Then:
The tip of Logan's nose brushes the back of her knee, his words vibrating into the cartilage, "I'm done with ultimatums."
Rory's not completely on this plane of existence, what with the magical way he's doing that thing with his fingers, but she registers the scrapey sound of his voice, and the fizzy feeling in her joints, "What ulti-who?" Her toes curl in the sheets, her own fingers pressing into the tops of his shoulders.
He's only a thatch of blonde hair and busy hands that suddenly still, his face obscured by moonlight and her own soft flesh. "It doesn't have to be just one way, Rory. You, or," He's not going to say it, "Not you." He didn't say it.
He's an expert in pulling her apart and putting her back together, and she tries to savor it because she knows how temporary it all is. Every kiss, every flick of his tongue is a promise he can't possibly keep, but she's going to allow him the lie.
Afterward, they lay head to toe, tangled and sweat-slicked and languid, both of them drowsy and sated. Logan's left hand rests possessively over the knob of Rory's ankle, and she's tracing little circles on the sinew of his calf muscle, and it's been years since she's felt this full. Like when he kisses her, she has to remind herself that the sun is a star and does not actually exist in his smile.
Except the name that Logan won't say is still humming between them, ensuring that there is always going to be distance, no matter how few millimeters actually separate him from Rory.
And it's how she ends up here, isn't it? It's one night in Hamburg, and then subsequent nights in subsequent cities, and then it's just choices that no one seems to make for themselves.
If at all.
Now:
The phone vibrates against her bedside table and shakes Rory out of the heavy limbed, disoriented kind of sleep that makes it hard to discern dream state from reality. It's Logan's voice, rusty and bare. "Are you up?"
The LED lights form a 1,3,6 and it occurs to her that it's probably even later where Logan is. "Urm."
"I'm sorry, Ace, I just needed to...Go back to sleep."
"No, I'm up. I'm up." She sits straighter in bed, pulling the quilt up with her, as if he can see her nightgown through the phone. As if her modesty is even at play here now that she's pregnant.
She's still having trouble with the reality of all that anyway, no matter how many blood tests and notifications to her phone informing her of embryo sizes and their relation to a variety of legumes and root vegetables, as if she'll later be making a fetal soup, and not producing an actual, small human.
"How's the book?" He isn't calling to inquire about her writing. She's seen the news, and the internet, and her grandmother's texted her seventeen times in pristinely punctuated grammar about the private plane with the mechanical failure, and the media mogul and his wife contained therein.
"The book is fine." She doesn't mean to be so short with him. She's tired, and she's worried, and she's had that ongoing nightmare about baby arms stretching out of her belly button four consecutive nights; the connotations of which are far too terrifying to parse. But Logan has just lost both parents and she's already selfish in so many ways, this cannot be one of them. "Hey, are you okay?"
"Am I supposed to be?" His words are taut, a razor wire of too-thin emotion.
Her own guilt swells, softening her tone. "Logan."
There's a beat of silence, maybe ice cubes, maybe sheets rustling. "I wish you were here, Ace. I need a friend. I could use a friend."
"I'm here."
"But I'd rather it if you were here. This here. Not that here."
"Well, that's the here I am. Here here, not there here."
"Uh, Ace, is Grover about to conduct a physical demonstration of the words here and there for us?"
"No. Please, get some rest. Everything will look better in the morning." She hopes she's managing to convey some kind of patting motion with her tone, even over the phone.
"You gonna be here when I wake up?" He sounds small, and disembodied. Not nearly Logan enough, hollow.
"Logan." Less gentle.
"I'll send a car. Don't pack. Just come downstairs when the bell rings."
"I can't. I have to meet with my editor tomorrow, and-"
"No one cares if you Skype in. Just go downstairs when the bell rings, Rory. For me. Okay, that's not probably enough of an impetus. For the good of humanity. Think of the children."
He doesn't know how true that is and that fact isn't lost on her. Her bed is warm and her closet has never seemed so far away, but Logan's never sounded like this before. Not when he lost millions of dollars on a whim, not when he careened off the side of a mountain on a dare.
It could be Pavlovian, but when her doorbell rings, she's packed.
