A/N: Getting into the mood proved to be difficult because I've been flying for the past few days. I wrote this with The Weepies in my playlist, Neruda flashing on my screen, and vivid flashbacks of my ex on repeat.
Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, the poem is Pablo Neruda's (and his beautiful mind), an excerpt below belongs to Ayn Rand.
No Other Way
Chapter 1: Neruda
Jess, a bottle of shampoo, and too many memories he tried to forget.
'Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.'
Fate, which he surprisingly believed in considering the millions of books he read, was trying to tell him something, when he randomly chose a book of Neruda's poems from his bulging bookshelf. What it was, he wasn't quite sure yet. He pondered on this, as he chewed on his morning toast – dry, like his humor – and sipped his morning tea (because he had pretty much sworn off coffee for obvious reasons.
"Hey Matthew, give me a number!"
A crash followed by the slamming of the door and loud cursing floated from the adjacent room. "A number, as in a number between one and ten? 'Coz that's just ten choices. Or a number, like a hot girl's number? I have more of those."
"Stop being cute, Mat-ty," he called, obnoxiously stressing the last syllable. "Between one and twenty."
A brunette in a tan sweater stomped into the kitchen, waving a bottle of… well, something at him in a supposedly threatening manner. "I thought I already made myself clear. I'm not sharing my shampoo!"
His left eyebrow immediately went up. "What, that flower-smelling crap? I don't know if you noticed this, but I'm not Chris. And," he added after a bit of thought, "Chris has more hair. More flower-smelling, girly hair. Like you."
"Oh." He froze, blinking stupidly at Jess' smirking face. "So that explains the lack of afro. I need my damn coffee. S'too early to argue without caffeine," Matthew muttered darkly, as he stomped towards the coffee machine. A familiar scent slowly filled the room, causing his stomach to turn, but only slightly. It had been two years, after all.
"My number?" he reminded him.
Matthew effortlessly flipped the shampoo bottle to peer at the price sticker on the bottom. "Tell Chris he owes me seventeen dollars. And fuck you. I have manly hair."
He rolled his eyes. "Why you spend that much shit on shampoo is beyond me," he mumbled, quickly flipping pages until he reached sonnet number 17. His fingers abruptly froze, mouth tensed, as dark eyes skimmed the first few lines. Fate clearly loved him today. But irony loved him more.
"I didn't know you liked Jane Austen. It's just, she's…" she made wide circles with her hands in a helpless gesture, "worlds away from Bukowski and Kerouac. Not that I'm stereotyping you," she hastily added. "Because that would be silly considering I love beat poetry just as much as you do…"
Her rambling was interrupted by a deep chuckle. "I can read different things too, you know. Too much of the same thing is boring."
"Which is why Hemingway puts me to sleep."
The teen ignored her swipe at his literary tastes, as his hand skillfully plucked the book from her waving ones. He smirked. "Pablo Neruda?"
"It's beautiful," she justified almost immediately.
His eyes closed shut as he attempted to reach into not-so-faraway memories of warm afternoons spent on a rickety bridge as he waited for a certain letter from Washington. "I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off," he recited. "I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul."
He opened his eyes to meet her shining blue ones. Her cheeks, he noted, were stained red.
"You've read Neruda."
His lips formed a lazy smirk. "Different things, Gilmore. Different things."
The bell sounded, signaling the exit of his last customer. His eyes darted to the stupid cuckoo clock Matthew insisted on keeping. The shrill peeping that came every goddamn hour was apparently not annoying enough for Chris to chuck it out the window, and expensive enough for Matthew to keep it.
He had less than an hour before closing.
Automatically, his hands reached out for the books which were out of place, swiftly rearranging them in alphabetical order, by author. His hand stopped at "Rand."
Upon second reading, he actually appreciated "Atlas Shrugged." Not that he'd tell her, of course. Up to now, he was still unsure whether they were on speaking terms.
He pulled it out, opening it on a random page.
'Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark. In the hopeless swamps of the not quite, the not yet, and the not at all, do not let the hero in your soul perish and leave only frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.'
