I Will Always Love You (10 page)

She couldn’t stop thinking about him. She wondered what his bedroom looked like and if he had a girlfriend and what he was
doing now. And, of course, what he thought of the kiss.

The kiss.

It shouldn’t have happened. Vanessa knew that. She’d immediately broken it off and run all the way down the four flights of
stairs and hailed a cab. It wasn’t until she was halfway home that she’d realized she’d left her video camera at his apartment.
She’d sent him a quick e-mail asking him to drop it off at the Cantor Film Center, where she’d pick it up next semester, but
hadn’t heard anything back. Which was a good thing. Maybe Hollis regretted the kiss just as much as she did. After all, Dan
would be back in a few days—back for good. They were about to start a new life together. Entertaining a crush on her former
TA was not a promising start.

The loud screech of the buzzer yanked Vanessa out of her reverie. She slid off the steel stool and ran over to the ancient
intercom system.

“Hello?” she asked curiously. Maybe it was one of Rufus’s Beat poet friends. They sometimes stopped by without warning.

“Vanessa?” a gravelly voice asked. Hollis. Fuck. Why had he come here? Was he stalking her?

Asks the girl who’s spent the entire afternoon on a Googlefest.

“Hey,” Vanessa said. She tried to sound casual, but it came out more like a bark.

“I have your camera. Buzz me up?” Hollis yelled into the intercom. Vanessa looked around in panic. The general level of cleanliness
of the Humphrey apartment always hovered somewhere between dusty and disastrous, and it was closer to the disastrous end of
the spectrum today. With Rufus and Dan away, Vanessa had gotten lazy. There were half-empty mugs of tea everywhere, her clothes
created a messy trail from the living room to the bedroom, and she was in her pj’s, a cut-up black sweatshirt and boy shorts.

She quickly ran into the bathroom and combed her fingers through her short black hair. Right now, the back was misbehaving,
turning up in a little ducktail no matter how many times she smoothed it down. She frowned as she noticed a deodorant stain
on the outside edge of her sweatshirt. She hurriedly threw the sweatshirt on the floor and ran into her bedroom. She rifled
through the dresser drawer and picked out a gray long-sleeve thermal T-shirt and an old Marc by Marc Jacobs jean skirt she’d
co-opted from Blair Waldorf during the few weeks they’d been roommates the year before. She just finished buttoning the skirt
when she heard a knock on the door.

She swung open the door and stood in the entrance. Hollis wore a messenger cap and square Prada glasses. His gray eyes looked
slightly tired, like he hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in a few days.

Vanessa grinned firmly, but kept her body wedged in the doorframe. It probably wasn’t a good idea to let him inside.

“Ever heard of e-mail?” she challenged, crossing her arms over her chest. In her haste to get ready, she hadn’t put on a bra,
and hoped it wasn’t obvious.

Hollis grinned. Vanessa tore her eyes away from his broad, easy smile. “Hey yourself, Cinderella.”

“Sorry about that,” Vanessa apologized. It must have seemed pretty weird when she’d run away at the stroke of midnight.

Hollis gently brushed past her and into the apartment, surveying the surroundings. A large abstract charcoal portrait Jenny
had done of Dan and Rufus hung above the lumpy, mustard-yellow couch. “So, this is your place.” The way Hollis said it, she
couldn’t tell if he was making fun of her.

“Sort of,” Vanessa said defensively. “I mean, I live with my friend’s family.”

Doesn’t she mean boyfriend’s family?

“For some reason I always thought you were a Williamsburg girl.” Hollis shrugged off his coat and hung it over the back of
one of the rickety wooden chairs in the kitchen. He walked over to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in the corner and squinted
at the book spines.

“Um, I used to live in Brooklyn,” Vanessa said nervously. What was her problem? Even Jenny at her most awkward would have had more poise. “Anyway, do you want something to eat?” she asked lamely. She
needed something to do besides stare at Hollis.

She opened the fridge. There was a half-eaten tub of hummus that had turned an odd green color, a coagulation of some sort
of stew, three cans of a strange red Bavarian beer Rufus liked, and a mysterious protein shake. “Scratch that!” Vanessa hastily
slammed the door shut. “Do you want to go out and get a drink? Or a snack? The diner on the corner has really good cheese
fries,” she babbled.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I watched the footage on your camera,” Hollis said, ignoring her nervous chatter. “It’s really
fucking good, Abrams.”

