Title: A Sorta Fairytale
Author: Girl on the Wing
Rating: PG-13
Summary:
Pairing: Luke/Lorelai.
Disclaimer: Amy Sherman-Palladino owns 'em all; I just take them out to play. Title comes from the Tori Amos song from the same name; written whilst listening to lots of Ben Jelen.
A/N: "Raincoats and Recipes" never happened, but the Dragonfly is open. No real timeline.
A Sorta Fairytale
He knows her skin would feel like rose petals; he doesn't know how he knows this, and he feels like the world's biggest idiot for thinking such a thing, because it sounds like one of those ridiculous fairytales with all the crap about true love forevermore; he knows it would feel like the soft, glowing petals of the new blossoms, so delicate they could break and float to the ground an eternity away, and yet strong-willed, for they've made it this far.
The only evidence he has to this theory is when their her fingertips brush the back of his hand when he passes over the coffee after the usual twenty-minute debate about her life span in accordance to the stuff, but it's evidence enough to make him jump when it happens, but she's too busy with downing a ridiculous amount of caffeine to notice. He's grateful for her obvious addiction at these times; maybe that's selfish, but it makes it easier for him, makes it easier to shield that reflex for when they get close enough to remind Luke of everything he's thought of the past years.
He's noticed a lot of things that come this easy over time – it's easy to argue with her insistence on coffee and fried dough products, easy to appreciate Rory's quieter nature when Lorelai is around, easy to get focus on wiping the counters like it's the last thing he'll ever do so he doesn't have to quite look her in the eye. Her eyes sparkle like nothing he's ever seen before, and he knows that's almost as trite as the way he feels about her skin, but it's the truth, as it always is with Lorelai, and he can't do anything about it.
When it comes to her, there are a lot of things he can't do anything about.
She comes bouncing into the diner one morning, and he looks up from writing down a grocery list to see a pink Hello Kitty shirt with dark curls cascading down it heading his way, and he dares himself to meet her eyes, which he does, and is rewarded with a few seconds of wide, sapphire excitement surrounded by long lashes. Lorelai hops onto a stool and looks at him expectantly.
He sighs with resign, the same mock annoyance he's been using pretty much every morning for the past ten years, and hands over a large mug filled with steaming coffee. She grins like a five year-old with a lollipop and drinks it with the same enthusiasm she does everything else, setting the empty mug down in an amount of time he even has to admit is impressive. She sits swinging her legs on the stool for a few minutes, as he takes care of the rest of the customers of the diner, and when he comes back to the counter, she announces that the inn has made money. Lots of money, she confides, or rather, what she considers to be a lot of money for an inn on its opening weekend. She tells him she's storing it in her piggy bank in the front closet, and he frowns and says that sounds like a pretty unsafe place for the amount of money she's talking about. She grins when he plays along, and really, he only does it so she'll grin like that, taking over her whole face, and he'll be damned if it doesn't make her eyes even brighter, though he knows this isn't possible. A lot of things seem impossible with her, more good than bad, like ever being in a bad mood, or not being infected by her energy once she gets her coffee in her. There are impossible things, too, that are not as good, like ever getting the chance to see if he's right about her skin, and he doesn't even want to think about his theory of what her lips would feel like.
So impossible are these things, and so reluctantly has he relinquished to acceptance, that Luke finds it takes him a long time to notice anything is different. In fact, it nearly takes Lorelai naked in the diner for him to notice.
The morning is brisk; the slight chill in the air makes Luke shiver as he heads outside, a bag of garbage thrown over his shoulder to dump in the trash cans, and he pulls his coat tighter around his flannel shirt to keep out the wind. The trees are still bare, but seem to stiffen against the wind, and he feels winter coming, and he's really getting tired of these Hallmark expressions popping up into his daily thoughts. He's just slammed the lid on the garbage can when he notices a flash of something very pink toward the front of the diner. He stands for a moment, bewildered, before heading around the building to find something that was, he could honestly say, the last thing he expected to see standing on his doorstep: Lorelai wrapped in a fluffy pink towel, her hair wet and tangled into a messy ponytail, shivering in the chilled air. He lets out a string of curses, mostly out of pure shock and some out of concern for her standing freezing wearing, well, nothing, in the middle of town, that makes her turn around, and the look on her face melts him faster than he can say, "Damn it, Lorelai."
