Minute Detail
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
A/N: Messed with the time span of events that do occur on the show, a bit, but the times make sense – aren't completely pulled out of nowhere – they convert to hours, of course.
- -
It's two words on a page.
Her handwriting looks like her so much it's fucking sickening.
If he were someone else, it'd be under his pillow by now, but he's not. If he were someone else, it'd be tacked on his wall.
It's three in the morning and it's two words on a page.
And five hundred forty minutes in the future he has his hands in a blonde girl's back pockets.
-
He's never been to D.C. and probably he never will be. The souvenir is plenty. It's more than enough. He can see the whole city in the pencil lines. It's reflected in the graphite, soft and streaky.
Granite obelisks and calm, still reflecting pools. Crowds of sweaty tourists and snappy clicks of disposable cameras. Flags flying and security personnel at every gate, people crowding around and peering through metal slats. Fences and neatly manicured lawns; the clatter of feet at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. High school students like her, the author of these pencil words, in clean, pressed sweaters exactly like hers, holding timid coffee cups to their lips. Listening to a mix of droning lecture and fierce enthusiasm for the expensive world of politics.
Probably, she didn't get bored.
If he were someone else, he would put substitute content in the beige-whitish expanse below the words and the comma after them—at least, in his mind, he would, so he could think about it more easily. Were he someone else, he would wait for her, because if he were someone else, he would pretend to understand what these words mean.
And what it means that she sent them in a battered envelope, folding it carefully as she would a real letter, addressing it shakily but confidently in black ballpoint pen.
This is all she had to say.
He's himself. He does understand what it means, but seven hundred eighty minutes in the future the same blonde girl will interrupt his lunch. He will welcome the interruption and he will ignore the stares.
He's awfully good at this.
-
She put a horizontal line at the top of her 'J'. It irritates him.
Her fingerprints are scattered throughout the page, embedded in the margins. The lowest of the three holes is stretched out and bent, like she considered ripping it out of a binder but changed her mind.
It's what schoolgirls do.
This blonde girl comes up to him when he starts his shift, and he knows how to maneuver both his body and his lips not only to make her happy but to make someone else jealous, someone who is finally home and greeted with these suggestions right in front of her; dear Jess is halfway to lack of clothing with this blonde girl in the diner and the town and this is how it is, now – this is what two words is worth.
He does things for jealousy.
They're more enjoyable that way.
-
This is the way sex is supposed to be.
"Again," she drawls. "What're you doing?"
"Nothing," he answers honestly.
"You fucking call this nothing?"
"I fucking call this nothing."
He wakes up.
In eight hundred forty minutes, on his afternoon break, he will make this dream real in the apartment's closet.
He forgets the difference between dirty and sweet enough that even she calls him on it. Dear Jess, she says, sarcastically—she fills in the end of a sentence: kiss me, you bastard, we don't have forever—and she moves more tightly against him. He feels a pang, but it could be his imagination, or the corner of the book in his pocket digging into his back.
-
Her voice is higher than he remembers (but it couldn't have changed in only two months away), and it matches the letters in those two words she wrote and sent: clear-cut and thin with pencil dashes on the ends of the lines, tilted slightly left.
He hears it, though; in his head it is the pitch that he recalls from before, the pitch that reverberated in his skull, "Welcome home."
Dear Jess, I'm sorry.
Dear Jess, I should have said goodbye.
Dear Jess, I was an idiot. Dear Jess, I hate you. Dear Jess, what gives here? Dear Jess, I'm reminding you, don't say a word. Dear Jess, I think I liked it in Washington but I don't think you would have. Dear Jess, maybe you would have, maybe. Jess, what are you doing here. What are you doing here?
"What are you doing here? You said you'd meet me over there at five." She jerks her head back in a way he assumes is supposed to be seductive.
The look on Rory's face is worth it all. He leans over the counter, and Rory is still watching, and then his tongue is in her mouth and it is worth it all, because Rory is barely disguising her staring and her complexion is beginning to match her pink shirt.
-
He is wrong to have expected anything more; this he knows, to have expected any more than these two syllables.
She expected him to understand her and her minced words; this he knows.
Deviled eggs smell worse by morning on a car than raw; this he knows, now, and he thinks he knows what happened, who stained his car with yolk. He can't blame her entirely – he's lied, too.
It is only the human nature in him that wants a signal: yes, you are correct. You are right. But he does not deserve it, and what's more, five hundred forty minutes after he received her letter he could taste cheap strawberry lipgloss that wasn't hers by any stretch of the imagination. Rory's lips had been only hers; it was her soft skin on his, her palm slipping up to his face when they kissed, that summery afternoon. It was her own individual smell (a mix of soap and invigorating nervousness). He considers the possibility: the taste of her will forever be what launches to the front of his mind when he happens to think of weddings.
He could barely fit his hands in the pockets of this blonde girl's jeans and he enjoyed the sensation, her rocking against him gently when he stopped breathing hard. That was how things were supposed to go.
