Author: imonadiet... Jocelyn.
Disclaimer: Yeah, I don't own it. I did however try to stay as close as possible to the portrayal of the characters. I, however, am not a comic genius like the writers of the show.
'Communication' is the Key
"Jess," Rory called out to her boyfriend. He was walking down the street in the middle of Stars Hollow a ways ahead of her. When she got no response she shouted louder. "Jess!"
Jess turned around and smiled when he saw who was calling to him.
"Hey," he greeted her with a kiss. "How are you?"
"Not so good," she said. It was then that he noticed she didn't looked very happy.
"What's the matter?" he asked, slightly concerned.
"Taylor's looking for you," she said to him.
"What? Why? Oh, jeez, you know... I told him that that green-bean thing was just an accident. You know, I was hurrying to pick stuff up and I accidentally hit the stupid can. It was an accident! I was get-"
"No, Jess, you don't understand. Someone broke into Taylor's Soda-Shoppe, and now he's looking for you. He's really mad. What happened?"
"What do you mean what happened?"
"A whole one of the windows is shattered, what did you do?"
"What did I do?"
"Yes, what did you do? I mean did you do it? Did you get mad and throw a rock, what?"
"What are you talking about? I didn't throw a rock at the window to Taylor's store! I'm not ten."
"So you didn't do it?"
"No, Rory, I didn't do it," Jess denied vehemently. His face was flushed in defense. He looked away from her, took a breath, looked back at her and said, "You think I did it?"
"What? No! No. I just, I mean, who else would do that? I just can't really imagine... who else might have done it if it wasn't you."
With that Jess turned and started walking away. Rory looked after him, stunned. When it registered that he was walking away from her, she took off after him.
"Jess!" she called out to him. She ran a little bit to catch up to him. She grabbed onto his arm, and attempted to spin him a little bit. "Jess."
He stopped and allowed her to turn him, but didn't look at her. She reached up and tried to force his face to look at her. Still, his eyes would not match hers.
"Jess, please. I'm sorry. Can we talk? Look, I'm sorry," she begged him.
He looked at her then, but still remained silent.
"Jess?"
"What?" he sighed.
"I'm sorry. Come on I wanna talk you about this, let's go someplace not quite so public and talk. Please?" Rory asked him, searching his eyes.
"Fine. Let's go to the apartment," he said resignedly.
Rory's stomach churned on the way to the diner. She had tried to hold his hand while they were walking, and he had allowed her too, but he dropped his wallet out of his pocket and after he bent over to pick it up his hands remained in his pockets. Rory sighed quietly and wondered how in the world she had gotten herself into such a mess.
She really liked Jess, maybe even loved him. But he was so confusing. Everyone knew that, everyone had told her that. And there was so much miscommunication that it was frustrating, and sometimes she even wondered if they were worth it. But then she would remember how much he had fought for her, and even though he had gotten so frustrated and the whole town had been against him he had still come through for her. She accepted the fact that if things didn't work out it would be mostly her fault. She knew that sometimes she attempted to make him be something he really wasn't. She tried hard to avoid it, she honestly did! But it was hard for her to go from someone like Dean to someone like... Jess.
Throughout Rory's inner dialogue they had continued walking and reached the diner. Jess opened the door and allowed Rory to pass through first.
"Hey, Rory," Luke greeted her.
"Hey, Luke," she replied.
"You looking for your mom? You want some coffee?" he asked.
"Oh, no thanks, that's OK. I'm just here with Jess."
"Oh, all right. What are you two up to?" he asked them
"Nothing," Jess said. "We're just going to go upstairs and talk."
"Um, yeah sure. Talking I uh, suppose would be OK," Luke stuttered.
"Thanks," Jess responded, ushering Rory up the stairs. When she was out of earshot he leaned back and stuck his head out of the curtain and said, "Oh yeah, and Luke?"
"Yeah?"
"Would you mind not "forgetting" something upstairs every ten minutes this time? We're actually talking," Jess said to Luke.
"Heh, so you knew about my little plan?" Luke chuckled.
