Only in Your Dreams (Gossip Girl #9)(43)

“The boys?”Vanessa asked. The twins came up behind her, pulling on her hands with all their might.

“Play with us!” they cried.

“So, you know, the job is fairly standard.” Ms. Morgan fiddled with her Treo for a moment. “A few days a week, just in the afternoons. You’ll fetch the boys from camp, run them to their therapist, accompany them on their playdates, the usual sort of thing. No doubt you know the drill.” She put the phone to her ear.

Camp? Playdates? Excuse me?

“I think there’s been some misunderstanding,” Vanessa stammered, struggling to stay upright with the wine in her system and the weight of two kids tugging her floorward. Suffering for her art was all well and good, but she was no Mrs. Doubtfire.

“Yay!” the twins cried. “Mommy, is Vanessa our new friend?”

“Yes,” the woman answered, her ear still glued to the over-size phone. “She’s your new friend.”

She was?

“It’s eighteen dollars an hour,” Ms. Morgan added as she clicked out into the foyer and up the grand staircase. “You can start right now.”

Oh yeah, she definitely is.





Gossip Girl 09 - Only in Your Dreams

b and s decide it’s share and share alike

She’d made three trips back and forth, but Blair still hadn’t managed to get all of her bags up the five flights of stairs. There wasn’t a doorman, there wasn’t any air conditioning, there wasn’t an elevator, but she didn’t mind because the whole thing was just so . . . cinematic.

Blair had a plan for her life, a script she wanted to follow exactly. But so much of what had happened so far—buying a wedding gown, leaving Lord Marcus, getting hired by Bailey Winter, and now moving in with Serena—wasn’t planned. If someone had told her just a week before that she’d have to get a job for the summer, she’d have screamed and protested— working for the summer was definitely not part of the story of her life—but Blair didn’t feel like screaming. She felt . . . happy. Maybe there was a lesson here; maybe instead of trying to always live according to a plan, she should just go with the flow? Maybe things really did always work out in the end.

Just like in the movies.

Bounding down the last flight of steps to retrieve her very last bag—a crocodile Paul Smith duffel she’d picked up in London only a couple of days before—Blair was startled by the lanky, dark-haired guy wearing a crisp blue Hugo Boss suit, stepping out of the parlor-floor apartment. She froze in her tracks.

Isn’t there a handsome downstairs neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany’s?

“Hello there,” Blair called out in her best vaguely Eastern European, Audrey-Hepburn-as-Holly-Golightly accent.

“Hey,” the guy responded shyly. His tousled brown hair hung down in front of his blue eyes. He tucked his hands in the pockets of his suit pants and pulled himself up to full height.

“Good evening,” Blair replied, strolling down the stairs primly through the narrow, badly lit space that passed for a lobby. She squeezed past the smiling stranger and bent to pick up her bag. “Excuse me,” she continued, heaving the bag full of shoes onto her shoulder.

“Of course,” he said, leaning his back against the door to his apartment. “Can I help you with that?”

“I can manage it,” Blair told him stoically. She flashed her most charming smile. “Have we met?”

“I’m Jason.” He extended his hand. “You visiting for the weekend?”

“Oh,” she explained, “I’m moving in with my dear old friend Serena. On the fifth floor?”

“Oh, I know Serena.” Jason paused. “We hung out the other night, drank some beers on the stoop. She never mentioned anything about her beautiful roommate, though.”

And she’d never mentioned her handsome new neighbor either.

Typical.

“It was a bit spur of the moment,” Blair explained. “It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time.” His lips spread into a cute, flirtatious little grin. He tucked his long fingers into his back pockets. “And I’m a great listener.”

“Is that so?” Blair shifted the bag from one shoulder to the other. It was sort of heavy.

“Not only that,” Jason continued, “I was just on my way out to pick up a nice cold bottle of rosé. Have you been up to the roof yet? Maybe you’d like to join me for a welcome-to-the-building drink?”

“I didn’t know we could get up there!” A cool glass of pink wine with a broad-shouldered, blue-eyed stranger sounded like the perfect way to celebrate the end of a milestone of a day: new job, new house . . .

New romance?

Serena was busy memorizing her lines for tomorrow. A drink with Jason would keep Blair out of her hair.

“I know a way,” he said, winking. “I’ll meet you in fifteen minutes?”

Under normal circumstances that would hardly have been enough time for Blair Waldorf to prepare herself for an evening tête-à-tête, but this was the new and improved, girl-with-a-job, ever-fashion-ready, easygoing summertime Blair Waldorf.

“I’ll give you ten.” She skipped up the stairs slowly turning back to smile at him. “By the way, I’m Blair.”