He hurries her inside, and she's babbling before he even unlocks the door, something about the shower, and two cats, and squabbling outside her house, and the door being locked, and to be truthful, he isn't really listening to a word she's saying; he just needs to know what she needs. He wants to help, but she won't shut up long enough for him to get a word in, and he really just wants to spend as little time around her while she's in that damn towel as possible, because it makes him even more nervous than her eyes, which he has to deal with on a daily basis, so really, this isn't fair at all.
Somehow, amidst the towel and her rambling and his nervousness, Luke hurries into his apartment to find the extra key to her house, and she stands in the doorway shivering, and when he glances up as she starts in about the cats throwing down outside, he curses inwardly and notices her bare shoulders, her arms wrapped around herself. He grabs his jacket off the chair and hands it to her, insisting she put it on before she freezes to death and everyone will blame him for her untimely death, and she proceeds to tease him about how he's going to arrange her funeral and what song they'll play as the priest speaks. She's up for anything Simon and Garfunkel, and he interrupts her in his frantic searching for the key to tell her if they play anything at her funeral, he's going to make sure it's something by Guns 'n Roses. She rolls her eyes and starts referencing Rolling Stone magazine, and that's when he gives up.
Ten minutes later he finally manages to locate the key buried in one of his desk drawers, and he follows Lorelai outside, ignoring her protests that he doesn't have to walk her home, and tells her it's for her own safety. The walk up to her house seems both longer and shorter; he wants to get her safely inside, but the situation would be so weird, if she wasn't Lorelai and he hadn't almost come to expect this type of thing from her, that he almost wants to stay with it as long as possible.
And it has absolutely nothing to do with Lorelai being in a towel.
They reach the front door, and Luke unlocks it and lets her inside, and she turns around when she steps inside, meeting his eyes, and this time, he doesn't look away. He looks at her and her eyes sparkle with something different than their usual gleam. She's close to him now; he's standing half in the doorway, and she hovers by the door, one hand on the knob, one hand clutching her towel. Her mouth is open slightly when she looks at him with an expression he'll be damned if he can read, but he recognizes a few things jumbled in it: her usual amusement, mixed with a hint of mischief, as well as something he hasn't seen often, and never in her, at that: the slightest trace of nervousness, and the only reason he recognizes it is because it's the same thing he feels every time he sees her, meets her eyes, just like now.
So that's what it looks like.
And then she laughs, thanks him and makes a joke about meeting again like this some time, and she is gone.
When the phone rings at the diner and Lane picks it up, she listens for a moment and hands it to Luke with a knowing smile, and something else, smiling with something else that makes him stare at her as she walks off. He answers the phone, and the voice on the other end complains about the porch railing being broken.
