She's So Halogen

Chapter Four

Author-- Tinuviel Henneth

Summary-- Future-fic: One beautiful, reluctant, Pulitzer Prize-winning muse + a depressed and creatively stuck songwriter + a bevy of selfish exes, substantial egos, and senseless evasion = A good, old-fashioned romance. Unconventional 'ship alert!

Disclaimer-- I don't own any of the people you recognize. José and Katie belong to themselves, although they have been borrowed for this fic against their will. They're real people! Everybody else is fictional and was either invented by Amy Sherman-Palladino (who owns all of GG) or myself (who owns nothing). So there.

Author's Note-- This chapter is a little on the short side. However, I think you might like it anyway. ::grins::

*

"This is the drunkest I've been since I was in college," Rory declared. They were in the middle of a burgundy-and-gold hallway on the twentieth floor of Dave's hotel. He was attempting to hold her up. She was about as rigid (and cooperative) as a damp silk shirt. To add to the problem, he was a bit beyond tipsy himself. They had fallen down on the elevator when it moved too fast for them (although no faster than it did any other time). He was almost positive he gave the cab driver a hundred dollar bill and told him to keep the change.

"That's wonderful, Rory," he said. His head was pounding already. He was dreading the morning. Mostly, though, he was focused on getting her into his bed. He, being a gentleman in all situations concerning women who get too drunk to think intelligibly and then lose their apartment key card, was going to sleep on the couch in the living area of the room. It was times like these he relished having money.

"Have you ever been this drunk?" she asked. He propped her against the wall and took his own card out to unlock his door.

He looked at her for a moment, trying to figure her out. She was definitely a compulsive drinker. A compulsive consumer, actually. He hadn't thought it was possible to inhale rice with chicken and shrimp in it. She proved his entire belief system wrong. It actually made him feel silly when he didn't finish his entire piece of salmon. By the time their food was eaten, both had consumed a few more drinks than they probably should have. The conversation hit a lull only once. They ordered creme brulèe, ate half of it, paid, and left.

"Not in a while. I lived for a week on almond brittle, coffee, and hard liquor after Lane and Dickwad got married, though. Not pretty." He laughed. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. "Welcome to my humble, hotel room abode."

"Humble?" she scoffed, stumbling in. "It's bigger than my-- hic-- apartment."

"Well, I'm going to go wash my face," he said. He was hoping cold water would sober him up some. He wasn't eager to spend the night drunk in the same relative space as an intoxicated girl. He glanced over at Rory, but she had already sunk down onto the sofa and closed her eyes. He went on his way to the bathroom and flipped on the light.

He stared at his reflection in the mirror for quite a long time, wincing at the image. He didn't just look plastered, he looked downright sick. Actually, sick is the precise word for how he was feeling. His skin was all blotchy and sallow; his eyes were reddish. He turned on the squeaky cold tap and cupped his hands to collect some of the water that gushed forth. He was halfway through with his second splash when he felt her brush past him. The bathroom was very cramped, sure, but not so much that she had to actually touch him when she went past.

She hopped up onto the counter. She had changed out of that spectacular dress and into a pair of his boxers and a Purist tee shirt. He could see the wheels turning in her head about the shirt.

"Yes, I realize that's José's band," he said. He let the rest of the water he had been holding cupped in his hands run back into the sink.

She looked down and started to laugh. "I didn't even notice. But now that you-- hic-- mention it, why do you have a Purist shirt?"

"It's got a quote on the back I thought was pretty amazing. 'Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.' The only deep thing I bet José ever came up with."

"Marilyn Monroe said it," Rory said, her voice somewhat flat. He looked at her, a small frown on his face. "I think that Marilyn would have known better than-- hic-- anyone, too. I'm not sure why Purist would have a slogan like that. They're all from Ohio, not-- hic-- California."

"You've completely demolished my entire belief system," he deadpanned to mask his certain disappointment at that notion. He found she was a walking contradiction. She was against a lot of the ideas he had previously held dear.

"Oh," she said, arching her eyebrows sweetly, "drat."

Dave reached behind her and pulled a towel off the rack. While he was so close, she reached up and touched his dripping face, gently with her fingertips. He stared at her for a moment, his gaze blank for the most part. He kind of froze, unsure of what she was going to do. She sat there, her face inches away from his, her fingers resting just below his right cheekbone. She wiped a few droplets off his jaw and brought her fingers close to her face to examine the mysterious wetness.

