Reconciled

"Why did you marry him?" he asked with a surprisingly steady voice.

"He pushed me," she said with a shrug. "I kept telling myself that I was happy. He did all sorts of little things for me-the kinds of gestures that you make, except that he relied on his money to pull them off instead of skill or brawn. It was always about the money. He was always trying to buy my love. He even tried to buy Rory's love. But he did make the gestures. You're supposed to appreciate those things, so I told myself that I did. And I told him and Rory and Sookie and anyone else who asked that I was happy."

"But you weren't." He stated it more than asked it.

"Oh god, no," she rolled her eyes. "I think I told myself that if I pretended enough, I would start to believe it. But I was just so heartbroken. And I missed you. I missed my life, too. I missed the town. You know, the diner is such a hub for the town and I couldn't go in it. I couldn't go near it."

"You know you could have, don't you?" He remembered the weeks following the breakup. He was angry, but he missed her. If she had shown up, he might have felt resentment, but part of him would have rejoiced. "It wasn't the same without you. Everybody thought that I had changed something when I rebuilt that wall. I hadn't, of course, but they weren't wrong. Something had changed. You weren't there."

"And you wore that ugly black hat." She admired the new blue Red Sox cap he was wearing. It brought out his eyes nearly as much as that old one that she had given him so many years ago, but it had a nice cloth tab instead of the cheap plastic sizing. How that old cap had survived seven years of daily wear she couldn't imagine. It was as much a scientific mystery as her metabolism.

"No, I couldn't go in the diner. I couldn't go to town meetings. I couldn't even go to the stationery store because that meant walking by the diner. I couldn't risk seeing you. It hurt too much."

"So he pushed you?" he asked, not wanting to change the subject.

"He did. We were sitting in this restaurant in Paris and he said we should get married. I dodged the question. I told him it was too soon, which was stupid, but I was desperate. And he kept saying that he didn't want to wait and I thought about when I'd said that to you. The shoe was on the other foot. And he kept pushing. I didn't want to hurt him the way that I'd been hurt. And I thought, 'Why not? What am I holding out for?'"

"And that was, what? September? October?"

"November," she corrected. "It was only a week before you called me when April got sick."

"Interesting timing."

"It was. I had managed to avoid you the whole summer and I only saw you from afar a couple of times that fall. But then suddenly there you were, in my life again."

"I was so… hurt. And angry. Did you know that we got into a fist fight, Christopher and I?" He nodded. "A lawyer had just told me that I would probably lose April. She was all I had left. You were married to him and I was going to lose the only other person who kept me going. I saw him there, coming toward me, clearly looking for a fight, so I gave him one." He looked down at his hands. "I never fight. I think it was only the third time in my entire life that I've ever hit someone."

"He told me about it," she said. "Not at the time, but later, when we were breaking up."

"Really? So does that mean that you broke up because of me?"

"Partly," she explained. "We broke up because when we tried to get back to daily living, reality crept in. I eventually realized that the reasons I didn't marry Christopher when I was 16 still applied. It wasn't right. I had had this fantasy of life with my daughter's father for so long, but it was nothing like that."

"You figured that out in just three months?" He didn't understand. That kind of insight took time. Even he knew that. It could take years for someone to realize that they were in a loveless marriage.

"It's easy to see when you have the problems we had."

"What problems?"

"Well, that's where you come in," she explained. "He wanted to move. I didn't. He wanted to have a baby. I didn't. Of course, I just said, 'What's the rush?', but I really just didn't want it."

"Wait... you told me that you did want kids. Do you not want to have kids now? I mean, it's fine if you don't, but we should really talk about it so that, you know, we can both be-like yesterday…" He wouldn't have been so careless if he had known that she didn't want to have any more kids.

"Oh, Luke, no." She took his hand and pulled it to her chest. "I did want a baby. I do." She took a breath. "I just didn't want one with him. And not just because it felt like the knife of losing you being twisted. It also reminded me that Chris wasn't there for Rory."

"So he was upset because you didn't want to have more kids?" he asked. "Didn't you talk about it before you got married?"

"Nope. And it was more than that. I think that he wanted a kid because he felt me slipping away almost since the moment we got home. I resisted all of the changes he wanted to make. He wanted to redo Rory's room for GG, I resisted. He wanted to buy a bigger, newer house, I resisted."

"You love your house."

"My house is in Stars Hollow," she reminded him. "I think he understood that he was an outsider. He didn't fit into my life in Stars Hollow, so he tried to take me out of it. And having a baby was a way to keep me invested in the marriage. Of course he didn't need that because I was invested in the marriage just because it was a marriage. I may have made a mistake, but you don't just give up on a marriage. Once I was in it, I was in it."

