Chapter 3 Dirty Sonnets


"Stretched your legs enough, Gimpy?" asked Jess of Luke as he and Rory surreptitiously exchanged more obscene napkins.

The napkins were now contraband since Rory didn't want her mother to know. And she certainly didn't want Luke finding them, although he didn't really know her handwriting, so she could possibly pass them all off as Jess,' thereby deepening his reputation for corrupting all things Rory. Rory was OK with that. As a matter of fact, Luke yelling at Jess might well be the red herring she needed in order to tell her mother that she had quit Yale.

A cramp had settled into Luke's leg. He scowled at the bench seat of the picnic table where he was stretching it, trying to work out the cramp. It was not cooperating. He snarled back at his nephew. "You're gonna be old one day, too, if lung cancer doesn't catch up with you first."

Lorelai grasped at the straw Luke accidentally gave her. "Old. Yes, that's good. Old. You get to be our age, Luke, and we're just a little too old for some things." Lorelai began her imitation of a bobble-head doll as she tried to get Luke to buy into the "too old" thing.

"Whaddya mean, too old, Lorelai?" Luke groaned as he stood up on two legs again. "Neither of us is even forty yet. The only thing we're too old for is taking crap off over-confident twenty-somethings who need a haircut." Limping to the other side of the table, where Jess sat, he cuffed Jess on the head none too lightly.

"Well, there comes a time when the cutoff shorts need to be relegated to the back yard. Or someone needs to rethink the length of his sideburns." She squinted pointedly at Jess. "Or maybe, sometimes, it's just time to not make any major life changes."

Luke's shields went up instantaneously. Shit Shit Shit Shit Shit. She can't run now, we only have one car. He envisioned her peeling off the rubber on the Jeep's tires as she headed for … where? Where the hell do you run when you've already run away to elope? Maybe he should look up bus schedules. Or maybe they should have taken the Prius.

Tiny fissures spread like wildfire across his heart.

Also recognizing Lorelai's squirming, Rory gaped at her mother. Was she going to run? How could she run from Luke? He was her home, her rock.

Jess silently watched the Lorelai train wreck into Luke's soul.

Luke's face, now ashen except for his blue eyes which blazed with the pain and fear. Fear that they'd gotten so close this time, but still couldn't hold it together.

Lorelai stared at Luke, her love for him and desire to comfort him losing the battle to reach out to him.

He worried that the words, never his friends, would fail him now.

"Lorelai," said Luke shakily, "Which life changes exactly do you not want to make?" He wondered if he would faint when the oxygen in his lungs gave out.

In a fruitless attempt to distract Luke, Rory tossed a handful of sticky napkins in the air, shouting, "Jess wrote dirty poems!"

"Hey!" Jess cried. "Yours are much dirtier than mine! Do you write your mother with that pen?"

Luke reached out and pulled an errant napkin that had somehow attached itself to Lorelai's hair. He puzzled over the handwriting, unable to believe that it was Jess' or that Rory could write verse that dirty. There had to be limits even to her vocabulary, and he was pretty sure these words weren't ones to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary. Not that he ever cracked a dictionary; he was just sure it couldn't have been Rory. Then he remembered his whole love life was falling apart.

"Lorelai, please, just tell me what you want," Luke pleaded with her.

"It's not what I want! It's what I don't want! I don't want to disappoint you!" Her concern was sincere.

"Well you're scaring me right now! Scaring is worse than disappointing!" he retorted. "What is it you don't want, then? For god's sake, Lorelai, you're driving me crazy!"

"I almost stole a yacht and I'm dropping out of Yale!" screeched Rory.

Simultaneously, Lorelai confessed, "I don't want any more kids!"

A stunned silence as the four stared at each other, dumbfounded.

"But I bought the Twickham house! You said kids would be good!" Luke yanked his hat from his head and beat it against his thigh.

"Wait, what?" Everyone turned to Rory. "You stole a yacht? You're quitting Yale?"

"You're getting rid of the Crap Shack and moving into the Twickham house?" asked Rory.

"I know!" said Lorelai sadly as the pain washed over Luke's face. "And it broke my heart to see you playing baseball out there today. But I just can't see another round of babies and all that comes with it."

After pondering a moment, Lorelai's expression darkened and she turned to Luke. "You bought the Twickham house? It's huge! And it has a giant hole in the floor. What were you thinking?"

"I'm quitting Yale and I have no home," mumbled Rory sadly.

"I'm thinking that the Twickham house is gonna cut my house repair time in half," grumbled Luke. He looked at Lorelai with a tinge of resentment. "And the space for kids thing," he added truthfully.

"Oh, Luke," said Lorelai, pulling him into a hug. She reached a hand behind her to hold Rory's hand, unfortunately getting a handful of hair instead. Rory shoved her hand away.

Suddenly Lorelai pushed Luke away and turned to Jess. "It's not like you to keep out of the drama. What's your story?"

"I got a contract to publish my book, but I'm flat broke, homeless and I can't afford food, so I can't concentrate enough to even finish editing the damn thing." Jess' defiant look reminded Lorelai of her own defiant teenage period, when she desperately needed help, but no one was there except for her mother, reminding her constantly that she should live like she was the beloved perfect daughter in a 50's sitcom. She pushed away the recognition that her own beloved perfect daughter was no longer so perfect. She was a yacht-stealing felon. She'd deal with Rory in a bit. Jess' situation was more desperate.

"Ok, so now we know what we have to do," said Lorelai calmly. "We need to feed Jess again." Picking up her purse, she started across the street toward the ice cream store, her heels, which were completely inappropriate for the park and a picnic, betraying the wobbly feeling she felt in her heart.


A/N: Short, noisy, everyone's unhappy.