Disclaimer: Dear Mrs. Palladino, these characters are thine
How I long for the day that I can say that they are mine!
But your Luke and your Lorelai are yours alone 'til then.
Thank you for creating them. Love always, Erin.
Author's Notes: This is the chapter that deals with Luke's perspective on the events that actually happened on the show. After this, the story will move forward. I realize there's not much dialogue in this chapter, but that's because it's not my dialogue, and I'm not going to steal from the GG writers. The bits of dialogue that actually are from the show are in italics.
As I said before, for the purposes of this story, parts of "Afterboom," "Luke Can See Her Face," "Last Week Fights, This Week Tights," and "Raincoats and Recipes" did not happen, but parts did. You'll see what I mean.
And, if you're experiencing déjà vu, it's because elements from my stories "I Stayed," "What He Wants," and "No Use Crying Over a Spilled Drink" are all in here.
Chapter 3
Siren Song
So tell me what I see when I look in your eyes
Is that you, baby, or just a brilliant disguise?
Contentment was part of Luke's nature. He had always been one to accept his life without truly desiring to improve it in any way. Improvements were changes, and he didn't deal well with change. It was why he hadn't accepted those scholarships to college, why he'd been willing to maintain his long-distance relationship with Rachel even when she could see it wasn't working, why he let his relationship with Lorelai stay exactly where it was. It was true that there could be the potential for something better than the relationship they had, on the chance that she felt the same way about him, but the relationship they had, with her as his customer and his friend, was working fine. If he did nothing to change it, he'd still have that relationship. If he tried to change it, he might get a romance with the most amazing woman in the world—or he could end up not only getting his heart broken all over again, but losing Lorelai as well. At least with Rachel, he'd only lost a girlfriend. If he lost Lorelai, he'd lose one of the best friends he'd ever had. And so, for years, their relationship remained the same, and he was content with that.
Years passed, and before he knew it, Rory was sixteen and headed for a fancy private high school. Luke had known the little girl for half her life. And even though she was well into her teens, he still thought of her as a little girl. He couldn't quite believe it when she started dating the bag boy from Doose's, that Dean kid. Dean was nice enough, and he seemed polite and respectful. But even so, Luke had the urge to narrow his eyes menacingly at the kid whenever he was in the diner, and he knew for a fact that he would rip Dean's head off if he ever caused Rory to shed a single tear. The fact that he felt so strongly about this surprised him. What the hell? he thought. You're not her father. You have no claim to her at all.
Rory's sixteenth birthday party was the first time he really caught a glimpse of Lorelai's parents. They looked pretty much the way he'd imagined them: prim, poised, austere. They kind of intimidated him, so he avoided talking to them at the party.
A couple of months later, he was in the diner trying to get the voices of carol singers out of his head when in came Lorelai, minus her usual smile. He knew that she and Rory hadn't been on the best of terms for the last week. It was all over town that Rory and the bag boy had spent the night at Patty's studio after Rory's dance. He knew Rory well enough to know that her judgment was good and it probably had been as innocent as she'd said, but he'd been a sixteen-year-old boy once and he knew what all sixteen-year-old boys wanted. His dislike of Dean continued to grow.
But that wasn't all Lorelai was upset about that night. Apparently the events following Rory's dance had caused a fallout with her mother, and she'd been uninvited from her parents' Christmas party. Luke couldn't believe that. His family had had their share of fights, but uninviting a family member from a party would have been unthinkable. He knew that Lorelai's parents were a part of her life again, because they were paying Rory's tuition at the school she went to, so she had been seeing them a lot more often. But this early Christmas party, apparently, was something she'd gone to every year. Luke couldn't stand to see her look so sad, so he went into the kitchen and used the little artistic skill he had to fashion a burger that looked like Santa. It did get her to smile, as she told him that nobody had ever made her something quite so disgusting.
Then her cell phone rang, and he pointed to the no cell phones sign and told her to take it outside. He hated cell phones. It drove him nuts to look out and see tables of people all talking into pieces of plastic. As he was arguing with her about it, she missed her call, and as she was checking her messages, Taylor and the carolers came in asking for some hot chocolate. Luke wasn't willing to give Taylor anything for free, so of course that turned into an argument, but then the next thing he knew, Lorelai was standing up, screaming for the number for a cab company. Her father was in the hospital, according to Rory's message, but Rory had taken the car and she had no way of getting there. Luke froze, suddenly flooded by the memory of being ten years old and going to see his mother in the hospital for the first time. He didn't give it a second of thought before he told Lorelai he would drive her. Once he did, the details came quickly. He'd pay for everyone's food and Taylor could take his hot chocolate and lock up. All he knew was that he had to get Lorelai to the hospital.
There was that vulnerable side of her again, in the car on the way there. She wondered aloud if her father was dead. Luke told her he wasn't, then immediately regretted it. His mother, after all, had said that she would be fine. Lorelai started talking about her father—how she thought she should be remembering the time he bought her a Barbie or something, but it had never happened. Her father was not a bad guy, she said, and he always tried to do what he thought was the right thing for his family. He did things by the numbers, and Lorelai didn't. She thought she must have been such a disappointment to her father. Luke couldn't believe that, and told her so. How could Lorelai be a disappointment to anyone? Sure, she'd gotten pregnant and dropped out of high school, but since then she'd become the manager of a successful inn and a valued member of the community, not to mention the mother of a very sweet, highly intelligent teenage daughter. To know Lorelai was to love her. How could any parent be disappointed in that? Lorelai told him she thought he'd buy a Barbie for his daughter, and that startled him. He'd gotten used to thinking that he'd never have kids. Having a kid with Lorelai, though, would be different. She told him he'd make a great dad, and he told her she already made a great mom. Lorelai knew this, and replied quietly that it was the daughter part she didn't have down yet. Luke felt a pang inside, and wondered silently what was worse: losing parents whom you were close to and who you knew were proud of you, or losing a parent you'd already proven you could live without, never knowing how he felt about you?
It only occurred to him later that he could, conceivably, have dropped Lorelai off at the hospital and left. But he knew Lorelai better than she realized. She'd been coming to his diner every day for eight years, and sometimes he knew what she was thinking better than Lorelai herself. And he knew that right then that Lorelai was losing it, and she needed someone there. She tried to put on a brave face in front of Rory, who was scared of losing a grandfather she was just getting to know, but Lorelai was scared to death herself, too scared even to go visit her father. It was killing Luke to be there, taking in that horrible hospital smell and seeing people being wheeled by. All kinds of bad memories were coming back to him. But Lorelai needed him there, so he stayed.
He had his first real conversation with Emily, Lorelai's mother, that day. Until then, he'd mostly heard Emily horror stories, but the woman seemed surprisingly human as she sat there next to him. He sympathized with her. It was horrible to see your spouse lying in the hospital like that. He remembered how hard it had been on his dad. He ended up telling Emily about how he'd kept the all of his father's things, even his sign, in the diner. Then Emily abruptly asked him what was going on with him and Lorelai, and told him they were both idiots when he insisted there was nothing.
But there was nothing, nothing outside a wish he kept buried in the back of his mind, a winning-the-lottery kind of wish. When they'd shown up at the hospital, Emily had asked Lorelai if she was on a date, and Lorelai had replied, "It's Luke, Mom," as if the idea of the two of them being on a date was really that ludicrous. He would never be anyone to her but the man who provided her with coffee and a hug when she finally broke down—she only let herself break down after she knew that her father was going to be all right.
She brought him a hat as a present after her father went home, and the two of them stood in the empty diner with the lights out, watching the Christmas pageant rehearsal making its way through the town. Lorelai said it was hard to imagine living anywhere else. Silently, he agreed.
Every once in awhile, it started to kill him that she would always be there, not about to pack up and leave like Rachel, but she would never be there with him. It was in these moments that he started to think that maybe he should do something about that, and he had the urge to swallow all his fear and put himself out there.
