Chapter Text
Piety is for the plebeians and the sheep of the world, or so Trix Gilmore proclaims. These abstract promises of a life better beyond the grave and eternal goodness are to distract the lily-livered blue collar workers whose dull and fruitless nine-to-fives are never getting better. Since then, the Gilmores have only been Protestants on paper and whenever else it suits them, like when their daughter has premarital sex. Lorelai, in turn, attends thirty minutes of Good Friday mass (the dramatic reenactment of Jesus on the cross is a whole Stars Hollow production, she wouldn’t ever miss it, duh) and says she’s getting married under Luke’s chuppah or not at all (there’s a joke here) and tries to fast for Ramadan, i.e. abstains from eating for four hours then caves and inhales a Weston’s brioche but still pushes three tables together at Luke’s and orders an impressive feast of burgers and fries for Iftar.
All this to say: Rory Gilmore hasn’t been religious a day in her life.
On the evening of a bitterly cold and dreary All Saint’s Day (that is, the day after Halloween), she’s heading towards the subway station with her head bowed and Giovanni’s Room tucked under her armpit, hightailing it to her dorm to sit in front of the space heater and watch terrible indie movies on her roommate’s TV.
Between Rockefeller Center and the Fifth Avenue/53rd Street station is Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, the sprawling mass of Gothic architecture that would’ve evoked some sort of eerie spiritual self-consciousness in Rory hadn’t its grounds been dotted with tourists, smoking and barking into cell phones and wrangling children into knit scarves. She shoots it a cursory glance, a split second of a thing with her mind on what to have for dinner later, and like being struck by a lightning bolt she happens to catch a familiar figure ducking into the building, leather jacket and rolled up paperback in backpocket and all.
Rory stops. The entire world comes to a grinding halt, too—melts away, this is what it would be like to trip on acid maybe, everything gone dark and grainy except for the one focal point in technicolor so bright it hurts to look at—but after the momentary stupor she blinks and chalks the sight up to loneliness and nostalgia and futile, futile yearning. She turns right and continues on her way, her shaky hands balled into fists and shoved deep in her coat pockets.
(The thing is that Jess is definitely shameless enough to sit in a place of worship to read his Ackers and Bukowskis. He’s also shameless enough—at least about his books—to call that prayer of his own. Rory’s definitely schmuck enough to agree with him, mostly in the spirit of my creed is love and you are its only tenet and her own near-religious devotion to the written word and the little secret existing between those.)
All this to say: Rory Gilmore is religious, but her holy sacrament is something about a pretty crooked mouth and nicotine-stained fingers and a love like an autoimmune disease, amen.
Jess has been gone for the entire summer and most of autumn. Jess was a dream too good to be true: Rory woke up cold alone, nothing to show for the six months she had him except for a mutilated heart and simmering resentment and half-promises that he’s long past keeping, what with each of them at one end of Kerouac’s proverbial road, and even then he doesn’t have the decency to be gone. He is still in every corner of the city like a bloodstain on a favorite dress: here is the bench at WSP here is where Book Row was here is the hole in the wall diner that makes heavenly pancakes and shitty burgers here is a cigarette butt on the street here is a boy with a scowl then a smile then a fuck you here is two lovers making out in the grass here is the beating heart of the city here is jess mariano. He promised. He promised and he left, and it’s not like Rory pines or anything because she’s a student at Columbia University and she’s got a fucking life, but sometimes the radiators in her dorm room stop working and it gets cold and lonely as a grave even when she’s buried under her many blankets, and she’s always had a tenuous grip on where her fantasies wander when it comes to him.
RORY: This was fate.
JESS: I think it was.
Come late August, Lorelai bullies Luke into closing the diner for the day to help move Rory into Furnald Hall. Luke only puts up enough of a fight to save face; he does, however, launch many a tirade against the shitty city drivers and too many people crammed into too many buildings on too small a piece of land then ask Rory whether she’s sure wants to live on a failed experiment island that reeks of piss and patchouli.
Luke just says, “Among other things.”
“I live on Broadway, Luke,” says Rory. “Very upstanding place.”
“Thespians,” he counters with a disgusted twist to his mouth. Lorelai barks out a laugh and starts a spiel about catching A Year with Frog and Toad before they return to Stars Hollow; Luke bats her away like she’s a gnat.
Rory leaves them to it, quietly slipping out of her dorm (!!!) and down the stairs, past kids her age with boxes and some of their well-dressed parents and a little kid crying for his mommy who finds and scoops him up right as Rory steps into the fray outside.
Luke’s truck is parked between an obnoxiously cherry red Range Rover and a beat up Mercedes that looks way too small to fit a suitcase. Rory sidesteps a cluster of middle-aged men smoking as she heads to get her last box (FALL/WINTER SHOES) from the bed of the truck. It was one of the first they loaded in, which means it’s all the way at the end, so Rory twists over the panel to maneuver it to the opened front.
The box catches on something. Rory hisses damn it under her breath and reaches in to grab the offending object; her fingers close around worn cotton material. Maybe one of her boxes wasn’t taped shut all that well—
A thick, well-loved grey zip-up jacket.
Rory grasps the thing in both hands, staring at it in bewilderment. An unimportant afterthought, a trinket from a previous life. Like her. Her chest hurts like this belongs to a recently deceased beloved and their scent still lingers on the cloth. She brings the soft material up to her face—
Someone knocks into her shoulder, jarring her awake—sound and color pours back into the world, and she stumbles back into reality. “Sorry,” a tall, lanky guy half-assedly says, a huge handbag clutched to his chest, and Rory shoots him a grimace-like thing meant to be a no worries! smile; the woman next to him rants that you need to be careful, Danny, how the hell am I supposed to trust that you’re okay five thousand miles away from home when you’re always such a ditz with your head in the clouds, maybe I shoulda listened to my gut and you shoulda stayed at home—
Rory balls the jacket up and throws it back where she found it. She hefts the cardboard box into her arms and shakes her head to rid it of all thoughts of runaway ex-boyfriends, her eyes stinging. Whatever.
Lorelai and Luke stay long enough to meet the roommate—Julia, who actually went to Chilton with Rory (they shared a Chemistry class in junior year; Julia’s dad is the businessman who drove to the Independence Inn to ask Lorelai out way back when, which leads to an uncomfortable but mildly entertaining moment where Ian says, “Congratulations on your marriage,” to Luke and Lorelai, who stare at each other like cats caught on a shelf) and has an extensive collection of French indie film posters à la Rohmer and Godard—and bicker over where to have a late lunch—the classic Hard Rock Café (Lorelai) or B Side in Hell’s Kitchen (Luke)—so really they stay the entire day and well into the evening.
Rory’s loath to let them go. The city’s loud and intimidating, gorgeous but so bright it makes black spots dance around the edges of her vision, and she’s almost irrationally afraid of getting on the subway alone, of being alone every single day, ninety miles and a state line away from everything she has ever known—but college.
Columbia University, New York City. Not Harvard, not Yale, but better. Braver. (Closer to the NYT offices and the good literary scenes.)
After greasy pizzas at B Side, Luke leaves first. He has the college-issued mattress in the bed of his truck and a piece of paper with Rory’s address written on it in the dashboard.
