A/N: A spin on 6x08, because I love angsty Jess/Rory stories. I don't own Gilmore Girls. Thanks for reading!

The floor is covered in papers; even more so than usual. Scattered words, remnants of phrases. He sits with his head in his hands, attempting to hold in the memories before he does something truly crazy.

Maybe he'll send it, this time.

At least he's handling it better this year, Jess rationalizes. The first year involved a few beers and more than a few bruises. Attempts at distraction that never worked for a minute.

Sending this would be crazy. He picks up his pen again.

Rory,

He closes his eyes. She's there - eyes flashing with joy, flickering shut as she laughs at something he says.

Rory,

Happy birthday.

Another paper falls to the floor. The second year, he blocked her out of his memory. When that ultimately failed - not that he anticipated a different result - he wrote her a letter. It ended up like the ones drifting through the air now - crumpled and smeared with everything and nothing to say.

This is ridiculous. The chair grates against the floor as he stands.

He knows he's speeding, but his foot presses the gas harder, harder. Scenery whips by until he can't tell the grass and the flowers from the trees. Jess parks a mile out, crunching through the hardly trailed paths. It's not hard. He's been here before. She's been her before, with him.

He sits on the bridge, starting into the water and feeling uncomfortably sentimental. He's not supposed to be here. He's not supposed to be reminiscing about the days that spent here. He's definitely not supposed to still be thinking about her. Not after three years.

Jess yanks a piece of paper out of his coat pocket. It tears slightly, but he smoothes in out as best he can on the chipped boards of the bridge.

Rory,

The writing's shaky; whether simply from the boards or something more, he doesn't dwell on. Line after line appears, but he doesn't fully realizing what he's saying until it's been written. He doesn't try to counteract the words, exposed as they may be. Here he only has one sheet of paper. He writes about his book, his job, the sights in Philadelphia he still has yet to see. And every line, he can trace back to her.

"Come with me."

"I can't do that." He held on to that slight inflection in her voice, the initial hesitation; twisting it in his mind until the decline became hidden desire blocked only by fear and past mistakes.

"You don't think you can do it, but you can. You can do anything you want."

"You don't know me!" As always, with remembrance of those words, a sting that never completely went away intensified. Perhaps that phrase had hurt more than anything she'd said that day; more than anything she'd ever said.

He's been staring into the water, his reflection blurring and clearing in sporadic moments, tossed by the ripple of the water and the wind. Jess turns his attention back to the paper. The ink spills all the way to the bottom of the page. He signs it, then stands, folding the letter and placing it in his jacket pocket.

Maybe this time he'll send it. That would be something truly crazy. He doesn't even know what the letter says anymore.

Sending it would be crazy, but he passed that point a long time ago.

He doesn't send it. Not that day, not the next. A week passes but the gnawing does not. Jess finds himself making a series of phone calls, passing roads that he soon forgets the names of. There's only one destination as far as he is concerned, and as for how he goes about it, he doesn't really care anymore. Then he sees it - a flash of headlights soon dying out and plunging the world around him into darkness once again. Still, it can't hide what he's waited years to see again. Her hair swings around her shoulders as she climbs out of the car and though he can't see her face yet, he knows that she's more beautiful than she has ever been. Realizing that she'll be heading inside the house if he doesn't make an appearance, Jess steps out from the shelter of the shadows and swings the gate open, stepping in lightly. He watches her spin around. Surprise knocks her slightly off balance, yet she still holds a certain unique grace about her.

"Jess."

"Hey."

She sputters, tossing words off her tongue. He knows he should say something and save her the trouble, but he's too busy taking in the moment.

"I…" She shifts. "Sorry, that wasn't a sentence."

"I got the gist."

"What are you doing here?"

"I got a job - professional driveway stalker." He grins, trying to remember the last time he did such a thing.

She smiles back but it's quickly replaced by a blend of impatience, confusion, and anxiousness. "Jess."

He answers her, holding the conversation with more ease than he anticipated. However, he notices her ever-changing position, the way she continually watches for something. She never used to do this. She had always been absorbed in the matter of the moment and he wonders just how much has happened in the past few years. "I can come back later if you want."