He came close the night Sookie went on her first date with Jackson, the produce man who would eventually become her husband. Apparently, it had been the double date from hell—Sookie with Jackson, Lorelai with Jackson's cousin, this scrawny little guy with a weird hat. According to Lorelai, the cousin, whose name was Rune or something, didn't like her because she was too tall. Luke couldn't believe that. He could not for the life of him imagine not finding Lorelai attractive. He looked at her, all dressed up in her date clothes, and was struck all over again by how beautiful she was. She was so colorful, so bursting with life! And this idiot, this Rune guy, was walking away from her without a second thought. Luke knew he couldn't just sit there and let her get walked out on and then sit at a table alone, all in one night. So he gave her his best coffee, with the nutmeg, and dealt out a poker hand.
She was so cute. She wasn't just beautiful, she was cute, too, and that was a quality that most people didn't still have at age thirty-two. It was strange that she'd had to grow up so fast after she'd gotten pregnant, and yet the child inside of her had refused to die. She had that adorable, teenage-stubborn look on her face when she gave up four of her poker cards at once. And then the two of them glanced over at Sookie and Jackson, who were alone at their own little table, basking in the newness of their relationship and the promises it held. He saw it and he wanted it for himself, and he could see in her eyes that she did, too. And he almost asked…almost. If he'd just been a little bit quicker, he wouldn't have been interrupted by damn Mrs. Kim, screaming at Lorelai that she didn't know where Rory and Lane were, which forced Lorelai to leave. Damn Stars Hollow. People were always interrupting you. And the next time he saw Lorelai, of course he lost his nerve and only suggested that they play poker again sometime.
Are you nuts? he sometimes asked himself, and he wasn't quite sure how to answer. She was such an amazing woman, so unique, and if he didn't ask her out, someone else would, and then he wouldn't even have the possibility of a relationship there to cheer him up. But then he remembered that as long as he didn't do anything, he wouldn't lose a friend, the woman on the other side of the counter, the woman who could make up painting songs at the spur of the moment. "Grab your brush and grab your rollers, all you kids and all you…bowlers, we're going painting today!"she sang one day, jangling spoons. He did his best not to show it, but that was endearing enough to make him reconsider about painting the diner. At the very least he'd get to spend time with her.
He really didn't want to paint the diner. It was change, but it was worse than regular change—it was changing something that reminded him of his father. It amazed him that night when he opened up and started to talk about his father to Lorelai. He was letting her see the side of him he never let anyone else see. She remarked somewhat sadly that it must be nice for him to be so connected to his dad, and he reminded her that she had that with Rory. He'd never had a real desire for kids, but sometimes he had this wish to be to someone else what his father had been to him, what Lorelai was to Rory. He showed Lorelai the spot on the counter where his father had taken down that order, the day before Luke's life started to change, and she said they should leave that spot alone when they painted the diner. And right then he loved her more than he ever had. She did understand. The two of them sat there on the floor behind the counter, and he wanted to kiss her so badly. But of course he didn't.
He thought his chance had come that night, when Lorelai called him and asked her to come over to her house to find a baby chick that was loose. He thought that could only mean one thing. Why the hell would she have a chick loose in the house? But of course she actually did. Rory's science project had escaped and Lorelai could hear it but not see it. He'd always be the man she could count on to help her find baby chicks, but not the man she could count on for sex.
That man, apparently, was Christopher, Rory's father, who just breezed into town one day with no warning. He was a good-looking man, that Christopher. The whole town was talking about him. Luke never got the chance to talk to him, but he would have had a few things to say if he had. It wasn't his place, and he knew that much of Christopher's lack of involvement in the Gilmores' lives was Lorelai's choice, but it was still beyond his comprehension how the man could have no contact with his only daughter beyond a weekly phone call and visits on holidays. Without having spoken a word to Christopher, Luke knew he didn't like him.
That dislike only grew when Lorelai stood him up for their painting date. He knew why. He suddenly felt none of that love for her that he'd felt in that moment the two of them had shared behind the counter. How could she have done that to him? How could she have been so inconsiderate? But of course he ended up forgiving her when she went into the diner alone and painted it. You couldn't stay mad at someone with a smile like that.
It was like some sick joke when she came into the diner wearing Rachel's sweatshirt that she'd bought at the rummage sale. Luke hated getting rid of things, but he had no reason to keep Rachel's shirt anymore, so he donated it. It was best to move on, he thought, and getting rid of the shirt she'd left behind would mean that, once and for all, he was finally over Rachel.
And then there it was, right in front of him, on the new object of his affection. He knew it was totally irrational, but he ended up yelling at her in the middle of the diner, even though she had no way of knowing where the shirt had come from.
Then, just a few weeks after Lorelai had returned the sweatshirt to him, who should waltz back into the diner but the sweatshirt's original owner herself. Rachel was as beautiful as ever, and as impulsive—she'd just spontaneously hopped on a plane to Hartford after seeing that one was leaving out of O'Hare. He'd imagined that moment so many times in the past, Rachel coming back because she realized she missed him and wanted to be with him again. In all of those fantasies, he had fallen in love with her all over again and the two of them had lived happily ever after. But amazingly, he felt none of that when she came back into town. More than anything, he felt annoyed. He'd stopped believing that he could depend on Rachel, the woman who had skipped town more times than he could count without much warning. The time he and Rachel had spent apart had served to harden him, and he approached her now with guarded cynicism. He wasn't going to get hurt again. But deep down, he knew that there was more to it than that. He just didn't feel in love with her anymore. He couldn't figure it out. Rachel hadn't changed a bit. She was the same gorgeous, adventurous, fascinating woman with the amazing eyes, the same woman he'd fallen in love with five years ago. He guessed he was the one who had changed.
It kind of bugged him, too, how Rachel had taken to spending time with Lorelai. He knew she had that talent for seeing people, but this time it was like she was a mind reader. She found that abandoned inn, the Dragonfly, and showed the pictures to Lorelai before she even knew that Lorelai wanted to open her own inn. Next thing he knew, Rachel and Lorelai were going off to look at the Dragonfly together and he was finding Lorelai up in his apartment because Rachel had taken her there. And then it was Lorelai who was telling him to trust Rachel, that this time she meant it, that this time she really did want to stay. For some reason, that was when he chose to believe it. Maybe it was the fact that Rachel cared enough to tell Lorelai, probably knowing that she would tell him. Or maybe it was the fact that Lorelai was telling him at all, and he realized that he probably had a better chance with Rachel, whom he had loved once and who might still love him, than with Lorelai, who apparently wouldn't mind seeing him with Rachel. So he figured, What the hell, and decided to give it another try with Rachel.
That try pretty much failed. However he looked at it, Rachel was disrupting his routine. For years now, he'd enjoyed the privacy of waking up alone. It was just odd to be waking up next to someone again, someone he was no longer in love with. And it was worse to be expected, to be depended on by someone he didn't love. He had the people of Stars Hollow depending on him to always be there with coffee and food—and of course that included Lorelai. But the town of Stars Hollow had kind of become his new family, and of course family expected things of you. Rachel wasn't family. He didn't know where she fit into his life.
But damn her and her incredible vision. The next thing he knew, her bags were packed—and not because she wanted to be somewhere else, but because she could see what he was really feeling. She knew how he felt about Lorelai. She'd seen it right away, and she'd even gotten a picture of the two of them on a bench at the Firelight Festival that captured it perfectly. He'd had to stare at that picture, thinking, God, is that how I always look when I look at her?
So Rachel left for the last time, and she told him before she left, "Don't wait too long to tell her."
But apparently he already had.
Before he could act on his feelings, or do anything, she was engaged to some guy named Max.
