Title: What Sam Says
Chapter 11: The Fifth Test
A/N: Okay, so I'm putting two chapters up in a period of twenty-four hours, cause I felt bad last night when I got off the internet at five. At night. Five at night, people! That's early!
So here's my second chapter of June 4, just to make up for it.
More flashbacks. Flashbacks galore!!!
Oh, and the names of the chapters are getting weirder and weirder, I know. Pretty soon I'll be going backward.
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"And how long did Tristan keep the silence?"
"Till the elevator doors opened."
"Longer than I thought."
"Me, too."
"But continue."
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In New York, Tristan dropped Rory off at the same room in the same hotel as before, and then ran off somewhere, but posted a guard outside the double doors of the suite. Rory, in a panic and not knowing what to do, called Jess.
"Hello?" Baylor answered the phone.
"Uh. Hi. Uh, is Jess there?" Rory asked, unsure of what she might have unknowingly interrupted.
"Sure. Just a sec." Baylor didn't seem too put-off by the thought of some strange woman calling Jess, so maybe it was nothing.
"Hello?" Jess answered the phone.
"Did I interrupt something?" Rory asked immediately.
"What? No. Baylor's going over the script for tomorrow. Are you okay?"
"No. Jess. I…I'll talk to you later." Rory hung up the phone, and then kept her hand over the receiver.
"Chicken. You're a big fat chicken," she told herself, before steeling her nerves and picking up the phone again. This time, Jess answered.
"Rory?"
"Look, can you come over here? I…. Tristan has me under house arrest. I need to talk to you. Come over here. The same hotel. Room 1507. Now, please." Rory spoke in halted phrases, her mind hardly connecting anything.
"Sure. Anything," Jess said.
"Thank you." Rory hung up the phone and started pacing. Sure, she'd talked with Jess about pretending to be pregnant; faking a test…but they'd never said anything about actually getting pregnant. It had been Rory's idea to actually get pregnant—all the proof Mark would ever need—but now that she might actually be pregnant, she was a little worried about what Jess' reaction would be. Too worried, she realized. It was just Jess. What did she care?
But, oh…she cared.
"Hey, how ya doing. I'm just gonna go in this room right here—" Jess' voice said out in the hall. Rory perked up.
There was a murmuring. The guard, Rory figured.
"No, I'm a friend of…Tristan's. I'm here to check on Mark's girl. Yeah. Make sure she's here."
There was another murmuring.
"Well, she coulda gone out the window. Ever think of that? Yeah. So Tristan wants me to go in the room, check on her."
More murmuring, and the door was unlocked.
"Thanks," Jess said as he walked into the suite. The guard nodded and closed the door, and Jess whistled as he looked around. "Big room."
"Jess."
Immediately Jess snapped back, concerned once more.
"Rory. What's wrong?" he asked, rushing over.
"This…is really hard to say. Yeah. It's…hard."
"And 'this' is?" Jess asked gently.
"I…think I might be pregnant."
"Huh." Jess collapsed onto the bed behind him. He looked up at Rory, opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it again. "Huh, " he repeated.
"Yeah. You see, after you dropped me off, I made an appointment with a doctor. And got…artificially inseminated."
"Huh." Jess said again, looking all over the room, until finally looking back up at Rory. "So…are you pregnant?"
"I dunno. They said you have to wait a week, but I don't want to wait a week. I bought five pregnancy tests in Virginia." Rory walked over to her bags near the dresser and started searching through them.
"When were you in Virginia?"
"About twenty minutes ago. Here they are," she emerged triumphant, holding all five tests in her hands. "I'm gonna go take 'em."
"All of them?" Jess asked.
"Well, yeah. You see, they're all different brands. And they all say…to take a week after your last would-be period," Rory said, reading a package.
"And it hasn't been that long yet, right?"
"Right. But I'm hoping that at least one of 'em's positive. There's no such thing as a false positive anymore."
"Ah. You…go do that, then."
"I will." Rory smiled and walked into the bathroom. She felt much more together now. Jess, on the other hand, felt much more apart.
"Two minutes," Rory announced a few minutes later, pressing buttons on her watch.
"You took 'em all?" Jess asked.
"Uh-huh," Rory nodded, walking over to the bed where Jess was still sitting. "All five." She sat on the bed next to Jess. Very close to Jess. They both stared at the open bathroom door. Rory heaved a long, concerned sigh, and Jess unknowingly lifted a hand to her back and started rubbing. She leaned into his shoulder, and he continued rubbing the small of her back. Her watch started beeping. Both paused and stiffened.
"This is it," Rory murmured.
"Yep."
"I should go check them."
"Yep."
"Come with me," Rory demanded, grabbing Jess' hand from behind her.
"Okay," he agreed, seeing the look in her eyes. She nodded, and they got up off of the bed simultaneously. They slowly walked over to the bathroom, and stood in the doorway staring at the five sticks of plastic sitting on the sink.
