Jess hadn't replied yet. It was understandable, though, considering he had spent his Sunday with his uncle. Then Monday came and he was too busy managing Truncheon's Books, just like she was also supposed to be working.
The only emails she had gotten since the previous week were from Paris; she was sending all these articles and sites about pregnancy, motherhood, kids, teenagers, families, and one that Rory wished was spam about the best sexual positions to conceive a baby.
Rory read all of them; she knew Paris well enough to know that she would have gone into details on every single one and if she missed something, she would get busted. Being grounded by Paris was out of question now with Lorelai's wedding so close.
She had a very good idea of what this was all about. Paris was crazy about Mark Evans, she didn't even meet him personally, but he was the owner of a small magazine company that she loved in New York, and Paris thought that if she showed her support for him and Rory, he would invite Paris to work there.
Rory never told Paris the exact reason why they broke up, but the first week afterward Paris kept on insisting that they should get back together. She calmed down after a while and now she was clearly trying to bring up the subject again.
Rory logged off her email account and went back to finishing typing her article; one, as she'd been informed, that was going to be on the front page of the next day's edition. This was a huge deal for her. It was her first great opportunity since she started working at the New York Post, and as much as she wanted to focus on it and type out the best piece that whole company had ever seen, she was still feeling insecure.
Being Editor there wasn't her dream job; she was still stuck in an office following a nine to five pace and the furthest her job had taken her so far was Trenton, New Jersey. But she knew it was only a matter of time until they saw her potential and shipped her off to New Zealand or Puerto Rico or any other country where something interesting was going on. Now Mark Evans was out of her way, and after her mother's wedding there would be nothing stopping her from going out and seeing the world.
Also, it occurred to her that besides managing Truncheon's Books Jess was also (and mainly) a writer. It wouldn't be too hard for him to accompany her to those places and still live his own dream while he was at it. She immediately shook that idea out of her head; he hadn't even bothered to take five minutes to reply to her yet, and she most certainly didn't know what his intentions were, if there were any.
Rory finished her article before her daily lunch with Paris. She organized her desk the best she could before taking her laptop and leaving the building to get to their usual restaurant.
She scanned the place only to find that Paris hadn't arrived yet, so she took a table and turned on her computer. She checked her email: still no response from Jess, although Barack Obama seemed to find some time to ask her if she was available to work with him again; the email was probably sent by an assistant and it was probably sent to all of the journalists who covered his campaign, but still Obama had found the time to give someone instructions to mail her.
She closed the window and started to work on a piece to which she was assigned that morning. She sensed someone sit on the chair at her right, and then, someone sat on the chair at her left, making her look up, confused.
Paris's husband greeted the blue eyed girl, who greeted him back with a confused smile before greeting the actual wife.
"So, did you read them?" Paris asked, completely ignoring the formalities.
"Every single creepy one of them," Rory nodded. "And honestly, I'm really thankful for all the effort you're making, but it's just not going to happen."
The blonde girl looked at her shocked, even letting her jaw drop a little bit before giving a glance at Doyle who also seemed very astonished; then she looked at her best friend again, waiting for an explanation.
"I'm sorry, Paris, I'm not going back with Mark Evans, we're definitely over," Rory sighed.
"What? What are you talking about?" Paris raised her eyebrows. "I couldn't care less about you and Mark. Besides, he might own a great magazine, but the guy is a moron."
"You said we should marry and that you wanted to be a part of it," Rory replied incredulously.
"Doyle told me I should be more supportive," Paris explained.
"That I did," he confirmed with a nod. Rory frowned in perplexity looking at the both of them hoping that things would soon be clarified.
"We're thinking about having children and we want your opinion," Doyle finally said, looking dearly at his wife and taking her hand.
"We already know Doyle's parents are okay with this and mine think it's just a waste of time and energy on someone who will just disappoint you constantly and we don't have anyone else to ask, so we wanted to know your opinion before making a decision," Paris continued. Rory kept looking from one to the other without saying anything. "And don't worry, if we do decide to go ahead with this, it will be after your mother's wedding. I don't want to look fat in the ceremony," she kept on. It was very thoughtful of her to take her mother's wedding into account when making one of the most important decisions of her life, Rory thought ironically.
"So, what do you think?" he insisted.
"About what?" Rory asked.
"About us, me, Doyle, doing the baby thing. Are you pro it? Con it? Should we throw a baby shower, or buy a cat?" Paris replied starting to sound even more impatient than she usually got when she wasn't getting the reaction from people that she wanted.
"Well, I don't know, this is for you two to figure out, I guess…" Rory said. It seemed that the more they explained and the more she tried to understand what was going on, the most confused she got.
"We don't know what we think," Doyle moaned.
"Too bad, I won't decide it for you," she shook her head and started to pick up her stuff from the table.
"Why?" the other girl shouted.
"Because you're crazy," Rory explained, standing up and leaving the table.
"You are no longer the godmother of this perhaps never-born baby!" Paris shouted again to her back, causing people there to look at both of them. Doyle placed his hand on his wife's shoulder to calm her down.
Rory went to the counter to cancel her order before she walked out of the restaurant and wandered around for a while. Her mother was getting married, her childhood friend was married with children, her other best friend was married and thinking about babies… for the first time it ocurred to her that she was the only one who was completely single and lonely, living alone in a tiny apartment in New York and trying to stick with her old friends – she never bothered to bond with people at work, she always thought she would get a job as a international correspondent soon. It seemed she was stuck in time these days. She would still go back to her town whenever she could, she would still go to Friday Night Dinners at her grandparents' house, and, as the cherry on the top of that cake, she was holding on to a high school flame who just recently decided to suddenly reenter her life.