Lorelai is sipping a beer while she sits on a chair on the porch, her legs tucked under her thoughtfully, the yellow porch light casting a warm glow on her face in the darkness of the evening. There are insects buzzing throughout the yard and the sun has sunk far enough below the horizon to keep its pink clouds from quite fading into nightfall just yet. Luke hammers on the porch railing, trying to concentrate on not hitting his thumb, which is incredibly distracting when she's talking about God knows what, it doesn't really matter, it just sounds better coming from her. Luke takes a nail from his teeth and lines it up, hammers the nail in carefully, and he notices the job is taking far longer than he'd expected because she's just so damn distracting. He finally sets down the hammer on the porch, comes around up the steps, and picks up his beer from the railing on the other side, leaning against it and looking out into Stars Hollow as it grew sleepy, the first stars above twinkling amidst the dusty clouds. He takes a drink of the beer when he sees a small yellow glow floating toward him, and he recoils and instantly hears laughing behind him. Lorelai sets down her beer and walks toward him, grinning and telling him not to be afraid of the teensy firefly, it won't hurt him. He glares at her as she reaches past him, her body angled beside his, and catches the firefly between her hands, pulling her captive toward her. He isn't noticing the firefly so much anymore; he's realizing just how close she is, realizing that he could reach out and cup her face toward his, if he wanted, and he does want to, but he stays still. It's only the right thing to do, he reasons; after all, Lorelai is awfully caught up in explaining the whole firefly-catching thing to him, and he can't help but notice the glow around her dark hair in the twilight, the shadows dancing across her face as she talks animatedly about the firefly. She brings her hands up to his eyes, still cupping the firefly, and he can see a tiny glow light up the palms of her hands every few seconds through her fingers. He watches as she opens her hands a little, just enough to for him to see the firefly up close, and it shines in her hands with a small, urgent beam of expectancy, kind of like Lorelai.
He shifts his weight when he sees her looking at him with a little smile on her face, unlike any he's ever seen her wear before. He's starting to notice that the porch light seems a little too dim, and her eyes are a little too bright, and there's far too much going on behind that smile that he's unsure of. It's driving him crazy, her being secretive like this, and he does the only thing he can think of: he kisses her.
He leans in and kisses her gently, pressing his lips against hers almost carefully, and her instant reaction, a reflex, Luke thinks, is to tense up, but after a moment she relaxes slightly and brushes her lips across his, tilting her head a little bit and kissing him deeply, and Luke has to grab the porch rail with his free hand to steady himself. There are ten thousand things racing through his head right now, none of which he can get any grasp on at all, but the main theme would be something along the lines of I'm kissing Lorelai, and she's here, she's right here and – he blanks out when her tongue sweeps across his and her lips are softer than he ever thought possible. He realizes she's leaning into him, her hand is clutching his arm to steady herself as they kiss, and somewhere in the back of his mind this registers, that she needs to be steadied as well, and that's a good thing, right?
Then things come crashing back to Stars Hollow, she's pulled away, and he's both grateful for the opportunity to catch his breath and disappointed that it stopped. He opens his eyes, and the look he saw just before he kissed her, the same one she wore when he let her into the house that day with the towel (how he refers to it in his mind, The Day with the Towel), is intensified a hundred times over, especially the nervousness part. They are staring at each other for what seems like eternity, when Luke is distracted by a small glow coming from her hand every few seconds, and they both look down to see her palm light up once more in the darkness, and they both laugh nervously, and Lorelai holds up her hand and opens it, setting the firefly held in there free, and it floats off into the night, a lazy luminescence appearing as it spirals into the night.
And now they are alone, with nothing to distract them, and Luke looks down at the porch railing he's been gripping, and sees her hand still resting on his arm. He slowly looks up to meet her gaze, and has just barely caught a glance of the sparkle in her eyes shining blue even in the dim light before she's close, too close to him, again. Her lips meet his, and his hand leaves the porch railing to find her waist and pull her even closer, and his fingers knead the skin below her shirt before he even knows what he's doing. Her arms slide up his chest and around his neck, and Luke is sure she's going to break away any second to ask what the hell that pounding is, because his heart really is beating that loud.
This is what happens when he comes over to fix the porch, and when he leaves that night the porch is still broken, but both of them let a silent understanding pass between them that that means he'll have to come over again and finish.
When he does, he barely gets up the steps before they're kissing, when Lorelai sweeps out the front door into the glow of the porch light and the descending dusk, and she wraps her arms around him and he holds her, feels every inch of radiance as their lips meet, and he feels half stupid, like some lovesick teenager, and half unreal, like everything he ever dreamed was coming true. Then he goes back to feeling stupid, because his thoughts have turned to storybook phrases ever since that evening a week ago. He wonders briefly if that would be considered their anniversary, since that was the first time anything really happened, and then starts to worry about where he would take her for a six-month anniversary, because sixth months is a pretty long time, right? Then he mentally kicks himself for thinking anything while he's kissing Lorelai and he softly bites her bottom lip, just enough for her to feel it, and she moans a little and he thinks he might just go a little bit crazy.
