A/N: You guys are cool with copious amounts of romance, fluff, and cuteness, yes? 'Cause that's what you're getting here ;)

(For disclaimer, etc. - see prologue)

Chapter 25 - Two by Two

"So you guys really hit it off?" said Rory, the phone held under her chin as she held one outfit in front of herself and then another.

"Dave Rygalski is amazing!" Lane enthused in her ear. "I mean, I loved him from afar all this time, but you always wonder if the reality is going to live up to the daydream, you know? Dave does. He so does. We just started talking about music and he loves everything I love and other bands that I never even heard of, but I want to love just because he does. I mean, if they suck I won't like them just on his say so, but I want to love them, I really do."

Rory giggled at her best friend's manic rambling. Lane had been saying she was in love with Dave since before she knew his name, on and off for weeks now. It was cool to know that now they had actually met and talked she still thought he was just as cool, maybe even cooler in fact!

"So, tonight is your first official date with Jess, huh?"

"It is," Rory agreed with a sigh, abandoning both outfits from her hands onto the bed and sitting down beside them with a thud.

"You don't sound thrilled?" noted Lane with surprise.

"I am thrilled, well, mostly anyway," her best friend squirmed some, even though she couldn't be seen. "You know me and Jess, we've always been so comfortable around each other, and even now we're dating, I've adjusted. It's nice being closer, it's good... really good," she blushed even alone in her own room. "But this is a date, a real one, and not just my first with Jess but kind of my first at all. Me and Dean hung out some, but the only real date we had planned was to the dance that I ended up going to with Jess."

"Well," Lane considered. "I guess the dance was kind of a date, and this doesn't have to be so different, does it? I mean, from what you said, you're just hanging out at Babette's place. No pressure, right?"

"No, no pressure," she agreed, recalling that Jess had said exactly that on their walk home from school.

Suddenly, Lane was apologising and hanging up in an instant thanks to Mama Kim coming up the stairs. Rory threw the phone down next to a pile of ten outfits. This was ridiculous. Hanging out with Jess was an activity she had enjoyed these past five years and more. Kissing with Jess was a new concept but Rory was certain on the fact she liked that a lot. There had been a niggling worry about how far he expected her to go and how quickly, but that had been dealt with earlier. That left precisely nothing to worry about, and yet Rory had butterflies in her stomach and a complete inability to pick out an outfit. There was only one thing for it.

"Mom!"

Jess would like to justify to himself why he was feeling weirdly nervous about his first official date with Rory Gilmore. The two of them had been the best of friends since age eleven. Of the two of them, he was the one usually willing to take even more risks than she would. The trouble he had got himself into over the years attested to that. There was absolutely nothing scary about Rory and yet he felt he was shaking all over as he walked up to Babette and Maury's front door. Maybe it was the warning Luke had given him as he left the truck, about treating Rory right and not doing anything he knew he shouldn't. Maybe it was just that he felt a real idiot going to another person's house to see his girlfriend, with a gift in his pocket and his hair fixed just so. Maybe it was just because this was Rory and having a real first date with her made their whole relationship entirely different and whole lot more serious. Honestly, Jess had been pretty serious about Rory since he was eleven, so maybe it wasn't the big deal he thought it was, but somehow it still felt like it. Taking a deep breath, he stepped up into the porch and knocked on the door before he became any more of a girl over this whole evening.

Rory answered pretty quickly, dressed in fitted jeans and one of her prettier tops. She smelled of fruity shampoo, well-loved books, and something that was just distinctly her. Without a thought in his head, Jess smiled and leaned in to kiss her lips.

"Hi," she greeted him right after, feeling a blush rise in her cheeks.

"Hi," he replied in kind, and then let her usher him inside.

Jess got a real surprise when he saw the table all laid out nicely, just for two. Rory had gone so far as to light candles and pour soda into fancy glasses. The meal was a take out, he knew, since Rory never had and probably never would cook. The fact that she got Thai food meant more than anything else.

"Huh," said Jess, the way he so often did.

Rory smiled widely and came to stand beside him.

"You like?" she checked.

"I do," he nodded once, wrapping an arm around her waist to keep her close. "Thank you."

"I figured this was your date as much as it was mine," she shrugged as if it were nothing, even though they both knew it was.

"And in the spirit of this being quite the occasion..." he replied, reaching into his back pocket and producing a paperback that he duly handed it over.

Anybody else would have probably thought it was a pretty crappy gift. Clearly the tome had been well-thumbed already, but that didn't matter, in fact it was part of its charm for Rory. With a grin a mile wide on her face she flipped through the pages, glad to see that this was just exactly her favourite kind of book, full of margin notes in handwriting she knew almost as well as her own.

"Franny and Zooey... with your notes," she smiled up at him then. "Jess, it's perfect! Thank you!"

She all but lunged at him, crashing her lips to his own. Jess was happy to let her, holding Rory close in his arms as they got lost in the moment for a while. When they finally broke for air, the grin on her face still remained.

"I figured you weren't really a flowers and chocolates girl," Jess shrugged, tucking Rory's hair behind her ear. "And I've been telling you that you need to read more Salinger than just Catcher in the Rye already."

"You're so good to me," she sighed. "But I'm pretty amazing myself," she told him then, turning out of his arms for a second but returning fast, showing him the movie she rented just for him.

It seemed like it was going to be a pretty great night.

"It's open," called Lorelai when she heard the knock, knowing it must be Luke. "I was just checking out the take out options and..."