“Thank you for coming,” says Rory, suddenly feeling simultaneously very old and very young.
“Ah, it was no big deal,” insists Luke.
“Well.” Rory shrugs bashfully; he hugs her and it’s a little awkward but very, very warm; Christmas morning and Snoopy cartoons and the safety of being a kid and carried in the arms of someone older and stronger. (Christopher calls two days later. He sends an arrangement of peonies and chrysanthemums for good luck.)
Luke pats her shoulders, smiling wistfully. “I know your mom’s got everything covered, but, uh… I’m only an hour and a half away. Call me if you need anything.”
Rory says, “Oh, I wouldn’t subject you to more of the city than absolutely necessary,” trying not to cry. She watches Luke climb into his truck and turn the key in the ignition with a twisted stomach. He’s giving her a last wave when she plucks up the courage to step up and knock on the window for one more thing.
He rolls it down. “What’s up?”
“Um.” She swallows. “I just want to—do you know if, um, Jess—”
Luke’s mouth twists pityingly. “Oh, Rory—”
“Just—is he back here?” she asks, getting rid of the words in a rush. “Do you know?”
“He’s not here,” says Luke, averting his gaze. She thinks of the hoodie. “He’s in California. Still.”
“California,” echoes Rory dumbly. Sunny, beachy, touristy. It sounds like the punchline of a terrible joke.
“He’s staying with his father, y’know. Venice Beach, I think.”
His father . Rory still can’t believe he has one of those. “Okay,” she says, her voice sounding very far away. She tries for a reassuring smile and Luke must see right through it, but thankfully he doesn’t push. “Thanks again, Luke. Drive safe.”
Luke opens his mouth, hesitates, then says, “Bye, Rory."
The last words of Gatsby suddenly come to the forefront of her mind: so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Once she finds him that first time by the church, she opens Pandora’s box: he is everywhere, and he finds her right back.
The second time is two weeks later in Central Park.
Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness plays from the earbuds of her brand new iPod, at Lane’s behest only even though she still thinks The Smashing Pumpkins suck; her pointer is tucked between the pages of the Hedwig and the Angry Inch (a read for her Radical Psychoanalysis elective) to mark her place. Rory’s just gotten out of her Freedom of Speech and Press seminar, an hour and some change to kill before she meets Julia and Marty for lunch. She walks the fifteen minutes to read and people-watch but ends up here, like this, momentarily struck dumb, Hamlet staring at his father's ghost only much angstier.
It’s unmistakably him, sprawled on his back on the dead leaves and grass with a worn paperback held by the top of its spine above his face. His face, God, time and distance haven’t dulled the sharp pins and needles of want that assault her body when he’s close enough to touch. He is so, so pretty, unfairly so, and if only she could knock his teeth or something to that effect.
Rory can’t look away. Not so long ago she would’ve been welcome to crawl on top of his body and curl up like a cat to be read to.
Asshole. What an asshole, unless he’s suffering from a bout of telenovelaic amnesia he knows she lives here now: in this city, in this borough, in the building fifteen minutes away from this stupid, overpopulated park. Who does that? Is he seriously so callous that he would return from his impromptu journey of self-discovery without so much as a half-assed apology, lounging and encroaching on a space that he knows is hers ? He knows , he had been the one to tell her about the grassy meadows with their gentle slopes and glimmering lakes (and the ice-skating rinks in the park—Rory had said said I’m very klutzy on ice skates and Jess had smiled and said so am I, good thing we've found each other, God, just remembering him is like having him gone all over again), he knows and yet he’s still here like he hasn’t a care in the world.
She could wring his neck. She could eviscerate him; maybe she should, maybe if she screams and cries and throws shit at him for thirty minutes she won’t have to walk around with this chronic heartache. But then that would imply that Jess deserves some monumental attention when, in turn, Rory hadn’t even been worth some empty words over the phone, and I could easily forgive his pride if he had not mortified mine.
(No. No, she is never forgiving him.)
Rory tilts her chin up in a piss-poor imitation of her grandmother’s haughtiness and darts past Jess without looking back. Nothing could break his concentration span, not when he’s reading and invested in the words (unless it was her with butterfly kisses on his face, but that’s a bygone); still she makes sure not to look down until she’s a safe distance away.
She sets up shop on a cold bench, haloed by dying trees. She runs her thumb over the buttons of the iPod to switch to Fiona Apple, craving the righteous anger of When the Pawn before she goes back to her book. The letters appear nonsensical, blurring together, unfurling into straight black lines. Rory tilts her head back and blankly stares at the skyline as pale sunlight slants over the buildings. Her lungs are cold, turning icy with it.
(What would he have done if he’d seen her? Was he there for her, waiting to catch her as if by chance, to apologize and beg for her back, please, Rory, I know I screwed up but I love you, too; here Rory would be able to one-up him and turn away from him and leave him feeling like trash on the sidewalk, as shitty as she’s tried not to feel for the past half-year? Would it?)
The third time is at the Starbucks on Union Avenue. Or, at least, she thinks so.
Sequestered to her small wooden table next to the floor-to-ceiling window that overlooks the lamp lit streets, Rory’s elbow-deep in a question set for the terrible Philosophy class she has to endure. The prof is a hardass, the academic equivalent of a picky eater: he either likes what he sees or he doesn’t, and for him to like it it has to be absolutely perfect. Rory’s already gotten her research done and cross-referenced two days ago (a five-hour stint at the Milstein Library) and is now putting it all together. She’s editing the final draft of her answers when she decides she needs a caffeine refill, so she drops her Bic and heads to the counter for a hot white mocha with an add shot.
Only when Rory reaches for her money, the barista says, “It’s already been paid for.”
“Huh?”
“Some guy came up here half an hour ago and dropped a twenty,” explains the other girl, punching up Rory’s order. “He said to cover anything you might order.”
“Some guy?”
“Yeah, a James Dean type. Dark hair, not that tall, leather jacket.”
“Oh,” says Rory, oh, she thinks she’s inherited grandpa’s heart conditions because what the hell, suddenly it's beating fast like it wants to break out of her body and her fingers are numb and it hurts to breathe, she hates this feeling, “Oh.”
“He was sitting in that corner,” says the other girl, pointing to a pouf-like red couch across from the table with Rory’s things on it, “reading and watching you. You seriously didn’t notice?”
“No,” mutters Rory, her mouth dry.
The barista wrinkles her nose. “I’d be careful walking home tonight if I were you.”
“I need your help,” says Julia earnestly, and the stormy Thursday afternoon finds them wrapped in thick coats and rifling through the stacks at East Village Books for a birthday gift for the girl in Julia’s Intro to Sculpting elective.
“She listens to a lot of Jack Off Jill and Babes In Toyland,” Julia’s saying, trailing after Rory and wringing the ends of her scarf in her hands, “and she reads Kerrang! in print (she has someone send it over from London every week), and she drinks her coffee black, like you, and—”
And if Rory didn’t know any better, she’d think Julia was halfway in love with this girl. As it is, though, it’s not really her business. “Don’t worry,” says Rory, inspecting the box of a Fight Club VHS tape. She looks up at Julia and smiles. “We’ll find her something she’ll like.”
