As he'd suspected, Luke wasn't too happy when Jess slipped inside the to-be diner in the later afternoon, the bell jingling to signal his arrival. He was immediately met with four quick strides over to him, a rough hand grabbing him by his book bag and then dragging him up the stairs.

"Where were you Jess?! Where were you?!"

"Reading," he said, shrugging his shoulders.

"Re-" his uncle pinched his brow, "Where?!"

Jess lifted one shoulder and then tossed his head back over it, indicating a vague direction.

"Jess! You can't just not come home after school, okay?! You have to come straight home! And if you're not going to, then you have to tell me where you're going! But you shouldn't not come straight home! Unless, like, you have an after school thing or something! But I should know!"

Jess heaved a sigh and cast an unfixed gaze over towards other side of the small room.

"You got it, Jess? Jess!"

Jess turned his head back and looked up at his uncle, who lifted a hand and rubbed the back of his head again, staring down the boy in front of him with some bewilderment. Jess took this as his sign to be let go and walked over to the kitchen table, climbing into the chair and slinging his bag onto the table top. He folded his hands in front of him and rested his chin on them, letting out a puff of breath.

Luke made his way over there slowly, eyeing his nephew as he opened the refrigerator. "You hungry?"

Jess shrugged.

Jess stepped up to the edge of the path, acorns crunching under his shoes into the dirt, and the sharp sound knocking him out of his reverie to fully take in where he was. School had gotten out for his second day there, as painful and uneventful as the first, ten minutes prior. As soon as the bell rang, he'd found himself being pulled by something - curiosity ... boredom ... routine ... or something else tight inside his chest that he had not read a word to define yet - to take the same aimless walk he had the day before, only this time knowing where he would end up.

Jess took a deep breath, breathing in the early Spring air tinged with leftover cold. He surveyed the grounds in front of him and found it exactly the same as it had been the day before. She had said that she worked, or something about living, just up the road a little ways from here. Jess bit the inside of his cheek and stepped off the road into the grassy field. He made his way over to the tree standing in front of old house and with his feet firmly rooted in place he leaned over and looked up and down the empty porch.

Dropping his head and looking down at his feet Jess let the options rattle around in his brain. He had wandered this way and stayed sitting by this old, abandoned house yesterday because he had wanted to be alone. It's large but squat shape and crumbling outline amidst a slightly overgrown field and secluding collection of brambles had struck him like a slightly familiar face in strange town. The last thing he had expected, or wanted, was for someone to find him. So, the last thing he was interested in doing was going to visit wherever it was she came from. He could care less, no matter how curious her appearance and words had been.

Jess shuffled his feet against the tangles of weeds and dirt and then turned around, shouldering off his bag, and sitting down cross-legged against the trunk of the old tree, back facing the abandoned house. He wedged himself into a comfortable position against the roots and lightly touched the overgrown grass around him, patting down and familiarizing the spot. Jess kicked out his legs and dragged his bag over into his lap, unzipping it and pulling out his book. He looked up blinking and squinting at the sunlight filtering through the tree branches and then folded the book open to the right page, starting to read just as the day before.

Time passed but Jess made sure to look up periodically, blinking back into the world and checking that it wasn't too late by how close the sun had sunk to the cypresses lining the other side of the road. It was during one of these relapses back into the real world, that couldn't have been more than fifteen or so minutes since he started, that he heard the sound of shoes kicking up dirt along the road behind him. He stiffened in place and then folded in his knees and the covers of his book. The footsteps stopped and Jess heard a feminine sigh, the steps then resuming and stopping at the sound of wooden boards creaking beneath the weight of someone sitting down. Jess held his breath and let his one hand brace against the tree trunk behind him.

Quickly he darted his head around and saw her sitting there, in blue jeans and a pink tie-dye t-shirt, her arm propped on her knee and chin rested in her hand, long fingernails softly pressed into her cheek as she looked off into the distance away from him. Her dark, wavy hair now had offsetting streaks of green in it. She had a coffee cup in her other hand and casually took a sip. Jess let his head fall back against the tree trunk and sighed. He wasn't ... hiding exactly. But every instinct from the crown of his head down into the pit of his gut had told him all his life it was better to observe first than to be observed. If he hadn't come to see her at the inn like she asked then why was she here? He relaxed his legs, still trying to contain his limbs behind the thick old tree.

"Hey, punk!" Jess jumped in place. "Quit hiding." Her voice floated over to him easily on the light spring air, cheerful and teasing, "Didn't want to come by the inn?"

