Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

With a forcibly airy and pleasant tone, Lorelai says, “You actually just missed, uh, Jess.” 

“Jess?” 

“Jess.” 

“Huh,” says Rory, faking disinterest and distraction with the salt and pepper dip she’s shaking out. “He was in Stars Hollow?” 

“He showed up two nights ago and left yesterday.” Lorelai drums her fingers on the tabletop. “He came to get his car. Luke’d hidden it to trick him into going to school and actually graduating, but… we all saw how that turned out. Anyway, he came, he fought everyone in his path, he left—and I met his mom. Liz. She was in town too.” 

“Oh, wow.” Rory’s fingers twitch; she pops a fry in her mouth and averts her gaze while she chews. “What’s she like?” 

 “Uh… ditzy. Like a hurricane.” 

“Ditzy like a hurricane?” 

“A hippie-rock chick, a bit out of touch with reality—well. She’s a lot. It wasn’t… pretty, when they were here. Luke took it pretty bad.” 

Rory gives an unintelligible hum. The bell above the door chimes; she glances at Luke behind the counter—fiddling with the toaster, his back straight, he has always had impeccable posture—then back down at the linoleum tabletop and greasy burger. 

“How… What are you thinking?” asks Lorelai, careful the way she only is about Jess and all the collateral damage he drags behind him. The boy of Rory’s dreams is a landmine. “About… him?”

“I’m glad I didn’t run into him,” Rory settles on saying, finally looking up at her mother and giving her a hesitant sort of what-can-you-do grimace. “I wouldn’t’ve wanted to deal with all… that, you know? The baggage of it. I’m much happier keeping it in the past.”

All this to say: Rory Gilmore is a fucking liar.

So when she catches sight of him on the subway she doesn’t ask about his trip to Stars Hollow—she thinks of doing it, for a brief half-hearted moment, she is her mother’s daughter after all, but it would probably rip them out of this shared delusion they have, the one where they exist tethered only to one another and not to an entire world, to other people, who are Shirley Jackson-esque in their plights against small-town hoodlums, and she’s already fighting herself about this, she doesn’t need to add her mother’s Gilmore passive-agressiveness to it—or about his car, his mother, his fight with Luke. She grips onto the metal handrail with gloved hands as she watches him read across the car, his shoulders relaxed and his chin tucked into a zipped-up (hallelujah) coat. The book has a dark purple cover, and she traces the slope of his nose and again imagines kissing him, tucking herself into his arms to be held, digging her hands in his pockets to stay warm. She needs a lobotomy. Seriously. She looks away from him and accidentally meets eyes with an old lady’s chihuahua. She stares down at her ballet flats for the remainder of her ride. For a brief moment she is six years old and scared of everything, then it passes; she’s nineteen and wanting, you know, so it goes.

At her stop on 14th Street/Sixth Avenue, she steps toward him and nudges his forehead with The Virgin Suicides as she crosses to the doors. She drops the paperback in his lap right as he blinks up at her with a near murderous look on his face before it—shifts into something much more terrifying; she darts out the train a split second before the mechanical doors slide shut behind her.    

On what might be the coldest night of the year, wind howling and snow falling in thick, blinding clumps, she runs headlong into him, their bodies full-on colliding on the street. No, really. On the street, slush-slick pavement brick under their feet, like the kind of disgusting Hallmark movie that Lorelai imposed a strict ban upon. Gilmore mockery has an element of sophistication to it, too. This, however, does not; it’s only annoying, a little bit sad and pathetic.   

“What are you doing here?” asks Rory, reeling and recoiling.   

“I work,” says Jess, equally stilted. His cheeks are pink, cherub-like; he’s wearing a beanie and he looks boyish and soft, like if she were to touch him he would be warm and gooey like a melted marshmallow. 

“Here?” Two blocks over from where she lives, which he very well knows, on account of the last time they saw each other having been here, moonlit and melancholic. 

“I bartend at a place on the corner of 101st Street and Broadway.”

“You bartend?"

“The tips are good.” 

“No, I mean, doesn’t bartending require people skills?” 

“Look out, Lenny Bruce, you’ve got a competitor,” says Jess monotonously. 

“What should be is a dirty lie,” acqueisces Rory, equally monotone. 

 “Astute,” he says, squinting up at the weeping grey skies before he raps his knuckles on her arm. “What the hell are you doing out in this weather?” 

“What are you doing out in this weather?” she demands, never one to be outdone. 

“Bar closed early because of the storm. Now you.” 

“Meh.” She pauses. “It’s stupid.” 

“I won’t laugh.” 

Rory sighs and crosses her arms over her chest. “I miss my mom,” she finally admits. “I thought if I took a walk in the snow I’d feel closer to her or something, but I’ve just given myself frostbite or hypothermia, I don’t know, one of them, but basically I can’t feel my nose.” She pokes the appendage for good measure—nothing—and huffs out a perfect white cloud between them, while one side of Jess’ mouth quirks up like he finds her amusing like a kid who keeps tripping and falling on her ass all over the playground. 

“You do look a bit frostbitten,” he says, all pretty and crooked.

“Says you.” It’s overwhelming, destabilizing, going through this again: finding him so gorgeous it hurts to breathe, her head’s spinning around / her feet are off the ground like a Cranberries song. She does the only thing she can in the face of this, which is try to rile him up into doing something mildly sucky so her brain computes and (re)registers that he can’t be trusted, really, that he’s her heart’s persona non grata. “I’m pretty sure your place has no heating.” 

“Well,” says Jess, burying his hands in his coat pockets and glancing down at their shoes, “I figured I’d hang out at Saint Patrick’s for a bit then head home. It’s always warm in churches, I bet there’s a perk of Christianity’s that you didn’t know.” 

Rory had almost forgotten that. The first time she saw him—thought she saw him—was his back retreating into the church. Does that count as divine intervention? “And then?” she says, trying for a casual tone and failing miserably. “When you get home, you’ll freeze to death and your frozen carcass will stay in that apartment forever like an antique taxidermied deer?” 