"Yeah, I get that." He remembered how long he stayed in his bad marriage with Nicole.

"I wasn't going to just give up. But I resisted. I did try to make him fit in there. I tried to get people in Stars Hollow to give him a chance. They probably felt like they'd be cheating on you. But I think it probably would have been difficult anyway. He just didn't fit. Then my mother wanted us to have another wedding. We had agreed to a party, but she tried to throw in vows, too, and I didn't want to do it, but Chris did. I think that was a breaking point."

"Is that why he wasn't at the hospital when your father had the heart attack?"

"Um, no. He found a copy of the character reference that I wrote for you."

"Oh." He understood the impact that would have. He must have read it 100 times, had it memorized. It had to have hurt Christopher to know that Lorelai saw Luke as a father to his daughter. The implication that Luke was there for Rory more than Christopher was not only easy to read between the lines, but it was a close match to reality. "That letter probably saved my relationship with April. I'm sorry that it ruined your marriage."

"I'm not." Lorelai was getting used to this new approach of bare, blunt honesty. "The marriage was doomed. The letter helped move it along. And I would have been more heartbroken if you'd lost April, especially since…"

"Since I sacrificed us to have a relationship with her?"

"Yeah," she replied. "But you do know that I don't blame her, right? I mean, she's a great kid and it's not her fault. And we should have been able to work it out so that all of us were happy."

"Yes, we should have," he admitted. He took a deep breath and prompted her to continue.

"So he didn't show up to the hospital because he was angry and had turned his phone off."

"For a day and a half?" Luke imagined Lorelai, Emily, and Rory sitting in the waiting room of the hospital for hours on end with only Logan for support and it angered him. He pictured Lorelai making phone call after phone call, trying to get a hold of Christopher.

"Yeah. But the worst part was that once he got there, he only stayed an hour and then left again."

"Because I was there?"

"Yep. He threw a tantrum," Lorelai recalled. "And that was when I realized it was the same old Christopher. The same fair weather friend. After he found the letter he accused me of still being in love with you, that I didn't want to move or have another wedding or a baby because of you."

"And?"

"Well, he was right of course, but I told him he wasn't. I told him that I wasn't in love with you. I told him that I loved him. I really did want to work on the marriage. I didn't want to quit, and it didn't matter how I felt about you because that was over. I even considered totally cutting you out of my life for good... But then he didn't show up at the hospital, and I realized that he has almost never been there for me. Or Rory even, not when it really mattered. You did, though. You were always there. For both of us." She scooted over next to him. He put his arms around her and let her snuggle into his neck. "And I realized that I wasn't willing to cut you out of my life for him. It didn't matter that I couldn't be with you the way that I wanted, you were still family to me. I couldn't cut you out. I wouldn't. He wanted something that I wasn't willing to give him. And I would never be able to rely on him. So it was over. Three months and it was over. The day it was over was the first day I started to feel… like myself again. Of course, feeling like myself meant that I was a loser who was destined to be alone, but I preferred that to what I had been doing."

At this natural lull in the conversation, they sat quietly, studying each other's faces. There was hope in both. Not just hope, certainty. They were going to be okay. More than okay.

When they finally looked somewhere other than at each other, Luke noticed that it was well into the afternoon. And when she realized that they had skipped lunch, Lorelai was starving. Exhausted and not in the mood to cook anyway, Luke remembered that they hadn't taken the time to pick up groceries before they left Boston the day before. So they both changed, then he disengaged them from the mooring and they headed to a wharf in Marblehead for dinner.

~ooooo~

As they walked from the dock to the restaurant, Luke put an arm around Lorelai's shoulders and asked, "How are you feeling?"

"In general, or about… everything we've been talking about?"

"Both, I guess."

"Um… I feel… good," she said, nodding. "Yeah, I feel really good." She smiled at him. "How about you?"

He nodded. "I feel good, too. Better than good."

"Better than good? What do you feel, great?" she teased.

"Great. Fantastic, even…" He gave her sideways smile. "What can we do to get you to 'fantastic'?"

"A steak would be a good start. Maybe some french fries. Cheesecake."

~ooooo~

"So, Luke? Did you date anyone while we were apart?" she asked as they were waiting for their entrees.

He laughed and took a long drink of his beer before matching her gaze. "Um, yeah. Once."

Lorelai wasn't surprised by the pang of jealousy she felt, but she knew that she had no right to be upset and she wasn't. Part of her didn't want to know, but her curiosity got the better of her, so she just listened.

"It's kind of a funny story, actually. Kirk was yammering on about how he was going to break up with Lulu to be more like me."

"Well, Kirk has always looked up to you," Lorelai offered.

