___

Luke drives home. He turns off the headlights and kills the engine, coasts to a stop, because he doesn't want to alert Jess if he's here, doesn't want to deal with questions. He just wants to sit downstairs in the darkened diner and think about Lorelai and Nicole and why women are allowed to make enigmatic statements and then just leave. He knows that, as a man, he would never be allowed to get away with that sort of thing.

He lets himself into the diner quietly, locks the door behind him. He goes and sits on the third step of the staircase, buries his face in his hands. He's just getting ready to start brooding in earnest when he hears something.

Voices. Noises. A gasp; a breathy sigh. Stuff he really should not be hearing, floating down from upstairs, through the door that has been left partially open.

Rory and Jess.

Oh, god, thinks Luke, for what feels like, and probably is, the hundredth time today.

And he's about to jump up and run up the stairs and interrupt something he really, truly does not want to see, but he's got no choice.

Except he then hears Jess say, "Rory, I love you."

And Luke is frozen. He can't do it. For one thing, it sounds like he's too late to do anything but embarrass all of them. For another, he doesn't want to mess up their moment.

He knows there aren't enough moments like that in life.

So he does the only thing he can do, which is let himself back out of the diner, and go for a walk.

***


He tells himself he is not going to see Lorelai. Then he tells himself he is but only because he has to talk to her about Rory and Jess. Then he tells himself he should talk to Lorelai about other things anyway. Then he tells himself he's not going to her house, and that's final.

He is still having this argument with himself as he walks up her front stairs.

He can see there are lights on, and he hears a television, so hopefully she is up. He knocks on the door.

After a moment, Lorelai answers the door. She is wearing sweatpants and a tank top, her hair in pigtails on either side of her head, and she is holding a pint of Godiva ice cream in one hand. She looks adorable, and the overall picture makes Luke think of a teenage slumber party. "Uh, hi..."

"Oh, Luke! Hi!" she says. She follows his gaze to the ice cream. "Gotta love that gourmet market," she says, grinning. "I may have to move in there." She frowns. "Jury's still out on the mountain cheese, though."

Luke hasn't quite figured out what he's going to say or why he is even here, so there's a moment of silence while he works on that, and she must see the look on his face, because she says "Ok then! So, I guess you're not here to discuss dairy products."

"Uh, no."

"Well, come on in. I'm watching The Music Man for the fifth time this month. I mean, it's not Hairspray, but you have to give AMC credit for consistency."

So Luke follows her in. He can hear the musical in the background.

"I spark, I fizz, for the lady who knows what time it is..."

He follows Lorelai into the living room.

"I cheer, I rave, for the virtue I'm too late to save..."

"You want to sit down?" she asks.

"The sadder but wiser girl for me..."

And then Lorelai looks at Luke glaring at the television, and picks up the remote and shuts it off. "Ok, I guess this isn't a Professor Harold Hill moment."

He sits down on the couch with a sigh. He remembers the last time he was on this couch. He rubs his eyes. And suddenly, he has to laugh about it all.

Lorelai sits down in a chair on the opposite side of the coffee table. "Ok," she says finally, "This whole mysterious laughter thing is intriguing, but you know my attention span isn't going to win any world records so just spill it."

"Sorry," he says, "It's so hard to pick just one topic." He decides to go with the most pressing matter. "I came home early tonight, and, well, I almost walked in on Rory and Jess."

"Almost? Walked in on what?"

"I... heard them."

"Ah." Lorelai says.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I just couldn't, ah, interrupt them. If you want we can go back there now and talk to them."

Lorelai looks shocked and a little angry, but not as much as he would have thought.

"What stopped you?" she asks.

Luke thinks about it, decides to tell her the truth. "I, uh, heard Jess tell Rory he loved her."

Lorelai cocks her head to one side. "Well, did he sound like he meant it, or like he was just trying to get her to take her shirt off?"

Luke just looks at her.

"Ok," she says. "I get it."

She stands up and paces around the room. "Well, this isn't a huge surprise. I think they usually hang out over there on Saturday nights. When you're with Nicole." She pronounces the last word carefully, like it might be booby-trapped and she doesn't want to get too close to it.

"You mean you knew they were there? Alone?

"Rory and I have talked about it a couple of times." She makes air-quotes around the word 'it'.

"It?"

"You know... It."

"Oh. It. Right. Got it."

"So yeah, I knew this was coming. Sort of. And if they're not being safe about it, between the two of them and their oversized brains and me as the shining example of not being safe, then there's probably nothing anyone could have done to make it otherwise."

"You seem awfully calm, though. A couple of months ago you were nervous about them making out in the middle of the afternoon with me right downstairs."

"I think," she says, "That it's out of our hands now. All we can do is be there for them and hope for the best. Rory's graduating in a few months, and she's going to be eighteen, and after a point there's a fine line between prudent chaperonage and being Mama Kim, Stalker Mom."

"So you've already thought this through."

"For about seventeen and a half years, yeah." She smiles at him.

Luke sighs. "So you're all right, then?"

"As all right as I can be, given the circumstances..."