Jess won’t meet her gaze. He used to be much better at lying to her, or at least at nitpicking the truth until it was pretty enough for her to stomach, or at simply not talking to her; now that his life’s in shambles it seems like he no longer has enough energy to devote to the endeavor. “It’s cool. I’ll layer up.” 

Rory doesn’t really think before she says, “Come back to my room with me?” 

His head jerks up, hazel eyes wide and glittering. His mouth opens but nothing comes out, so she—flustered and so, so off-kilter—beats him to it, embarrassing herself before he can do it to her, her entire body burning so bad she can’t feel her face. She’s a human-shaped blob on the sidewalk. 

“It’s totally more for my benefit than yours anyway, cause Lane was crashing with me and she just left and it feels awfully, um, wonky—with just two people in the room, imbalanced, like missing a few very important fingers, and Julia’s gone half the time sneaking around with this girl she’s been half-obsessed with since the start of the year, and she thinks I don’t know but, please, she’s a terrible liar, she goes all shifty every time she tries, and anyway I think I was her gateway into her lesbian awakening—by the way, you were right about the Ginsberg, not so much about the porn—” 

“Did you buy the porn or did you look it up online?” interrupts Jess with the kind of feigned innocence that usually made Lorelai want to smack him upside the head. 

“Hey, so not the point,” snaps Rory, suddenly feeling a little sweaty, which is thoroughly uncomfortable what with the bitter chill. “I’m saving you from possible freezing to death, hell, from pneumonia—” 

“Too late for that.”

“What?” 

“You think this is my first winter in an unheated place? Please.” 

Rory stares at him. She imagines, in thorough detail and vivid technicolor, finding Liz Danes and ripping her a new one. 

Jess sighs. “Hey, get that look off your face.” 

“Oh, I’m not looking at you with any look," insists Rory. “Promise.” 

“Tell that to your pinched brows and pouty mouth.” 

“Stop looking at my mouth.” 

“Alright,” says Jess, averting his gaze and rubbing the back of his neck, a little flustered and squirmy, “Okay. I feel like we’re not going anywhere here.” 

“I recognize that tree,” says Rory.

“Okay, so I should go, and you should go. Separately. In different directions.”

She pretends not to hear him. “I’m only a ten-minute walk away, but we should still get going before the storm gets worse.” 

“Rory.” 

“I’m out of Red Vines. Should we risk it and stop by a convenience store?”

“Rory.”  

“No, you’re right. We’ll just make do with whatever’s in the fridge and not expired.” 

"Rory."

“I have a space heater and an entertainment center and snacks. What do you have?” 

Jess heaves a great sigh. “A broken Mr. Coffee that my roommate thinks is a bong.” 

The more she discovers about his lackluster lifestyle, the more she gets the urge to tranq him and tie him up, shove him in a suitcase, and take him to Stars Hollow to dump him on Luke’s doorstep. “You should move out.” 

He snaps his fingers. “I’ll get right on it.” 

“For now you’ll come with me?” 

“Like you’ll let me say no.” 

“Oh, pshaw,” says Rory, grinning like a maniac. She turns away from Jess, starts walking while he follows; she curbs the urge to hyperventilate by blowing her cheeks out like a chipmunk and holding her breath until she can’t anymore and it could be worse: he’s seen that Chilton portrait of her that makes her forehead look abnormally huge, now he’s just going to see her room for the night. An extended showing. That’s all it is, really.

Jess takes it all in from his first step into the building. Rory wonders what’s going through his head. What does he think of the dirty carpeted floor? The perpetual stale stench of sweat, cologne and perfume, highlighted by the pugnancy of various cuisines like Chinese takeout and salt and vinegar chips? The dim echoes of music from those with loud stereos (tonight’s Fugazi and the Spice Girls and what sounds like Chopin or Mozart or Vivaldi (Rory wouldn’t know the difference) among others)? The other students, ducking in from the cold and into each other’s dorms with muttered expletives, one of them hauling a six-pack of beer with him, one of them saying he’s got a huge bowl in his room that he can’t wait to get to, others just immediately going to shut themselves in their own rooms? Does he, like her, contemplate how easily he could’ve fit in an environment like this if he had just let himself?

And anyway it feels like sharing her world with him, like this life is a mandarin and she is quartering it to share on a picnic blanket. It gets even worse when they reach her dorm and she shuts the door behind them: she is spitting out her masticated half of the fruit into his cupped hands; he is unflinching and takes it. She’s taking off her shirt and he’s kissing her sternum. 

He goes to the books first, as hooked on phonics as he had been at seventeen in her two-mile town. He keeps his hands clasped behind his back, like touching the spines of the paperbacks is like touching hers and he is not allowed to, and Rory—she wants to touch him right back, to hold him close, chest-to-chest so their hearts can sync up, how stupid is it that she loves him more because he is as reverent of the written word as she is? Not even like Dean, who had tried for her—Anna Karenina  and Sense & Sensibility because she had asked—but because Jess, like her, doesn’t really know how to exist in the real world. He, like her, was born with something ticking inside like a bomb, a thing that’s only quieted when he delves into other realities in pursuit of strangers’ words in the hopes that, maybe, the suffocating loneliness will unwind from around her trachea.

It’s not so unbearable when he’s with her, though.  

“Nice collection,” says Jess. “Succinct. I assume you’ve got more under your bed?” 

“You assume correctly,” says Rory. She checks the machine and finds a message from Julia (don't  worry, I’m not frozen to death in a ditch somewhere, I’m at Marianne’s apartment and, um, pretty snowed in so I guess that’s where I’m staying — and here she emits a muffled sort of squeal-groan-whine combination—okay,  see you when I get back )  and two from Lorelai (the first starts normally: hi, kid, I hope you’re warm and asleep and not out in the storm, which explains why you didn’t pick up the phone—oh, hey, how’d you get in?   And Luke’s voice says: you need to lock. Your. Door. and the rest of the message is just the two of them ribbing each other; the second message goes sorry, okay, Luke’s here to watch classic cozy night in movies cause I twisted his arm, so obviously we’re starting with When Harry Met Sally and moving onto The Silence of the Lambs—)

“Your mom’s making Luke watch When Harry Met Sally?" asks Jess, thoroughly amused over the rest of Lorelai’s rambly message. 