By the time the plane lands, Logan's already texted her the particulars for check-in at the hotel; code name, room number, concierge he likes (John Gregory Dunne, Presidential Suite, Salome, respectively). She doesn't have any bags really, just an overnight case, and the bellman doesn't really know what to do with her, so they stand awkwardly in the elevator together while it ascends the forty-five floors to Logan's room. The doors open into a cavernous foyer that is completely devoid of light, except for what the elevator provides, and Rory sincerely hopes that she can feel her way toward a bedroom somehow without knocking over any Faberge eggs or porcelain statues of Sisyphus.
"Rory?" Logan's voice is thick with disuse, but it helps her decide which direction to turn in the velvety darkness. She hasn't seen him since that morning in New Hampshire, hasn't spoken to him since then, either. A beautifully wrapped package had arrived shortly after they parted, no card. She never opened it, but she had had her suspicions.
"Yes, it's me. It's just...I don't know where the light switch," She bumps up against an ottoman that once probably belonged to an Ottoman, "I can't seem to find…"
"Marco?"
"Polo!"
"Marco!"
She arrives at the doorway, finally, a little sweaty from the panic of disorientation. "Found you."
"Marco." Logan says again, this time almost under his breath. Her eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and she can finally make out Logan's shape in the king sized bed. "So," he starts, rather conversationally, "I'm having a bit of an existential crisis here."
Half drunk bottles of scotch and whiskey and god-knows-what else give way to empty tumblers lined up along the bedside table, and the spent condensation glistens like crescent moons in the half-light.
Logan scoots up and over to make room and Rory repositions herself in the open space, kicking off her shoes and climbing in completely, careful not to allow any limbs to touch. Oblivious (or maybe, absolutely purposefully) Logan bridges the gap by resting his cheek on her shoulder, matching the rest of his body to hers. It takes her breath away a little, the straight line of warmth suddenly stretched along her limbs, the proximity. "I don't think I know who exactly I'm supposed to be if Shira and Mitchum aren't here to tell me not to be it."
"You are the only you that you can be, Logan." She resists pressing a kiss to his forehead, the soft hairs pushing at the top of her lip, but he's too close, and warm, and he smells like hotel linens and Scotch and so many years of her life.
"Come on Doctor Seuss, you can do better than that."
They lay in silence for a few minutes, Logan's head heavy, his hair tickling at her chin. The room itself is stale and too lived in, like Logan's not left this room, or this bed, or even this position in many hours, maybe even days. His muscles tense, instead of the intended relaxation, under her perfunctory back patting.
A headache builds behind her eyes, a mixture of surging hormones, caffeine avoidance and tension.
She tries to mind meld with Lorelai, what would she do, what would she say, how would she go about making this better? She can't think of where she'd find bread, let alone a toaster and a banana to mash on top for him, and she hasn't packed any sparkly Barbie band aids. My mom could fix this. Someone else could fix this.
A fresh terror invades her gut: she's going to be the only person who can fix something for someone else very soon.
Rory shifts under the weight of Logan's upper body, and eventually he sags against her, relaxing as she drops her hand between the wings of his shoulder blades and rubs.
"I'm so sorry about your parents, Logan." She means it, no matter what ill-feelings or resentment she's ever harbored toward the Huntzbergers, or all the ways that they laid tracks that locomoted Logan straight out of her life.
"Wanna hear something funny? Odette left me an hour before I got the call." He doesn't laugh. Something in Rory's chest tightens. "It was all very dramatic and French, and I think it may have impacted the jet stream in such a manner that it pulled my parents' plane straight out of the sky. So in a way, this is all my fault."
"You know that's not true."
"I know that I was engaged to someone I didn't love enough, and when she called my bluff, the sheer weight of my parents' pending disappointment crushed an entire airliner, and, in turn, a small vineyard in the Napa Valley. It's science, Rory. Science."
She hates herself a little for the butterfly wing of hope his break-up affords her, if even for a few seconds. "It's coincidence."
They lay quiet and still for what feels like forever, because Logan is neither of those things at a stretch, and she almost convinces herself he's asleep when he cuts into her thoughts with a blatant and forceful sigh.
