A/N: I was watching 'Jews and Chinese Food' for old times sake, and inspiration struck. Just a little Rory/Marty oneshot.
Disclaimer: I am not the genius behind these characters. If only AS-P would hand them over...
"Sure. We're still friends."
The way he said that nearly broke her heart. She could tell, by the look in his eyes, that they weren't quite friends anymore. Not the way that they had been.
His parting words to her were so formal, so… cold. Her gut told her she wouldn't be seeing him again for a long while, that she should say something, anything, to keep this moment from haunting her memory.
But she didn't. She just watched him walk up the stairs, staring long after his shoes had disappeared from her view.
And next weekend, just as he promised, there was an envelope shoved beneath her dorm room door, Rory printed neatly on the exterior in careful, familiar handwriting.
Reaching inside, she pulled out two crisp twenties, and an unorganized stack of crumpled fives and ones. As she set about sorting the bills, a small scrap of paper fell from the pile. It was worn thin from erasing and rewriting, and the short sentence that he'd settled on was almost illegible, the words nearly lost amidst pencil smudges and eraser tracks.
He's lucky to have you.
She wasn't quite sure why the phrase brought tears to her eyes, but it did. Giving up on organizing the money, she rummaged for a pencil in her desk drawer. On the back of the paper, in small, tidy letters, she wrote a short reply:
Some girl is going to be lucky to have you, too.
And somewhere, in the back of her mind, she wondered if that girl was her.
End