“I see the irony, too,” says Rory, saving the messages on the machine for when she wakes up missing home so much it feels like she’s going to splinter into a thousand homesick pieces. “But they’re both so boneheaded about it it’s not even gonna matter.” 

“Runs in the family, then,” mutters Jess under his breath. 

Because she’s intelligent and logical and practically clairvoyant, Rory chooses not to engage with him about this, lest they both lose their shit and he stalks off into the night to be frostbitten to death/she clobbers him to death with one of her Intro to Poli-Sci textbooks. With more force than necessary, she strips herself of the many unnecessary layers and tosses them over the back of her laundry chair.

“Make yourself at home,” she says, only a little sarcastic. 

The room’s messier than her own was in Stars Hollow (second semester and Julia’s influence has turned Rory into a little bit of a slob), but Jess doesn’t look like he cares or even notices. He likes messes anyway, knows to step around the stacked CD cases on the floor and set his coat over the left-side back of the couch like it’s where it belongs—then he freezes up. 

“Uh,” he says eloquently, brows a little furrowed. “Should I—?” 

“The mini fridge is over there,” says Rory. “I’ll grab blankets and the movie.” 

“No Alfred Hitchcock, I beg you.” 

“No promises.” 

Jess ducks his head right after Rory catches his small grin. They’ve got the routine down: Jess sets the snacks on the table in the order they’re most likely going to want them, Rory chucks the fleece-lined blanket at Jess’ back so he can wrap it around him like a cape and keeps the weighted one to throw over her lap.  

Rory turns off the overhead light and flicks the bedside lamps on. “We’re watching Jeanne  Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles ."

“Your accent is fucking atrocious,” says Jess, settling onto the couch. 

“Thank you.” It proves she’s not ingesting any of this shit through osmosis. “It’s directed by Chantel Ackerman, who also did News From Home."

“What’s that?” He looks too pretty after hours, innocent and lovely like the TVU song (people look well in the dark / if you close the door I’ll never have to see the day again), like a child’s lullaby. She keeps sneaking glances at him like she can’t help it.

“It’s an avant-garde documentary film,” says Rory a beat too late, staring fixedly at the TV screen, where a woman in a blue dress strikes a match to light the stove. “It’s scenes of New York with voice overs of her reading letters her mom sent her back home.” 

“Sounds a bit boring.” 

“It was. It was more about the sort of—message, I guess, underlying it. The mom’s letters fade out over time and the city becomes all the more vivid and there, sort of like she’s slowly replacing one with the other.” She grabs a mallomar. “I dunno. I found it a little sad.” 

“It makes sense,” says Jess, not even a little bit mocking. “For all your mother’s kooky sensibilities and misplaced righteous anger—” 

“Hey.” 

“If the shoe fits.” 

“Well,” huffs Rory. “She’s my mom. She’s a great mom, she’s a great person, and I get that your experience with mothers has been—less than stellar, I get it, yours was like a ditzy hurricane-type of not-there, but don’t rag on mine just for that.” 

Jess fidgets a little; when he speaks his voice is hard and emotionless. “I don’t like your mom because she doesn’t like me right back and she makes it pretty clear.” 

“Well. I know that.” She does, she does. Her two greatest loves; it makes sense they would share this mule-like stubbornness. She just wishes that it was only about Metallica and not their mutual archenemy. “You know, for what it’s worth, I don’t like your mom either, so. Tit for tat.” 

He laughs. “You don’t know my mom.”

“I know enough. I’ve heard enough. I’ve got excellent inference skills, you know. Critical analysis, all that whambo jambo Chilton pretended they wanted us to have.” Really she learned it when— “My most convoluted brain aerobics were the stunts I pulled to try and figure you out.”  

“Ah.” Jess lolls his head back against the back of the couch and blinks up at the ceiling. He glances at her out the corner of his eye. Her toes curl.  “You know,” he says while the lady on the TV bustles about in the kitchen still, God this movie’s boring, “I did that on purpose. Many things about us were said… in between words to keep you sharp and witty.” 

“Right. So tell me: your skipping town. I should’ve guess using—what, your dad-obsession with Bruce? Thunder freaking Road? The many comparisons to Kerouac, that argument about the Beats you and Paris had over my kitchen table?”

“She looked about ready to stab me through the eye with a plastic fork.”  

“Oh, she so would’ve.” Hadn’t their evening been unceremoniously interrupted, like a needle scratch on a record. Jess hums like he can read her thoughts.

Neither of them speaks for a long, long time. They of the avid mocking, especially when it’s avant garde experimental bullshit that neither of them really likes in films despite how they salivate over it in their paperbacks and CDs, don’t even engage in any of that. Finally, when Jeanne loses it and goes stabby on her client-dude with the scissors, Jess says, “I wanted to take you with me.”  

Rory chokes on a Cheeto. 

“I would’ve,” he continues, all hushed and choked. “If I could. Put you in my pocket or something. Carried you across the country like a fucking lucky rosary.”  

“I’d totally fit in your ugly duffle bag,” rasps Rory. She clears her throat. 

“My ugly duffle bag.” And he knocks their knuckles together like a confessional. Forgive me. Forgive me. Want me. Am I not enough? What can I do to make you want me? (All he has to do is exist. If she says the word she would tumble into his arms like tripping and falling face-first into her grave to rest. To rest.) 

And her eyelids are  so heavy, it’s impossible not to let them shutter for a moment. The same can be said for her head, her body, so she slumps all over, and it feels like something—a beacon, an angry flame—inside Rory’s chest dies with it. Extinguishes. Poof. Out like a light. 