Julia returns her smile, dimples forming in her cheeks. “I owe you.”
“Are you kidding?” says Rory, crossing over to the next shelf in the cramped space, fingers trailing on the roughened wood. “I’ve been meaning to come here since I moved to the city.”
“Oh? Why hadn’t you yet?”
(“East Village Books,” says Jess, his voice rough and sleepy in her ear. “It’s not just books. Movies, CDs, posters, wacky shit like tarot cards and all this antique crap—but the books. They’ve got everything.”
“Oh yeah?” whispers Rory, cradling the phone close like it’s his head tucked in the crook of her neck. “Tell me more.”
Jess clicks his tongue. “I’ll take you in the fall. That’s my birthday gift for you.”
Rory bites the inside of her cheek. Doesn’t say, you plan on still being with me almost half a year from now, when you don’t even know what your next permanent address will be? She stifles the worry. “You should make a list of all the places you’ve said you wanna show me. I’m holding you to all of them.”
“Wouldn’t expect anything less from you,” says Jess; then, after a muffled yawn: “I’ll give you all the addresses so you can mark them down on your map, how’s that sound?”
“Perfect,” says Rory, desperately wishing he were here so she could kiss him.)
“It just… you know.” Rory lamely waves her hand in an ambiguous gesture. “School. Busy.” She crouches down and pulls out the first book she gets her hands on: Aliens & Anorexia by Chris Kraus, its cover creeptastically black and neon green and purple. She turns it over and checks the blurb. Julia’s friend would like it, but so would Rory, and finders keepers. Next to it is a maroon Shakespeare anthology that Rory forces herself to turn away from.
They browse the shelves while hail pelts on the window panes. Julia gravitates towards the VHS tapes while Rory sifts through books upon books on everything she could think of and then some: occult manuals that look like something out of Sabrina, thick mathematical philosophy and law textbooks, ancient Archie comics and eclectic graphic novels, paperbacks in French and Japanese and Ancient Greek. It’s a treasure trove, Aladdin’s cave for the literati and the kooky. She randomly picks Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls because it looks like it would be right up Julia’s friend’s alley, but the rest of her selection—the Kraus, an original poster from Banned Books Week in 2002, Slow Days, Fast Company, and a second-edition Marlowe that’s much too cheap for what it is—are hers.
They take Rory’s stack of books and Julia’s stack of VHS tapes to pay at the register. A middle-aged woman with purple hair and eyebrow piercings rings them up. “Thirty-eight dollars and twenty-two cents,” she says of Rory’s things.
Rory digs her wallet out of her coat, accidentally knocking her elbow into the nearby shelf. Several books clatter onto the hardwood. “Oh, sorry,” she says, sheepish and cheeks hot, kneeling to pick them up and haphazardly stuffing them back in their places. She straightens up, hesitantly smiles and hands over two twenties then takes the change and her purchases.
“We have a bring your own bag policy, ” intones the woman, “for next time.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” says Rory, a little too high-pitched with embarrassment.
She absent-mindedly glances at the books she’d placed back onto the shelves, straightening them out with her lip between her teeth. She takes out a random one to look at while Julia finishes up. Wait Until Spring, Bardini. The spine naturally gives way in the middle and Rory’s heart—dimwitted idiot—immediately stutters, malfunctions like outdated machinery.
The pages are full of blue ink: underlined chunks, circles around entire paragraphs, words in the margins. Lots of people write in the margins of their books (see: Mark Twain and Walt Whitman; hell, Voltaire wrote an entire manuscript in these sparse spaces while he was in prison) but this handwriting is as familiar to Rory as her own is. Messy, slanted in some places, alternating between lower and uppercase with no regard to proper capitalization, decorated with little smudges.
It’s wishful thinking. Nostalgia, longing, all of that. Rory lightly glances around her, as if to check for a witness to her momentary lapse in sanity, and returns the book where it belongs. Nothing even happened.
(“You’ve got a run in your tights,” says Julia, jerking her chin at Rory’s knee.
“Oh,” says Rory carelessly. “It must have caught something on the floor.” At least this explains why she’s freezing to the point of shaking—there’s a hole inviting the cold to come in.)
Finally, they both swallow their prides on a bench at Washington Square Park.
Ha, ha. Rory itches to find whatever higher power is knocking her around like she’s Giles in a really long episode of Buffy and clock them in the face.
It’s anticlimactic and quite terrible. Jess stops in front of Rory where she’s sitting with half a scone and Nausea at eleven in the morning, his face gone pale like he’s seen a ghost but a hardened determination lining his shoulders. Rory stares at the clenched fists by his side so she doesn’t have to look at him, but then he clears his throat.
Correlation does not imply causation, yet Rory meets his eye and loses her appetite. It’s unfair that the sight of him invokes so much—pure fury and bittersweet yearning and burning shame and all those other nebulous flares that have always been mildly terrifying. It would bowl her over, if she were a lesser person.
His cheekbones look jagged and prominent in his sunken-in face. His hair hangs and curls around his temples and his ears. He looks like a shell of what he should be, what he had been. He’s not exactly dressed for the weather: jeans, boots, hoodie and freaking leather jacket. (How much of his clothes did he take with him when he left Luke’s? If he’d been high-tailing it to sunny Cali, there would’ve been no need for winter coats. Maybe those are still shoved in the back of his closet above the diner, untouched like they’re waiting for his return.) Where’s he staying now, how does he eat? Does he work? Go to school? Is she sitting on the bench he’s sleeping on tonight?
Rory grits her teeth. It’d be incredibly embarrassing if she upchucks what she’s had of her pastry onto his shoes. She looks down, back at her splayed-open book (“I’m afraid I can’t. Do you want a potato omelet? The ham’s locked up: the patron is the only one who cuts it”) to feign disinterest. She can’t focus past the last sentence.
Neither of them speaks. Rory turns a page without reading the one before it. Next to them, three kids in reddish, disarrayed private school uniforms are listening to Springsteen on a portable CD player: hey, that’s me, and I want you only / don’t turn me home again / I just can’t face myself alone again. In the distance two little kids chase each other and shriek in delight; an older woman with librarian glasses is reading a thick hardcover. Much further is the rest: hustle and bustle, NYU students and tweedy professors and dog walkers and kids with their babysitters, punks and hippies and straights, normal people and weirdos, and so much, so many things, sights and noises, everyone else has their own life, it’s a bit harrowing to be confronted with the fact that the world keeps turning no matter what, there are other lives and other hearts, other than the one currently splintering in Rory’s chest—
Jess kisses his teeth and breaks the silence.
“So how’s Columbia?”
“Screw you,” says Rory thinly, passing him the half of the scone that’s left. It’s cherry, anyway, his favorite. (What else is she supposed to do with her hands? Where should she put them now so she doesn’t slip up and reach for him?)
“Yeah.” Jess brushes her fingers with his cold ones as he takes the paper bag, purposeful and spiteful, proving nothing she doesn’t already know. “Right back at you.”
“What the hell are you doing here?” blurts Rory, incapable of playing dumb for a second longer. She resolutely stares straight ahead at the water fountain, the trees stripped of their foliage, the carefree people who she’d much rather trade places with right now. Instead she’s in this body, hers, a treacherous thing (sweaty palms, racing heart, itchy desire) that hasn’t caught up to reality yet.
