a/n: sorry to get you used to daily updates and then have a 'paper is due' explosion of life and school. Good news – I'm following it up with probably the shortest chapter of the entire story. It's also probably the most important in a lot of ways, so I hope you like it and it was worth the wait. Thank you again for all the feedback. I appreciate each and every one of you who are still with me.
Disclaimer: I don't own it. Any of it.
chapter 7: thought I felt you moving beside me
She's at the Stars Hollow Gazette when her phone rings with one of the last numbers she expects to see. He was quiet and distant for most of his visit. She never managed to get details out of him before he had to go, but she knows at some point, he'll let her in. Or else.
She doesn't want to finish the threat, even in her head. It isn't a pleasant thought to bear out to its conclusion. It's nearly as unpleasant as the thought of actually running the lackluster article she has about the progress with the sewer system – the one she currently has titled 'That's a Crap!'
(She's not sure the exclamation point makes it any better. In fact, she's pretty sure it doesn't.)
"Ski chalet in Switzerland," she says. They've started answering their phones this way when he's in London because they're ridiculous. It's a nice tradition, though, and she's clinging to it a little bit because she's afraid she's already losing him.
"I wish," he admits.
That is not their pattern. Her mess of emotions skyrocket into anxiety with just two words.
"So what's stopping you?" She asks, the words coming out a little strangled.
"We're having a baby. A living, breathing, sentient human being that's part you and part me. We're going to mess him up. Him." He sighs. "I can't stop thinking about my father. You don't know this, because your mom is great, but having a less than stellar example for inspiration makes this all overwhelming. And it isn't just my father, Rory. My mom is a snob and my grandfather…"
While she was squeaking by on Pop Tarts and bargain-bin movies, raised for the first few years of her life in a literal shed, she was being told she was great. She was being told she could do anything she wanted, that she was brilliant and beautiful and had all the tools for success. While he was raised wanting for nothing physical, he was being told he could only do what was expected of him and, if he didn't, he was a bitter disappointment.
His confidence is mostly a front. Hers is mostly a prop.
When it comes down to it, they're the same, albeit with very different doubts and fears. She knows she'll mess up and she doesn't want to. He doesn't think he can get anything right. The difference is subtle but profound.
She probably should've seen this coming.
"I don't want to live in London," she says carefully. "And I don't think you do, either. You want to be here – with me. Don't you?"
"Yes," he says firmly. "I want to be there. I want you to know that I'm not there just because of our boy. I want to keep doing the job I'm doing now because I'm good at it, but I don't want to do it here. London was supposed to be for a year. When I tried to go my own way, he bought the company. I've gone back and forth thinking it was his messed up way of maintaining a semblance of a relationship – but it's control. I don't want to be like him and I don't want to be controlled or manipulated into becoming him. I'm heading down that path and it freaks me out. I need to make it stop somehow."
"So how do we do that?" She asks. "How do we make that happen?" See, the thing is, she doesn't have any more answers than he does – at least not about the big stuff.
"I'm asking him to transfer me to New York. It isn't that close, but it's at least in the same timezone. That's a start," he explains. "I've been sitting here thinking for a while. I want to buy something in the city and something in Stars Hollow – a townhouse, a condo, an apartment, a grotto. Something. It won't kill him to let me use the helicopter. Or, hell, I'll buy my own if he says no. I hate that I have to ask him for things in the first place." There's a long pause, a bit of a break. "I mean… that's what I'm thinking. What do you think?"
"You threw a lot of money around in all that," she says breathlessly, still trying to catch up. He's him so he went from zero to sixty in the blink of an eye. "I don't have a job. I'm working on my book, but I don't have prospects outside of that. I don't know if I'll be able to get it published or if it'll go anywhere. This place is never going to make any money. I'm not going to just let you buy me a house. Or two. That isn't how it works. That's not a partnership."
He's quiet for a really long time. The only reason it's uncomfortable is because the mutual silence is over a phone line, over an ocean. She can't watch him. She isn't going to say it, because she knows it would feed into his own doubts, but throwing a bunch of money at the situation to mold it into what you want is what his father would do. Even without being able to see him, crestfallen and slightly rejected, she knows she needs to find a way to fix the damage her words probably just caused, whatever it was that stunned him into silence.