He smells like seventeen and falling in love for the first time, like hopelessly dreaming of twenty-five and a hazy future full of the kind of adoration that leads to a joint tombstone. 

When she jerks out of her weird half-sleep it’s to jarring quiet that rings in her ears and blurry jagged shadows: the coffee table, the stack of books and magazines and empty Bic pens and lighters on it, the couch the rug the entertainment center with the black TV screen, the beds on opposite walls of the room. Jess is the only solid thing, the only shape she could trace by memory, by touch alone. She reaches for and circles his wrist. She tugs. 

“Jess,” she whispers. It’s louder than her heartbeat.

He murmurs something unintelligible, burrowing his nose deeper into the blanket.

“Movie’s over.” 

“Mm-hmm.” 

“It’s late. Sleep.” 

“Good here.” Adorable. He’s all curled up on himself like a baby, his back to the arm of the couch and his head pressed against his shoulder, breathing deeply and steadily. 

“There’s a bed.”

“Good here." 

“I’m not going to bed unless you do,” she hisses, just to be contrarian.

“Okay. Stay.” His eyes are still closed. 

“You ask so nicely,” she huffs. 

One eye cracks open. “Please.” 

Rory’s pulse is hummingbird-like in her ear; the sound of Jess’ breathing is deafening—she shuffles closer until their knees touch between layers of clothing and blankets, until they face each other, hands like protective shields between them. Their knuckles are a hair’s width apart. 

“Jess?” 

His eyes are closed. He’s half-asleep already. “Yeah, Ror?” 

Did you also sometimes feel like you and I are the only people in the world? Do you feel it now?

“If you kick me,” she starts, and he laughs tiredly before she even threatens him, and she can’t finish it because she laughs, too, his has always been infectious and lightning in a bottle. 

She loves him. She loves him again, or she loves him still, or was she born loving him? Sometimes it feels like that, this sort of biblical genesis, like on the sixth day something holy made him out of starlight and soot then made her from his rib. You are dust and to dust you shall return; you are love’s and to love you shall return. No difference there. 

Jess grumbles, “Shut up.” 

Rory flounders. “I literally didn’t say anything.”

“Your mind. I can hear it literally whirring. Just—” He blindly reaches for and cups the back of her head, fingers tangling in her short hair. “Just. Shut up.” 

“Hate you.” 

“Hm. Liar.” 

He’s not not right. Rory scoffs and, without even thinking about it, darts forward and kisses the tip of his nose. Jess’ eyes open wide and he emits a strangled noise, and she orders, “Don’t make it weird.”  

“Oui capitaine,” he says, and he keeps his hand in her hair while she shuffles close so their legs are all entangled messily and she’s close enough to tip her head onto his shoulder when she falls asleep, the dead silence like a secret third thing between them.  

An ear-splitting trilling noise wakes her. 

It takes Rory a long time to realize that it’s her cell phone ringing; that she should answer it; that it’s all the way at the far end of the bedside table. She knocks over a bottle of water and the tissue box before she finds it, blindly answering and smushing the device to her ear.

“Mhm?”

“Morning, Lindsay Lohan.” 

Rory gives an unintelligible half-groan. Then—

Oh, no. Oh no no no no what has she done. What has she done. She lurches upright, is hit with an overwhelming nausea that has her certain she’s going to throw up all over the flower-patterned comforter, decides she literally wants to die right now, then collapses back into the sweat-damp sheets, closing her eyes against her impeding killer migraine. 

“Did I wake you?” asks Jess, sounding terribly amused. “I assumed you’d be up by now since it’s ten and you’re usually an early riser, but then again no one who gets trashed enough to make drunk phone calls is an early riser.”

“Good morning,” says Rory, tiny and feeble. Drunk phone call. Right. Fuck. 

What sort of crap did she spout at him last night? She can’t remember it, let alone much of anything besides the club strobe lights, Paris’ mouth on hers, and the vaguely-neon colored puke that she hopes was washed away by the ocean. 

“You got water and Advil next to you?” 

“Mm-hmm.” 

“Good. Have some. Eat something greasy.” 

“You sound like quite the expert. Had a few wild nights of your own?” 

“I am my mother’s child,” he retorts dryly and casually. Rory rolls over to soundlessly gag a bit over the edge of her bed. “Is this a developing habit or something?”

“God no. I’m just on spring break.” 

“Spring break. Wow. I’ve got so many jokes I can’t even pick one.”

 “If you must know,” huffs Rory, “Paris showed up at my door three days ago and kidnapped me. She drove me to Florida in a van with her freakishly athletic roommate and Glenn.”

“Glenn?”

“George Costanza on speed.”

“Ah.”

“Then we got drunk and Paris kissed me and cried about us being at two different colleges.”

Jess chokes then laughs. “Sounds like a fun trip.” 

“Please. The room looks like flowered wallpaper puke.”  

“Sounds very torturous and somewhat anti-Geneva Convention.”

“Yep. If they’d stuck Saddam Hussein in flower-patterned rooms, the whole Iraq thing would’ve ended much sooner.”

“True. Listen, I’ll leave you to it—”

“Hey, no, wait,” protests Rory, “don’t hang up. Wait.” 

Jess pauses. He inhales, faint and crackly. “What’s up?” 

“Are you seriously making me say it?” 

“Say what?”

“What the hell did I say on the phone?”

Jess laughs. “Seriously?”

“Tell me.” 

“You didn’t say anything.” 

“Then why did you call me?” 

“I was… concerned.” 

"Tell me." 

“Jeez.” He clears his throat. “Uh… you rambled about that book you’re reading, Last Words from Montmartre—sounds freakish, by the way—then you called me an asshole for leaving and you listed a bunch of my other slights.” He sighs, resigned. “Then you went into a tangent about living in the city, some stuff about… y’know, the pressure, the weird limbo state you feel you’re in.” Another pause. “You, uh. You said I make it easier. That you still wanna kick me in the nards sometimes, but.” 

Rory blinks. “Are you omitting anything?” 

“Not really.”

“Not really?"

