AN: shorter chapter today, sorry. next one should be longer when Rory and G go to SH.
Jess sat at his desk in Apparatus Bay and watched Celeste walk back and forth along the empty store floor, barely getting any work done himself. Little by little he was beginning to get used to the idea of Celeste being pregnant again, picturing her belly growing and recalling how she used to wear all those gorgeous bodycon dresses back when she was expecting Evie. She'd been beautiful, not that she wasn't now, but then it had just been emphasized in the best way. Jess was in awe how pregnancy had suited her in also other ways - Celeste being very active, knowledgable and glowing the entire time, inside and out. He just deeply hoped they'd both be safe this time. He didn't want to relive the close call they'd had.
Those thoughts aside, with his limited knowledge of French he wasn't really following much of what Celeste was saying right now, and really Celeste wasn't saying much at all, as Natalie, her lawyer in France, was doing most of the talking on the other side of the phone. There had been some follow up questions for Natalie and it was good for Celeste to understand how Henri's court case was going. It just didn't seem like a viable option any longer to just bury one's head in the sand when it came to all matters concerning the Aubertin name.
It was truly a quiet day at the store, and Celeste really hadn't objected to Jess' impromptu decision to allow Taylor to do town meetings in the store starting from next week. They needed any income they could get and it couldn't hurt being liked and understood better by other locals who didn't know them that well yet.
"So..," Celeste began with a deep exhale, as the call ended. "Bad news first," she continued. "We don't know whether the NDA is forged because we cannot contest it unless I can prove I'm Odette who would have to file for it to be inspected," she explained. She could in theory of course ask her mother, but she somehow just felt unable to just pick up the phone and call her. And she could of course just risk it - claim to be Odette, prove it through biometrics and get access to her properties - but she was worried what that would do to her current identity. If she did that, claiming to being in the witness protection programme or anything of she sort wouldn't really work in that case.
"Any good news?" Jess inquired, hopefully.
"That his ruling was yesterday and he won't have a chance to file for release on good behavior until 2030," Celeste replied. Henri was out of the picture for the next 10 years, making Celeste breathe a lot easier. The best part of this was that it wasn't even her who'd gotten him in jail. She wasn't the only one he hated at this point.
"Is it wrong for me to hope someone offs him on the inside?" Jess asked, not too seriously. But he really didn't have any sympathy for Henri.
Celeste rolled her eyes.
"Anyways so now we wait what Emily learns. She told me she got a meeting with my mother for Monday. I actually didn't expect her to just got to her, I don't even know what I expected - spying or asking around... something, clearly I haven't been thinking straight… Now she'll just go ask 'what's your problem?' and there's no way of telling whether mom is lying or not. She'll probably just think that I'm too chicken to go talk to her myself or something," Celeste complained. She was beginning to regret asking Emly to look into it, frankly - fearing the impression this was leaving. Maybe her hormones had influenced her judgement?
"Then just tell her to not do it," Jess suggested.
"I can't do that - she's helping me, at least that's what she thinks. She flew all the way there, she's been there for a little more than a week already - because of me. I just can't, I can't be this flaky person…," Celeste argued.
"Then just let's see… maybe she's got something up her sleeve," Jess added hopefully. "Now - how are you feeling?" Jess pulled Celeste onto his lap.
Celeste understood well what he was asking. "Better than last week, though you'll probably find crumbs in bed for a while," she replied, explaining why she was eating saltines in bed in the morning. Though she really didn't need to explain it, he knew as it was.
"I think I'm going to try to start going swimming again, I need to exercise more," she replied. She was fretting about her increased starting weight too - and she really wasn't the exercise nut she used to be. She rarely went jogging these days, and with no pilates in town other than doing some in-home yoga and the occasional swimming that mostly happened with Evie, she wasn't doing much other than walking everywhere she could.
"I have a good feeling about this," Jess assured, stroking her arm and pulling her face downwards for a sweet kiss, knowing she was worried about the tests to come and making it past the 12 week line.
Jess knew it was a little early to really get excited, but he was. He felt like if this baby wanted to come to them this badly, despite all odds, it couldn't just be a fluke. He knew it wasn't always the way things worked, but he was excited, and he was hopeful. He hadn't truly needed another kid, feeling like there were enough underage relatives around to give him that feeling of being a role model and in a way mentoring as well, but now that it was happening he couldn't help but to smile on the inside. The problem was that right now, it seemed like he was the only one smiling, Celeste keeping very much a straight face, as if showing no emotion towards the subject at all, only dealing with the practical side of this - getting past the nausea and taking more care of herself when it came to moving herself and food.
He almost felt like he wanted to be a fly on the wall when she went to therapy, wanting to know how she really felt about it.
"Hey," Rory sighed, picking up a call from Logan. She was just going to bed and Logan was usually at that time just finishing up his work day or on his way back to his hotel.
"Hey," he reflected, and for a moment silence lingered. They hadn't really talked on the phone for a couple of days, not in a way that went beyond saying 'hi' to the kids. That night Logan had already finished work, but instead of going to his hotel room straight away he had gone to grab a drink at the hotel lobby bar instead. The pub would've been the way to go in London, doing what the locals do, he knew that - but he wasn't really there to interact.
"So how are you?" Rory asked, feeling tongue tied around her own husband. She wanted him to open up, just tell what was going on in his mind, but that seemed so much harder over the phone. She didn't have high expectations - just telling her about his work day was enough.
