AN: Hi, dear readers. Two in a week, you might ask? Well, consider yourselves lucky! This one-shot was something that's always been in my head, and last night it just came all out. I want to thank my girl DSLeo for betaing this.

Note that the rating is a strong T. I've debated making it M, but it's not smutty or graphic, so T it is. Write your complaints to my mom. You're not getting a refund. This takes place in the second half of season four, somewhere between "A Family Matter" and "Nag Hammadi [...]".

Just A Chat Between Friends

After all those weeks of dating Jason, Lorelai just couldn't decide when it exactly had started. Probably with his birth... At first she was courted, then disappointment by his lack of commitment on their first date. Then came the first sex, followed by a night spent in miserable loneliness in his guest room. And now this. In retrospect, it had come on so gradually, she felt like a rabbit that had been put into a pot of water and now that the pot was on the stove she couldn't tell when it had become too hot for her. Even when, in fact, it had become too cold. Being pampered after a great first night together was one thing. But spending another night alone in the room next to his when it hasn't been that great, at least not for her? That was not what Lorelai had signed up for.

She checked the alarm clock on the designer nightstand. It was just after nine. He had to get up early the next day, so they had had an early supper followed by an early orgasm. On his side. She got out of bed and put her clothes back on.

She knocked on his door and felt like she was 17 again, when knocking on doors had been part of her job on a daily basis. She poked her head through the door.

"Jason, I totally forgot that Sookie told me to be at the inn super early tomorrow. So I'm just gonna go now."

The lie had crossed her lips more easily than she had anticipated.

"OK," came the reply of a half-asleep Jason.

She slipped out of his apartment and was in Stars Hollow in record time. She drove by the diner and saw Luke behind the counter. The chairs weren't even up yet. Maybe she could help him close up faster.

Prepared to hear the bells announce her presence, she was surprised to find the door locked. The noise of her body slamming into it had alarmed Luke. He turned around and all but jogged across the diner to let Lorelai in.

"Hey, are you all right?" he asked worriedly.

Lorelai rubbed her elbow and arm, and uttered a quiet "Yeah."

When she sat down at the counter she couldn't help but wonder. "Since when do you lock the door so soon? It's half past nine."

"Normally, I wouldn't," he explained as he poured her the remains of the coffee in her favorite mug. "But Kirk wouldn't leave me alone. He came back three times to ask me if I could come home with him to distract his mother so she wouldn't notice him taking Lulu to his room."

"Yikes," said Lorelai before she drank from the mug.

"What about you?"

"What about me?"

"You look fancy tonight." Of course he had noticed her clothes. He had to force himself to look anywhere else than into her eyes or he might drown in them one day.

"Fancy shmancy," she mumbled.

He ignored her comment. "You wanna donut with your coffee or something?"

She eyed him suspiciously. Had he just offered her a donut without her asking? "Is it poisoned"?

"No."

"Is there a tiny little man inside so you can monitor my food intake whenever I'm not eating here?"

He rolled his eyes. "You got me. It's not poisoned, but I am part of a pioneer project in monitoring food intake."

"I knew it!"

"So? You gonna take the donut?"

"You have to ask?"

He slid the saucer over the counter, a well-practiced move she always enjoyed. She was a bit surprised that he didn't bag it for her. A plate meant consumption in the diner. He had made that clear after the bagel incident of '97.

"I'm trying to eat it quickly," she commented as he went on with his closing down routine. He was just cleaning the coffee maker.

"No need to hurry."

"Not trying to get home to the missus?" she asked. She just had to. It was half masochism, half evil. Luke belonged to Stars Hollow like the gazebo. Him living elsewhere was the same to her as if someone had a house without a living room.

He turned his body only a little, but he saw her from the corner of his eye. "No."

That was curt, noticed Lorelai.

"And you? Not staying at that boyfriend of yours?"

She was thrown for a bit, but quickly recovered. "No." After a moment she added, "Since when do you know?"

"A couple weeks at least."

"How?"