“I live here.”
“Screw you,” she says again, but it sounds tired and wrung out. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”
“Hey, you won’t go away either,” retorts Jess, bitterness dripping acidic off of every word. Mutually assured distruction.
“Shut up, you’re the one buying me coffees and hanging out in my parks—”
"Your parks?”
Rory stops. She’s such an idiot. She can’t believe she’s defending herself to the guy who broke up with her by putting an entire country between them, the same guy who hadn’t even mustered up a few platitudes over the phone but instead let her do the talking. She goes back to the Sartre.
“I keep seeing you,” says Jess after a long stretch of silence. “Everywhere.”
So do I, thinks Rory, biting her tongue to keep the words where they belong. She has so many questions. So many things to say. Instead she tastes blood on the roof of her mouth.
“Rory—” A heavy sigh, a false start (“I—”) and a pause, then, hesitant and uncertain (Rory wants to smack him in the face for it): “Do you want me to go?”
“Yes,” says Rory. In the same heartbeat, she blindly reaches out and grasps his wrist. She hates him. She hates herself. If he leaves again he’s going to smash her heart to bits.
Something icy tickles the tip of her nose, the backs of her hands. Rory turns to look at Jess just as he tips his head up to the white flurries and grey sky, his mouth slightly parted. (First snow of the season. She should call Lorelai.) Jess exhales, his shoulders slumping. His pulse flutters under her thumb, hummingbird quick; he’s still jumpy to the touch.
Rory looks away, a lump in her throat.
“How much will an apology make you want to kick me in the nards?” Jess asks lightly.
“No more than I already want to.”
Gradually, Jess twists his hand so he can close his fingers around her knuckles. Rory glances down. His nails are bitten to the quick while hers are manicured and polished blue; there’s a metaphor somewhere in that.
“I still am sorry,” he admits quietly. Forgive me for I have sinned.
It keeps snowing, dusting on his and her boots, their shoulders, the unimportant rest of the park. It’s dizzying to have that kind of power—to forgive, that is.
“Are you just saying what I want to hear?” asks Rory.
“You want to hear a reason.” Right in one. “I don’t really have any of those—or at least not a good one. For that, too, I’m sorry. That, and leaving you, and—the bedroom, at that party—”
Oh. Rory swallows the bile down. The bedroom, that party. She had shoved it so far into the recesses of her mind, the skeleton’s got moss growing on it. “That,” she says, scratchy words crawling up her throat, “I deserve a reason for.”
Thunder Road bleeds into Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out while Jess gathers his wits. The snow stains Rory’s tights, melts into icy water that seeps through the flimsy material onto her skin. It gathers in small patches on the grass and clings to the naked tree branches jaggedly curling above them. The world grows narrower, constrained to just the two of them on this bench—in other words, suffocating, and because the silence is choking her she says, “The first time I ever went anywhere in Luke’s truck he had a Bruce CD in the stereo.”
Jess says, “Me too.”
Rory hums.
Finally, the right—the only—words come to him. “I was just—Rory, I wanted to keep you so bad.”
“What?”
“No, that sounded wrong.” His grip on her hand tightens, like he’s curbing the urge to bolt—his, hers, both of theirs. “Everything was going to shit. I found out I wasn’t graduating, and I just—I knew Luke was gonna kick me out. We had a deal, I didn’t do my part, which means I’ve gotta go. And you were gonna—not want me anymore, and I’m not martyring myself here, alright, but it was—fuck, I’m—”
God. She’s so going to puke. “Don’t—”
“I wanted to show you that I could be good,” he gets out in a rush; it lands like an axe blade to the chest. “Alright? I wanted to make you feel good, I wanted to show you that despite all the other shit that was wrong with me I was worth keeping, and it’s no fucking excuse for not listening to you, for scaring you like I did, and I’m—I’m so fucking sorry, Rory, I don’t—” His voice cracks, and he tries to pull his hand away from hers but she keeps him where he is, like an anchor (though which one of them is the sinking ship—) “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. There’s nothing else to it, I’m just—really fucking sorry—”
“Okay.” Rory inhales sharply then involuntarily shivers, digging her nails into Jess’ skin. “Okay.”
He makes a strange, muffled sound. Rory chances a glance at him and finds him worrying his bottom lip with his teeth. Without looking at her, he asks, “Now do you want me to go?”
She would rather crawl over burning coals. “I am still angry at you,” she replies blankly.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s enough of one.”
Jess tentatively asks, “Do you want to be friends?”
“Absolutely not, I don’t want to be friends," snaps Rory, a little harsher than she means to be. Friends. Friends, are you kidding, he’s had his hands up her skirt and now he wants to be friends, what are they, Ross and Rachel?
“What do you want, then?” It sounds like I’ll do anything you want. She doesn’t know where to put all that faith; it’s too much for her to hold in both hands.
“I should get going.” She retracts her hand and stands, tugging the edges of her knit hat over her numb ears. What the hell does she want? “I have a class in—” she checks her watch, an hour— “now.” She wants to kiss him, she wants to hurt him the way he’s hurt her. I can’t stand what you do, I’m in love with your eyes. She wants to break his ribcage and scoop his heart out and thoroughly mangle it so it resembles hers, then keep them both—her heart, his heart—in the same glass encasing, turning them into a museum exhibit. The Lovers, 2004.
Jess stands, too, digging his hands in his pockets. The scone’s on the bench, in the space he had left between them. “Alright.” He purses his lips, frowning down at his boots. “So, uh.”
“It’s a big city,” she says, trying for a casual tone, “so I’ll see you when I see you.”
He looks up and meets her eye. Nods a bit jerkily. “I’ll see you when I see you,” he repeats stiltedly.
Rory walks away, I'll see you when I see you, and after the past month of stumbling upon bits and pieces of him like it’s a treasure hunt, it doesn’t sound like a dismissal. It sounds like a promise. See you tomorrow, or in a week, or even in a year—she’ll see him.
At the very last moment, she whirls around. Jess is already looking at her, had been watching her go pink-cheeked and glassy-eyed, snow falling thickly all around him, quiet and melancholic. She quickly retraces her steps back to him (he says her name, Rory?); she doesn’t know why or what she wants to do until she does it.
Rory presents Nausea like an offering. Jess exhales a white cloud and produces Morrison’s Sula from his back pocket. Wordlessly, they trade books (so it goes) before she goes, this time without looking back.
maybe i’m too young / to keep good love from going wrong
[...]
too young to hold on / and too old to just break free and run
“Merry Christmas.”
Her pencil skids across the page, the lead snapping. “Crap,” she mutters, looking up at the culprit. “What are you doing here?”
“Work,” replies Jess tartly, placing a paper cup next to the calculator before he collapses into the seat in front of her, messy hair and leather jacket over a Sonic Youth crewneck and Kafka on the Shore. It’s freezing and dreary out, X Files sort of weather, and here he is: coatless, scarfless, gloveless. He’s going to die of hypothermia.
“Work?” she demands—or whispers, really, keeping her voice low. Last time they were here Julia got kicked out for talking too loud. “You work here? In the Rose Main Reading Room?”
“No,” he replies at the same decibel. “ In the area.”