When he leaves, and glances back at her silhouetted in soft yellow of the moonlight and darkened yellow of the porch light, he remembers he still hasn't fixed the porch.
They're finally doing Movie Night – Lorelai considers this a larger step in the relationship than he does, admittedly, but he finally relents after many, many mornings of her begging at the diner – she calls it "her new shtick" – coffee and shameless pleading. At first he refused because it is Movie Night and he is Luke, but after awhile he refuses just to be amused by her latest tactics. It's only so long he can go without kissing her, however, so he agrees to her damn Movie Night and she rents several things he's never heard of and is fairly sure aren't even in English. He shows up in his normal clothes, and she lets him in, and they watch.
It isn't nearly as bad as he thought, especially with Lorelai's head resting on his shoulder, where it fits perfectly under his chin, and her fingers absentmindedly playing with his shirt buttons as she watches, engrossed in several people onscreen yelling about their island resort being destroyed in a plane crash, or something. He really has no idea, because she keeps tugging at his shirt, and it's so distracting he can't even feign interest in the movie.
The credits start rolling, and some dinky music is playing in the background, and Luke finally notices that Lorelai has stopped fiddling with his buttons, which, while somewhat comforting, is also rather disconcerting, because he can't figure out why she stopped. Or why she's not babbling on about the movie. He glances down at the figure curled in his arms and realizes her breathing has deepened and steadied, and the soft rise and fall of her chest indicates that Lorelai has, quite unexpectedly, fallen asleep in his arms.
His immediate reaction is to panic. This wasn't planned. Not that he hasn't ever had a woman fall asleep beside him before, but this is Lorelai, and she makes any situation jump to about six thousand past the normalcy meter. He shifts uncomfortably, when she suddenly takes a deep breath, and he freezes, scared to death he's woken her. That's one thing ten years of Lorelai's daily diner trips have taught him, if nothing else – a sleepy Lorelai is a force to be reckoned with, as in, the kind not to touch with a ten-foot pole. However, she settles back against his shoulder, clutching the edge of his shirt, and watching her eyelashes flutter, swept across the curve of her cheek edged with soft shadows from the television, Luke reaches over unconsciously and lets his fingers brush her skin softly, just to feel her.
It's exactly like he knew it would be – rose petals, and he doesn't even feel remotely dumb for thinking so.
Three weeks later, after the porch has finally been fixed and Luke has one arm somewhat awkwardly tucked around her waist and she sips coffee and is actually quiet for the first time in all the time he's known her, he blurts out that he loves her, because he just can't hold it in anymore. Her eyes will give her away, he thinks, they tell everything, and he can't even look, so when she turns to him and opens her mouth, he leans in and kisses her breathlessly, because he's absolutely terrified at what she would've said.
Luke remembers one of their early dates, where they had actually stayed in Stars Hollow for once instead of driving out from under all the prying eyes, and not only that, they even allowed Kirk within a ten-foot radius. He had just opened up an ice cream stand, to Luke's eye-rolling and Lorelai's utter delight. She grabs his hand and whisks him toward the stand, where a Kirk is wearing a paper hat entirely too small for his head, and people are crowded around everywhere, and Taylor is loudly commenting on the plaque from the town council authorizing the stand, and Luke thinks he might even have heard his name being mentioned as the stark contrast to a fine establishment like Kirk's that allows decorations. Lorelai holds his hand tighter, and Luke forgets completely about wanting to smack Taylor, at least for a moment.