She stopped short of saying anymore when she walked through to the hallway and realised it wasn't just Luke that had arrived. He had brought her dinner, she suspected home-made, and he was dressed up pretty fancy for a date in her home, sans baseball cap and everything.

"Wow!" she literally gasped.

"I did promise you our first date would be worth the wait," Luke told her seriously, just a little proud of the fact he had astonished her in the very best way.

"You did," Lorelai nodded, smiling widely.

She dropped the take out menus onto the side table and moved in closer. Reaching her arms round Luke's neck she planted a kiss on his lips.

"Hi," she greeted him with a grin.

"Hey," he replied, finding her amusing as ever. "As much as I don't want to ask you to move right now, I need to put the bags down."

"Oh, okay," she gave in and let him through to the kitchen, following him with a real skip in her step. "So, what comes after putting the bags down, because..."

Lorelai got no further with her sentence, as Luke suddenly turned around and grabbed her, pulling her impossibly close and kissing her thoroughly. It didn't matter to Lorelai at all that she couldn't breathe for fully five minutes. Never had she been so glad to be starved of oxygen.

"I repeat, wow!" she said happily as they parted. "A man who brings me dinner and kisses like that. Where have you been all my life?"

"Behind a counter, serving you coffee," he pointed out.

"Well, I'm glad you finally came out," she replied, immediately realising what that meant. "Yeah, that came out wrong," she winced.

"Don't worry about it, I understood," Luke promised her, dropping another kiss onto her lips before attending to the food he had brought for them.

Lorelai just stepped back and watched him move around the kitchen. There was a man in her life, and that man was Luke. He had always been there, for the past five years, helping her, supporting Rory. He and Jess had become a part of their family in the oddest way, and yet not so familial as to make this moving on in their relationships to be considered icky in any way.

Lorelai had Luke here for a date. The thought of it kept resonating in her mind and every time made her heart beat a little faster. She smiled.

Rory was curled up next to Jess on the couch watching a movie, and was pretty sure she had never been this comfortable in her whole life. Jess had his arm around her, his fingers playing absently with her hair, whilst her head rested on his chest. There was a bowl of popcorn in his lap that they both kept digging into whilst Kate Hudson committed suicide on the screen. It didn't matter to Rory that they were watching Almost Famous for the seventh time. It wasn't her favourite movie, but Jess liked it a lot and that was why she rented it for their first date. It had occurred to her, as her mother talked her down from the fourteenth outfit change, that this really wasn't the big deal most first dates were. She and Jess knew each other so well before they started. Tonight could be fun in ways their friendly hang-outs had never been before, but it wasn't scary or strange, they could just do what they always did, with the added bonus of kissing and cuddling.

"I think it might be bad manners to smile while somebody kills herself," said Jess as he glanced down and noticed her happy expression.

"Sorry," she muttered, though the grin reminded on Rory's lips as she cuddled up closer still to Jess.

He kissed the top of her head, eyes focusing back on the movie, for all of five seconds anyway. Rory moved against his side until her face was level with his own. She kissed his cheek once, twice, and just as soon as she had his attention her lips found his. They both knew the deal here, that there were lines they wouldn't cross yet, boundaries not to be tested so soon. Maybe that was why Rory was suddenly so confident in coming onto him this way, Jess suspected. She had no worries about giving the wrong impression since they already established the ground rules. Whatever had caused her to be bold, Jess wasn't complaining.

The popcorn bowl slipped onto the floor as he pulled Rory closer, hands tangling in her hair as they hit full make-out mode. Peaches wasn't sure what to make of it as she trotted over and observed the young couple who seemed to have completely abandoned their movie and their sweet foodstuff. All the more popcorn for her to enjoy, she supposed, helping herself to the mess of kernels on the carpet. Rory and Jess didn't notice at all.

"So, that was what you meant by the date being worth the wait," said Lorelai, immediately gasping in a breath when she was done talking.

"Not exactly," Luke admitted, flopping back against the pillows beside her.

It was a miracle they managed to get through dinner before this happened, truth be told. All this time of knowing each other, of wanting each other apparently, it had all come to a head tonight. It was fine, they were both adults and sure of what they were doing, plus they knew what it was to be safe and careful. The truth was neither of them had actively planned to have sex tonight, but neither had ruled it out as a possibility either.

"Hmm, I think I could stay here forever," she said breathlessly, shifting closer to her man, glad of his arm around her and the kiss he planted in her hair. "You think that'd be okay?"

"I wouldn't complain," he assured her. "But honestly? I think maybe we should move before too long. It's close to eleven."

She knew what that meant. Luke had told Jess in no uncertain terms that he would be leaving the Gilmore house at eleven sharp and expected Jess to be leaving the Dells at the same moment. Bending the rules would be wrong on so many levels, and insight all kinds of questions. They couldn't afford that right now. Still, Lorelai wasn't letting this moment go any sooner than was strictly necessary. She turned and draped herself over Luke's naked chest, reaching up to kiss him firmly on the lips. He responded because there was nothing else to do when such a woman started something like that. Lorelai was everything he ever wanted, and he'd known it from the first day they met, however crazy and cliché it sounded. Being with her like this, finally moving forward into a real romantic relationship that could really go somewhere, it felt as close to perfect as Luke suspected anything ever could be. He wished he didn't have to leave within a half hour, but it would be okay. There would be other nights, this he told her in mumbled words against her lips.

"You betcha ass there will," she grinned into yet another kiss. "Now I have you, Luke Danes, I'm not letting go."

"I'm counting on that," he assured her with a genuine smile that he had a feeling he would be wearing for a good long while.

To Be Continued...