"Yeah, well, he thought it was cool that nobody cared if I came home at three in the morning or if I walked around the house in my underwear."

"Of course people care. They'd pay to see you walk around in your underwear. I'm quite sure I could make a killing."

Luke ignored her. "I set him straight. Told him if he hurt Lulu I'd hurt him. The I went upstairs and called Coach Bennett for a date."

"Judging from the look on your face I'd say it didn't go well."

"Vegan."

"Oh, ugh," Lorelai understood. Luke liked to eat healthy, but he didn't go overboard and he liked cheese, eggs, and meat. He just didn't eat much red meat or fried foods. He ate a lot of vegetables and went a lot easier on sweets than Lorelai, something not hard to do.

"She was also just a little bit… nuts." He laughed, remembering. "She made me sit on the same side of the table."

"Ugh."

"And she talked about ex-boyfriends."

"Ugh."

"Yeah, apparently she made a habit of dating swim dads," he said. "Of course, the first date was the last."

"Did you go out with anyone else?"

"Um, no. That was enough for me," he said. "I remembered that I hate dating. And I knew that I would compare anyone I dated to you and they would always lose. I didn't shut the door on it, but I pretty much decided that night that I would probably never date again. It wasn't worth it. I had April and that would have to be enough."

"Hmmm… I'm glad you don't have to be a hermit."

"Yeah? Me, too." Luke paused while their food arrived. Then he asked her something that weighed heavily on his mind. "Do you still see him?"

"Who, Christopher?"

"Yeah. Do you still, you know, hang out with him?"

"No, Luke," she said. "And I don't think I will. I mean, I saw him at Rory's graduation. Maybe I'll see him at her wedding, if she has one, but I don't know if I'll see him even then."

"Are you okay with that?" he asked. "You were pretty close."

"Yes, I'm okay with that. Our relationship was never, ever healthy. And I've never been really attached to him. The idea of him, maybe, but not to him. He was never around long enough. But I do have some good memories. Like-Oh! I never told you!-My mother got arrested!" She drew out 'arrested' like she was savoring the moment.

"No!"

"Yes! For drunk driving! She called me to pick her up at the police station while I was on a date with Christopher. Oh! I have pictures!" She brought the pictures up on her phone and handed them over to Luke.

"Oh, wow. This is…" he said as he looked through the mug shots and the faces of the arresting cops. "I don't even know what to say about this."

"Yeah, my parents had quite the year. Dad's heart attack, Mom's arrest. She had cataract surgery and the guy botched it. That's where I was one of the days you couldn't find me, by the way. I had to drive her all over the place. Well, they sued the doctor and they added the settlement to the money they had allocated for Rory's tuition that Christopher was paying for and guess what they did with it!"

"What?"

"Guess!"

"Um, they hired Tony Bennett to sing at a dinner party."

"Guess again!"

"They bought a giant gilded cage?"

"That's not a real guess!"

"Okay, they, uh, they bought Rory another one of those expensive bags."

"A Birkin bag? Why would anyone need two Birkin bags?"

"I don't know why anyone would need one Birkin bag, but you're making me guess and I couldn't think of anything else."

"Okay," she finally relented, "I'll tell you. They donated it to Yale for the Rory. Gilmore. Astronomy. Building!" She lifted her palms to the side as if to say 'Tah Dah!'

"You're kidding." He couldn't quite get his jaw to close.

"I am not kidding. And she just sat there and let them do it. She hardly even objected. It's not even Rory, you know. It's a science building. Rory has never been into science. She was an English major."

"So there's a building at Yale with Rory's name on it?" He couldn't believe what he was hearing.

"Well no," she explained. "It was supposed to open last winter, while she was still going there, but the groundbreaking got delayed for a year because of some permit problem and now it's going to cost twice as much and it won't open until next January at the earliest. Can you believe it?"

"I guess I shouldn't be surprised," he said. Then he sighed and groaned, "I love you, Lorelai, but I have to be honest. I am not looking forward to spending time with your parents again."

"Aww, honey," she replied, "I know it's hard to believe, but they really have changed. I can't promise they'll welcome you with open arms or even that they'll be 100% civil to you, but I think they are happy that we're back together."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I mean Mom saw what I went through with Christopher. She was there when he didn't show up at the hospital after Dad's heart attack. You know, she probably remembered that it was you who was there for me when he was in the hospital six years earlier. And she saw that you brought food. And she saw the way Chris and you both acted when he did show up. Trust me, Emily knows now, finally, that Christopher isn't right for me, that if I had married him at 16, I would have been miserable. She finally sees who he really is. And I think… at least I hope, that she sees who you really are, too. Because you're amazing."

A/N: Next Up, "Full Steam Ahead"