Author's Note: So this chapter is a little shorter, especially compared to the mammoth last one (thanks for all the reviews, it means a whole lot to an author to get feedback, as I'm sure you all know), and it might seem kind of drabbling and pointless, but I think it's kind of important.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It was time, Lorelai had announced, to get out Casablanca. Casablanca was their "ice-breaking" movie, a movie anyone could relate to and everyone should have heard of. When she noticed the tenseness that seemed to have sprung up between her daughter and her boyfriend, she took it upon herself to come up with a remedy.

Rory was scooping ice cream into dishes next to her as she set out whipped cream, chocolate syrup, caramel sauce, Twizzlers, Hohos, and Oreos on the counter for their classic sundae buffet. There was leftover Chinese in the fridge from yesterday, so she warmed it up in the microwave.

"Damn, I forgot the Bugles," Lorelai muttered, searching through the cupboards pointlessly. They never kept food in the cupboards. She found a pair of shoes she had been looking for up above the sink and made a mental note to retrieve them later, although she knew she'd probably forget.

Rory looked up from the ice cream. "The what?"

"The Bugles! The little chips shaped like . . . a horn or something . . ."

"We've never had Bugles."

"Uh, yes, we have."

"You're delusional."

Logan came into the kitchen just then and, not knowing what to do, he sat at the table, drumming his fingers idly on his leg, watching mother and daughter bicker between themselves. Eventually, Rory noticed him.

"Can you mix the gummy worms with the candy corn and put it in that bowl?" She asked wickedly, knowing what his response would be.

"Come again?"

"C'mon, Logan, live a little. You're supposed to be the Thelma to my Louise, the Bonnie to my Clyde. You have to have the gummy-worm-candy-corn mix," she begged. She forgot the rift that was between them at the moment. When she was in her house, next to her mom, it was almost like her modern day problems couldn't touch her. Like they didn't even exist.

He laughed and stood up to do as she asked, relieved that things were starting to seem somewhat normal again. "I don't think Thelma or Louise ever ate candy corn."

"Well," Rory went on, almost giddy with delight as she put the ice cream back in the freezer, "if you can pass the candy corn test we might just find a Brad Pitt to knock off tomorrow." As she passed him, she put her hand on his shoulder. It wasn't a big deal, but it was very intimate after the estrangement that had plagued their trip here. He was suddenly very happy.

"I've never seen Casablanca," he remarked slowly, watching the gelled worms fall into the bowl and thinking that the idea of eating those with candy corn was so disgusting they must have had to think really hard to come up with it.

Lorelai turned to him in shock, gripping the counter behind her. "What? What?!" He opened his mouth to say something, but it was too late. She was shoving him into the living room. "You can't go on for another second being so deprived! At least not in this house you can't," she added pointedly, steering him to the couch and shoving in the DVD before turning on the television.

He watched as both of them made several trips to carry in all the food, and then the beginning credits stopped rolling and the story line began. He wanted to pay attention, but try as he might, he couldn't. His eyes kept drifting to the way Rory's sweater had slid partially off her shoulder, and how he could see sparse golden freckles on her skin. She clumsily stuffed the gummy-worm-candy-corn mixture into his mouth, making him chew it and giggling when he tried to spit it out. An hour later, Lorelai had fallen asleep on the couch, so Logan moved in to kiss her. She let him.

Almost like he was trying to claim her, he pushed her back against the coffee table and began to probe her mouth with a deeper motion. That was when she suddenly tensed and shoved him off. He looked at her questioningly, confused. "Not with my mother here," she rebuked gently, and turned back to the TV screen. He watched her face flicker with shadows from the light, how there was something mysterious and foggy hidden behind her swirling blue eyes, how there was a whole part of her that he didn't know at all.

He looked at the book that lay next to her on the corner of the coffee table. And in that second, he thought it was the bigger part of her.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Sitting in the darkness on the bridge, Jess took a cigarette out of his pocket and stared at it. There was a lot that you could read into a cigarette if you truly wanted to. He'd never really looked at one before. He turned it over and over in his hands, feeling its smoothness, its fragility. He tapped it twice on the wooden planks beneath him and watched excess tobacco drift down to land in the silent water. Flaring up his lighter, he put the delicate tip of the cigarette into the flame and watched it curl and singe, first yellow, then orange, then red, then black. That made him think of relationships. They started out white and unmarked, and then someone would light them with a just mere spark. At once they burned away, so incredibly quickly that they would have gone through the violent stages of hot color and crumbled into blackness before you even realized you had anything in the first place. What was worse was that this blackness lingered under the white the whole time; it was just unnoticeable at first until a flame was put on it.