Max. Max. He didn't like that name. And he was pretty sure he didn't like Max, either. He went over to Lorelai's to pick up his toolbox, and maybe, just maybe, to finally tell her like Rachel wanted him to. But Lorelai was all dolled up for a date with Max. Rory's English teacher, he later learned. Max was eyeing Luke suspiciously, so he couldn't resist getting in some little digs about how he did things around the house for Lorelai. And that Max dug right back at him.
And they got engaged. Of course they got engaged. Because Max loved Lorelai—why wouldn't he love Lorelai? Luke could certainly understand that. And Lorelai probably loved him, too. Hey, why not? Max was attractive, articulate, well-read, clean-shaven. He was the anti-Luke. So of course Lorelai loved him.
Stars Hollow went nuts, of course, because everyone loved Lorelai and everyone wanted to see her happy. And, as he felt his heart slowly breaking, he realized that he did, too. And she had seemed very happy the day she'd seen her about to leave for a date with Max, and even happier the day that she had come in to the diner glowing, dying to meet Rory because she had some important news that she had to tell Rory first, handing Luke a yellow daisy. He later learned that there had been 999 other yellow daisies, all part of Max's proposal. God, he was good, that Max. Very slick. Women can never resist flowers—of course she said yes. Of course that made her happier than anything Luke could ever come up with. A thousand yellow daisies. How much money would that have cost?
But Luke did want to give her a nice wedding gift. Well, not nice—something she really loved would have to be more than nice. And that was what he wanted to give her—something she'd love. If she didn't love him, she could at least love his gift.
He tried to think of what he could get her. He couldn't get her a normal wedding gift—she already had a house and everything that people with houses normally had. And what was a normal wedding gift, anyway? Luke hadn't been to a wedding in ages. Toasters, he thought he remembered. Blenders. Dishes. If Lorelai didn't already have all that stuff, she wouldn't use it once she did. Something expensive? Crystal or china? It would be a waste of money, and she'd probably get sick of it right away. Soon she'd have her new husband to buy her flowers and fix things around the house. What should he get her, then? Should he make something? What on Earth could he make? Luke was not a creative person, but, he realized, he could build things. He'd learned some carpentry from his father. But what the hell could he build her? A table? A chair? No, her house was cluttered enough already. Something wedding-related, then?
And then he thought of the chupah. Of course. He'd build her a chupah, and he'd build her a damn fine one. He used a picture as his model, and carved it so that the wood spiraled up from the base, and birds and flowers and animals adorned the posts. Luke was very hard on himself, but when he was finished, even he had to admit that it was beautiful. When he brought it over to her house, she thanked him, and as the two of them stood under it, he felt a lump in his throat. He wished so badly that he could be the one standing there when it really counted.
And then it was over. Just like that. He was in the diner when he heard. The wedding was off, and Lorelai and Rory had left town for awhile. He wanted to throw out his arms and shout, or to walk around grinning like an idiot. Instead, he just gave everyone free coffee. Lorelai didn't love Max after all. She wasn't getting married, and nothing else mattered.
He'd barely had time to rejoice over that piece of news, though, when he got a phone call from Liz one morning at the diner.
"Hey," she said. "I got a real big favor to ask you. Are you working now?"
"Yeah, I'm working. What do you think I'm doing?" he asked warily. Liz's life was as chaotic as always. Her third marriage had dissolved when the guy had been arrested for dealing drugs, and when she'd started dating a man who seemed to be a decent human being and genuinely to care about her, the poor guy dropped dead of an aneurysm. But Liz hated being single, so a new loser was probably on the way.
"Luke, I…I can't deal with Jess right now. Things are just so crazy right now, I mean, with Alan dying, and I'm going through AA, and Jess has been getting into trouble lately and I just don't know how to help him."
"Uh-huh…"
Liz was starting to sniffle. "He was supposed to go to summer school but he skipped it so much he almost failed…he comes home late all the time and I don't know where he's been…and he was arrested for minor in possession, and I'm so scared that I've been rubbing off on him, you know?"
"Uh-huh…"
"And I…I thought maybe you could help, so I thought… "
"Oh, man, what did you do?"
"I'm sending Jess up to your place for awhile, if you don't mind," she said, as casually as if she was saying, "I'm sending you some flowers."
"Excuse me, are you serious? Just like that, huh?"
"Well, you know, I've got my job, my meetings to go to, and you could probably do a better job with him than I could."
"Oh, Jesus Christ, Liz! So it's not enough that you send a teenage kid to live with me indefinitely, but I'm supposed to straighten him out and turn him into a fine, upstanding citizen when you're the one who messed him up?" That was a little harsh, and maybe not even completely true, but he felt it when he said it.
"Luke—"
"You never change, do you? You haven't changed a bit since you were eighteen and bailed on us when Dad was dying! When things get too tough, you just get rid of whatever the problem is and move on with your own life! Are you ever going to grow up?"
"Luke—"
"This is unbelievable!" He was yelling now in the middle of the diner. "You won't ever change, will you?"
"That's not why I'm doing this, Luke!" she cried. "I'm doing this because I love him! I can't bear to see him end up like me! And I need to get things together before I can do anything to help him."
Luke sighed and closed his eyes. "Okay, fine," he said. "Do what you want, make the arrangements. Now I'm working, we'll finish this later."
And so Jess arrived on a bus. Luke hadn't seen him in a long time, and he was struck by how much Jess looked like his late grandfather. They'd noticed it when he was born, but the resemblance was still there, seventeen years later. But Jess also had something of Liz in him, something like a mix of Liz at two different points in her life. He had the fuck-what-you-think, rebel-without-a-cause attitude that Liz had had as a teenager, but the sullen indifference of the younger Liz who had existed between Sheila's death and Carrie's advent. It wasn't until Jess actually arrived that it fully hit Luke that he really didn't know what he was doing. He couldn't even talk to the kid, for Christ's sake! And then there was Lorelai, who had said she'd help him out, telling him that Jess was way more screwed up than Luke thought he was. For some reason, that really pushed Luke over the edge. It was one thing to think you were doing everything wrong, and something completely different for it to be confirmed by someone who actually knew what she was talking about. The next thing he knew, he was making some comment to Lorelai about getting pregnant at sixteen, which was probably the most asshole thing he'd ever said to her.
Then the next day he was getting calls from Taylor saying that Jess was stealing from the fund-raising cup, and he was so frustrated he was pushing Jess off a bridge. He couldn't quite believe it when he was standing there looking at his nephew, dripping wet in the middle of the lake. This was bad. One day with Jess and already he'd lost it. He knew then that it was time to apologize to Lorelai.
He was actually thinking of Jess when he talked about kids having jam hands. He remembered Liz and Jess coming to visit once when Jess was about five or so, and after they left the whole apartment was sticky. Jess was past the jam hands phase now, but now he was into stealing lawn gnomes and change, not to mention drawing chalk outlines that the townspeople called "phony murder." Luke had to laugh at that. At first he'd only seen teenage Liz in Jess, but his nephew was more like him than Luke had originally thought. He was remembering what he had done to the gazebo as a kid. Jess' prank was a lot more original and funny and a lot less destructive, but even so, the people of Stars Hollow were ready to run both Luke and Jess out of town. Luke thought he'd never have that much to say at a town meeting, but there he was, defending not only Jess but himself, too.
But Jess was not a bad kid, Luke slowly realized. Angry, yes. Selfish, yes. Lazy, definitely. Jess had definitely disrupted his routine, but Luke was developing a new one that included Jess. He started to get used to having the kid around, and gradually he started to think that maybe the time he spent with Jess could be like a second chance for Liz. His sister's life was continually screwed up, and here was his chance to make sure that Jess' wasn't, too.
And still, there was Lorelai.
