Disclaimer: I do not own Gilmore Girls or any of the characters associated with the show.

Chapter Nine: Favorite Mistake

Thursday passed.

Then Friday.

On Saturday, Rory stopped making excuses for him.

On Sunday she stopped hoping to casually bump into him in the hotel and started dreading his inevitable reappearance. Because he would reappear. There was no way that he could have had sex with her and then left for another country without telling her. Right?

Jesus. Was this how Dean felt when she had slipped out of town without a warning? The thought knocked the wind out of Rory. She had been walking through an art gallery, but she quickly sank onto a bench crowded with tourists pondering the works on the wall. This feeling of regret, deception, betrayal-all caused by Tristan's sudden disappearance-had she caused Dean those same feelings?

The past three days she had just wanted to see Tristan to reassure herself that her decision to have sex with him didn't change her fundamentally. Sex was just sex. Especially with Tristan. It was an empowered choice. Until he couldn't be bothered to treat her as anything other than someone he had used for his own pleasure and quickly discarded.

There had been all of those nights that Rory had been awake in her hotel bed, fuming over the thought that Dean was in bed with Lindsay. Had he been lying awake too, feeling like he the girl he had broken his vows for had used him for her own thoughtless games?

She couldn't do it. It was too much. She felt like she was drowning under the weight of the embarrassment of sleeping with Tristan, and the shame of using Dean.


"Hello?"

"Hi, Mom."

"Hi."

"How are you?"

"Kirk broke the wind chimes, so, you know."

"What?" Rory asked, clutching the receiver closer to her ear in hopes to better understand her mother.

"Never mind, you wouldn't get it."

"Oh."

"So where are you?"

"Berlin."

"Berlin, Berlin, the city of sin."

Rory could feel her muscles tense in her shoulders. "Where'd you hear that?"

"It's got a nice ring to it, is all. No reason to get snippy."

"I'm not snippy!" she protested.

"You sound snippy."

"Oh, Rory, is that your mother? May I speak to her for a moment?"

Rory turned to see Emily walking into the room. She had never been more relieved to see the woman in her life. "Sure, Grandma," she said. She passed the receiver over without saying another word to her mother and returned to her room to finish packing.

Once again she reprimanded herself for calling Lorelai. Yes she felt lost. But her mother was being completely unreasonable. She wasn't even trying to mend fences. Well, that was the last time she would try that, she promised herself.

She grabbed a pile of t-shirts and began to refold them, then place them into her suitcase. A knock on the door to the hallway surprised her. She threw the shirt she was holding into the suitcase and went to open the door. And there, after four agonizing days, stood Tristan. Looking just as devilishly handsome as always.

"Hey," she said, coolly. Damn. She shouldn't have said anything to him at all.

"Are you guys on the flight to Spain tonight?"

"Yes."

"Us too. I don't know why we didn't just fly straight from Switzerland."

Her eyes narrowed as she examined him. "Why would you do that?"

"To save the flight we took this morning," he answered reasonably.

She crossed her arms in front of her chest, the hurt that had been festering for four days turning quickly into anger.

"You were in fucking Switzerland?" she hissed.

"Yeah. I went with my Mom to some charity thing. Now I'm back with my Dad to go to Spain. It's like they don't get that I'm 19 and they don't need to have joint custody of me."

"You could have told me, you know."

"What?"

"About Switzerland."

"I did."

She tilted her head and gave him a look that he could have only interpreted as a seething glare. She watched as he rubbed the stubble of his chin, thinking.

"Shit. I thought I did. So you're mad at me because you thought I just took off?"

She sniffed and looked up towards the ceiling, then past him out the door. He had a way of making her feel so small and foolish. Again.

"Whatever. It's no big deal. I just thought you'd call or something."

"Oh yeah? On our imaginary international cell phones?"

She sniffed again, indignantly. "Fine. Whatever. See you on the plane." She moved to close the door but he slipped into the room before she could close it.

"What? Get out, my grandmother is in the other room," she whispered.

"Look, I came here for a reason," he said, ignoring her. His face was solemn.

"Okay," she said, letting the word trail a little in the air.

He rubbed his face with his hand, clearly stalling.

"Well, come on, spit it out," she demanded, impatient.

"I didn't have on a condom the other night."

Rory's heart thudded heavily against her ribcage, then stalled. It felt like an eternity before it beat again. When it did, she noticed Tristan was still talking.

"...so I know I'm clean, and if you're on the pill-"

"I'm not on the pill," she said quietly.

"Oh." With that little syllable he sank down onto her bed, right on top of her pile of clothes.

She turned her back to him, her thought running through her mind like molasses. She couldn't look at him until she had an answer to this problem.

"Rory?" he asked at length.

She turned to him slowly. "Fuck you, Tristan."

"Hey…"

"No hey!" She was yelling now, oblivious to the fact that her grandmother was in the other room. "You don't have any fucking right. Here I've been feeling completely used by you for the past four days. And then you march up here and tell me that not only did I make the biggest mistake of my life, but I could also be pregnant because you couldn't be bothered to put on a fucking condom?"