Jess edged up, untangled his legs and scraped his hand along the rough bark of the tree. He turned around, letting his book fall open hanging from his hand, several pages falling loose from under his thumb. He pulled up his bag with the other hand but let it drag in the grass. Jess gave her a deep shrug of his shoulders and twitched his mouth into a half-frown.

"Don't worry, kiddo," she said with an expression settling somewhere on amused exasperation. "I told you I come by some of the time after work. I usually have about an hour to kill a couple days a week." She smiled at him. "But if you want it all to yourself, you'll have to arm wrestle me for it. I was here first and," she said, dipping her index finger to make the point, "I'm older."

"What's with your hair?" he asked moving over to the porch steps and pulling his book back up into both hands, sitting down next to her and flipping it open, as if planning to ignore her presence.

"Rude," she said, tugging at a green curl. "What's with yours? It looks like no one ever brushes it."

Jess cut her a glare and went back to flipping the pages of his book, trying to find where he had left off. They sat in silence for a minute, her fingernails intermittently tapping against the cardboard coffee cup, elbows pressed into her knees. "A friend of mine did it this morning," she piped up, "Awful, right? But it'll wash right out first time I take a shower."

Jess put his book down on the step beside him and pressed his palm against the wood, leaning over in front of Lorelai and peering into her face. She blinked and sat back. "What, do I have something in my teeth?"

Jess sat back again and picked the book up, fwipping the pages against the pad of his thumb. "You're weird," he stated.

"Again, with the rudeness," Lorelai chimed, taking a sip from her coffee.

Jess sat, staring at a sentence in the middle of the page, reading it over in his head several times, as his eyebrows knitted together. Then he looked up, staring out into the grass in front of the building. "Do you have a husband?" he asked.

"What?" Lorelai asked, pulling the coffee cup away from her lips.

"Do you," he said the words carefully, as if asking a little kid, "have a husband?"

"Why?" she laughed.

Jess stopped, looking at her with a guarded frown. "Cause you're old."

She let out a short, sharp laugh at that. "Well, okay then. I'm old," she whispered to herself. "Um, no. I don't have a husband."

Jess looked out in front of him for a moment longer and then pressed his hand back down on the pages of book, turning his face back to the words. "Okay."

Lorelai twisted the plastic lid of her coffee cup between her fingertips. "I almost had a husband," she said, almost as if admitting a fact to herself that she didn't quite believe.

Jess looked up at her. The light hit the side of her face between patterns of shadows cast by the leaves above them. Her eyes looked distant, a smile whispered across her face that wasn't like the others she'd teased his way. He thought, just for a moment, in just that light with just those words, that she looked just like his mom.

"My mom's almost had a husband a lot of times," he offered.

"Oh?" she said, turning his head to look at him, her left hand bunched up in her brown and green curls. He nodded, simply, mouth rested into barely a frown on his tiny face, reassuring the fact to her in his best attempt at solidarity.

That same different sad smile crossed her face briefly, but this time Jess felt it directed at him. His frown deepened.

Jess stood up, the movement abrupt and spurred before he'd even thought about it. He picked up his bag and turned around to face her, pressing the bag against his shins. "I have to get back now or my uncle will get upset again."

"Okay," she said, picking up her coffee cup and standing. She started to walk out towards the road and Jess tromped along behind her, his bag hitting against his knees with every step. They stopped at the edge of the dirt path. "That's good," she said. "That your uncle would be worried."

"Yeah," Jess frowned up at her.

"I'm going that way." She the pointed the opposite direction up the road, where the path disappeared behind a bend.

Jess looked down and bit his lip softly, thinking. He looked back up and decided it wouldn't bruise his ego too much to let a few more words pass between them. "What's that way?"

"I told you, where I work. You didn't want to come, remember?" She started to walk out towards that way. "Invitation still stands. Maybe next time, kiddo?" She nodded towards the book still in his hand, "We have a little library even."

Jess looked down at the book, slipping slightly from between his fingers and where it was held against his book bag. "And…," he bit his lip again, "You said you stay there too, right?"

Lorelai stopped. "Yeah," she answered, "In the back potting shed."

Jess gave her an incredulous look. "Are you a squatter?"

She laughed, airy but bright. "No, it's an arrangement I have with the owner. Fixed it up to be cozy. My daughter and I live there."

"Your daughter," he tested the words to himself.

"She's about your age, I think. So another reason to come by." She winked at him and then started to walk away. Jess looked after her and just as she was about to round the bend she shouted out without looking back, "Get on home, punk! Before your uncle worries!"

As she was out of view, Jess turned around and started back into town.