He shook his head with an ironic smirk. What made you so philosophical, Mariano? Sick, twisted idiot. A cigarette is just a cigarette. He stuck it between his lips and inhaled, feeling that familiar tightness in his lungs, before breathing out a cloud of dense smoke. His hands started to twitch like they always did when he was nervous, and he sighed to try to calm himself. As of late, his mind had been working overtime, creating little scenarios and then destroying them because he was too jaded and cynical to enjoy them. Instead, he read anything, everything, it didn't really matter, as long as it took up time that he would have otherwise spent postulating and guessing and regretting.

He wasn't the kind of man to apologize and try to do things over, better. That would require an emission that he had been wrong and needed to fix things in the first place, which stabbed a knife directly into his pride. For people who had grown up like Jess did, it wasn't too difficult to figure out why his pride mattered so much to him. It was all he had, the one thing that couldn't be taken away from him, his only defense against the world which he was brought up in. He had been taught that he could trust no one except himself, so that was pretty much how he'd lived his life.

Lately, though, he started thinking maybe he wasn't so trustworthy.

It had been stupid to just run off to California, but now, when he was alone again, he still felt like his reasons had been valid. God, he couldn't imagine having stayed in Stars Hollow High for one more year. The principal there had a vocabulary that Jess had mastered by age eleven. All of the novels on the class reading list were one step up from a Dick and Dottie book, and a very small step, at that. And the people. They were so close-minded. They didn't accept him, and he hadn't exactly rolled out the welcome wagon for them, either.

But at the same time, he was mentally kicking his eighteen-year-old ass for not seeing that, however valid his reasons might have been, a few more months of hell would have been preferable to what he had gone through. There was no other way to put it, regardless of how cheesy and poetic it sounded – he had lost himself. There was nothing for him on the West Coast. Even the depths of the ocean weren't as deep as Rory –

And there it was again. Stop thinking about her. And if you have to think about her, don't sound like freaking Nicholas Sparks, okay?

Anyway, California had been empty. Pointless. There had been a reason his dad hadn't searched for him until seventeen years after he was born: he was just curious. He didn't want a commitment, and it didn't take Jess too long to find out he didn't want one, either, but it did take him long enough that by the time he realized it he had already lost everything he had. Stupid pride had driven him out of Stars Hollow, and it kept him away for a while. He ended up feeling just as lonely and restless in Santa Monica as he had in Connecticut, even more so – go figure – despite its life and color. It wasn't his life or his color. His blood had thumped in his veins and empowered him with a burning desire he had thought he knew already but he really hadn't, not until he experienced it full on.

But, as he had already pointed out to himself, by then everything was lost. It was too late.

He took another drag on the cigarette. It really did help calm his nerves. Too bad. If it didn't, he would have pitched it.

Ha. Yeah right.

He hated how familiar it was here. It made him angry that nothing had changed. Everything had to have changed. His whole world had been shaken, and here Taylor was in front of Doose's, just like he had been every day since probably the Jurassic period, lining up peaches and pears to tempt helpless little old ladies into buying fruit that they couldn't even eat with their bad teeth. It was an outrage to him that everything could be so . . . normal. Or at least what passed for normal in Stars Hollow.

He wondered what she thought whenever she saw him. Actually, he knew. He saw it in her eyes, heavy and hooded, all the pain he had caused her. That, too, crawled underneath his skin and burned through the layers of tissue right to his heart. Didn't she know that her hurt, no matter how awful, was magnified a hundred times in him? He had been forced to live every damn day for the past two years knowing what he had done to her, not even caring what it meant for him because he was so slashed by the guilt of making her innocent blue eyes turn dark with confusion and pain. He couldn't apologize; it wouldn't be good enough.

He hadn't wanted to hurt her. Oh God, he really hadn't. For the first time in his life, he had thought about someone else more than himself. But he didn't have much practice. Old habits cropped up, he couldn't talk, he couldn't tell her what was on his mind, even though his goal was always to make her happy. Had he believed he would stay in Stars Hollow forever? No. Not for one second. That was one of the first things he'd told Rory when he met her. So what had he been thinking? Stars Hollow forever, maybe not, but Rory forever, yes.