“Fifth Avenue?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Doing what? Personal shopping for Carrie Bradshaw?”
His mouth twists in displeasure. “Bike messenger.” He glances at the messy spread of things on the table between them—thick textbooks, multicolored binders, notebooks and pens—then focuses back on her. “You with someone?”
“Yeah, Marty,” says Rory, just to see how Jess’ features subtly but certainly shift, his face turning a passive mask. She derives a sick, twisted sort of pleasure from watching it happen.
“Huh,” he says tonelessly, picking up a Bic and twirling it in his fingers. “Got yourself a new beau?”
“A beau," she repeats, thoroughly amused.
“A paramour?” he tries, very clearly uncomfortable and trying to make her feel the same way. Oh. She can’t do this, the sick-in-stomach has gone from pleasant to painful in five seconds.
“He’s a friend,” she finally says.
“So a pal. A buddy.”
“Jess.”
Jess defensively raises both hands then pulls an open textbook closer, squinting at the formulaic letters and numbers. “College is going good?”
“It’s going great.”
“So, Columbia was definitely the right choice?”
Rory shrugs. “Last week I had a nervous breakdown because my mom wouldn’t answer the phone and I haven’t seen her since Thanksgiving, but then I walked around City Hall Park and looked at books in the Strand for thirty minutes and suddenly it wasn’t so bad anymore.”
“I shoplifted my first book from the Strand,” muses Jess wistfully.
“Seriously?” At his slight smirk, Rory presses her palms to the tabletop and leans closer, hissing, “I swear, if you steal a book from here—"
“Relax, would you,” he huffs. “I borrow now. I have a library card and everything. I’m an upstanding citizen.”
“Show me.”
Jess sighs and lifts his hips to dig his wallet out of his back pocket. He flips it open and pulls out the red NYPL card. Rory snatches it, finds the JESS MARIANO stamped on it, and hands it back, a little miffed.
“Since when do you have a library card?” asks Rory offhandedly.
“Since I moved back.”
“I mean why. You never did before.”
Jess clicks his tongue, clearly bristling. “Things change.” He drops the pen and raps his knuckles on the wood. “Anyway. I should go before your Marty comes back.”
“Yes, please, bolt the second it becomes a normal conversation,” snaps Rory, loud enough that a few people turn their heads. Her cheeks flame and she ducks her head, glaring at the scribbled equations in front of her. “God forbid I learn something about you.”
“You’re not privy to all my personal shit,” says Jess. “You’re not my girlfriend anymore.”
“And I thank my lucky stars every day for that.”
Jess pushes the chair back, its legs loudly scraping against the floor, and walks away without a backward glance right as Marty comes back, reeking of pot.
“Hey,” he says, confused. “Everything okay?”
“Oh, yeah,” says Rory breezily. After a beat of weird silence, she lifts the pencil she’d been holding all throughout her conversation with Jess, and her smile feels elastic-like, stretchy and gummy. “Broke my pencil.”
“Huh,” says Marty, but he sits down and goes back to studying for a moment. Then he asks, “You went to get coffee or something?” nudging the paper cup Jess left.
“Um. Long story.” (She pulls the lid off the cup and sniffs it. Herbal tea. There’s still a box of his favorite kind in the back of the kitchen cabinet that Lorelai’s least likely to check.) Her stomach churns painfully. Rory stares intently at her books to avoid Marty’s inquisitive gaze. Her chest hurts, numb and caved in, and a part of her thinks ha, see, wasn’t worth it, never has been and never will be; his first reaction has always been to cut and run, Jack hitting the road, so whatever, this is how it’s going to be from now on: half a conversation, a landmine, a Speedy Gonzales run, etcetera.
Find the antiderivative. Her Calc I final is in two days. She grabs a pen and starts to write, logarithmics and exponents and—
“Hey.”
Rory looks up.
Jess says, “Sorry. I freaked.” Hell. Just when she thinks she’s finally got a handle on things. And he looks so sad about it, too, shoulders hunched and hands in the pockets of his jeans, remorseful and anxious. “Can we—talk?”
She took Calc I at Chilton. Rory looks at Marty, who’s got the slightly-constipated face of someone watching 60s TV, and tells him, “I’ll be right back.”
She grabs her coat and blindly follows Jess as he weaves between the tables. She glances at his hand and wishes she could hold it for a brief moment. Outside, Jess sits on the curb. Rory does, too, hugging her knees close to her chest. Cars zoom past them; pedestrians sidestep them like the little bugs on the gravel that they are. The sun’s almost fully set; Rory squints up at the sky even though this isn’t Stars Hollow, she won’t find a single star. Instead she catches a slew of skyscrapers and a part of her likes it better.
Jes starts, “I don’t, uh…”
“Yeah,” says Rory, feeling so incredibly weak and stupid. “We don’t owe each other anything. Only you don’t get to be angry at me.”
“Hey,” says Jess, thin but still furious. “I know I screwed up when I left, but you didn’t make shit easy for me either.”
“Excuse me?” demands Rory, absolutely ready to smack him in the face.
“With your mom, your ex, just. At least with Shane I knew it was a fucking phase, with you I only found that out when you—”
“Shut up,” fumes Rory. “A phase? What, like I was smiting my mom and my grandparents? Are you hearing yourself right now, you know that’s not even me, and—” We had plans , the prom and then across all of New York, Brooklyn art museums and Coney Island rides and— “Stop projecting your anger onto me because I’m here.”
“Tit for tat.”
“You left me. You broke up with me by going to a whole other state without saying a word. I should hate you for it, I should never even want to speak with you—my mom would think I need inpatient treatment for being here, like this, making excuses for you all over again.”
“I didn’t ask you to make excuses for me.”
“Then why are you here?”
Jess finally looks away from her, glaring at the rest of the world instead of her. “I’m an asshole. I don’t have it in me to go with grace.”
“You can say that again,” huffs Rory. “No matter what you say, or how long you stick around and—pester me with this—we’re not—”
“I don’t want you back,” he interrupts.
“I don’t want you back,” she retorts, like a kid wanting to have the last word. “So—what?”
An ambulance drives by, its sirens deafening and ominously Lynchian—DANGER, DANGER. YOU ARE STEPPING INTO THE ALTERNATE REALITY WHERE YOU ARE STILL IN LOVE. TIME TO WAKE UP, PRETTY GIRL.
“I like having you in my life,” confesses Jess quietly; even with all the noise she hears him. “Even peripherally, like this, just… stumbling into you by sheer luck. I mean, I came here cause I got the sudden craving for a Dostoevsky, and I found you.”
“Oh?” says Rory, momentarily distracted. “Which one?”
"The Brothers Karamazov."
“I could lend it to you,” she offers automatically, leftover sentiment from when they traded books like kisses and secrets. “Um. If you want.”
“That’d be nice,” he says, noncommittal. Then he exhales heavily through his nose. “I had to sell some of my books when I came back. I can’t exactly buy new ones right now.”
Like the John Fante she found at the bookstore with Julia. Of course. “Are you running low on money?”
“Don’t,” he snaps.
“Jesus,” she bursts out. “Get over yourself. The bite me shtick isn’t funny, and if it’s gonna be your only reaction to everything I say then I’m leaving.”
