So this is my first story for this category, and I'm not sure if I got the characters completely right. Constructive criticism is lovely. Although, not too mean. I'm only human. Enjoy!
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"I need to borrow a book." She says, plopping herself down on her usual stool. The stool in front of the spot on the counter he's been cleaning for the past hour and 16 minutes, hoping she'd show up.
And even with that hour and 16 minutes of anticipation, he is still trying to figure out what to say. "A book?"
"Yes." She states, pointing an ivory finger towards the wrack of colorful mugs, and the coffee maker.
"What kind of book?" He passes his awkward stammers off for cool and collected, and slightly annoying.
"Something I haven't read yet."
He sets the coffee down in front of her, and watches out of the corner of his eye as she sniffs her warm drink first, then took a sip. Rory always sniffed first.
"Well that's where we run into a problem." Nonchalantly, he tosses the rag he has been wiping the counter with behind him, hoping that it lands in the sink. Her impressed face tells him it does. In return for the cosmic kindness that has just been bestowed on him, Jess promises God (even though he's still not sure he exists, his lame-ass father is proof enough of that) that he'll stop throwing his cigarette butts at the ducklings that swim around in the pond. "You read everything."
She looks skeptical. "You must have something. Otherwise you will be of no use to me anymore, and I'll stop telling people that we're friends." Her big blue eyes feign innocence as they peer at him over the rim of her bright orange coffee mug.
"Then let's find you a book."
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Luke's apartment is dim, quiet, and smells faintly of sandalwood. Jess has completely taken over the lone bookshelf hidden behind the door, his various paper-backs and hard-covers crammed onto the shelves and spilling over into teetering piles, stacked nearly 4 feet high.
Rory slowly pans over the whole array, studying, memorizing, internalizing.
Some people think that the eyes were the window to the soul, but Rory knows it is their books. She could tell so much about a person by what they read.
He watches her eyes linger on a particularly worn out copy of The Canterbury Tales, and a decidedly untouched volume of Jane Austen. Oliver Twist's cover is not intact anymore, and his scrawling penmanship has filled in with black sharpie where the title once was on the yellowing spine of the book.
"Its official." She says, standing up, hands on her hips. "I have, in fact, read everything."
"Everything good, anyway." He fills in. "Ever think of reading something that wasn't written a century ago?"
She gives him a look that one might give a cross-dressing mob boss with a tale and fairy wings. "Nobody nowadays can write like Dickens or Trollope." She pauses. "Even Steinbeck, I guess, if you're the type who likes to breast feed grown men." He watches her face. It provides the perfect window into her mind. He loves to see her nose wrinkle, her eyes squint, her expressions change and contort.
"Maybe not Steinbeck." They say together.
"James Patterson?" She makes a face.
"John Grissom?" He shakes his head.
There is a pause. "If we can't stand to read modern authors, what will we do if nobody can write the classics anymore?" She asks, the look of adorable and legitimate fear on her delicate features making the fight against the smile he longed to show even more difficult. If he just starts kissing her, would she eventually figure out how much he likes her, and how hard he's struggling to keep up his ever-present 'I-don't-give-a-crap bad boy' persona?
She bends over again, squatting by the lowest shelf and scanning his books with such intensity, as if she might actually find one she hasn't already read twice.
Screw it, he thinks.
Suddenly he is hovering only inches above her. "Than we'll just have to find some other way to entertain ourselves."
She scoffs, as if there is nothing she would rather do than read Hamlet all day long. "Like wha-" Turning around to find Jess hunched over her is certainly a pleasant surprise. He hopes.
"You don't think that you can find something you would like to do as much as reading?" His breath is quiet, voice heavy with something Rory isn't sure she wants to identify. He feels her heart pounding through the 2 small inches of air that separate their chests.
"I might be able to think of something."
He smiles, not a smirk, or a half grin accompanied by an eyebrow raise that he only gives her when she has said something particularly ridiculous. A smile. "A smart girl like you can always think of something."
Their lips meet, soft. His chapped and rough coupled with hers smooth and warm.
He immediately thinks: Damn, now I'm gonna have to give up those baseballs that I stole from the school in return for this, aren't I?
This must be some absurd, divine way of making him drop what Luke so cleverly calls his 'bored asshole and proud of it' act.
He'd gladly trade.