"We were both drunk, Ror."

"Don't 'Ror' me," she spat. "That was on you. We both know that drunk, casual sex is not really my thing. That's your game. You should be better at following the rules."

"Fine. You're right. Are you happy? And yelling at me about it isn't going to solve our problem."

Being right didn't make her happy, not in the slightest.

"So let's figure this out. When was your last... you know."

Period. He couldn't even say the damn word. And to be honest, she had no desire to discuss the topic with him, either. How the hell were they supposed to get through this, whatever this was, if they couldn't even say the damn word period?

"I don't know, Zurich, maybe?"

"Are you sure?"

She was positive. She remembered exhaling the breath she didn't know she had been holding for weeks, relieved that even though she and Dean had remembered protection there were no surprises.

"How long ago was that?" he asked.

"Two weeks, I guess?" she said.

"And when can you…?"

"I don't know. Week three or something?"

His face lit up. "So we're okay then?"

She shook her head. "I don't think it's that simple."

"Can you take a test?"

"I guess that's the only thing to do."

She rummaged through the room to find her purse. "Get up. You're coming with me," she said.


They hurried out of the hotel and down the city streets until they reached a pharmacy. Rory scoured the shelves, but could not locate the tests. They eventually asked a saleswoman, who was able to locate the boxes. Tristan quickly paid for it and they left the store.

"Now what?" he asked. They were standing just outside the doorway of the pharmacy.

"I don't think these directions are translated to English," Rory said, her heart sinking. She opened the box and flipped through the accompanying leaflet. She had been right.

"There's probably an internet cafe on this street," Tristan said. "We could go online and try to translate the German."

So, with no better option, they set off down the street. They eventually encountered a small internet cafe. Tristan bought a half-hour of internet time from the woman at the front desk. They settled in to a computer in a vacant row along the back wall.

Tristan tried to dictate the German directions while Rory typed, but his accent was so contrived that she ended up snatching the pamphlet away from him and transcribed it herself. Under lighter circumstances she would have appreciated his attempt. But her heart felt anything but light.

"I think we have to wait."

"Where does it say that?" he asked, leaning over her to see the screen.

"Well, it doesn't, exactly. It says "'19 days after the relations hesitate to take the exam fully.'"

"Ah," he said, skeptically. "Well what does it say about the timing of your, you know, period."

"That seems to suggest that we are ok."

He let out a quick breath of air and leaned back in his seat. Rory watched him curiously.

"Do you need a drink?" he asked.

"I don't think I can," she responded automatically.

"Come on, there can't seriously be a chance that you're considering keeping our nonexistent kid."

"Abortion isn't an easy decision for me."

"You're not pregnant!"

"We don't actually know that."

"We need a drink," he said. And he firmly pulled Rory out of her chair and back onto the street.


They ended up at the first bar they had passed. It was dark and utilitarian. Tristan was on his third whiskey. Rory was nursing her first gin and tonic. It was strong. She guiltily took small sips every few minutes.

"You know, I never sleep with girls like you."

She looked up at him. Perhaps she should have been offended, but she was running out of the capacity of adding emotions to the burden she was already schlepping around.

"Is that so?" she asked.

"Girls like you, the careful ones, always seem to get into bigger trouble than the other type."

Rory snorted. "Trouble is trouble, Tristan."

"Some girls are more prone to the trainwreck. And when it happens, it happens. And then there's girls like you. Who have this look on their face like the whole world has stopped and caved in at their feet."

"Because my life is just that picture perfect?"

"Squeaky clean," he affirmed.

She shook her head and looked past him into the empty bar.

"You don't like hearing that said out loud?" he challenged.

"It just shows that you don't know me at all."

"Oh really?" Another challenge.

She took a sip of her drink. "My mother got pregnant with me when she was fifteen years old. She had me at 16. By 17 she had run away from her parents house with me in tow. If I appear to be one of the good, sheltered girls, then that is a compliment to the work that my mother put in to raising me to make sure that I didn't follow her lead and end up a trainwreck."

"You're still pretty damned squeaky clean."

She felt her anger towards him rise again. Those words were the most insulting thing she had ever heard in her life. The intention behind it so stabbing.

"I'm a mess, Tristan. Don't you get it? It's all too much. I've already been letting everybody down, and now this…"

"How could you possibly be a disappointment?" he asked drily.

"I had to drop a class last semester," she started.

"Woo hoo, big deal," he said. "I got expelled."

"I'm in a pretty bad fight with my Mom."

"So is every teenage girl in America."

"I'm potentially knocked up by an asshole."

"Come on Mary, you can't win this one."

"I slept with Dean."

"That high school jock boyfriend you had? Every good girl loses it on Prom night."

"He was married."

That seemed to take the wind out of Tristan's sails. He sat back, studying her for a moment. It only took a minute for Rory to stop feeling smug that she had proven something to him and start regretting what she had just shared.

And then, he actually chuckled. "So I knocked up the Bagboy's dirty mistress."