A few tantalizing minutes of playful kissing elapsed. Both of them sensed that their solitude would be fleeting. Pulling back and regarding each other, their thoughts were exactly, if silently, in sync. Because both of them were wondering what chance they had. Like met like as Chuck and Blair’s gazes met. Both cast in the same mould: proud, stubborn, and both possessing the dark magic of destruction.
Chuck knew that he would be bad at this, that he would push her away in a vain attempt to keep her at a distance. He knew that he would fall at Blair’s feet, when she was cold and he was aching for warmth. He knew that he would prostrate himself before this her, and that part of him would hate her for it, even when his lips ached to kiss her.
For her part, Blair played scenes of the immediate future in her head. She knew that she would drive him insane, with her intermittent prideful coldness and her desperate neediness. She knew that she would try desperately to change him into something new, and that he would fight her with cruel words, and she would beg his forgiveness: she would swear to him that she didn’t want him to change one fraction.
It was inevitable.
Neither of them smiled; the mood was too solemn for that. But if it were a night for inevitabilities, then the words that Blair uttered next seemed perfect:
“I love you.”
Chuck grimaced slightly, convinced he would never get used to saying this words. But at the sight of her, he knew it was true. So he murmured back, “I love you, too.”
Both were full with the knowledge of their own imperfections, they enjoyed the silence of the night as it slumbered. One thing they didn’t know then, although they might have sensed it, was that they would say those words in a hundred different ways: breathily in an undertone, shouted in accusation, wholesomely, in public, in private, in passion, unwillingly, expansively, and on and on.
It was inevitable.