Title: Pulse

Rating: R

Date Started: 8-6-07

Date Finished: 8-27-07

Summary: He was the force that shook her, kept her human. Through her chest, veins, cheeks, lips. She did always live to please. Future Fic. Literati.

Disclaimer: I don't own Gilmore Girls. The rights belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino and the WB. Not mine.

A/N: To everyone who reads this fic I have some important news. I know you guys feel kind of drawn out with the way the story's been going so far, I don't blame you. I mean, six chapters in and just a bunch of phone conversations? So here I am telling you that this story will progress, maybe not faster in the coming chapter, the pace has pretty much been set, but this story is a Jess/Rory and it is rated M for a legitimate reason. I want this story to be real, something that could easily happen on the show (with a few mature exceptions). On that note, I now present chapter seven. Reviews are always appreciated.

Chapter Seven: Glass Mask

Water slid over his lean shoulders, pools of moisture collecting on the cold tile floor of Jess's humid bathroom. He wiped a clean streak over his foggy mirror with his hand, clearing the misted glass. He slicked his hair away from his face, wrapping himself up in a towel due to the cool draft from the open bathroom door.

It was mid evening, the city of New York damp and swelling from the rain that had fallen some hours before. Jess let his towel drop to the floor and stepped past it, lying out on his unmade bed. The haphazard sheets tickled his exposed stomach, the shy contact that made him feel heavy with sleep. He shifted onto his back and ran his fingers over his closed eyelids, thinking.

When they first met she had reminded him of an add he'd seen once, one of those huge, billboard size deals that were plastered on the sides of buildings around time square. It'd been a picture of some blonde chick laying in the middle of a grassy field, an ad for shampoo or something, and the girl had two or three yellow Labrador puppies crawling all over her. Rory hadn't looked anything like the girl, but the minute he saw her the image was forever connected in his mind with his initial reaction towards her. She had the same sort of exquisite innocence that painters spent decades trying to replicate and capture.

The olive skin along his cheekbone was pressed against the crisp bed linins. He briefly entertained the unrealistic film reel of Rory next to him in bed, her hot little body pressed against his while he slept. It was the kind of fantasy that his mind had visited many times before, although none of his previous musings had held the imminent promise that this fantasy possessed. The idea held substance. Rory was no longer out of reach. In fact, she was easily within his grasp. The very notion made his abs clench as he allowed his mind to wander further. The heated blush of her cheeks and the arousing sensation of her nails digging into his shoulder blades, rumpled sheets pooled around her waist lazily, her curtain of dark hair surrounding the two of them as she leaned over to kiss him; his mind ran through these scenarios in quick, rapid succession.

Contact. That's what his body was desperately seeking and attempting to inform him. Even if it was just to see her, talk with her in person instead of the cautionary fill-in-the-blank phone calls they had shared over the past few months. There was a definite line in their current interaction, a margin of unexplored territory that he was burning to write in.

The feral, animalistic side of him wanted to claim her, that crazy Italian Alfa-male mentality that could poison as easily as it could posses. He'd gone through puberty watching other guys stew in their jealousy. He'd wanted women before, girls from other times, before and after Rory, companions for a man that found himself continually settling for what was easy or convenient. But this, the drug-like heaviness in his spine and the deep pull of his lower abdomen, this was what had struck Michael Corleone and Robbie Turner into dumb silence and tunnel-like actions. He felt it, he hated it, and at the same time he wanted to feed it and watch it progress into a sex-filled delirium.

He rose from his bed and began to dress, gathering clothes and attempting to mute his earlier thoughts. The sounds of the city flooded back into his bedroom through his reconnected mind. It was early still and there was much thinking to be done on his part

--

He kept his notebooks hidden. Imagine, a grown man hiding his journal in his own house. But it was something he'd done since his early teens when he'd started keeping one. It wasn't something he wrote in every day, or every week, even. The entries were sporadic at best, ranging from three times a day to three months apart. But Jess had never been one to make plans; organization had escaped the left side of his brain very early on. Examples of this could be seen in said notebooks on multiple accounts. Every page was covered, literally, with words and sketches of nearly every kind. He'd drawn a few choice landscapes from every place he'd ever lived, all of them featured in no real order. He made detailed lists or documentation of things that irked him. Like today, when he'd gotten news that he would have to push back the opening of his publishing house two more weeks.

