Author's Note: Response to what is not-so-fondly known as Cliche Challenges, which are a dare as much as anything. My friend gives me a cliche, and I have to find a way to make it not suck terribly. Or, at the least, try valiantly to do so.
Prompt(s): hands; unrequited love
Love was something Paris Gellar would admit to feeling in the presence of only a few people. Love was a weakness, a chink in her armor she could not afford and would not allow. The plan she held for her life did not have space for love. She had no qualms about becoming a clichéd high-powered workaholic woman-in-power who slept on the couch in her office because she worked ridiculous hours and had nothing to go home to but more work, four days worth of newspapers on her stoop, and perhaps a little television because she sequestered off no time or space for love in her life.
Despite that, she did love. She loved her family, though she could hardly think of a reason why, save for the fact that they were blood relations. She loved thinking—not learning, necessarily (which she rather disliked, because learning meant that there was something she didn't know and thus had to learn, which was another chink in her armor she could not afford), but the conceptual and analytical processes of thinking, putting pieces together, seeing the pattern and causality that others could not. She loved knowing (especially knowing more than others). She loved strange philosophical things like hermeneutics and reducto ad absurdum logic proofs and DeMorgan's Law.
She also loved things she would never admit to aloud. Looking pretty instead of intimidating or empowered, for the sheer purpose of looking pretty. Television shows like the abysmally inaccurate Law and Order and the moronic sapfest of Hannah Montana. Kelly Clarkson—both her music and the way her hair always looked incredibly perfect. Hands.
The latter was the only one she would never even acknowledge, even to herself, in any state of consciousness. Harboring a secret love for hands was for silly and self-centered emo teenagers with half-head haircuts and black fingernails who blogged about their tortured souls and the romance they found in their current bedmate's opposable thumbs. Yet she loved them anyways.
Tristan's hands had been coarse. Not rough, not grabby like she expected in her many daydreams that preluded their necessarily brief pseudo-romantic encounter. The skin of his palms had been calloused, probably from lifting weights in efforts to maintain his Adonis-like physique, but his fingers were soft against her skin.
Jaime's hands had been soft. She could tell the first time he awkwardly took hers as they walked out of the restaurant that he'd never done a day of hard labor in his life, and probably never even lifted a dumbbell like Tristan had (his scrawny build was proof enough of that). Every time his soft palm brushed against hers, as he twined his fingers with hers and offered her a gentle smile in his cutely awkward way, she'd imagined him as a lily-handed nancy boy from the Victorian era, all soft looks and soft skin and soft soft soft in every way.
Asher's hands were soft, but in a different way than Jaime's. Jaime's had been the hands of a boy, bony and spindly with bitten-down fingernails, where Asher's were the gigantic paws of a significantly matured man. The fleshy tips of his fingers had always smelled faintly like pipe tobacco and old books and, every time they brushed against her skin, had elicited an uncontrollable shiver throughout her body. He had always known the right ways to touch her, from a hand on her shoulder as he stood behind her in a library and pointed out a musty old volume for which he would unfailingly have an accompanying story about the author, to grasping her hips and pulling her towards him behind closed doors with a mischievous glint in his eyes.
Doyle's hands were chubby. Rather like the rest of him, really. He was almost always quivering in one way or another, clenching his hands into fists repeatedly, or drumming his fingertips on a desk, or—most often—tapping away at a laptop furiously. His fingers were shorter than hers, stubbly, and often stained with ink leaked from a pen; they would tremble ever-so-slightly every time they touched her, his inexperienced fumblings endearing but frustrating. Try as he might to be romantic and loving, his hands were too chubby, fingers too dumpy, to elicit any physical response from her body.
Then there was Rory. Paris could remember years ago in a closet at Chilton, spilling her heart out to Rory Gilmore over her rejection from Harvard, and feeling Rory's hands on her, holding her comfortingly, thin fingers running through her hair as she cried. More than once she'd caught herself studying in the library with Rory and staring at the other girl's pale hands instead of the textbooks open in front of her. Rory had the type of hands one would imagine belonged to a pianist, or a cellist— delicate and just a little bony, but not overly so, with long, thin fingers that moved deftly and definitively. Except, Rory's fingers moved so deftly with a pen grasped between the slender digits, or dancing along the keyboard of a computer. Her fingernails always looked perfect, but effortlessly so—as if she was born with flawlessly manicured fingernails that never chipped, never grew, and never looked anything but shiny, immaculate, and symmetrical.
