Disclaimer: I do not own any of these characters, all the credit goes to the lovely Palladinos.

A/N: This is my first attempt starting something new in a long time. I recently updated one of my old fics, Exchanges on a Rainy Afternoon (from approximately 7 years ago), but this is the first time I've written something new. Let me know what you think/what you'd like to see in the future. Thank you so much. This takes place during Nag Hammadi is Where They Found the Gnostic Gospels.

Let me know what you all think and what you'd like to see more of in the future! Reviews are very much appreciated. Love you all.

Hollow Spaces

I think I'm suffocating. That's the best way I can describe it, because truthfully the lack of oxygen intake is making my head foggy. An eighteen-ton tractor trailer is parked on top of my chest, and my heart is pounding so hard to get blood and oxygen to every cell in my body that I can hear its furious pumping in my ears. So loudly, that I almost didn't hear Rory Gilmore asking me what I even stopped her for, wanted to say. I want to buy myself some time to get my heart to slow down from the mere act of being in her presence. She's not having it. She wants the instant gratification of hearing my words. I can tell she doesn't want to talk. She's angry. She's listening, but I know her well enough to know that she's not. What do you have to say to me.

I should fucking know what I want to say. And yet, I'm standing in front of her, completely and utterly defeated. I'm the definition of scrambling right now. I have no idea what I can say, should say, would say. To say I have given this moment some thought would be a massive understatement, because it's pretty much all I've been thinking about since I've left. At Venice Beach, the fucking hot dog stand, that crammed piece of shit apartment I'm staying in right now. I sat in these places for hours and hours and I'm surrounded by all these noises and I'll hear is her voice. All I feel is her hand touching my face. All I see are her eyes telling me it's going to be okay. This is all I think about. I think about getting my shit together and coming back to Star's Hallow, and finding her, maybe in the bookstore or at Luke's. And she says hi to me and gives me that smile that's only for me, and even though she's still hurt, she tells me with her smile it's going to be okay. These scenes cloud my vision and pervade the essence of my being. I can't focus. I look like shit.

All signs seem to point to me saying something, anything, other than staring at her with my hands in my pockets like some fucking James Dean rebel without a cause. My goal is to make it seem like I've got a handle on the situation, but I know my eyes betray me. They always do. She knows I'm suffocating.

Her hair is shorter. I am initially offended, because that's just the sort of small change you would expect someone to tell you. I imagine she might have called me from Yale during a free minute between classes. She might have told me about her classes, or the coffee cart she found, or the eccentricities of the people she's met. She would have told me about her hair. She didn't. I painfully realize I lost that privilege a long time ago. I don't get to know those things.

I wonder what she's reading right now. On her birthday this year, I was in a bookstore in Greenwich Village holding a leather-bound copy of Ayn Rand's journals. I knew she had already read them hundreds of times, but I was going to write my own notes in the margins and give it to her. The guy at the register asked me who I was buying it for, and I answered him with the most unapproachable leer I could muster. Truth is, the person for whom it was intended would probably never receive it. It's collecting dust next to my bed. I want to tell her to read Al Franken's new book and that she can just borrow mine, because I just finished it. Maybe if I can say the right thing, I'll still get to tell her that. The book is sitting on the front seat of my car. It's there, waiting for her. Although, like the journals, I think it knows it will never have its rightful owner.

I keep trying to formulate something that resembles an apology, but nothing is good enough. An apology isn't good enough. I don't even know where to begin. Everything sounds like a cliché. Everything sounds like I put it together in the moment, when it should have been planned from the moment I left for California last year. I have the words, but how do I say them? The ability to speak fails me. My mental assembly line is malfunctioning; the words I string together are incoherent. Simply, I am fucked.

Rory's eyes betray her, too. She is beyond hurt; she is livid. She is humiliated. She fought for me, defended my honor, and believed in me. That's more than anyone's ever done for me. The least I could have done was to attempt to rise to the occasion. I didn't. I am weak and worthless. She is beautiful, in all her white-hot fury.

I wonder if I'm dying. Before you die, you see your life flash before your eyes. My mom kicks me out and sends me to my uncle's apartment in the middle of fucking purgatory Stars Hallow. I see myself standing in her room on a fall evening, failing, despite my best efforts to escape from a Star's Hallow dinner party because Rory urges me to stay. I'm giving her back her stolen copy of Howl with my tiny scrawl in the margins and she has this surprised look in her eyes that feels a little something like hope. We're sitting on the bridge and Ernest only has lovely things to say about her. I'm watching her with this look of amusement on my face as she tries to discern the lyrics to Guns of Brixton, and I'm in awe of her because I've never known people who like The Clash quite the way that I do. I crash her car while we're taking a break from pseudo-studying and I know that everyone thinks it's my fault. Her boyfriend who doesn't get her or appreciate her built that car, and everyone blames me because I'm the hoodlum and the bad influence who is only going to hurt Rory. Maybe they are right. She is okay, but for a split second I start thinking that she's better off without Jess Mariano fucking up her life.