A list had then begun to mentally formulate itself inside his mind; number of days this would worry him: fourteen. Number of items he had then gone out to pick things up just to get away from Truncheon and all it's incomplete glory: three. Those items being a bank deposit from his bookkeeper's apartment five blocks away, the pair of boots that someone had abandoned behind a rusted bench on ninth and sixth, and a typewritten manuscript from his most promising—and penny-less—unpublished client, hence the typewriter. Number of times he had contemplated getting off the rug and hurling himself out the window: eight.

The idea's level of appeal didn't increase in conjuncture to the number of times he considered it. Mainly because he was just uncomfortable enough on the floor to seriously contemplate moving but just tired enough to stay where he was.

A very detached variation of his senses heard his door being unlocked, opened, shut, and locked again. A part of him hoped it was a burglar or an assassin, but only a small part.

Jess was unsurprised to see Nick's boyish frame paused in the doorway, bemused.

"Man, what are you doing on the floor? Counting the cracks in the ceiling . . . again." Nicked walked over to the couch in an exaggerated manner and sank down without invitation, knowing that it wasn't needed.

"No, I'm decomposing as we speak. I circled the coroners number in the phone book for you, you know, since I love going out of my way for those I care about."

"So wonderful to know I'm held in such high esteem." Nick muttered dryly. Jess remained motionless.

Leaving his eyes closed, Jess posed a question that any other normal person would have already asked. "So."

"It might help if you got away from the one word conversations there Jessie."

He sighed. "Fine, 'what's up'. That sound better?" Jess mocked.

"There's a good boy," Nick said cheerfully.

"Huh," was all Jess could manage.

"What are we doing?" Nick asked in a somewhat muffled tone of voice. This fact was unsurprising seeing as he had his face buried in one of Jess's couch cushions.

"The question you should be asking here isn't plural, it's singular. We're not doing anything. I—on the other hand—am sleeping; you're just sitting there on the couch, all helpless and dejected looking."

Nick sat up so he could survey his friend, roused from his passive stance, or lack thereof. "We should go out."

"Like now?" Jess wondered lazily.

"No, not now. I'm too tired to do anything now. Well, except maybe help myself to one of your beers—"

"—bring me some of my vodka-tea stuff while you're up. It's in a jar next to the Peroni's you so desperately crave."

Nick's voice began to fade in and out of volume as he talked on his way to Jess's kitchen. "I just don't see why two young, good-looking guys such as ourselves don't spend more time with the fairer sex—"

Jess's smirk caused Nick to silence himself in embarrassment. "And that," he said with a flourish, "is exactly why you are a walking train wreck when it comes to girls."

Nick gave a sound of neither encouragement nor disdain.

"Go ahead, ask."

"Ask what?"

"Whatever it is you're thinking."

"You serious?"

Jess sat up as well. "As a heart attack."

He took a seat in the black velvet chair that his bookkeeper had given him when he first moved into his current apartment over the future home of Truncheon Books. It had been presented as a housewarming gift. It was the kind of thing that Leaha would have loved to paint him sitting in; its dark colors suited his personality and did wonders for his gold-flecked eyes.

"How often do you, you know . . . how often is normal?"

It wasn't difficult to guess the meaning of Nick's words. He was notoriously awkward when it came to women. Jess tried to remain serious for Nick's benefit. "Don't worry about normal and all that bullshit. I mean, you do realize that I have a casual relationship at the moment? Just think back to the times you've seen Evan around, that's how often."

"You mean that's all you guys do? Just have sex?"

He shook his head. "No. It's like regular dating, just without all sorts of unrealistic commitments. You can keep all your deep, dark secrets and no ones feelings get hurt. It's easy." Jess shrugged.

"That doesn't sound easy, not for me anyway." Nick took a swig of beer. "I'm nervous around girls," he clarified. "God, how many guys have that problem at twenty-four for christsake? I mean, I can imagine fourteen—" He broke off.

"Lot's of guys have the same problem that you've got. Look, the issue here is that you aren't looking for the right type of girl."

Nick's expression changed. "What'd you mean?"

"I mean," Jess continued, "that you need to find someone who's like you. You know, who likes to do the same sort of stuff and they're interested in the same kinds of things. You should be looking for compatibility. If you can find that then everything else will feel easy."

"You ever found that?"

"Compatibility?" Jess thought back to his previous phone conversation. "More or less." He evaded.