"Uh, yeah. Kinda hard not to figure out. Not even my senile great grandmother 'forgot' as much stuff as you do."
"Is something wrong with you two?"
"It doesn't matter. We're just talking, so if you could stay down here... I promise I'll return her completely undeflowered."
"Jess..." Luke warned.
With that Jess made his way up the stairs and peered through the slightly open door. Rory was standing over near the doorway to his room, cautiously peering in. He knew that she was curious to see what it looked like, but she was too shy to ask to see it and if Luke or Lorelai ever came upstairs and saw them remotely near his bedroom, they would be reamed.
He made a bit of noise by dropping his key on the floor and taking a minute to open the door, and during that time Rory had repositioned herself to a chair in an unsuspecting area.
"Hey," he said as he came into the room.
"Hey," she said shyly.
"So..."
"Yeah."
"You uh, you wanted to talk, right?"
"Oh yeah. I uh, I do want to talk. But uh, it would be hard to tell cuz uh, I'm not really doing very much, uh talking."
"Except for right there."
"Yeah, well."
"So... what?"
"What?"
"What did you want to talk about, Rory?"
"Oh," she said, startled by his harsh tone. She decided she better just spit it out.
"I just wanted to talk about what happened out there. You know... what happened."
"You mean you thinking I'm a delinquent."
"Jess, I didn't mean it badly. I just... I just don't really know you."
"You don't know me?" he asked doubtfully.
"Well, I mean I know you like to read, and I know you have a car, and you work two jobs, and you work hard, and you're smart, but I don't really know YOU."
"I don't really know what you're talking about."
"See, you always do that! You always cut me off, like, block me off so much. I just mean, that I know facts about you, well not even that many really, but... I just don't GET you."
Jess remained quiet and calm throughout her outburst and after. He didn't say anything.
"Well..." she probed.
"Well what?" he asked.
"Augh, don't you ever have anything to say?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"Say whatever the heck it is you're thinking. I don't care if you hurt my feelings, it doesn't matter to me! Just... talk!"
"You don't know what you're getting into if you tell me to say what's on my mind," he warned.
"Jess, I could care less. I want to know what I'm getting into by being with you. Cuz right now I don't know. I want to be with you, and that's all that I know. I want to know everything. Tell me how pissed it made you when I doubted you. Just tell me whatever!" she begged him.
"You want me to tell you how I'm feeling, Rory?" he said her name angrily. "You're right, I am feeling a little bit 'pissed'. But I'm also a lot confused. You blame you're not knowing me on me, that I cut myself off all psychologically from you. I think really what it is, is that you don't want to know what I'm thinking. I think it scares the crap out of you to think that I might be thinking something BAD about my BAD life in New York and my Bad mother and my BAD gone father and everything is bad. But that's really not the way that it is.
"Everyone all makes it out to be like I'm poor little Jess, delinquent, alcoholic, drug addict. Yeah, so, I lived in New York. Big whoop. I smoke, so does half of Stars Hollow. Do you really think that I could put all those butts on the side of the road? I didn't even do anything in New York. I went to the bookstore, and the record store, and I went to the little PARK thing to listen to the unsigned bands play music begging to get a record deal. I had sex with my girlfriend. I wasn't a pimp, I wasn't a dealer; I lived the same kind of life that most of your prep friends at Chilton live.
"Now that I've informed you about my background or whatever, there is one thing that's been 'pissing' me off a little bit lately, too. And that is that you knew that I wasn't Dean. I know that I'm not Dean, and I made that explicitly clear to you before we started dating. Am I wrong?"
Rory, thinking the question to be hypothetical, didn't respond. However, he asked a little bit louder and she jumped and said, "Yes."
