Sorry to keep you waiting. My Rory/Jess feels have been playing hide and seek, but I buckled down and tapped this one out finally!
The end is near friends. The end is near, but not here.
It was a hallucination surely, a surreal manifestation of Hemingway's scrawling matador narratives. But if this was reality, Jess knew he didn't want to dodge this raging bull. No, he'd rather take a swing at the venomous beast. His fists curled in hard edged defense.
Rory's cries warbled through the confined space, bouncing and flitting in a sporadic tango off the severe concrete.
"Connor, no." She lodged herself between them, her back to Jess with white hands palming Connor's chest. His brooding eyes drilled into Jess for a moment longer before his face, which was quickly adopting the shade of pickled beets, tilted down to defy Rory's manic appeal for retreat.
"What kind of fool do you take me for? You asked me for a favor, Ror. A loan, a small thing for a friend of yours. A friend. So I take care of it, assign this 'old friend' Jess to one of my people. Just to have some measly intern correct me in a meeting, a corporate meeting, telling me that Jess is a man and not some sorority sister or something. Didn't think to mention that minor fact, baby?"
A rollicking rage swamped Jess' senses. A steady stream of red tinted the whole scene. He wasn't the matador anymore, he was the blasting bull.
Jess took Rory's willowy arms in his hands and tugged her backwards. "You don't talk to her like that, okay?"
"I can handle this, Jess." Her chastising gaze left him empty and scorched.
"Yes, Jess. She can handle this." The sneer in that prick's voice made him wild with loathing.
Rory squared her shoulders. "Have you been drinking, Connor? This isn't you. Let's go sit down and talk about this, okay?"
"No, Rory, no, I don't want to effing talk about it! My girlfriend is trying to pull one over on me, and I'm not gonna take that sitting down. I want to have it out with the rat she's been slumming it with."
Jess leaned sidelong against the coarse brick, the fight draining out of him and flowing unswervingly into the awaiting gutter. "Your girlfriend? Girlfriend. Huh."
Rory wheeled back in his direction with beseeching blue eyes. "Jess—"
Connor took a lumbering step forward with snapping teeth flashing in the glow of a nearby streetlight. "Yeah, buddy, my girlfriend. Our anniversary is next week."
He felt a deflating force bearing down on his punctured lungs. History was destined to repeat itself, right? She would always belong to someone else.
In an uncharacteristic burst of energetic defiance, Rory stomped her heel into the crackled pavement and pierced Connor's chest with a manicured nail. "That is enough! You do not waltz in here and spin this on its head, you deceitful cretin! You cheated on me, remember? Everyone knew it, all of our friends, all of New York! And you chose her. I think I was more than accommodating in all of this, letting you have your little escapades with the temp secretary extraordinaire and bowing out gracefully—"
His hand clamped down on her wrist as he towered over her. "Ror, baby, I—"
She shook him off easily. "No! Don't, okay? We've been over for almost six months, Connor. Go home, sleep off the hangover, and don't ever call me. Ever."
He wilted into himself, an overgrown cactus that had been dislocated from its desert plot. "I'm sorry, Ror. I messed it up, messed us up."
"We wouldn't have made it anyway." She stood firm with finalized conviction. "Please just find your driver and leave. You shouldn't have come here. This day was supposed to be perfect."
She brushed past both men without another word. Jess choked back the boulder of hostile impulse that blocked his windpipe and watched with sudden detachment as Connor crawled back around the building in defeat.
Yet Jess didn't feel like the victor. Rory's dismissal somehow seemed to comprehensively include him too.
"Rory, wait! Rory…"
She whirled around, her jaw clenching in stony despondency. "Not now, Jess."
He futilely swiped at her arm. "Hey, just a second, please, I—"
"I said not now!" Her eyes scurried to evaluate the impact of their commotion as they approached the spangled gazebo, all decked out in tulle and twinkle lights. It seemed heir voices had been mercifully swallowed up in the glitzy swell of an old jazz song. With methodical tenacity, Rory forced a calming intake of breath and corresponding release. She continued in a perilously low tone. "In the next five minutes I have to be sure that the getaway car is parked in the right place and properly outfitted, both with luggage and the customary tacky decor. Then I would like to paste on a happy face for the sake of my mother, who will possibly attempt to derail her own honeymoon if she thinks I'm upset about something. So to boil it down for you, I need space."