"The week has been a busy one so far, but Owen was really a quick study. Owen was a little sceptical of the idea of Mitchum helping him, but he understood the reasoning…," Logan replied. In part it was him also saying that maybe Rory's idea wasn't horrible, but he wasn't there yet to actually admit to it. He wasn't ready to tell Rory that it had been the right thing for her to do, because she really should've just suggested this to him not Mitchum.
"Good," Rory replied, feeling awkward.
"And you?" he asked.
"Finny is better, no more fever. So I think we'll got to Stars Hollow for the weekend… G's coming too," she said.
"How did that go?" Logan asked, knowing Rory had taken G to therapy.
"I can't go into the details but just... Poor G. And she is being such a trooper, I think most girls wouldn't know what to do with themselves in a situation like this.." Rory exhaled.
"You can tell me if you want to, you know - I can tell it's hard for you too," Logan suggested, hearing her struggle.
"It's pretty personal, I don't think she'd want me to, to be honest. But I guess… the short version is that her stepdad is a freak... bunch of inappropriate behavior, sort of borderline abusive, pretty gross if thinking very clear-headedly about it. I think she got out just in time before anything really bad happened," Rory summed it up. It felt good to talk about it, Logan was right. And she knew she could trust him, she needed to feel like he was in her court too.
"That's rough, I'm sorry," Logan replied.
"Hey, do you think we could just go to Martha's when you come back, just the two of us," Rory suggested, after some silence. She felt she wanted something to look forward to, something that was their special place, and while Martha's had all sorts of memories by now, it was what she could think of off the bat. Maine was more painful than Martha's, that's for sure.
"Sure, Martha's it is, though you might want to call the housekeeper and have her check the place doesn't have any burst pipes or anything," he suggested. It was an old house, that didn't always cooperate no matter how many precautions were taken.
"Okay," Rory replied, making a point to check up on it. "Hey, who's looking after the Maine house these days?" Rory suddenly recalled, having not really thought about the place since they'd last been there and now with Catherine gone, she really didn't know what was up with the place.
"Charlotte found someone to handle it, I don't even know more than that," Logan replied.
It was still odd to think of Charlotte and Owen as a part of their family now, but that's what they were - and even if they didn't own that particular house, it was still a shared knowledge that anyone could fairly easily use any one of these properties.
They talked some more, mostly about the kids or what was nice about the house in Martha's Vineyard, how Rory missed the bakery nearby, even if she had Magnolia's right on the corner in Manhattan. Logan told her how he'd had dinner with Charlotte and Owen the other day, what their new place in London was like and how some other employees were reacting to the shift in management. Some were not happy, and he'd even fired a few for disrespecting him - he didn't like being that kind of employer, but sometimes it was necessary.
After hearing Rory yawn for the second time, a good twenty minutes later, they said their goodbyes, both feeling relieved of having taken the time to talk. It was important, even if the things they had discussed hadn't been deeply intimate.
Logan ordered another Macallan neat and observed his own reflection at the mirror at the back of the bar shelf. He was piecing his own issues together too, little by little. Largely it was about being in control, or at the very least not losing it. He didn't know why it was so important to him, but he knew that he just needed to find other means of dealing with it than doubting Rory's intentions.
"Macallan neat," a tall man, roughly Logan's age, who by the looks of him, was coming straight from the airport, his suitcase in tow, ordered and asked with a brief gesture whether the seat one over from Logan, was taken - which it wasn't.
His order certainly caught Logan's attention, appreciating a man with good taste in scotch.
The man sat and disinfected his hands with a small bottle of disinfectant, and accepted his drink with a polite "Thank you".
Logan wasn't even sure why he felt the need to start up a conversation with the man. Maybe it was that he missed his own buddies, someone who wasn't all about the serious things, someone who was physically there? Maybe talking about life to someone who didn't know every complexity about him could do good? Maybe it was just a midlife crisis - the whole lot of it?
G sat down at her desk in English class, where they were supposed to start working independently as the teachers were finishing up a meeting at the teacher's lounge. It really wasn't much of an issue for anyone in her class to obey simple rules like that, and already she could see most of the people beginning their assignments without objections.
She opened Alan Lightman's 'Einstein's Dreams' and looked at the worksheet in front of me.
"G?" Philippa whispered.
"Yeah?" G turned towards her friend, speaking in whisper also not to disturb anyone else.
"Rosalie asked about you," Philippa said. Philippa was leaving before lunch that day, so they didn't really have a lot of opportunities to talk that day.
G realized that she'd forgotten to cancel her appointment at Ulifeline, having gone to her new therapist's instead. Rosalise must've worried about her because she hadn't shown up.
"Oh, yeah. Sorry - I went to someone else with my sister," G replied, apologetically.
"So everything's okay?" Philippa asked.
The classroom wasn't perhaps the best place to talk about these things, she didn't want anyone else to know, but she was a little impressed that Philippa actually sounded genuinely concerned. She almost felt like telling her, but it was a much longer discussion than this setting allowed.
G shrugged, she couldn't really claim that.
"Hey, next week - maybe you want to come over to my place - we could watch a movie or something? Just hang out?" G asked instead, only now realizing Philippa hadn't even seen where she lived in the four months they'd known each other. And this was the self-care her therapist was talking about, wasn't it?
Philippa smiled, replying, "Sure," friendlyly.