Jess huffs. “I am low on cash. But I don’t want your fucking pity.”
“Good thing I wasn’t offering it.”
“Good.” He runs his hand over his face. “It’s whatever. I’m working on it. I’ve got a roof over my head and I eat enough, so I’m not exactly complaining.”
“Three square meals a day?”
“Sure.” It’s so clearly a lie.
A part of Rory thinks he deserves it. He chose to throw all the shit Luke did for him in his uncle’s face, he chose to walk away from her, and this is his karmic retribution. The other part of her wants to reel him in from the cold, hide him behind her ribcage where it’s safe and warm. “You should get a thicker coat,” she ends up saying, the words thick and cloying in her throat.
“You should get used to being alone,” he retorts blankly. He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, wary as if gauging her reaction. “New York’s not Stars Hollow. Things don’t just fall into place here.”
“Yes, I clued in to that when I got pickpocketed,” says Rory.
Jess hums. "Other than that it's a cool place. All the places, all the people. You'll meet someone in no time, specially at your school. A nice, upstanding guy straight out the J. Crew catalog to make Mr. and Mrs. Gilmore proud. They seem the type to like planning weddings and baptisms, though only if the guy wipes his ass with hundred-dollar bills."
"You're being a dick."
"Part of my charm."
She hates him. She wants to hold him so bad, it’s like an addiction they should stick her in a white room and give her grippy socks for. “I’m not all that happy,” says Rory quietly, “that I’m not your girlfriend anymore.” She wonders if he hears it over the honking cars, the tires skidding on asphalt, passersby yelling. She stands up and Jess follows straight, his brows furrowed; before she even thinks about it Rory says, “Give me your hand.”
His mouth opens then closes before he does as she asked, palm up. Rory takes his hand, bracing it palm-up in her own, and scribbles the landline number to her dorm room.
“In case you’re dying,” she states firmly while Jess stares at the ink on his skin like it’s hieroglyphics. “And you have any last words you want to tell me.”
Finally, he only says, “I don’t have a phone.”
“It’s. I don’t expect you to call. This is just in case you need to reach me. Now I have to get back to studying,” says Rory. Someone knocks into her and doesn’t apologize about it; she’s long past feeling annoyance at that. “And—Marty.”
“I gotta go get ready for work,” counters Jess.
“Work again?”
“I don’t just have the one job.”
“Ah,” says Rory, nodding once. “Hey, you got running water for a shower?”
“Funny.”
“I try,” says Rory, looking down at her Docs. “Now—shoo.”
“Shooing,” he says, giving her a mock salute and going, going, gone, let and letting go.
Here began all my dreams… The saddest thing I’ve ever seen…
“You depress me,” says Julia.
“Bye, have fun,” retorts Rory, and with a huff and a bye Julia’s out the door, dressed like Kate Moss on the cover of a tabloid. The moment the lock clicks behind her Rory sighs, heavy and morose, and slumps back onto her mattress. Morrissey warbles and she stares at the ceiling, mind empty, an impenetrable chill in her bones, her entire being sick with yearning she refuses to name: I would love to go back to the old house / but I never will.
“Bah,” she says out loud, just to check that she exists. It echoes. She grabs Factotum off its place on her bedside table, emptily flicking through the pages and staring at the pencil marks left behind.
She misses Lane. She misses her mom like a toothache. She misses Paris, damn it, Paris who’s at Yale, Paris who sporadically calls to rant over the phone and Rory sort of hates her by the end of these calls because, well, Paris Geller in fine form, but a few weeks later when her phone rings and it’s POL POT on her caller ID again she picks up without hesitating. She misses being surrounded by people who know her, who love her; here it’s Julia and Marty and a handful of acquaintances who don’t innately understand her and dammit, she's lonely.
It’s a city of eight million people. She can hear them, muffled and motley outside her window. Everyone else seems to have it figured out: they have friends, they have boyfriends and girlfriends. They dress in clothes that they like, clothes that don’t make them want to take scissors to their skin. They have jobs, careers, aspirations they are certain of. Eight million people. Rory Gilmore is just a faceless blip among the more important, the more established. She is so, so incredibly lonely. She hadn’t thought it possible to feel this alone, like she could disappear right now and nothing would happen. She has never wished to disappear, to go gentle into the night, not in the way she does now.
The phone rings. Landline. Rory lets the machine pick it up, still loosely fiddling with the pages.
A click. “Hey. Uh,” and Rory jumps up like she’s been electrocuted, feeling a little deranged, “it’s Jess,” and she trips over all the shit on the floor to get to the phone, only holding herself back at the last moment, hands curled to her chest like the plastic is flammable.
His voice is rough and crackly through the reciever; frozen in place, Rory stares at the machine. “So, uh. I got a cell phone. Figured since I have a way to reach you, you should have a way to reach me too. Anyway, I’m reading Henry and June . It’s great, a weird Three’s Company set up, but… It looks like the love was really there.” He paues here, long and drawn out where he would be chewing on his bottom lip to figure out what to say. “I’d love to talk to you about it. Fuck. Anyway. See you… whenever.”
Then a click, and Louder Than Bombs is once again the only sound in the room. She clicks to repeat the message. Again. Again, again.
(Hey. Uh, it’s Jess—
The love was really there. I’d love to talk to you about it.)
Rory buries her face in her hands. At this rate, she’s going to end up completely blue by Asleep. She might even have a good cry, refusing to seek out the comfort she secretly, shamefully craves.
She blessedly catches him at the steps of the Met, a paperback splayed open on his bent knee and a half-eaten sandwich in hand. Without even thinking, she darts up to him; never in her life has she ever been so relieved to see him, even the sprinkler incident is nothing compared to this.
“I kissed my roommate,” blurts Rory. “Well, she kissed me, actually. I kissed back."
To his credit, Jess barely reacts save for the raise of his eyebrows and the closing of his book—Marguerite freaking Duras, The Lover, laminated with the library filing system sticker on the bottom of its spine—on his middle finger. “Uh. Is it a… thing?”
“Well.” Rory bristles, a bit uncomfortable. “She’s been having some sort of sexuality crisis for a while—”
Jess snorts, lips ticking up into half a smile. “You look like you’re having one right now.”
“I am not,” insists Rory unconvincingly. “I’m very secure in my sexuality.”
“Okay.”
“I am. I like guys.”
“I know you do.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I don’t, but it’s not exactly my business, is it?”
“Do you really think that being with you was so terrible it turned me off men forever?”
His laugh is muffled but audible. “Christ. It wasn’t terrible, was it?”
“More like terrible’s second cousin,” amends Rory. (A lie, of course—it was sort of like a dream, having him hers, kissing him whenever she wanted, touching his nose and clavicle and knuckles, hands under his sweaters for warmth, her body plastered to his to fuse them, their romantic love, their communism of two. No one ever got her like he did. Maybe no one ever will. Maybe it’s why she’s left the porch light on since he left last summer. Maybe it’s why she’s standing by the open door waiting for him to trip inside, welcome home, honey, I’ve missed you so. Maybe she needs to get a grip.)
“High praise,” says Jess. “Was it a good kiss, at least?”