Ayn Rand's writing was so typically Rory. The objectivist philosophy, the monologues on morality and rationality, taking matters into one's own and perfectly capable hands, hope in the hopeless because yes, the hopeless had capable hands too. God, this passage reminded him so much of Rory that he swore if he closed his eyes, he could feel her climbing out from the book, feel her heartbeat against his chest.
The whole world in the palm of her hand; his entire heart too.
He had done possibly everything in the book to get her to hate him. He crashed her car and broke her wrist. He made her break up with her tree-like but perfect boyfriend. He refused to go to every Stars Hollow festival except for the Winter Carnival because, let's face it, he felt threatened by Dean, and the Bid-A-Basket Festival because, at that time, that was his only chance to have Rory all to himself.
It was so worth the $90, by the way.
During the short, tumultuous time that they were together, every date was as spontaneous, as unplanned, and as clumsy as his neurotic girlfriend would find it. He made a wonderful first impression with her grandmother with his black eye. He tried to force her to have sex with him at a kegger. He didn't take her to prom. He left her without a word – twice.
He was horrible, a monster. Lorelai hated him. Grandma Gilmore hated him. Shock. Rory's idiot father hated him too. Not to mention Lane and Paris. The whole population of Stars Hollow – which probably amounted to 20, but hey, it's still an entire town – also hated him.
But not Rory. He thought she did. But when he came back to see her, to give her a copy of his first book, she looked at him with those liquid blue eyes of hers that shone with so much happiness and pride that he was almost blinded.
She always believed he was destined for something greater.
He always thought he was destined for her.
He closed the book with a quick thump, and slipped it into the space beside "The Fountainhead" (her favorite book).
It felt like the whole world was conspiring against him to remind him of what, or who, he lost. This was ridiculous. Two years had gone by since the last time they had spoken. Evasion was easy. She trotted around the country to chase a presidential candidate. He stayed in Truncheon, and spent a few minutes of his holidays with Luke on the phone. He never went to Stars Hollow, paid rare visits at Liz's home to see his half-sister, Doula. A possible engagement between her mother and his uncle – the only father he ever had – loomed ominously like a dark cloud, but was still non-existent, non-palpable. He was still safe.
So why the multiple nudges from Neruda, Rand, and a bottle of shampoo?
"Done over there?"
He looked up, startled. "Yeah, sure. Is it six yet? I think I need coffee."
Chris raised his eyebrow. "But you hate coffee."
"I do."
"Uh…" he would have enjoyed the confusion in Chris' eyes if he wasn't so focused in his thoughts. "There's one more customer. Pretty girl, by the way. Totally your type."
He had a type? Huh. "Yeah? And just what is my type?" he asked, curious.
"Tall, thin, peculiar taste in books, amazing eyes."
The groan followed as soon as the words were out. Goddammit. So the whole world now included Chris and the said customer. He really needed that coffee now. Or a beer. Screw it, he needed a damn tequila.
"Could you finish up? This headache's driving me nuts."
"Okay…" Chris answered hesitatingly. "Are you asking her out? 'Coz I won't if you-"
"I'm not," he cut him off, stalking toward the front door. The last thing he needed was a girl who'd remind him of someone else, someone he lost two years ago to the most arrogant, most superficial, richest, blondest asshole.
He was done with this. He was done with her. He swore the last time he'll think of her was as soon as he finished his second book. Whenever that was.
"Hey Chris," he called out, as he grabbed his denim jacket. "You watched CNN lately?"
"Yeah, sure. Why?"
"Any idea where the Obama campaign is right now?"
"It's in Philly," came a quiet voice from behind him.
He whirled around in surprise, knocking a few books from the top of a display case to the floor. It was his first book – the one he dedicated to her.
Fate wasn't conspiring with him, he realized. The sonnet, the passage from "Atlas Shrugged," the sudden longing for coffee, they weren't ways of reminding him of her. It was fate's way of preparing him. Because after two years of zero contact, after two years of avoiding Connecticut, after two years of putting her on paper to help himself get on with his life,
She was here.
