A/N: Who's ready for a new Literati fic? I hope lots of you are! So, I had a poll on my Profile Page a while back to try to figure out what would come next after the three WIPs I had going at the time (I am now down to one!) and this one got quite a few votes, so I'm going to give it my best shot. Ready? Okay! :)
Disclaimer: All recognisable characters from Gilmore Girls belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and other folks who aren't me.
Chapter 1
"I really don't usually do this kind of thing."
Rory meant those words when she said them, though she wondered if Jess believed her. He didn't really have much frame of reference since their acquaintance had been so short, but somehow Rory felt like she had known him forever. It was the only reason why she was doing this.
Well, maybe the alcohol was playing a part, but mostly it was just Jess and how well they got along, how easily they had connected. It was all too easy, or maybe Rory was being too easy, she thought, as they rolled around together on the bed. Right now, she didn't feel as if she could help herself at all.
It wasn't as if she were a virgin or anything. She supposed most young women her age couldn't say they were without lying about it. All her friends had sex, and they weren't always picky about the person either. Of course, she was thinking of Madeline and Louise or Logan and Finn. Rory was different to her friends that way, except for Paris actually. They were both a little more discerning about who they jumped into bed with, usually anyway. Jess was just different, in more ways than Rory could count right now, as he continued to assault her senses, but damn, if it didn't feel good.
"I must be crazy," she said aloud, hardly aware the words were outside of her head until Jess moved away.
"I'm not sure that's a compliment," he told her, smirking all the same.
"I didn't mean it that way," Rory assured him, catching her breath at last. "I just... Well, I meant what I said, I'm not this person. I don't usually do this kind of thing and with a guy I just met."
When he met her striking blue eyes, Jess was pretty sure that Rory was telling the truth, not that it bothered him much either way. When a woman as beautiful and amazing as this started kissing you and all, Jess knew it was a foolish man who tried to stop her. Still, if she didn't want this to go any further, he wasn't the kind of guy to force the issue. It might just kill him to be a gentleman right now, but he would do it, if that was how it had to be.
"I can go, if you-"
"No," she said quickly, pulling him closer again. "No, I don't want you to go. Unless you want to go?" she checked, looking more nervous about that than she ever had about what they were half way to doing a minute ago. "You don't wanna go, do you?"
He had no words to give her, they really didn't need them anyway. Moving in to kiss her again, Jess made his feelings very clear. He wanted this as much as she did, he wanted her more than he'd wanted anything in a long time, and if she was willing, which she was proving to be, this was going to be a hell of a night.
Truth be told, he hadn't expected to have much fun when he came to this place. Some fancy hotel on the other side of Hartford was hardly the usual venue for his buddy's band to be playing, but the strangest people liked Hep Alien's own special brand of rock. It was enough people to make them some pretty decent money, though not quite enough for any of them to give up the day job. Still, Jess did pretty well at being both manager and roadie for Dave, Zach, Brian, and Lane, and he got a cut of the money for doing it. The gigs got him out of the house, the cash was never a bad thing, and yes, there were always women that were interested. None of them were quite like Rory though.
"Mmm, hold on sec," she murmured against his lips, shifting out from under him.
Jess looked like he was all kinds of painfully disappointed, but Rory wasn't really trying to get away, as she soon proved. With a smile on her lips, she stood at the foot of the bed, fumbling for a moment with the hidden zipper of her impressively sparkly dress, which suddenly fell from her body and pooled at her feet.
It was kind of thrill to see Jess' eyes widen at the sight of her barely dressed. She had known he wanted her before, but now, there wasn't a hint of a doubt in her mind about it. Rory joined him on the bed again, straddling Jess' lap and helping him out of his clothes too.
This hadn't been the plan at all, not even a little bit. Rory hadn't come to this party with the intention of doing anything more than talking with her friends, dancing into the night, and maybe having a few drinks along the way. It was Logan's twenty first birthday party, the real one, not the highbrow staged event that his parents organised, but the blow out that the Huntzberger heir really wanted to celebrate his coming of age.