Jess stepped forward with a grave look. "I get it, okay? He's a jerk and he shouldn't have come here like that. Let me help with the car and—"
"Jess, stop." She squeezed her eyes shut, both to ward off the threat of crystalized tears and to effectively block his downturned expression from view. The cutting betrayal was too fresh; he wasn't going to crumble her gritty resolve. "You doubted me back there. I saw it. You were shutting down the second he called me his girlfriend. I can't…after all I've said and done in the last 24 hours…you still don't trust me."
Silence. A calloused palm drifted in a spectral stroke against her arm. The shutter of her eyelids rapidly lifted as she took a sharp step to the side. His hand coasted aimlessly in the comatose summer air, a sadly absent gesture that sounded like an inharmonious clatter in the presence of the smoothly roaring saxophone backdrop.
"Rory…"
His almond eyes ravaged her face in an evocative melancholy regard. She felt paralyzed at the slight slump of his shoulders and the enduringly forlorn sinking of that warped mouth. "I know, Jess. It sucks. But apparently this is the mold we're stuck in. I've disappointed you too many times before, played the right cards at the wrong times. I thought we were past this…I thought that when I stayed this morning, when I told you I'm not running this time…" Her breath abandoned her with a rocketing momentum. In a scarcely audible folding of her heart, she managed to whisper, "I'm not mad at you."
"Then give me another chance." He didn't make another move to touch her, and she mentally thanked him for that. She knew that would be her undoing, the devastation that was his skin on hers.
Her saturated eyes stormed transversely over the grass at her feet as she crossed her arms protectively against the cumbersome mass of his hoarse plea. "No."
A vehement curse spilled from his tongue. "Why? Why, Rory, you can't—"
"No! Okay? I said no. We're family now, and I don't mean that in the 'ha-ha we're step cousins' stupid way. My mom—the only person who has consistently loved me and supported me no matter what—is married to your uncle. And I know how much Luke means to you. He looks at you like you're the son he never had and I can see that you feel the same way about him."
Jess shoved his hands in his tuxedo pockets, his Adam's apple dipping furiously. "What are you saying?"
Rory tucked her arms more tightly against her abdomen as she rocked back and forth. "I don't want to hurt them with this, with us. I don't want them to take sides in the series of explosive confrontations that are sure to shadow this kind of mistake."
"So now this is a mistake? You were practically beating me over the head with assurances that you wouldn't regret this." His chin jutted with insolent challenge.
She flinched at the highly-strung chord battering his typically off-the-cuff cadence. "I didn't think I would. But I can't keep making those same assurances day after day after day. I can't keep begging you to believe in us, Jess. It hurts too much to know I'm the only one who does."
"Yeah, well I'd hardly call this painless." He rifled a hand through his scalp, then glanced up at the frosty spread of stars that had incidentally been dappled across the sky for the special occasion. They just seemed cold and unfeeling now, completely bereft of any lasting magic. "So what? I'll see you at Christmas dinner? That's it, game over?"
Her heels sunk tragically deeper into the sodden ground. Her stomach wrenched at that abortive proposition. But then she relived the grisly portrayal in the alley—the shooting look of dented hope engraving itself into the lines of his forehead and the easy surrender in the sagging of his frame—the renewed stab of loss pummeled her at the core.
With a feeble nod, Rory took an emblematically regressive step toward the DJ. "I'm sorry, Jess. This is not how I imagined the ending to this day."
His blistering scoff did little to alleviate the cresting pressure behind her eyes. "At least we agree on that point."
Squinting over her shoulder, she watched as her mom pranced in a diagonal path over the dance floor and threw her arms around the grinning groom. A silver tear escaped the fortress of Rory's heavy lashes. Turning back to Jess with a resigned fatality, she stammered—"I-I should go. I guess I…I'll see you around."
She had barely taken three quivering steps before his hand fastened around hers. "This is what I want, Rory. I'll prove it to you, I promise. Let me prove it to you."
Stealing one last arduous glimpse of his seamlessly constructed face—the hooded hazelnut eyes, the stubborn wave of his dark chocolate hair, the chiseled set of his jaw, that alluring pull in the corner of his lips—she carefully extracted herself from his grip. "I'm not sure you can."
Then she was off again, practically jogging her way across the square. And this time, he didn't follow her.