Gossip Girl: A Novel

S&n

Serena was holding Nate's hand loosely in hers, swinging it back and forth.

"Remember Buck Naked?" she asked him, laughing softly.

Nate chuckled, still embarrassed, even after all these years. Buck Naked was Nate's alter ego, invented at a party in eighth grade, when most of them had gotten drunk for the first time. After drinking six beers, Nate had taken his shirt off, and Serena and Blair had drawn a goofy, buck-toothed face on his torso in black marker. For some reason the face brought out the devil in Nate, and he started a drinking game. Everyone sat in a circle and Nate stood in the middle, holding a Latin textbook and shouting out verbs for them to conjugate. The first person to mess up had to drink and kiss Buck Naked. Of course they all messed up, boys and girls alike, so Buck got a lot of action that night. The next morning, Nate tried to pretend it hadn't happened, but the proof was inked on his skin. It took weeks for Buck to wash off in the shower.

"And what about the Red Sea?" Serena said. She studied Nate's face. Neither of them was smiling now.

"The Red Sea," Nate repeated, drowning in the deep blue lakes of her eyes. Of course he remembered. How could he forget?

One hot August weekend, the summer after tenth grade, Nate had been in the city with his dad, while the rest of the Archibald family was still in Maine. Serena was up in her country house in Ridgefield, Connecticut, so bored she'd painted each of her fingernails and toenails a different color. Blair was at the Waldorf castle in Gleneagles, Scotland, at her aunt's wedding. But that hadn't stopped her two best friends from having fun without her. When Nate called, Serena hopped right on the New Haven line into Grand Central Station.

Nate met Serena on the platform. She stepped off the train wearing a light blue silk slip dress and pink rubber flip-flops. Her yellow hair hung loose, just touching her bare shoulders. She wasn't carrying a bag, not even a wallet or keys. To Nate, she looked like an angel. How lucky he was. Life didn't get any better than the moment when Serena flip-flopped down the platform, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him on the lips. That wonderful, surprising kiss.

First they had martinis at the little bar upstairs by the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance to Grand Central. Then they got a cab straight up Park Avenue to Nate's Eighty-second Street townhouse. His father was entertaining some foreign bankers and was going to be out until very late, so Serena and Nate had the place to themselves. Oddly enough, it was the first time they'd ever been alone together and noticed.

It didn't take long.

They sat out in the garden, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. Nate was wearing a long-sleeved polo shirt, and the weather was extremely hot, so he took it off. His shoulders were scattered with tiny freckles, and his back was muscled and tan from hours at the docks, building a sailboat with his father up in Maine.

Serena was hot too, so she climbed into the fountain. She sat on the marble Venus de Milo statue's knee, splashing herself with water until her dress was soaked through.

It wasn't difficult to see who the real goddess was. Venus looked like a lumpy pile of marble compared to Serena. Nate staggered over to the fountain and got in with her, and soon they were tearing the rest of each other's clothes off. It was August after all. The only way to tolerate the city in August is to get naked.

Nate was worried about the security cameras trained on his parents' house at all times, front and back, so he led Serena inside and up to his parents' bedroom.

The rest is history.

They both had sex for the first time. It was awkward and painful and exciting and fun, and so sweet they forgot to be embarrassed. It was exactly the way you'd want your first time to be, and they had no regrets. Afterwards, they turned on the television, which was tuned to the History Channel, a documentary about the Red Sea. Serena and Nate lay in bed, holding each other and looking up at the clouds through the skylight overhead, while they listened to the narrator of the program talk about Moses parting the Red Sea.