Only in Your Dreams (Gossip Girl #9)(63)

“Bree, are you okay?”

“Dan,” she replied calmly. She opened her eyes and smiled up at him. “You’re smoking.”

Shit.

He tossed the burning butt into the night. “Sorry,” he appologized sheepishly.

“You don’t need to apologize,” she said in a voice so neutral it was condescending.

Dan took a seat next to her on the roof as darkness descended. The backyard was so dark he could just barely make out the sparse tops of lilac bushes and the burning embers of people’s cigarettes. He closed his eyes and tried to pretend they were on top of a mountain in the Pacific Northwest, but even his poet’s imagination wasn’t quite that strong.

There’s no oxygen up here. Not enough for two . . .

“I won’t mind if you want to smoke,” Bree continued. “I wish you wouldn’t, because it’s bad for your body and it’s bad for the earth, but you’re an individual. You can do what you like.”

Dan didn’t feel like arguing. He shook out another cigarette and lit it. There. He felt better already.

“I’m sorry you had to come up here after me,” Bree apologized.

Dan decided not to mention that he hadn’t been looking for Bree, just a minute of peace and nicotine.

“Anyway, I thought you’d be downstairs talking to Vanessa. It certainly seems like you two have a lot of things to say to one another.”

Dan didn’t know how to respond. The truth was, he didn’t really believe he and Vanessa were going to be living together for the rest of the summer as . . . friends.

Friends with benefits, maybe?

“I’m not mad or anything,” Bree assured him, and she sounded like she meant it. “We’ve had a nice time together these past few weeks, haven’t we?”

“Totally,” Dan agreed, nodding. He knew what was coming.

“I’ve really enjoyed the experience of getting to know you, getting to understand you a little, as a person. That’s always a magical journey, don’t you think?”

Oh boy.

“Right, right,” Dan replied. Her philosophy-of-life mumbo jumbo was getting kind of old. He’d be glad when he didn’t have to listen to it anymore.

“And it’s okay to be sad when the journey ends,” she said. “But our paths are diverging. Your life path has taken you to a big Hollywood party. That’s just not something that I understand. My path is leading me elsewhere.”

He’d gambled his education and his entire future on a romance with Vanessa, and he was comfortable with that. But he’d gambled his entire future with Vanessa on Bree? What had he been thinking?

Bree stood and stretched, holding her hands high above her head and exhaling deeply. Only her bright white camisole and white-blond hair were visible in the dark, so she looked like she was floating, legless.

“Oh, Dan.” She sniffled a little. “It is hard to say good-bye, isn’t it? I try to remember what my yogi teaches about letting go of things, but it’s hard. I mean, I’m still just a student.”

Suddenly it didn’t seem hard to say good-bye at all.

Dan hugged her weakly because it seemed like the right thing to do, then watched her disappear through the trap door. He was kind of glad that they were breaking up, and he was definitely psyched she was going to leave. He’d learned a lot from her, about nature, about exercise, about spirituality, but he’d reached his breaking point: he just wanted a cigarette, a minute of peace, and then he’d head downstairs and go home with Vanessa—in a just-friends sort of way.

“Bummer,” uttered a male voice in the darkness.

Why was it so hard to get a minute alone?

“Who’s that?” All Dan could see was a cherry tip and the telltale scent of a joint.

“Sorry, dude.” Nate Archibald stepped closer to Dan. “Didn’t mean to eavesdrop. I guess you didn’t realize I was up here.”

“Oh, hey.” Dan recognized the preppy stoner guy who’d broken Jenny’s heart last fall. Jenny seemed to have gotten over it pretty fast, though, so there were no hard feelings.

“You’re taking it pretty well,” Nate commented.

“Honestly, man,” Dan replied philosophically, “it just wasn’t meant to be. I thought she was someone I was interested in. I mean, I thought I was ready for a change. But you know what? I was wrong. I think I just fell into the trap of being excited by the idea of someone new, even though we were totally wrong for each other.”

“Really?” Nate coughed. The thing Dan had just described sounded sort of familiar.

“The thing is,” Dan continued, waxing philosophical, “there’s a girl downstairs, and she’s the one, man. She’s the one.”

Which one?

“I think I know exactly what you mean,” Nate added, his voice an octave higher than normal. “And that chick was right, too—there are, like, paths, right, and sometimes they just . . . diverge. Right?”

Whoa.

“I don’t know about paths,” Dan replied, even though the whole paths-diverging thing was actually borrowed from Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Less Traveled,” which he’d actually quoted in his graduation speech. “I’m kind of sick of all this New Age bullshit, to tell you the truth.”