It was so strange that this woman whom he thought he understood so well, whom he'd been able to explain her own feelings to, who blurted out whatever she was thinking whenever she was thinking it, could still be so much of an enigma to him. There were times when he thought she did feel that way about him, like when he built the runway for the fashion show at Rory's school and someone's mother started talking to him, asking him for directions. Lorelai reacted so strangely to something that hadn't even been flirting. "Go ahead! Date her! Marry her! Make her Mrs. Backwards Baseball Hat!" she'd yelled before storming out of the diner. Luke had to laugh at that. She was jealous—how else could you explain her acting that way?
But then she went on a date someone from her business class who was at least ten years younger than her, who brought his mommy and daddy to the diner to take a look around, and for some reason, that infuriated Luke. Would she really rather date anyone—anyone—than Luke? It certainly seemed that way.
And then she was sitting there at the counter, telling him that actually, she really wasn't very good at dating, because it was too uncertain, and she liked things she could count on. There weren't many things in her life that she could be sure of, she said, not too many people who would always be there for her no matter what, but along with Rory and Sookie and Stars Hollow, he was one of them—wasn't he? And he had to agree that he was. No matter how fed up or angry he got with Lorelai, he would never stop caring about her. He'd always be there.
Hey, she was there for him, too. When his Uncle Louie died, he couldn't believe it when nobody would help him. Not Liz, not any of his cousins. Luke had disliked his uncle as much as anyone else, but that had nothing to do with whether or not he'd take care of the funeral arrangements. Louie was family, and you did whatever you could for family, no matter what you thought of them. It was such a simple concept. Why couldn't anyone else understand it?
But Lorelai did. When he told her about it, she did everything she could—helped at the diner, helped with the coffin, even got the war re-enactors to come. But it was more than that. When he was losing it, she could be his voice of reason. When he was ready to give up on the whole thing, because Louie was a selfish asshole even in death, she was there reminding him that he was doing this not for Louie, but for his dad. Luke's father, she said, was up in heaven watching him, and smiling. That was an image that never failed to comfort Luke, and he calmed down.
Then, when the two of them were standing with the minister beside Louie's grave, the uneasy feeling he'd had since he'd talked to Taylor started to grow. He remembered his father's funeral, and how he'd been awed at the number of people who had come and told him what a good man his father was. And then there was Louie, whose own family wouldn't even show up for his funeral. Taylor had told Luke that he was like Louie: a loner who had never married and was only getting crankier over the years. Would no one come to his funeral, either? Lorelai said no. She asked if Louie would ever build someone a chupah, or fix things around other people's houses without being asked, or bake a coffee cake and blow up balloons for a girl's sixteenth birthday like he'd done for Rory, or raise his nephew without a second thought, asking for nothing in return. When she put it that way, he didn't sound like such a bad guy. And Luke realized, as they stood there, that those were all things his father would have done.
When they got back to the diner, the whole town was there, having a kind of impromptu wake for Louie. They had all hated Louie as much as anyone else—they were just there for Luke. "People like you," Lorelai told him, and he felt a lump in his throat. He hadn't felt so loved in a long time, and it made him love Lorelai even more, because she made him love himself.
Of course, it was hard to remember why when she was screaming at him to go to hell. His heart stopped when she told him that Rory and Jess had been in an accident. Jess had crashed Rory's car, and Rory had fractured her wrist. The two kids he loved the most in this world had been in a car wreck, he had no idea where his nephew was or if he was even okay, and Lorelai was screaming at him that it was all his fault. A week before she'd said he was a great guy for taking in his sister's kid when there was nothing in it for him, and now he was the bad guy for not sending Jess back to New York. There was so much information to process right then—car accident, Rory hurt, Jess missing—and all Lorelai could do was guilt-trip him, as if he wasn't upset enough. He needed to go away, he needed to go find Jess, he needed to get away from Lorelai. They screamed at each other to go to hell, and he went off, his heart thumping with fear.
He found him sitting on the bridge, the same bridge he'd pushed Jess off of when Jess had first moved in. Jess no longer looked like the sullen teenager he'd taken in months ago who had stolen and offended practically everybody. He looked so young, and small, and scared, and alone. "I made sure she was all right," Jess said, and Luke could hear the sorrow and fear and regret in his nephew's voice.
Luke felt his heart swell, and right then he loved Jess more than he ever had. "I know you did," he said. Suddenly he was angrier at Lorelai than he'd ever imagined he could be. How dare she accuse him of not caring? He wanted what was best for his kid the same way she wanted what was best for hers. And what was best for Jess included him passing high school, which would be a hell of a lot easier with help from someone like Rory.
But it's all about her, as usual, he thought angrily as Jess stood up and he put his arm around his nephew's shoulder. Jess didn't move away. The two of them walked back to the diner in silence as he continued silently fuming. Damn it, she'd never even gotten to know Jess! He hadn't hurt Rory on purpose, and if she'd seen him tonight, she would have believed him when he said he'd made sure Rory was all right. Luke had seen Jess lie, and he wasn't lying then. And didn't Lorelai know him well enough to know that he would never even consider doing anything that didn't have both Jess and Rory's best interests at heart? Or that family was the most important thing to him and there was no way in hell that he would give up on his nephew at the first sign of trouble? Hadn't they had that conversation about family before? How could she say those things to him? She knew how much it hurt him. She had to have known.
Once they were back at the diner, Jess said, "I want to leave. Now."
Luke blinked. "Tonight? Just like that?"
"Yeah," Jess muttered, not meeting his uncle's eyes. "I want to get out of here."
Luke frankly didn't blame him. Jess was bound to run into Lorelai at some point, and then there would be trouble. Worse, Jess was bound to run into Dean. "All right," said Luke. "I'll put you on the next bus. I'll call your mother to let her know you're coming."
Jess put a bag together with all his essential things. "You can send the rest later," he mumbled, and he was gone.
The whole thing was dizzying—way too much to deal with at once. So Luke closed the diner and drove up to that lake in New Hampshire he'd gone with his father years ago. He needed to get away, do some fishing, be alone—anything to get his mind off things.
The first person he saw when he got back was Rory, sporting a cast on her wrist. Thankfully, she didn't seem to be mad at him like her mom was. As he served her food in the empty diner, she whispered to him, "It wasn't his fault." He knew.
He never did get around to sending Jess' stuff back to New York. He supposed he'd gotten used to it, and it was easier to keep it and pretend everything was still the same than to send it back and acknowledge that it wasn't. It didn't matter, because Jess was back to stay barely two weeks after the accident.
But sometime during those two weeks, Luke noticed one of the books Jess had left behind sitting in the bathroom. The spine read Legends of the Rhine. Luke absently flipped through some pages and would have stopped, but one page, a familiar name jumped out at him.
It was spelled slightly differently, but the name was the same. He read a legend about a water nymph, a siren, called Lore who would sit on a rock in the Rhine called the Lei. The nymph, therefore, was also called the Lorelei, and she would "lure boatmen to destruction in a furious rapid which marred the channel at that spot. She so bewitched them with her plaintive songs and her wonderful beauty that they forgot everything else to gaze up at her, and so they presently drifted among the broken reefs and were lost."
That sounded familiar, although he'd heard her sing, and people were more likely to run from the room in terror when she sang than to forget everything else to listen to her.
He read on: "In those old, old times, the Count Bruno lived in a great castle near there with his son, the Count Hermann. A youth of twenty, Hermann had heard a great deal about the beautiful Lore, and had finally fallen very deeply in love with her without having seen her. So he used to wander the neighborhood of the Lei, evenings, with his zither," (What the hell was a zither? Luke wondered), "…and express his longing in low singing. On one of these occasions, suddenly there hovered around the top of the rock a brightness of unequaled clearness and color, which, in increasingly smaller circles thickened, was the enchanting figure of the beautiful lore. After that he was a changed person. He went dreaming about, thinking only of his fairy and caring for naught else in the world."
Oh, God. Luke couldn't help but read on about how one night Hermann had gone in his boat with his faithful squire to sing a song to the Lorelei, who was moved by the song and tried to save him. But alas, "the boat was upset, mocking every exertion; the waves rose to the gunwale, and splitting on the hard stones, the boat broke into pieces. The youth sank into the depths, but the squire was thrown on shore by a powerful wave."