Paris had, on a few occasions when Doyle was fumbling awkwardly with her belt buckle or bra clasp, ashamedly caught herself wondering if such obstacles would trip up someone with such incredible hands as Rory Gilmore. If those hands that looked like music and delicacy all wrapped up into one package of skin and bone would ever drag roughly across her skin as Doyle's did, if those thin, tantalizingly deft fingers would trip over clasps and clothes, if those annoyingly perfect fingernails would feel as grubby and stubbly as Doyle's fingertips did. Or would they slide smoothly across her skin, uncalloused palms gliding along effortlessly, delicate fingers conquering clasps and clothes with no contention, fingernails scraping incredibly and wonderfully against her skin?
Every time she caught herself with such thoughts, she mentally hit herself in the face with a very large book. One ought not think such thoughts about one's best friend, she scolded herself. Obviously. A best friend is a best friend, nothing less and certainly nothing more.
Yet no matter how many times she scolded herself, no matter how many times she hit herself in the face with an imagined book, no matter how many times she practically flogged herself for such inappropriate thoughts, she still found herself thinking them. At the most inopportune of times, she would find herself staring at Rory's hands as the fingers flew across a keyboard, tapping out two hundred words a minute on her latest piece of journalistic or scholastic brilliance, and she would flash to a highly inappropriate mental place where it was her skin under those fingers, the rhythm of the typing turned into a rhythm pulsing through her body, under her skin, leaving her hot and flustered and very certainly out of breath. And then Rory would pause, look up, offer Paris a smile—curious, or friendly, or concerned, or whatever flavor suited the moment—and Paris would feel just a little bit warmer, a little more flushed, and would fumble for a conversation topic or an excuse to leave the room. And that would be that, until the next time Paris stared at Rory's hands and let herself wander into another highly inappropriate mental place.
That wasn't a problem now, though. Because Rory was gone, off trailing political campaigns and rattling out one astoundingly perfect and brilliant column after another, every day, across the country. And Paris was not with her, and could not look across the living room to see Rory sitting at the kitchen table with papers and laptop and books spread around her, scribbling out notes with a pen held between her slender fingers. Instead, she would see Doyle fumbling around the kitchen, his woefully stubbly fingers manhandling a bag of coffee beans or beer bottle. She had never been in love before Doyle, but she imagined that she was content enough with him that she could call it love and that would be that, and so she did. In every phone call and email traded with Rory, she made mention of her happiness with her boyfriend—though if it was to keep Rory up-to-date or to convince herself, she wasn't sure. Every time Doyle got hung up on the clasp of her bra or the buckle on her belt, she bit back a sigh and actively forced herself to focus on his positive attributes, instead of wandering into a daydream about Rory's pale and surely skilled hands and fingers.
When Doyle proposed, she accepted without hesitation. This may not be love, she thought, but it was close enough for her tastes. He was something she was not ashamed to say she loved—unlike Kelly Clarkson and Law and Order and hands, especially wiry, pale, unblemished hands with perfect fingernails—and that was enough for her. The ring was modest but suited her, because he knew her, and the band he wore on his own hand somehow made his left hand look a little bigger, a little less chubby, a little less stubbly. Rory was the maid of honor at the tiny, simple ceremony Paris and Doyle opted for, and her own left ring finger remained unadorned, the pale skin looking lonely and empty, longing for a ring of its own to go with the three others she wore on other fingers with perfect fingernails. She hugged Paris tightly and kissed her cheek, and did the same for Doyle, and stood with Lorelei as they both waved while she and Doyle drove away to the airport, destined for a honeymoon in Scotland. And Paris allowed herself only one glance back as they drove off, memorizing in an instant how Rory looked in the simple blue bridesmaid's dress, hair tumbling around her shoulders, cheeks rosy from the excitement of the wedding, waving. The lights of a car pulling into the parking lot behind her silhouetted her for a brief instant, the shape of her hand as she waved happily after the car imprinting into Paris's mind. She tore her eyes away as Doyle took her hand, sliding his short fingers between her own bony ones and bringing them up to kiss the back of her hand lovingly, and she smiled at him and kissed him and told him she was happy.
And off they went. She sat next to him on a plane to Scotland, reading a copy of The Economist while he slept, though he still held her hand, holding it between his in his sleep. She looked at him once while he slept, at the gold band around his finger, and allowed herself a brief indulgence, wondering what it would look like if she sat next to Rory instead of Doyle, the gold band wrapped around Rory's delicate ring finger instead of his.
Then she shook her head, firmly told herself that was the last time, and turned back to the article about Robert Mugabe and his most recent atrocities. Because she may not love Doyle, but she was content, and it didn't matter that she loved Rory. Because she loved Rory the way she loved hands—secretly, in the dark recesses of her mind, sandwiched between the Rolodex filing system of every hand she'd ever held and the fact that she couldn't help but sing along joyfully with every Kelly Clarkson song she'd ever heard. Unadmitted, unacknowledged, unallowed. And that was that.