"No, it's just, uh, we're kind of exposed here." That explained things. Her wary lapse of attention was a one-time thing.

As he follows her into the house and shuts the door quietly behind him, he remembers the last time he passed through this door. He only hopes she can forget more easily than he can. Jess faces her again. Instead of walking ahead, she's staring at him. He presses his lips together. Rory blinks once, twice, then walks forward. He follows without a sound.

Her room is the opposite of everything she once was - all pink and frills and expensive tastes. She avoids his gaze as she tells him about leaving Yale. He knows there's more to the story than what she's saying, but it doesn't change the fact that, for all appearances, she's given up. She's clearly uncomfortable, so he pulls the book out of his bag and hands it to her.

"The Subsect. Written by Jess Mariano."

"It's no misprint."

"Jess." She looks up, eyes wide. "You wrote a book?"

He nods. "You wrote a book."

"A short novel."

"You wrote a book. You sat down and wrote a novel. I always knew you could. This is so great, Jess. How did it happen?"

He drinks in her surprise and excitement. "I ran into these guys who run a printing press. They decided to read it, and…" He shrugs. "Well, here we are. Author distributed, too."

Jess watches her face carefully as she talks, her voice suddenly alive and filled with excitement, her face animated.

"What about a sequel? Is there going to be a sequel?"

"Read it before you get too excited about it."

"I know it's good, Jess. You've got such a great brain, I knew that if you could just sit down and stop shaking it around that you could do something like this. I knew it. I knew it."

"I know you did."

Rory freezes suddenly. A moment passes and his gaze flickers from the door to her face.

"Sorry," She looks back at him. "I thought I heard a noise."

He stands slowly. "It's getting late anyways."

She stands as well, rising within a foot of him. He wills himself not to lean closer. "I just wanted to show you this. Wanted to tell you that I…couldn't have done it without you. Any of it."

Her eyes shine - happiness, bashfulness and, if he's not imagining things, a twinge of sadness - and she shifts her weight. "Thanks." She says, voice soft.

Jess stares at her a moment more before asking, "I'm going to be around for a couple days. Can we talk again? Preferably above a whisper?"

"Yeah, I'd like that."

"Tomorrow night? Say…eight? I'll pick you up."

"Sounds good."

The happiness residing in his chest is quickly replaced by a myriad of other feelings when the silver Porsche pulls up. The man steps out, staring Jess down and sliding a hand around Rory's waist.

"Aren't you going to introduce us, Ace?"

"Jess, this is Logan." She looks back at smug man beside her. "Jess is an…old friend."

He wonders if he should leave now and spare himself what promised to be a terrible night. But she was closer to him than she had been in years, and he wasn't ready to give that up yet.

"Mind if we all go together?" Logan smirks over Rory's head, his other hand intertwined with hers.

"Not at all." He nods as Logan pushes past him, watching them drive off and grinding his foot into the ground below.

He hadn't been wrong about dinner. For twenty minutes, he suffered though Logan's sarcastic remarks to Jess and the sugarcoated words directed at Rory. Jess struggled to keep his temper in check, reminding him that he was doing this for her sake. For all those years and dinners that had a bitter ending that he could never take back.

Life wasn't any easier now that he was past his teenage angst. But she was gone, and that made it infinitely harder. Rory Gilmore had been a catalyst for the change in him over the years. He wondered if she saw that. And, like he had heard from so many people over the years, relationships were supposed to be give and take. From the way her hand trembled as she picked up her glass and shot a glance at the pompous young man beside her, it was her turn receive a nudge in the right direction.

Jess shot a clear glance at her, receiving an apologetic one with a meaning equally as clear. His eyebrows lowered slightly and he turned his head to study the other side of the room. Nothing much to see - just a woman wailing in the corner and people milling under the smoky blue lights. Nothing at all compared to the sight that sat diagonal to him. He fixed his eyes on a point on the opposite wall. No use in vying for something he had let slip away far too long ago.

He would save some of his dignity, at least in front of this ostentatious air-head.

A minute later, his eyes dart unwillingly back to her. She's doing it again - turning her head with no sign of ease, eyes flying over every object in the room.

Minute by minute, the tension rises and he knows he won't be able to hold his words in much longer. The explosion happens quickly and he smothers it as best he can, standing up and heading for the door before he can reverse any of the changes he's apparently made.

