Story Title: Falling Away With You

Chapter Title: Caring is Creepy (The Shins)

Summary: His dreams were laced with airy shadows of the women he had left behind in the last few years (his woeful attempts at pushing Thumbelina out of his head). Amy, Lauren, Kim, Kat, Nikki; they all haunted him with the ghosts of their laughs and vague flashes of their eyelashes batting over vacant eyes. Literati

Notes: Thanks for the feedback! I'd like to particularly thank pamhalliwell, who gives me incredible reviews and makes me feel like I can walk on water ).

xxx

I think I'll go home and mull this over

Before I cram it down my throat

At long last, it's crashed, its colossal mass

Has broken up, into bits in my moat

"Hey, when are you getting home? I've got some dinner ideas. I've been itching for Chinese as of late, but Thai has also treated us very well in the past. Ideas?" Nick quickly said when Jess picked up his phone around 9 that night, after an awkward return from the square.

"I'm actually out of town," he hesitated, bracing himself for the disapproval.

"Oh," Nick said, sounding dejected and somewhat lonely, odd noises when interlaced with his slight Boston accent. "So you went."

"Yeah."

"Huh."

"That's my line," he tried to joke.

"Seemed to fit my vantage point a little better." Jess nodded and felt like smiling. He knew how unhappy Nick was with him over his decision to go. He had been insistent, almost annoying about him not going.

Jess sighed when neither spoke and tried to turn the conversation from himself. He spun the wheel.

"I'd go for the Chinese. Food Zone, though it sounds like a joke, is probably your best bet."

"Mhm," Nick quickly replied, tight-lipped.

"Are you actually pissed that I came here?"

"Just wondering why you're being a fucking chick."

"'Scuse me?" Jess asked, perplexed. He was leaning against the headboard of his old bed by himself (he still hadn't adjusted to the idea that Luke was almost always at Lorelai's), feeling very alone up until his phone rang.

Her breakup scene with Logan had driven them apart. It was a supernova and all they had been were wandering dust particles that found themselves consistently running into one another. Both had been expecting there to be a massive vacuum in her life once he was gone, and it was simply assumed that he would take his place. Together they would collide in the place where Rory and Logan had been and both were sure that things would be cataclysmic and phenomenal.

Instead of that vacuum, they were forced to deal with the unpleasant sensation of floating away from one another, slowly but surely, into space.

And unless one of them fought it and halted that movement, soon enough they might float too far apart, and find it impossible to return.

It wasn't as if he wasn't determined to get her back.

(It was a constant flutter in his brain, that need.)

And he wasn't intentionally rethinking everything.

(Sometimes his mind just ran away with him.)

Certainly Nick's words hadn't stung him in any way, shape or form.

(He just was upset that his opinion on the Chinese food he wouldn't be eating that night wasn't valued.)

"I thought your stupid 'I'm gonna try and argue against everything he says' bit this morning would've gotten doing things you KNOW you aren't supposed out of your system. Guess not." The room was dead silent on the other line and Nick's breathing was viciously low.

"You don't even know her, and you certainly don't understand the situation better than I do," Jess argued. He wasn't sure why. A year of living with Nick had taught him volumes about unyielding tenacity.

"Sometimes it takes and outsiders' perspective to help you see things you didn't before."

"What exactly are you insinuating?" Jess asked, his mouth held at a confused angle and his eyes dangerous. His voice threatened Nick; dared him to say anything contrary to what he had been doing. The free hand that was holding his book was now dangling as the curve in his elbow locked into place over his bent knee.

"If you go for this right now, you're the rebound guy." Nick's voice hadn't fallen much, but it was hard to argue against his moderate fear of the dark and thoughtful man with the hair. "You're not a basketball player, much less a basketball. You don't want to be the rebound guy."

"How do you know that I'm going to be a rebound guy?" Jess questioned, astonished and feigning curiosity.

"Any guy who dates a girl right after her last 'relationship' is the rebound guy. He refreshes her memory. It's like a crash course on the beginning of a relationship. He's a practice. Girls don't expect much out of them.

"Usually this isn't a horrible thing for a guy. Think though--this is THE girl. The Last Temptation, as you so chickishly put it the other night. She's it. And regardless of how in love with you she is and how done with Mr. Snobby-Ass Tool Whose Head Jess Wants to Bang Against a Brick Wall Until it Cracks Like an Egg, she's going to expect the same things out of you that she would expect out of a rebound guy. She's going to demand your attention. Rebound guys don't do that; they keep their social and dating lives completely separate, and typically prefer their buddies over some chick. She's going to want real dates. Rebound guys go for a beer and then expect her to want to go back to his apartment. She's going to want commitment. That's when rebound guys go running."

