AN: Thank you, again, for the great reviews. Each one of them has put a huge smile on my face. A couple notes: I've appreciated the comments on voice and characterization – this has been my big struggle, since I'm new to writing in this fandom. I'm still nervous trying to speak Sherman-Palladino. So thank you to those who commented, and please let me know if I slip up on this. Also, thank you to those of you who have commented on writing style. I've slowly developed a particular style I use for Alias fic, and wasn't sure how well that would translate over to GG. So thank you for the encouragement!
AN2: I should give you some sort of timeline, but I don't know how long this thing is going to be, yet. I'll tentatively say three more chapters, but it really depends on my muse.
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He'd looked at her house for her, after the termites hit. He put on his dirtiest clothes and crawled under the porch and spent the better part of an afternoon figuring out just how bad the damage was, and what he would have to do to fix it.
It wasn't the first time he'd done something like that for Lorelai.
And that was what he hated – about termites. They work slow and steady; you never know how bad the damage is until the day you fall through the porch. Sure, if you're smart, you know to look for signs; you get the place checked and tested periodically. But who really does that?
Certainly not Lorelai.
He knows this:
Some things just gnaw in silence, and in the end, it doesn't take a storm or a fire or a hurricane to pull the whole thing down. It just takes sitting there and waiting too long.
******
She would have expected The Day Something Finally Happened With Luke to be novel or wild or earth-shattering. She'd be shocked or elated or crushed and her whole life would spin out of control and all the excuses and reasons and fears would cleave in two, and with perfect clarity, she'd see what she'd always been looking for.
She'd see him.
And there wouldn't be any worrying or any waiting, or stopping and thinking about why it had all gone wrong and what in the world they'd been waiting for.
But it wasn't like that. It wasn't like that at all.
It was like any other day. She arrived in the diner in her normal pre-coffee haze, going on about something having to do with the Dragonfly and Sookie's new oven and Michel's sudden obsession with a new French singer whose ballads might out-treacle Celine Dion's. She'd segued into Rory's latest adventures (her civil disobedience to the oppressive library closing hours) halfway through her second cup, and Luke had poured and nodded and placed a plate of pancakes in front of her with barely more than a grunt.
Kirk had picked this opportune moment to test out a very small, and very loud, keychain alarm that he started to explain was an anti-theft device, not on the car, but on the keys, except that he hadn't quite figured out how to deactivate it. Yet. At which point Luke merely looked at him, and he backed out of the diner so fast he knocked over a chair in the process.
Somewhere between pancakes and hash browns and the second and third cup, he'd made the mistake of lingering beside her chair in a quiet moment and somehow agreed to stop by her house on Friday and take a look at the coat closet door that somehow kept locking itself. This, naturally, led to a rather lengthy (and admittedly one-sided) discussion of who would want to put a lock on a coat closet anyway, and whether Lorelai had a poltergeist, and what Taylor would say about poltergeists in Stars Hollow and whether they would use a real actor or CGI to play the poltergeist in the movie version.
Luke agreed to stop by that evening, instead. This had nothing at all to do with shutting her up.
And so after breakfast and three cups it was off to the Dragonfly, where Michel was cooing over his new iPod and apparently carrying on a war of silence with Sookie, who had purchased no less than three thermometers and was quite happily testing out her new oven.
She left the inn late that night, later than was necessary, but with Rory studying hard at Yale and likely not even to call tonight – Western Civ final tomorrow – it was just as easy to stay late at the inn. She was fine with it, most of the time, even a little used to it by now. Still, an empty house was never as appealing as a Rory-filled one.
Luke was already sitting on the front porch when she pulled up.
"Oh, Luke, I'm sorry! We moved it."
He looked like he actually understood this. "It's no problem; I just got here."
"Still, I'm sorry. Here, come on in and I'll get you something to drink." She pushed the door open and disappeared into the kitchen, Luke trailing behind her with his overlarge toolbox.
He already had the closet door open by the time she got back, carrying two glasses of lemonade, and was working on removing the handle.
"You have to take off the whole handle?"
"Only if you want me to get to the lock." He glanced over his shoulder. "You made lemonade?"
"It came from a mix. No produce was harmed in the production. But I do have some beer, if you want."
"Nah, lemonade's fine." He reached around to take the glass, fingers brushing hers as he did.
Nothing unusual about that. Nothing unusual at all.
She sat down on the bench across the narrow hall. "So, is it a poltergeist?"
"No, it's likely a stuck latching mechanism. It's a simple tension lock, but the door's not closing all the time – that's why you think it's locking itself."
"So you have to fix the tension-thing?"
"Are you going to sit there the whole time and ask me questions?"
"Yep."
He seemed to accept this, and took a sip of lemonade. She watched (and questioned) as he disassembled the remainder of the handle and squirted all the moving parts with a can of squeaky hinge-oil.