His breathing became shallow as he watched her stare at the water. Those big blue eyes suddenly flicked back to his face and she touched him again, this time with her whole hand. He gently reached up and pulled her hand away from his face, placing it neatly in her lap. She seemed disappointed for a moment, about to get off the counter. He stopped her by placing his body in front of her, in between her knees. She looked up at him quickly, suspicious. He smiled, then hastily rubbed the towel over his face. When he was sure he had gotten enough of the water off, he threw the towel aside and grabbed her by the back of the neck, pulling her mouth to his. Her hands were instantly at his kidneys, pulling him closer to her. It also forced her to wrap her legs around him.

He made a frustrated growling sound in his throat because he couldn't seem to get her close enough. He had never kissed someone so intensely when she was sitting on a counter. He wasn't sure he really wanted to kiss someone in a bathroom on a counter. In that train of thought, he moved his hands down her sides to cup her under her buttocks. He pulled back a couple in inches, gave her a cheeky grin, then lifted her cleanly off the counter. She giggled and pulled his lips back to hers.

Having only been there one night previously, he was not familiar with the terrain of his hotel suite. En route to the bed, he tripped over a table leg and almost dropped her. He also stubbed his little toe on the bathroom door. The funny thing was, he didn't really notice the pain. She seemed to think if was funny that he injured himself.

Once they were in the vicinity of his bed, he let her down. The moment her feet touched the ground she was working on getting his tie off his neck, and then making sure it was properly thrown far across the room in a long purple strip. His shirt came next, ending up in a sad gray heap at their feet. She also made short work of the white wife beater he had on. She had never seen him shirtless before. At a pool party in college she'd gone to with he and Lane, he hadn't swum. He had kept his shirt on. Now that she had him all to herself for the moment, she wondered why he hid his body. He was small for a man, probably only a little taller than she was, and his frame was sturdy but still lithe. At the same time, by no means could he have possibly been described as "buff." Rory didn't especially care. It was good enough for her to run her hands over his chest, then down over his abdomen. He did not have a six pack, she was pleased to note.

As she explored the skin of his torso, he toyed with the bottom hem of her shirt. He wasn't sure if she had anything on under it, so he prepared himself for whatever he would be greeted with when she finally realized he needed her assistance at getting it up and over her head. Lane used to yell at him to be careful of her nose. Evidently, he was too zealous when it came to removing the other party's shirt.

Somewhere along the line it occurred to her that he was trying to take the Purist shirt off of her. She smiled to herself, kissed him desperately, and stepped back a bit. She took his hands in her own as he lifted it up. As soon as the offending garment was away and on the floor with his shirt, she meshed her mouth back over his. He stood stupidly for a moment before turning them around and pushing her down onto the bed. She began to undo his belt, but as he was on top of her, what he did mattered more. He bent down to kiss at her braless breast. She arched her back against him, but she didn't immediately encourage him. She moaned softly, and then went back to her previous task. She had the buckle undone and the pants down to his knees in a minute or two more. He moved his mouth back up to hers, locking eyes with her before she shut her own. He kicked the pants away. The buckle made a metallic clicking as it hit the floor.

She pulled back a moment and opened her mouth to say something but her cut her off. "Uh-uh, Rory. You are not going to rationalize your way out of this," he told her and kissed her again.

Much later, as they lay curled up together in a tangle of sheets in the throes of a mutual post-coital semi-consciousness, she worried about her stupid cat and smiled to herself because he hadn't been kidding about measuring up against her poster. Idly, he decided that she was the only woman he ever wanted to sleep with again.

*

Dave woke up kind of late the next morning. He rolled over to find the bed otherwise empty. His head vaguely hurt, but the hangover wasn't bad because he hadn't drunk all that much. It did, however, feel like he had several yards of cotton batting stuffed into his mouth. He looked around the room. Last night's hastily shed clothes were neatly folded. The purple silk tie he had chosen specifically to match her dress was hanging over the French balcony door handle. The door was slightly open, the tie fluttered in the New York City breeze. His shirt was folded so well it looked professional and sitting on the same chair her pretty purple dress had been draped over after she'd changed out of it into the short-lived bits of his clothes.

It wasn't hard to figure out that she was already gone. It made him kind of sad that she hadn't woken him up to say goodbye, but he reasoned that this was probably a bit of a shock to her (as it was to him), and that he would be seeing her later on at the show. Thinking about the show, however, made him kind of sad. Afterwards, their tour began, and he wouldn't be back in the City again for almost a year. He didn't want to think about such a thing. It wasn't as if he could ask her to come with him after only one night and two dates.

