Author's Note:

Sorry, darkheadlights, for leaving you hanging. This site was acting funny and I didn't receive an email about your review. I also think the site didn't send out emails for chapters 6 & 7 when they were posted? But um… there's no good excuse for me not having chapter 8 up already… I meant to get this back up days ago. Anyway, it's here now. I want to post chapter 9 and the new chapter 10 asap. I hope they'll both be up by the end of the day Friday. ;)


Chapter 8: I Don't Know if We're Really Friends

"Do you still love my daughter?"

Jess was taken aback by the question, to say the least. He stood there, blinking a few times but betraying no emotion.

"Why?" he asked her cautiously.

"No reason," Lorelai replied, smiling a bit. "I just... you do, don't you?"

Jess shrugged while darting his eyes away a bit nervously.

"What did Rory tell you about, uh... our most recent encounter?" Jess awkwardly asked her. He figured Lorelai wouldn't have been thrilled that he'd tried to steal her daughter away here to New York.

"I heard you told her you loved her back in February," Lorelai replied. "And then just drove away," she added, eying him skeptically, as if trying to gauge any reaction and figure out what he had been thinking at the time. Jess' eyes opened just a tad wider at this news – Lorelai didn't realize what she'd just revealed to him. Lorelai didn't realize that there had been a more recent encounter.

"I... I hope Rory won't mind me telling you this," Jess started to respond, "but um... I'm surprised she didn't tell you herself." Lorelai felt herself tense up, unsure of what she might find out as Jess continued. "Um... a little over a week ago it was my mom's wedding, you know?" Lorelai nodded. "And well..." he trailed off, thinking maybe Rory didn't tell her mother for a reason.

"Just tell me," Lorelai pleaded in a quiet tone, desperate to find out whatever it was that her daughter had refrained from mentioning. She stared at him, but he was still avoiding eye contact with her. He seemed quite torn about whether or not to tell her anything... or maybe he was just deciding how much to reveal. Or how to say it. Lorelai tried to be patient.

Before Jess actually got around to responding, Dr. Simmons had finished up with Clara and exited the room.

"You two can go back in and be with her now, if you'd like," she told Jess and Lorelai.

They looked at each other awkwardly after the doctor had unknowingly interrupted a somewhat important moment for them. Something had been just about to come out of Jess' mouth and Lorelai wanted to know what it was going to be. Jess, on the other hand, would rather escape and just join Clara.

"Jess, please just tell me what happened," Lorelai said. "Clara will be fine by herself for just two minutes."

"Alright," Jess agreed. "So basically, I... I said goodbye to my mom, and Luke, after the wedding was over. And then... well I'd heard at the wedding that Rory was still at Yale that weekend, so I decided to find her." He looked up at Lorelai and she did look a bit surprised, but she was also clearly waiting to hear more.

"So I found her with Dean right by her dorm," Jess continued, and he thought he noticed Lorelai react when he said Dean's name. It was a very brief and subtle reaction though. He wasn't sure, but maybe he was over-reading into things. "Dean left, and I, well..." Jess faltered, and looked down toward his feet to half-mumble the next part. "I asked her to come away to New York with me."

"You what?" Lorelai asked, very surprised. Jess ignored the question.

"So, I mean, she turned me down. She um... she confirmed that she really doesn't want to be with me," he finished sadly, unable to hide his disappointment at what her response was.

"So the answer is definitely a 'yes' then, I guess," Lorelai replied, mainly for her own benefit.

"What?" Jess looked back up at her.

"Yes, you still are in love with my daughter," she clarified, an unexpected amount of sympathy and understanding in her tone.

Jess didn't respond; he just breathed slowly, staring back at Rory's mother for a moment and wondering what she was thinking. She was correct, of course, but he didn't feel the need to nod or confirm that in any way – he figured him simply not denying it would be confirmation enough that she was correct.

"Clara's probably wondering what's keeping us," Jess finally said. Lorelai nodded and closed her eyes, preparing herself to move from one fairly intense revelation back to the more intense Clara situation.

They walked back into the hospital room, both Lorelai and Jess feeling awkward and unsure of where they stood with one another. Lorelai greeted the girl with a grin, walking over to the other side of her bed and putting her hand on her shoulder. Jess smiled at Clara too but was still distracted by what had just happened out in the hallway. He wondered if Lorelai was mentally preparing a "stay away from my daughter and please move on" speech, and meanwhile Lorelai had stopped smiling at Clara and instead her gaze had drifted off aimlessly because she was busy trying to figure out why Rory hadn't told her what had happened.

Lorelai remembered it was only the night before last when she had caught Rory with Dean, and she tried to remember exactly what her daughter had said then. Rory had said that Dean loved her. Rory had used the phrase "my Dean" at some point. She'd talked about how she was better for Dean than his wife Lindsay was. But she'd never said she loved Dean. Not in that whole long speech of defense. Lorelai would have remembered.

And when Rory had told Lorelai about Jess saying "I love you," then leaving... she hadn't ever specifically told Lorelai that she didn't love him. Lorelai was so lost in these thoughts about her daughter's messy love life that it showed on her face and Jess grew a little more concerned that she was really upset at hearing about his encounter with Rory at Yale.