Her smile fades, and Luke can tell that somewhere around the middle of the sentence she has stopped talking about Rory and Jess. She glances at the floor, twirls a lock of her hair around one of her fingers. Luke knows it's a nervous habit of hers, but it draws his eyes to her neck, and the bare skin of her shoulders and arms.

"Listen, Lorelai--"

"I heard you were shopping for engagement rings," she blurts out.

"Oh jeez. I really hate this town sometimes."

"You couldn't have known that Kirk would be working there. Well, on second thought, maybe you should have."

"I was just looking," he sighs.

"It's none of my business anyway," she says, and fiddles with some pictures on the mantelpiece.

"Lorelai, listen--"

"I meant what I said earlier today," she says. "I'm sorry. About all of it. It's all my fault. Everything you said was true. And I'd been drinking that night, when you came over, and I just thought I'd dive right in--" she laughs "--and you'd think I'd know by now that that never works out, and, oh god, I miss you, and I miss the diner, and I'm so sorry--"

And now she's crying and she's still standing at the mantelpiece, and she's knocked over one of the pictures and she's trying to right it, but it keeps falling over. And so Luke gets up and goes over to her and takes the picture away from her and puts it down, and grabs her hands and holds them gently in his own. She looks at him with frightened, teary eyes. She continues: "I'm sorry, I wasn't going to lay all this on you, I--"

"Lorelai--"

"It's just, seeing you again, and --"

"Lorelai!" Luke finally yells, "Are you ever going to be quiet and let me apologize, too?"

She laughs a little, and wipes her eyes. "I should have just written a letter, huh?"

But he ignores the question because he's never going to get through this if he lets her sidetrack him. "I'm sorry too, all right? It's not all your fault. I had no right to say some of that stuff. True or not. Ok? I'm sorry." He squeezes her hands a little on the last word, and he notices for the first time how cold they are; and he'd like to hold them forever, or at least until they warm up, and he pushes the thought out of his mind guiltily.

"Ok," she says.

And just when he thinks she's calming down, damned if she doesn't start up again.

"So do you think we're still going to be able to be friends after all this?" she asks. "I mean, I don't want to get in between you and Nicole, and I'm sorry I acted before like you should just kick her to the curb. It was really immature, I mean, not that I'm the queen of maturity, but I have my moments. And... I think you of all people deserve to be happy." And Luke sees the tears starting to well up in her blue eyes again, but she goes on. "So, I can just stay out of the way, like I have been. I mean, I'll understand if you just want me and my melodramatic tendencies out of your life for now."

And the first tear spills out and slips down her cheek, and she takes a big breath to start the next sentence, and so Luke is forced to let go of her hands and grab her by one shoulder and the side of her neck and kiss her, a little roughly, because how else is he ever going to get her to shut up?

He really has no choice. Anyone would agree.

She tenses up for a split second, and then she goes all soft and relaxes, tilts her head a little to the side and opens her mouth to his, slides her arms up around his neck. She smells like baby powder. He lowers his hands to her waist to pull her closer, and his fingers inadvertently brush the bare skin between her tank top and her sweats, and she moans a tiny little moan, and so he kisses her harder. Meanwhile she's got got one hand on the back of his head now, fingers ruffling his hair, and she's running the palm of her other hand over his bicep and shoulder and upper chest, feeling the cotton of his button-down date-night shirt.

And then, evidently, sanity reasserts itself because they both pull away at the same time.

"Oh, god, Luke," Lorelai says, breathily, looking a little panicked. "I'm --"

"Stop," he says, still trying to catch his breath too, " I don't want to hear the words 'I'm sorry' again tonight, all right? That was all me. Well, maybe not all me, but I'm officially taking responsibility for that one."

"But, what about Nicole?"

Luke sighs and lets go of Lorelai's hand (he didn't realize until now they were holding hands), and sits down on the couch. He runs a hand back through his hair; it still feels weird not to have the baseball cap on.

"Well," he says finally, "I guess I have some stuff to think about." Although, all he can really think about right now is the way Lorelai's body felt pressed up against his, and the way their lips fit together, and the way she breathed, and...

But Lorelai seems to take the statement for what it is; doesn't look happy, no, but doesn't protest. "All right," she says. "I understand."

"Listen," he says. "I really miss seeing you in the diner."

"I miss being there," Lorelai says, and she smiles a little.

"Why don't you come in tomorrow morning? Breakfast on the house."

She looks dubious.

"Blueberry pancakes?" he offers.

"You're an evil, evil man and you're going to come to a bad end someday."

"Yeah, yeah. So you'll be there?"

"I'll be there."

"Great. I need to go now, you know, get my head on straight. When Jess gets here with Rory, try not to break any of his bones or do any permanent damage, all right?"

"I promise, cuts and mild abrasions only."

"Lorelai," he says, because he cannot stop himself, "It'll all be all right."

"I don't believe you," she says, and pouts a little.

"Yeah well. Gotta take what you can get," he says as he walks to the front door.

And then he leaves. And he goes to a payphone to call Nicole. The same payphone, in fact, that he called Nicole from on that last disastrous night with Lorelai.

She answers on the first ring. "Nicole? It's Luke. I need to come over, so we can talk."

***

To Be Continued