you ever be subtle?
"I'm sure she's around here somewhere," Blair says, waving him away. "Look for the leggy blonde surrounded by admirers."
Dan pauses, awkwardly, like he wants to say something. He looks almost respectable, she notices, in a gray shirt and black blazer. "Uh, okay," he says. "I'll see you around, then, I guess?"
"I guess," Blair says tersely.
Serena ends up pouring Blair into a cab somewhere in the vicinity of dawn, after one free drink too many made it hard to stay vertical. She hadn't seen Dan the rest of the night.
She spends the early hours alternately cuddling into her fluffiest robe and puking, and she's nauseous enough that even the smell of the bakery on the corner sends her right back to the bathroom. She's just going to close the window when there's the insidious smell of cigarette smoke and then the sound of laughter following. It takes a minute for her foggy brain to make the connection, but she realizes that Dan is on the fire escape just below hers, entertaining someone. And in that moment Blair is so annoyed and sick and strangely mortified that she fills up a glass pitcher with water then upends it right outside the window. She is happily rewarded with a shriek and some muffled cursing.
She pokes her head out the window but doesn't see the girl, just Dan glaring up at her. "Smoking is a disgusting habit," she informs him.
"You smoke!" he says disbelievingly, wiping water out of his eyes. He's drenched. He must've gotten the worst of it.
She smirks. Good.
"I am trying to quit," she says loftily, and snaps her window shut.
She regrets it as soon as she's both fully sober and no longer feeling ill, but at that point there's nothing to do except cringe quietly to herself and hope she never runs into him ever again in her life.
And then she drops an earring under the fridge.
She stands there in the kitchen in her stockings glaring at that little gap of space between fridge and floor. If she's not out of here in twenty minutes, she's going to be late for work. She has other earrings she could just as easily wear. But Blair has a problem deviating from predetermined plans and she really does like those earrings a lot. Plus it's a very tiny fridge, intended to fit inside her coffin sized Manhattan kitchen, and she's had to resort to shifting it before, in similar situations. She can do this.
As it turns out, she cannot. She can physically move the appliance, but as soon as she does, she cracks some prewar wiring in her charming old-fashioned apartment and there is a sudden outpouring of water everywhere.
Blair stands there, shocked, and then tries to stem the flow somehow, which proves impossible, and – god, it's going to ruin her floors, she is definitely late, and she's going to drown here in the titanic outpouring from the stupid too-small refrigerator. So she piles towels on the ground and does something else she'll later regret: she goes out the window, down the fire escape, and bangs on Dan's window like a psycho stalker. While dripping everywhere.
When Dan appears at the window, he looks tired and unimpressed. "You are the neighbor from hell," he tells her.
"I know, I know," Blair says impatiently, shivering a little. "It's just –"
"From hell," he repeats. "When everyone in New York decided as one not to get to know their neighbors, it was because of people like you."
"I know," Blair snaps, which probably she shouldn't do in this scenario, and then gives up the whole story, adding, "It's just a desperate situation, I don't know who to – can't you just come up for a minute?"
Dan stares at her and sighs and finally says, "This is karma at work, you know."
"Yes, yes, I'm very terrible and I'm getting what I deserve, I know," Blair says. "Please?"
That seems to win him over, thankfully, and in a few minutes he's slipping across her soaked floor to assess the damage. He fiddles around underneath the sink for ten minutes and whatever he does ceases the tide, thankfully.
"You need to call a real plumber," he says as he gets to his feet again. "But at least it's not gushing anymore."
"Thank you," Blair says. "How did you know how to do that?"
"I lived in a lot of shitty apartments before this one." He crosses his arms. "Why did you ask me to help?"
"I don't know anyone else in the building," she says with a shrug. "Um. I did say thank you, yes?"
He rolls his eyes. "Yes. I just meant, you know… You clearly don't like me very much."
"I neither like nor dislike you." Blair shifts her weight a little. "Why do you say that?"
Still staring at her, he releases a little huff of a laugh. "Uh, well, let's see. You glare at me all the time. You're not very polite. I went to your party to flirt with you, and somehow that ended with you pouring a bucket of water on my head."
She finds herself fidgeting again, drip drip dripping onto the floor. "It wasn't my party," she mumbles. "And it was a pitcher."