Her circulation is being slowly siphoned off from the weight of Logan's leg across hers, and she gently pushes him off so she can extract herself finally from the bed. She putters around the hotel bathroom, washing her face, her hands, brushing her teeth and examining her face for physical evidence that could betray her own secret.
Four tall glasses are collected near the sink, and Rory fills each one to capacity with water from the tap, hoping to convince Logan that hydration is paramount to sleep.
She juggles the water glasses like she's working at the diner, and forces one into his hand as she sets down the others. "Drink. And when you finish that, drink more."
"Ah, my favorite drinking philosophy," he says drolly, but follows her orders to the letter, downing three glasses in short succession.
"I'm sorry I didn't get any ice. If you want, I can…" Rory trails off, folding her leg underneath her on the side of the bed and perching on her ankle.
He reaches out, hand still clammy from holding his glasses of tap water, "No, stay."
"I'll find some aspirin. You'll need it."
"I'm good, Ace, stay." Logan picks up the fourth glass, rolls it between his hands. "I'm still marveling at the fact that my ex-girlfriend shows up for me the second I call her but my real friends didn't."
"They don't know what to say, Logan. They don't know how to help you." She bites the inside of her lip, and is about to say, Neither do I, when Logan's fingers land on the angle of her jaw. She pulls back as his lips land sloppily on her chin, his other hand coming up to cup the side of her face. "Logan. What are you doing?"
"You're all I have left, Ace."
She can't imagine that it's true, so it must be both of their exhaustion talking, "I think it's time for sleep now. Maybe things will look clearer in the morning."
She feels the barest of nods against her shoulder, and the hand that had just cupped her face splays over the flat of her belly. Her first instinct is to flinch, but there's nothing there yet to hide, everything is still mostly concave. He mumbles something then, something that sounds eerily like, "I can't do this alone," but it's late, and he's still a little drunk, and if that's what he actually said, she'll eat her hat.
"G'night." She does kiss him then, a dry one to the crest of his hairline, the only part of him she can reach, what with her hands pinned by the weight of his arm across her chest.
He hums a few practically tuneless bars of the Golden Girls theme song, and she slowly acquiesces to the koala-like nature of Logan's nuzzling.
She almost has herself convinced, as she lays with her fingers threaded through Logan's fine, short, softer than she remembers, hair. This is friendship, nothing more. She repeats it like a mantra, willing it to be true, as she listens to Logan's breathing deepen, and certainly not as her own pulse slowly matches his.
She wakes a few hours later; Logan has the blackout shades drawn, so it could be anytime. She just knows it's the middle-she's not well rested yet, and she doesn't quite have to pee enough to warrant a trip out of the warmth of her bed-their bed. Logan's leg is looped casually over both of hers, his right hand on her left shoulder, arm snugly across her chest.
His eyelids are still closed and he's vulnerable, and she thinks, just kiss him. His lips are full and his cheeks are flushed pink and she's close enough that she can spot little imperfections across the bridge of his nose, tiny hairs out of place against his forehead.
She doesn't kiss him, but she thinks about it for the rest of the night and wakes up the next morning still wondering why she didn't.
Friendship.
That is exactly why however many hours ago, she boarded a plane in yoga pants, no bra, and mismatched athletic socks to fly across a zillion time zones in the middle of the night with zero advance notice. Friendship.
(Later, she finds herself having to really build up to an acceptable level of outrage when the news page of her email account touts her bedraggled, no bra wearing self with the caption, "Mystery Woman Rushes to Aid of Grieving Huntzberger Heir.")
She shifts, and his hand slides down from her shoulder, hitching in the pocket of her stretchy pants, the weight of it balanced on the curve of her hip. Logan murmurs something sleepy and warm into the back of her neck, and Rory settles back against the planes of his chest.
They spend the day drifting in and out of naps, between room service deliveries and pots of fresh coffee. Early pregnancy means that she could happily Rip Van Winkle her life away, but something causes her to stir, and she struggles to find her bearings.