Vanessa blinked in confusion. Hollis sounded like her TA again. Had the kiss even happened?

“Can we watch it together? I’d love to talk to you about it,” he prodded.

“Sure. Sorry it’s a mess.” Vanessa pushed open the door to Dan’s room and kicked a pile of dirty laundry away. She awkwardly
stuck her hands in the pockets of her skirt. Dan’s bags from Evergreen were stacked against the wall, and the bed hadn’t been
made. She knew she should feel weird about having Hollis in the apartment, but it was really hard to think about Dan when
she could sense Hollis’s eyes on her, watching her every move.

“I like it here. You saw my apartment, and that was before complete party carnage. I’m twenty-five and I live in a shithole.”
Hollis busied himself with attaching the camera cables to the computer, then sat on the edge of the bed expectantly. He took
off his hat and ran a hand through his thick jet-black hair.

“Okay,” Vanessa muttered, pressing play. She took a seat on the floor, as far away from Hollis as possible. The screen sprang
to life, panning out from a MetroCard stuck to the floor of the subway car to a homeless man on the plastic orange seats,
surrounded by all of his belongings, peacefully reading a book.

Next, the camera zoomed wildly, capturing the faces of people as they were rushing to the subway. Hollis sat up. “This is
my favorite part.”

“Really?” Vanessa asked, flattered. He’d critiqued her work before, but this felt so much more personal.

The bedroom setting can have that effect.

“Yeah. But sometimes you’re so removed. I just want to know more about your subjects. Why you chose them. Who they are,” Hollis
mused as the camera jump-cut from an old lady feeding pigeons in Union Square to a group of revelers spilling out from the
subway.

Vanessa continued to watch as the camera shakily followed two girls wearing matching silver sequined dresses trip up the First
Avenue L station stairs. From their backs, you couldn’t tell how old they were. They looked like they were searching for danger.

Hollis tenderly cupped Vanessa’s chin and pulled her into him. “This is what I’ve been wanting to do since the party,” he
whispered. She felt his stubble against her cheek. They weren’t kissing, but their lips were millimeters apart. Vanessa leaned
in, and her lips touched his.

Cut!

“We’ve had a great day together, haven’t we, sonny?” The truck driver, whose real name was Hank, asked as he rested his beefy
arm on Dan’s shoulder. The truck pulled onto the West Side Highway.

Yeah, right, Dan thought. The whole time, Hank had given Dan life lessons on women. “You can just drop me off at Ninety-sixth Street,”
Dan said hurriedly. “Actually, here’s fine.” Close enough.

“Okay,” Hank said, looking disappointed as he reached over Dan to open the door of the truck.

“Thanks!” Dan yelled as he slung his duffel bag over his shoulder and began making his way to his apartment three blocks up.
New York was freezing, but the air felt redemptive. He felt like he could run up a mountain.

He bounded up the stairs two at a time. Maybe it had been the outdoor air, but he barely felt winded as he reached the fifth-floor landing outside the apartment. Or maybe it
was the fact that, unlike his roommate at Evergreen, who’d hooked up with almost every girl in the Victoria Woodhull Vegan
Womyn’s Co-Op, Dan would never have to go through his life uncertain that he was loved and in love. He dug into his khakis
and found his keys, held on a simple lanyard key chain that Jenny had made one summer at craft camp.

He opened the door and heard the muted sound of a film playing in Vanessa’s room. He couldn’t wait to see her face when he surprised her.

“Honey, I’m hooooome!” Dan called eagerly. He cracked a grin at how simple and lovely the phrase sounded. He swung the door
to his bedroom open.

“Dan!” Vanessa was lying on his bed, naked save for her red boy shorts with black X’s all over them. But she wasn’t alone.
She was with a guy. An equally naked guy.

Dan gaped, unsure of what was going on. Was this a bad joke or a dream or some weird sweat lodge vision?

Vanessa scrambled out of bed and stood up, holding the blue flannel duvet around her body. “I can explain,” she stuttered
helplessly. Her face was flushed, her lips looked red and bee-stung, and her dark eyes were wide and confused.

“Who the fuck is that?” Dan heard himself asking. He felt like he was a character in one of those lame romantic comedies that
Jenny loved. In just a second he’d find out that this wasn’t Vanessa, but her long-lost twin, who’d sneaked into the Humphreys’
house to hide her boyfriend from the Feds.