Clara was watching them in silence, trying to gauge their faces. To Clara, it looked like they were both in a state of worry at the moment and they also, other than briefly smiling in her direction, now seemed almost to be avoiding looking at her. After what felt like far too long of an awkward silence, she asked a question she really didn't want to have to ask.

"Did you tell him or something?"

Hearing the girl's scared and quiet voice, Jess and Lorelai both returned their focus to her.

"What?" Jess asked, confused. Lorelai took a second to comprehend the question.

"Oh gosh, no. I'm so sorry," she said. She was sorry for making Clara worry that her secret had been revealed and also sorry for ignoring her so much since returning to the room. She deserved to be the center of attention right then; it wasn't fair for Lorelai to be so distracted by thoughts of her own daughter. Rory's life had been so much easier than Clara's and Clara needed someone to be thinking about her right now. Clara clutched her abdomen in pain again and Lorelai gently brushed a stray and sweaty hair out of the girl's face, hoping she'd appreciate the gesture.

Jess pretended to ignore the fact that he was being kept out of the loop about something. He waited until the contraction had finished, then decided to move onto a safer topic to distract everyone in the room from everything they may have been thinking about.

"So it's been a while since you've seen your brother and his family?" Jess asked.

"Yeah," Clara replied. "I met Pamela a few times before their wedding, and she was really nice to me the whole weekend when they got married, and then about a year later I became an aunt," she said. "My mom took me to go see the babies when they were about six months old. Shawn and Trevor," she added with a smile. "They were adorable and fun to play with. And there was nothing quite as cute as seeing Andre around them. I never really had seen my big brother as a baby person but he was just so happy to have children - you could tell."

"And that was the last time you saw them?" Lorelai asked.

"Well, yeah, unfortunately. When my mom died, Andre said he... he didn't want to come to the funeral."

Jess and Lorelai looked at each other, unsure of how to react to that. Both Jess and Lorelai had less than stellar relationships with their own mothers, but still would probably go to their funerals if they died.

"It's not 'cause he hated her or something," she explained, seemingly reading their minds. "I think... he just didn't want to cry in front of everyone. He was really sad." With an air of lingering sorrow she added softly, "We both were."

Lorelai and Jess both nodded, their hearts breaking for this little girl. Neither of them had ever really experienced true loss like that before. Lorelai's grandmother had died and she saw what that was like for her father, and she'd been scared when her father had been hospitalized because of his heart, but she couldn't really relate, especially not back when she'd only been fourteen-years-old. Jess had experienced a little more, because growing up he'd known a few kids who'd OD'ed and another who had committed suicide... and also one of Liz's nicer boyfriends had died... but he'd never been really close to any of those people. They could both see this girl's grief was still felt strongly, and Jess wondered exactly how recent the death had been – although he knew it must have been within the past three years.

"Tell me something about your lives!" Clara requested, trying to lighten the mood. "Do either of you have any nieces or nephews?" she wondered.

"Oh um, no," Lorelai answered on behalf of them both. "Jess and I are both only children."

"Oh," Clara replied, a bit disappointed that her idea to take the conversation in a new direction had fallen flat. "Um, well, Lorelai, you said you had a... daughter, was it?"

"Yes," Lorelai replied, smiling. "Rory. Jess here dated her," she added, jokingly pointing her elbow in his direction, across the hospital bed.

"Oh, interesting. Yeah I had kind of been wondering how you two became friends," Clara said with a little laugh.

"Yeah I don't know if we're really friends," Jess quickly clarified, looking over at Lorelai.

"Oh, sorry..." Clara started to apologize, but Lorelai interrupted her.

"Oh Jess, stop it," Lorelai said, rolling her eyes. "Clara, don't worry. Jess is just being Jess. So you were asking about Rory? She's a student at Yale, and is on that university's school newspaper too. That's her dream job, to become a reporter," she explained with pride.

"She told me, more specifically, that she wanted to become a foreign correspondent," Jess added. Lorelai nodded to confirm that this was still true.

"Wow," Clara replied.

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure she was only eight when she started reading newspapers practically all the time," Lorelai gushed. "She adored literature and poetry too, more than your average kid; and I always imagined she'd grow up to be an author. But, one day she told me journalism was actually her calling."

Jess just listened as she kept talking. She started telling stories he'd never heard before. He was learning things about Rory as a child that he'd never known. And, as Lorelai talked about her little girl, her face just lit up. He thought back to the Lorelai who'd judged him as rotten pretty much from the get-go and had never trusted him. Today, she had been completely different. After she'd gotten him to tell her things that he never thought he'd confess to anybody, he was sure she'd want to kill him. Instead, she was remarkably sympathetic. With everything that had happened today, she hadn't even once gotten angry with him or made him regret opening his mouth. As he stood next to Clara's bed, continuing to be allowed to be silent, he truly appreciated how wonderfully she was able to keep the conversation going.

Perhaps Clara's assumption was correct. He couldn't believe he was admitting it. But, when she'd said the two of them were friends, Lorelai didn't act like the idea was so crazy. Maybe, just maybe, it was possible for things to really change. Jess looked over at Lorelai, who was still excitedly recounting things a young Rory had done, and the corners of his mouth lifted just a little as he resisted the urge to smile.