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Chapter 10
Fourth of July, 2011
Rory hated the New York subway in the heat of the summer. She sat stiffly on the seat, sticky with sweat, already annoyed that she'd have to dry clean her best skirt suit. But the sweltering commute was worth the price, because if Rory was right, she was pretty sure she just nailed her interview with a boutique publisher in SoHo.
She was on her way back to Brooklyn, her knees jittering with adrenaline. The interview had been easy from start to finish. After weeks of prodding - after she almost got the job in Philadelphia, but then found herself out of the running because of a lack of editing samples - Rory had convinced Jess to let her show a chapter of his work marked with her edits, and it had been a resounding success. The interviewer - a high-level, fifty-something editor with cat eye glasses - looked impressed. "You really seem to connect with this text," she observed, flipping through it, "your insights are spot on."
Rory shrugged, "It was easy with this one, he's a great writer."
The editor then tried to wheedle the name of the author from Rory for a few minutes, but Rory laughed and swore up and down that she could only share the chapter on the condition of anonymity, and besides the book was already under contract somewhere else.
"Fine," the editor smiled and pursed her lips, "but if you have friends who write like this, I do hope you introduce them to us sometime."
Rory left in a chorus of handshakes and so nice to meet you and we'll be in touch. When she reached the ground floor and exited out to the street, she called her mom, and they screamed together and jumped up and down. It was finally happening, Rory felt. After wasting so much of her twenties with paralyzing unemployment and indecision, she was finally beginning to figure it all out.
She leaned back in the subway seat, resigned to dry cleaning her suit, and sighed happily. She was heading back to Stars Hollow this weekend for Luke and Lorelai's engagement party, she was sure she'd be seeing Jess there, and by the end of the week she might be employed. Everything was lining up.
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Her train on Friday night was late, but Rory didn't care much. Lorelai picked her up from the station, all smiles. "Hey kid," she greeted her, pushing food wrappers off the seat and onto the floor, "train didn't fail of heatstroke?"
"Almost," Rory buckled her seatbelt and closed the door. "It's brutal out there."
"I know it's too hot to eat, but what do you want to eat?" her mom asked cheerfully, "the Indian place is closed for construction, but I think we still have some Thai and Chinese options. And Luke's, of course."
"Luke's," Rory decided immediately. "Extra fries."
Lorelai drove one-handed while she called Luke and placed their order. Rory could hear Luke on the other end of the line, exasperated. "Lor, I know your order. You don't have to . . . Lorelai really, you . . . Lorelai, I know what you guys want!"
" . . . and coffee. Lots of coffee. To go," Lorelai finished, winking at Rory. "Need me to say it again? Did you write it down? I can have Rory text it to you."
"Good god," Luke groaned. "If you say it one more time you're getting nothing. No extra fries, and decaf coffee."
"You wouldn't," Lorelai said, affronted, "I think we're allergic to decaf. I'm pretty sure we'd go into anaphylactic shock. Does decaf come with a complementary hospital visit? We might die."
"See you soon," Luke grumbled.
"Love you," Lorelai chirped, then snapped the phone shut.
"Is he closing the diner for the party tomorrow?" Rory asked.
Lorelai nodded, "For the evening, yeah. Taylor was so mad, especially because Luke explicitly disinvited him from the party, but I told Taylor later that of course he was welcome to join."
"Are you trying to get Luke to call off the wedding on the night of your engagement party?" Rory raised her eyebrows.
"He won't notice," Lorelai said dismissively, "and I'm not going to make Taylor mad when we're trying to get permits to have the wedding in the town square. You'd think I was trying to host a nuclear arms parade, the amount of paperwork we have to go through."
"That bad, huh?" Rory said sympathetically.
"I have to provide character references. Character references. I then cheekily asked Taylor to be my character reference and he was not amused. So I had to send him a gift basket to make it up to him and now he's also seeking letters of recommendation and a notarized ethics statement."
"That's awful."
"And we'll get fined if anyone mixes up the separated recycling system or spills anything on the grass," Lorelai rolled her eyes, "I swear, as soon as the wedding is over, I'm going to engage in an ongoing, guerilla campaign of civil disobedience against those damn recycling bins."
Rory grinned. "I'll help. I'm good at mixing up paper and plastic."
"Aw, my brilliant, disobedient progeny," Lorelai gave her a one-armed squeeze. "So lucky to have you."