"Overheard Babette and Patty," he said. He left out the part about him almost stumbling into Caesar after finding out.

"I didn't really wanna spend the night at his place. Especially tonight."

Luke wrinkled his forehead as he tried to figure out what she possibly could have meant by that. He turned around to face her. "He didn't... do anything, uh, to you, did he?"

"God no!" Luke gulped in relief. "I wish..." she mumbled.

"Don't joke about that!"

"Sorry."

"And what did you mean exactly?" he dug deeper. He had abandoned the coffee maker and was now in his usual spot, opposite of Lorelai behind the counter.

"You don't really wanna know..."

"And why would I have asked?"

"Because you're nice."

"I am not."

"Oh, you are nice."

"If you say so..."

"I'd say so."

"You dodged the question."

"Believe me, you don't wanna know."

"Lorelai. Why would I ask you if I didn't wanna know? Have I ever been mistaken for a chatty person?"

"Fine. At your own risk." She drained the rest of the coffee. "The evening didn't go as planned. I wasn't exactly satisfied."

She could see the wheels turning in his head. The deep crimson in his cheeks signaled that he had understood what she was trying to communicate. Luke wished he could disappear in that moment.

"I knew it was too much for your delicate ears... They say when you get married you'll get prudish."

"Stop it! I doubt I would have reacted any other way had I not been married," he defended himself. "Besides, what did you expect?"

"I didn't expect anything. Aim high, expect nothing, isn't that what they say?"

"How the hell should I know? Who are you referring to anyway when you say 'they say'? And what's with the proverbs?"

"Well, it's proverb Thursday."

He grunted in response. They were quiet for a while.

"If you wanna talk, I'm here," he offered.

"While that's a nice offer, I don't think I can talk to anyone about it, not even Sookie."

Silence.

"I'd need a lot more that a warm cup of coffee and a spy donut before I'd talk about that," she announced.

"I have some Jim Beam in the store room."

"Are you serious?"

"Always." And with that, he went around the corner, and when he came back with the bottle, she slightly shook her head.

"What gives?" she asked him in bewilderment.

"You wanted to talk, so let's." He grabbed two glasses and filled them each with a finger of whiskey.

She downed the content of her glass faster than he could grab his. To his surprise, she didn't immediately start babbling about her problems. She seemed to practice phrasing what she was about to say.

"Being referred to as 'Umlauts'," she started, "may have been a smart thing at 13, especially after the prank he pulled then. But being called Umlauts in any sexual content has turned me off so much, that if I had a penis, it would have crawled back inside me."

Luke gave her a more than puzzled look. He followed her lead and drank his whiskey, then he said to her, "I have not the slightest clue what you just said."

"OK, I'll start at the beginning. I'm dating a guy called Jason who I know from childhood because our parents have been running in the same circles forever. When I was 13 we were at summer camp together, and he found it hilarious to rock a boat so hard that I fell in the pond. With my clothes on. The cold water had its effects on my body and I wasn't wearing a bra, so I was christened 'Umlauts'."

"Umlauts?" he asked, still without a clue.

"You know, the two dots above vowels? Mötley Crüe?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, my wet upper body kinda resembled the two dots..."

And the penny has dropped. "Oh. Oh!" he said, even more embarrassed now that he was forced to think of a naked and wet Lorelai with erect nipples. He immediately refilled their glasses.

"So, um, he called you that? Umlauts? Tonight?"

Lorelai took a sip. "Well, yeah, but it was kinda in the wrong situation."

"You mean, during..."

"It wasn't during during, but definitely in a moment leading up to... it."

Luke downed his second glass of whiskey. There it was, the moment he had dreaded for years. A talk with Lorelai about sex. And he had encouraged her to open up. What on earth was wrong with him?

"And it wasn't just that," she added, finishing her second glass. "After that I kinda had a hard time getting... there. And I can't keep being pushed into his guest room. He can't not finish me and expect me to sleep in the next room."

Luke wished he could cut off his ears now. "More?" he asked her, the bottle already in his hand.