"OK, great. And so, here I am working two jobs, trying to get myself better so that I can be better for you, so that you'll maybe think that I'm a little bit worthy to be standing in the same room as you, working my butt off every second of the day studying, working, and then still having to find time for you. Then, I thought, you know, she really does deserve a guy like Dean. Nice, makes time for her, does special stuff. So I decided that I was gonna do something really amazing for you that would totally shock you, that you would totally love, something that maybe Dean might do with a little bit of a Jess twist. So I waited in line for six hours for Distillers tickets, went to your house to pick you up cuz I figured that since I had said I would call you might be home, and your mom jumps down my throat about being a bad boyfriend and not being there for you and not being good enough for you. And after the concert, I went home that night, and I did listen to your message, I really couldn't help it. I don't have quite enough self-control to hold back from something like that. So, then there you are telling me that I can't leave you alone that much.
"Well, really all that I can say, is either you can have a stupid, poor, dumb, nobody boyfriend, with no car, no job and no house who does nothing but spend time with you, but I didn't really think you would want that. So, there you go. You really wanted to know. And there it is. It's all laid out for you like that. Are you happy? Did you get what you wanted?" Jess stopped from his rant, his face red with passion and anger, his hands waving all over the place in animated description.
"Is that all?" Rory asked. Tears that showed her sensitivity glistened in her eyes.
"No," Jess said loudly. "You really did not know what you were getting into when you asked for my soul on a little plate," he said with a dark chuckle.
"That night, a couple weeks ago when I got that black eye. You thought I attacked your ex-boyfriend. After I agreed to go meet your grandmother when I really didn't want to because I knew that I was going to do something to screw everything up, but because you begged me to, I went. And I did screw it up, just like I knew that I was going to! Do you know what that was really from?"
"A football," Rory said meekly.
"No, I lied about the stupid football. It was from a swan. A freaking swan!"
Rory stifled a giggle, "What?"
"A swan. I was on my way to go to your grandmother's house, and this stupid bird just runs out into me and started flapping its wings at me and it hit my in the eye and gave me a black eye. That's why I was late. And even when I told you that I didn't want to talk about it with you, you couldn't even try to let me make a good impression to your grandmother. Jeez, Rory. You don't get it. Everything that I'm doing, everything in my life since I've moved here is you. You, you, you. And you don't even ask me to. I just can't help myself!"
He had been pacing back and forth across the apartment and with that final statement he collapsed exhaustedly onto the sofa.
"Whoa," Rory said under her breath.
"Is that enough feeling for you?" he asked her. He looked so cute sitting there on the couch, embarrassed for having shown her so much of himself. Rory walked over to the couch and sat down next to him, taking his hand.
"Yes. Perfect," she said quietly. "Was it awful?" She asked.
"What?" he asked, still looking down.
"Letting me know all that?"
"No, I guess not. But, jeez, Rory, you don't understand what it's like for guys, or at least for me. I don't like telling people my feelings. I can't just sit down and say to you, 'Yes, well I'm feeling very hurt by this'. I just don't work that way."
"I'm sorry, you know."
"Hmm?"
"For expecting you to be all lovey-dovey. I knew that you weren't like that and I was so stupid and I just expected you to be like that! Ugh! I can't believe me. Man."
"Look, it's OK. I don't want you to feel bad. I just hate walking around all the time hating that that happened."
"Well Jess, mah little snooggle bunny," she said, pulling her legs up onto the couch and resting her head on his arm. "I do believe that communication is the key to any relationship," she said in a faux-stern voice.
"Huh. Is that so?" he said, tilting her face up to look at him.
"Huh, yeah. It is. We should really uh, communicate more, Jess," she said smiling flirtatiously. She continued to smile as he bent his head down and touched his lips to hers and kissed her.
They didn't notice as the door opened and Luke walked in. He cleared his voice, "Looks like you guys are pretty good at talking," he said slyly, and he laughed as Rory laughed and buried her blushing face in Jess' shirt.
"We're even better at 'communicating', right Rory?"
Author's Note: Now I understand what all those other people meant when they were begging for reviews. It's kind of scary to put a story out and not know if people will like it. If you read it and you have something you'd like to say, please review so I can just know if you like it and I can sleep. Also, if you think it would be a cool story to continue with, lemme know. I'm not really sure as of now. Thanks a bunch, buckos.
