Gossip Girl: A Novel

An hour of sex burns 360 calories

"What are you two talking about?" Blair's mother asked, sidling up to Nate and squeezing Cyrus's hand.

"Sex," Cyrus said, giving her a wet kiss on the ear.

Yuck.

"Oh!" Eleanor Waldorf squealed, patting her blown-out blond bob.

Blair's mother was wearing the fitted, graphite-beaded cashmere dress that Blair had helped her pick out from Armani, and little black velvet mules. A year ago she wouldn't have fit into the dress, but she had lost twenty pounds since she met Cyrus. She looked fantastic. Everyone thought so.

"She does look thinner," Blair heard Mrs. Bass whisper to Mrs. Coates. "But I'll bet she's had a chin tuck."

"I bet you're right. She's grown her hair out—that's the telltale sign. It hides the scars," Mrs. Coates whispered back.

The room was abuzz with snatches of gossip about Blair's mother and Cyrus Rose. From what Blair could hear, her mother's friends felt exactly the same way she did, although they didn't exactly use words like annoying, fat, or loser.

"I smell Old Spice," Mrs. Coates whispered to Mrs. Archibald. "Do you think he's actually wearing Old Spice?"

That would be the male equivalent of wearing Impulse body spray, which everyone knows is the female equivalent of nasty.

"I'm not sure," Mrs. Archibald whispered back. "But I think he might be." She snatched a cod-and-caper spring roll off Esther's platter, popped it into her mouth, and chewed it vigorously, refusing to say anything more. She couldn't bear for Eleanor Waldorf to overhear them. Gossip and idle chat were amusing, but not at the expense of an old friend's feelings.

Bullshit! Blair would have said if she could have heard Mrs. Archibald's thoughts. Hypocrite! All of these people were terrible gossips. And if you're going to do it, why not enjoy it?

Across the room, Cyrus grabbed Eleanor and kissed her on the lips in full view of everyone. Blair shrank away from the revolting sight of her mother and Cyrus acting like geeky teens with a crush and turned to look out the penthouse window at Fifth Avenue and Central Park. The fall foliage was on fire. A lone bicyclist rode out of the Seventy-second Street entrance to the park and stopped at the hot-dog vendor on the corner to buy a bottle of water. Blair had never noticed the hot-dog vendor before, and she wondered if he always parked there, or if he was new. It was funny how much you could miss in what you saw every day.

Suddenly Blair was starving, and she knew just what she wanted: A hot dog. She wanted one right now—a steaming hot Sabrette hot dog with mustard and ketchup and onions and sauerkraut—and she was going to eat it in three bites and then burp in her mother's face. If Cyrus could stick his tongue down her mother's throat in front of all of her friends, then she could eat a stupid hot dog.

"I'll be right back," Blair told Kati and Isabel.

She whirled around and began to walk across the room to the front hall. She was going to put on her coat, go outside, get a hot dog from the vendor, eat it in three bites, come back, burp in her mother's face, have another drink, and then have sex with Nate

"Where are you going?" Kati called after her. But Blair didn't stop; she headed straight for the door.

Nate saw Blair coming and extracted himself from Cyrus and Blair's mother just in time.

"Blair?" he said. "What's up?"

Blair stopped and looked up into Nate's sexy green eyes. They were like the emeralds in the cufflinks her father wore with his tux when he went to the opera.

He's wearing your heart on his sleeve, she reminded herself, forgetting all about the hot dog. In the movie of her life, Nate would pick her up and carry her away to the bedroom and ravish her.

But this was real life, unfortunately.

"I have to talk to you," Blair said. She held out her glass. "Fill me up, first?"

Nate took her glass and Blair led him over to the marble-topped wet bar by the French doors that opened onto the dining room. Nate poured them each a tumbler full of scotch and then followed Blair across the living room once more.

"Hey, where are you two going?" Chuck Bass asked as they walked by. He raised his eyebrows, leering at them suggestively.

Blair rolled her eyes at Chuck and kept walking, drinking as she went. Nate followed her, ignoring Chuck completely.

Chuck Bass, the oldest son of Misty and Bartholomew Bass, was handsome, aftershave-commercial handsome. In fact, he'd starred in a British Drakkar Noir commercial, much to his parents' public dismay and secret pride. Chuck was also the horniest boy in Blair and Nate's group of friends. Once, at a party in ninth grade, Chuck had hidden in a guest bedroom closet for two hours, waiting to crawl into bed with Kati Farkas, who was so drunk she kept throwing up in her sleep. Chuck didn't even mind. He just got in bed with her. He was completely unshakeable when it came to girls.

The only way to deal with a guy like Chuck is to laugh in his face, which is exactly what all the girls who knew him did. In other circles, Chuck might have been banished as a slimeball of the highest order, but these families had been friends for generations. Chuck was a Bass, and so they were stuck with him. They had even gotten used to his gold monogrammed pinky ring, his trademark navy blue monogrammed cashmere scarf, and the copies of his headshot, which littered his parent's many houses and apartments and spilled out of his locker at the Riverside Preparatory School for Boys.

"Don't forget to use protection," Chuck called, raising his glass at Blair and Nate as they turned down the long, red-carpeted hallway to Blair's bedroom.

Blair grasped the glass doorknob and turned it, surprising her Russian Blue cat, Kitty Minky, who was curled up on the red silk bedspread. Blair paused at the threshold and leaned back against Nate, pressing her body into his. She reached down to take his hand.

At that moment, Nate's hopes perked up. Blair was acting sort of sultry and sexy and could it be . . . something was about to happen?

Blair squeezed Nate's hand and pulled him into the room. They stumbled over each other, falling toward the bed, and spilling their drinks on the mohair rug. Blair giggled; the scotch she'd pounded had gone right to her head.

I'm about to have sex with Nate, she thought giddily. And then they'd both graduate in June and go to Yale in the fall and have a huge wedding four years later and find a beautiful apartment on Park Avenue and decorate the whole thing in velvet, silk, and fur and have sex in every room on a rotating basis.

"Suddenly Blair's mother's voice rang out, loud and clear, down the hallway.

"Serena van der Woodsen! What a lovely surprise!"

Nate dropped Blair's hand and straightened up like a soldier called to attention. Blair sat down hard on the end of her bed, put her drink on the floor, and grasped the bedspread in tight, white-knuckled fists.

She looked up at Nate.

But Nate was already turning to go, striding back down the hall to see if it could possibly be true. Had Serena van der Woodsen really come back?

The movie of Blair's life had taken a sudden, tragic turn. Blair clutched her stomach, ravenous again.

She should have gone for the hot dog after all.