"One more," she nodded.

Her words haunted him in his head. This putz had the audacity to send her another room after sex? And not do his job first? Down his throat went another shot of whiskey.

"So, what did you do?" he asked. It was all the alcohol. He never would or could have asked her this sober.

"What do you think I did? I did the job myself," said Lorelai, raised her glass and emptied it.

It was pure torture. The images she put in his head drove him close to insanity. And beyond arousal. Thank God for the counter between them. This was wrong on so many levels. For one, he was married. Secondly, he and Lorelai were friends. And thirdly, they had never had that kind of relationship. They had moments of emotional openness, but never like this.

The alcohol was having its effects on Lorelai as well. "If only he'd be better equipped..."

Luke didn't know if he could trust his ears.

"You know, there's always that moment when you first see each other naked. A woman hopes he'll grow when he doesn't show. I mean, not in a humongous way. I don't want him to poke my liver. I should stop babbling on about this stuff. You're a married man now, you don't have problems like that. Not that you'd have problems like that anyway, so..."

He didn't leave her in silence. "When you're married, it doesn't mean you don't have problems in that area. Just because you have someone at your disposal for sex doesn't mean you'll get to use them for it all the time."

"Well, it saves you a trip to the next bar to get to know someone for sex."

"I haven't had sex in weeks," he blurted out.

A moment worthy of a spit take and an empty glass in front of her. Today just wasn't her day.

"But I mean, that's normal, right? Going through a dry spell."

"You ask me? I've never even went through a wet spell, no pun intended. I guess a dry spell is normal. When you've been married for ten years. But in the first year? Even my mother has made comments about not having been able to keep her clothes on when she was first married to my dad. And that's Emily Gilmore talking, the queen of etiquette."

Luke turned silent again.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to make you feel bad or anything," she shrugged and gave him a half-smile.

"It's OK. You didn't. If there's anything you did it's pointing out that I'm possibly at fault for not satisfying my own wife."

Now it was Lorelai's turn to want to cut her ears off. She knew Luke wasn't exactly a Samantha, but at the same time she hadn't expected him to open up about those things. Taboo things. At least taboo in their friendship. She felt like she had better go home before said something to him she'd later regret.

"Maybe I just should shave more often..." he said, but Lorelai didn't get what he was trying to say.

"Huh?"

"Nicole told me she kinda hated my stubble on her skin. It hurt her or something."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

Lorelai raised her hand to his cheek and stroked him. "Huh."

"What?" he wanted to know.

"I don't think it's prickly. Unlike you," she grinned.

"Haha."

"Well, what do you know. Proverb Thursday has become pun Thursday."

"I guess it feels different on more delicate skin than on the palm of your hand."

"Anyway," Lorelai said as she got up from the stool. "I'm going home now. I hope I didn't stay too long."

"You didn't. It was either this or talking to Mrs. Gleason."

"Aw, you always know how to make me feel appreciated," she said sarcastically.

When she was almost out the door, Luke simply had to ask her. The whiskey had lowered his inhibition enough and his curiosity got the better of him. "Lorelai?"

"Hm?"

"Did you, um, fake it? I mean, for him?" he quietly asked, his cheeks redder than before.

"Hell no!" came the response. "He might as well know that there's room for improvement."

And with that, she was out the door. Luke exhaled and couldn't hide his smirk. Of course Lorelai would say something like that. He watched her as she passed the Jeep and walked home. It confirmed his choice to sleep upstairs that night. Sometimes it just wasn't worth faking it.

The linguist in me needs to let you smart Gillies know that Umlaut technically is the wrong term here. Umlaut means the transformation from a to ä, o to ö and u to ü in the German language. The two dots on their own are called dieresis. They can be found on all vowels, and I've seen them in French, Spanish and even English (hello Brontë sisters!). Also, the correct plural for Umlaut is Umlaute, not Umlauts. If I don't deserve a review for sharing that knowledge, I don't know what else I could have done...