“Oh, well, I give it a 42, but I can’t—”
“Dance to it. So it was... an adequate kiss.”
A familiar, painful chord strikes in her guts, an old friend returned to greet her. “God. Exactly. It was fine. Nothing to write home about.” Home. Lorelai. Rory buries her face in her hands. “This is soooo stupid. I can’t believe I’m having a sexuality crisis in college. I feel like a throwaway one-line joke about lesbian experimentation in a Dawson’s Creek episode.”
“It happens,” says Jess dryly. “Just go home, read some Ginsberg, and watch some porn.”
"Seriously."
“That’s what I did. Granted, I was fourteen, but—”
“You’re bi?”
“Hey, bambi,” he says, sounding long-suffering, “it’s 2004. Contrary to what Taylor Doose may have you believe, bisexuality is Okay and not a sign of mental instability. Everyone’s at least a little bi. Here, queer, get over it, you catch my drift?”
“I mean you," says Rory, getting why her mom got so frustrated with Jess sometimes. “You never mentioned you were bi.”
“Call me crazy, but maybe I didn’t wanna add sexuality to the list of offenses they’re gonna use to crucify me at a town meeting.”
“God, you ass, I mean to me," says Rory, suddenly very hurt. She hates him. Truly, to the marrow of her bones, she wants to pull him apart. She wants to knit her skin to his. She wants to commit some torrid act of violence against him to express all the much he makes her feel. “This is a big part of you, and we were friends, we were—” Here she falters, incapable of speaking of their ill-fated relationship when it’s not the butt of a joke. “You never said. Did you not trust me, or something?”
“I must have mentioned it,” he says. “I must have said something. Didn’t I say something?”
“No. You didn’t.” In an undertone, she spitefully adds, “That was a recurring theme with us.”
“Rory.”
“Like how you didn't tell me about California, even though I was on that bus.”
Jess says nothing. Rory laughs, self-deprecating, until he nudges her thigh with the corner of his book and says, “You should read this.”
“I already have.”
“Well, what did you think?”
Rory meets him with a look. Her nose is frigid, numb, as are the tips of her fingers and the pits of her stomach. She says, “I should go.”
“I miss talking to you,” says Jess. “Without residual bullshit. Why did you tell me about your roommate?”
“I happened to find you here,” says Rory, touching the back of her hand to his for a brief moment. “You have a habit of being in the right place at the right time when I need” (you) “a breather.”
“Not to—make me jealous, or something?” He sounds nervous, looks cleaved open.
“No,” replies Rory. “Um. I liked how Duras writes even though it sort of sucks.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s too emotionless,” she continues, averting her gaze when Jess’ own turns soft and fond—does he always look so moony-eyed when she talks? This is the first time she isn’t completely invested in her rambling, focusing on his reaction to it instead, and it’s as devastating as an atomic bomb. “I get the whole removed, faceless aspect of it, but if the characters are supposed to be feeling all this much, then why am I not getting it from her writing? It’s like in The Mandarins, when Anne falls in love with the writer in Chicago and says it’s the love that changed her life, but really he’s the equivalent of old stale bread.”
“Maybe it’s a French thing,” muses Jess.
“Aren’t the French supposed to be big on sex and passion?”
“It could be that they don’t know how to express the magnitude of it on paper.”
“They should learn it,” says Rory, just as something beeps—Jess’ watch, which he glances down at with a frown.
“I have to go,” he says, “but keep this with you til next time?”
“Jess,” calls Rory to his retreating back, “this is a library book!”
“I’ll pay the overdue fees!” he calls without turning back, raising a hand in farewell and weaving into the crowd of strangers to be swallowed up, as anonymous as Duras’ two lovers. He and she, she and he; Rory is left with an open book and It was as if he loved the pain, loved it as he’d loved me, intensely, unto death perhaps, and as if he preferred it now to me.
Rory borrows Wait Until Spring, Bardini from the NYPL and reads it in a single afternoon, cooped up in her room while outside it snows and Julia watches weird experimental French cinema then walks around in circles, reading Baudelaire out loud to practice her pronunciation.
(“Do you even know what he’s saying?”
“Well, there’s something about Ovid here. Ovide chassé du paradis latin. God. It’s giving me Chilton war flashbacks. I did Latin with fucking Koestler.”)
It’s a light read, the heaviness in the subtext: a decent chunk of it is all fathers and sons, sons and fathers. It makes sense Jess would give this book away after a stint with his own father—an unsuccessful one, if his unceremonious return to New York is anything to go by. She wonders how to breach the subject with him, then decides against it. She really doesn't want to know.
(She could look in the mirror. Christopher hasn't called since the first week of the semester.)
“Hi, Jess. Um Lane’s band is playing at CBGB Tuesday night. Gil—their new guitarist—scored them a gig. Lane’s really excited, obviously—it’s CBGB, it’s where punk was born, like the B-52’s and Television and Blondie and the Talking Heads—and Patti Smith, and Joan Jett, you know that Joan Jett is Lane’s Holy Mary, when we were kids she wrote I love Rock ‘n Roll on her arm in black sharpie and Mrs. Kim came to pick her up earlier than expected, like, half a minute later, so I told Mrs. Kim that I wrote it to tease Lane even though Lane asked me not to and so she wouldn’t let me see her for like a whole month—anyway. Sorry, I just thought you should know about their gig. You were one of Hep Alien’s first ever supporters, maybe you’d like to… hm. Anyway. It’s at one. If you… Bye.”
For just a moment, she pretends Jess is waiting for her down the slush-outlined street and not just loitering there for a smoke, a lit cigarette loosely dangling between his lips while he flicks his Zippo open and shut—restless hands, fluttering from her cheeks to her hair to her waist, playing with her fingers, leaving tattoos all over her skin—and absently watches the flame
Like this, from a distance, Rory can indulge in her fantasy. He’s on the sidewalk outside the club because he wants to go inside with her, so what’s gonna happen is she’ll walk up to him and kiss him hello and he’ll run his hands down her sides along the leather she’s wearing and he'll warm her up and he’ll promise filthy things for when they get home much, much later.
She’s got quite an imagination. Maybe she should consider a creative writing minor. Anyway it’s the late hour (and the shadows on his cheekbones, and his lovely fingers, and his gorgeous, gorgeous face) invoking all of this, so it doesn’t really matter, so she squares her shoulders and steps closer.
“Classy way to commit suicide,” she says lightly when she finally joins him.
His eyes flicker up to her. “Thanks, Vonnegut,” he says roughly, muffled around the filter in his mouth. “You want one?”
“Sure, right after the lobotomy.”
Jess ducks his head but the streetlamp still catches his slight grin. “Nice outfit, by the way. I dig the leather.”
Rory tries not to fiddle with the hem of her skirt, lacing her hands together at her back. She gives an acknowledging hum, refusing to say thanks and too flustered to come up with some sort of witty remark. Kiss me, she thinks; then immediately after she thinks Rory, no, chastising herself like she’s a misbehaving pet.
“Grandma Gilmore would have a heart attack if she saw you in this getup,” he adds, and the spell breaks, and Rory remembers that half the time she has vaguely violent urges towards him. (Different kinds of violence, of course, sometimes the kind that involves her teeth and tongue, but—violence all the same.)