Logan's computer provides an eerie blue light that illuminates the area nearest the closet, making the hanging clothing seem alien and strange. Logan is nowhere to be found, until she realizes there's a low murmuring coming from behind the bathroom door. After a few minutes, the door opens, light flicking quickly off. Rory's eyes readjust as Logan removes his bluetooth and places it gently on the desk next to his glowing Macbook. He doesn't look much worse for the wear, even after all the drinking and his clear and present exhaustion.
"Did I wake you?" He says softly, sliding back into the high backed desk chair. "I'm sorry."
"No, it was just," She doesn't want to admit how her body seemed to sense his absence, even in sleep, "I had to pee."
"Paris never sleeps, so." He shrugs, as if that explains everything. "Bathroom's all yours."
"Just tell me if you want me to go. If I'm an imposition."
"You aren't." His face goes a little blank. Inscrutable. Like they both forgot that he called her here. "There are just a lot of...Odette called."
A litany of comforting platitudes run through her head, and she ends up with, "Gotcha."
She tries to ignore the quizzical look that passes over Logan's face, but instead shuts herself in the bathroom, knees up to her chin as she sits on the closed lid of the toilet bowl and attempts to calm her breathing. Logan's moving around in the room, presumably reacquainting himself with the life of a human being, or with another bottle of scotch, and she's in here hiding because she's a big, fat chicken.
When Rory emerges, teeth freshly brushed and ego gently dented, Logan's sitting cross-legged on the bed, laptop balanced on his knees. "Do you think that I could talk my wedding caterers into moving the menu into more of a wake direction? Is filet mignon considered gauche at a funeral?"
She shrugs, because she genuinely has no idea, but he has to have people who can do this for him, so he doesn't have to. Rory slides onto the king-sized mattress, lightly closing the laptop cover and almost catching Logan's fingers in the process. "What did Odette have to say?"
"She wanted to reiterate why she left me, I presume."
"You didn't talk to her?"
Rory can't tell what Logan is thinking, she almost never could. It occurs to her then that it's probably because most of the time, he doesn't really know either. "It wouldn't change anything."
"I'm sure that she's sorry, that she regrets-"
His expression narrows, and Rory sees that Huntzberger streak of anger burble up to the surface of Logan's usually placid eyes, "I don't want to hear what she has to say right now, Rory."
"But you will. Maybe not right now, but you guys were going to-"
"If I've learned anything from all of this, Ace, it's that discretion is the better of part of valor. Hands down."
"That isn't you. You put yourself out there, you're the risk taker, the brave one."
"That used to be me. I was a kid then, and I'm not a kid now. She can keep her phone calls and her regrets and I'll not be in the position to take anymore risks. Not with her." Not with my heart, is what Rory hears, even if it's not exactly what Logan means.
The day of the funeral is a mess. In its infinite wisdom, New England decides it is the exact right time for twelve inches of snow and ice to sweep through in November, stranding travelers in airports and overbooking hotels all along the eastern seaboard.
Logan is a mess. Honor is a mess. Finn and Colin are stuck somewhere in an Econolodge because of the storm and routinely send inappropriate text messages of themselves emptying their minibars, and then later, of other people's minibars in rooms that they appear not to be invited to. Emily Gilmore refuses to attend the funeral on the grounds that, "It is impolite to dance on the graves of the deceased, Rory," and she sends a large, waxy-leaved plant instead.
After the minister has gotten back into his limousine, Logan turns to Rory, his eyes rimmed red, his hand flat on the small of her back. "I should have just thrown them the Viking funeral. They would have hated that."
"Come home with me." The thought isn't even fully realized when it leaps from her mouth, but she can't imagine just leaving him all by his lonesome, not with his friends stuck god knows where and his sister having her own family to deal with. This is just being a good friend.
Proving once and for all that his sense of self preservation is well-honed, even in his grief, Logan waves her off. "Why Miss Gilmore, I'm scandalized."
"Shut up. The house is big and lonely and you shouldn't…"
"Be alone? You can leave the shoelaces and belts, Rory, I'm not on the verge of a nervous breakdown." He slips on his sunglasses, hiding the new sad lines around his eyes, and stuffs his hands deep into the pockets of his wool overcoat. He isn't eating like he should, and she knows he isn't sleeping, because she's getting manic emails from him about random impersonal topics at all hours, and she can do this, if he'll let her.
