We don't need to go shopping
Luke had spent the last half hour vainly trying to get Lorelai to stop crying. His flannel shirt sleeves were soaked and one of them had a rather disgusting amount of mucus, which was the reason he decided to strip down to his dark green Henley shirt even though the weather was really quite nippy, and if Lorelai hadn't been in the middle of a crying jag he would have never allowed his flannel to get so wet, or at least he would go upstairs and get a fresh shirt. Hell, he'd even left his jacket hanging in the stairwell back at the diner, because when Lorelai ran out of the restaurant, he knew that his one and only job was to follow her until she was able to say whatever she needed to say.
So here he was, sitting on the front porch of the Crap Shack in the darkness, shivering, and it meant nothing because Lorelai was still crying and making no sense whatsoever.
"We don't need to go shopping," she sniffed, in a brief pause while her tear ducts tried to convert more coffee to tears.
"OK," he said slowly, grateful that he finally understood a complete sentence. Luke had never really caught on to the language of sobs. "We can, when you do want to, but we don't have to. Whatever you want. Shopping. No shopping. The mall. I'll even eat one of those damn soft pretzels if you want me to."
Giving no sign that she'd heard a word Luke said, Lorelai continued. "Because, you know, Sookie, and I thought that maybe we should go shopping for clothes that won't fit either of us because they'd be too small, way too small, but they'd still be really cute because there'd be some plaid there, and some flannel, and you know my style, so there'd be a lot of that if that was what we needed. And we'd have to get some apples, because I'd have to have the apples if we were going to need the too-small clothes." She buried her face in his shoulder, beginning her moisturizing work on his Henley.
"I'll get you all the apples you want, sweetheart. We can go to the cider mill and get apples, and cider and hard cider, and if you want apple dolls, Liz has an in with the apple doll booth owners and you can have a whole family of apple dolls… "
"Apple dolls! A whole family!" Her wailing rose in intensity.
OK, that was the wrong thing to say. Luke was grateful that Morey and Babette were gone to Atlantic City for a jazz festival that weekend. The rest of the neighbors didn't matter because they'd never liked how loud the Gilmore Girls were and the clown at Rory's eighth birthday party had taken a wiz in their front yard. Lorelai hated them even more after that because she blamed them for calling the cops, which resulted in the clown being taken downtown and kept for two hours in the closet that Taylor Doose called the Stars Hollow jail.
"But we don't have to get other things either, disgusting things, like that rubber bulb that looks like an onion, but I don't know if they even sell those things anymore, and I don't know how to use it anyway, but it's on the list, so we'd have to get one, only we don't have to get one after all."
"Breathe," he said as his strong arms pulled her closer and his hand made soothing circles on her back. "We don't need to get those onion things either, not until you're really ready, OK?"
"But I wanted to get apples and onion thingies and clothes. I didn't know it, but when I thought we might have to go shopping, there wasn't anyone else in the world who I wanted to go shopping for onion thingies with, but we don't need onion thingies, and now you're going to be mad, or run, or go all Mr. Freeze on me because you and marmalade and it would have been really really bad, but it's not really bad, it's just regular bad, because I was such a terrible counter and forgot to look at the calendar sometimes and then primordial happened and then no apples, but I wanted them anyway."
She dried her face and looked up at him. He wondered how a woman could look both horribly blotchy with red eyes and too much snot running down her nose, yet still be the most beautiful creature on the face of the planet.
"So you understand?" she asked as the last of her sobs faded away.
He lifted a hand and tucked some stray curls behind her ear as he smiled with more confidence than he actually had.
"We don't have to go shopping for onion thingies and too-small clothing and apples, and that's both good and bad, because you kinda wanted to, but you were afraid of something you didn't need to be afraid of." He summarized her words for her as he processed, trying to figure this puzzle out.
"No Mr. Freeze? Even though it sounds like an ice cream store, which I would normally love, I really don't like Mr. Freeze."
Luke gave her his special stern look which said that she had jumped across the Grand Canyon of conclusions.
"Lorelai. Mr. Freeze is gone. I'd rather argue with you until the windows rattle than freeze you out again. I'll get mad again, sure, both of us will, but the only running I'm ever going to do again is after you. I promise."
She smiled wanly. "Good. That's good. So you're not mad?"
He nodded. "Not mad. I love you."
"I love you too, that's why it surprised me so much when I wanted the apples, but made me sad when I couldn't want the apples." She sniffed, looked down at her hands, then looked at him again with wide eyes.
"Do you wanna see the stick? When I thought we needed to go shopping, I thought maybe I'd better check the stick first, so I checked the stick and it said that primordial wasn't really going to lead to apples."