Maybe he is more like his father than he cares to admit. In being stubborn and independent and shooting him down, maybe she's being more like her mother than she cares to admit. The thought makes her groan and has her hammering out a compromise as she speaks.
"Why don't we go into the city the next time you can come out here? We'll pick something together. I'll look around at what I can maybe freelance again and if I can save some money, then we can look for an apartment or something here."
"Okay," he agrees. He doesn't even sound completely offput or heartbroken, so she supposed that's a start. "Want to get online and start scouting some things out for us? I've been blowing off a meeting to sit here and think. I should probably go do some convincing that I want to keep this job."
She smiles. "I can do that. I'll email you a list. It'll be way more productive than this expose on the seedy underbelly of Stars Hollow."
There's some cutesy back and forth about the town not having a seedy underbelly, but no one wants to see what's under the sewer system anyway. They agree if the Hollow has a questionable corner, it's Al's Pancake World because that place is still open so it's got to be some kind of drug front.
Just like that, though, she feels like they're adults. It's disorienting, but the kind of disorienting when you're a child and you put your arms out and spin until you're not sure when you've actually stopped. In other words, it's not the bad kind.
He should probably be able to feel the emptiness of his apartment, but he can't. He felt more empty all those months ago returning after his night in Connecticut with Colin, Finn, Robert, and Rory. It seemed a little more final, somehow, that Rory would never be in his home again. Odette didn't really make a dent. He doesn't feel different and, looking around for the first time since she officially finished moving out, he can't see where her things had been. Granted, he has an excellent housekeeper, but there aren't empty rings on the mantle where dust didn't settle while her things were there. The spot by the door where Rory's shoes always sat was never otherwise claimed, and it's been empty for a long while now. That has more of an effect on him, he thinks.
His head does the time conversion automatically when he thinks he wants to call her. They've already talked today, twice, and have been emailing back and forth about apartments in New York for almost a week. They've been in contact in a variety of ways about the complicated details they're trying to sort out and he has absolutely no complaints. If he called her now, it would be to hear her voice. It would be strictly because he wants to, and not because he has to for some reason. He's never had that pull toward someone the way he has it toward her now.
They've talked about a lot, and yet it occurs to him as he realizes her shoes haven't been in what he'd come to think of as their spot, that they haven't discussed just as much. Her shoes won't ever sit in that spot again because he officially terminated his lease this morning and he doubts very much she'll be back before he moves out.
His father arrived in town this morning and they're working on dividing job duties so he can go the HPG office in New York and still function – in exactly the capacity he wants to function, no more and no less. The conversation has been hit or miss, but they've avoided making below-the-belt accusations and it doesn't feel as tense or reluctant as he expected. Mitchum said exactly once that it'll be good to have Logan closer to home, especially 'during all of this.' Exactly once, Logan had to actively try not to choke on his shock.
But now that he's home, with a glass of Scotch he doesn't actually want, and staring at the spot where her shoes were or the place where her bag landed on the chair towards the kitchen side of the counter island, he just wants to talk to her. It's all very sentimental and sloppy and sappy. He doesn't care.
"Third star to the right?" She answers.
"I miss you," he replies. It's blunt instead of the whimsy he's pretty sure he can hear in her voice. It breaks their newish tradition, but he doesn't care.
"What happened?" She asks, sounding a little suspicious.
He shakes his head, which is stupid because there's been Scotch and also she can't see him doing it. "Nothing. I just… do. I'm sitting here thinking about it – about you. I miss you, Ace. Tell me about what you're doing right now. I want to hear every detail."
Yeah, he knows what he's asking. Her vocabulary is expansive and her descriptive skill may be unparalleled, at least for the people in his life that he's really paid attention to. He wants to hear it all. She doesn't say she has better things to do. Instead, she gives him what he asks for and he can almost hear her pleased sigh when he thanks her before he lets her hang up because she has things to do that don't include measuring the height of files and useless information cluttering the (her) office just so she can describe it to him.
The silence feels a little less haunting once he hangs up, and he's a little less empty. He might be by himself but, for the first time in a really long time, he doesn't feel alone.