"C'mon, Huntzberger, it'll be like," she doesn't want to say the old days, because that wouldn't be much of an advertisement, "You need to regroup."
"Naw, Ace. I'm good." Logan leans over and brushes the side of her temple with his too cold lips, pushing her in the direction of her car. "Thanks for, you know, the rescue."
But somehow, three days later, Logan is barefoot in the kitchen of her grandparents' Hartford house, studiously chopping leeks for a soufflé. "Can you handle the salad?" He smiles at her, the way that makes her chest feel achey and tight, and she nods dumbly.
She can, and does, handle the salad. And then she sets their two place settings at the now drastically reduced dining room table, the joyless furniture now living between someone else's joyless four walls, or perhaps, making another family exceedingly joyful, a task that could not previously be accomplished here, by that particular dining room set.
They eat their meals in a generally companionable silence, both of them probably using the time to figure out how either of them ended up here.
Every minute she spends with Logan is another minute she should be telling him the truth about what is going on with her, but every minute passes with nary a mention. Yesterday, he found her passed out on her laptop keyboard, her forehead creating a rather impressive key smash and inserting screens of gibberish into one of her re-writes, and the day before that, she was using the Wall Street Journal as a makeshift blanket, snoring away in the breakfast nook.
"So, Ace, you know that I do not judge lest I be, you know, judged. But should I be worried? I know some really discrete rehab centers, you know, so you could get some help. If you needed it, of course." He's so earnest and sincere, and it breaks her heart, knowing that she's just experiencing the drain of the first trimester and maybe she should take his suggestion, because she's a lying monster who lies, and if that doesn't resemble some kind of addiction, she doesn't know what does.
Instead, she emits a hysterical sound that is a mixture of a sob and a guffaw, her shoulders shaking, and her hand flies to her mouth. "No, Logan, no."
Logan stands stock still for a moment, his eyes scanning her face in attempt to make sense of what is happening in front of him, and deciding whether or not he should be offended or sympathetic. He opts for sympathetic, and brings her a bowl of matzoh ball soup that he seemingly produces out of thin air, assuming that she's clearly coming down with the flu.
After she finishes the soup, he drops a kiss on the top of her head and takes her to her bed, folding down the comforter and fluffing her pillow before she sleeps. The guilt she holds seems to burnish and bloom in the depths of her stomach, then.
A few afternoons later, Rory stands stoically and watches as Logan deposits each and every electronic device that he owns-two cell phones, a satellite phone (she doesn't ask, he doesn't offer), a tablet, two laptops and an iPod-into a giant cardboard box and seals them with a resounding thwap of packing tape. There's no return address, and in Logan's incomprehensible scrawl, the label is addressed to the Huntzberger Publishing Group. He shrugs at her, his dress shirt unbuttoned to reveal his v-neck underneath, sleeves rolled up like he's just been repairing a leaky pipe instead of preparing items for post, "I feel like my family would appreciate the ceremony in this," gesturing to the corrugated collection of ways to no longer reach him.
Rory has no doubt that they would.
They move around each other's routines easily, like this is the life they'd always been meant to have. Logan in his seemingly unending collection of threadbare band t-shirts and five days of beard growth, legs thrown casually over the arm of an original Chesterfield, reading Slaughterhouse Five for the fiftieth time and pouring the next fifth of something down his throat; Rory, steadfastly editing and revising and hunching fastidiously over hundreds of index cards that detail scenes from her novel, which she shuffles and reshuffles until her eyes cross and her shoulders ache with fatigue.
Some nights, he ends up in her bed. They don't talk about it, before or after. There isn't a negotiation or a treaty or an embargo; just Rory sometimes wakes with Logan curled around her parenthetically. There are no sides of the bed, just a tacit agreement that they both remain comfortable and still, and that no one snores.
She wakes up some mornings and he isn't there; the empty space burns a little in the pit of her stomach. Like he's rejected her somehow, when there's been no reason to believe she's ever accepted him in that same way. His absence is like an ache that flares up in a long-since healed break, one that heralds rainstorms and causes her to move about more slowly during her day.
