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

Chapter 14: Passing Notes

Rory held the box in her hands. The pit of her stomach clenched. What in the world could he possibly want her to see in this box? She delayed opening it for a moment, running her fingers over the dusty lid.

She looked over at him next to her. He was waiting for her. His eyes flickered briefly and she realized that he was nervous, too.

"This isn't, like, your pet hamster that died when you were six, is it?" she teased.

"No, no. Scruffy is in the shoebox under my bed."

He cracked a smirk and she smiled too. She opened the lid of the box and put it down gently on the other side of the bed.

She didn't know exactly what she had been expecting, but it certainly hadn't been this. The box was full of badges, photographs, and handwritten notes.

"Are these from military school?" she asked, holding a handful of silver pins in her hand.

"Yeah," he said simply. Then, "It's everything I have left. I don't...Rory…"

"What?" she asked softly.

He sighed and looked away, across the other side of the room. When he turned back to her he said, "I have never showed these things with anyone before. Not even the honors in there. But you knew me before. And...I guess I just need you to understand."

He looked so vulnerable, so genuinely earnest. In that moment she wanted to ease his mind, bring back the laughing, passionate boy that she had been falling for all of these weeks. She scooted closer to him and focused her attention back on the box. She felt his left arm wrap around her waist and she shrank into his embrace.

She flipped through the pictures first. They were mostly formal portraits or pictures of JROTC events and drills that other people had taken. There were a few clippings from what looked to be a school newspaper. Tristan briefly explained each object that she pulled from the box.

"You don't sound like you were unhappy there," Rory said at last, putting down an honor roll pin that she had been examining closely.

"At first I was miserable. The first few weeks I was just a little bitch. Yelling at the officers and accusing them of being jealous of the lifestyle that had gotten me to that place. I thought that all the girls I had hooked up with and all of the drugs I had tried at parties...all of the nights speeding around in my car half bombed...all of the money...I thought that was something that made me more of a man than them.

"Then the third week I began to realize that my father hadn't sent me there as a little joke to scare me. I was locked up there, and he wasn't letting me out. Everything was cold and dark there. We had 4 am physicals where we would just run in the dark in the frozen yard. The classes were dry, so much worse than any lecture that Chilton threw at us. We had daily bunk checks, and shoe shine checks, and mess hall checks. It was order. Nothing more nothing less."

"You made friends, though," she said, thinking about the faces she had just seen in the photographs.

Tristan shrugged. "Of course. It was a pretty revolving door, though. Most parents don't have the heart to keep their kids in there long."

"But yours did," she said.

"Yeah. At the time I thought they didn't want me to come home that year because they didn't know how to tell their friends where I had been. I was angry, and it followed me everywhere like a storm cloud. It was pretty fucking clear I hadn't been in Switzerland at boarding school."

"Typical," Rory said.

"I know now that they thought that if they let me out I would have ended up a statistic."

His voice was dark, and Rory suspected that he was thinking about what rabbit hole he could have gone down if he hadn't made the changes in his lifestyle that he had committed to.

"So they kept you there?"

"Through junior year. I kept myself there for senior year."

"Why?"

"I couldn't go back to those people. To Chilton. I know you get that."

"We all missed you," she said honestly. At the time, she wouldn't have been able to acknowledge that emotion. But she knew that he had flickered through her mind as she walked the halls of Chilton. And she knew that she would have been happy to see him again. Just as she was when he walked into the bar several months ago.

Tristan reached into the box for the first time. He rifled through the momentos until he pulled out a long envelope. He handed it to Rory.

She opened it gingerly. Inside were many sheets of paper. She unfolded them and her breath caught in her throat when she saw her own name on the first line.

She blinked up at him in surprise.

"They're not love letters or anything," he said quickly. "It's not like I wrote you all these letters I couldn't mail."

"So what are these, then?" she asked, thumbing through the pages.

"I kept some of the notes we passed in class. They must have fallen into my bag when I was cleaning out my locker. I didn't notice them in there until I was already in North Carolina."

"We never passed notes," she said, disbelievingly.

"See for yourself…"

Rory picked up the first note.

Rory-I need the notes from Friday, I was out.

Not my fault you ditched school.

"Riveting stuff," Rory said dryly.

He laughed. "Keep reading."

Rory flipped to the next page. It was a page from her notebook. Presumably from their Shakespeare class. Certain lines were highlighted in blue, not her own handiwork. She never used blue highlighters. She must have caved and given him the notes.