They continued chatting as they drove down the dark Connecticut highway. After a while they turned down the road to Stars Hollow, and entered the little picturesque town. The lights were on at Luke's but the sign clearly said CLOSED.
"I'll be right back," Lorelai said, putting the car in park.
Rory leaned back in her seat and waited, watching, as Lorelai tapped on the door. Luke appeared, scowling, with an enormous paper bag. They chatted for a few minutes, and then Lorelai kissed him and returned to the car.
Rory craned her neck, but didn't see anyone else in the diner. Shaking disappointed thoughts out of her head, she turned to her mom and continued their chatty reunion.
They set up Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and curled up on the couch, wearing sweatpants and accompanied by half of Luke's entire menu and a couple glasses of white wine. Rory felt content. She munched on her fries and teased her mom about wedding plans and seating charts.
"Well, the guest list has been a journey so far," her mom stretched out her legs, groaning, "I'm trying to prevent half of Hartford society from being invited, and Luke's doing everything he can to keep half of Stars Hollow from being invited. So who knows kid, this may be a very small wedding. Maybe we'll reclassify it as a large elopement."
Rory laughed. "Stars Hollow has to be invited! And just give Grandma a table of ten seats and let her choose who to pick from Hartford society, Hunger Games style."
Lorelai grinned, "Good idea. I already convinced her that her hosting responsibilities will make it so she can't sit at the wedding party table."
"Well done," Rory approved. "Who all is at the wedding party table?"
"You, me, Luke, Jess, Sookie, Jackson, maybe Liz so far," Lorelai ticked off, "Oh, and April of course. I don't think TJ is going to make Luke's cut - " Rory snorted on her wine - "And your date, whoever that is." Lorelai winked at her.
"My date?" Rory repeated. She sipped her wine.
"No pressure, but yes, you are ranked high enough on the guest list that you get a plus one," Lorelai reached for the pancakes, "and whoever it is, we won't make them sit with Emily and the dear Daughters of the American Revolution."
Rory laughed weakly, but took another sip of her wine. It made perfect sense that she should have a wedding date, but she felt undeniably weird having a wedding date at a table that Jess would also be sitting at.
"Does Jess get a plus one?" she asked, trying to play it cool.
Lorelai shrugged. "If he wants one, but I don't think he will." Then her eyes narrowed. "Why the curiosity, child of mine?"
"I just don't want to be the only person at the table bringing a stranger along," Rory protested. The excuse sounded a little pathetic, even to her.
"What happened to Valentine's Day Brooklyn guy?" Lorelai asked, "I thought that was happening?"
"It was," Rory toyed with the stem of her wine glass, "I think I ended it, though."
"You think you ended it?"
Rory shrugged. She felt uncomfortable with this whole topic. She had been having fun with Noah - he was sweet, with his square glasses and calm confidence and love for film and the same types of weird cinema that she and her mom loved. They had a good time together. He brought her to vegetarian restaurants and breweries and she introduced him to all her favorite coffee shops tucked into corners in Brooklyn. She played the role, acted the part, encouraged the script.
But something in her knew it wouldn't last. It couldn't last, not when her head was embarrassingly full of a different type of dark-haired artist. Her cells shuddered differently when Jess was around. She was done pretending to be cool, acting as though she was avoiding the dark waters inside her heart that concealed her unresolved teenage romance. She had toed the edge for months, peering into the deep, nearly pushed in whenever Jess shot her one of his wry half-smiles, or when she traced the sharp lines of his profile with her eyes. In February, when he brought her Thai food at the hospital and accompanied her during one of the worst New York City blizzards in recent memory, she finally threw her hands up, reckless and irrational and unzipped, and dove straight in.
She had used Noah as a life raft, a buoy to keep her head above water. But gradually, as the current got stronger, she found herself slipping away regardless. She liked the distraction of having Noah, but after a while it wasn't enough to keep her from drowning in whatever she felt for Jess.
"I did end it," she clarified. "A few weeks ago."
"A few weeks ago?" Lorelai repeated Rory again, outraged. "What, you just don't tell me things anymore?"
"I was going to tell you," Rory leaned back, sighing. "It didn't feel like a big deal."
"But your wedding date feels like a bigger deal?" Lorelai asked shrewdly.
Rory took a very large, deliberate bite of cheeseburger, and chewed on her response. She swallowed. "No. I was just asking, for logistical reasons, because if my hypothetical wedding date is the only stranger at that table, I'll feel weird. Should I just bring Lane as my date?"