"A stick that says stuff? That's a stick I definitely want to see."
Her smile grew stronger. Lorelai reached into her back pocket and pulled a small white plastic stick out. She took Luke's hand, placed the stick in it and wrapped his fingers around it, hiding it from sight.
"So you're gonna be OK when the stick says it's time to buy apples? Really sure?" The death grip she had on his closed hand told him what the right answer would be, even though he already knew that whatever had prompted this meltdown would be OK with him.
He answered truthfully. "Really sure."
She let go of his hand and he uncurled his fingers, flexing them a few times in the hope that circulation would eventually restart. His eyebrows knitted together as he looked at the strange device. He'd seen something like this before, but couldn't remember where.
As he finally recalled the advertisements for pregnancy tests on the female TV channels Lorelai loved to watch, he suddenly found it hard to breathe. All of the nonsense aligned and made sense in Luke's brain as well was in Lorelai's. His stomach also started to turn over precariously as he realized what was coating the stick. He set the stick off to the side, rubbed his hand on the arm of the settee and took Lorelai lightly by her elbows.
"You thought you were pregnant? But you aren't? But you kinda wanted to be? But you were worried about what I'd think?"
"That's a lotta buts, mister," she said. "But yeah."
"But we want to get married. Why wouldn't I be happy about this?" He smiled as he began to think about shopping, too. Tiny baseball gloves and hockey sticks. A car big enough to hold the family. A bigger boat with tiny little life jackets.
"Marmalade," Lorelai replied, shrugging. "You don't like the sticky hands."
He turned her palms upward and kissed each one in turn. "Jam. Not marmalade. When those sticky hands belong to our kids, I think I'll manage. Probably more than manage. It'll be the best day of my life."
She pulled him to her and nearly choked the life out of him with her exuberant kisses.
When the initial high spirits had subsided, a flash of guilt hit Luke. He pulled back from Lorelai and looked her in her now dry and happy eyes. Seeing the solemnity in his expression, she squeezed his hands and waited, wondering if he were going to change his mind, if running and getting mad and Mr. Freeze were coming back, even though he didn't look mad.
"Lorelai, I gotta tell you something." He looked out into the darkness, half-hoping for a catastrophe to come and prevent him from saying what he'd hidden from her for a couple of weeks. He had no such luck, because sudden catastrophes apparently only occurred to Luke Danes when he thought something good was about to happen, like when he tried to invite Lorelai out in the early years.
"We don't have to start saving cardboard boxes."
"OK," she answered, confusion staining her voice. "No boxes."
She wrinkled her nose trying to figure out what he meant with boxes.
"Uh, Luke, I don't get it."
"I almost bought the Twickham house," he said quickly, embarrassed.
"You almost bought a house without telling me?"
"Yeah," he admitted. "Probably kind of a dumb thing to do."
"Probably not probably," was her answer. "We need to discuss these things before we make big commitments like that."
"I know, I know. It was just that… I always wanted to buy that house for my family and when I got the chance, I just kind of got all involved in the back alley deals that it took to make it all happen."
"Back alley deals? In Stars Hollow?" She giggled at that one.
"Oh please, you have no idea how horrible it was. Negotiations with Taylor, and steam rooms and the town elders, and Kirk in a towel. It was traumatizing."
"Stars Hollow has town elders?"
"Yeah. Who knew? So anyway I had it all organized, then Taylor starts talking about a deep pockets guy who wanted to make a higher offer, and then the deep pockets guy turned out to be Kirk, and he's got a quarter of a million dollars in cash."
"Kirk has as much money as Rory has in her trust fund?"
"Rory has a trust fund?"
"Yeah, my grandmother set it up for her. But you're drifting, Luke," she said, snapping her fingers to bring him back in the moment.
"Ah, yeah, so Kirk wanted the house too and he complained that Taylor and I made a deal under the table and he wanted it on the table, and Taylor insisted that the town elders decide, but they only meet in a steam room, so that's why that one flannel of mine shrank."
"Because you were wearing flannel in a steam room, talking to the mythical town elders. Where was Kirk?"
"He was there too, but wearing a towel. It was not a pretty sight."
"So who are the town elders?"
"I don't know. They were all wearing towels over their faces, and I was getting kinda dizzy from, you know, the steam and wearing the flannel. But then they decided that I should get the house anyway, and Kirk was really pissed, but I was really happy and Taylor was miffed, because he knew he could skim more money off Kirk than me." He took a deep breath. "The town elders like you, though."