The third page was an oldschool "Will you go out with me, check yes or no." It was dated April 1st, 2002. "Aren't you clever," she said. "Asking me out as an April Fool's joke."

"You checked no and tossed it back to me quickly enough," he said.

"And if I had checked yes?" she asked.

He swallowed. "Then I don't think it would have been an April Fool's joke anymore."

She flipped to the next page. It was the first of a packet of stapled papers. She examined it closely. It was an essay she had written.

"Where did you get this?"

"I probably swiped it from your bag when you weren't looking," he said.

"Why?"

"I was interested in your subject matter."

"And it was?"

"The assignment was to pick a Shakespearean sonnet to which our angsty teenage hearts could relate."

"Hey! I remember that paper. That was a rather personal one to steal." She flipped to the introduction. "God, I'm almost afraid of what I wrote."

Shakespeare is renowned for his ability to articulate the subtleties of love. He not only captured a universal emotion eloquently, but managed to do so in iambic pentameter. While we as high school juniors are only beginning to experience love and loss, Shakespeare's timeless words can still guide us through the journey. Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 resonates with me. He writes: "love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds/ Or bends with the remover to remove:/ O no; it is an ever-fixed mark," (Shakespeare, Sonnet 116). I find his words speak universally of the challenges that all couples face in relationships. These words remind couples that even in the twenty-first century, true love can endure through the challenges of growing up such as moving away, exploring independent career paths, and altering our ever changing perspectives of the world.

She looked up from the paper. "I sound so young in this," she said. She was blushing softly.

He took the paper away from her. "This essay gave me more hope than anything you had ever said to me."

"What do you mean?" she asked, reaching to take it back, as if she would find the answer in a different paragraph.

"You picked such a cliche sonnet."

"What? This has an A on it. It couldn't have been that trite."

Tristan shook his head. "You wrote everything our teacher wanted to hear," he explained. "And I think you meant every word of it at the time. You were with Dean then. Did you believe in those words?"

She thought about it for a moment. "At the time, yes."

"Your sonnet choice lacked any kind of passion. And I liked that. I had seen the way you guys acted together. I knew that you guys lacked that spark. And I wanted to show you what that felt like."

She broke eye contact with him, turning her head to the paper in her lap. Looking back on Dean, she knew that they lacked fire. She hadn't known that at the time, of course. That realization would come later, when she had Logan and desired him and his attention so desperately. Had Tristan really seen that all those years ago?

"And which sonnet did you choose," she challenged, not acknowledging his words. "Or did you even turn it in?"

"Sonnet 130," he answered, not even having to think about it. "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun/ Coral is far more red than her lips' red/...And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/ As any she belied with false compare."

"Tell me this is about Summer, or one of those girls," she said.

"Why would you want to hear that?"

"I don't know, Tristan. Maybe because you tried very hard to make my life miserable in high school. It's kind of hard for me to sit here listening to you quote sonnets at me about how I was blind to the beauty of our love."

He hadn't anticipated her reacting this way. "How did I make you miserable? Did I sabotage your grades? Ruin your friendships? Bully you in the cafeteria?"

"Well, no...not exactly. But you always manipulated situations just to get a rise out of me."

"Because you loved the banter. And you still do. You're picking a fight right now. It's the only way you have ever allowed yourself to connect to me."

She didn't respond to him. She looked like there were a thousand thoughts racing through her mind, so many that she couldn't pick which one to spit out at him.

"Read the last page," he said pointing at the stack of papers. She flipped to the back.

"It's just a page from the script we used for Romeo and Juliet," she said.

"Turn it over."

She began reading the handwritten words on the back. "It's a note to me," she said. "I don't remember this."

"It's because I never gave it to you."

"Why?"

"I chickened out when I came to you to say goodbye."

He watched as some of the angry tension left her body. She started to read the note but then handed it to him.

"Read it to me."

"I don't think I can," he said honestly.

"I need to hear it from you," she demanded.

He studied her for a moment, realized she wasn't backing down. And somehow his need for her to finally read the letter outweighed his own embarrassment of the contents. He cleared his throat and began to read.

"Rory,

"Just know this: I'm sorry I'm disappointing you. The play was far from my mind when I broke into that safe. And if I am being truthful in this note then I guess I should confess that you weren't. I hate your boyfriend. I hate that you are so wrapped up in him that you don't even see that I want you too. He got to me the other night. And now I feel like I'm going insane thinking that I fucked it up. I'm sorry I fucked this up.