"No, you should not 'just bring Lane as your date,'" her mom said, scandalized. "Besides, Lane is already invited. And last I checked, she has three dates, all immature boys."
"Paris?" Rory suggested.
"Rory," Lorelai countered, raising her eyebrows.
Rory stared at the television. She drained her wine and poured herself another glass. She wasn't ready, really, to have this conversation with her mother, but then again they did talk about everything and Rory was resigned to the Jess-related floodwaters that she was treading water in, patient, wanting. She was sure her mom would figure it out anyways the next day, when Jess showed up at the engagement party and Rory undoubtedly acted like a transparent idiot.
"Does this have anything to do with you editing Jess' novel?" Lorelai asked. Her tone was softer, coaxing.
"Maybe," Rory said, stiffly.
Lorelai hesitated a minute. Then she poured herself another glass too. "Look, Rory, I'm not stupid. It's totally fine if you're all into Jess now."
"I'm not all into Jess now," Rory countered, combative. But then she relented. "I am, maybe, a little bit into Jess now."
It was very odd to say it out loud. Rory focused her attention on her glass of wine, the blood rushing to her cheeks. As unzipped and illogical as it all was, Rory felt some settling sense of honesty in telling her mother the truth of the tempest.
Lorelai cracked a large, insuppressible smile. But she pretended to be casual, watching the movie, popping French fries. "I was wondering if this would happen. Editing his book. If that isn't a cover for an illicit romance, I don't know what is."
"I did edit his book!" Rory protested. "It's been a year of it. He sends me chapters in the mail, I mark them up and mail them back to him."
Mark them up and mail them back to him was the most nonchalant way Rory could have possibly phrased consumed the chapters like a raving addict, poured heart and soul into editing comments, flung chapters back in the mail as fast as possible to get another fix soon.
"And it was just editing? No cute romantic notes attached, no phone calls late into the night about sexy things like grammar and syntax and punctuation and years of romantic history?"
"Nope, just editing," Rory said firmly.
"Well that's so much more boring than it could have been," Lorelai reached for her wine glass. "I was hoping for some juicy story of you two holed up in a bar or library somewhere, editing into the dark of the night, drunk on words, meeting of the minds turning into some wild, late night - "
"Mom," Rory said, sternly. She sipped her wine and sighed, "Besides, I'm getting the feeling that this is a one-sided thing."
"A one-sided thing?" Lorelai repeated incredulously, "you think he's not 'maybe a little bit into you?'"
Rory shrugged, her eyes on the television. There was a sinking feeling somewhere in her abdomen, a sense of fragile disappointment that acted as a constant chill on her interior emotions. So far, Jess had shown nothing resembling a reciprocity of emotion. He was funny and sarcastic, open to spending time with her, perfectly relaxed in whatever friendship they had struck through editing. But he maintained a consistent, careful, unrelenting distance. Rory could feel it physically, in the way he ever so slightly angled his body away from hers, or created an extra inch or two of space between them when they walked. She could also tell that he was refraining from talking too much about their personal lives, about whatever romantic mess either of them found themselves in. He painted a picture of friendly curiosity about Noah, but seemed unbothered and uninterested. When his friends mentioned Jess taking girls home from bars, Jess had rolled his eyes and rejected the line of conversation, steering them carefully to less personal territory. As much as she didn't want to admit it, Rory could tell that Jess had built a series of invisible barriers, a protective shield, and he had no intention of removing them.
"He hooks up with girls from bars sometimes," Rory said idly.
"Of course he does," Lorelai was unperturbed. "Any girl going into a bar by herself is looking for something that looks like Jess. Jess looks like trouble in the good way."
Rory was vaguely annoyed by this. "Trouble in the good way?"
"Yeah he's the John Bender, the Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause. Nobody aiming for a hook up goes to a bar looking for a sweet Prince William to take them home - they go looking for a young Johnny Depp smoking a cigarette in a dark corner."
Unbidden, a memory arose of seventeen-year-old Jess, looking very much like Jim Stark, leaning against a gas station, toying with a cigarette, waiting for her.
"I know," Rory sighed.
"Kid, Jess has been hopeless for you for years," Lorelai said, firmly. "Ever since he got shipped off to this town, years ago. And if he seems like he's not interested, it's because he's good at putting on an act and you probably scare him because you're different than any of those girls he's finding in bars in Philadelphia."