There was a comfortable silence in which both men thought of separate things, their minds far away from each other but not so different. It was in this silence that Jess reached for his journal in which he had previously written of his frustrations involving Rory. He tore out the insensitive page and ripped it in half, and then fourths, and eighths, and so on until there was nothing left but a hand full of confetti.

--

Glass. The floor looked like it was made from glass. Was that why she had a tightened, stinging sensation in the pit of her stomach? The table was made from glass; the kind of opulent office furniture that you saw in movies about politics and crooked businessmen.

Her coworkers sat around the table in their stiff navy suites and transparent expressions of seriousness and false importance. She gazed out the floor-to-ceiling windows and watched the commotion below. Rory then looked back up at the other men and women seated around her but she quickly glanced down through the tabletop at her shoes, the only healthy alternative. Her stomach gave a painful lurch every time she listened too closely to the pompous conversations being voiced around her or saw the arrogant glint of a Rolex against someone's bloated wrist. The suffocating quality of the room was beginning to make her gag, make her face burn in an all-too-familiar way.

She was able to identify the emotion much more effectively now. Over the past few years she'd become well acquainted with the physical side effects of shame. But what was it that was making her feel so degenerate, so meaningless that if she squinted hard enough the porcelain hand that she had carelessly left on the glass tabletop would burn and slowly dissolve until it was as clear as the rough cut glass beneath her? She was as see through as the transparent faces that controlled her paycheck and her former employment references. Lightheaded nausea made her turn pale at the sight of a window washer dangling fifty stories above the ground. She was the only one that flinched.

--

The drive to Hartford from New York wasn't a very long one. In fact, for Rory Gilmore, if felt impedingly short.

It was dark by the time she pulled into the driveway of her grandparents expansive, upper-class home, noting that she was already fifteen minutes late for Friday Night Dinner. Even years after it's necessity the Gilmore family had kept up the tradition and Rory was never one to disrespect the rules. But on this particular evening she wasn't looking forward to sitting through an awkward dinner and having to drive all the way back home to her empty apartment and the nagging question of what came next in her career.

One of her grandmother's dispensable maids answered the door and led her into the living room where her mother and Luke were seated along with Richard and Emily.

"Oh, hello Rory," Emily chimed from her seat across the room.

"I'm sorry I'm late, traffic . . . " She trailed off as they all made their way into the dinning room upon her grandmother's request. Luke gave her an encouraging smile while Lorelai hugged her in greeting. For a moment Rory's queasiness subsided.

They made their way through salads and were halfway into their main course before Rory said a word. She had been trying to focus all her attention very intently on the stem of her crystal glass but she was shaken by the questioning voice of her grandmother.

"Rory, have you been listening to a word I've said this entire evening?" The elder Gilmore asked.

She looked up, blinked, and decided that some sort of explanation was needed. The queasy feeling she had been experiencing since the eye-opening board meeting had peaked a few moments before. But now Rory was enveloped with a placid sense of calm.

"I quit my job today."

Four jaws quickly fell to the floor but Rory made a swift recovery.

"Don't worry, I'm still making money. I've got an agent who's getting me articles to write—and I'm still being published—just as a freelance journalist instead of a staff writer."

The fist one to speak up was Richard, Rory's grandfather, who was the quickest to recover after Rory shared her bit of startling news.

"You know Rory, that's actually a very smart career move. As long as you keep up a steady stream of work, well, you could end up earning more money that way and make more contacts for future positions within the business." He nodded wisely from his seat at the head of the table.

Rory smiled mildly at her grandfather. "Thanks grandpa, I'm glad you approve."

"Why didn't you like your first job?" Lorelai asked curiously. "I mean, you were only there for, what was it, three-and-a-half months?"

She frowned. "I don't know. I was just sitting there this afternoon in one of those meetings with all the board members and important people that I'm supposed to impress and I just sat there feeling sick the whole time and my face did that burning thing that it does sometimes. And these guys are sitting there all decked out in Brooks Brothers and Armani and I was thinking: how is this in any way significantly changing anything? And then I started thinking about how nobody reads magazines anyway, so there's no way any of it could matter. So by then I was still feeling sick, worse by the minute actually, so I thought about all the magazines I've seen left lying around places. Doctor's offices, subway stations, grocery stores, park benches, just about everywhere. I realized that nobody reads the articles in the first place so why do something that isn't going to make a difference? Now I just want to write things that I think are important. I want to actually care."

She paused after giving her little speech to actually taste the food in front of her, suddenly starving. "Wow grandma, this chicken's really good."