"What a distinction."
"I'm sorry?" she tries.
He doesn't seem to buy that, not that she blames him, and instead starts to excuse himself. At the door, he half-turns to say, "You're not terrible. I mean, maybe not everyone's type, exactly, but…you're just a little –"
"Insane?" Blair supplies.
Dan looks at her. "Intense," he says. "That's not always a bad thing."
"Too bad I only use my powers for evil." At this point no amount of denial and avoidance in the world could erase the embarrassment of this entire situation, so she'd really just like for him to leave.
"Too bad," he agrees, and gives her a little nod before going.
Blair sighs and looks at the clock. There is no salvaging this day.
The next day Blair has some cupcakes sent to his apartment. That seems the thing to do. When she gets home, there's a post-it stuck to her door with his number on it. She shoves it to the very bottom of her purse and does not call him.
Blair needs something to distract her from recent disasters, and Serena is always good for that. She organizes a girls' night out of sorts – Blair tries to take over the planning but Serena is having absolutely none of it, and Blair is kind of grateful for that at the end of the day. It can be nice to cede the reins once in a very, very long while.
There's a fair amount of club hopping that ends in some very drunk karaoke, Serena painfully off-key on Ace of Base's All That She Wants. Blair does not exactly remember the transition from the last club to here, and thanks to the steady stream of girly cocktails she doesn't really care either.
Serena and Penelope are in charge of queuing up the songs. Blair is just being pushed to the front of the room for that Mandy Moore song that she pretends not to know the lyrics to when she realizes there is a person hesitantly lurking by the door and that person is Dan.
"Nelly Yuki, this one's on you," Blair says, shoving the microphone at her and hurrying off. She half-trips on her heels and has to reach out for Dan and whoever is standing next to him to catch herself.
"Why are you here," she demands. She gives a dirty look to the girl she'd landed on so she'll move away.
Dan glances at the girl too, then looks back at Blair. "Uh, well, I'm sort of realizing that you drunk dialed me."
Blair's eyes widen and she gasps, "I did not!"
"I – It's fine." He's a little sheepish, maybe. "I'll just…I'll go, you have fun with your friends."
But before Blair can say a word, Serena has swooped in on one side of Dan and Iz on the other, both of them explaining why he has to stay as they drag him off towards the other girls. Blair takes a minute to gather herself as best she can before following.
Dan is a good sport about being the new entertainment for seven shitfaced socialites who make him sing boy band songs for the better part of half an hour. Blair has somehow been relegated to the end of the sofa, like she's Nelly Yuki or something, watching all of her blitzed friends fawn over Dan half-assing Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely.
"I'm going," she decides, but no one hears her. So, louder, and standing for emphasis (though she wavers a little), "I am going."
Which causes Serena to look up at her with that mischievous twinkle that has never meant anything good for anyone ever. "You and Dan should go together. Because you live in the same building. It makes all kinds of sense. And logic."
Blair makes a sour face at her, but seeing as she's genuinely too drunk to make it to the door without assistance, she says snappishly, "Fine. 3B, are you coming?"
The combination of fresh air and walking seems to make Blair three times as drunk, and she has to clutch Dan's jacket all the way into the cab. "I did not call you," she says stubbornly. She doesn't let go of him even though they're sitting now. "I would not have done such a thing."
"You left me a message," he tells her. "You can listen to it if you want."
Blair would honestly rather die. She buries her face in his shoulder and groans loudly.
"It wasn't that bad," Dan says, sounding amused. "Honestly. I thought it was cute."
"Cute?" Blair repeats, pulling back just enough to peer at him, frowning. "Bunnies are cute. Drunken embarrassments are not cute."
He's smiling a little. "You are really cute."
Blair tries not to make any expression. "Shut up, Humphrey."
It's on the way out of the cab that she realizes she left her purse at the bar. Her hand reaches for it automatically and closes around nothing; she has her phone in the pocket of her jacket, but her keys are definitely nowhere nearby.
"I can take you back," Dan offers, but Blair bites her lip, shakes her head.
"If you could lend me your couch…" For some reason a funny thing is happening in her chest as Dan looks at her.