When the band showed up, the girls had hoped for good looking guys to flirt with and they were not entirely disappointed by at least two out of three, though Louise had bemoaned the fact the drummer was a girl. She really did have a thing for drummers, with her only explanation being that rhythm could be important. Rory knew exactly what she meant though, as with much of what Miss Grant had to say, she often wished she didn't.
Still, out of all the members of Hep Alien - who actually rocked, as it turned out - it was the guy not playing an instrument or singing at all that caught Rory's attention. She saw him first on the stage introducing the band, and then he seemed to disappear. First, he was down by the edge of the stage, back against an amp as he read a book for a while. Rory almost went over to talk to him a couple of times, but it never happened. Logan wanted to dance, and then Colin and Finn wanted their turn. Paris had a crisis with her dress and then there was an issue when the manager of the hotel came and asked them to dial the volume down as the hour got late. Somehow, it was up to Rory to smooth things over, the most sober and level-headed out of all of her closest friends a large amount of the time.
Rory finally got time to slip away to the bathroom, and then on the way back, she had spotted the mysterious non-band member slipping out through a back door. She couldn't say whatever possessed her to follow a strange man in black who hung out with a rock band out into the dark. Rory was intrigued, that was all she could say.
He was leaned up against the wall of the building, reading still, by the light from the window, and holding a cigarette in his free hand. Rory had stepped back and audibly gasped at the picture he made. Sexy didn't even begin to cover it.
"You lost?" he asked her, not even looking up from his book.
"Nope, I know exactly where I am," Rory told him smartly. "I was actually wondering where you were going?"
"Nowhere much," he told her, taking a drag from his cigarette. "You smoke?"
"Not usually," she replied, shaking her head and moving closer, "but I do read, a lot," she told him, peering at the cover of the book he held.
"All of your kind read," he said, smirking terribly as he looked her over. "Austen, Dickens, Shakespeare, plus all those fancy textbooks for your fancy school."
"Wow." Rory shook her head, smiling in spite of herself. "Inverted snob, much?"
Jess closed his book then and just stared at her. Rory wasn't sure if he knew what that smouldering look of his could do to a person, but at the time she hadn't been willing to give him the satisfaction of letting him know.
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night."
She watched his eyes go wide at what she knew to be a word-perfect quotation from the very book he held.
"Impressive," he told her then.
"You can go to a fancy school, wear a fancy dress to a fancy party, and still know Ginsberg," she told him, arms folded over her chest in triumph.
"I stand corrected." Jess smiled, pushing off the wall very suddenly and getting right into Rory's personal space without hesitation. "I'm Jess," he told her.
"Rory," she replied.
He nodded, whether just in acknowledgement of her name of in approval of something, Rory couldn't be sure, and didn't really get the chance to ask.
"How'd you feel about Bukowski?"
That was how it started. She rose to his challenge regarding the Beats and then countered with her own praise for the likes of Austen, a topic on which Jess could hold his own also. When she started shivering from the cold, amongst other things, they headed back inside. Since it was clear they couldn't talk so close to the party, it just seemed natural for Rory to take Jess up to the room she had for the night.
"Don't get any ideas," she had said as they walked in. "You're only here for your literary knowledge."
"So, you're saying you only want me for my brain?" Jess countered, smirking wickedly.
Rory had learnt very quickly that look was just dangerous, but that just made her love it all the more. They sat down to talk and that was exactly what they did, for hours. Rory lost track of time and she was pretty sure Jess did too. They drank shots from the mini bar, but not so many that they got stupid drunk. It was all just social, conversational, reasonable.
Rory kicked her high heeled shoes into a corner at some point and Jess' leather jacket ended up hung on the back of the chair he spent most of the time sat in, while Rory lazed on the bed. It was all just friendly, like they'd known each other forever, until they started bickering.