Jess sighed and his head fell to one side. "And?"

"Now, my theory is that the girls do this intentionally and never expect the rebound guy to commit or care. Rebound guys don't care about getting yelled at or when girls cry. They're really good at blowing everything off. The girl is pretty much just trying to remember how much she can get away with because, chances are, during her last relationship, at least toward the end, she could get away with anything.

"If this is "The Girl" and "The One", you're not going to do any of those rebound guy things. You're going to tell her, "Oh, I'm in love with you" and "I only want to be with you," and it might very well make the situation worse rather than better."

"You're saying she doesn't know what she wants and I don't know what I'm doing?" Jess said, comatose from the lengthy explanation.

"I'm saying that she might think she knows what she wants, but will handle it poorly, and that you think you know what you're doing, and I trust that you've done this before, but this situation is definitely different." Nick paused. "Basically yeah. She doesn't know what she wants, and you're clueless."

"Thanks for that briefing on dating, Dr. Phil," Jess sarcastically quipped.

"Just trying to shed some light." There was a pregnant pause and Jess felt a knot forming in his throat from misuse. He had been stonewalled by the lengthy explanation that Nick had given him. Though Nick was typically the more verbal of the two, it wasn't saying much (especially in comparison to Jess), and usually he kept the ranting to a minimum.

Jess tried clearing his throat of the knot, but he imagined it had long since grown hands and fingers and was now clutching at his vocal cords, desperately trying to stay put.

It should have no problem; I've inhaled enough tar in the past5 years or so that it should be relatively easy to hang on, he thought, trying not to let Nick hear him.

"I'm really hoping that repeated coughing shit means you actually do have some doubts or reservations about this whole thing," Nick snapped on the other line.

"Yeah," Jess said, looking around at the empty apartment, uncomfortable with the solitude.

"Yeah what?" Nick said, pushing him to continue.

"I've got a few doubts," Jess said with a monotone. Painfully disinterested. That would be the title of the new book. How ironic?

"Good," Nick said, surprised that he had succumbed to the pressure so quickly. "So, you were saying something about Food Zone?"

Lift the mattress off the floor

Walk the cramps off

Go meander in the cold

Three steps.

Breathe.

Two more steps.

Breathe.

Stop. Turn around. Three steps.

Breathe.

Early spring was brutally unkind in Connecticut. Brash. Chilly. Windy as hell. Unforgiving.

Maybe it was just what he needed; something that wouldn't let him just…forget. He needed a constant reminder. When the wind whipped at him from behind, it was the surprise of seeing her again (although he had known it would happen all along). When he turned on his heel, it was the kiss-Oh god the kiss. Sweet, soft, gentle. Oh so reminiscent of Saturday afternoons in 2003. Pink lips colliding with his thin and crooked ones, her hand laid so gently on his chest.

He shook it out of his head and concentrated on his pacing, maneuvering around empty boxes and garbage bags.

When the gusts caught him in the face, it was Logan, standing before the two of them, feeling awfully close and quite reconciled. The wind brought back that cold. That numbness that takes over when you get caught.

Breathing even did something odd to him, reminding him of the day (oh god what a day). Those calming breaths that he was trying so desperately to have—they were looking at her when she said "I love you." He'd dreamt that image in his mind in a million different ways, under a million other conditions (never any quite like these) and then it was there and it was like breathing out a breath that had been paining him for far too long to hold in. It reminded him of fragile footsteps and the unraveling (but good unraveling) of the great knit sweater that had become his problems with his past and how his mind just shuts down when he smokes that stress cigarette.

Cigarette. Cigarettes. Lots. That's what he needed.

But unless he wanted to get back into the car and drive all the way to Hartford to a 24-hour wannabe Kwik-E-Mart he was just going to have to deal with it.

He kicked a particularly uninteresting trash bag in frustration, praying that it wouldn't rip open and spew diner-gunk at his shoes.

Shit. He had not packed another pair of shoes.

Who was he kidding? He didn't really own many other pairs of shoes. A dressy set that he bought for Liz's wedding (there was a good time) and a few worn pairs from his days of hauling ass away from the cops or responsibility (depending on the day). These brown, indescribably nondescript boot-like things were just about all he had.

So if he got diner-gunk on them, he was fucked.

He sighed a little when the force hadn't cut a hole in the plastic and went back to pacing, though a little less fervent now that he had almost destroyed his only pair of shoes.

"Should've made a list," she sang tauntingly in his head. He shook her voice out of his ear. She'd been doing that for a couple of weeks now; periodically jumping in with her sage words of wisdom in her "I told you so" tone of voice. "Should've made a list," "I would've called first," "Shouldn't have had that third drink," "Remembering her last name would've been good."