"Okay," he says after a moment, measured. "If you're sure."
She feels more herself as they approach his door, but she still has the sensation that lights are too bright and surfaces too mobile. She keeps blinking like doing so is going to flip a switch to sobriety.
He holds the door for her, hand reaching out to feel along the wall for the light. Blair enters tentatively. She had wondered what his apartment was like.
The layout is not dissimilar to her own: an open living space giving way to cramped kitchen and small bedroom. But whereas hers is meticulously decorated in creams and blues, with everything in its place, his is like a haphazard explosion of well-loved pieces all stuffed in together regardless of the final effect. There are books on every surface and records stacked up in piles (he's that kind of hipster, then), worn-out chairs spilling stuffing in places. There are still several boxes too, though as far as she knows he's been in the building almost six months.
"Oh, uh, I'm still not fully moved in," he says sheepishly, following her line of sight.
She arches an eyebrow. "I can tell."
He insists on giving her his bed, making it up with fresh sheets. While she sits there stiffly, he gets her water and aspirin, a shirt to sleep in, and a spare toothbrush still in its wrapping. It's all so stupid and so stupidly thoughtful that Blair is almost angry.
"What?" Dan says, giving her a curious look. "Is something –"
"Oh, for god's sake –" Blair kneels up so she can yank him down into a kiss.
Dan doesn't quite react except to freeze, which makes it a particularly awkward situation, made worse when Blair pulls back after a moment. Her hands are curled in his shirt but his are held out to each side like he doesn't know what to do with them.
"Here I thought you didn't like me very much."
"I don't," Blair says obstinately, pouting. When he raises an eyebrow, she adds in a huff, "It's just not very easy for me."
"What's that?"
"Being…" Her nose wrinkles. "Having emotions. At other people."
Now he's kind of openly laughing at her, which Blair shouldn't abide but somehow does anyway, though she shoves him back a little for good measure. "Yes, I can see that you have trouble with that."
"Don't make fun." Blair flops back to her seated position, a little genuinely sulky now. He doesn't have to kiss her but he could certainly avoid making her feel worse about it.
With enough earnestness that she almost believes him, Dan promises, "I'm not. I'm just… You're very drunk right now."
He's switched to that gentle tone people often use with drunks, so Blair must be acting highly pathetic. She grimaces. "I don't need pity," she informs him archly. "I clearly misinterpreted, so –"
"You didn't," Dan says.
But Blair has entered the self-pity part of the night. She drops onto his bed, sinking into the duvet a little, and pulls a corner of it up over herself. Dan sits next to her and then lies next to her, very purposefully keeping some blanket between them.
"It's all very difficult," Blair says after a moment, looking up at the ceiling. And she doesn't know why, but, "My last boyfriend wasn't very nice to me."
"I'm sorry," Dan says.
"That's not really…" She purses her lips briefly. "I do things like yell at strangers at three a.m. And dump water on my neighbor's dates. And act very mean to people when I don't intend to, sometimes to push them away but really because I just like to."
And kiss boys who obviously don't want her to kiss them.
The look in Dan's eyes is softer than it should be considering there's a crazy girl he hardly knows in his bed telling him too much about herself.
"You dumped water on my sister," he says.
"The redhead's your –"
He shakes his head. "No, she's – a complicated situation, but that night of the party, that was my sister."
For some reason that is the straw that breaks the ridiculous camel's back and Blair just starts laughing, hands coming up to cover her face. "I was really, really hungover," she says. "I can't be held responsible. You can probably tell by now that I do not make appropriate choices when alcohol has been involved."
"I don't know," Dan says, something of a smile in his voice. "Tonight went pretty okay, by my estimation."
She moves her hands down so she can stare at him. "How much did you drink?"
He laughs quietly, shifting onto his side so he can see her better. "Nothing," he says. "But I ended up with the uptight girl from 4B in my actual bed, so…"
She thwacks him with the shirt he'd handed her before. "You shot me down, remember?"
"No," he corrects, "I gave you an I.O.U."
Blair laughs again. "A sex I.O.U.?"
"Hey, whoa now, who said anything about sex?" Dan says, smiling. "I don't remember offering sex before we've even had our first date, what kind of guy do you think I –"
Blair tilts up to cut him off with a kiss a second time. Only this time it isn't uncomfortable or clumsy, it's just nice.