Disclaimer: Yeah, I don't own it. I did however try to stay as close as possible to the portrayal of the characters. I, however, am not a comic genius like the writers of the show.
'Communication' is the Key
"Jess," Rory called out to her boyfriend. He was walking down the street in the middle of Stars Hollow a ways ahead of her. When she got no response she shouted louder. "Jess!"
Jess turned around and smiled when he saw who was calling to him.
"Hey," he greeted her with a kiss. "How are you?"
"Not so good," she said. It was then that he noticed she didn't looked very happy.
"What's the matter?" he asked, slightly concerned.
"Taylor's looking for you," she said to him.
"What? Why? Oh, jeez, you know... I told him that that green-bean thing was just an accident. You know, I was hurrying to pick stuff up and I accidentally hit the stupid can. It was an accident! I was get-"
"No, Jess, you don't understand. Someone broke into Taylor's Soda-Shoppe, and now he's looking for you. He's really mad. What happened?"
"What do you mean what happened?"
"A whole one of the windows is shattered, what did you do?"
"What did I do?"
"Yes, what did you do? I mean did you do it? Did you get mad and throw a rock, what?"
"What are you talking about? I didn't throw a rock at the window to Taylor's store! I'm not ten."
"So you didn't do it?"
"No, Rory, I didn't do it," Jess denied vehemently. His face was flushed in defense. He looked away from her, took a breath, looked back at her and said, "You think I did it?"
"What? No! No. I just, I mean, who else would do that? I just can't really imagine... who else might have done it if it wasn't you."
With that Jess turned and started walking away. Rory looked after him, stunned. When it registered that he was walking away from her, she took off after him.
"Jess!" she called out to him. She ran a little bit to catch up to him. She grabbed onto his arm, and attempted to spin him a little bit. "Jess."
He stopped and allowed her to turn him, but didn't look at her. She reached up and tried to force his face to look at her. Still, his eyes would not match hers.
"Jess, please. I'm sorry. Can we talk? Look, I'm sorry," she begged him.
He looked at her then, but still remained silent.
"Jess?"
"What?" he sighed.
"I'm sorry. Come on I wanna talk you about this, let's go someplace not quite so public and talk. Please?" Rory asked him, searching his eyes.
"Fine. Let's go to the apartment," he said resignedly.
Rory's stomach churned on the way to the diner. She had tried to hold his hand while they were walking, and he had allowed her too, but he dropped his wallet out of his pocket and after he bent over to pick it up his hands remained in his pockets. Rory sighed quietly and wondered how in the world she had gotten herself into such a mess.
She really liked Jess, maybe even loved him. But he was so confusing. Everyone knew that, everyone had told her that. And there was so much miscommunication that it was frustrating, and sometimes she even wondered if they were worth it. But then she would remember how much he had fought for her, and even though he had gotten so frustrated and the whole town had been against him he had still come through for her. She accepted the fact that if things didn't work out it would be mostly her fault. She knew that sometimes she attempted to make him be something he really wasn't. She tried hard to avoid it, she honestly did! But it was hard for her to go from someone like Dean to someone like... Jess.
Throughout Rory's inner dialogue they had continued walking and reached the diner. Jess opened the door and allowed Rory to pass through first.
"Hey, Rory," Luke greeted her.
"Hey, Luke," she replied.
"You looking for your mom? You want some coffee?" he asked.
"Oh, no thanks, that's OK. I'm just here with Jess."
"Oh, all right. What are you two up to?" he asked them
"Nothing," Jess said. "We're just going to go upstairs and talk."
"Um, yeah sure. Talking I uh, suppose would be OK," Luke stuttered.
"Thanks," Jess responded, ushering Rory up the stairs. When she was out of earshot he leaned back and stuck his head out of the curtain and said, "Oh yeah, and Luke?"
"Yeah?"
"Would you mind not "forgetting" something upstairs every ten minutes this time? We're actually talking," Jess said to Luke.
"Heh, so you knew about my little plan?" Luke chuckled.