It's one of the slow days, when the revisions feel like she's sludging through mud up to her kneecaps and no amount of crackers, sleep, and ginger root seem to quell the lingering nausea that's plaguing her, when Logan stumbles upon what Rory thinks is a benign piece of mail, but turns out to be more.
He's holding something that the nurse handed her after her last doctor's visit, some pamphlet about flu shots during pregnancy, which she had accepted numbly and just stuck into her bag without a second thought. That had then stuck to the back of a file folder, which she had laid on the dining table, which Logan had begun to clear for a meal that he had just painstakingly prepared.
It is that chain of events that brings her to this moment, as her heartbeat crashes inside her rib cage and any sense of fragile normalcy they'd built here dissipates into the frosty New England night.
"You weren't going to tell me," Logan says more to himself than he does to her, and she has to grip the knob on the dining room chair to keep from pitching over, as all of her blood drains directly from her heart and into her toes. His face is completely still, but his feet are not, and he's gone before she can answer.
Rory expects the walls to shake with the slam of the door, but it's just an easy creak and slow click to close, and she pauses to allow her her blood stream time to re-route and resume carrying life-saving oxygen to vital organs.
He hasn't gotten far, just as far as the front porch, seeing as he's shoeless and keyless and now, faithless. Logan leans against the topiary, shoulders moving in that, I'm taking deep cleansing breaths kind of way, but he doesn't turn or acknowledge her when he hears the front door open.
"Logan, I-"
He holds up a hand, and her eyes trace the way the veins stand out on the backs of them, one of his cuticles has a tiny half moon of a scab. "Not now, Rory."
She supposes that should be that, that this is when she does what she's supposed to, and turns around to leave him to do whatever he needs to do in this moment. She isn't that emotionally intelligent, apparently. "I didn't mean for-"
"You did, you did mean for," he says, the bite evident, "You didn't forget, it wasn't the timing. This, this was purposeful. You meant to." She doesn't have to see his face to know that his eyes are narrowed, his jaw tight. The hand he had held aloft is now caressing a branch of the tiny shrub, toying with a leaf, picking at it until it finally floats into the pot below. "I need some time, Rory. Can I please just have that?"
She nods, even though he's not looking at her, and slips back into the house. She's washing dishes at the sink, just something to do with her hands, when she hears the front door open. After a few minutes, careful footsteps enter the room, and she feels the unfamiliar scratch of a beard at her neck, as Logan hooks his chin over her shoulder. His breath puffs against her jawline and he very carefully slides his arm around her waist, like she's the horse that could spook.
It's been weeks since they'd had a conversation that didn't somehow end up dangling in some way, like one of them was always leaving something unfinished. Or waiting for the other to fill in a gap that never seems to get filled. That morning in New Hampshire, she never meant to see or speak to him again. The Logan chapter of her life was finished, and she'd put it to bed, disconnected from him and the life that didn't exist anymore. He had had Odette and a dynasty to carry on, and she had had to realize she was the piece that didn't belong.
"I didn't want to...you're not obligated in any way to be a part of anything that you aren't ready to be a part of. I know what that's like, to feel like you're being pushed," and she didn't, not really, because look at Lorelei and how she was the immovable object in so many versions of so much of their history, "I can do this on my own. It's okay. Maybe it's better that way."
His ribs move with his intake of breath and he presses closer to her back, reaching around to quiet the faucet. "I understand why you'd think that, but you're forgetting one thing, Ace."
She's afraid to turn her head, to meet his eyes, or to see what new layer of pain she's caused him with this revelation, both the pregnancy and her utter lack of faith in him, or herself, "What's that?"
The room is silent save for a droplet from the faucet into the full pan and the squelch of the dishrag abandoned in the sink, and Logan's slow, calm breath near her ear. "You never asked me to stay."
Rory should say, I didn't know how to, or if I could, but instead, she leans farther back into his touch. It feels safer there, with the squares of their shoulders aligned and Logan's feet between hers, his heartbeat stuttering against her back. "I never did, no."
Finally the hand that's landed on her hip sneaks around to her stomach, the backs of his fingers knuckling under her t-shirt, "You could ask me now, if you wanted."