Luke let out a bitter laugh as he closed the book. He'd always thought her name was unusual. How fitting that she was named for a mythical creature who lured those who loved her to a violent, painful death.
He had forgotten, though, about the end of the legend, the part that said, "The bitterest things have been said about the Lorelei during many centuries, but surely her conduct upon this occasion entitles her to our respect. One feels drawn tenderly toward her and is moved to forget her many crimes and remember only the good deed that crowned and closed her career."
And thus, she came back one day when the diner was closed. She didn't want to make up, she said, she'd just had a really crappy night and needed a cup of coffee. He could just pretend she was a new customer, Mimi. And despite his anger, he let her have the coffee. He knew the look on her face, and he knew she needed the coffee badly.
Then she started to talk, and he knew why. Her heart was broken. For all these years, through all the different relationships she'd had, she'd always had Christopher in the back of her mind, and the hope that he could just get his life together and the two of them and Rory could be a mommy, a daddy, and a baby girl, just like they had been meant to. But this time she'd thought she had found what she'd always wanted—love, comfort and safety. And she had been wrong. Apparently Christopher had gotten his girlfriend pregnant, and she, not Lorelai, would be the one getting the love, comfort, and safety. He would be there for his girlfriend and his new baby all the way when he had never been there for Lorelai and Rory. And then Lorelai told him what he already knew—as much as she loved her independence, as much as she considered herself lucky to have what she had in her life, she really wanted someone who would be there for her through the years, unconditionally. Someone who'd be there at the end of the day.
You already have that, Luke said silently as he pushed a doughnut on a plate down the counter toward her. Damn it, why was she so hard to stay mad at? His love for her was back, and it wasn't going away.
Then the town had a dance marathon. Having raised money for the bridge, they now needed money for a tarp to cover the bridge. Honestly, sometimes Luke thought Taylor was just looking for any excuse to be in charge of something. Sookie and Jackson were married now, and at the dance marathon, they started arguing, because Jackson wanted four kids in four years or something and Sookie didn't. In front of Lorelai, Luke said a few less-than-positive things about having kids and then started to think better of it. He'd come a long way since he'd made the jam hands comment, and now he thought that having kids might not be so bad. He was used to having Jess around by now, and in spite of himself had grown quite fond of the kid. And, of course, on the other end of the spectrum was Rory, whom he had felt very paternal toward ever since the day he'd pulled her from the path of the car. He would love to have kids like Rory, and, as he told Lorelai later as he helped her fix her shoe, he would love to have kids if it was with the right woman. He just left out the part about who that right woman was.
And then the dance marathon was over and the next thing he knew, Rory and Jess were dating. He couldn't believe it. He wasn't stupid, and he could certainly tell that Jess had a thing for Rory, but he'd never thought that the feeling was mutual. Apparently Dean had picked up on what Rory was feeling and had broken up with her right there on the dance floor. Jess had broken up with that blonde girl from the hairdresser's whom he'd stuffed into a closet once, and now he and Rory were an item.
It was the weirdest thing for Luke. When Rory had been with Dean, he'd gotten used to hating him, and after Rory and Dean had broken up the first time, Luke had ended up wrestling with Dean outside the diner because he wouldn't let Dean in. But Jess was his nephew, and Luke was his guardian, and thus while Luke couldn't hate him for dating Rory, he could lay down a set of rules about when Jess would have Rory home and what he could and could not do with her. Jess had actually had to remind him, "You're my guardian, not hers."
His nephew was dating Lorelai's daughter. And he knew exactly what Lorelai still thought of Jess. That and the fact that Lorelai was seeing some guy named Alex who liked to go fishing made him think that maybe he should move on, try to find someone new. He hadn't had a serious girlfriend since Rachel, and maybe it was time to try again.
Taylor was putting in that damn soda shoppe next to the diner, and then one day he was approached for a signature by Taylor's pretty, red-headed lawyer, Nicole Leahy. According to Jess, Nicole had been flirting with him, and so Luke got up his courage and asked Nicole out. He couldn't believe it once he had. He never asked women out, and Nicole was so different from the people he interacted with normally. She lived in New York, wore suits, had manicured fingernails, took bubble baths. She was a lawyer, for Pete's sake, and Luke hated lawyers. And as if that wasn't bad enough, she worked for Taylor.
But he did like Nicole. She was a nice person with an easy way of speaking, and she was positive and accepting and made him feel comfortable. Luke was nervous on their first date, and ended up babbling, telling her a story about Lorelai accidentally hitting Taylor in the face with a French fry. He was red-faced by the time he finished the story and thought he'd totally blown his chances. But Nicole just laughed gently, and then he started to relax.
He opened up more than he'd expected to on that first date. He told Nicole all about his parents, Liz, Jess. Nicole got to meet Jess when Luke brought her back to the diner after their first date, and Jess tried to leave, with a smirk on his face, insinuating something not-so-subtly. Luke grew very annoyed at that, probably more annoyed than he should have been, and he ended up yelling at Jess outside and smacking him upside the head. This was his first date in a long time, and Jess was making it look like all he wanted was sex. But nothing seemed to deter Nicole. It was amazing. For the first time in years, Luke had a girlfriend.
But there was a problem. Nicole had met Lorelai right before the first date, and she knew who Lorelai was. Lorelai had been outraged when he'd let Nicole take a cell phone call inside the diner, and had gotten into a silent fight with him, but what was he going to do, kick her outside on the first date? But then, in addition to the French fry story, he'd ended up talking about Lorelai and coffee, and now Nicole looked at him suspiciously whenever he mentioned Lorelai. He couldn't really blame her. Even though Nicole was a nice person and a great girlfriend, his feelings for Lorelai weren't any less strong than before.
In the spring of 2003, all kinds of bad things started happening. First, there was the Independence Inn catching on fire. It was still standing, but there was plenty of damage, and Lorelai's life was in chaos. Things weren't going well with Rory and Jess. He couldn't tell exactly what the problem was, and Jess would never tell him, but Luke knew that their relationship wasn't exactly all candlelight and flowers. Jess had apparently been skipping school to work at Wal-Mart, and that news so distracted Luke that he completely blew it when he met Nicole's parents, and ended up babbling nonsense to them. Luke was getting phone calls at five in the morning from an irate parent whose house Jess had trashed, and in the middle of all this, Fran Weston, the sweet old lady who owned the bakery and the old Dragonfly Inn, died.
Apparently Rory and Jess had gone to a party at some kid named Kyle's house, and Jess and Dean had gotten into a fight over Rory. Luke had gotten a very angry phone call before the crack of dawn from Kyle's father, complaining about the damage Jess had done to his property. Luke set his teeth and fought the urge to strangle Jess when he talked to him about it.
But it got worse. First, there was Jimmy Mariano showing up one day out of the clear blue sky. And then, the news that Jess had missed too much school to graduate from high school. Luke couldn't believe it. He was angrier at himself than he was at Jess. How could he have missed this? How could he have let this happen? Jess was an intelligent kid. Liz had been extremely smart at his age, too, despite what her grades said. When Liz had taken aptitude tests, she had always been way above average. Jess was even smarter than Liz had been, but at least Liz had graduated.
Luke didn't want to see Jess fail, though, and on a more selfish level, he really didn't want his nephew to leave. So he offered Jess one more year that he could stay, another opportunity to graduate high school. Jess refused. And so, because he knew it was right, even though it hurt him so badly inside that he could feel physical pain, Luke said it: "Then you gotta go."
He'd intended at least to say goodbye, to help Jess figure out what he was going to do on his own, but before he could do anything about it, Jess was unceremoniously gone. Jess hadn't said goodbye to him, or to Rory, or anyone. He'd just gotten up and left. He hadn't told Luke where, but Luke had a pretty good idea that a certain long-lost father was a factor in Jess's choice of destination.