"Uh, yeah. Kinda hard not to figure out. Not even my senile great grandmother 'forgot' as much stuff as you do."
"Is something wrong with you two?"
"It doesn't matter. We're just talking, so if you could stay down here... I promise I'll return her completely undeflowered."
"Jess..." Luke warned.
With that Jess made his way up the stairs and peered through the slightly open door. Rory was standing over near the doorway to his room, cautiously peering in. He knew that she was curious to see what it looked like, but she was too shy to ask to see it and if Luke or Lorelai ever came upstairs and saw them remotely near his bedroom, they would be reamed.
He made a bit of noise by dropping his key on the floor and taking a minute to open the door, and during that time Rory had repositioned herself to a chair in an unsuspecting area.
"Hey," he said as he came into the room.
"Hey," she said shyly.
"So..."
"Yeah."
"You uh, you wanted to talk, right?"
"Oh yeah. I uh, I do want to talk. But uh, it would be hard to tell cuz uh, I'm not really doing very much, uh talking."
"Except for right there."
"Yeah, well."
"So... what?"
"What?"
"What did you want to talk about, Rory?"
"Oh," she said, startled by his harsh tone. She decided she better just spit it out.
"I just wanted to talk about what happened out there. You know... what happened."
"You mean you thinking I'm a delinquent."
"Jess, I didn't mean it badly. I just... I just don't really know you."
"You don't know me?" he asked doubtfully.
"Well, I mean I know you like to read, and I know you have a car, and you work two jobs, and you work hard, and you're smart, but I don't really know YOU."
"I don't really know what you're talking about."
"See, you always do that! You always cut me off, like, block me off so much. I just mean, that I know facts about you, well not even that many really, but... I just don't GET you."
Jess remained quiet and calm throughout her outburst and after. He didn't say anything.
"Well..." she probed.
"Well what?" he asked.
"Augh, don't you ever have anything to say?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"Say whatever the heck it is you're thinking. I don't care if you hurt my feelings, it doesn't matter to me! Just... talk!"
"You don't know what you're getting into if you tell me to say what's on my mind," he warned.
"Jess, I could care less. I want to know what I'm getting into by being with you. Cuz right now I don't know. I want to be with you, and that's all that I know. I want to know everything. Tell me how pissed it made you when I doubted you. Just tell me whatever!" she begged him.
"You want me to tell you how I'm feeling, Rory?" he said her name angrily. "You're right, I am feeling a little bit 'pissed'. But I'm also a lot confused. You blame you're not knowing me on me, that I cut myself off all psychologically from you. I think really what it is, is that you don't want to know what I'm thinking. I think it scares the crap out of you to think that I might be thinking something BAD about my BAD life in New York and my Bad mother and my BAD gone father and everything is bad. But that's really not the way that it is.
"Everyone all makes it out to be like I'm poor little Jess, delinquent, alcoholic, drug addict. Yeah, so, I lived in New York. Big whoop. I smoke, so does half of Stars Hollow. Do you really think that I could put all those butts on the side of the road? I didn't even do anything in New York. I went to the bookstore, and the record store, and I went to the little PARK thing to listen to the unsigned bands play music begging to get a record deal. I had sex with my girlfriend. I wasn't a pimp, I wasn't a dealer; I lived the same kind of life that most of your prep friends at Chilton live.
"Now that I've informed you about my background or whatever, there is one thing that's been 'pissing' me off a little bit lately, too. And that is that you knew that I wasn't Dean. I know that I'm not Dean, and I made that explicitly clear to you before we started dating. Am I wrong?"
Rory, thinking the question to be hypothetical, didn't respond. However, he asked a little bit louder and she jumped and said, "Yes."