Right.

“I’ll leave you guys alone,” Hollis said bluntly. He shrugged his shoulders and pulled on his T-shirt. He shot Vanessa one
last, long look, and then stalked out of the bedroom and out the front door.

Vanessa felt rooted to the spot. She wanted to run after Hollis, and she wanted to comfort Dan, all at once. This was very
bad.

The understatement of the year.

Dan could feel the tears beginning to well up in his hazel eyes. He felt his heart clench. Was this what having a heart attack
felt like?

He looked around for something to throw. He needed to hear something shattering, because that was what his heart was doing
right now. He picked up Vanessa’s video camera and hurled it, as hard as he could, against the opposite wall. Instead of breaking,
it bounced onto the floor, then rolled under the bed.

Art is indestructible.

“Fuck you,” Dan shouted. “And by the way, you can’t live here anymore!”

He stormed out of the room and through the front door of his apartment, slamming the door behind him, and hurtled down the
fire stairs. His hands were shaking. He was home, but he felt further away from anything he’d ever known.

Sometimes home is where the heart breaks.

that’s what makes b a fighter

“Here’s good!” Serena announced to her driver as the Lincoln Town Car sailed past Nate’s limestone town house on Eighty-second.
Normally, Serena was embarrassed that her agent demanded she be provided a town car for transportation to and from Coffee at the Palace shoots, but today, she was thankful that she could easily slip away from the soundstage.

“Sure thing,” the driver said easily.

Serena slipped out of the car and bounded up the snowy steps of Nate’s town house. As she ran, she didn’t notice the fresh
set of footprints on the snow leading up to the door.

She yanked off her ugly red Hermès goatskin driving gloves, a gift from her chain-smoking LA publicist, and stuffed them in
the terra-cotta planter sitting to the left of the entrance. She pressed Nate’s buzzer with her red polished fingernails.
It was dark outside, and the freshly falling snow made Serena feel nostalgic. Always on the first snowfall of the year, she,
Blair, and Nate would meet for hot chocolate, then sit on the steps of the Met, not caring how cold it was. Maybe she and
Nate could go there tonight.

“Hello?” Nate’s voice sounded sleepy. Had she woken him up?

Not really.

“Natie!” she yelled into the intercom, trying to calm herself. She didn’t want to just burst in his room and profess her love.
“It’s me and it’s freezing!”

“Serena?” His crackly voice sounded incredulous through the intercom.

“No, silly, it’s your mom. Of course it’s me!” she said impatiently.

“Oh.” Nate paused and Serena held her breath. She didn’t have another script to follow. Nate had to let her in. “Come in,” he said finally, pressing the buzzer long and loud.

Serena pulled open the door, ran up the stairs, and burst into Nate’s bedroom. One of the best things about Nate’s house was
the fact that the third floor was entirely his. When they were younger, they used to pretend his bedroom, den, and bathroom
were their own private apartment.

Some people still like playing house.

“Hello?” Serena called again, hearing her voice bounce off the dark oak ceiling.

Nate walked out of the bathroom, wearing a wrinkled green T-shirt and green plaid boxers. Serena looked gorgeous and healthy
and happy, all in one spectacular package. He was suddenly very aware of the fact that Blair was still showering. “What are
you doing here?” Nate asked. Blair had said Serena was at rehearsal all day.

“I was just in the neighborhood!” Serena wandered over to his dresser and picked up a model sailboat. She passed it gently
from hand to hand as if playing a game of catch with herself. “So, what have you been up to today? It’s freezing.”

“Not much,” Nate mumbled. How long had Blair been in the shower? Ten minutes, fifteen minutes? She usually took forever, but
he wasn’t sure how much time he had.

To do what, exactly?

Nate felt confused. Just as he’d always felt whenever he was with Serena and Blair at the same time. Why did they have to
be so confusing? He loved Blair. He was following Blair to school, for God’s sake. So then why did Serena, with her deep blue
eyes that reminded him of the Pacific Ocean and her long limbs, tight and taut like the strings of a tennis racket, make him
feel… well, make him feel the way he felt right now.

Serena put down the tiny sailboat model and picked up another, larger ship with three tiny canvas sails. Ever since she could
remember, Nate had been obsessed with sailboats. She knew she was avoiding what she really wanted to say, but now that she
was here, there were so many emotions bubbling inside her, she wasn’t sure where to begin.