"So then what?" Rory asked. She was deflated, frustrated.
"Wait him out, play the long game," Lorelai smiled. "Sometimes the long game is worth the wait."
Her mother's engagement ring glinted in the light of the TV. Rory emptied the wine bottle into her glass.
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The next morning, Rory grabbed her copy of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and curled up on the front porch bench with a steaming cup of coffee. She wanted the madness and the comedy, wrapped in fairy magic in warm summer nights. If she was going to feel unzipped and illogical and frustrated by romance, she may as well do it with Puck and Titania.
Shakespeare was a prophet. And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together these days. Rory sipped her coffee.
The engagement party started in the late afternoon, when the smell of barbeque began to drift in the summer heat. The party should have happened months ago, closer to the actual proposal, but it was delayed by Richard's time in the hospital and long road to recovery. Lorelai acted cheerful and blasé about it, but to Rory her mother's voice sounded just a little hollow. All three of the Gilmore women were worried about Richard.
"Grandma, Grandpa!" Rory hurried to the van that was idling on the edge of the town square. "And, uh, hi, I don't think we met," she reached out her hand to the harried looking nurse that was trying to open the back doors.
"This is Simone, she's the new nurse," Emily threw Simone a look of deep skepticism.
Simone glanced at Emily with fright, and then hastened to unload Richard's wheelchair from the back of the van. Richard himself was sitting up front, jovial. "Rory, it's good to see you!"
"Good to see you too, Grandpa," Rory opened the door and gave him a hug. "You look great!"
Great was a term of shifting meaning these days. Compared to this time last year, Richard looked pale and drawn, his skin like paper, his hair thinning. He had lost a large amount of weight, and sagged slightly in his chair to the left. But he was still dressed impeccably, and his voice was no less booming.
Simone helped him out of the van and into the wheelchair. "It's just easier for me to get around this way," Richard explained, looking around the town square with interest. "Now where's Lorelai?"
Rory smiled. She was used to the wheelchair at this point, and grabbed the handlebars to begin moving it. "I think Mom was helping set up the food. This way."
They left Emily to berate Simone about the proper way to park the van, and meandered through the town square to the corner by Luke's, which was set up with tables of corn on the cob and potato salad and watermelon and barbeque. Luke was standing there, arguing with Sookie.
"The burgers are fine, Sookie, they don't need a jalapeño jam."
"Just a little?" Sookie wheedled, proffering a jar. "Or here, what about a nice garlic and pepper aioli?"
"No," said Luke. "Put it on your own damn burger, but this is a free country and a condiment optional table."
"But people will make the wrong choices," Sookie insisted. "Look, I brought homemade pickles too!"
"Set it all next to the ketchup and mustard," Luke pointed. When Sookie seemed to hesitate, he repeated himself, warning. "Sookie, with the condiments!"
Sookie grumbled and set her cache of gourmet burger ingredients on the checkered tablecloth next to the relish. Luke, exasperated, turned to Rory and her grandfather. "Rory, hi. Richard, good to see you, you're looking great."
"So I keep hearing," Richard smiled, "these burgers look marvelous, Luke, could you - "
"No," Emily snapped, appearing suddenly on Rory's other side. "Richard, you know the doctor's orders. Lorelai said that some Korean woman is making you a vegetarian burger."
Richard sighed as Emily pushed his chair over towards a picnic table.
The engagement party mingled with the town square festivities. As the afternoon turned to evening Rory shared three different helpings of dinner with her mom, and smiled as Babette and Miss Patty cooed over Lorelai's ring.
"Where has he been hiding the cash for this thing?" Miss Patty demanded, glancing at the diner as if expecting to see rolls of bills hidden in the siding. "Darling, this is magnificent."
Babette nodded fervently in agreement. "What a flasher. Sugar you better hide this or Taylor is going to start taxing it."
Lorelai laughed, "Well, I guess this is the pay off when you don't get engaged for decades."
Rory snorted into her punch, and tried to recover. "Miss Patty, which of yours was your favorite engagement ring?"
Miss Patty launched into an impassioned recollection of Eduardo, some Argentinean dancer that she met "while touring the continent." Lorelai and Rory exchanged a look and had to fight very hard to suppress their giggles.