"You take those two, I'll take these two, and we'll meet up for the middle one." Rory said, pointing to the two on the left for Jess. He nodded, and they walked to their separate edges of the sink and picked up the tests.
"Positive, and positive," Rory announced, her voice a mixture of elation and nervousness.
"Same here," Jess nodded. Rory closed her eyes as tightly as she could, picked up the fifth and final test, and opened her eyes.
"Negative."
"A false negative, apparently."
"Yeah. So."
"So."
"You're pregnant."
"I'm pregnant," Rory half-laughed. "I…don't know what I'm feeling."
"It's okay to be scared."
Rory nodded.
"And…thrilled," Jess said after searching her face.
She laughed. "I think I'm both."
"I can see that."
"Yeah. So. You wanna run with me?"
"What?"
"Run. I need to run. Get away from Mark and Tristan. You wanna run?"
"Don't you have to tell Mark you're pregnant?"
"I'm gonna leave the tests here."
"All of 'em?"
Rory shook her head. "I'm gonna take the negative one with me, and throw it away. I'll leave the other four on the sink."
"Uh, okay. So, running."
"Yeah. I've got an idea. You take both of my bags downstairs—give them to the front desk, to hold—and then come back up and talk to the guard. Distract him, and I'll run downstairs and meet you outside, around the right corner of the hotel."
"Okay." Jess nodded. "I can do that. Uh, I'm gonna do that."
Rory zipped up her bags and handed them to Jess, who shouldered both of them and started out the door. She spent the time he was downstairs arranging the pregnancy tests on the sink and in the trash can, and then slipped the negative one back in its box and into her pocket. Before long, Rory could hear Jess' voice in the hall, talking to the guard about "THIS ROOM OVER HERE."
Rory smiled and edged out of the room and down the stairs. She got her bags from the front desk and was outside and around the corner before the elevator for Jess arrived upstairs.
He caught up with her five minutes later. "You're fast."
"Thank you," she smiled.
"So…what now?"
Rory shrugged. "Back to your place for the night?"
"Sure."
Rory stopped Jess seconds later. "What's your relationship with Baylor?"
"What?"
"Baylor. What's your relationship with her?"
"She's my best friend. Star of my movie. Major manipulator."
"And?" Rory asked, knowing there was more.
"And…" Jess sighed. "We used to date. Right after we met. For a month. But there wasn't any chemistry, so we broke up and we've been best friends ever since."
"And?" Rory prompted again.
"And…nothing. Seriously, that's it. I'm not in love with her. I've never been in love with her. I've always…adored someone else," Jess swept a stray hair off of Rory's forehead.
She blushed. "Oh."
"Let's go," Jess said, pulling her hand and steering her to the subway.
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"So you stayed at Jess' apartment. And nothing happened."
"Nope. He slept on the couch."
"Good. Was Baylor there when you got there?"
"No."
"Cause that probably would've been awkward. And the tests were almost all positive?"
"Yep. I was definitely pregnant."
"And you definitely still are."
"Yep." Rory laid her hands on her stomach.
"Any movement?"
"A little. Not much. No outside movement."
"Well, you tell me when there is, cause I wanna feel my grandchild. God. I'm old."
"You're not that old."
"That's right. You're young. What are you doing having a baby?"
Rory rolled her eyes. "Back to the story."
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The next morning, Rory and Jess hopped in his car and headed back up to Maine. They were there for twenty minutes when Mark caught up to them.
"Hello?" Jess answered his cell phone.
"Jess. There's some weird guy calling your apartment asking for you. Over and over and over," Baylor informed him.
"Did you tell him where we are?"
"No. You want me to?"
"No. Hold 'em off. Tell 'em you don't know where I am, and I have no idea where Rory is."
"Already been doing that."
"Tell 'em I'm in Stars Hollow, visiting my uncle, and you have no idea where Rory is."
"Can do." Baylor hung up.
"Tristan?" Rory asked.
"Already," Jess nodded. "I think you're gonna have to head off on your own."
Rory nodded and twirled a strand of hair around her finger thoughtfully.
"When'd you start doing that?" Jess asked, plucking the strand from her finger and settling it back into place.
"Huh? Oh. I dunno. I just picked it up somewhere, I guess."
"Don't do that, it makes you look stupid," Jess commanded. "We need to cut your hair," he said thoughtfully.
"Right," Rory nodded.
"Too bad we can't dye it. That would've been good."
"Why can't we dye it?"
"The fumes. Harmful for the baby."
"Right." Rory bounced up and down nervously. Jess angled an arm around her body and pulled her towards him.
"Calm down. We're gonna pull this off."
Rory nodded.
"Let's go get that hair cut."
"Not too short, though," Rory commanded, placing one protective hand around the very end of her hair.
"Not too short," Jess agreed, leading her to the bathroom.