She nagged him, a little, when she made her uncannily well-timed appearances on the forefront of his brain, his mistakes held under her blazing glare. She inspected them, questioned their maker (and the wiseness he possessed), peered at them from a collection of angles before coming up with precisely the biting, yet fitting comment that would slowly tap his brain into logical thought. She would smirk a little as those words left the lips that he had imagined in his head supernaturally, ever-so pleased with herself for what she had accomplished.

In his head, she was small, even the size of Thumbelina when he thought it so. And though he envisioned her so tiny, she was so much more real to him than what she scolded him for.

A time or two, he had wanted to hear what she had to say so badly that he made her ten feet tall; a formidably frightening experience. Her voice remained softly taunting, to a tune he could not and did not care to discern. It was all hers. Rory's Malevolence. A composition that he had coined as such one late night when she watched him disapprovingly from over the top of Anna Karenina, as he stumbled over a conversation with distraction number twenty-two.

Hail to your dark skin

Hiding the fact you're dead again

Underneath the power lines seeking shade

Far above our heads are the icy highs that contain all reason

She saw right through him. Like the song that resonated in his brain when she occupied it so perfectly and so casually could, without secret, unmask the fact that the only lights in his life were Nick, Truncheon, Luke, and the hope that one day, maybe just one day soon, she would come back.

He got no pleasure from her penetrating stare and how her voice always managed to weaken his defenses (and yet somehow, every now and again, build them up in just the right way); Jess hated that he couldn't hide. Even though he knew that she wasn't real, even though he was sure that she was as fictionalized to him as his dreams, he felt the guilt and the darkness that she broke open when she descended into his mind.

It was like her brightness in his life made the shadows look that much murkier.

Suddenly, he stopped pacing.

(Was he finally getting tired?)

Something about a smell he had just caught was thrown him backwards into what had seemed like a prehistoric era that he had only ever heard about. Something…thanksgiving-y. Suddenly he was back at that table in the diner, having Thanksgiving dinner with Rory and her mom and Luke (oh GOD what a scenario that would be now) and every movement, every brush of her arm against his, was vivid again.

In his mind, the memory was still there. It wasn't like it had gone forever. But nothing about it had ever seemed real. Like, for the most part, it hadn't really happened.

Jess scratched his head as he smiled (but only just a little) to himself. It was the coffee fumes mixed with the undeniably iconic smell of turkey gravy. The only time in his life that had been forced to couple the two in his mind had been that day (up until now of course).

Secretly he wondered what had made the smell happen upon him with such uncanny timing.

He shook his head again. Maybe it was just all in his head.

It's a luscious mix of words and tricks

That let us bet when we know we should fold

His dreams were laced with airy shadows of the women he had left behind in the last few years (his woeful attempts at pushing Thumbelina out of his head). Amy, Lauren, Kim, Kat, Nikki; they all haunted him with the ghosts of their laughs and vague flashes of their eyelashes batting over vacant eyes.

He remembered high-healed shoes walking seductively down the sidewalk, smeary red lipstick and how it clung to the cigarette butts of thousands of Virginia Slim 100's that pooled in the bottoms of glass ashtrays from the bar. Bar tabs from god-only-knows-how-long-ago flashed through his mind, and he remembered how freely all of them drank when in his presence, encouraging the same behavior in him. The bob and sway of too much liquor crept into his slumberous musings, troubling him more deeply than the women.

Tremulously he continued to stumble through his necessary slumber, elated at last at the sight of daylight.

Sun crept slowly into the apartment. It was the first sunrise that he had witnessed from his bed in that room. Usually it seemed too bright, intrusive. Today it was welcome, and slowly climbed the walls and warmed him back from his half-dead musings on his past.

(Was it his past already?)

But he was scared. Scared that he couldn't change. Afraid that, no matter what, he had become a womanizing, grade-A charmer. He was afraid that when they did inevitably part (he pushed that from his brain), that no matter how much he understood now, he'd want to push her back out as he had trained himself to do since she left him on that bus.

On rocks I dreamt of where we'd stepped

And of the whole mess of roads we're now on.

"You're awake?" Luke asked, his face tracing the purest form of astonishment that Jess could recall.

Jess stood by the window, looking out into the sun, for once glad that Luke had showed up. The company couldn't kill him.

"Yeah," he said groggily. "What time is it?" he asked to break the silence.

"5:30. I came to make sure you were still here." Luke stood rigid in the doorway, unsure whether or not he was permitted to enter the room. Jess had seemed to fit in it so well right then.

