this can also be found at AO3 under newrromantics profile and at livejournal at lydsmartin

one.

In the long months between your disappearance, when you were off partying it up and I was left to pick up the crumbling pieces of my life, when I didn't know where you were and why you had left and hadn't gotten so much as a goodbye-

I never once said I missed you, (i wrote it and thought it but i didn't say it; i didn't tell you, not once, not ever. not until you were back and we were curled on my bed, silk sheets beneath us and your lips on mine, and you told me you missed me first).

And I remember one lunch, in the dead of Winter when the leaves had fallen off the branches and there was ice on the floor and Is and Kati wore matching Saint Laurent coats for a full week, when I had picked up my phone and pressed your number into it and held it up to my ear.

Is was complaining about Mr Harris and you didn't know who Mr Harris was - he was new and cruel with the face of an angel and Kati had made a million jokes about the devil with an angel's face and Penelope had rolled her eyes, asking if this was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I had thought of you, and only you, and all the days spent at Cece's summer house, curled up in that tent, laughing and crying and - your phone went to voicemail.

It's Serena! I'm not here right now but I promise to call you baaaaack! Cue Georgina's manic laughter in the background and you giggling, giggling, always giggling - so happy, and I used to think you were sunshine personified, this unattainable Golden Girl to all the boys you were but to me, to me, you were so much more; the sun layered with vices to keep her sane, perfect and beautiful to everyone around you, but you were as sweet as you were cruel, accidentally falling, always falling, but still smiling, like the world was your oyster and you were it's queen.

And that lunch, setting on the steps of the MET (it was our second month there, it still felt weird, being the new crowned Queen and marking our own kingdom. it felt empty and lonely and strangely intoxicating, high off power i had wanted for so long). It was sitting there with a yogurt in my hand and the girls bitching about teachers that I thought about how much I missed you, how I let it sink into my skin and overtake my system - I hadn't done that since the day I called to ask Lily why you weren't at school and she delivered the cruel blow of, oh she didn't tell you?, and my world, for the first time, came crashing down all around me and I was weak, unable to stop it, unable to stop, unable to stop - that lunch was like an echo of that afternoon, except my kneeling in front of the toilet seat was metaphorical, hypothetical, just a scene playing on loop in my mind.

I never told you I missed you. But only because I couldn't reach you.

\ - \

two.

In the late Summer of '03, I had kissed Nate underneath a tree in Cece's backyard and for a brief, shining moment I had done something before you; I had kissed Nate Archibald and you hadn't, and in that moment with his hands awkwardly holding my face, all I could think of was you.

I didn't tell you I was jealous of you. I didn't tell you that you were the only one who consumed my thoughts; my best friend, my sister, how many times had we affectionately dreamed of being real, true sisters before deciding blood can't determine family? How could I ever think of you as anything other than that - the girl I had grown up with.

Nate was the boy I dreamed of you but you were the girl I dreamed of. Long nights spent lying awake thinking what it would be like to have Nate kiss me, to have him touch me, but how much longer did I think about the shape of your lips, the curve of your neck, the way your hair shone in the light? All the little details I picked up about you but never about Nate, and how I attributed it to jealousy; the deep burning kind that rotted my soul and tore my insides up.

I had looked at you, at the way Nate looked at you; the love-struck look in his eyes he never held towards me and I had thought about how lucky it would be to be you. To be able to have boys look at me like I was beautiful, so beautiful, like I was a princess they'd fight for, wars would be made in my beauty, and I would be the goddess stories were written about - if I was you, if I was you that would happen but I wasn't, and it left me up at night. Pondering and dreaming and wondering what was so fundamentally wrong with me.

Nate had kissed me, and you were inside the house, and all I could think was, "This is one thing you don't have over me, this is one thing I have and you don't." But I was wrong, because Nate loved you more than he could love me; he loved you before he knew he loved you, after he knew, even after that, and he had kissed you first, anyway. The week I was in Scotland and you had all gone to Penelope's and played spin the bottle.

I had told you about Nate, later that day, curled on my bed, with a smirk. Hoping you would be jealous, crushed, feel the anger that welled inside of me. But you had grinned ear to ear, genuinely happy for me, squealing, B! B! that's so exciting! and I felt even more hurt - that you could love me but I couldn't do the same for you, that I had to feel bitter when I thought of you and all you had, the attention you received and the attention I lacked - (and you hadn't mentioned Spin the Bottle and how you reached Nate before me, how you would continue to have him when I couldn't keep hold of him).

I was jealous of so many things with you - your beauty, your ability to ace everything in life despite trying, how you won everybody's hearts over with a smile, how you took and took and took from me - the girls at school, my mother, Nate. But, more than anything I was jealous of Nate, and it was so easy to think I was jealous of you, of the way Nate loved you, but maybe I was just jealous of Nate, that I couldn't love you like he could.

\ - \

three.

In Paris I came close to telling you this - I love you. Oh, I love you, Serena. I've said it so many times before, I love you, I love you, I love you but I had never said it and meant it the way it felt in my heart; I love you, not as a friend, or a sister, but as a romantic interest. In the way I want to spend the rest of my life with you but not by your side as middle aged women on their fourth husband, but as your wife, (and isn't that a scary thought?).

It was so easy that summer - our heartbreaks fading away each moment spent together. It was the first time I ever felt something more for you and could admit to myself; watching Tiffany's and The O.C. cuddled on the same bed, legs intertwined, how easy would it have been to kiss you? Fingers skirting the skin of my thigh as you reached for the popcorn by my side, your nails scraping past my skin, the blue of the nail polish standing out against the pale of my skin. It felt electric, every time we touched; applying make-up on together in the bathroom, silk robes tied loosely around our waists and giggling about boys.

You told me about your latest adventures and I felt my thighs tighten, the way I had to squeeze my legs together to stop from screaming. I replaced each faceless, nameless boy in your stories with me; I was the one you were painting, sprawled out against a couch (although in my fantasies it was velvet and we were in a mansion and everything around us was beautiful, not some dingy low-rent artists apartment). You had your eyes trained on me, the seductive smirk I know you wear for those men, the curve of your brush painting me curves onto canvas; immortalising me as your lover. Lover, a word I hated until I tried it out in a sentence with you and me.

I didn't tell you about that. I never told you all the times I would dream about you. It felt wrong and dirty and shameful - a secret I kept locked for myself. Who has sex dreams about their best friend, the girl they've dubbed their sister, the girl that is going to stand next to them at the altar as the maid of honour and not the bride; but dream I did, all night long, when things were bad with boyfriends and when things were good with boyfriends - it was always your face I saw in between my legs, that cheeky grin, careless, hair tucked behind your ears, the girl I'd loved since before anyone else.

And how I love you - that jealousy and contentment and hate, that rich and deep loathing for you that courses through my veins like a second blood, is nothing next to the love I feel; the love that has buried itself in me, enriched my soul, given me a second heart. It's like a thud against my chest, a whisper in the night, a prayer against my lips, the biggest secret of them all: I love you, Serena.

(But I'll never tell you that).