"OK, great. And so, here I am working two jobs, trying to get myself better so that I can be better for you, so that you'll maybe think that I'm a little bit worthy to be standing in the same room as you, working my butt off every second of the day studying, working, and then still having to find time for you. Then, I thought, you know, she really does deserve a guy like Dean. Nice, makes time for her, does special stuff. So I decided that I was gonna do something really amazing for you that would totally shock you, that you would totally love, something that maybe Dean might do with a little bit of a Jess twist. So I waited in line for six hours for Distillers tickets, went to your house to pick you up cuz I figured that since I had said I would call you might be home, and your mom jumps down my throat about being a bad boyfriend and not being there for you and not being good enough for you. And after the concert, I went home that night, and I did listen to your message, I really couldn't help it. I don't have quite enough self-control to hold back from something like that. So, then there you are telling me that I can't leave you alone that much.
"Well, really all that I can say, is either you can have a stupid, poor, dumb, nobody boyfriend, with no car, no job and no house who does nothing but spend time with you, but I didn't really think you would want that. So, there you go. You really wanted to know. And there it is. It's all laid out for you like that. Are you happy? Did you get what you wanted?" Jess stopped from his rant, his face red with passion and anger, his hands waving all over the place in animated description.
"Is that all?" Rory asked. Tears that showed her sensitivity glistened in her eyes.
"No," Jess said loudly. "You really did not know what you were getting into when you asked for my soul on a little plate," he said with a dark chuckle.
"That night, a couple weeks ago when I got that black eye. You thought I attacked your ex-boyfriend. After I agreed to go meet your grandmother when I really didn't want to because I knew that I was going to do something to screw everything up, but because you begged me to, I went. And I did screw it up, just like I knew that I was going to! Do you know what that was really from?"
"A football," Rory said meekly.
"No, I lied about the stupid football. It was from a swan. A freaking swan!"
Rory stifled a giggle, "What?"
"A swan. I was on my way to go to your grandmother's house, and this stupid bird just runs out into me and started flapping its wings at me and it hit my in the eye and gave me a black eye. That's why I was late. And even when I told you that I didn't want to talk about it with you, you couldn't even try to let me make a good impression to your grandmother. Jeez, Rory. You don't get it. Everything that I'm doing, everything in my life since I've moved here is you. You, you, you. And you don't even ask me to. I just can't help myself!"
He had been pacing back and forth across the apartment and with that final statement he collapsed exhaustedly onto the sofa.
"Whoa," Rory said under her breath.
"Is that enough feeling for you?" he asked her. He looked so cute sitting there on the couch, embarrassed for having shown her so much of himself. Rory walked over to the couch and sat down next to him, taking his hand.
"Yes. Perfect," she said quietly. "Was it awful?" She asked.
"What?" he asked, still looking down.
"Letting me know all that?"
"No, I guess not. But, jeez, Rory, you don't understand what it's like for guys, or at least for me. I don't like telling people my feelings. I can't just sit down and say to you, 'Yes, well I'm feeling very hurt by this'. I just don't work that way."
"I'm sorry, you know."
"Hmm?"
"For expecting you to be all lovey-dovey. I knew that you weren't like that and I was so stupid and I just expected you to be like that! Ugh! I can't believe me. Man."
"Look, it's OK. I don't want you to feel bad. I just hate walking around all the time hating that that happened."
"Well Jess, mah little snooggle bunny," she said, pulling her legs up onto the couch and resting her head on his arm. "I do believe that communication is the key to any relationship," she said in a faux-stern voice.
"Huh. Is that so?" he said, tilting her face up to look at him.
"Huh, yeah. It is. We should really uh, communicate more, Jess," she said smiling flirtatiously. She continued to smile as he bent his head down and touched his lips to hers and kissed her.
They didn't notice as the door opened and Luke walked in. He cleared his voice, "Looks like you guys are pretty good at talking," he said slyly, and he laughed as Rory laughed and buried her blushing face in Jess' shirt.
"We're even better at 'communicating', right Rory?"
Author's Note: Now I understand what all those other people meant when they were begging for reviews. It's kind of scary to put a story out and not know if people will like it. If you read it and you have something you'd like to say, please review so I can just know if you like it and I can sleep. Also, if you think it would be a cool story to continue with, lemme know. I'm not really sure as of now. Thanks a bunch, buckos.