As the shade stretched over the town square, and the moths began fluttering over the candles on the tables, Rory saw a familiar old car sputter around the corner and park next to Luke's. She felt the color rise in her cheeks, and refocused intently on the conversation before her. But out of the corner of her eye she saw Jess, in a black t-shirt and jeans like a vintage poster from The Outsiders, twirl his keys around his finger and slide into the diner.
Before she could make up an excuse to go inside, her grandmother appeared at her shoulder. "Your grandfather is going to be the death of me," she snapped.
"What, why?" Rory glanced at her grandpa, who was talking happily with Lorelai.
"He's now gotten three different townspeople to fetch him one of those nasty burgers. I only barely managed to confiscate the last one. What part of doctor's orders does he not understand?"
Rory sympathized with her grandpa. "Well, it is the Fourth of July. I know he's tired of being vegetarian."
"But he's ill, can't he understand that?" Emily was irritated.
He was ill. Rory and her grandmother looked at Richard, who, despite his smile and animated hand gestures, was looking older and weaker by the day. In his chair he looked so much smaller, a hunched version of his usual tall and gregarious self. He looked pale in the dimming evening light.
"Is he getting any better?" Rory asked softly, after a few moments of quiet.
Emily maintained her prim posture, but her eyebrows pinched slightly. "No, not really," She said stiffly.
The quiet stretched a little longer this time. Rory crossed her arms, shielding herself from that terrifying sadness that sometimes seemed to well up whenever the Gilmore women talked about Richard. She shook the thoughts away. "He looks good today," she said, trying to be positive, "and who knows, maybe he'll turn around soon."
Emily snapped out of it as well. "Well I should hope so," she said, busily, "because we have a gala at Yale next month and I look ridiculous standing next to that chair in photographs."
She touched Rory lightly on the back and returned to Richard and Lorelai, fussing over the collar on Richard's shirt.
Rory watched her grandparents for a moment, feeling an aching tenderness in the warm summer evening. But before she could turn around, she felt a nudge against her shoulder blade.
Jess' eyes were on her grandparents. He handed her a cold beer. "Wheelchair, huh?"
"Taylor will give you a ticket if he sees you drinking out here," Rory warned him. She took the beer anyways. "And yeah. He doesn't need it, but he needs it."
He nodded with understanding, and continued with the lighter thread of her response. "Half the people out here are drinking, you think I give a damn what Taylor thinks?"
Rory giggled. "You know Taylor will leap at the opportunity to give you a ticket."
Jess made a face of agreement. "Well then let's go find a place to sit where he can't see these then, how about that?"
They meandered to the diner steps, and sat next to each other, keeping the bottles on the step below, behind their legs. Rory felt her cells buzzing. She tried to be casual, tried to look out over the festivities, but she was acutely aware of his tan forearms and his messy dark hair and the way he smelled like whiskey and pine trees. She was hopeless, but she didn't mind it.
"How's the party been so far? I got stuck in traffic."
"Fine, the usual," Rory replied. "There's a George Washington impersonator walking around somewhere, and I thought I saw an enthusiastic Lincoln but it also could have just been a guy in a top hat. Someone put Kirk in charge of the fireworks so I think Luke has four counties worth of fire departments on standby."
Jess shook his head. "This place is something else."
"It's pretty great," Rory said, cheerfully agreeing.
"That's not what I meant," he said flatly.
"I know," she smiled.
They each took a drink of their beer. Although he seemed calm, there was something tense about Jess' posture, about the way he set his beer down a little too hard. His knees were angled slightly away from hers, and he looked rather intently out over the square. Rory was used to his unflinching eye contact, the searching way he would look at her and the pointed questions that would follow. But now he seemed unwilling to meet her gaze.
"Everything alright?" she asked lightly.
"Yeah, of course," he glanced at her, barely, and then looked back at the square. "Sorry, I've had a lot on my mind lately."
"How's the book going?" She asked, understanding.
There had been a few, long months where she hadn't received anything in the mail from Jess. She knew the book was nearly wrapped up, and back in April she had read a chapter that hinted at a conclusion, but she hadn't seen a true ending yet. When she texted and asked about it, sometime in late May, he responded with a short stalled. She didn't ask again, not wanting to pressure him, but the lack of manila envelopes often made her feel down and empty, unsatisfied, impatient. Her addiction to his writing was a monster, but she'd done her best to keep it under control while he dealt with whatever was blocking his progress.
"Like shit," he said, honestly.
She waited. The summer breeze ruffled her hair.