"Here I am," he replied flatly. They stared each other down for a second, each wondering separate thoughts regarding him and Rory and what had happened the day before. Jess entertained the idea that she had thought of him warmly all night, then regretted it when he remembered all of those doubts that plagued him only hours before.

He crossed the room to retrieve a shirt he had long discarded on the floor and placed it alongside his bag, pulling another from it and sliding it over his head dexterously. Luke scratched the back of his head and looked in other directions, feeling out of place.

"You need help downstairs?" he asked as he pulled a pair of socks onto his feet, which he covered with his shoes. His only pair of shoes. He smiled wryly to the floor.

"If you want. No big deal," Luke said, adding in a shrug for good measure. He was always trying to look nonchalant.

"It's Sunday. You always need help on Sundays," Jess stated, looking at him dryly. Luke backpedaled and puffed out his chest, bracing himself for the answer to the question he was so hesitant to answer.

"I thought you might want to, you know, talk to her or something." It came out meeker than he had expected, almost a whisper (though keep in mind it was Luke). Jess shrugged as he crossed the room to his old dresser and dragged a comb through his hair, as he so often used to when he wanted to avoid looking at Luke. Fearing that he could see the truth. In profile he could be so much more deceiving.

"If she wants to talk, she knows where I am." Nick would've been so proud.

"That is," Luke started, sighing and sitting dejectedly in a chair at the kitchen table, "the stupidest thing that I have heard you say in a long time."

"I'm happy to retard my intelligence to aid your reminiscing," he said understatedly into the mirror.

"Jess-," Luke said before being interrupted.

"Look," he drew out, turning around with the comb in his hand, his eyes already midway through a dramatic roll. "I already came here. I made a move, and I didn't have to. I sent her a letter. I came to her home town." Jess pointed at him with the comb. "This is no longer my problem."

Luke scoffed at him, amused. "You have obviously never had to be in a real relationship with a Gilmore," he commented, a smile dancing across his face, his arms crossed across his chest.

"Yes I have," he said, moving back to the dresser to continue on his hair.

"The few months in high school that you treated Rory like crap do not count. Besides, you weren't around that much. And I'm pretty sure your relationship was about 85 physical."

"I did not treat her like crap. And no, it was not," Jess said.

"Yes you did," Luke quickly corrected before he could be argued with again. Jess conceded unwillingly with a shake of his head and no more words.

Hold your glass up, hold it in

Never betray the way you've always known it is

One day I'll be wondering how

I go so old just wondering how

I never got cold wearing nothing in the snow

"And your point was?" Jess wondered as Luke shook his head at him.

"If you are dating a Gilmore, it will always be your problem. It may have nothing to do with you! It might be about something that they don't have anything to do with. But it will always be your problem. Even just a little bit. Something about it will be your responsibility."

"Why is everyone giving me relationship advice? Did you think that I just sat on my hands when I moved out?"

"Everyone's giving you relationship advice because you clearly are an idiot. And, no, for the record, I didn't think that. But if any of those had worked out, would you be here after Rory again?"

"I don't know." Jess exhaled and seemed to deflate as he leaned against the dresser, his arms over his chest and his feet crossed at the ankle.

"Do you want to talk to her?" Luke asked.

"Yes," he responded. A knee-jerk reaction that he had never been able to beat out of himself. He would always want to talk to her. He loved talking to her.

"Then you better go and do it. Because, as brash as they are, they won't do that kind of stuff. Like I said, this, from now on and forever," he drew out the word to indicate its importance, "is your problem."

This is way beyond

My remote concern of being condescending

His jacket was on and he was halfway out the door, adjusting his collar in an attempt at calming the shake that was quickly overcoming his will power that had kept it suppressed. Luke was standing behind the counter, immobile in the center of chaos.

He took one last, pleading look at the Formica praying that Luke would tell him that a loophole existed somewhere in this plan. Instead he just looked at him, and every rigid plane of his face told him "no."

All these squawking birds won't quit

Building nothing, laying bricks.

The outside of the house looked the same, with the exception of a few minor structural improvements that he was sure Luke had been recruited to do over the last few years. He knew that the inside would be different.

He wanted so desperately to know if she noticed it too. If she felt that weird 'first-day-of-class' anxiety when she walked into this house that had once been her home and realized that things were different. New rules. New family. New appliances.

But he couldn't ring that doorbell, or knock on that door, or tap on her window. He refused to believe the rules.

He did not, and would not, take relationship advice.

With his hands in his pockets, and his chin resting on his chest, he sat down on the porch and huddled into himself.

He would only meet her halfway.