She wants to try every flavor, naturally, so Luke makes her promise to at least go one at a time. Before the night is over, they end up making their way through vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, rocky road, mint chocolate chip, cookie dough, and some odd cherry thing. Lorelai around ice cream is something to happily excited that he almost wishes Rory were here instead of him, because he can just imagine the two of them with Kirk's ice cream. He steps back to watch her wave a chocolate ice cream cone under Taylor's nose, and Taylor gets extremely flustered, trying to reprimand her, but unable to move for fear of Lorelai's awry ice cream managing to get on his face. Finally, Lorelai grins at Taylor and bounces away, coming up to Luke with her second helping of chocolate for the night.
It's captivating, even with that ridiculous ice cream cone. Damn it if her eyes aren't actually sparkling, and Stars Hollow glows with the scent of sugar in the air and lights dancing among the trees, and Lorelai being there just makes it all seem more…there goes those fairytale words again – magical. She leans toward him and kisses him, her lips soft against his, and she tastes like chocolate, and he closes his eyes and lets Stars Hollow fall away.
And when he opens his eyes, he hears catcalls from Miss Patty, and wants to disappear a little, but Lorelai reaches up and wraps her arms around his neck, burying her face in his chest, and he can feel her laughing, and so he closes his eyes again.
He finally decides to stop being so damn nervous because it's Lorelai and just do what he feels like doing, because it's Lorelai. So when they step inside her living room after going out to dinner one night, he kisses her, not softly, but not hard enough to hurt – just enough to let her know he means it. He reaches her shoulders and slides off her coat, and it falls to the floor in a pile that is quickly trampled by Lorelai's heels moving backwards toward the staircase, never breaking contact, kissing him with every intention she possesses behind it, and the fact that he knows it only makes it that much more intense. His jacket quickly follows her, and she kicks off the heels with impressive fluency by the time they reach the landing, where he puts her hands on her hips and presses her to the balcony, finally pulling away from her lips to kiss her neck, to find the hollow in her throat right above her collarbone, where, when his tongue traces the dip of her neck, she gasps and grips the banister, and he almost smiles, because he finally can take control.
He can feel her skin beneath his hands, it's her hips, and her back, and the arch he skims with his fingertips, and breathes into her shoulder, because Lorelai's fingers are tangled in his hair to steady herself, and the air seems thicker and his mind has lost most of the intellectual capabilities it previously possessed. Lorelai slides her hand under his shirt, and she leans forward, kissing his jaw line, tracing it with her tongue, and Luke rests his forehead against hers, their eyelashes brushing and she's so close, those huge eyes barely open, and the only thing that matters now is that they keep touching.
"Luke." He hears his name from somewhere very far away, somewhere right up close next to his ear, and it's breathless and impossibly desperate. Lorelai could never sound like that, she's always been the one in control of things, always steady – and when he pulls back and looks her in the eyes, her rounded, clouded eyes, he swallows hard and lets her thread her fingers through his and lead him up the staircase, her eyes never leaving his.
She wakes up and finds the bed empty; he stifles a smile as she sits straight up and looks more beautiful than he remembers, just like every morning. Lorelai's eyebrows are knitted, and she rubs her face for a moment before looking back at where Luke used to be laying, then around the room, then back to the bed, as if convincing herself he was, at one point, laying there. It's then he moves from his stillness in the doorway, and she looks up and sees her steaming cup of coffee in his hands as he approaches. He's unable to hide the grin any longer, passing the coffee off to her and easing back onto the bed, pulling the sheets up to cover the two of them. Lorelai sips the coffee for a few moments before setting aside and scooting closer to him, and he wants to run his fingers through her dark curls, feel the softness of the morning and Lorelai and the sun streaming through the window, so he does. A smile slowly spreads across her face, and he wants so badly to kiss her when she smiles like that, and she knows it, and he does.
This how he knows what her skin feels like, and her lips, and how he knows where he belongs, and how he knows he ended up in some fairytale she couldn't have spun better if she'd tried, and somehow, he's okay with that.
Thanks for reading! Feedback is muchly appreciated!