"So you bought the house? Without telling me?"
"Sorry. Yeah. Then I started thinking that maybe we should talk about it first, so I canceled it again during the cooling-off period."
"Which means we don't have a new house. We can still live in the Crap Shack."
Luke nodded. "And we don't need to save cardboard boxes for moving, because we're not. I know now that you don't want to move."
Nodding, Lorelai pondered this news for as long as she could ponder anything, which wasn't long.
"So we aren't going to have a baby, and we didn't buy a house."
"That pretty much sums it up," Luke agreed.
"Almost. We do want a baby or babies sometime, right?"
"Yes, absolutely. And if we do end up with babies, we may have to rethink a different house. You know, if you have quintuplets or something like that."
She giggled. "You've got a pretty high opinion of your swimmers, buddy."
His cheeks pink, he retorted, "I wasn't the track champion of Stars Hollow for nothing, you know. We Danes men can move fast when we need to."
The next morning, Luke slipped out of bed a little early and went to the diner. First thing, he heated the oven and slid one of the pies he'd prepared yesterday into it while he got the rest of the breakfast ready. He ran upstairs for a minute, opening the safe and bringing the day's change downstairs along with another small bag. Once all the deliveries were in and everything was set for breakfast, he ran over to Doose's for a little shopping, handing over breakfast responsibility to Caesar and Lane.
After putting away the groceries, he looked at the clock. Still a while before Lorelai would get up, so he made a cup of tea and settled onto the sofa with the latest sports magazine. Before long, he had dozed off.
Hearing his snores when she did awaken, Lorelai quietly got ready for the day. Once dressed, she slipped into the closet that she called a sewing room and pulled out an empty box, some wrapping paper and some ribbon. She crept quietly downstairs, took her purse and went back upstairs to wrap her present.
Carrying the tiny, exquisitely wrapped box, she moved back downstairs and entered the kitchen.
"Luke Danes, what have you done?" she cried, waking him.
He grinned, not even being able to pretend to be grumpy as she pulled him into the kitchen. "I went shopping," he said nonchalantly.
Every surface was covered with apples of every sort imaginable. Green, red, yellow, and combinations of colors greeted them.
Coming up from behind, he wrapped his arms around her waist. "I wanted to make sure you had apples in case you wanted to want to have apples again."
He opened the fridge, showing how he'd filled it with juice, soda, health water, every apple-flavored drink he could find.
Moving her in front of her junk food cabinet, he opened the door.
"Green Apple Air Heads! A whole case! Oh! Jolly Ranchers too! Sour Green Apple Bubble Tape! Gummi Bears! Jelly Bellies! Laffy Taffy! Pop Rocks! Sour Patch!" She was bouncing now, even before ingesting any sugar.
"My turn," she said, turning him toward the table. She pointed to the neatly wrapped package lying on top of the biggest bowl of apples she'd ever seen.
He unwrapped it carefully, looking up at her excited face before lifting the top of the box.
As he pulled the key out, she blurted, "I wanted to make sure you know you have a house already, so don't go buying any more houses without talking to me first, OK?"
"OK, deal." They sealed the pact with a kiss, gentle and loving, growing in passion as they moved closer to each other. He broke the kiss, then went in again, soft as a feather, yet leaving no doubt in their hearts.
"One more thing," he said, really pulling away this time.
"There's more?" She clapped her hands. "Apple ice cream? Bubble bath?"
"Wait for it," he said as he opened the door and pulled out the apple pie.
"You made me a pie?" Her smile broadened. "I know what I'm having for breakfast."
With one hand on the pie and one on her waist, he set the pie down on the table and pulled her onto his lap as he sat down himself.
"It's more than a pie," he said. "Look again."
Her tear ducts switched on again, this time from happiness as Lorelai looked at the sparkling rock in the center of the pie. "Luke."
"I want us to go shopping, Lorelai, when we need apples, when we need diapers or tiny little baseball gloves. I want us to go shopping for furniture for the house we will spend the rest of our lives in, the house we'll pay the mortgage on, that you'll decorate and I'll repair. I want us to go shopping for toilet paper and curtains and insurance and sump pumps and Geritol."
"Lorelai Gilmore, will you do me the honor of going shopping with me for the rest of my life?" He pulled his mother's ring out of the pie, held it gently in his mouth until it was clean, then slid it onto her already extended finger.
"I'm sure you have no idea what you're getting yourself into, Luke, but YES! with all my heart, my darling, my friend, my love, I will."
Fin
A/N: This near-drabble blurted itself out when I woke up this morning, having finally broken the writer's block on A Really Nice Man.