A/N: Chapter number 25, whoop-de-doo! Thank you readers for hanging on to this story for this long, and I hope you keep reading it until the very end, which shouldn't be too far away. I've said it before and I'll say it again: These two lovebirds need to get hitched eventually. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: I, the author of this story, do not own any of the characters from Gilmore Girls. That honor belongs to the wonderful Amy Sherman-Palladino. I am not making any money on this (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I'm losing money over it…).
25. You Know You Love Me
It was eight o'clock sharp, and Jess had been waiting under the tree by the pond where he'd proposed for a good fifteen minutes. There was no sign of Rory, the area was dark and quiet, and he was starting to get cold. Despite the chilly weather, he couldn't leave. Rory was his everything, and Jess had to admit that her cryptic message from earlier today fascinated him. He couldn't help but wonder what she was up to. "Probably something only a Gilmore girl could come up with…" he mused silently. Just then, soft steps behind him alerted him to the presence of someone else, and he stiffened.
"Hey, you."
Jess sighed and relaxed, it was Rory. He made a move to turn around.
"No!" Rory hastily exclaimed, and he froze. "Don't turn around. You'll spoil the surprise."
"So getting summoned to this place isn't surprising enough?" Jess quipped with a smirk.
Rory didn't answer, but Jess soon felt a piece of soft cloth fall over his eyes.
"A blind fold?" he asked dubiously. "Really?"
"It's more fun this way, I promise," Rory told him reassuringly, and took his hand.
They began walking, and it didn't take long for Jess to completely lose track of where they were. The old Independence inn grounds weren't his turf, so for all he knew, Rory could be leading him anywhere and everywhere.
"So… Cammie found you?" he inquired as they were walking.
"Yeah," Rory replied, and Jess thought he could discern shame in her voice. "Sorry I bailed on you like that."
"I know why you did it." He squeezed her hand gently as a means to reassure her that they were okay. "I'm glad Cammie was there, you know, who knows what could've happened without her."
"The Stars Hollow massacre, an entire town wiped out in hours," Rory joked in a mock-serious tone. "Mind the uneven ground, by the way."
"A blood bath," Jess concurred, as he tried his best not to stumble and fall on the rugged ground.
"They say one of the girls got away, and she's haunting the place," Rory continued in the same voice. Jess decided to play along.
"You don't say? So, what, are we going all Ghostbusters tonight? I bet Dr. Venkman and Dr. Stantz are willing to come out of retirement."
"And risk getting owned by the Winchesters? Haven't you heard what they say?"
"Do I even wanna know?"
Jess sighed heavily. It had been a slight mistake to let Rory (and by default Lorelai) introduce him to Supernatural, and he suffered the consequences every Thursday.
"'Outer space exists because it's afraid to be on the same planet with the Winchesters'," Rory recited, and Jess had to start coughing loudly to hide his laughter.
"Seriously, Rory. You may have gotten me to maybe agree that Sam and Dean Winchester are way more hardcore than the Ghostbusters-dudes, but that nugget did not boost their street cred. And by the way, are we there yet? Wherever 'there' is? We've been walking for hours!"
"Ten minutes, tops," Rory corrected him amusedly. "And we're pretty much there. Can you stand still here without running off or peeking?"
Jess stopped, standing obediently still. He felt Rory let go of his hand, and moments later he heard the unmistakeable sound of a door opening. So, they were going to a house, or an apartment, something that at least had a door, but the location was a mystery. Rory again took hold of his hand, and pulled gently. Jess took a step forward, banging his foot against the doorstep.
"Mind…" Rory began, just as Jess began cursing under his breath. "…your step. Sorry," she apologized sheepishly.
"This better be worth it…" he grunted, trying to ignore the pulsating ache emanating from his foot.
Compared to outside, it was warm in here, which could only lead him to believe that this 'somewhere' had walls and a roof to go along with the door. Through his blind fold he could perceive a soft light.
"Are you ready?" his fiancée asked him, sounding all eager and sprightly.