The note ended as abruptly as it began.

"Why are you sharing this with me?" she asked softly.

"I needed you to understand."

"What?"

"You keep trying to compare me to other boys you have dated. Stop. I'm not them. I'm not Dean or Logan or anyone else. I get that the timing here with Carly isn't ideal. And I get me leaving her for you scares you. But don't you get it yet? When I was getting kicked out of school, you were the only thing that I could think about. I know that I loved you then with the most that I was capable of. And I knew then it wasn't enough for you. That's why I didn't give you the letter. I have changed so much in these ten years. And through it all I have wondered if I would ever get a second chance with you. Now here we are. And I just want you to let me try to love you."

He was breathing heavily, waiting for her to say something. She took a long time, trying to find the courage to match his honesty. "I haven't been with anyone since Logan," she said, forcing herself to look him in the eye as she confessed something she kept deeply guarded in her heart. "You...all of this...it scares me."

A smile tugged at his lips. "Ohhhhh Mary," he said lightly. He brushed a strand of her hair behind her ear. "You have no idea what you do to me."

She kissed him deeply then, letting the doubt go. In just a second's time he had slipped an arm around her and pulled her back onto the bed so that she was stretched out on it, him hovering just over her body.

He trailed kisses across her jaw, down to that spot on her neck he had discovered last night. Chills ran up and down Rory's spine. She dug her nails into his back, twisting at the fabric of his shirt. He returned his kiss to her lips and she moved to unbutton his shirt.

She worked at the bottom button as Tristan nibbled her lip softly. She was pulled slightly back to reality as she realized she couldn't get the damn thing to open.

"What kind of shirt is this?" she complained, tugging at the buttons. One in the middle popped off at the assault.

Tristan just laughed. "An overpriced one, apparently." He deftly unbuttoned it and discarded it by the side of the bed. Rory slid her hands under his undershirt, running her fingers along his abdomen and chest as she slowly pulled it off of him. She took a moment to appreciate his strong chest. But she quickly pulled his lips back to hers.

He groaned slightly. "My turn," he said, pulling away from her. He began to unbutton her prim sweater. Her stomach clenched with nerves. She took a shallow breath to steady herself. Through the nerves, she didn't doubt that she wanted this.

Tristan pulled her sweater off and discarded it in the growing pile of clothes beside the bed. He ran his fingers over her body, then her lips. Rory laid back as he planted kisses on her collarbone, then her breasts. She sat up and reached around to unclasp her bra. Tristan kissed her firmly as he slipped it off her shoulders. Rory wiggled out of her skirt. She rolled over so that she was straddling him.

"God Rory," he whispered. He ran his fingers along her smooth skin, cupping her curves with his strong hands. She started unbuckling his belt. She was ready for him to bare himself just as she had.

Her phone started vibrating in her purse where she had dropped it by the door. "Ignore it," she begged. Tristan willingly complied. He pulled her in for a deep kiss. She rocked her hips against his as she unbuttoned his pants. He groaned in appreciation.

But the phone didn't stop ringing. The third time it went off Tristan grumbled: "I think someone is looking for you."

Rory sighed and slipped out of bed. She crossed the room, suddenly much more aware of her nakedness. She answered the phone just as the fourth phone call began to sound.

"Where have you been?" Luke yelled

"Sorry, I wasn't near my phone. Is everything okay? Is Mom okay?"

"She's in labor. She's about to start pushing. We sent you about a thousand texts. Where are you?"

Rory pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at it in horror. Luke was right. The messages had been coming in for hours now. "Oh God Luke, I'm so sorry. I haven't been looking at my phone. I'll be right there, okay?"

"Fine. Hurry up. She's in hysterics that you're not here."

'"Tell her I'll be there in ten minutes."

She hung up and turned back to Tristan, crossing her arms to cover her nakedness. "My mom's in labor, I've missed about a million texts. Can you drop me at my car so I can get to the hospital?"

Tristan was already off the bed and putting on his shirt. He pulled her to him and kissed her deeply. "I'll drive you there myself."

Distracted as she was, she couldn't help but appreciate the feeling of his strong hands on her bare back. She kissed him again. "I'm so sorry," she said.

He took a step back, looked her up and down, and smirked. "What for?" he asked. "I think this was a pretty damn good evening myself."

She smacked his arm playfully as she grabbed for her clothes.