He told Lorelai first, because he wanted this news to cause Rory as little pain as possible. The poor girl had finals and her own graduation to worry about, and he didn't want to interfere with that. The fact that Jess had hurt Rory so much angered him more than anything. Maybe he'd spent too much time trying to keep Jess from turning out like his mother. Instead, he'd turned out like his father—an abandoner.
However he looked at it, Luke had failed. He'd spent two years trying to help his nephew out, to absolutely no avail. Jess was right back at the place he'd been in before his mother had sent him to Stars Hollow.
And aside from that, despite what he told Lorelai, Luke really did miss Jess once he was gone. One day he went up to his apartment, found it empty, and realized that it was going to be empty like that from now on. When everything began to sink in, Luke went over to his bed and cried like he hadn't cried in years.
He was crying again a week later, for an entirely different reason.
Rory was graduating from Chilton, and she and Lorelai wanted him there. It was just Lorelai, Lorelai's parents, Sookie, Jackson, and him. Christopher wasn't even there, which only increased Luke's dislike for this man he'd never even met tenfold. What kind of man didn't go to his own daughter's graduation? Where she was the freaking valedictorian?
In April, Rory had found out that she'd been accepted to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and Luke had been amazed and proud. Rory was such a great kid who worked so hard, and she deserved those acceptances more than anyone in the world. Luke had awkwardly tried to hug her, and hadn't quite succeeded.
That feeling came all over again at her graduation. His beautiful little girl had grown up so well. It amazed him that he attached a possessive pronoun there. He had absolutely no claim to Rory through blood or marriage, and he'd had nothing to do with raising her. But he'd known this young woman whom he would always think of as a little girl for ten years, and he did love her like a daughter. He felt the lump in his throat start to grow when Rory began to make her speech, and by the time Rory thanked her mother for everything she'd done for her, he was crying outwardly and unapologetically.
When the graduation was over, he hugged Rory, and Lorelai thanked him for coming. In a few days, he and Nicole would be headed off on a cruise, and Lorelai had seemed to think it was a good idea. She confirmed this when he brought it up again at graduation, and Luke began to accept the idea that he and Lorelai were never meant to be. He might as well try to make things work with Nicole.
But then, like a warning, he had a dream that night. Lorelai walked up to him and said, "Don't get engaged." Luke woke up sweating and breathing hard, trying to figure out what the hell he had just dreamt. Don't get engaged? He hadn't been planning on getting engaged. Nicole was a good girlfriend, a nice little addition to his life, but he couldn't imagine being married to her. Even though he'd had no plans to propose, and even though he'd never been inclined to trust his subconscious before, he decided to take the dream Lorelai's advice.
Later, when he thought about it, he supposed he really had taken her advice. He didn't get engaged. He got married.
He and Nicole were on that cruise, and except for a few times they got stuck listening to this guy playing drinking glasses, it was wonderful at first. But then Luke started to notice that everyone around them was either in love, engaged, or married for a long time. He grew even more uncomfortable after he and Nicole spent time with another couple whom they'd met, and they assumed that Luke and Nicole were married. He started to rethink things. Maybe Nicole was as good as it would get. He didn't love her, didn't feel anything like what he felt towards Lorelai about her, but she was nice and friendly and could carry on a decent conversation. And, according to what she said after they danced with several other couples on the boat deck, she loved him, at least after a few glasses of champagne. Luke had had a few himself, and when he reflected on it later, it was probably that, and his rethinking, and the fact that Lorelai seemed to have no problem with him and Nicole being together, and the fact that he'd been upset since Jess left and needed something new in his life that made him propose. Nicole accepted, and the captain married them as several other couples stood around and watched.
But the next day, he woke up and thought, What the hell? Who did he think he was—Liz? This was the kind of thing she would do—marry a not-so-serious significant other on the spur of the moment without giving a thought to the consequences. They had only been dating for a few months, and they hadn't talked about anything practical—where they'd live, whether they wanted kids, whether they'd keep the same jobs. Luke was so embarrassed by the whole thing that he really didn't want to see or to talk to Nicole. He suggested snorkeling the next day, which allowed them not to talk much, and then they decided to continue with that trend by not talking for the entire rest of the cruise. By the time they got off the ship, they'd decided to divorce.
But Nicole sending the lawyers from her firm down to the diner to make sure he didn't cheat her out of anything—as if he would—wasn't the only thing he had on his mind that fall.
Everybody had something new in their lives. Lorelai and Sookie were restoring the Dragonfly, furthering their goal of owning their own inn. Rory went off to Yale, which was strange. It had been weird when Lorelai and Rory went off to Europe after Rory's graduation, and he'd had to get used to not seeing them there in the diner anymore. But then it was a whole different kind of weird when it was just Lorelai. He'd gotten used to thinking of the Gilmores as a unit when they were in his diner. It completely threw him off to only have Lorelai there, and, as he admitted when he was being honest with himself, he just missed Rory. He'd lost Jess already, and now he'd lost the other kid he loved. At least she was back sometimes on weekends.
One of the weekends she was back was when something really strange happened. He'd heard, of course, that Rory's ex-boyfriend Dean was getting married, which was strange enough in itself. Nineteen years old and they were getting married—and the girl wasn't even pregnant, as far as Luke knew. Dean was going to college—at Luke's alma mater, according to what he'd heard—and he was getting married. Luke couldn't even imagine being married at nineteen. Liz had done it, but, well, she was Liz.
And then, all of a sudden, Dean's quite pathetic bachelor party was headed into the diner, and an extremely drunk Dean was slumped over the counter, moaning Rory's name. Luke was the only one who heard it, and the name immediately set him on the defensive. All Luke knew was that he had to get those kids out of there before they heard Dean, too. News spread fast in Stars Hollow, and he wanted to be absolutely sure that he would be the only person ever to know that Dean had just spoken Rory's name.
Dean kept talking after Luke dragged him up to the apartment. He talked about how smart Rory was, how he thought she could fix the world, and he wondered why she didn't love him. Luke felt a pang as he laid Dean down on his bed. He sympathized with this kid whom he had never liked. Dean, like Luke, had settled, had married the first nice girl who came along, all while being in love with someone else, while being enticed by the siren song of a Lorelai.
Luke pondered what to do about Dean all that night. He knew Dean probably wouldn't remember what he'd said in the morning. But the next morning was Dean's wedding. Luke's advice to Dean would probably have to be along the lines of "Don't marry one woman when you're in love with another—believe me, I know." But that would mean the wedding, the wedding that day, would be called off, and eventually Rory would find out why. Hell, the whole town would find out why. It would be a scandal that the Stars Hollow gossips would love, and it wouldn't be pretty. So Luke's only solution was to let Dean go through with it, and just to make sure that Rory didn't go anywhere near that wedding. He wanted to call Lorelai and tell her about it, so that she could be the one to stop Rory from going, since she was better at this sort of thing than he was. But Lorelai was busy with Dragonfly business, so he just had to tell Rory himself. Rory accepted that without question, although she did look a bit confused, but he thought she seemed relieved as well. Maybe she hadn't really wanted to go, after all. Or maybe that was just his wishful thinking.
Funny, though, how Luke didn't take the advice that he would have given Dean. Nicole just came by one day and suggested that they postpone the divorce. They were, after all, the same two people they'd been before they'd gotten married. As Nicole said, getting married had been what had broken them up. And, after all, she had been a good girlfriend. Not to mention that divorce was a pain in the ass. So Luke agreed, and did his best to ignore the conscience that was screaming, "No! You can't stay married to one woman while you're in love with another!"
It was strange, though, starting to think of himself as a married man. Up until then, he'd just thought of himself as soon-to-be-divorced. But slowly, it started to hit him: I have a wife. And of course, when he told Lorelai about it, she was upset, and fired back at him with the strangeness of the situation. This time, Luke wasn't even sure if it was because she possibly had feelings for him, too, or if the situation just really was that strange.