“Just.” She hears him kiss his teeth. “It’s the second time you tell me you think you love me over the phone, which isn’t weird per se, just the fact that it happened twice. If I had a nickel, you know.” 

“Oh. Motherfucker.” 

“You were drunk, Rory. Don’t worry about it.” 

Rory sits up, realizing something. “So it was you calling me,” she says, even though there wasn’t really any doubt. Call it fate, call it a sixth sense, twin flame kismet or sheer idiocy, but she knew it was him. “At my graduation.” 

“Yeah.” Then, “Your graduation. Was it good?” 

“My mom cried during my valedictorian speech and my grandparents bought me a Prius for all my trouble.” 

“You get much use out of the Prius in the city?” 

“The Prius is in our garage at Stars Hollow. If I get an apartment with parking next year I’ll drive it over so I can actually watch it while it sits and gathers dust.” Then, “I said I love you? Those exact words.” 

“Yes.” 

“And?” 

“They were preceded by a I wish I didn't, but."

“God. Sorry. That’s horrible.” A pause, then: “Do I get something embarrassing in return?”

“How about the exact same sentiment echoed back.” 

“Really?” 

“Really.”

“Well then… why do you wish not?” 

“Because it’s fucking exhausting to carry the weight of it and know I’m never gonna… put it down. Not in the way that matters.” As in: you won’t love me back.

“But it’s… you technically can. Put it down. Isn’t it obvious?” It pours out of her, all the time, a kaleidescopical thing. There’s so much of it. It’s embarrassing, thoroughly mortifying. Can’t he see it? “Like, ceteris paribus.” 

“Yeah, exactly. Ceteris paribus, so, never. It’s never going to be right to put it down.” 

“Jess.” 

“Rory, I get it. You’re way too fucking good for me, and everyone can see that: your mom, Luke, your whole family, the glass-bubbled population of Stars Hollow. I know I don’t deserve you.” 

“Bullshit.”

“Baby,” he says, all fond and sweet and very far away. “You’re an Ivy League scholar from a family that came over the Mayflower. I didn’t even graduate high school; I’m a bike messenger and a bartender and when it gets warmer I’ll be working in construction again. I’m—not really amounting to anything, which I didn’t give a fuck about when I was seventeen but I now realize it’s much of a foundation for—the kind of shit I feel, what I want—it—you know.” 

“Jess. Jess, Jess, Jess.” She likes saying his name. It makes him real. Cogito ergo sum, or something close to that: I am loved therefore I am. “Please. I have a killer headache; let’s talk about this—when I get back. Tonight, okay, we’ll meet up somewhere and. Talk?”  

“Uh, I’m actually in Philly now.” 

Rory takes the phone away from her ear to stare at it. She contemplates slamming it shut, or maybe hurling it at the wall, but in the end she just puts him on speaker and buries her face in her pillow to muffle her scream. 

(Déjà vu. Suddenly she’s cramming for Chilton finals, perpetually nauseous because New York and the valedictorian speech and she’s got six zits on her forehead and her boyfriend won’t even fucking call, and Luke is banging on her kitchen door and urging Lorelai outside.) 

“Gilmore?” Jess’ voice is a little tinny. “You still there?” 

“Yes. Philly. Cool. Brotherly love.” 

“Yes. Very cool. The place I’m staying in is really close to all these ethnic restaurants and an IHOP, which is… cool.” 

Rory says nothing. 

“I’m here visiting an old friend,” continues Jess. “So. It’s. I’ll be back.” 

Rory stares at the immobile Paris-shaped lump on the bed next to hers and tries one of those zen breathing exercises. She still feels like throwing something. The water bottle, maybe, because she can’t afford to throw her cell, but it’s much too early and headache-y to incur the inevitable Geller wrath should she wake her roommate. Instead she says, “Okay. I have to go; Paris is waking up and she looks death-like. I think she and I should go seasrch for the grease you mentioned.” 

“Yeah, yeah. Take care of yourself, Rory. When I come back—”  

“Let’s go to the Strand,” proposes Rory, her heart in her throat. 

“Yeah,” says Jess after a long beat. “Yeah. Let’s. You got any plans on April second, miss wild party girl?” 

“Go crawl in a hole,” says Rory, and she snaps the cell shut to cut off Jess’ laugh before she does something stupid, like, you know, ask him to marry her or like blood oath-tie himself to her.   

Something hard and pointy jabs her side. Rory jerks, accidentally emitting the kind of freaked-out idiot yelp she thought she’d left behind with being fifteen years old and the Chilton skirt, but it’s just Jess and a shit-eating grin and a cloth-bound hardcover. 

"Love and Friendship and Other Youthful Writings," he says, brandishing it. “Have you read it?”

“It’s the first book I ever bought from Andrew’s store.” 

“Is it any good?” 

“It’s Jane Austen.” Like, duh. 

“Hm.” Jess inspects the book for a few seconds then sticks it on the shelf in front of him. 

Rory stares. “I’m, like, one hundred percent sure that’s not where it belongs.”

“I know, it’s all the way on the other side of the store.” 

“This is the Contemporary Literature section. Austen is not contemporary lit."

Jess heaves a long-suffering sigh and pulls the Austen down again. “Alright. I’ll put it back on the way out. So… what do you have?”  

Rory shows him: Theban Plays and Our Vampires, Ourselves and The Little Friend.  “You caught me at a good time. I’ve got this insane craving for poetry right now, which is where I was headed next.”

“Ah, spare me.” 

“The pleasure of my company?” 

“The torture of sloshed-up meaningless words masquerading as high-brow literature.” 

“You’re a total poseur,” scoffs Rory. “I’ve seen you read poetry.”

“Ginsberg doesn’t count,” says Jess automatically. 

“What about Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair?"  Early autumn of senior year. Rory vividly remembers stumbling off the bus on the first rainy afternoon of the season, Chilton sweater and scoliosis-inducing yellow backpack and all, and finding Jess engrossed in the thin paperback on the gazebo steps and almost throwing up on her saddle shoes. “Or that collection of e.e. cummings I lent you?” (Then, in the backseat of his car with his mouth on her inner thigh: why then to heaven with hell, whatever sages say and fools, yeah, baby?)