He grunted in acknowledgement, and Rory pulled the blindfold off of him. He blinked a couple of times before the surroundings became clear. He stood in a little… room. It wasn't a house, certainly not an apartment, but more like one large, multi-purpose room, lit by a small ceiling lamp and a larger lamp in one of the corners. There was a large bed in another corner, a bathtub covered by a flowery shower curtain next to it. Around the room, miscellanious tools and pieces of furniture were littered; two armchairs, a small coffee table, rakes, a garden hose, a digging fork, a ratty old couch and a larger table.
"What is this place?" Jess asked and turned to Rory.
"It's my first home. Mom and I lived here during my first years, it used to be a tool shed, but mom decorated it as best she could. The old handyman, Jackson's cousin Rune, who thought mom looked like a circus freak, used to live here, so I spent the day trying to clean up after him and rearrange the furniture," Rory explained, looking around the little shed.
"You used to live here?"
He ignored the fact that Jackson's strange cousin had lived here, but the fact that Rory, his Rory, had once lived here would be impossible to deny. He had the urge to feel bad for Rory, but when he again looked around the room, imagining Rory and Lorelai here, it was impossible to get anything else but a happy picture in his head. This was not bad, not compared to the saggy mattress and the phony people he'd been crashing with in New York when Luke had burst in and hauled his ass back to Stars Hollow when Liz got married.
"It's nice," he said appreciatively, and Rory lit up with the widest, goofiest smile.
"It means a lot to me, it's part of my life, you know. I thought it would be appropriate…" She trailed off, her gaze falling to the ground.
"Appropriate for what?" Jess asked suspiciously.
Rory didn't say anything, but began unbuttoning her coat slowly, fiddling with the buttons before she slid it off.
She was wearing pajamas, though it was nothing like the cotton pajama bottoms and worn Yale t-shirt she used to wear to bed in Philly. This was a glorified cream-colored minidress, with lace details which made her skin glow in the ambient light. Jess felt like he should look away.
"You look… different," he finally managed to choke out.
"It's an old Christmas present, it's been in my drawer at home forever." She blushed and crossed her arms self-consciously, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
"Not that I don't mind the…" He nodded to the pajama-dress, unable to rememeber the correct word for it. "You know… But why are we here?"
She positively attacked him, springing at him like a gazelle. Their lips met, and she kissed him hungrily. Jess responded, almost automatically, his lips eagerly finding Rory's. He wondered how he ever could've kissed trampy Shane just to piss Rory off. This was…
And he found himself comparing kissing scantily clad Rory with kissing skanky Shane, and he couldn't find the difference. There was that same urgency in both kisses, a sort of knowledge that this was not for real. He broke off the kiss, pulling away.
"What?" Rory asked, her face flushing red. "What's wrong?"
"Are you trying to have sex with me?" Jess questioned frankly, eyeing Rory for her response. It always told him the truth, even when she tried not to.
His suspicions were confirmed. She got that expression on her face that she got everytime he called one of her attempts to smooth over rough edges or deny something.
"Yes…" she admitted reluctantly, crossing her arms again and stepping back.
"Why?"
"Why? Why? Maybe because I want to."
"Here?"
"I thought you liked this place!"
"It's great for showing me where you lived, but for sex?" He shook his head. "Are you trying to fix something?"
"What are you talking about?" Rory rebutted defensively. "I thought we were good for once. Is something bad?"
"We need to get married," Jess stated wearily.
As soon as the words left his mouth, he understood he had said something wrong.
"No!" she yelled at him, desperation seeping from her voice. "No! You promised you would wait as long as it took, until the time is right."
"It is right, don't you see?" he pleaded with her, and took hold of her arms.
"It's not!"
"Why?"
"Because…" She struggled to find the words, but just like earlier when she had tried to tell Cammie that she was wrong about thinking that fitting into Stars Hollow would be a cakewalk, she couldn't.
"Every problem would go away, can't you see that?" Jess told her, pushing a stray tress of hair behind her ear. "Your grandma would stop bugging you…"
"Not likely…" Rory snorted under her breath.
"The town would get off our backs, your mom wouldn't have to worry about her brain filter shutting down…" Jess continued, ignoring Rory's remark.
"It's not that easy," she pouted, shaking her head.
"And you thought having sex would make it easier?"
"I wanted… to get close, to make up for bolting out like the black death was coming through the dining room doors."
"Again, I don't have anything against this place, but why here?" Jess asked her, leading her to the bed where they sat down.