"I don't know," he sighed, and took another swig of his beer. "I just feel like there's something missing. It's distant."
Rory toyed with the word distant. "There's a lot in there that is emotional and beautiful, right at the surface," she said slowly, "but I think sometimes it feels like someone's emotions and not yours."
"It shouldn't be mine," Jess said, with a hint of surprise. "I'm writing characters, I'm not writing myself."
"Well, yeah, but your characters are mouthpieces." Rory struggled to come up with the right words. "It's like . . . sure the characters are fictional and the problems are fictional, but the emotions need to be real. And sometimes it feels like . . . like maybe you're writing about emotions but not with them?"
A great shout of applause came from the gazebo, and Rory could see that the band was wrapping up in preparation for the next group, which would play during the fireworks. Jess was staring straight ahead, his eyes narrowed, thinking.
"I mean, Jess, I think it's brilliant as it is," she backtracked. "If I had felt an emotional disconnect I would have told you ages ago. It's so good, and raw, and real. I'm only saying what I'm saying because you feel a distance, not because I as a reader feel a distance."
"You don't?" he asked, skeptical.
She tipped her shoulders. "Not really. I can see what you're saying, because I know you, but no, I don't think the typical reader would notice."
"But wouldn't it be better if it was actually raw and real?" he said, frustrated.
"Yeah, probably," she said honestly. "But it's already great."
"I want it to be better," Jess said. "It isn't getting published until it's there."
She looked at him, her eyes skimming his profile and the sharp of his jaw line, and felt her abdomen twist. She ignored herself. "Anything I can do?"
"No," he said. His tone was a little short.
Rory raised her eyebrows and took another sip of her beer. She wasn't offended - she knew Jess well enough to know he wasn't trying to be rude - but she was a little worried about him.
After a few minutes of silence, she decided to change the subject. "I had a good interview earlier this week at a publishing house in the city."
"Really?" he raised his beer, tapping it against hers, "Congrats, big Yale editor! 'Bout time."
"She loved your chapter," Rory smiled, "tried to get your name from me for a while, but don't worry, I protected your privacy. They couldn't even torture it out of me."
Jess snorted. "I'm under contract, there's not a damn thing I can do about it."
"Well, I think that sealed the deal," she said. "I was dead in the water before you let me share that around. I really appreciate it."
He shrugged. "You're a good editor. They should see that."
"Thanks," she said.
"How's everything else?" Jess asked. He seemed like he was more relaxed. "Brooklyn? Tutoring? The guy you swear you picked up in a bar?"
"I did pick him up in a bar!" Rory said, offended. But she felt a twist of something like self-satisfied pleasure that Jess had remembered that conversation and still had it on his mind. She continued. "Everything in Brooklyn is good. Tutoring is fun, I had a few high school students get great SAT scores back. And I broke up with Noah."
Jess didn't react at all, aside from taking another drink of his beer. But he seemed a little amused. "Why?"
Rory just made a face. She wasn't about to tell Jess the real reason, because she wasn't one to take a gamble with zero chance of a payout.
"Well I can't say you sounded too thrilled about him back in April," Jess stood and stretched, collecting their two empty bottles. "I'll get us a refill."
He disappeared back into the diner before Rory could rebut him. She bit back a smile. Jess wasn't wrong, of course, but she had tried to put on a good act back in Philadelphia, hanging out at the bar with Jess, Matthew, and Chris. And Jess had just seemed unconcerned, amused in that infuriating way of his. He dismissed Noah easily.
She buried her head in her hands, willing herself to think about something, anything else, but her heart was not cooperating and her pulse beat more quickly. Lord, what fools these mortals be!
Jess tapped the cold bottle against her bare arm and she jumped, gasping. "Sorry," he chuckled, and handed it to her properly.
She threw him a look, and took a drink.
"I'm assuming," Jess continued, as though they had been having an actual conversation about Noah, "that you ditched him because he was boring and because you found him at a bar. Men that you find at bars are always boring."
"Aren't you a guy at a bar?" Rory shot back.
"Sometimes," Jess said, carelessly.
"You're not boring," she pointed out. A second later, she regretted it, because she realized it sounded like a comparison to Noah.
"I'm sure plenty of people would beg to disagree," Jess replied, without skipping a beat. "Am I right, is that why you dumped him?"
"No," she said. "It wasn't because I found him at a bar. And he's not boring! I just . . . I don't know, I wasn't feeling it anymore. I have high standards."
