Because I'm Worth it (16 page)
“Because I’m his little sister,” Jenny answered, stunned that she’d actually just seen her brother’s sallow, sideburned face live on TV. She’d known Dan was going to the show, but she hadn’t even bothered to ask if she could accompany him. He was so obsessed with being Mr. I’m-The-Next-Keats that he barely even noticed her existence anymore.
The camera shifted to the Les Best tent in Bryant Park, where Serena van der Woodsen strutted down the runway wearing a cropped white baby tee with I L
OVE
A
ARON
printed on it, her gray Constance Billard School uniform skirt, a red wool cape, and Les Best ankle boots. It looked like she was supposed to be a sexy version of Little Red Riding Hood or something.
Not that anyone would
ever
pay money for a school uniform.
“Hey, isn’t that our peer group leader? Serena van der Woodsen?” Elise pointed out.
Jenny stuffed an entire Oreo into her mouth and nodded, her cheeks bulging. It was Serena all right. Looking as perfect as ever.
“Quick, change the channel! There’s no way I can eat anything while I’m looking at those legs,” Elise squealed, tossing a beaded velvet throw pillow at the television.
Jenny giggled and turned off the TV altogether. She picked up her I L
OVE
NY mug of Coke, glancing warily at the feast spread out on the old steamer trunk that served as a coffee table. The apartment was so filthy, she worried that at any moment a disgusting lobster-sized cockroach would drop out of the crumbling plaster in the ceiling, right into her cold sesame noodles. She noticed Elise hadn’t actually ingested any food yet. “You don’t have a problem eating in front of me, do you?” Jenny picked up a pair of chopsticks and twirled them around in the cardboard container of noodles. “I promise I won’t even look at you.”
Elise picked up her dumpling with her fingers and bit it in half. “That’s just in the lunchroom at school,” she said with her mouth full. “I can’t eat with all those skinny girls looking at my fat.”
“You’re not fat,” Jenny responded, even though being around Elise actually gave her an appetite because she felt so tiny in comparison. Still, it was kind of a relief to see that Elise didn’t have a real eating disorder, she was just insecure.
That was the thing about making a new friend—you were never quite sure if you totally
knew
them or not.
“Did you paint that?” Elise asked, pointing to the oil portrait Jenny had painted of her father, which was hanging over the mantel. Rufus was wearing a white V-neck undershirt with cigarette burns in it, and he hadn’t shaved in days. His wiry gray hair stuck out in all directions, and his hazel eyes were wild with caffeine-induced excitement and from doing too much acid in the sixties. It was a pretty accurate portrait.
“Yup.” Jenny wound more noodles around her chopsticks. She hadn’t painted anything since the portraits she’d done of Nate in December. She’d painted his face in every style she’d studied. There was Picasso Nate, Monet Nate, Dali Nate, Warhol Nate, and Pollock Nate. But when Nate had broken her heart, she’d burned them all in a metal trash can out on West Ninety-ninth Street. It had been a moment of catharsis—their love turned to ashes. Actually, now that she thought about it, she should have saved the ashes and made something with them—a self-portrait or a calming seascape—but it was too late now.
Elise reached for yet another dumpling. “Will you paint me?” she asked.
Jenny glanced out the smudged living room window. The snow was so thick, it looked like someone was exploding giant down pillows in the sky. “Sure,” she said, standing up to get her paints. It wasn’t like she had anything better to do.
“Cool!” Elise tossed the remains of the dumpling back into the container and unbuttoned her too-tight Seven jeans. Then she pulled her pink Gap turtleneck over her head, taking her pull-on crop-top bra with it. When Jenny returned with a clean white canvas and her palette of oils, Elise was sprawled out on the couch, her wiry blonde hair dusting her freckled shoulders, completely naked.
“What are you doing?” Jenny demanded, mystified.
Elise stretched her arms over her head and settled her head back against the throw pillows. “I’ve always wanted to pose nude,” she said. “You know, like that scene in the movie
Titanic
.”
Jenny sat down cross-legged on the floor opposite her and wetted her brush. “Whatever,” she remarked, frowning at her eager, voluptuous subject.
Maybe her new friend was less insecure than she’d first thought. And a lot crazier, too.