He's tugging on his coat when he hears it. His pulse quickens and he stops so suddenly it's as if he knew the voice was coming all along. "Jess, wait." She catches up to him. "Jess, I'm sorry."

"We shouldn't have done this." He shouldn't have done this. He should have known better, after all these years."

She doesn't agree, and he's glad, despite everything he's just told himself. "He's just in a bad way lately."

The words fly out before he can bite them back. "He's a jerk."

"I know. In there, definitely. He's not usually like this."

"I read that guy the second I saw him. I should have begged off."

"I didn't want you to." The words are quiet, and it's all he can do to keep from kissing her right then and there. He can only imagine what Logan would do if he found them.

"He better not come out here."

"He won't. Not for a while, anyway."

"What's going on?"

"I told you, he's not usually like this. He had a lot to drink, he's been traveling, his family's bugging him…"

"With you, Rory! What's going on with you?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean! I know you better than anyone. This isn't you." He says the phrase again, hoping she won't refute the claim.

"I don't know."

"Come on, Rory. You're living at your grandparent's place, being in the DAR? This isn't you! This, you going out with this jerk with a Porsche? We made fun of guys like this!" Back in the days when money didn't matter, when they were only fighting for peace and quiet and books and bridges and each other. Back when they weren't struggling with jobs and figuring out how the ever unfair world worked.

"Dropping out of Yale - Why did you drop out of Yale?"

"Jess." Her eyes beg with him to stop and though he knows he should, his eyes still bore into her.

"Yale isn't Stars Hollow. It isn't Chilton. I thought it was. I was stupid, but I did. And it's not. It's not!"

"Ror -" Jess reaches out.

"Don't."

His arm falls back to his side and he sighs, lowering his voice. "Look, I'm sorry. I don't know what happened. But this isn't you. You know it isn't. You don't give up just because something happened. What's going on?"

"I don't know." Rory crosses her arms. "I don't know." She's getting defensive and vulnerable and he knows that she'll figure it out on her own from here. As for him, it's the least he could do for all the pushing and pulling she's done, consciously and unconsciously, for years.

"Come on, you got all through all of high school with Paris, of all people."

A watery laugh spills out of her, so quickly he almost misses it. "She was my roommate at Yale."

"No way."

"Yeah. It's been interesting, between the life coaches and her old boyfriend - really old, I mean, and her new boyfriend and…"

He smiles, watching a glimpse of the girl he used to know appear on the surface.

Her phone buzzes. "It's…Logan. I-I should get back." The solemn shadow floods her eyes again.

Jess trips over his goodbye. "M-may-maybe we'll catch up at a better time."

He didn't come here to yell at her, though he doesn't really regret it. Some things need to be said, and they've both passed up too many opportunities already. Still, this all played out differently in his head.

What was he expecting, really? For her to still be single - just waiting for him? For her to fall back in his arms? It's been too long, he knows that.

The knowledge doesn't help the ache that consumes him as he reaches out. He wants to wrap her in his arms, bury his face in her hair. Tell her he's sorry, he's done running, done fighting with her.

Wasn't he just doing those very things less than a minute before? He may never be done and he hates that.

His hand brushes her arm. It's warm against the air; cold by all other standards. It takes all he has to make his feet move and focus on the empty street in front of him.

He closes his eyes. She's there - eyes flashing with joy, flickering shut as she laughs at something he says.

He remembers what he really came to say and turns around. "Happy birthday, by the way. Wasn't that a few weeks ago - Your birthday?"

She nods. She's not smiling now. Jess turns away again. A block away, he leans against the brick wall, closing his eyes again and shoving his hand in his jacket pocket. The crumpled texture of a once-carefully folded object brushes his hand. He pulls it out slowly, unfolding it and reading it without seeing the words. It's wrinkled and worn and the already crooked scratchings of ink have only been made worse by this condition.

He meant to give this to her. Meant to send it on her birthday. And, maybe, he didn't take it out of his pocket because he thought that somehow he would be able to give it to her tonight.

The paper falls from his grasp as he straightens and walks forward again. He doesn't see where it falls.

He meant to say so much more.