--

Back at her apartment in New York, Rory lay half-submersed in steaming bathwater, her skin pink and somewhat shriveled from osmosis. Suds from her shower jell had gathered in small clouds of foam over the waters rippling surface, concealing only scattered areas of her unclothed body.

In the womb of her bathtub she could think with calm precision. It was all becoming clear to her. Somewhere down the line she had stopped being honest with herself, and everyone else, too. But tonight she had said what she really thought and—unsurprisingly—she felt a nerve-pinching weight shirt. The door was finally closed, the last word written. It was her first ending, the first time she really said No to something bigger than herself.

I said No.

--Debutants, salmon puffs, cocktail parties, Birkin bags, pool houses, drunken bridal parties, cheating boyfriends, disappointments, high society snobs—

Over. Done. For real this time.

The Real Rory Gilmore was back and ready to make up for lost time. Gingerly, she lifted a semi-dry arm from the side of her tub over to its edge where her cell phone lay, unopened. It had been four days since his last call, through the course of which she had kept her phone on her person at all times but she had tried not to feel any form of disappointment when it failed to ring. After all, their last conversation had shown that Jess had a variety of things to consume his time. Not to mention the fact that they had made no commitments, no agreements. She had no right to feel jaded or expectant. There was no way she could assume that Jess would call again; those weren't the kind of methods he used. Instead of berating her to the point of annoyance like some of the other men she had dated, Jess had always let her slowly realize the things she already knew, to accept her own thoughts as the truth, to let her make her own decisions.

It had taken her nearly seven years, but she finally knew what she wanted.

Going through her list of recent calls, Rory dialed Jess's number from the relaxing confines of her bathroom. It was nearly midnight on a Friday, there was a seventy percent chance that he was awake; the thirty percent included the possibility of Jess being asleep or engaged in other night-like activities.

He picked up on the third ring.

"Hey Jess, it's Rory." A pause. He greeted her in a pleasantly surprised fashion. "Yeah, I've got some news for you. Three guesses as to who is currently out of a job."

She didn't even try to hide the smile that had spread across her face.

--

"Hello?"

"Rory!"

"Oh, hey mom."

The older woman sounded energetically cheerful. "Guess who has good news."

"Ah, you know that's a hard one. Sure you can't just tell me and suspend all the unnecessary parler?"

"Of course not. What kind of mother would I be if I just handed everything to you without making you squirm a little beforehand?"

"The kind that gets lots of hugs and candy on mothers day?" Rory tried.

"Wrong! Not that I don't like the hugs, or the candy, the candy's pretty damn good actually, but that's besides the point—"

"Oh? Point? We have a point at the end of this discussion?"

"Absolutely. And we'll get to it if you just play along a teeny bit longer." She teased.

The younger girl was quick to respond. "Playing."

"Alright, are you sitting down?" Lorelai asked.

"No. Why? I thought you said this was good news, not sit-down-so-you-don't-fall-over kind of news." Rory accused.

"It is good—trust me. If goodness could be graded this sucker would get a big red smiley face and three of those stickers that teachers are so fond of plastering on assignments."

"Still not getting why I have to be seated to hear this."

"Because, I want you to be able to jump up and start a conga line when you hear it."

"I think your wishes on this particular issue are going to have to be sidestepped for the welfare of mankind in general."

"Well, I think mankind will just have to get over it because LukeandIareengaged!"

"W-what?"

"Sorry." She let out a breath. "I said that Luke and I are engaged!" A beat. "Again!"

"Oh mom! That's wonderful." Rory exclaimed as she unlocked the front door of her apartment. "Have you set a date yet?"

"A month from tomorrow." Lorelai said happily.

"Wow, that's—"

"--Sudden?"

"Yes."

"And unexpected?"

"Not so much the last one," Rory said knowingly.

"You knew?" Lorelai asked, shocked.

"From a non-direct source, yeah, I had some idea."

"That can't be fare. How can everybody else on the Earth know about my engagement before I do?" The elder Gilmore questioned incredulously.

Rory laughed into the mouthpiece of her cell phone. "You're on the outside of very important inside information."

"Oh."

"Oh? What kind of 'oh' was that?"

"Nothing," Lorelai tried to cover herself. "Just wondering if your supper secret inside information came from our dear friend Jason Bourne."

Rory visibly blanched. "Jess mom, you can refer to him as Jess. And yeah, he told me a couple of days ago. Luke had mentioned it to him or something."

