Monday PT.2
JESS-
If you walked into Jenn's, you'd see the normal bunch of customers for twelve o'clock on a Wednesday.
In the corner, there was a bunch of school kids, goofing around and sharing coffee and muffins for their long break from school.
At the counter, there was a line of between three and four people, all patiently waiting for their orders to be placed.
There was an air of cool all throughout the café, just like it had been known for.
The room was decorated in a warm, soft yellow, the furniture all old, beautifully stained wood that would keep Luke's interest for hours. In the background, a playlist of indie-folk music played, a little too mellow for Jess' taste, but there was something so peaceful about all of the factors mixed in together that had sucked him in.
He'd fallen in love with a coffee shop, and he could explain why with one word: Rory.
Everything about the place reminded him of her, from the window that held a long bench you could sit at to people watch, to the sunflower walls that he knew she would love. The music held a strong air of her presence, and he knew half of the bands would play songs that she listened to almost every day.
Usually, he mixed into the cool, calm and collected category, fading into the background and not stepping out in the slightest, his usual seat one of the bar stools at the window. Today was not one of those days.
Seated at his usual table, in his usual seat, with his normal order of tea sitting between his hands on the old wood in front of him, Jess Mariano could be described by a lot of words, none of them resembling, "calm", "cool" or "collected".
Despite his new-found tea addiction border-lining on par with Rory's love for coffee, since he'd gotten his order he'd managed to swallow a total of two mouthfuls and he knew that the liquid was beginning to turn cold; he'd been nursing it for well over twenty minutes.
He hunched further into the red leather bar stool and bit his lip, frowning down at the table in front of him. The Rory he'd known – the Rory he loved – was known for her unusual punctuality, so he'd thought it best to arrive thirty minutes before he'd told her to come, just in case.
It had turned out to be a terrible mistake.
Because, even though when he'd arrived he knew there was no way she would be that early, no matter how nervous she was, Jess had been staring at the door ever since he arrived with one question rolling through his mind on repeat.
Will she come?
In his email he'd made it as clear as a crystal.
If she came, it meant that she was willing to give them a chance and see where they went. If she didn't show up, it meant that she didn't want him to contact her again and he would do his best to fulfil her request and leave her alone.
It meant she was probably in love with the new douchebag she was seeing and she didn't want Jess to be a part in her life at all.
And he would try to stay away, he really would.
Although, he already admitted to himself, he would start visiting Stars Hollow more often, just in case she happened to be there one of the days he visited.
All he wanted to do was be able to look at her.
God he missed looking at her in person, not through a computer screen.
Wow, he snapped sarcastically to himself, you're not pathetic in the slightest.
When the doorbell rang to signal another customer that wasn't her, he couldn't help but narrow his eyes at the young couple that walked in, hand-in-hand, the girl giggling pathetically at something the boy next to her had said.
It probably wasn't even that funny.
You're just showing off.
He admitted to himself that he was starting to go crazy and he frowned at the mug he was holding. He couldn't afford to go crazy; at least, not yet.
Because, despite what the guys had put on the coffee mugs and sold online without his consent, he was nowhere close to being like Hemingway. He wasn't even close to being accomplished enough, and that meant that he wasn't allowed to go crazy. Not yet. He didn't have a right.
Just thinking that probably makes you crazy.
"Jess, hun." At the soothing voice, his eyes turned up and his lips pulled into a small, shy smile. He couldn't help it, he felt like she'd caught his thoughts drifting out of his brain. "Stop worrying. If she knows what's good for her than she'll turn up – who wouldn't if you were waiting?"
Even though her words were meant to encourage and sooth, all they did was make him more nervous. Because he couldn't handle the thought that maybe she wouldn't turn up.
What if she didn't want to see him again?
"Stop. She's going to be here; don't doubt her." Jenn's voice had taken on the tone of authority that only ever came out when she was chastising him and he had to bite his lip from rolling his eyes at her. He knew she'd find a newspaper and hit him again if he did that.
Jenn had never asked for a son, she muttered all the time that she didn't have time for family, but she sure treated Jess like her own kin and had from the moment she met him. For the first time in his life, he didn't mind having a motherly figure around all that much.
Maybe it was because her café and her spirit somehow reminded him of the good times in Stars Hollow – a feeling he couldn't even begin to explain why he missed –, or maybe it was just the tough-love, all the while kindness she'd shown him from the second he'd stumbled through the door.
He couldn't tell you why he loved her.
All he knew was he did, and he couldn't remember the last time he'd had someone to take care of him the way that she did.
He'd found the café going on four months before their scheduled meeting, in some of his darkest times, by pure accident. He'd stumbled out of his apartment for the first time in over two weeks because he'd run out of his carton of cigarettes and the liquor cupboard was slowly emptying despite how full it had been less than half of a month before.
He'd been so drunk that he'd accidentally turned the wrong way, gone left instead of right, and had managed to turn down the wrong street.
Even though it was only three streets from his apartment, he'd never been on the street before, and when he walked past, he ended up stopping outside on the pavement and watched the people through the window.
Admittedly, he was looking for her, just like he did through every window of every coffee shop he passed, believing that the universe would somehow manage to bring them back together, and what better place than a coffee shop?
It had been nearly an hour of her frowning at him with a concerned look on her face before he thought fuck it and barged through the door, the aroma of coffee washing through his sense.
He almost wanted to cry.
Up until that point, he'd had a hard time walking into a coffee shop. He hadn't been in one for over three years, apart from Luke's where there was so many other smells it practically drowned out the coffee smell.
The smell hit too close to home.
It reminded him too much of her.
He'd spent too much time trying to forget her existence so he could survive.
"Wow, who drank a liquor store?!"
He turned around ready to snap at the woman who'd spoken to fuck off – again, not his brightest days – before he took in the older woman with the kind, smiling eyes and noted the joking tone in her voice, his words catching themselves on the tip of his tongue.
She was the same one who'd been checking on him through the window for the past hour and suddenly he didn't want to be rude, he wanted to hug her. He knew she was the mother he'd never gotten instantly.
She'd patted him on the back, nodded to the table which became his regular over the following months, and then brought him a herbal tea which helped him get sober in record time.
Since that day, he'd been back every morning and almost every afternoon, and the pair had found a strange bond that tied them together.
No matter how much she joked about it, he refused to call her mama, and she refused to let him pay for any of the cups of tea he managed to consume.
He shook his head to clear the memory fog away from his head and his eyes skimmed from her to the door and back again involuntarily. "The problem is, I don't think either of us has ever really known what's good for us when the other person is involved."
With a sympathetic look that she'd perfected over the course of getting him sober, she bent down and kissed his head before she picked her coffee pot off the bench in front of him and turned to finish the rest of the coffee-cup rounds.
When the door sounded to announce another soul's arrival, he didn't have to look up to know that she'd decided to come.
Just like always, there was a pull in the energy around him – it had been the same when they were younger, and it was just as strong as ever in that moment in the café.
Slowly, he lifted his eyes from the wooden table underneath his mug and suddenly found the brightest pools of blue he'd ever seen.
And in that moment his nervousness and fear completely disappeared.
She was there.