Yes. Rory forever.

When had he let himself lose sight of it?

The cigarette finished, he snubbed it out and tossed it in the water. A brief memory of him showing up at Yale, desperate, pleading, without a plan, glimmered across his mind like moonlight. He abandoned it and stood up to walk back to the diner.

"O plunge your hands in water
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin,
And wonder what you've missed."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Jeez!" Luke gasped, turning around from the kitchen table with surprising haste and almost knocking the chair over. He grabbed the bottle of beer he had been drinking and took another swig.

"You're intimidated. Admit it," Jess taunted, his mouth in a straight line. He took off his jacket and hung it by the door, and it seemed like he had never been gone.

"Where have you been? You know what, never mind. We're gonna have to strap cymbals on your feet or . . . or somethin', because you walk like a girl," Luke grumbled, wondering how on earth Jess had learned to be so quiet. The beer seemed to suddenly taste bad and he made his way to the kitchen sink and poured it down the drain.

"I walk like a girl? This coming from the man with a bell over his door?" Jess shot back, striding over to his unmade bed and ransacking through the sheets in search of a book. Or at least Luke guessed it was a book, and he was right. His nephew straightened up with a slim volume that looked extremely well worn in his callused hands.

"So . . ." There was the long pause that Jess had gotten extremely used to. It was the surefire sign that Luke wanted to bring up an awkward subject but couldn't, and was hoping for a little help. Well, you ain't gettin' none. "Umm . . . is everything okay?"

"Downright chipper."

"Did you . . . talk to anyone?"

Jess sighed irritably. "Would it be easier if I strapped a video camera to my forehead or just carried a tape recorder?" There was that teenager poking his head through again. He could only imagine the serious déjà vu that Luke had to be going through right now. Just for kicks, he might grab his coat, march out, and go crash his car.

"Nah, it's not that. Never mind." He turned back around to look at some papers on the table.

However, the current Jess was just a tad bit different than the old Jess. It was the current Jess that dropped the façade and said bluntly, "I haven't been bothering her, Luke."

His uncle looked over his shoulder and nodded. "Okay."

"Okay," Jess replied. Luke turned back around to go read, but Jess' curiosity was suddenly piqued. "What are those?" He asked, indicating the papers spread across the tabletop.

Without warning, Luke became very flustered. "Uh, nothing . . ." He muttered, trying to gather all the loose sheets together and stuff them in a folder as quickly as he could. Jess leaned forward and blinked once or twice.

"Divorce papers?" He asked quietly, wondering if he was going to suddenly fall into cardiac arrest at the tender age of twenty. Maybe even pop a blood vessel or something. An image of Lorelai flitted through his brain. No way. There was no way that divorce papers could be on Luke's desk. That would indicate his uncle had been married . . . and, well, that was the day hell froze over.

"Um, yeah. Long story. Well, not really. It should be a long story, when you get married, but mine isn't. I went on a cruise with Nicole, got drunk, got married."

Jess tried to imagine what color parka Satan was wearing.

"What?" He almost forgot who Nicole was, and then remembered. "The lawyer?" That was so . . . so . . . wrong.

"When we got back on land, though, it all seemed really stupid. So I'm trying to fix it." Luke cleared his throat with extreme discomfort, looking like he wanted to jump out the window before admitting all this.

"You . . . married . . . a lawyer . . . on a cruise ship." A pause as it soaked in. "Does MTV know about you?"

Luke suddenly became so embarrassed that he refused to talk about it anymore. "Shut up and go read."

"Did you get hit in the head by a whale? Threatened into submission by a terrorist group? Maybe your brain couldn't handle the sea air after all the years of burger fumes and you just . . . lost it."

"Go read!"

"Did you get married in flannel?"

"Jess."

"And did she have a matching baseball cap?"

"Jess."

Stunned, Jess stopped his wicked tirade and sank back onto his bed, staring at the book and not reading the words. Okay, so maybe things had changed around here a little. He suddenly started laughing when he thought of Luke standing in a lawyer's office with flowers and a horse drawn carriage parked outside, and he couldn't stop.