Jess frowns in confusion. “Do you catalog the stuff I read like on an Excel spreadsheet, or?” 

“I’m surprised you even know what Excel is.” 

“I love it when you say passive-aggressive shit in a baby princess voice.” 

“I do not have a baby princess voice.” 

“You’re doing it again.” 

“I wanna check out the new Alice Oswald collection,” says Rory decisively, shedding the baby princess voice in favor of the Kirk-get-away-from-me one. “Come on.” 

“Do I look like a Stooges track to you?” 

“Huh?” 

“‘m not your dog and I don’t wanna be,” says Jess, then he follows Rory through the stacks like she’s walking him on a leash.

“And now I wanna be your dog, and now I wanna be your dog,” sings Rory quietly, her grin so wide it hurts her cheeks. 

“Yeah, yeah.” He rolls his eyes, good-natured, and absently drags a book off a shelf as he walks past it—he does that sometimes, when a color or a word catches his eye—and inspects it, flipping it from front to back cover with a tiny furrow between his brows. Rory smothers her smile with her knuckles and turns back to the slim books. She traces her index finger along the little spines, accidentally slipping from Woods Etc. to Wild Geese. 

She pulls it down. Her gaze flicks from the cover to Jess, who has the Austen tucked under his armpit and a slim paperback titled Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day in his hands. He hasn’t said anything about love or Philadelphia or—well, anything, quipping about literature and poetry is his equivalent to someone else walking out in the middle of an argument, and Rory doing it is her equivalent to blocking her ears and trilling at the top of her lungs. 

It works for her. She imagines them both with their heads in the sand, side by side, suffocating and maybe holding hands. 

“You ever read anything by Nikki Giovanni?” asks Jess.

“No,” says Rory, and he tilts the book toward her to show her: 

I’ve heard the stories

‘bout how you don't deserve me

‘cause I'm so strong and beautiful and wonderful and you could

never live up to what you know I should have but I just want to let you know:

I take Master Card

You can love me as much as your heart can stand

then put the rest on

account and pay the interest

each month until we get this thing settled.  

“Huh,” says Rory; in a moment like this she really would’ve expected to have her heart in her throat, to have her hands shake like an arthritic, to have this congenital urge to run away twining around her lungs like ivy on the walls of a hallowed university. But she’s steady. Steady, steady, steady. She has known this all along. She touches the bones of his wrist and finds his pulse, really just to make sure that this is not another dream. “As much as your heart can stand.” Head in the sand, but at least she’s asking for help to yank it out. 

Jess audibly swallows and closes the book. He doesn’t return it to the shelf. “Things usually take time to get properly settled.”

“I’ve got time.” 

“Okay,” he says. He meets her eye and grins like a fool. “Okay.” He knocks his knuckles against the shelves then pulls down a familiar little book. “Y’know when I read this,” he says of Kaddish,  still a little completely beside himself, “I couldn’t help but notice some similarities between your mom and his.” 

Rory huffs and shoves him as hard as she can, chasing the sound of his laugh deeper into the store the way she used to in Stars Hollow and New Haven and in this terrifying, electric city that keeps handing him to her like a gift, like the first flowers of spring or a lovely rainy day, like a thing that’s hers to have and hold. 

“Rory,” the voice on her answering machine says. “This Serendipity shtick we’ve got going on is starting to get on my nerves. Call me back?”

“Sorry I missed your call! Speaking of Serendipity,"  she says, accidentally-on-purpose calling right before her nine AM so she can leave a message while he’s at one of his many jobs and ignore her phone if he calls her in the next hour, “a sequel for Before Sunrise is coming out in the summer. I think a sequel really defeats the whole purpose of the movie, but I guess anything to have Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy on screen together again.”

“I really hope they’re not calling it After Sunrise. It’d be tacky as all hell. What are you doing tonight?”

The Broadway Dive is noisy, crowded; a neighborhood hole-in-the-wall type of place packed with college kids, pleasantly reeking of smoke and beer, conversation and laughter—the kind that feels like a blade in her chestplate, she of the lonely girls in this city of millions—and in the shadows of it she finds him. 

Jess isn’t smiling, not really, but he’s a far cry from the surly busboy at Luke’s: he’s clearly listening to the two girls in front of him, engaging with them albeit minimally, and he even ducks his head to chuckle when one of them must say something funny, like he has to hide his happiness from the world. Rory watches him, struck, he’s gorgeous. She almost turns around and leaves, terrified—this is a familiar feeling, this freefall, she knows what comes after it and she’s not strong enough to live through it twice, no, never again—

(Okay, now she gets it. This running away thing, they must share it, a DNA code they’ve inherited—he from his yet-nameless father, she from Lorelai whose disappearing acts have been calamitous in ways Rory’s just noticing now, but maybe if it’s the two of them it cancels out, two rights make a wrong, don’t they?)

Rory goes to the bar. She hoists herself onto a stool, then interlaces her fingers on top of the sticky vinyl, and waits for him to see her and come over. Enough running. She’s staying put. 

“Hey,” he says, and he smiles, bright like the sunrise; after a moment of hesitation he leans over and kisses her cheek, easy, like it’s over the counter at Luke’s and they have a splayed-open paperback between them. “You came.” 

“You asked,” says Rory. And it’s too much, okay, she’s not prepared, the words come out of her mouth before she can consciously evaluate their weight, “But it’s only for—one drink, okay, I need to get back to my dorm soon. I’ve got a lot of work to do. Finals.” 

“Okay,” says Jess. She’s so terrified he’s going to break her heart again. “Just as well, y’know, cause—I’ve gotta work.” 

“Just as well,” echoes Rory. She catches sight of her grin in the reflective glass behind Jess. It looks like Pennywise’s. She carefully schools her facial muscles into something casual and normal and less psychopathic, consciously unfurrowing her brows. 