It got even stranger after Nicole bought a townhouse in Litchfield and asked him to move in. He hesitated and said, "Sure…" because he didn't really know what else to say. He started spending the night at Nicole's occasionally, but he could never bring himself to actually move in. It just wasn't home. He belonged upstairs from the diner, in the apartment that had been his father's office. He couldn't tell himself that he lived anywhere else.
So he told Lorelai instead. And she was upset, indignant, didn't know why he hadn't told her sooner. It was exactly the reaction he'd expected, so he didn't know why it bothered him so much. Maybe it was just the fact that Lorelai being upset mattered at all. What she thought really shouldn't matter so much. Theoretically, his wife should be the only woman whose opinions mattered. But in reality, it wasn't like that at all.
And then one day, out of nowhere, Liz showed up. Liz hadn't come to visit him in years. Apparently it was her high school reunion or something. She did look very happy, but Luke had grown to distrust Liz's happiness. Great new job, great new boyfriend—it was the same old story. In at most a few months, everything would go to hell. It always did with Liz. It amazed him that Liz could be such a smart person, but he could be one of the only people who knew that, seeing as she never learned from her mistakes.
Liz's reappearance reminded him about Jess's car, which, as he'd mentioned to Liz, was hidden in their father's old garage. But when Luke went to check on it, it was gone. He couldn't believe it. Had someone stolen it? Who would steal a piece of crap car like that? And then when the police figured it out, Luke couldn't believe that he hadn't figured it out himself. Of course, Liz had lied, and she had been in contact with Jess, and Jess had come back and stolen the goddamn car. As if Luke didn't have enough to worry about right then, he had to be reminded all over again about his failure with Jess. So when he did talk to Jess it wasn't exactly a happy reunion. He yelled at Jess to stay away from Rory and told him that Jess hadn't been kicked out, he'd gotten himself kicked out. And Jess just proved that he hadn't changed at all. Even after all this time, Jess was still ungrateful and didn't appreciate anything Luke had done for him. Why the hell had Luke spent so much time caring about him? And why the hell could nothing ever go right with Jess or with Liz?
He was still angry and frustrated when Lorelai came into the diner that night. She was so different from the bubbly, perky Lorelai who'd come into the diner earlier that day. She was the calm, wise Lorelai, the mother Lorelai, reminding him gently that it was thirty-five degrees out and Jess was sleeping in the car. And he ranted to her about how families were spilled drinks and he was sick of cleaning up the messes they made. The next thing he knew, he was going over to Nicole's for the night and letting Jess have the apartment. And although he said he didn't care if Jess froze to death, of course he found himself driving his truck back to make sure his nephew did get a warm bed to sleep in. Something about that sight, Jess going from that beat-up car he loved so much to the apartment, made him realize that the car really was the only place Jess had now. So he put some money in Jess's car, figuring that Jess could probably use it. It was funny how Lorelai seemed to bring out the best in him.
The next day, though he was right back at why-the-hell-do-I-try-so-hard-with-this-kid. After meeting the latest object of Liz's affection, T.J., a not-so-bright guy with an Etch-a-Sketch, Jess had proceeded to tell Luke, in so many words, that he didn't really help anyone. That he was a pain in the ass, and he just made things worse for everyone by making them feel like they disappointed him. Nothing else Jess said could possibly have made Luke feel as bad as he did then. He wasn't insulting what Luke did; he was insulting who Luke was. What Jess had said hurt him so badly that Luke could think of nothing to do but to revert to his most adolescent instincts and get drunk. And he never got drunk.
And then, going along with more recently acquired instincts, he found himself at the home of the one person who could fix him when he couldn't fix himself. He broke into Lorelai's house and ended up cutting himself on her broken window. As she fixed his hand with Barbie band-aids, he slurred the afternoon's story to her, and Lorelai told him that what Jess had said wasn't true. She said she'd talked to Liz earlier that day, and Liz had told her how much she looked up to Luke. That did make him feel a bit better.
He talked to Liz again later that night, at the Firelight Festival. He'd reconsidered about T.J. Aside from the Etch-a-Sketch and the fact that if he didn't seem to be so crazy about Liz, Luke would have sworn he was gay, T.J. didn't seem half bad, and Luke thought he might even be good for Liz. Liz apologized for Jess, and thanked Luke for what he'd done for him. Jess would be okay, Liz thought. She told Luke she thought Jess was like their father, which in some ways Luke could see. Jess had the same sensitivity beneath a tough exterior that his grandfather had had, and with that, Luke could see how his nephew could be all right. "Sometimes it just takes awhile for things to sink in," Liz said softly. "It did with me." Luke looked at his little sister and finally conceded that maybe this time, she really had found happiness. For once, she seemed genuinely together. The Renaissance Faire earrings she made really were nice, and T.J. seemed to care about her very much. Liz handed him a pair of those earrings and said he could give them to his wife— "Or Lorelai." So he ended up going with that option. Luke hugged his sister goodbye, feeling better than he had all day, and no longer regretted putting the money in Jess's car.
A week later, he gave money to another person he loved.
Lorelai told him she wanted to take him to dinner at a nice restaurant, which kind of confused Luke. He knew it couldn't be a date—Lorelai knew he was married and he was pretty sure Lorelai was seeing someone, probably that guy who had tailgated Luke and whose fancy car he'd seen her sitting in. But what reason could she have for wanting to see him out like that?
They never made it to the restaurant. Luke ran into a dressed-up Lorelai in the park, and she looked upset. They ended up sitting down on a bench as Lorelai cried, telling him about how everything with the Dragonfly was going wrong, and she hadn't been able to get in contact with Rory lately, and it was one of the few times in her life when she wished she had somebody. At dinner, she'd been about to ask him to lend her $30,000 for the inn. $30,000. It was a lot of money, but he couldn't stand to see Lorelai crying like that, saying that she was failing. He held her tight as he told her that she was not failing. And he meant it. Lorelai was such a strong, smart woman who had accomplished so much, and with the Dragonfly would accomplish even more. He would probably never tell her this, because it sounded a bit patronizing, but he was proud of her for it.
But although he loved her independence and capability, it was moments like that one in the park when he loved her the most: the moments where she let her guard down and showed him her weaker side. Those were the moments when he knew she needed him, and it was wonderful to be needed. Those moments made him determined to fix whatever was wrong, to heal whatever hurt she was feeling, to make sure she never cried like that again.
So the next time he saw her, in the diner, he gave her a check for $30,000. She tried to tell him that it was too much, and when he told her not to negotiate about it, she wrote it down on a napkin. He wrote back, figuring out how she could pay him back. Then she wrote back asking what Nicole would think about that, and Luke got annoyed. The truth was that things between him and Nicole were getting worse by the day. He slept in his apartment more than he slept at Nicole's, and Nicole was not very happy about that. They kept having fights about it, and Nicole did not, to put it mildly, react well when he eventually told her about lending the money to Lorelai. That, unfortunately, was a fight that nearly all of Stars Hollow ended up witnessing.
And then one day, Luke woke up at Nicole's place, got dressed, and realized he was wearing another man's socks.
He grew numb, then slowly angry as the implications set in. Nicole was seeing someone else. That wasn't just cheating, it was adultery. In his mind, it was unthinkable for two people in a marriage. After all, he may have had feelings for Lorelai, but he would never dream of acting on them as long as he was married to Nicole. Although, given this new turn in events, he acknowledged that that might not be very much longer.
To prove it, he spied on Nicole one night, and watched as she and some guy went up to their townhouse. He'd been trying to make himself feel better with the possibility that there could be some other explanation for the socks, but then he saw the guy.