Blair sat at a corner table in the downstairs bar of Red, the new cozily romantic Perry Street boutique hotel, drinking Absolut and tonic and trying not to watch the coverage of Fashion Week on the Metro Channel. It seemed like every time she looked up they were showing the same clip of Serena prancing around the runway at the Les Best show wearing her school uniform and that stupid I L
OVE
A
ARON
T-shirt. Even in the bar, she could hear people murmuring, “Who is she?” and “Who’s Aaron?” It was enough to drive Blair right up the red velvet–covered wall.
“I wore my Yale tie this time,” Owen announced with a sly grin as he strode through the door wearing a tan Burberry trench coat and a black wool fedora hat that made him look even more manly and dashing than when she’d first met him. He slid into the red velvet–covered bench next to Blair and kissed her on the cheek. His face was damp and cold from the storm, and the feel of it against her face made her whole body tingle. “Hello, gorgeous.”
Instantly Blair forgot all about Serena. She was with a sexy older man who called her “gorgeous.”
So there.
“Hi.” She twisted her ruby ring around and around on her ring finger. “I’m sorry I dragged you out on a night like this. I was just so . . .
bored
.”
The cocktail waitress came over and Owen ordered a Bombay Sapphire martini straight up. He pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights from his pocket, put two cigarettes in his mouth, lit them both and passed one to Blair. His black eyebrows furrowed with brooding concern as he gazed at her with his piercingly bright blue eyes. “You’re not in any trouble, are you?”
Trouble?
Blair took a drag off her cigarette and considered her answer. If you could call having a crush on your older, married Yale alum interviewer trouble, then yes, she was in
terrible
trouble. “Maybe,” she replied coyly. “Are you?”
The waitress brought Owen his martini. He ate the green olive floating inside it and then wiped his mouth with a cocktail napkin. A trace of dark five o’clock shadow cloaked his sharply defined chin. “I was in a breakfast meeting this morning, eating Cheerios with five other lawyers, and I was thinking about you,” he admitted.
Blair ran her fingernail over her fishnet-stockinged knee. “Really?” she asked, immediately wishing her voice didn’t sound quite so eager and hopeful.
Owen raised his glass to his lips, his blue eyes smoldering. “Yeah. I’ve been so crazy busy this week, but I promise I’ll get that report over to the guys at Yale ASAP.”
“Oh,” Blair responded disappointedly. She twirled her little brown cocktail straw around in her drink. For once she hadn’t even been thinking about Yale. Being with Owen made her feel like she was
beyond
Yale. She was his “gorgeous,” the star of his show. Or maybe she was only deluding herself.
Glancing through the paned glass window behind them, Blair could barely see the cars parked out on the street. They were just masses of white, like big, dumb sleeping elephants.
She could feel Owen watching her as she puffed on her cigarette and blew a stream of gray smoke into the air above their heads. He’d asked to see her again, hadn’t he? And he wouldn’t have done that if he wasn’t attracted to her. He was just nervous, that was all. Inside Blair’s head, the cameras were starting to roll. She was the femme fatale seducing the handsome, good, older lawyer. Yale was the last thing she wanted to talk about right now.
She took one last puff on her cigarette and then stubbed it out in the chrome ashtray in the center of the table. “I almost went to jail once,” she announced, trying to sound intriguing.
This wasn’t exactly true. A few months ago she’d stolen a pair of cashmere pajamas from Barneys’ men’s department to give to Nate as a surprise gift when they were having problems. But when they’d broken up for real, Serena had convinced Blair to put the pajamas back. She’d never even gotten caught.
Owen chuckled and picked up his drink. He was wearing gold cuff links with a blue
Y
stamped on them to match his blue-and-gold Yale tie. “See, you’re just the kind of girl Yale needs,” he joked.
“And I’m a virgin,” Blair blurted out, fluttering her eyelashes at the randomness of her remark. It was strange. Even though Owen was extremely dashing and she really wanted to see what it felt like to kiss him, she was a little afraid of what she was doing.
“I’m sure Yale needs more of those, too,” Owen laughed. He crossed and then uncrossed his legs and Blair could see she was making him nervous, which wasn’t what she’d intended.
She reached under the table and slipped her small, trembling fingers over his warm, tanned hand. “I don’t mind if you kiss me,” she murmured in a low, breathy voice that sounded exactly like Marilyn Monroe in
Some Like It Hot
.
Owen put down his drink. “Come here,” he said gruffly, wrapping his free arm around her and pulling her toward him.