What she likes even more than the kiss is seeing Dan open his eyes and pull his bottom lip into his mouth for a moment.
"Have you thought about it?" she murmurs, and off his questioning eyebrow turns slightly coy, says, "You're really good in my head."
He takes that same lip between his teeth, like maybe he needs a minute. "You're pretty good in mine too."
Blair smiles a little then, not quite shyly but not not shy, and suddenly doesn't feel so bad anymore.
Of course she wakes up so wretchedly hungover that she'd prefer to crawl underneath the bed rather than interact with another human ever again, let alone a human she's kind of sort of maybe reluctantly interested in.
Not that she's at all justified in using half of those qualifiers considering she near-literally threw herself at him. Blair makes a muffled sound of mortification and buries her face in the pillow.
Dan's pillow.
He'd gone to sleep on the couch at some point, possibly after she'd passed out, so Blair is alone in the bedroom. She's still in her clothes, having never actually gotten into the t-shirt – though someone kindly removed her heels and set them beside the bed.
She does some furious cleaning-up in the bathroom and then makes her rumpled dress look as decent as she can before rummaging in his closet for anything she can fashion-McGuyver into a cute look. She comes away with a white dress shirt (very nearly her size; ugh, hipsters), a slightly tragic but nevertheless necessary hat (her hair is just…no), and a pair of sunglasses someone must have given him as a gift, because they're actually nice.
Then she steals out of his apartment like a thief in the night, pausing only to glance at him asleep on the couch, shoulders seemingly bare beneath the blanket.
She meets Serena for brunch, and also to get her purse back.
"Walk of shame outfit," Serena notes proudly. "That's my girl."
"Ew, nothing happened," Blair says. She doesn't bother taking off her sunglasses inside the restaurant, and refuses to even look at the waitress until there's coffee in front of her. "He was a perfect gentleman."
Serena looks, if anything, prouder. "I'm happy for you, B. He seems really nice."
Blair's lip curls a little. "It doesn't matter. The entire horrible night was a horrible mistake."
At that, Serena's eyebrows raise. "But I thought –"
"I was humiliated!" Blair says. "Never in my entire life have I made this much of idiot of myself, particularly with such consistency, in front of some guy."
"I know," Serena says with a little smile. "You must really like him."
Blair just gapes at her. "That's hardly –"
"You're nervous," Serena continues. "Figuring stuff out. Wanting to make a good impression. It's like your Yale interview, only with sex."
Blair scrunches down into her seat, pulling the hat down lower over her face. "Don't remind me of that," she hisses.
Annoyingly, Serena grins. "Don't be so hard on yourself. It's not like he doesn't like you back. I mean, did you see how much NSYNC he let us make him sing?"
Blair is back in her building afterwards, impatiently jabbing at the elevator button when she hears someone pause in their descent down the stairs. Her spine prickles, she turns, and sure enough – it's Dan.
His gaze travels over her slowly, up and down. "Looks like I was robbed."
Blair bites her lip. "I only borrowed a few things," she says. "You can have them back."
He comes down the rest of the way. He has a book tucked in the crook of his arm; she's tempted to ask if he ever does anything with his time besides hip picturesque nonsense, but she doesn't. When he gets to her, he reaches over to pluck the hat from her head and put it on his own. "I should hope so," he says. "Considering it's my stuff."
Blair has a private, desperate my hair! moment but she brushes past it, pushing the sunglasses up onto her head as a distraction. "Where are you off to?"
"Nowhere important. Why?"
The elevator finally opens with a soft ding behind her, so Blair takes a step back into it. Her fingers are at the buttons of the white shirt. "I thought I could return your things," she says innocently.
Dan's smile sends a little flutter through her chest, but as soon as he gets close enough, she hits the door close button. "Better luck next time," she calls through the rapidly closing gap.
The look of huffy annoyance on his face is absolutely delicious.
On Saturday he comes to the farmers' market with her. He holds her basket and makes her buy artisanal truffles. They share one cigarette on the way back, because Blair is quitting.
