A/N: As always, thanks you for your reviews, they make us all kinds of happy! Enjoy chapter 7.
Disclaimer: We do not own any of the characters associated with Gilmore Girls, but we own Cammie, 'cause she's absolutely kick ass cool.
A screeching sound made Jess sit up straight. He didn't remember setting the alarm on his phone. On the other hand he didn't really remember his phone's alarm sounding like that either. He did remember falling asleep on the sofa, and waking up when Chris fell on him. He also remembered talking to them about jobs before falling asleep again. Job. Jess groaned and sat up straight, hoping he wasn't late.
The screeching sound was still going off, and he looked around. Beside the sofa he finally found the source of the offensive sound, an old-style alarm clock, with a post-it note on it:
Good morning!
Breakfast is in the fridge.
// Your co-habitants
P.S Chris asked if you could hook him up at Wal Mart.
Jess smiled, shaking his head, wondering where the hell they found the clock. Making his way into the kitchen, he thought about how to make Chris an employee at Wal Mart. He'd definitely call his old boss in Hartford, see if he could pull some strings. Then he'd have to talk to Chris, see if he could get him to at least try to appear like employment-material. Right now they needed all the money they could get their hands on if the publishing company was ever going to become more than a dream in a rundown business space.
"Locust Publishing…" Jess muttered to himself. "Well, at least it's something…"
He opened the fridge, finding a ham-sandwich, some yoghurt and a bottle of orange juice waiting for him. Working and living with Luke had at least given him a slightly refined palate, and after taking his first bite of the sandwich, he quickly decided to claim cooking duty, and save them all from having to digest something that could be possibly lethal. Jess quickly discarded the sandwich and instead took plenty of yoghurt and the juice. Sitting down at the kitchen table, he found his note pad there, opened somewhere in the middle. It didn't take Jess long to understand that they had read it. But how much had they understood? Had they gathered that he hadn't finished high school? Did they understand why he kept going back to blue? Had they… Had they read the last part? Part of Jess wished they hadn't, it was embarrassing as it was to try to show these guys that he wasn't a complete idiot, but on the other hand, he felt that reading that part was the only way for these guys to understand him.
He glanced over towards a clock in the form of an old vinyl LP. Half past seven. He might as well get moving, show up early on his first day and get some brownie points. He took his writing pad, put on the leather jacket and snuck out of the apartment. Philly was as chilly as ever, and the late April sky was a light shade of gray as he walked the few blocks over to the coffee store. This new place of his was growing on him. The right amount of city to make him feel safe in his anonymity, but with the right amount of people knowing about him to make him feel comfortable. New York had been too big, too bustling, too much trouble, and Stars Hollow had been just the opposite, plus trouble. Philadelphia had yet to let him down, and he wished hard that it wouldn't.
Inside the coffee shop, Jess could see Cammie zooming in and out from behind the counter, and he tapped a couple of times on the door window to get her attention. Seconds later, the door swung open.
"Okay, note to self: you need your own key," Cammie said when she ushered him in.
"And good morning to you too," Jess responded, mock-sarcastic.
"No time for greetings, my supplier was late, again I might add, and I tanned his ass so hard he didn't know what hit him! Now I have to get everything in order before I'm supposed to open, which would be in twenty minutes, so sorry Jess. No greetings."
"Okay, take a breath, and show me your storage room and I'll take care of your supplies. Go wipe some tables and don't stop breathing."
"Wow, that's very manly of you. A little more muscle and the ladies will crumble at your feet," Cammie smiled. "If only they did that for me… You think the dark mysterious thing actually works as a general rule, or is it something personal for you?"
"I have no idea, since I'm not playing the dark mysterious card as a general rule," Jess replied. "What did I just tell you?"
"Right," she said, and pointed towards the counter. "Storage is that way. Impossible to miss. Big door, slightly chilly inside, lots of cookies and stuff. I'll be over there, wiping tables and pretending I'm very domestic."
Unlike Luke, Cammie didn't seem to have any kind of system for storing her supplies, so when Jess got started, he ended up creating one, and it took him a bit longer to get everything inside the storage room. Cammie, of course, wasn't late to notice he'd been gone too long.
"What are you..?" she began as she entered the room. She stopped dead as she saw the neat rows of ground coffee, cookie boxes and other goods stacked on the shelves.
"What did you do?" she asked, astounded.
"Your system, or rather lack thereof, decided to rebel against you," Jess replied simply.
"It rebelled against me? All on its own?"
"It's not my fault your system was very conniving. The coffee had issues with the lemon-meringue pie, and that started it."
"And you helped everyone out?"
"Yup."
"And everyone is happy now?"
"I'd say so."
"Then why is the Rocky Road tucked away in that corner without anyone to keep them company? Didn't they want to play with my chocolate chips?" Cammie asked, looking amused at Jess.
"Rocky Road had a 'tude," Jess replied curtly, adding silently to himself: "Much like the tall idiot that liked them…"
"You have the strangest things going on in that head of yours… So if my storage is systematized, maybe we can move on to customer care?"
Jess nodded, and followed Cammie out into the coffee shop.
It was easy for him to get behind the counter and serve customers, easier than he'd thought it would be. There were no Kirks who couldn't decide what to order, no Ceasars who forgot the ham, no coffee addicts who would stumble in at regular intervals and demand caffeine in whatever form that would give them their fix quickest. This was a normal coffee shop with normal customers.
