A dirty blond head on the back of his couch and a sickly sweet smell of weed in the air, Chuck didn't know he had missed that.

It'd been two years for them - an era of Blair for one and a string of second bests and a trip down the memory lane for another. He wished he could say this outloud but words were for pedestrians while Chuck was getting chauffeured around and Nate was flying high.

And when flying high enough, Nate could barely drive, walk or talk.

Instead, like a page torn out of a fashion shoot, he would effortlessly and casually just stand or sit or lay there with his lit joint. It would be held carefully away from the heritage upholstery, designer clothes and delicate complexions, even at Nate's most plastered.

Weight on both hands and guilt just for a moment off his shoulders, Chuck was leaning from the above to watch Nate's face, trustingly tilted backwards towards him in unknowing, idiotic beauty. Nate's lips were parted like a well-trodden sin, candy-pink and spit-shiny from sucking on a neat joint and bitter confessions. Chuck's damp palms were sliding on the leather and so was his slipping sanity.

It'd been awhile.

With a smirk, Nate blew a perfect ring of smoke right into his face. Chuck inhaled it, letting the burn etch deep into his lungs, hoping it'd go to his head and excuse what he knew better and yet was about to do.

"Guess it never pays to really get what you want," Nate said with a sudden outburst of common sense, grass breath and sour grapes. "Sex was great but too easy to be true, you know? I like it hard." His lips wrapped around the last word.

Hard was how Chuck was, so close and yet so far, that with Nate's addled mind still wallowing in his post-Serena blues but with his jock body already yearning for greener or possibly evergreen pastures. Sprawled under his eyes, high and horny, there was one of the better things that Blair and Chuck had shared. Doing it again wouldn't bring Blair back but maybe a taste of simpler days that never were?

In the midst of Chuck's misgivings, Nate just stared up at him as a hand-written invitation to a highly exclusive circle of hell.

Some people had mistaken Nate for a ticket to paradise, only to find out how easy it was to be cast out. Poor little Jenny, a fallen by the wayside angel with a smudged eyeliner, who waited for her turn for so long, she became a punchline. Chuck had lusted for the exquisite, acrid taste of her burning bridges as she was torching everything. Also, for a second time of taking what had been saved up for Nate - who could care less about being a prince charming but then he'd have to try.

The thing about Nate, he was always moving on. The trick to keep his attention was to move in a different direction.

"Blair?" confusedly slurred Nate, squinting at him with longing, lips already chewed raw.

Chuck decided it wasn't rape if someone was begging for it.

His mouth crushed all confusion, taking in the surprised pot-heavy exhale, the sweet spit, the giving fullness of a pout, the finally giving tongue, the burn of a fresh stubble across his lips. Head turning, he was afraid to topple, head over heels, into Nathaniel Archibald again - another thing he'd sworn off along with bad cocaine and his signature scarf.

"I'm so fucked up tonight, Chuck. So fucked up. But not nearly fucked up enough," Nate whispered up into his mouth, a spoilt child asking for what he knew he'd get. Chuck should have been grateful that Nate knew it was him. And not like that other time, during a steamy-window, smoke-chamber limo ride home from another summer on the coast. When Nate, hand down Chuck's pants, kept calling him Carter.

Fondly, Chuck's palm ran smooth and warm over Nate's upturned throat, moving his chin up, iup/i now; his fingers gripped to bruise below the jawline; Nate gaped, obscene. The sound of his zipper and Nate was already moving on the couch, scouting up, letting his head fall further down, wild eyes not leaving Chuck's even for a heartbeat.

Look at him waiting, all loose from weed, pupils melting dark over the blue. Nowhere to rush anymore, Chuck traced the red of Nate's lips with the head of his cock. Nate licked it and laughed. But only until Chuck pressed on. Soon, Chuck Bass briefly believed in god as he was sinking slowly between Nate's parting lips, sliding down the tender-pink tongue.

Skin flushed, throat working, Nate always gave it up easy like Chuck could never make people do even to the promising sound of crisp bills. Like he wanted it, like he wanted his pretty numb mouth fucked, like he wanted to feel. Feeling was what Chuck specifically did not want, nothing but the sweet unconditional surrender. He didn't last long, only until Nate's first tears - making a mess of Nate's face and earning sounds of honest spitting and then, a half-smile.

When he ended up crashing through all 102 floors of the Empire State Building all over again, Chuck noticed Nate's sneaky hand down below in the unzipped pants, squeezing but not stroking. The Archibalds never did it for themselves if someone could do it for them.

Lazily, Chuck reached down, found the only dick he knew as well as his own, and stroked dirty and rough, watching Nate's mouth go slack and still, frustratingly, stay with him as a flawless memory.

It paid to get what you really, really wanted. As long as you were getting away with getting it. Things Nate moaned just for him, cruelly believable, Chuck knew meant nothing right now - but everything in the long run.

When Nate came, he shot all hot and wet over Chuck's sweaty palm, Blair's glass coffee table, a thought of Serena's boobs, - crying out one name, whispering another, confessing the third. Gross, and yet Chuck licked his hand before wiping it on something surely less priceless than this moment.

He wouldn't place a bet on whom this tongue would confess its filthy desires and grand plans next - but he knew, Nate could never stop writing the teasing letters B, S, C on someone's skin. There were always the four of them under the same sheets.

Carefully, Nate shook off the ash from his joint into a crystal ashtray and took an elegant if shuddering, needy drag. Another of his talents was to look like tomorrow's regrets but Chuck was still living in the today.

"Listen. Do you want to-," Chuck started with a terrifying feeling that a half-truth might just come out.

"Tell me tomorrow," Nate muttered, already, abruptly falling asleep with his china-blue eyes open.

In fainthearted relief, Chuck pried the joint out of his fingers and opened his laptop to book a flight anywhere out of here - away from their own spider-web of streets and avenues, loyalties and losses. He seemed the only one to understand that the master plan of their lives had caved in on them all; time to fade to black.

The morning after was settling on the skyscrapers as he was packing light and deciding if not to live twice, then to die another day.

The quantum of solace was that none of the four of them could ever get far enough away from each other; the world was not enough to hide.