Dan appears to take her on a date. Blair is unprepared, her hair in a messy bun with a pen stuck in it, and about two more hours worth of work before she is allowed to relax with a glass of white wine. Therefore she is less than enthused about the timing of said date, or the lack of planning. She is not a spontaneous person.
"C'mon," Dan cajoles. He looks relatively good in just a t-shirt and jeans, which means Blair's standards must be grossly slipping. "Just a movie. Brooklyn Bridge Park. It's going to be so adorable it's gross."
Blair presses her lips together, internally debating. The fact that she's even allowing herself to be swayed is telling. "Fine. But I have to get changed."
By the time Blair is fit for public consumption they're running very late. Dan gives her a long-suffering look but Blair assumes it's just for show, considering he takes her hand as soon as they're outside.
The first problem: he wants to take the train. Blair demands a cab, obviously; she may have deigned to live in Park Slope, but she does not travel underground like a mole person.
So, she wins that one.
The second problem: he wants her to sit on the grass. He lays out a blanket and then gives her puppy dog eyes until Blair very begrudgingly sits down.
One point Dan.
"If I see one bug," she warns him, "Just one–"
"Yeah, yeah," Dan says, like she's absurd but he likes it, and puts his arm around her.
Once the movie starts Blair allows herself to relax a little, then a lot. She lets herself lean back against Dan's chest, lulled by his gentle breathing, the way he smells like coffee and the cologne she saw on his dresser, with just the tiniest hint of cigarette smoke. Her hand comes up to curl against his jaw before her mouth follows, soft kisses against stubble until he turns his mouth to hers. Then they're the horrible people who make out in the middle of public places and don't even care, to the probable disgust of everyone around them.
"See," Blair murmurs, "If you didn't have to drag me out of our building then we wouldn't be half an hour from your bedroom right now."
"Less than fifteen minutes without traffic," Dan corrects.
She arches an eyebrow. "Wanna test that?"
As soon as the elevator doors close on them, Dan sweeps her into his arms so immediately that Blair can't help laughing against his mouth.
They barely make it into his apartment (not Blair's first choice, of course; her emergency sex candles and champagne are up at hers, but his is closer and she's short on patience) from the elevator, and the buttons of her shirt definitely do not survive the trip. She had expected Dan to be shy, maybe, or at the very least kind of gentle and hesitant, but he's far from it. Blair likes the way he touches her with confidence, doesn't pass judgment on her eagerness; she likes how he grabs both sides of her face to kiss her, the sound he makes when she pulls his hair.
She pushes him back on the bed and climbs onto him, her skirt hitching up around her hips.
"I like to be on top," she tells him.
"That works for me," Dan says, pulling her down into another bruising kiss.
In the morning Blair wakes first out of habit, tugging on one of his shirts before going to investigate the kitchen. He has the expected sad bachelor fridge so breakfast is out – which is just as well, really, since all Blair knows how to do is scrambled eggs. She does intend to make coffee (he has French press, which, of course he does) but when she lifts the boiling kettle somehow the top comes off and scalding water cascades over her hand; Blair shrieks a furious stream of curses that does not even start to cease until Dan has stumbled out of the bedroom.
"Ten minutes in the kitchen and you have already hurt yourself." He brings her patiently to the sink so he can run her hand until the cold water. "I should consider myself lucky you didn't break the fridge."
Blair pouts at him. "This is not my sphere of expertise. One hires people for this sort of thing."
"Pouring water?" he teases.
"Ha ha, very cute, 3B."
"I know, I am very cute," Dan says with a deep, put-upon sigh. Blair punches his shoulder with her uninjured hand and he laughs, bringing the scalded one up to kiss. "I'll get you some ice, princess, and I'll make the coffee, because I am just that good."
"Wow, I might actually end up keeping you around," Blair says with a little smile. "However, this all depends on how the coffee turns out."
"Considering I've managed to transfer the hot water from the kettle to the press without injury to anyone, I think I've got one up on you."
"This is going to be one of those things you harp on about, isn't it? If you want a kitchen-savvy girlfriend, you're going to have to look elsewhere."
"It's okay, I'll be kitchen-savvy enough for the both of us."
Blair watches him move around in just his boxers, hair sticking up, and thinks: yes, it was probably a good thing she chose to let him live.