Jess had some mad love for Hemingway that Rory couldn't find a way to understand.
"Oh my God," she groaned, rolling her eyes for good measure. "You and Logan should get together, he is always telling me the wonder of the great and powerful Ernest."
"Logan," Jess echoed, suddenly looking less amused. "It's his party down there, right?"
"Right."
"He your boyfriend?"
"No," Rory said immediately, definite in her answer because it was entirely true. "I mean, we're friends, good friends, but I've known him forever."
"So, like a brother?"
"Not exactly," Rory tried to explain, making a face at the idea of Logan being related to her. "I mean, we're that kind of close, I guess, but we have been closer in the past, so no, not a brother. Just a good friend, but never a boyfriend, not really. Definitely not now."
"Huh."
There was no way for Rory to know what Jess meant by his non-verbal remark. He didn't plan for her to know, so that worked out fine. It was good to know that Rory wasn't dating Logan, and he had to assume, since she hadn't mentioned any other guy tonight, that she was free and single. Jess didn't hate knowing that. Not that he had realised at that point in the evening quite what was going to happen. He hoped, but he didn't know. Of course, that made it seem like he went up to Rory's room purely for the sex that may or may not happen, but that wasn't true. Just talking to her had been weirdly fun and then when they really got into a discussion about Hemingway and her argumentative side came out, well, Jess hadn't thought Rory could be any more attractive, but she proved him wrong.
"You can't get into Hemingway, but you can read The Fountainhead and have a clue what that political nut Ayn Rand is babbling about?" he challenged her. "You're cracked."
"It's not my fault if you're not smart enough to keep up with an intelligent woman," she countered, smiling too wide.
Whether she meant Rand or herself, Jess wasn't sure, but he assumed both. He wasn't mad about her knocking his intelligence. After all, he was self-confident enough to know how smart he was and was pretty sure he could already read Rory well enough to know she was kidding anyway.
When she moved to get up then, presumably to get a celebratory drink now that she had won their debate, Rory got her foot caught in her dress or the covers of the bed. Whichever it was, she almost went sprawling, and it was only thanks to Jess' excellent reactions that she didn't end up face down on the carpet.
"Wow, nice catch," she told him as he helped her back up onto the bed.
They were so close together, it would've been the easiest thing in the world to kiss her, but Jess hadn't done it. He gave it serious thought, but before he actually got as far as deciding to make the move, Rory had done it for him. There was no way in hell Jess was about to argue as she pulled him down onto the bed beside her.
They were just kissing at first, but it didn't take long for hands to start wandering. He was waiting for Rory to back off, to come to her senses and throw him out, but it never really happened.
"I really don't usually do this kind of thing," she told him between fevered kisses.
Jess had a feeling that was probably the truth. It didn't follow that the society types were all terrified virgins, saving themselves for arranged marriages. The world rarely worked that way anymore, and though it was probably true for some young women, he was pretty damn sure this wasn't exactly Rory's first rodeo. She was too good to be a complete amateur.
Still, Jess was wary. As much as he wanted this, he had to be sure she did too. Rory was special, he knew it from the moment he laid eyes on her tonight. He couldn't explain it, not for the world, but she was. She was very special, and he did not want this to be something she would regret in the morning. He went so far as offering to leave but she promised she didn't want that. The next thing he knew she was slipping out of her dress and taking control of the situation in a big way. That was fine with Jess, if it was fine with Rory. Actually, it felt better than just fine from where he was right now.
In the morning, there was no way to know what would happen next. Chances were they would both walk away and that would be that, but neither Rory nor Jess were thinking about how this ended, only how it began, as the last of their clothes were discarded haphazardly into all four corners of the room. They only knew here and now, hungry kisses and the impatient fumbling of hands for protection before their bodies finally moved as one. The rest of the world disappeared entirely in the moments that followed. Tonight was all there was, tomorrow be damned.
To Be Continued...