It was a pretty slow day, and Jess had time to sit down every now and then to write. Matt turned up just after noon to declare that he'd taken the job at McDonald's, and that Jake had gotten the job at the record store that him and Reg had told Jess about. Reg was out scouting if Target or K-Mart were hiring, and Chris was still hoping for his Wal Mart career to kick off.
"Tell Chris I'll call my old manager from Hartford and ask around, and I'll try to have something for him in a day or so," Jess told Matt.
"I'll tell him at the publishing house. We're supposed to put out a new copy of the Zine on Friday, so we have some editing to do. How's the writing going?"
Jess looked down at the two pages he'd written while taking his lunch break.
I'm not a big joiner, no one ever asks me. I was never asked if I wanted to move away from everything familiar I had ever known, and when I did hardly anyone wished me welcome to my new home. Or purgatory, as I first called it. Like some things in life, they came along without being really wanted. Chicken pox. Flu. Me. Subsect. I kind of liked it, though. They ignored me most of the time, I ignored them all the time. Almost all of them. The magic of blue, shining sapphires that pierced through all of my defenses. Blue could not be neglected.
"You know, you could have asked if you could read my stuff," Jess said instead of answering the question.
"Hey, you left it open, right in the middle, face up. For us that was an open invitation to dig around that mind of yours," Matt replied cockily.
"We?"
"What can I say? We're a nosy bunch, sue us. And while you're at it, stop avoiding the question. How's your writing going?"
"It's going…" Jess began, searching for the right word.
"It's going..?" Matt echoed.
"Forward," he decided.
"Forward's good," Matt said, looking encouragingly at him. "Okay, so we'll see you after work. Keep that pen going."
"Keep moving towards the door, or I'll come up with a reason not to serve you tomorrow."
Matt was out of the coffee shop like lightning, and Jess smirked to himself. It felt oddly good to be able to boss around with Chris and Matt. They were so dependent on coffee it was ridiculous, and they didn't even do much during the days. How crazed would they become once they had jobs?
"I feel so left behind," Cammie said behind him.
"Excuse me?" Jess said and turned around.
"I've been dying to know what you've been writing all day, but I didn't bother to ask, since I though it was something personal, and then he stomps in and says that him, Chris, Reg and Jake have all read it."
"So?"
"I want to read what you've written," Cammie said and pouted. "Please..?"
"It's personal," Jess replied curtly.
"So personal that you let those guys read it?"
"I was asleep, and they invaded my privacy."
"Your face up, open-in-the-middle-of-a-common-room privacy?"
"I thought they'd know better than to nose around in others' stuff. Clearly, I was mistaken."
"Clearly," Cammie echoed, still pouting.
"Fine then, read it," Jess relented. "But only because you said please."
"You're such a wimp, you totally can't say no to me!" Cammie cheered.
"Probably because it would be completely futile to try and resist. Just don't spread it around, it's not like I'm in for the Nobel Literature Prize."
"Fine, I won't say a word."
Won't say a word. Don't say a word.
"Cammie, can I have the pad back?"
"But you said I could read it!" she protested.
"You'll have it back in a few minutes, I just need to… I just need it," Jess urged.
Cammie hesitantly gave him the pad, and he went to sit down by one of the corner tables. His pen was moving rapidly over an empty page.
Under a weeping willow, by a lake, the spitting image of something taken out of some sleazy romance novel, I came undone. Blue came out of nowhere, and for five seconds, I knew exactly what heaven was. It was blue, shorter than me, all peaches and cream, dressed in dark turquoise, and it ripped me apart with five words: Don't say a word.
And I was stupid enough to say 'okay'. Stupid enough to get my hopes up, and all I got for this meaningful gesture was nothing. Silence. Blue went away, and I waited in vain for a sign that there had been a purpose behind my visit to heaven. Now I know; there wasn't.
Ten minutes later he handed Cammie the pad.
"Read it for what it is," Jess told her. "Do not analyze it, please. I've already got four amateur Freuds on my case, and that's four too many."
"I'll be as un-Freud as I can. Though he might have a thing or two to say to me. That would be some session."
"Yeah, Freud would give up hopes that psychoanalysis would ever make sense with you."
"Jess, you really don't want to get into psychoanalysis with me. I was supposed to major in psychology before I decided it was basically useless for me."
"So you changed major?" Jess asked.
"Nope, I didn't major at all."
"So you're just floating around, not having a major?"
"I'm not doing the college-thing at all. When psychology skipped out of the picture I couldn't find anything that seemed just as fun and interesting as it should have been. Don't get me wrong, I want to go to college, I just want to go because it's fun and interesting, not because it's expected," Cammie explained.
"And just when I thought all hope was lost on you, you finally begin to make a little sense…" Jess joked.
"Back to work, slave," Cammie quipped with a playful smile.
"Yeah, in a minute. I just need to call someone."
"Your secret girlfriend?"
"My former boss."
"Are you going to leave me already?"
"It's for a favor."
"So you're not leaving me?" Cammie asked, looking at him with puppy dog eyes.
"You are four," Jess responded.
"You're four and a half."
Cammie skipped off, and Jess pulled out his cellphone. For some insane reason he hadn't erased the number to the Hartford Wal Mart, and he just hoped that Bill Borden would still be working there. He hit the dial-button, and waited.
"Hey, this is Jess Mariano," he said when a lady answered. "Could I speak with Bill Borden, please, he should be the manager at… Oh. Okay, I can wait."
It was quiet for some time before he could hear the phone being picked up on the other end.
"Jess, long time, no hear!" Bill boomed. "To what do I owe this pleasure? You want your job back?"
"Not exactly…" Jess said, hoping for the best. "I sort of need a favor…"
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