Okay. 

He pours her the cherry coke and rum she asks for. She says—something, something that makes him snort and, well, say something back as he slides the glass along the countertop to her, and their fingers brush when she takes the drink but doesn’t sip on it. True to her word, she stays for this one drink, which lasts until the bar’s last call as she and Jess talk and talk and he walks her back to her dorm, wishing her goodnight with a kiss to her cheek and Lunch Poems slipped into her purse. 

They don’t speak to each other for a while after that, like what they’ve created is a thing much bigger than the both of them, as if by ignoring it they can keep it from swallowing them whole. 

cause nothing really matters / we followed the lines in the palms of our hands / you’re standing in the supermarket / nothing, holding hands

“Oh, I think this is for you,” says Julia, a little bit confused. She swings the door open wider to reveal Jess, who bears a striking resemblance to a feral cat that’s been dragged tail-first through a hurricane before seeking refuge in a tree, cowering and waiting for a fireman to coax him out with a milk saucer. 

Like a normal person faced with such a confusing sight past midnight, Rory just says, “Hey.” 

Jess, in response, blurts out: “Luke came to see me. My mom’s getting married again and she wants me to walk her down the aisle. And I need to move out the shoebox I share with two drug dealers and this guy I’m pretty sure is a lackey for the Bonannos unless I want to be eaten alive by mold, which means I’m sort of technically homeless right now.” He worries at his bottom lip, fidgety and dispirited, eyes wide and shoulders tense. “Is this a bad time?” 

“Is this a bad—” Rory stops. She looks around the maze of cardboard boxes, strewn around books and CDs and film tapes, socks and underwear and one sad Nike trainer with its other half in a frat house since March, down at the coffee-stained shirt and purple sweats she’s in, and she drops the jeans she had been folding into her open suitcase. She stalks over to Jess and grabs him by the shoulder of his Vive Le Rock shirt—they need to have a talk about where he shops because seriously,  where the hell is he scoring vintage Vivienne Westwood on his stingy budget—and tugs. “Come on.” 

“Come on?” he echoes. 

“Yeah, you’re looking all green and it’s gonna be really embarrassing for both of us if you puke all over Julia’s party dresses.” 

Jess is uncharacteristically silent and compliant as she drags him outside, at least until they’re down the stairs and out on the street. It’s late, past midnight for sure; they stumble along the sidewalk under the glow of the streetlamps and the skyscrapers and the car headlights, aimless and wandering like all of their favorite writers until Jess pulls away from Rory, saying, “God. Fuck, damn it. I should go. I don’t even know—” 

“Stop.” 

“I just—I can’t sleep and I thought—I needed to go, so I thought of you, but I shouldn’t’ve—” 

“Shut up. I’m glad you’re here.” And then, because anything else feels cataclysmic and she’s truly her mother’s daughter, Rory says, “Let’s find the nearest 24/7 deli and get a sandwich into you. You look so skinny. Like, Charles Dickensian-skinny. Are you eating enough carbs?” 

“Yes.” 

“Liar. Not the deli. Let’s go to the greasiest diner ever and pizza. My treat.” 

“Rory, I shouldn’t’ve come to you.”  

Morbidly curious and a little meanly, she asks, “Where else could you have gone?” 

Jess doesn’t answer. He looks struck dumb, and he exhales, his shoulders slowly drop, finally he says, “Christ alive. Okay. Compromise—bodega snacks or something.” 

“Aye aye, capitaine,” says Rory, and she almost reaches out to grab his hand. Instead she weighs his two dilemmas to pick the less disastrous one. “So,” she prompts.

“So,” he echoes. They start walking, angled close to each other like one is the sun and the other is a sunflower. The wind picks up; calms down. 

Less disastrous—anything steering clear of his mother. “What’s that about the mold?” 

Jess laughs. “The place is—well, I shoulda known. Three hundred a month for rent and utilities, there’s gotta be a flipside to it.” After a contemplative pause, he adds, “Besides the fact that at least three people are murdered on that street a month.” 

“Jesus,” says Rory, less disturbed than she would have been a year ago. Chilton Rory would have been completely appalled; Columbia Rory, who’s fought off a mugger on the Bowery with a bottle of pepper spray and a shriek and an accidental knee to the guy's balls, finds it easier to just roll with the punches. The city’s only as scary as she makes it out to be. 

“New York’s getting expensive,” says Jess, resigned like this is an idea he’s been mulling over for quite some time. “I’ve got a bit saved up, but.” 

Rory knocks his elbow with hers. “If only you had a few art prints to exchange for Room 1017 at the Chelsea Hotel.” 

“I dunno about art,” says Jess casually, “but I could spare the first few pages of a novel.” He stops and jerks his chin at the fluorescent-lit Armenian bodega, as if Rory isn’t gaping at him like a fish. “Have you ever tried a sou boreg?” 

“You’re writing a book,” says Rory, like hammering a coffin shut only—not for death, for something good and hopeful like a pink sky sunrise, like stepping into the crap shack in Stars Hollow for the first time and her mommy’s voice as she, incapable of hiding her elation, had said, “This is ours, sweets, you like it?” so really like all beginnings. 

“I’m only—writing,” says Jess. 

Rory catches him worrying at his bottom lip when she looks over at him. “Tell me.” 

“It’s stupid.” 

“Nothing that comes from your mind is stupid.” 

Jess’ features slacken for a moment before he runs a hand along his face. “Let’s get something to eat,” he says, and he leaves Rory out on the curb. The familiar tendrils of anger and frustration rise, coil around her lungs into the notches they have had since Rory was seventeen and learning that it is relatively easy to love and hate a person at the same time. A kiss with a fist is, after all, better than none; aren’t they past all that? Aren’t they both older, wiser; aren’t they both tired of the same old story? 

They are not doomed. They are not Shakespearean, or Athenian: they are two petty kids in a jungle, sticking tongues out and waiting for someone to crack. 