"Hmm, well, that's nice. It's good that they talk," she finished.

"Yes it is," Rory responded.

The corner of Lorelai's mouth twitched in a knowing gesture. "You know, it's also good that you guys talk, it really is. I mean—"

"Mom," Rory interrupted, "we don't have to talk about Jess if you don't want—"

"No!" Lorelai said a little loudly. She slumped against the back of her couch in exaggeration. "What I'm trying to say is that I want you to be able to tell me things without thinking you have to give me the censored version of your life." Lorelai took a breath. "I'm sorry. I just don't want there to be any taboo subjects between us. Boy's included."

"Look, it's ok. I've been rethinking a lot of things lately. Did I tell you that I talked to my editor today?" Rory asked conversationally, expertly changing the subject.

"Oh, you didn't mention it. I'm guessing this is the guy who keeps you in work now that you don't have a job with that magazine anymore?"

Rory kicked her heels off on her way into the kitchen, nodding her head as she did so, but then realizing that her mother couldn't see said head nodding because she was in Connecticut and not New York. "Yeah, I just got back from his office. I've never known any other editor to meet with writers on a Saturday afternoon but Hedges is a very odd man. He's already got me lined up for three different articles, all of them for newspapers."

"Hedges?" Lorelai questioned, bemused.

"It's short for Edward Headsburrough, " Rory clarified while she dug through the take-out drawer. "He's like seventy years old with this unrealistically strong Scottish accent, which makes him kind of hard to understand over the phone, so he has writers come see him at their hour of convenience to make up for it."

"Does he wear a kilt?" Lorelai asked eagerly.

"Would you be crushed if I told you he came to work every day in a jogging outfit?"

"Possibly."

"Well then I'll stick to my cone of silence routine that I pull whenever I'm stuck with a question that has no happy answer." Rory answered sadly, flicking through the menu from the Indian restaurant three blocks away.

"Damn your cone of silence. That must be some untapped genetic fluke because you sure didn't pick it up from me."

"As if half of Connecticut didn't already know that." She joked.

"So what are you doing tonight?" Her mother asked, picking at the wick of a Yankee candle that sat unused on her cluttered coffee table.

"I'll probably order food and get started on a few of those articles that Hedges gave me. Research mainly, a couple of outlines."

"No hot dates for my young, single daughter all alone in the big city?" Lorelai exclaimed disappointedly.

"Not tonight I'm afraid."

"What about later this week? Or next Saturday, what are you doing then?"

Rory frowned. "Nothing, whatever, I don't know. Why is this impor—oh." She stopped and set the menu down that she had previously been holding. "You think I'm seeing Jess behind your back, don't you? Is that why you're being so paranoid?"

Lorelai pinched the bridge of her nose to subside the headache that she already felt coming. "No sweets, it's just that you haven't dated much since your break-up with Logan and I don't know, I just thought that Jess might be the thing to pull you out of this funk you've been in. That's all, honest."

"Oh," Rory mumbled, genuinely surprised. "You think I'm still hung up on Logan?"

"Well yeah, the thought has crossed my mind a few times."

Rory sighed, sinking down in a chair at her wood-topped kitchen table. "No, I'm not upset over Logan. The reason I haven't been dating is because I've been working and trying to figure out how to be an adult without defining myself on what stage of a relationship I'm in. Besides, Logan is probably married by now."

"Married? To Who?"

"Don't know exactly. He showed up in front of my apartment the other day so he could ask me why I didn't want to marry him. See, his fiancée left him at the altar."

Lorelai gasped in real surprise, with a slight hint of malicious glee. "You're kidding."

"Nope. Seems appropriate thought, doesn't it."

"What'd you tell him?" Lorelai wondered.

Rory chewed on the inside of her cheek as she thought about how best to phrase her answer. "Basically, I told him that I could see myself happier unmarried, living a different kind of life than the one I'd be expected to live if I'd stayed with him."

"That sounds about right," her mother replied.

The stained oak of Rory's kitchen table appeared unbreakably solid beneath her ivory fingertips. She looked from the knots in the wood to the lines that surrounded them, brushing her hand in an invisible pattern over its surface.

"Yeah," Rory mumbled, "it does."

--

A/N: The meat of the story is pretty much established so there will be more interaction in future chapters between Jess and Rory. Again, I'm sorry for making you guys wait but I wanted the characters to be complete and developed before any major plot changes. I love to hear what you guys think, so please review.