“Can it and stop poking fun at my clothes like it’s a dominatrix getup.”
Jess snorts, dropping his cigarette onto the gravel. “Alright, Anne Elliot, let’s go inside. The band’s gotten all set up?”
“They’re on the way back to Stars Hollow, actually,” says Rory. She succinctly explains Hep Alien’s shitty luck with the timeslot they’d been given, ending with a relaxed, “So, I’m gonna head back to my dorm.”
“Shame.”
“That it is.”
It’s quiet. Rory had expected it to be a different scene—a louder one, the sort of thing she only read about in Punk Planet, leather and heavy eye makeup and heavier drugs—but it ended up being a total bust. Poor Lane. Rory scuffs her shoe—her mom’s black boots—on the sidewalk while, for some reason, Television's 'Venus' loops around in her head.
Jess says, “Let me walk you home,” brushing his knuckles against her elbow.
Rory automatically responds, “No, thank you.”
His mouth presses into a thin line. “It’s past one in the morning and this isn’t exactly Uptown.”
“I’ll get a cab.”
“Cabs don’t like going below 14th Street in the dark; you probably won’t find one.”
“Fine, maybe I’ll go to the Odeon and hang out with Bowie and Warhol til the sun rises.”
“I’ll stay two steps behind you and I won’t talk, pinky swear.”
Just because she doesn’t want to argue any further—knowing Jess, they can keep going in circles about nothing in particular—what with the cold and her sleepiness and the nine AM she has tomorrow morning, she picks her battles. “Okay, let’s go,” she huffs, rolling her eyes for added effect.
Jess falls into step behind her, hands stuffed in his pockets and smelling of smoke. He lasts all of a minute before he asks, “So, you been to CBGB before tonight?”
“I thought you said you weren’t gonna talk.” He pouts, playful the way he had been two years (a lifetime) ago (c'mon, show me your withering stare, I've been hurt before), and Rory relents. “I haven’t,” she admits, “and I don’t think tonight even counts. You?”
“A few times.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s a roach-infested, shit-encrusted hellhole of a dive bar, but it’s pretty cool.” He then says, like it’s absolutely no big deal, “I saw The Strokes here when I was fifteen.”
“Oh, no way."
“Yeah, it was my first time sneaking in.”
“That is so freaky,” says Rory, more to herself than to him “to think that while I was listening to the Is This It CD doing my homework for Chilton summer class you were actually watching Julian Casablancas moan into his mic.”
“More of a groan than a moan,” he says, “but pretty much, yeah.”
“God. I’m jealous.”
“Seriously? You’d pick ‘New York City Cops’ over Shakespeare Lit?”
“No, but if it’s ‘Hard to Explain’ then yeah, definitely.” Rory glances at him then nudges his elbow with hers. “Your face is doing a weird thing.”
“A weird thing?”
“Frowny.” Melancholic, contemplative: his mouth is downtured and his brows are furrowed, something bitter in the way he way he runs his hand down his face. But Jess only shoots her a look before he makes his way down the stairs to the subway.
Jess vaults over the barrier; Rory swipes her Metrocard. They take the L to the subway station closest to her dorm, sitting on the sticky plastic orange seats with their knees bumping every few seconds. Jess stares straight ahead, absent-mindedly fiddling with his lighter still, his eyes half-lidded. He looks like something out of French new wave: leaving, half-gone, mind elsewhere, ephemral and ultraviolet. Rory tries not to look at him too long. She tries not to steady his hands. She wants, wants, wants. It’s nauseating. It’s tiring, to want and resist, especially when it feels like she’s been doing this for her whole life. It would be so easy to breach the distance and kiss him, wouldn’t it? Like this, nocturnal and kamikaze, it would be okay because at least she gets him for a few minutes—
At their stop he knocks his knee against hers before standing. Rory stands too, right as the metallic whirring-whooshing sounds and the doors open, and they step out onto the platform. The city’s witching hour is as crowded with people as midday in Stars Hollow.
“What would you have wanted?” asks Rory suddenly. “If you had the choice. Shakespeare Lit at Chilton or The Strokes at CBGB?”
Jess replies, “Whatever the middle between the two is.”
(As in: something stable. A life that knows how to shut up and sit still. Most of Rory’s life has been safe stillness; most of Jess’ life has been chaos chaos chaos. If they traded, neither of them would survive.)
“So, here we are,” he says, staring up at Furnald Hall like it’s the Palace of Justice from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
“Here we are.” Rory crosses her arms over her chest, biting chilly pinpricks fizzing all over her body. “So—what are you gonna do now?”
Jess shrugs. “Not much.”
“Where do you live anyway?”
“Lower Manhattan.”
“You took me home still?”
“Course.”
Rory sort of—wilts all over. Something inside her crumbles, waves a white flag, even as she herself tries to set it all on fire. It’s much easier to disguise all the intensity inside of her when she can plausibly turn it into hate and anger and not have to look at it the way it really is. If he kissed her now she would melt, she would yield, she would beg him to please never leave her again, to love her until they both drop dead and even beyond that, into the joint tombstone they’ll both spend the rest of eternity in. Maybe she should kiss him first. He wouldn’t mind, she’s certain of it.
Instead she just does the normal, polite thing. “Thank you.”
“Hey, no worries,” he insists, fidgety. “I would’ve probably done this anyway—gone up and down on the subway, reading something.”
“How come?” asks Rory, voice gone soft.
“Just… don’t wanna go to my place.” His mouth twists like he’s swallowed a whole lemon. “It’s, uh… dirty, cold. Cramped. Not exactly…” He shrugs and smiles, a little hesitant. “Anyway. You should go inside, you probably have a class tomorrow.”
“What are you reading now?” asks Rory. She’s not so sleepy anymore, screw her nine AM, she doesn’t want him gone. If he goes now he’ll take this feeling with him, this unbearable desire, this hunger that she carries down to the marrow of her bones.
So Jess reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a paperback, its edges curving up like most of his books do.
“Stop desecrating library books.”
“This one’s mine, actually. I gave up on borrowing, I hate having to give a book back.”
“You’re possessive like a dog.”
“Only when I give a shit.” He used to leave bruises on her skin, bite marks in the hollow space between her breasts and on her inner thighs, where no one but him would see. She (sharp nails, greedy hands) wasn’t much better about it.
Intimacy, Hanif Kureishi. Rory flips it open to somewhere in the middle, reads a few lines, and checks for dog eared pages—Jess habitually only marks his place in a book when it’s his first time reading it; on a reread his memory does the trick for him—and sure enough finds a folded corner about a quarter of the way in. She reads the blurb and reluctantly hands it back. He wouldn’t say no, but it feels cruel to ask to borrow it before he’s done with it.
“Leave me a message when you get home?” she finally says.
“I’m a big boy.”
“I don’t want your death to be on my conscience. Just a little message. I’ll listen to it in six hours while I drag myself to the coffee cart.”
Jess snorts. “Alright.” He raises the hand holding the book in a wave. “Bye, Rory.”
“Bye, Jess.”
Rory keeps her eye on his retreating form until he is gone. It's strange, watching him leave and knowing he will come back. The pain of it is equivalent to what she imagines stabbing herself repeatedly would feel like.