Rory sits down on the dirty curb, curling her knees close to her chest. She rests her chin on top of them and watches, despite the late hour, the world keep turning. It will turn despite everything; she knows it: Jess could leave and Jess could say and in the grand scheme of things it wouldn’t matter. 

To her, however—well. She wouldn’t fall apart, but she wants him with her. 

“Hey,” says his voice above her, before a plastic container of cheesy, flaky bread is presented to her. “I also got some gatas if you feel like something sugary, after.” 

Rory takes the food. “Sit next to me,” she says. 

After a heartbeat, Jess does. His knee knocks against hers.  

“Will you tell me,” says Rory, and if he evades it or walks away this is it; she’ll leave without looking back, “about your writing?” 

Jess takes a long while to answer. He watches the traffic; he tosses a piece of sou boreg to a stray cat. Two guys in fancy suits rush past them, holding hands and laughing hysterically.“When I was in Venice Beach,” he starts, then—he stops, sighs, and starts again: “I look exactly like Jimmy. My father. It’s—I couldn’t look him in the face the whole summer. I couldn't look at myself cause all I could see was him. I didn't know he looked like that, y'know? And suddenly he shows up and—I'm his spitting image. And I don’t wanna be him, but—” he sounds terrified to admit it— “I already am him. I talk like him, I’ve got his hair and his eyes, I like the same music as him; hell, I kept reading ‘A Supermarket In California’ like it was gonna save me and one day he catches me doing that and he says it’s his favorite, too—” (It was Rory’s, for a while: Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? )  “and I fucking leave like him. I tried so hard not to be like Liz, just hurting everyone by being in close proximity to them, and I ended up on the other side of her. And—so. I dunno. 

“It made me feel like something explosive, Rory, I don’t know how else to say it. I—I wanted to run but I had nowhere to go, I wanted to come back to you even though I had no right to, I wanted to belong to something that wasn’t my parents or myself, and when I realized I could never have that I wanted to just, leave myself behind, climb out of my own body, drown in the fucking ocean, God, don’t even get me started, the ocean was everywhere—” 

Rory takes his hand. She grips it like it will keep him from floating away, digging her nails into the soft skin right under his knuckles.

“And when I wrote it all down,” says Jess, “it suddenly wasn’t so—well, I could breathe and—look at the knives in the kitchen without—” He stops, his eyes blown wide. 

“I’m driving to Stars Hollow tomorrow afternoon,” says Rory softly, surprising even herself. “Well, this afternoon, technically speaking. Come with me.”

Jess says, “What.”

“Not for the wedding,” says Rory. “Fuck that. Not for her. But—I need a break from the city, and you need one too. Come with me.”

He wrenches his hand out of hers and stands, saying, "That's not fucking funny, Rory."

She stands, too; as he starts to walk away she bitterly, loudly demands, “What’s keeping you here?” 

Jess freezes. Rory watches his back as his shoulders tremble once; he buries his face in his hands just as she crosses the distance to witness the downturn of his mouth as he says, “Where else would I go?” 

Oh, baby. Rory cups his cheek and Jess leans into it, sad boy, a cyclical narrative for the both of them. This was fate, she had once said so and she has always thought so, Rochester and Jane and the invisible string knotted under the left ribs, tying them together since they were made, before even that; an agonizing burn in her limbs that only abates when he is close and here, when he is hers, and still it is not enough: enough would be crawling inside the valves of his heart or sucking the marrow out of his bones, but she will learn to settle for just—this. 

“Rory,” whispers Jess, “I think I just spent the past few months angry at nothing in particular. At you, for no reason. It’s fucking draining.” 

“I know, me too. So can we stop? Can we rest?”

“How?”

“Come to Stars Hollow with me,” says Rory again, feeling a bit desperate. “Just for the summer. You can stay with Luke, and then you’ll stay with me,  please, I want to be with you, I’m sick of pretending I don’t love you because I do and I don’t think it will ever stop, like it’s a disease—” 

“Shut up,” says Jess weakly, stepping back and watching her hand drop “shut up, don’t say shit like that just because of how fucked everything in my life is right now—” 

"Jess—"

“There’s no other fucking reason for you to say this, damn it, Rory—” 

“I love you,” says Rory, “I love you, damn it, why is it so hard to believe?” 

“Because I’m—I left you, I’m me , there’s nothing for you to gain here, Jesus, I can’t believe it—” 

“Enough. Jess, I know you, okay, no one knows you like I do, and that’s why I believe in you and why I can love you even if you fuck up, but let me help you, let me be here for you because I want to be, okay, so don’t say no to make me stop talking or because of your pride or your anger, only say no if—” Her voice breaks, there’s the crux, the only reason he would say no is if— “you really don’t wanna be with me.”

“Jesus wept,” says Jess, and suddenly his hands are on her cheeks, cradling her face like she’s a ticking bomb and he wants to be blown to bits, suddenly—“I’m going to kiss you, alright, and if you don’t want that—”

“Idiot,” says Rory, only it has no bite because really she says it into his mouth, breathes it as her last before she kisses him, and kisses him and kisses him and kisses him, on this nondescript New York street, a place which means nothing in the grand scheme of things (she had imagined their second first kiss in meaningful places, a Park or the steps of the Met or something, something cinematic with music swelling and panoramic camera movements or fucking whatever) but everything, because he is everywhere all at once and so he is in the bright spots as well as in the hidden corners, and he kisses her like there’s something he wants to steal from her. 

“Not be with you,” he gasps, pulling back to kiss her bottom lip, the corner of her mouth, the tip of her nose, “not be with you,  as if that’s not—Gilmore, you’re all I ever wanted.” 

Falling back into him is so, so easy. It’s insane she managed to hold out for so long.

“Come home with me,” she whispers breathlessly. 

He laughs into her mouth then dusts kisses across her cheeks. “Yes,” he breathes, his eyes closed and his smile all hers, like his heart is, like he is, like she is his, this was fate, “yes, okay, yes yes yes.”

RORY: Turn right.

JESS: As you wish.