Jess laughed, trying to suppress it by coughing into the crook of his arm. "You do not have high standards!"
Rory gave him a withering stare. He continued laughing. "You dated me for chrissake. And god, Dean. And whatever that blonde dick's name was. Rory, you haven't had a decent boyfriend yet."
Even as he insulted her past romantic history, Rory felt herself fighting a smile. She liked the pathway of this conversation, and she felt a little internal burst of sparks at the brief acknowledgement of their shared romantic history. She found herself grinning, knees turned towards him, eyebrows raised in challenge. "Okay, first of all, Dean was great. Perfect first boyfriend - "
"Perfectly boring," Jess interjected.
" - and Logan was only bad sometimes, for the most part he was sweet and amazing - "
"A sweet, amazing asshole," Jess countered.
" - and you were wonderful, even if you needed some help to figure out how to be a decent boyfriend," Rory finished.
"Thanks for giving me the only caveat," Jess' eyes glinted. He was animated now, turned towards her, his half-smile in full effect.
"Well," she shrugged, feeling fun and dangerous, "you did have a bad habit of not calling. And disappearing. And generally doing everything you could to dismantle us." She took a sip of her beer. "But I've never been able to talk to anyone like I was able to talk to you."
She kept the past tense on purpose. The sun was nearly down now, the moths flitting around the porch light of the diner above them. Jess was smiling.
"Later girlfriends would thank you for the - what did you call it - help you gave me on figuring out how to be decent."
"You needed a lot of it," she teased.
"And you need to have higher expectations for men you pick up in bars," he stretched his legs out.
"I'm fine with the expectations I have for the men I'm trying to pick up," Rory contradicted, her tone light. She chose the present tense for that one.
Jess could have commented on it, could have immediately called her out on her transparency, on the way she knew she was probably looking at him, underneath her lashes. But he kept everything on the surface, even as he let himself relax, even as the conversation pulled into a direction that he usually avoided.
"I'm just saying Rory, aim higher," he advised. He gently knocked one of his knees against hers. "And don't let yourself be bored by men from bars."
She felt electric, in the heat of the evening. The crowds in the town square in front of them were setting up camping chairs, laying out blankets, arranging themselves for the fireworks that were sure to burn down at least one historic building. She saw Luke yelling at Taylor about something, gesticulating angrily. Everything felt like it was buzzing. Her knee tingled from where he'd touched it.
"I'll try," she rolled her eyes. "I promise you this much, I'm not looking to be bored."
"Good," he flashed her a smile. "Life's too short for that."
"Isn't it ever," Rory agreed. She was facing him, watching him, refusing to shy away from the topic.
It was the eye contact that did it. Her blue eyes met dark brown, and suddenly, instead of being loose and relaxed, teasing and (though she hardly dared to think it) flirtatious, Jess seemed to freeze. He looked away quickly. Something shifted, his energy disappearing behind the familiar, cautious wall that he usually kept between them.
He stood, a little too rapidly. But, with his usual ability to act natural and unaffected, he gave her shoulder a small squeeze. "I'll be back in a bit." And he disappeared inside the diner.
When the door slammed shut, Rory sighed and placed her chin in her hands.
She was spinning. It was so easy, too easy, to get caught up in Jess and the banter they shared. She already knew she was lost. She was resigned to it.
But maybe - she raised her head and glanced back at the diner, at the closed door. Maybe Jess was losing himself too, and he just wasn't willing to face it.
Rory knew she was thinking like a hopeless cause, like a mortal in Shakespeare's woods blinded by a fairy love potion, but she had an instinct and an intuition that was usually, always right. Maybe her mother was on to something, maybe Jess was just good at putting on an act.
She played with her hands, watching the crowd, lost in her thoughts. The air still smelled like Jess' cologne, like whiskey and pine trees.
Perhaps her mother was a prophet, and this was the long game. Rory didn't know how long it would take to deconstruct Jess' wall, brick by brick, conversation by conversation, but she was fairly certain she could do it. It almost seemed as though he was afraid of her, afraid of what she could do.
Feeling lighter, with something of determination or recklessness or joy bubbling in the usual dark waters that housed her feelings for Jess, she stood and went to join her mom for fireworks.
It could be a dream, or an illusion, but Rory was content to stay under the influence of love-in-idleness until Jess saw fit to join her.
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