His chin was rough and scratched Blair’s face as they kissed, but she’d never been kissed so expertly and powerfully in all her life. Plus he smelled faintly of Hermès Eau d’Orange Verte, which was her all-time favorite men’s cologne.
Blair had thought she’d be plagued by guilt the moment their lips met.
He’s a friend of Dad’s,
she reminded herself.
He’s
old. But Owen was such a good kisser, now that he’d started, she wasn’t about to make him stop.
s
can’t find her boyfriend, but so what?
“I told her she has a better backside than any girl in the business,” one of Les Best’s stylists told a photographer for
W
magazine. “That slim-hipped, tomboy butt. Like she could just slip on her boyfriend’s dirty old jeans and make them look fresh and sexy.”
Serena shook her lovely blond head in good-natured protest and puffed on an American Spirit. “My boyfriend never wears jeans. He thinks they’re overrated. He wears those green canvas army pants. You know, the real ones from the army surplus store?” She glanced around the crowded, smoky after-party which was in full force at Crème, a new go-go club on Forty-third Street, but she didn’t see Aaron anywhere. He’d never come backstage at the show, so she’d figured she’d just meet him here.
“And is your boyfriend named Aaron, by any chance?” the stylist asked. He giggled and pointed at her T-shirt. “You should get Les to make a whole line of those. Everyone would totally go for it—it would be so wild!”
“Would you mind stepping back for a moment so I could get her picture?” the photographer asked the stylist.
“And could you autograph this Polaroid for my collection,
Serena?” a tiny leather-pants-wearing older man with a white
buzz cut asked.
“Me too!” another voice chimed in.
Serena hitched up the baby blue hip-hugging Les Best jeans she’d acquired compliments of the house and pointed to the I L
OVE
A
ARON
logo emblazoned on the front of her shirt as she grinned cheesily for the camera.
“I bet if you held an auction for that shirt right now, you could sell it for a thousand dollars,” the photographer quipped as he snapped away. “But of course you’d never part with it.”
Serena took another puff on her cigarette as the group around her waited for her to respond. The T-shirt was cute, but it was really just a spur of the moment thing she’d done because she’d thought Aaron would think it was funny and to make it up to him for appearing in a fashion show on a Friday night,
their
night. She was a spur-of-the-moment kind of gal, which was exactly why this auction idea sounded so appealing. She could give the money to a good cause like Little Hearts, that children’s charity the Valentine’s Day ball money was supposed to go to.
“Let’s do it,” she giggled giddily.
The group of admirers whooped with delight and followed her over to the bar like adoring little mice following the Pied Piper.
“Who wants to buy a T-shirt?” Serena crowed, jumping up on top of the bar, and parading up and down like she was on the runway again.
Of course only someone as gorgeous as she was could actually get away with this.
The DJ joined in the fun, putting on Madonna’s old classic, “Vogue,” and turning the volume all the way up. Serena shook her booty and stuck out her chest—it was all in good fun—as every pair of eyes in the club tuned in to watch.
“Five hundred dollars!” someone shouted.
“Anyone else?” Serena taunted the dazzled crowd. “It’s for a good cause.”
“Seven hundred!”
“Eight!”
Serena stopped dancing, rolled her eyes and whipped her cigarettes out of her pocket, as if to say, “Your stinginess bores me.” The crowd laughed and fifteen or so lighters were offered her way. She bent down to grab a light from a lucky dude wearing a fur vest, and then pranced away again, shaking her hips to the music and puffing away as she waited for the bidding to go up.
“A thousand dollars!” the dude wearing the fur vest shouted. He’d gotten close enough to Serena to know that it was worth it.
Serena threw her arms in the air and whooped loudly, daring someone to take the bidding to new heights. As much as she hated to admit it, she didn’t even mind that Aaron hadn’t turned up. She might have loved him, but she was having a kick-ass time without him.
“We can ask the butler to take his clothes off and play the piano for us,” Georgie told Nate. “He does whatever I tell him to.”
When group therapy had been over and it was time for the outpatients to go home, the storm had already been so bad, Nate couldn’t get a car to take him to the station, so Georgie had offered to give him a ride. Then when they’d gotten to the station the trains had stopped running, so the ever-accommodating Georgie had taken Nate home to her house in her bodyguard-driven black Range Rover. Now they were sitting on the floor of her enormous, luxurious bedroom, getting stoned as they watched the snow pile up on the skylight overhead.