Luke closed his eyes and just sat there in his truck, neither thinking nor feeling. Then, slowly and calmly, he got up and looked at the sock man's car. The anger he was feeling welled up inside him, and in a rush of fury, he kicked the car. Then he kicked it again. And again. And again. And each kick was for something in his life that he had screwed up. His marriage…Jess…Liz…Lorelai…nothing was going right.
And they certainly weren't going any more right after a policeman came and hauled Luke off to jail. Apparently one of the neighbors had heard him and called the cops.
As he sat there in a jail cell, waiting for Lorelai to get the message he'd left her and to come bail him out, he thought, This is what my life's come to? Liz had always been the family screw-up, while he'd been the good one. But now here he was, forty-one years old, about to be divorced, cuckolded by his wife, unnoticed by the woman he loved, a failure at parenting, a nuisance who interfered with everybody's lives whether or not they wanted it, and in jail. Luke just closed his eyes and thought, I have got to change something.
A self-help tape. A week earlier, Luke would have laughed at anyone who used one of those damn things, and here he was using one himself. And it was the cheesiest thing he could possibly imagine. "You deserve love," it was saying. God Almighty.
While he was somewhere in the middle of the tape, Liz and T.J. showed up out of nowhere and told him they were getting married. The wedding would be Renaissance-themed, in a week, and in the town square. Luke had his misgivings about it—it was T.J., after all, and Liz didn't have the best track record—but he opted just to act happy about it. Liz was happy, after all, and that was all that mattered.
But then he found out that Jess wasn't coming to the wedding, and despite how his last meeting with Jess had gone, Luke set his teeth and decided to do something about that.
He drove to Jess's apartment in New York, which looked like a crack house. God, Luke thought, this is what I kicked him out to? He tried to convince Jess to come to his mother's wedding, but Jess refused. He'd just catch the next one, he said. Luke took a deep breath, and tried to keep his voice calm, but ended up yelling at Jess. He'd been there for Jess when no one else was, and Jess owed him, he told his nephew. As he stormed out, he thought, Why the hell didn't I say that a long time ago?
Surprisingly, Jess did show up, and just announced to Luke that he was staying with him. Then, when Luke, Jess, T.J.'s brother, and a bunch of other random people were out at T.J's bachelor party, T.J. announced that Liz wanted Jess to walk her down the aisle. Jess refused, T.J. wouldn't back away, and the next thing Luke knew, he and Jess were fighting and getting thrown out of the strip club. Luke couldn't believe it. Fighting? With his own nephew? How old was he? And why the hell did he try so hard with this kid who couldn't get anything through his thick skull?
Back at the diner, Luke attempted to talk to Jess again. It didn't matter, he said. If Jess really hated his mother that much, he was free to do so. Jess sighed, and said he didn't hate his mother, or Luke, either. He'd only come to Stars Hollow because of Luke, he said. That was the closest thing to a compliment Luke had ever gotten from Jess. Luke asked him why he hadn't wanted to come, and Jess was silent. And Luke knew then: Rory. He smiled to himself. It looked like he wasn't the only one who needed a self-help tape.
He thought about asking Lorelai to go to the wedding with him, but in the end decided against it. After all, he and Nicole hadn't finished with the divorce papers yet, and then he would technically be cheating, too. When they were officially divorced, though, Luke would have to keep in mind that Lorelai didn't seem to be attached anymore. Maybe she'd finally broken up with that guy.
Luke took his seat at the wedding and bit his lip, trying not to laugh at all the people milling about in Renaissance costumes and to avoid the eyes of Crazy Carrie Duncan, who was Liz's maid of honor. Suddenly, Luke felt a hand on his shoulder. He winced, thinking it was Carrie, but then the person attached to the hand spoke. "Hey, how's it going?" it said.
Luke knew that voice. He looked up and saw her standing there smiling. "Rachel," he gasped.
"Hey, Luke," Rachel smiled.
Luke stood up and gave her a friendly hug. "I didn't know you were coming," he said. "How've you been?"
"Oh, I'm great!" she replied. "How's it going with you?"
"Oh, pretty good." They stood in awkward silence for a second. Then Luke said, "Here, Rachel, sit down with me."
As they were sitting, Rachel whispered to him, "So did you tell her?"
Luke looked up in surprise. "Boy, didn't take long for you to get to that."
Rachel laughed. "Well, I've been wondering ever since I left. Did you?"
Luke sighed. "Well, right after you left, she got engaged."
Rachel started. "Oh…I'm…"
"But she didn't get married."
"Oh." She sounded bewildered.
"But right now I'm in the middle of a divorce, so…"
"Whoa, whoa, WHOA." Rachel put her hand up. "You got married?"
"Yes."
"To someone else?"
"Her name is Nicole. She's a lawyer in New York."
Rachel laughed disbelievingly. "Luke, you hate lawyers!"
"Don't remind me," he grumbled.
"You'd rather marry a lawyer than tell her how you feel?"
Luke had been getting annoyed. He didn't want to be reminded of his own failure with his love life at his sister's wedding. But when Rachel put it that way, he actually had to laugh. "God, I'm an idiot," he said.
"Ah, don't be too hard on yourself," Rachel said. "The guy I'm seeing right now had a thing for me for over a year before he did anything about it."
Luke raised his eyebrows. "You're seeing someone now?"
"For almost two years."
"How'd you meet him?"
"Well, I still do a lot of traveling, but my home base right now is Chicago," she said. "He lived in the apartment next door to me. Apparently he had a thing for me from day one…but he didn't ask me out for about a year, and now here we are." She smiled. "It's too bad he waited, though. I would have said yes if he'd asked earlier."
Luke smiled. "I need to finish getting divorced, Rachel. Then we'll see."
When he wasn't staring at the ground trying not to laugh, Luke had to admit that it was a very nice ceremony. He was proud of Jess for agreeing to walk his mother down the aisle, and as Liz and T.J. read their vows to each other, he felt a lump in his throat. He wanted that for himself someday.
Back at his apartment after the wedding, Luke told Jess he could stay for a couple days more if he wanted. But Jess was ready to go. He needed to go back to work, he said. But before he left, Jess thanked him for everything—for the money, which he would pay back, and for everything Luke had done for him. Luke was amazed, and responded with, "I'm here, Jess. I'm always here." They hugged, for the first time that Luke could remember, and he realized all over again how much he loved his nephew. He remembered what Liz had said about how some things took awhile to sink in. She'd been right. What do you know, he thought. Guess I did something right after all.
Once Jess was gone, he turned the self-help tape back on. To determine who his soul mate was, according to the insipid tape, he merely needed to answer a series of questions. Whose phone calls were never unwanted or too long? Did he see her face? Who did he go for when he needed comfort? Did he see her face? Luke stopped short at that. "Whoa," he said to himself.
But then, when Lorelai asked him to come to the Dragonfly for its test run, before it officially opened, that guy showed up. The guy he'd seen sitting in the car with her.
So they were still together. Luke didn't know why he was surprised. Life was always like that. Aside from that, though, Lorelai's parents had stormed out of the Dragonfly in a huff. Luke didn't know what that was about, but it seemed to be upsetting Lorelai.
So even if he wasn't still legally married to Nicole, although he wouldn't be for much longer, it wouldn't be the right time to do anything.
But when would it be? Would that time ever come?
To be continued…
A/N: Just so we're clear on this, the following did not happen for the purposes of this story:
-The teaser of Afterboom
-The scene with Shel in Luke Can See Her Face
-Luke inviting Lorelai to the wedding (as much as I loved all their wedding scenes!)
-Anything from Last Week Fights, This Week Tights and Raincoats and Recipes involving Luke and Lorelai dating or kissing
Everything else happened like it did on the show. In the next chapter the story will start to move forward.
Quotes about the Lorelei legend are taken directly from this website (it's not letting me do the formatting, but it's a link off of mindspring dot com. Basically, it's not mine, either).
Lyrics by Bruce Springsteen