"There," he said, replacing the final screw. "Should work just fine now."
"Here, let me try." She stepped across the hall and leaned over him, opening and closing the door with exaggerated flourish. "Oooooooh, it doesn't even squeak."
"Happy?"
"Perfectly." She chose this moment to realize she was practically draped over him, and his head was inches from her chest. She straightened up. "Thank you."
"It's no problem," he said, standing up, and he sounded like he meant it. His toolbox shifted and rattled as he picked it up.
"You're going?" She didn't mean to let the disappointed note into her voice.
Luke rocked back on his heels, eyes scanning past her to the still-open front door. He reached for his lemonade glass. "I was going to finish this first."
She smiled. She glanced toward the door, too, and they both headed for the porch. She sat on the top step, and he took the spot beside her, toolbox clanking behind them. She reached for her still-full glass and took the first sip of lemonade.
"Luke!"
"What?"
"Why didn't you tell me this is the worst lemonade known to man?" She leaned over the railing and spit into the bushes. "It's like battery acid. It's worse than battery acid. It's like the stuff they put on ships to break the ba—" she wiped her mouth with her forearm "—nacles off."
"Barnacles."
"What?"
"On ships. Barnacles. You said manacles."
Lorelai alternated between laughing and coughing. "And thank you for that mental image. Really, give me that." She reached across him, arm resting on his legs, and grabbed the offending lemonade glass. "Why did you drink it?"
Luke shrugged. "It was cold."
"It was lethal. Completely unfit for human consumption. It was Fear Factor: Lemonade Edition. I think it's the same stuff they served in Arsenic and Old Lace. Perfect for killing off lonely men."
And that was when she stopped talking. Stupid, Lorelai, stupid. He comes to fix your possessed doorhandle and you feed him poisoned lemonade and tell him he's lonely. Why don't you just repeat the whole embarrassing non-ask-out asking out, while you're at it?
Luke seemed to ignore this, or at least try to ignore it. He reached over and pulled both glasses from her hands, setting them down on the step beside their feet.
"How about we don't drink this stuff, you don't poison me, and I never have to hear another Fear Factor reference?"
She grinned at him, thankful. "Deal. Want to take me up on that beer?"
"You didn't make it."
"I didn't even choose it. Jackson brought it over last time we had dinner."
"Then I'll take it."
She jumped up from the step and hurried inside, feeling her cheeks burn.
She returned a minute later, beers in hand, and resumed her spot on the porch. He sipped his beer in silence; she gulped hers – anything to get the barnacle-solvent-lemonade taste out of her mouth.
"Luke?" Her voice had taken on the Serious Lorelai tone; she could see it register on his face.
"Yeah?"
"Why'd you drink the lemonade?"
He sighed, rocking back a bit. Didn't matter; she wasn't letting this go.
"I was being nice."
"You're never nice." Stupid, stupid Lorelai. "I mean, you're nice, you just don't say you're being nice."
He turned to look at her, a half-smile forming on his face. "You can quit now, or keep going."
"I'll keep going."
He sighed. "Somehow, I knew."
She smiled, but only for a moment, and Serious Lorelai was back.
"You didn't have to drink the lemonade."
"You made it."
"I make lots of things."
"You don't make anything."
"Yes, I do!"
"Name something."
"Rory."
"Doesn't count. And please don't tell me how many hours you were in labor."
"Does count, 14, and you're stalling."
"I told you, I was being nice."
"Why?"
"Lorelai—come here."
"What?"
"Just—come here."
"Luke, I'm sitting right here." She waved her hands directly in front of his eyes. He caught them in his, slowly lowering them into his lap. He didn't let go.
By this point, Lorelai had switched to sit-and-stare mode. Frozen. Stopped. Staring. Frozen.
This cannot be good.
Except when it can.
Because he kissed her. Luke. Luke kissed her. She couldn't say much for the first moments of the kiss because she was more stuck on the fact that Luke had kissed her than the fact that Luke was kissing her, and his lips were soft and his hands were still holding hers and she didn't even mind that he smelled like squeaky-hinge oil, and she should probably return the favor.
Her eyes slid closed.
He pulled away a moment later, and she opened them slowly, not sure what he would look like, what she would say.
"You still taste like lemonade."
Whatever he had expected her to say, that wasn't it; because he stared at her like she was speaking Swahili.
"I'm not complaining, I just—it's—" she broke off, groping for something, anything, to say. "I would kiss you even if you tasted like barnacle-solvent-lemonade."
As far as come-ons went, it wasn't her best.
"Oh."
He kept staring.
"So that's good?"
"Yeah." She smiled as she said it and, after a moment, leaned against him, her head resting on his shoulder, her forehead against the side of his neck. He squeezed their joined hands, rubbing her palm lightly with his fingers.
And this was how it started.
******