He got up and went into the bathroom. He washed his face and brushed his teeth. He combed his hair and then got dressed. He pulled his very ancient Chucks on and was about to leave when he crossed the room and shut the balcony door. He picked the tie up for a moment, marveling at the cool, slippery feeling of the silk against his fingertips. The damn thing had cost two hundred and seventeen dollars at Barneys, but was it ever pretty!

He looked away from the tie and let it return to its resting place over the handle. He left the room, making sure the key card was securely in his wallet. It would be just his luck that sometime over the course of the day he would lose it, but at least putting it directly into the wallet reduced the odds of that happening by a little bit.

He stopped in a small café nearby to get a tall cup of Chai tea, his favorite no-longer-trendy drink. He had never been able to really tolerate the taste of coffee unless suffering from a severe hangover. Being in a band, however, generally guaranteed that he would be hung over quite frequently, and consequently Dave had along the way acquired a mild tolerance for the stuff. Today, though, he wasn't in pain and he wasn't half-asleep. He got Chai tea instead.

Tea in hand, he hailed a cab and gave the address of his own apartment building. It mystified him why Liam, the band's paranoid-delusional and obsessive-compulsive manager, made them all stay in hotels, even when they were in cities where they had homes. Zach complained vocally about the injustice of that rule every time they were in Boston. Dave had never bothered to argue with it when they were in New York.

He used his real metal key to open the door, he put the tea down on the table by his bed, and then collapsed back on it. He closed his eyes for a moment, reveling in the comfort of his own bed, a bed he rarely got to enjoy. He was glad that in a year, the band would be taking a break. Too bad the break wouldn't be coming up sooner. For so long he had been looking forward to the non-stop year of touring they had coming up (America, then Europe and Japan). But now that he had someone to stay for, he couldn't.

He wondered where she went after she left. He figured she probably went home and fed Vladmir, then went back to bed after a long, hot shower. It occurred to him after a few minutes that she had probably made a pit-stop at the Planned Parenthood on her way. He couldn't remember if they had used a condom or not. That made him think they probably didn't.

Of course, those thoughts led to others, like what would happen if she got pregnant. Dave didn't know what he would do in that case, except maybe prove Mama Kim right after all that he was your typical American boy after only one thing, and once he got it, he split and didn't look back, no matter the consequences for the poor unfortunate girl. Dave didn't really think he had to capacity to abandon his own child, but anything, he had found out more than once, was possible after a one night stand.

No, that isn't right. Rory was more than a one night stand. In the two days he had really, really known her, he already felt closer to her than he had felt with Lane for most of their relationship. But it was still a fledgling relationship, if it could even be termed that. It was no situation to bring a child into. It was kind of a Bebe Bell-Steven Tyler thing, except he wasn't fucked up on drugs, and she wasn't the slut of the rock 'n' roll world.

He rolled over and buried his face into the bedspread to exorcise those thoughts.

Then something struck him. He sat up slowly and looked around the room. He got up and went over to the desk. He shifted through the mounds of papers and books and fliers and CDs (so that's what happened to Brian's old Juliana Theory!). Finally, he found what he was looking for, a standard wire-bound, college-ruled Mead notebook. It was old, from his freshman year of college, so the pages were yellowed and the cover bent and its corners long gone. The back cover was full of Lane's inane little doodles; she had still been fun then-- and he had still really loved her. He found a pen in a drawer, took the cap off, and returned to the bed.

Two hours later, he was sitting Indian-style in the middle, with the sheets pulled up over his legs, the notebook open on his lap. The pen in his hand glided over the page, black ink verses and choruses came to life. It wasn't much of a song, but it was a song. It was the lyrics to a song, something he hadn't been able to pull out of his head in the longest time.

Yep, it was official. Rory was good for him.

-----chapter finis

I smell a conflict of interests. . .

I like writing Dave. I've planned out a very AU fic that features my bizarrely-adored Fag-Hag!Rory living with a sadly gay DJ (Dave, abbreviated), who happens to be her best friend, Jess', boyfriend. Insanity, confusion, Lane, and Tristan ensue.

My theater camp kicked ass. This chapter dedicated to Meredith for being a Dave fan, too!

--T. Henneth / story completed 12 June 2003 / chapter posted 20 July 2003