She was starting to feel really sorry for herself, but she knew she shouldn't because things were going great for her, they were a little slow, but they were moving, and she knew it would soon all soon fall into place. She should be happy that her article would be featured on the front page on the next day. That meant a lot and she knew it.
She stopped at a hot dog stand and ordered one to go before heading back to the office to continue her work. She did her best trying to suppress the memories of a day very long ago, when she had ended up at a hot dog stand in the exact same city. Still, she couldn't help but analyze how things had changed since that day. In her teens, she had considered walking alone in the city to be an adventure, but now it was her reality. Also, taking the subway lately was necessary, rather than amusing, and she would cross her fingers that someone who was lost wouldn't ask her for directions.
She finished her hot dog outside the building, where the smelly smokers were taking a drag before getting back to their stressful jobs. She checked her email once again, this time only finding a message from Paris complaining that she'd been rude to leave the restaurant that way, and that she was still waiting for an answer. Rory deleted it with a sigh; it was going to be a very long day.
When the clock announced the end of the work day, she was already half-way through the door, desperate to go back to her apartment, take a shower, have dinner, read a book and go to bed as early as she could.
She was about to do the last item on that list when she decided to check her email once more. Still nothing from Jess, but in the past few hours she'd gotten a few more from Paris, one from Doyle apologizing for his wife's behavior, and one from her mother asking if they could change their wedding-planning a bit and go to New York that coming weekend for wedding shoe shopping, instead of just buying them in Connecticut. She giggled at her mother's excitement and decided to give her a call to catch up before resting for the next day.
She woke up feeling refreshed. She poured herself a cup of coffee, and then left her apartment and went down to the mailroom. Today was the day her article would be on the front page and she couldn't be more excited, in fact, she was so excited that she wasn't even bothered by the pile of bills that were together with the newspaper.
And there it was, the day's newspaper, and right on the front, in tiny letters, her name "Lorelai Gilmore" along with the newest headline in New York, all brought to the readers by her. She never thought she would care so much about the remodeling of the Wien Stadium, she wasn't even that into sports. She smiled happily reading her own words.
One of her neighbors brushed against her while reaching into his mailbox.
"Hey, did you hear about the new Wien Stadium?" Rory asked him with a smile.
The neighbor looked at her, first confused, and then after looking her up and down, he grinned.
"Yeah, I wanted to go there someday soon, would Friday work for you?" he asked leaning against the wall, trying to look cool.
Rory frowned realizing what had just happened. "Oh no, sorry, I can't," she apologized, starting to feel embarrassed; she tried a smile again, handing him her paper. "But there's a great piece about it in here, if you want to check it. I have to go."
She gave him an awkward wave and left without looking back.
When she arrived to the office, nobody seemed quite as thrilled about her article as she did. For most of them it was just a regular day, with a regular new edition that had a few articles on the front page and many more throughout the entire newspaper, along with some advertisements and letters from the readers, and, in that particular edition, also a recipe for onion rings (which seemed to be a hit among her coworkers, more interesting to them than Wien Stadium, at least).
X
The rest of the week was very uneventful until Thursday. Paris had decided she and Doyle would try to start a family, and Lorelai remarked after hearing the news from Rory, that "their kid will beg to go to Military School to escape from Paris's strict rules."
After making that decision, they were back to having lunch together, although Rory feared she would soon start to ask for her opinion on names and genders, as if it was really possible for Paris to control whether she got a boy a girl (it wasn't that much of a stretch to imagine that Paris would consider it within her power).
Rory had just finished taking a shower when she decided to check her email before going back to reading Gulliver's Travels – she was still very upset about Jack Black's version, and this was her way to get back at the Hollywood producers.
Just like the other days, she still got lots of junk mail, but no responses from Jess. She sighed and went to her bookshelf to read more about Laputa, noticing that the book was next to the Slaughterhouse Five on the shelf. She glanced at it and then took it very carefully, suddenly with a thought on her mind.
She had reread that copy of the book as soon as she had gotten it back from Jess, and he'd probably known that she would do that, so he'd written down his email address along with his footnotes regarding O'Hare's children's book Dresden: History, Stage, Gallery.
This is not some insightful view of Mary Endell's quote on Goethe, this is just plain vandalism, she thought when she'd first spotted it, written in ink, unlike all the rest of the footnotes that were written with a pencil. And if he had taken that much thought into it, to leave an obvious way for her to reach him, why hadn't he replied to her when she did exactly what he had clearly hoped she'd do?
She was about to return the book to the shelf when she heard her doorbell. Her heart skipped a beat, and she held onto the book tighter, moving it away from the shelf once again and holding it closer to her body. She wondered if what she was imagining to be true could even be possible, and she headed to the door taking a deep breath before opening it.
She couldn't believe her eyes.
A/N: So, I'm running out of time here but I wanted to update it before my trip. So, here's the next chapter, things are starting to heat up :) thank you everyone who favorited/subscribed and reviewed. I hope you guys enjoy this chapter, and seriously, your opinion means a lot to me!
An special thank you to luvtheheaven she's my beta reader and an amazing one at that! You guys should also check her fics and her videos! Chapter 4 probably will take a while longer to be updated, it's already written, but I'm working on a new project right now that I think many of you guys will enjoy. I'll let you know when it's up. Well, that's it I guess, I hope I have a lot of good surprises when I get back. :D