That was how things were supposed to be, with his mouth against a surname-less, blonde-framed, thin-line-smile face and with her staring in the distance and dear Jess hovering between them. It's there, hanging in the air between his false affection, calculated for spite, and her trembling glare focused on his display. The existence of written evidence – dear Jess – even though barely a scrap of proof, the envelope thrown away in frustration: it is a secret she will keep, a truth he is not planning to give away.
He still hasn't decided whether he has chosen to believe it – that she wrote him a letter and this is what it said, dear Jess. He has not decided whether he has chosen to believe that, nor whether he has chosen to believe the letter he so clearly comprehends though none of it is on the page, the long letter metaphorically set on the empty college-ruled lines, even though nothing is scratched there in printed English. Only he can read it, only he gets what she must have meant; he can understand perfectly. His mind recites it, involuntarily, all the time.
Dear Jess, I might miss you. Dear Jess, hello, where are you?
It should be so easy to forget.
"Hello, where are you?" She tilts her head and shakes platinum hair out of her eyes. She teases him, "What, am I not pretty enough today?"
He mutters. "I don't want to hear it."
"We both know why you're here," she says, her eyes slanting at him slightly, slyly.
"I don't know why I'm fucking here."
One more kiss, and he might bridge this gap between the unlikely pain and the easier forgetting.
Remembering need not be forever, dear your goddamn stupid self.
-
Dear Jess, your girlfriend acts like a whore.
It's what she meant, just not in so many words. It's what she would edit into the unwritten later if she could change it now. He heard her what she said, he heard her speaking so furiously to Lane – he wasn't meant to hear – and that fact made hearing it all the better. Better, like a sick satisfaction that sends pleasure through his body and makes his skin feel warm.
Dear, dear – it's a different kind of word, the kind he expects her only to use in sarcasm, in the dry, scathing comments that can be irked out of her after a few minutes of backandforth, but never in a document that meant anything.
Maybe this one didn't – to any observer it would seem nothing, less than a coincidence, a fluke – except he knows; he understands.
A few minutes: that was all it took to see it, dear Jess. Thirty seconds to pick up the envelope, twenty to rip it open moderately neatly, and the rest of the summer to get through reading it. The comma after his name, that was smudged more than anything else, as if she suddenly and abruptly jerked her pencil away, folding the sheet, deciding she had nothing more to say to him. As if she were sleepwalking; she had been planning to write him a novel's worth about DC but had been exhausted, and her sleeping self slipped folded and sealed paper into the mail slot across the hall from her dorm without having written anything else.
The envelope had a too-obvious American University watermark; of course, he threw it away, so this doesn't matter.
-
She didn't sign it.
It was the handwriting in the address that he recognized, and it isn't as if it took him long for it to hit him, dear Jess. Thinking back, now, as she slides past the diner more gracefully than she knows she can, he cannot remember whether there was a return address, but does this matter either? She was the one on vacation and she didn't have much to say: dear Jess.
One thousand four hundred forty minutes after it was opened (shoved into an old dust jacket so beat up the title is illegible), he was in the vicinity of an empty room, but closer even to someone else. Someone else with shiny blonde hair and a stare he still can't quite get accustomed to, who lied, then, and told him she was drunk, her head hurt, she was too tired – he did his best not to appreciate the lie.
He did taste her mouth, yet again, and she tasted strange; he accepted it and leaned in.
Were he someone else, he'd have licked the envelope when he opened it, but he isn't.
-
Dear Jess, she would have said if she were there the first time (one thousand three hundred eighty minutes after he read the two one-syllable words), if she were there watching him take off her clothes. Dear Jess?
She could finish the letter in words spoken, words aloud, words muffled in his jacket or his mouth, it wouldn't matter. But she wasn't there, and though she's home she isn't here now as he leans toward this blonde girl again, so he speaks to himself in her place: Dear Jess, what is fucking wrong with you?
"Shane," he says quietly.
"What the hell, Jess."
He undoes his shirt before she can reach out.
-
For the first time in his life he uses pencil.
Three thousand minutes after he carefully ripped it open and read it and threw the envelope away and hid it in an old book,
Dear Rory
He works shifts, and kisses at counters and smells hairspray, enduring the stares because she is staring, staring hard from her table, staring at him kissing someone else, and he catches her staring fiercely sometimes, rudeness – faux-cruelty, even? – possibly forming in her eyes, growing there because of him. He feels a strange stinging pride when he thinks of this.
"I don't care about the time, Luke," she says with a bit of a smile, pointing him toward the table of six clamoring for service. "We just want coffee before we die." He tries not to listen but he does, listens, smirks after a second, his upper lip curling slightly, edges of his eyes crinkling in his own kind of amusement. Her mouth bends around the word "die," rounding it and stretching it out, making it sound welcoming.
Five thousand, two hundred twenty minutes after he first sees her two words on the page, it is in the mailbox.
Dear Rory
(end)