Rory hesitated for a second. She had picked this place for a couple of reasons. One, her mom wasn't going to storm in right in the middle of things. Two, Cammie was not likely to bolt in right in the middle of things. Three… She just couldn't have sex with Jess in the same bed where she had been "the other woman" with Dean. And she was not going to tell Jess that.
"I told Cammie she could sleep in my room tonight," she said instead. It wasn't completely bogus. Cammie would probably end up sleeping in her bed anyway.
Jess nodded, and Rory suspected he might have come to the same conclusions as she had about not having sex in her old room. Minus the Dean-factor, which hopefully would remain a secret until she died, and then for some time after that.
"We still need to get married," Jess told her in a hushed tone, hoping she wouldn't get all worked up again.
"When?" she asked, defeatedly.
"I think we should try to set a date. The whole 'leaving it to whenever' was a nice idea in theory, but not so great in practice."
"It would have come to that eventually, I guess."
"Do you have a place in mind?"
"All the good ones are taken."
"The inn?" Jess suggested, happy to see Rory was jumping on the getting married-bandwagon.
"Too much like Sookie's wedding."
"The town?"
"Too much like Dean's wedding," Rory said, and they both cringed.
"The gas pumps at Gypsy's?"
She laughed, and punched him lightly.
"That would be a sight. We'd both end up stinking of gas."
"I like gas! It makes my car run," Jess defended, pulling Rory into a hug. "Tell you what, we close the deal with the bookshop-shindig, and then we set a date. Once we've got a date we'll go for a place. I'm not picky."
"As much as I would love to get married on the bridge, I'm having a hard time seeing how to work out the logistics. Plus, I'd have to worry about people getting pushed in the water," Rory smiled, remembering their Bid-on-the-Basket meal, where he'd told her how Luke had pushed him in.
"You have absolutely no faith in me at all, right?"
"I know that if you would be given a chance to push Taylor into the water, you'd take it," she pointed out.
"Come on, like you wouldn't!"
"Oh, I would, but I would be wearing a ridiculously expensive wedding dress, because that's what I'm seeing grandma insist on, and though you may convince me that pushing someone into water during the wedding is considered a good omen in some parts of the world, I think you'll have a hard time convincing everyone else of that fact."
Jess snickered. Pushing Taylor into a lake… That would be something.
"Fine. Nothing near water, then, if it will make you happy," he relented.
His heart warmed when he saw her smile one of those genuine Rory Gilmore-smiles, and he knew the immediate threath of a full-on shouting fest had been evaded.
"So… Your mom and Luke are where?" he asked after a while.
"At home, I think. Mom's got him watching Casablanca again," Rory replied, fingering with the lace on her nightgown.
"And Cammie is at home too?"
"I can see where this is going, Jess. The apartment above the diner. Mom tried that one. Major awkward-moment when she went down the next morning for a cup of coffee in pretty much nothing else but a flannel shirt and the entire town was there. You said you liked this place."
"I said it was nice," Jess corrected her, and before he could blink, Rory had pushed him down on the bed, straddling him with a mischievous grin.
"Your mouth said 'it's nice' but the rest of you said 'I like it'," she teased him.
"Is there a lock on the door?"
"Who else would come up with the idea of crashing in a tool shed?"
"I don't know… You? The handy man who thought your mom was a circus freak? Did he know how right he was about that, by the way?" Jess retorted jokingly, earning him a slap on the shoulder. "Hey, you both drink copious amounts of coffee, it's not healthy or even normal!"
"Lay off with the coffee-remarks, I don't know how it works, but it does. Why did you ask about the lock on the door?"
"Since your house and Luke's apartment is out of the question… Who am I to say no to a perfectly good and moderatly furbished tool shed?"
Rory pumped her fists in the air, clearly seeing this as some sort of personal victory. Jess just loved how incredibly silly and cute she looked while doing it, and smirked.
"I love you, you know that?" she told him and bent down to kiss him after having finished her little victory dance.
"I'm beginning to get that impression," he replied, kissing her in kind.
Not really. He had gotten that impression a long time ago, and he never wanted it to end.
A/N: It's getting close to the end. I'll have to see just how I play this out, but I'm seeing two, three chapters tops before this story is officially complete. Stay tuned and drop some lovely reviews!