I go back to New York without saying goodbye. She skips school and comes up to me in Washington Square Park like it's the most normal thing in the world and says "the big apple" like it's a Hail Mary. She misses her mom's graduation, because it hurt when I left without saying goodbye. I come back (for her), and we're kissing for the first time and she's wearing this blue dress that matches her eyes and I feel light inside because she chose me. We are finally together and I feel like someone really sees me.

She notices, too, when I start to lose myself. I can't hide from her. She might not know exactly what's going on, but she knows I'm not Jess anymore. She lets the weeks slip away as I sink deeper and deeper inside myself, because she doesn't know how to reach me. I can't expect her to save me, because I don't even know how to save myself. I'm not graduating high school, I missed too many days. I'm sitting in the office having this out of body experience where I'm telling the principal that I can still graduate because I'll just make up the work.

I'm smart enough to do this, I tell myself. Rory knows I'm smart enough to do this. I simultaneously am imagining the look of disappointment on Rory's face when I tell her I can't take her to her prom. Rory, the only person who has always believed in me. Rory, who always thought I was good enough; to whom I never had anything to prove. We're in Kyle's bedroom that night at this incredibly stupid party and she knows I'm broken and wants to fix me, but the assembly line is broken then too. Words escape me. All I want is to feel her close to me. She touches my face and her fingers linger in the nooks of my elbows pulling me to her and suddenly my existence is infinitely more meaningful. My pain, however, is too much for her to fix. I am breaking her down even though I promised myself I wouldn't. I don't tell her what's going on. I'm hiding from her, and we both know it.

I run away to California to follow my dad who never really learned how to deal with his problems either. I leave, again. I don't say goodbye, again. I do all these things that I know are going to hurt her, possibly kill her, because somehow the alternate is so much worse. Running away thing was a little trick the Marianos pass on from generation to generation, I think to myself. I know she's graduating. I know I should be there. I imagine myself sitting with her on the bridge, distracting her with kisses and literary musings as she attempts to write her valedictorian speech. But instead, I see myself sitting on a guardrail looking out over this skatepark next to the beach, hypothesizing which books she would have referenced in her speech. She's Rory, there had to be books. I keep calling her and hanging up. Assembly line still broken then too. I call her, with every intent of starting with the same explanation, but I hear her voice, full of anticipation and hope and my worthlessness sets in and all my defenses and explanations crumble to nothingness.

I remember the last time I called her, at this graffitied telephone booth somewhere on the boardwalk in California. It was her graduation day. Congratulations, I miss you, I'm sorry, I want to talk to you; all appropriate greetings. A basic "hi" would have sufficed. But instead, that fucking silence takes over, and instead of hanging up, I hear Rory's voice again, but it doesn't make me feel like everything is going to be okay. I think I might have loved you, but I'm just going to have to let that go.

All of this occurs to me in a single moment, but I'm not fucking dead yet. I'm still standing here with my breath caught somewhere between my throat and my lips. Am I even breathing? I need to say something, anything. I could start from the beginning and do my best to explain myself, but I don't think she has time for that. She doesn't want to wait for me and my explanations anymore. She's waited too long. Rory Gilmore doesn't wait for anyone. She started to wait for me, and I can tell she resented herself for it. She kept telling herself that I was worth the wait, that my showing up would make the absence worth her while. Maybe this time, I would stay. I would take her anger and confusion and work it into something that made sense. Maybe then we would both be able to breathe again.

But I can't stay here. I'm going to run. Before I even speak, we both know it. Still, something needs to be said. I can barely breathe, but I can't let the silence win this time. My head is spinning, because for the first time, I'm seeing how much I hurt her and I don't know how to fix it. She's trembling and I probably am too, but all the blood is rushing to my head so I can't really tell. My voice needs to fill the empty space between us that keeps growing and growing. I want to tell her everything, but the assembly line can't put the goddamn words together into a sentence. I need to try, even if I run. I'm going to run. But even still, I need to try to tell her all that I feel and all that I continue to feel. She needs to know that I'm sorry. I didn't want to leave, but I needed to.

I never really experienced the idiomatic "exploding" of one's heart, but in this moment, my heart is full. I am staring at her, with not a clue as to how to proceed. And yet, I'm standing here, looking into her eyes as I have so many times before and my heart is bursting at the seams with all these memories, and regret, and anger, and sadness, and respect, and trust, and appreciation, and adoration, that is so fucking intense that if I stop to think about it for another second, I might actually keel over and die.

"I love you."